by Russel Smith
Anne saw another Other girl, to a side of the players, reading pages, so she pushed in, focused, and caught a corner of the text, and cut and pasted into the archive comparer, on the off-chance it might be new and viable, a late entry into the now mostly unread library of the Other.
Then the book, in the middle of being copied, fluttered from the Other girl’s hands. The Other girl’s face was up, staring, in horrified confusion. Anne flicked over to where the Other child was looking. A smouldering hole had formed in the sand lot beside the children’s play space. A bizarre machine, unlike any devices she had seen in any xenology class, careened12 at top pace down one of the lesser coils. She looked down. An Other man and an Other woman were riding in it, driving. The machine was large and silver. It would fit a bed. The thing must have ripped through the surface. She had never heard of that. She looked closer, and the Other man and the Other woman were carrying a baby, and they had a look of terror and tenderness on their haggard faces, pale from the cruelty of underground life. Anne pulled out with a curled fist and they had no chance to escape. The restraint work of the Other authorities was always impressive in its brutality. The Others were monsters when it came to crime and punishment and angrily excised any difference with savagery. A remorseless circle of exexalters, at least thirty of them, were coiling in on the fleeing Others. How long did they have? She looked back, flipped up. The Other man smiled at the Other woman for some obscure reason, cooed over the infant. She flipped back and the round group of the sinister exexalters crept in, and then they all slowed, out of screen. She flipped back up and the strange machine had vanished. She curled up more. The machine had crashed into a boulder, and the Other woman with her baby were burning horribly inside the wreckage, and the Other man, thrown clear, lay dying on the grey sand. The Other man was looking straight up. He was looking straight up at Anne. He was staring at her across the galaxy right into her eye.
Anne’s face, as it sucked out of the viewer, pulled slightly on the flaps, gently squeezing her eyeballs in their socket13. Two hours and seventeen minutes had passed. Time was always distorted by drifting over the Other, what with a thirty-six hour, seventeen-minute, fifty-four-second day. Culture shock is always worse coming home.
“Ed?” She called up the professor’s visuals from control. His face, on Skype, was the haggard face of a begging administrator on one call after another.
“Hi Anne, did they hold up a sign saying ‘Hi, earth?’”
“I saw something.”
“Is it profitable and marketable?”
Was there profit in that rickety old machine somewhere? Was there some kind of profit in that? Or in the look of sadness on the Other’s face?
“There’s lots of wonderful things to see, Anne. Nobody needs us here to show them a new wonderful thing. The moon shines wonderfully every evening. Nobody needs seventy-thousand-ton telescopes in the sky to show them a place they have never seen before. If we want to keep an eye on, we have to find useful, profitable Otherness. Not the new and wonderful. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Profitable and marketable.”
“Profitable and marketable.”
The wreckage was still smouldering gruesomely on the viewer. The corpse of the Other man had already been cleared away. The machine, which must have been cobbled together in the underground, chuffed and spluttered smokily. And there was no way any of it could ever be profitable and marketable.
Anne called Lee, a colleague from graduate school who had worked on subterranean history, and if she was recalling it right, even something with machines. He was living in Cairo these days, she thought, some kind of assistant professor at the uni there.
“Is that Anne?” he asked14. He was older, more slovenly than she remembered, but it had been nearly ten years. She reached him at a Shisha bar on Tahrir Square. “Is that the Anne who is working, I heard, at ISEL and who is actually looking into the sky?”
“That’s me.”
“And what can I do for Anne who has a good job at ISEL where she is looking into the sky?”
“You once, long ago, studied the subterranea right?”
The hitch in his voice swelled awkwardly, stringently into a silence. The envy reached through the phone. Anne remembered. Lee had only managed a lousy archival job15, rustling in ten-year-old tapes for culinary elements. All the best dishes had been transferred years ago.
“Wow. You’re actually at ISEL asking me a question about the subterannea, aren’t you?”
“That I am.”
His voice hitched again. “You didn’t see a real breakout did you?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I just want to know if there’s any history on the machines used in breakouts.”
Lee paused, recognizing that his scholarship might matter, realizing that the Other existed, was existing, and he understood it, understood it usefully.
“Well, a big book on subterranea as a prison system is Nguyen’s Other Underground, but that was forty years ago or more even. The subterannea’s only had maybe a thousand hours of inspection over the past twenty years.”
“Why is that?”
“I guess they figure if the Others don’t care about it, why would we? People get bored with mysteries after a while, for sure. And then there was an article a couple of years ago, out of the unit at Oxford. ‘Otherness among the Other,’ but it was general xenosociology. Wasn’t that your field?”
“Before it all folded.”
“Right. We’re all xenologists now. Also, there’s a footnote in my last paper in Otherism on the first escape but you know all about that. So what can you tell me about your breakout?”
