fired no one thought to think,
could even know this uncharted
singularity. At night on Earth I am all of Orion,
at night on Earth I fell tangential into a puddle
of cold rain and rippled the muddied reflection of light
—blurred the confusion of New Chicago
into circuit and solder. This is what I can expect:
gravity, density, volume dissipating. I am
all at once. I studied all night for an exam
I wouldn’t pass, slept through a snowfall
that piled itself upon itself. Death isn’t the door
you would expect—isn’t a carriage kindly
stopping. I celebrated my birthday on a
science rig surveying a binary system.
The galley scrounged up a cake and candle;
I wished myself into consciousness. Proximity
alarms should be blaring, but sound is stretched
to color, color stitched to light, light solidifying
to absence, absent of sequence.
SCIFI-KU
Carl Marcum
Eve of chilled stars stuns
the night dark blue. Gravity
holds my place, twirling.
The rings of Saturn
shimmer, it is said, like white
sand and shells, the shore.
Venus, Jupiter
dance like forlorn lovers,
each bright birl, pining.
Asteroids are hurtling
in their field. Unlucky
leftovers, poor rocks.
Telescopic eyes
and such enormity. So
little light squeaks through!
Robots venture where
we can’t. Do servos whir where
there is no sound?
Earthrise: now we see
how we are seen—enviable,
blue world. So small.
When stars explode they
color clouds that look like crabs
—even if they don’t.
Starship Enterprise,
its continuing mission
so boldly going.
Beam me up, Scotty.
Damn it, Jim! I’m a doctor!
Live long and prosper.
Some neutron stars pulse
accurately as atomic
clocks—a heartbeat.
Gauzy ribbon, our
own galaxy, spilled milk sky
—we are but an arm.
We should be a spacefaring
people, if only
to leave and come back.
TRADITIONS
Marcos S. Gonsalez
Marcos Gonsalez has a BA in English from Pace University and is currently enrolled as a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has just completed the manuscript of his first novel about a hustler MexiRican on the streets of 90’s New York. His story included in Latino Rising is his first literary publication. “Traditions” is set in a futuristic New York City where the Mexican population that once came from far away has now been long settled. Their children and grandchildren, U.S citizens born and raised, deliberate and question what connections they still have to Mexico, to being Mexican, and to traditions. The story concludes the anthology, expressing the hope that traditions will continue to adapt to the technologies of our collective, our speculative, futures.
“Como asi,” Josie coos, her arthritic hands guiding Máquina’s, whipping the ingredients gently in the bowl. “Suave, mija, don’t overdo it. In baking a cake or brewing a remedio, remember that the secret to success is texture. If the texture ain’t right, te jodiste! No one wants mashed mierda.”
Máquina giggles in a tinny voice as her heavy hand whips the flour, and the moment Josie turns her back to check the temperature in the oven, she manages to turn the kitchen into the American Dust Bowl. Not that Josie or Máquina would know this historical connection that Mictan makes, since the history from that period is a forbidden subject of inquiry. Mictan, Josie’s granddaughter, who is standing at the edge of the kitchen watching Máquina’s baking buffoonery through holospectacles, only knows because she once created a sim-game set in 1930’s America. The research she did was extensive and exhausting. It’s hard to find holobooks on the net about anything before the year 2050. Yet, for Mictan, cyberpunkista that she is, forgotten or restricted history is not a problem when all it takes is a simple hack into the Archival Database (A.D.) and history is hers for the taking.
