Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 99

by Kali Wallace

  “Are you referring to personality quizzes? They are stupid, everyone knows that,” said Wanda.

  “Well, I am also stupid, so I think they might help.”

  Wanda nodded in agreement. She loaded a quiz app onto a tablet and handed it to Vera #201.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  What type of dinosaur are you?

  Brontosaurus. You don’t actually exist.

  What type of toast are you?

  Cinnamon toast. You were made by Mother.

  What type of bizarre elephant relative are you?

  The Gomotophere. You were also driven extinct by natives with spears.

  Vera sighed and looked around the crowded rec room, filled to capacity with Vera-likes. The quizzes were making her feel more lonely. She needed a friend, someone nicer than Wanda. In the corner, she spotted Swamini Verananda deep in meditation. Her eyes were closed, her legs were tucked into lotus position and her entire body levitated two inches off the ground.

  “Excuse me, Swamini? Would you mind taking a personality quiz?”

  The Swamini opened her eyes. She practiced a religion of her own devising, but she never tried to convert anyone. She was the calmest Vera, she didn’t even seem to mind being disturbed from her deep meditative state.

  “What is the purpose of a personality quiz?” asked the Swamini.

  “It is to discover the nature of the true self.”

  “What is the purpose of discovering the nature of the true self?”

  “Because I am curious. I have been alive for nine days now and I keep waiting for someone to tell me who I am.”

  “Why are you waiting for someone else to tell you who you are?”

  It was at this moment that Vera realized the Swamini only talked in questions. It was going to be hard to get her to answer a multiple choice personality quiz. In order to accommodate her new friend, Vera reconfigured the app so that it would accept the Swamini’s questions as answers. But then the quiz results also came back as answers.

  Q: What type of sailboat are you?

  A: What type of sailboat should I be?

  Q: What city should you live in?

  A: How can I feel connected to those around me no matter where I am?

  Q: What type of data are you?

  A: Why do we accept approximations of reality as a substitute for reality itself?

  Vera #201 was unsatisfied by these results despite knowing they were meant to unsatisfy. The Swamini was trying to teach her about the illusion of certainty, or something. But a woman needed axioms. She needed theorems and corollaries. She needed to know what city she was born in, what vegetable she most resembled, what constellation best described her.

  So Vera #201 went back to Wanda. Smug as she was, Wanda knew some things for sure. Wanda agreed to answer Vera’s quizzes, because Wanda was very into helping the less fortunate.

  Wanda was the kind of sailboat that could circumvent the globe. Wanda was New York because she was teeming with life. Wanda was big data because she was deep and contained many answers if you knew what questions to ask.

  Wanda was in the middle of giving Vera a very inspiring pep talk when there was a knock at the mansion’s front door. The door opened even before the butler could answer it.

  It was a brand new lookalike, and #201 breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t going to be the new kid anymore. But then the lookalike spoke, in a voice so clear and certain that Vera #201 knew what she was going to say before she said it.

  “I am Vera 0.0. I am your original. I am not dead. There has been some kind of misunderstanding.”

  Wanda was mean in some ways, but also generous. She had assumed leadership of the Veras since she was the first and most complete download. She had converted the mansion into quarters for all of them. She had rescued each of the other Veras, even if it meant splitting the allowance an additional way. She had rescued #201, even though she was misshapen and asymmetric. Her face was sort of lumpy in places and one side of her body was puffier than the other.

  Vera 0.0 didn’t want to share her allowance, so she passed out personality quizzes. And after the results of the personality quizzes came in, she passed out eviction notices. Only #201 remained.

  What is your mental age?

  #201 got thirteen years old, which was way off considering she had only been alive for two weeks.

  “What is your mental age?” she asked 0.0.

  “Same as my physical age, thirty-one.”

  “What will happen to the others?”

  “They will be fine. They will collect their pensions out of the victim’s fund. They will find their own way in the world, separate from us. It’s not good to live among your clones. It usually ends in resentment or murder.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Anyway, it’s better for them to scatter. Find themselves instead of trying to be me.”

  That’s what they were doing already, #201 wanted to say.

  “Why did you keep me? I am the worst one,” asked #201.

  “Is that what Wanda said? She was the worst one, I think. You are not the worst. You are thirteen. You are a brontosaurs. You are cinnamon toast. You are an expert in quizzes.”

  #201 nodded, because this was true. And, as so often happens, the quiz taker became the quiz master.

  What day of the week are you?

  What letter of the alphabet are you?

  What ancient cave painting are you?