She would be fired for a leak, even with Lee, even for a story no one cared to hear. Systems grow stricter as institutions decline. If there is nothing profitable or marketable in a thing, it must remain a secret or it has no value at all.
Her parents were still up when Anne, sick from the train and suffused with an indefinable and all-suffusing disappointment, rolled through the portico of the family farmstead. She found them in the viewing room, watching a new storm16 roll ferociously over the cornfields and the apple orchard. Mom was lying down, asleep, with her head on dad’s lap. The lightning from the storm was continuous enough that the room needed no other illumination, and Anne’s skin tingled furtively17 with the electricity in the air. She sat beside her father in the noise of the rain that filled her ears like a cloying syrup.
“How was the first day at ISEL?” he whispered.
“Everything I thought it would be.”
“And what did you think it would be then?”
It was the first time that day that anyone had cared what Anne thought. And at that very moment she didn’t want to see or to record. At that very moment she just wanted to listen to the rain.
“There’s just so much of it,” she said.
“It is another world.”
“And what are we doing looking at it?”
“Keeping an eye on, right?”
“Keeping an eye on what?”
Anne’s father ran a hand through her mother’s hair a few moments.
“This morning I was weighing in my mind that first book of the Other plants and animals we bought you. Remember that?”
“Sure.”
“And those bedroom sheets you wanted so badly, the ones with a little kangaroo-like Other thing on it. What are they called?”
“Calotricks.”
“And now you’re a grown-up woman, and they’re letting you look up in the sky from the big machines at ISEL.”
The storm ripped the sky, harsh as a lash against her eyes. Her dad was proud of her, but she could tell he cared less for the Other world, the distant miracle, a sign however remote that we were not alone in the universe, than whether she would be able to move out now that she had a job. She was about to tell him about the n
ightmare chase of the burning woman and the dying man and the baby they took with them when her mother roused, and Dad shushed, and began to sing:
Twinkle, twinkle18, little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle, twinkle little star19
How I wonder what you are.
He picked up his wife and carried her out of the viewing room to bed. Anne was alone, more alone than before.
The exhaustion of the day accumulating inside her, she was glad of a half-dark room and a storm. As a child, to be even a cog in the celestial machinery would have been enough. She loved a whole other world, miraculously reflected in a skypiercing eye. She was middle-aged now: there was only light, moving through emptiness, trapped by machines20.
* * *
1 “Topic modeling,” Hammond says of the process he and Brooke used to create the 14 rules, “is mathematically sophisticated but otherwise stupid. The algorithm looks for words that tend to occur near one another in a very large corpus of text.” Based on how frequently the words appear together, Hammond determined what my story had to be about. For instance, after finding clusters of words throughout the texts that suggested extraterrestrial worlds and beings, he gave me rule number one: “The story should be set on a planet other than Earth.”
2 The algorithm affected the story much more than I thought it would. Rule number one above seemed to conflict with rule number nine: “Include a scene set on a traditional Earth farm, with apple trees and corn fields.” The only way I could figure out how to follow both rules was to have someone on Earth viewing another planet. Which, I have to say, I like—the feeling that you’re watching helplessly as faraway events transpire. That suits our time, doesn’t it?
3 What most writers and readers consider style (a recognizable way with words) is not what the algorithm considers style. It was developed to analyze average sentence length, variance in paragraph length, verbs per 100 words, and dozens of other statistics and patterns that my story would have to follow.
4 I wrote a rough draft, based on the rules and guidelines, and dropped it into the interface. The first thing SciFiQ told me was that I used too few adverbs. I’ve always been taught to cut anything ending in ly, and I had to go back over the story putting in adverbs. Absurdly, good science fiction has a lot of adverbs.
5 It wasn’t just adverbs either. It was adverbs per 100 words. So they had to be sprinkled throughout.
6 The algorithm also told me what percentage of text should be dialogue and how much of that dialogue should come from female characters. This is where things get embarrassing. Turns out that, based on the stories I chose, only 16. 1 percent of the dialogue could be from a woman’s point of view. Which is a crazily low number. Female writers historically write 40 to 50 percent of their dialogue for female characters, male writers about 20 percent; so even by the shitty standards of male writers and history, this is appalling. It meant I had to make Anne shy and scholarly, and I had to make all the men around her bloviating assholes. Otherwise the dialogue numbers wouldn’t work out.
7 The female dialogue thing is still bugging me. If I had chosen a different 50 stories, or even changed one of the 50 stories, there would be a different outcome. I need to start reading better science fiction.
8 Rule number 11: “Engage the sublime. Consider using the following words: vast, gigantic, strange, radiance, mystery, brilliance, fantastic, and spooky.”
9 The algorithm distinguishes between the “literariness” and “colloquialness” of any given word, and I had to strike the right balance between the two kinds. My number of literary words was apparently too high, so I had to go through the story replacing words like scarlet with words like red.