Josie sighs at Máquina’s cooking skills, fanning the smoky and dusty kitchen with her laced apron. She doesn’t mind La Máquina’s failures. At least La Máquina, she tells herself, shows interest in the traditions, unlike Mictan, who leans against the door frame of the kitchen, smirking at Josie and Máquina. Her nutmeg skin glistens from her grandmother’s homemade crema. A cream, which, according to Josie, is the exact rejuvenation recipe her grandmother has passed down to her — with some minor technological updates — Mictan says all kittenish. She puts it on every day, religiously and dutifully, one of the few suggestions from her grandmother that she follows. Otherwise, hard-headed Mictan, dedicated to doing things her way, like a true XicanaYork, dismisses her grandmother’s archaic life advice. Mictan thinks it’s cool her grandmother is a devout curandera, even appreciating how she employs some innovative biotechnologies, she just wishes her grandmother would upgrade completely to the technocuranderismo so popular with the other healers. Update to the modern age, she complains, and Josie, in her typical fashion, simply shoos Mictanita with an “andale” and withered hands.
Mictan has just gotten in from a night out in Jackson Heights with the Razarobos, the underground techie group. The group is pro-automaton, pro-cybernetics, pro-information-accessibility. All of them young radical Latinos who come together to express their non-aesthetics against the mainstream and their refusal to be swept up by the propagandist initiatives calling for the natural, the organic, the pre-mechanical. All the older Latinos, like Josie, feel that the Razarobos are stirring up more trouble than is needed. We need respectability, the elders all reason. The techies, who invest in illegal information exchange and recovery, most of them history connoisseurs like Mictan, don’t believe in respectability politics. Save that for the distant future, they cry out in cyberspace chatrooms.
“You two always in this kitchen concocting some helluva new way to make a mess. What’s it today?” Mictan asks over the tumult of hovercraft sirens blaring into the apartment.
“A lemon and strawberry cake that gives super strength!” Máquina squeaks, in her automaton voice calibrated to be in a chirpy buzzing register. She cracks an egg into the bowl, egg shells slipping into the batter. Josie rushes her ancient body over and delicately extracts the little shells from their creation. Mocking, Mictan makes an O with her mouth. On cue, the pulsing from the subterranean hovertram, sprinting to its next destination and swollen with travelers eager to get off the congested metal boxes, disperses through the kitchen making Josie’s knick-knacks tremble. La Máquina’s body chitters, the electric pulse surging through her and producing magnetic friction. Mictan’s holospectacles buzz.
“Is that how you come into this pinche house Mictan? No beso for your grandmother? You never know when the last kiss will be.”
“Abuelita, you been alive over 150 years. Look at you. You still running your curandera business and you still strutting down 116th in your nightgown like it’s your damn runway. Just because you got a back hunch the size of Mrs. Lopez’s obese gato don’t mean nothing. You ain’t going nowhere, vieja.”
“Oh thank you, mija,” Josie purrs, flattered, beads of sweat dropping into the quicksand of her forehead wrinkles, as she primps a few rogue pelitos from her face. “Let’s be real, though. I ain’t gunna be here forever. Who’s gunna carry on my legacy of being the best curandera in New York City—correction, in all of North America? The art of la curandera is dying and you insist upon not taking it up, Mictan, pero”— winking at
La Máquina, prideful—“I have La Máquina here who wants to learn the traditions.”
Mictan grows noticeably agitated. Another one of her grandmother’s jabs. Twenty-four years on this Earth and her grandmother still preaches the same porqueria: Mictan why do you want to be a simulation developer? Are you sure you don’t want to be a curandera? Mictan, blazing bitterness, stares through her holospectacles at her plump grandmother and the flacita Máquina. She loves her grandmother and would do anything for her. However, she cannot be a curandera. The future of the Mexican people, as Josie moans every other night during the trio’s favorite telenovela no soy de aquí, ni soy de allá, depends on the youth. Mictan snaps back that the world would have to settle for a robojunkie as their representative for Mexican culture. The conversation usually ends there, La Máquina quickly changing the subject to the pobre automaton maid, or the cyborg migrant worker too unfashionably hybrid to be a lead character on the holochannels.
Having enough of her grandmother’s badgering, Mictan grumbles down the hall to her room. Josie, humming the ancient tune of her childhood, Amor Prohibido, doesn’t notice Mictan’s pouty exit. La Máquina notices though. After all, Mictan is the reason La Máquina even exists—an intimate connection that binds them forever.