10 I loved writing descriptions of the Other planet, but I could only include a few. My story had to consist of about 26 percent dialogue, so every time I wrote a bit of descriptive non-dialogue, I knew I’d have to make up for it elsewhere with some talking. It was like working out probabilities when you’re playing poker.
11 Rule number four: “The story should be set in a city. The protagonists should be seeing the city for the first time and should be impressed and dazzled by its scale.”
12 Rule number six: “Include a pivotal scene in which a group of people escape from a building at night at high speed in a high tech vehicle made of metal and glass.”
13 Rule number 10: “Include extended descriptions of intense physical sensations and name the bodily organs that perceive these sensations.” The first part of that rule is generally good writing advice (make ‘em feel it), but the second part is innovative: It’s not just the description but the organs that matter.
14 This guy is here—this whole scene is here—because there needed to be four speaking characters and I needed more dialogue. If I were just writing it myself, I would probably cut the whole section.
15 Ordinarily, when I’m writing and I’m stuck with a line I don’t like, I work on finding the right way to write that line. The adjective sucks? I find a better adjective or cut the adjective altogether. But, in this case, that’s not enough. If you cut an adjective in one place, you have to put in an adjective somewhere else, and putting in that adjective somewhere else alters the balance of sentence length, paragraph length, paragraph length variation, and so on. It’s a bit like doing a Rubik’s cube. You fix one thing, you’ve messed up the side you weren’t looking at.
16 Rule number five: “Part of the action should unfold at night during an intense storm.”
17 One way of looking at this algorithm is as an editor. It’s commissioning a story with guidelines and then forcing me to write it the way it wants. If I don’t do it right, the algorithm makes me do it again, and again, until I get it right.
18 I chose the title of the story. Some things the algorithm didn’t get to decide.
19 Did you know this poem was actually written by a person? A woman named Jane Taylor (1783–1824). And it’s so famous that everybody assumes nobody wrote it, that it just kind of appeared. That is the ultimate achievement of writing, that it’s so good that no person could have written it.
20 “The fact that it’s really not that bad is kind of remarkable.” That’s how Rich, my human editor, described the story. I’ll take it.
Visitation
Lisa Moore
I started having visions in late July, just as things were starting to heat up. The visions were preceded by the kind of optical disturbances many people experience. Floating prisms in my peripheral vision. Unaligned rainbows, or shimmers that sometimes drifted in front of my eyes as if carried on a light breeze. They were radiant but opaque splotches, so if I were looking directly at someone’s face, the mouth might be obscured. If I darted my eyes, fast, to the right or left, I could sometimes shift the spot so I could see the person’s mouth, but then an eye would be obscured, or a cheek. I thought early migraine symptoms, or detached retina, but there was no firm diagnosis.
I began to experience these floaters, or whatever they were, a month or so before the first vision. I don’t know if the man I saw was in any way connected to the minor visual disturbances that preceded his presence. I say man; he was corporeal. But that is all I can say for certain.
The vision was accompanied by the stink of rot; it smelled like our dog after he had rolled in the remains of a moose carcass someone had dumped in the woods. It was a stink that wafted in—simultaneously piercing and blunt, like a hammer that hits a thumb—but the smell was whipped away when the wind changed direction. I didn’t think supernatural at the time. I didn’t think evil. But I felt uneasy almost at once, a fluttering in my gut. And after only a moment, I was very afraid.
The first time I exp
erienced the vision, or visitation, was at the Low Point beach. I thought stress. The collapse of my marriage. My husband and I had been separated for a little more than a year and had recently finalized the divorce. Psychotic episode, I thought. I hadn’t been eating very much. I was working long hours. I thought fatigue. Though at first I thought the man was an ordinary stranger who had stopped at the beach because of the strange phenomena with the fish. The bay was thick with cod. Half the community had come out to see. There were cars lining the harbour, people standing around in small groups, trying to get a good look.
A marriage is this: My husband likes the glasses with the glasses, the cups with the cups. Every morning I unload the dishwasher and put the cups and the glasses together. He comes down and moves the cups.
The bath running, pipes shuddering, lolling surges of water, the scrudge of a calf or buttock along the white enamel of the cast-iron claw-footed tub we salvaged from an abandoned house in Low Point, a house collapsing into the long grass.
We are: Daily walks along Duckworth Street in the late afternoon together; occasionally, change for the homeless of downtown St. John’s, mostly kids with dogs, sleeping bags draped over their shoulders and cardboard signs that say they’re trying to get home; lattes from Fixed; past the Devon House, raku pottery in the window and hooked rugs, up to the Battery where there are seven black cats, mostly on the picket fence or the porch of the last house before you get to the lookout. We are the dog let loose in the Anglican Cathedral on the way back home, rippling through the chest-high snow at dusk. A mutt, mottled like an old mirror, an undulation, sniffing the graves; and my husband, with the black nylon leash wrapped around one of his puffy Gore-Tex gloves, letting the metal hook of the leash slap against his thigh.