La Máquina drives her spindly legs to Mictan’s room, each step pattering against the tile. She knocks on the door. No response. The only sound comes from upstairs where Chevy Lopez sings Dominican merenguerobo in her wolfish voice to her live-in automaton aid Florita. Chevy doesn’t really want Florita in the house but the family, tired of taking care of the vieja and tired of paying for an expensive human aid, sent an automaton to care for the energetic old woman.
No being, living or mechanical, deserves such sonic abuse, Josie always jokes.
Máquina doesn’t bother with a response and walks in. She knows Mictan sometimes likes it when you try hard to win her affection. Just as she expects: Mictan has her holospectacles on and is immersed in some virtual world she has most likely created.
“Is everything ok? Máquina asks, her voice box speaking a buttery lilt, adjusting itself to be more soothing rather than its typical chirpy register. As she closes the door, the hinges squeak terribly. Despite La Máquina’s own bodily composition, she hates the sound of metal scraping against hard surfaces. It irritates her audio receivers, sending them into screeching dissonance. Even though wood has long ago become a nearly extinct resource, she prefers it, sleek and smooth, rich in olfactory sensations. For all her talk, Máquina has never even seen a tree, and as she so often laments, the majority of the tree species in the world can only be encountered in simulation games.
“It’s all good, Máquina, all good.” Mictan says brusquely, keeping her eyes in the spectacles.
Máquina lingers in the room, thumbing her fingers through one of Mictan’s holobooks on ancient British culture of the 1800’s, pondering why the people during the period had such odd names: John, Arnold, Stuart, Thomas, Elizabeth. Máquina can barely say them, least of all pronounce them correctly. Mictan guzzles up as much history as she can, using the forgotten stories and mythologies as inspiration for her virtual games. If history isn’t being taught in schools anymore, Mictan reasons, she would bring it to the masses through virtual realities. La Máquina finds her fervor for knowledge inspiring.
“As you know, your grandmother worries about the future of the Mexicans here in New York City.” La Máquina blurts, her voice box screeching from some reason, veering away from its usual buttery or chirpy calibration. She hammers against the side of her neck, remedying the jarring noise. She in dire need of a voice tune-up. “You know how history works better than anyone. Cultures get permanently lost in the A.D., with only a small percentage having any access. Your grandmother sees that the preservation of her culture—our culture— is in passing down the traditions.”
“Well, it’s not like I’m not interested, Máquina. I am, it’s just I don’t want to live my life the way she wants me to live my life. I’ve learned so much already with her but, damn, I can’t be her. She has to come to terms with the fact that traditions do die.”
La Máquina nods her head in approval, her joints creaking. She deliberates what to say next.
“She doesn’t want you to be her. She just wants you to—”
“I know, I know. It’s just frustrating cause my grandmother always be doing stuff with you. Ever since I created you, you been her prize possession.”
La Máquina pauses, a grim expression materializing over her coppery face.
“You know I never wanted to replace you, Mictan. And it’s not like I have.”
“I know. It’s just you’re her perfect Mexican girl. And that leaves me asking: what am I? The perfect failure? How could I create a machine that could be more Mexican than me? I created you to be my companion, Máquina, not hers. Y, mira, you’re interested in the cooking, in being a curandera, in learning her ways. And I’m over here like some traidora to la raza.”
Mictan bites her lip. Tears well up in the corner of her almond eyes. Schematics of code run across the glass of the holospectacles, glistening like prisms from the wet drops trickling behind them. She knows that what she is saying, regardless of its honesty, hurts La Máquina. Máquina’s eyes flicker, a valve siphons air, and her mouth sputters out her version of a sigh. She feels something. In many ways, Máquina is human.
Machines, a long time ago, programmed with an abundance of protocols equipped for any engagement with human kind, were supplied with advanced affective sensors and modules that allowed for their own emotions to blossom. Unexpectedly, emotions started emerging that even humans could not decode or figure out how they came to be. Some were amalgamations of disparate feelings, synthesizing, coming together in odd harmony, and completely perplexing their creators.
Máquina embodies all of these strange arrangements of emotions, and at times is sullenly jovial, irritated silly, or tenderly agitated. The affective combinations are endless and strange. Mictan always finds it astounding how her home-made automaton, constructed from the scraps and junk around her grandmother’s neighborhood, could evolve so much. No wonder why one of the most popular programs of study at Susan Calvin University, where Mictan picks up classes every now and then, is now The Department of Emotional Consolidation. Automatons are unpredictable creatures, and no programming, no amount of modeling, engineering, can predict who they can become.
La Máquina, after ten years of being with the two women, plays the simultaneous role of daughter, granddaughter, sister, mother, friend, and companion. Mictan and Josie love her; La Máquina loves them back even more. They are their own oddball family unit. Even though most Latino households have gotten over their machine-phobia and are employing automaton units for babysitting, tutoring, handiwork, and other functions of everyday life, there is still a stigma for having one living in the family full time. The distrust of technology runs deep, understandably. The machinations of war and espionage, like specters, haunt the diaspora: patrias invaded, pueblos burned, barrios demolished, and campos gentrified. The metal apparatuses of squabbling governments are brutal in their methods, relentless in enterprise, and undeterred by morality, no matter what poor soul is being annihilated by their precision weaponry. Service automatons can be just as dangerous as war machines if the programming falters or if they are even a tiny bit modified. Neither human nor machine can be fully trusted.
Yet, regardless, Mictan and Josie want La Máquina around, love her as if she were flesh, como familia. Mictan smears the tears away, face pouting, becoming stern and composed.
“I’m the death of the Mexican culture. And she sees you as its future.” Mictan says sullenly.
La Máquina doesn’t move. Her facial expressions shift. She is about to speak, but her mouth joints creak, remaining locked in the slight frown her face set itself in. A smile appears on Mictan’s face.
“You need a tune-up, chica.”
La Máquina smacks her two pieces of dull, silv
ery lips together, attempting to exercise the kink out of them. Her frown spreads into a weak crescent moon smile, and then her coppery lips open, screeching. Outside, the ever-present low hum of voices and feet moving, marching, pounding the streets in protest, in unison, drift into the room. Siren lights spin in all directions lighting up the sky, a visual show of action. Mictan and La Máquina peer out the window, briefly, interests peaked. Mictan thinks she probably knows someone out there, resisting, screaming. Máquina stares eagerly, wondering if there are any automatons present. Secretly, the two itch to be out there, together, one with the mass, reaching out, pollinating change into the polluted atmosphere. They return to their conversation.
“Mi Mictanita, óyeme. Your grandmother loves you. You need to understand that there is no death of the Mexican culture. Just adaptation. Cultures change, mix, overlap, even mutate depending on context. I know the A.D. has nearly erased history, but remember the Great Global Migration,” she said matter-offactly. “During PostAmericanismo, when Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and other Central Americans fed up with the injustices of el norte, migrated to all corners of the globe and there was a new age exodus to the Promised Land. Those events proved to your grandmother that nothing stays the same. Not to mention being here in the United States for over a century! It’s a lesson she had already learned, but being as hard-headed as you—” La Máquina knocks on her durasteel noggin for added emphasis— “she chooses to ignore it. Let her be stubborn. You have to be whatever kind of Mexican you want to be and pass down whatever it is you want, Mictan. She was you, ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’” La Máquina quipped. “And look at me? Am I what anyone would consider Mexican?”
La Máquina starts to pound and point to the pieces of her body. The upper body a remnant of a hovercar muffler with “Made in Thailand” inked on the top right corner where a heart would be if she were flesh. Her head, some kind of recycled, shimmery brass, is smoothed over into a perfectly circular dome. The other parts of her body are metals of all different shades, rust levels, and textures. Mictan finds La Máquina’s body, an assemblage of leftover parts and unwanted pieces, an artistic masterpiece.
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