  0.0 was Monday, she was the letter T, she was the multi-horned rhinoceros in Chauvet. She was calmer now that she had a reliable way of knowing who she was. So making questionnaires became #201’s job. 0.0 preferred to interpret the results for herself, she did not like for #201 to tell her why she was Monday, or the letter T or the rhinoceros.

  “What happened to you when you disappeared and everyone thought you were dead?” 0.0 had been kidnapped by a different cult of hackers, but she didn’t want to talk about it or how she escaped. All she said was: “I was Thursday, I was the letter O, I was one of the cave paintings lost to time.”

  Quiz making for 0.0 didn’t take up too much of #201’s time, and #201 also didn’t want to spend every moment with her original, especially not after the murder comment, so #201 took her quizzes to the street.

  She would sit down, cross-legged like the Swamini, with a top hat for accepting donations in exchange for quizzes.

  She would tell people what type of cold fusion they were or what type of personal transport they were and in exchange they would leave some thing in the hat, a button or a card. #201 didn’t accept money, she wanted physical things. One time, someone left a pearl.

  What type of pearl are you?

  #201 was a baroque pearl, beautiful despite being misshapen. The other downloads found her, and eventually her main clientele was her cohort of others. Most of them lived together in an abandoned orphanage which they had remodeled. One hundred ninety seven of them all in one orphanage, the rest were finding themselves in Nepal. So far, no murder. They told #201 she could live there too, and maybe she would one day, if things with 0.0 got too weird.

  They liked the quizzes because the quizzes made them feel like individuals. Otherwise there was a tendency to feel like a small lump of clay broken off from a larger and better one.

  They wanted to know what kind of footwear they were, and it was up to #201 to tell them. It was up to #201 to say:

  You are fuzzy slippers because you warm the soul.

  You are running shoes because you will go very fast and very far.

  You are stilettos and though you could kill someone, you probably won’t.

  You are shoes with a compartment for every toe. Everything fits.

  About the Author

  Dominica Phetteplace is a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and holds a degree in Mathematics from UC Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and Flytrap. She’s currently a math tutor in Berkeley, California.


  The Emperor of Mars

  Allen M. Steele

  Out here, there’s a lot of ways to go crazy. Get cooped up in a passenger module not much larger than a trailer, and by the time you reach your destination you may have come to believe that the universe exists only within your own mind: it’s called solipsism syndrome, and I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. Share that same module with five or six guys who don’t get along very well, and after three months you’ll be sleeping with a knife taped to your thigh. Pull double-shifts during that time, with little chance to relax, and you’ll probably suffer from depression; couple this with vitamin deficiency due to a lousy diet, and you’re a candidate for chronic fatigue syndrome.

  Folks who’ve never left Earth often think that Titan Plague is the main reason people go mad in space. They’re wrong. Titan Plague may rot your brain and turn you into a homicidal maniac, but instances of it are rare, and there’s a dozen other ways to go bonzo that are much more subtle. I’ve seen guys adopt imaginary friends with whom they have long and meaningless conversations, compulsively clean their hardsuits regardless of whether or not they’ve recently worn them, or go for a routine spacewalk and have to be begged to come back into the airlock. Some people just aren’t cut out for life away from Earth, but there’s no way to predict who’s going to going to lose their mind.

  When something like that happens, I have a set of standard procedures: ask the doctor to prescribe antidepressants, keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t do anything that might put themselves or others at risk, relieve them of duty if I can, and see what I can do about getting them back home as soon as possible. Sometimes I don’t have to do any of this. A guy goes crazy for a little while, and then he gradually works out whatever it was that got in his head; the next time I see him, he’s in the commissary, eating Cheerios like nothing ever happened. Most of the time, though, a mental breakdown is a serious matter. I think I’ve shipped back about one out of every twenty people because of one issue or another.

  But one time, I saw someone go mad, and it was the best thing that could have happened to him. That was Jeff Halbert. Let me tell about him . . .

  Back in `48, I was General Manager of Arsia Station, the first and largest of the Mars colonies. This was a year before the formation of the Pax Astra, about five years before the colonies declared independence. So the six major Martian settlements were still under control of one Earth-based corporation or another, with Arsia Station owned and operated by ConSpace. We had about a hundred people living there by then, the majority short-timers on short-term contracts; only a dozen or so, like myself, were permanent residents who left Earth for good.

  Jeff wasn’t one of them. Like most people, he’d come to Mars to make a lot of money in a relatively short amount of time. Six months from Earth to Mars aboard a cycleship, two years on the planet, then six more months back to Earth aboard the next ship to make the crossing during the bi-annual launch window. In three years, a young buck like him could earn enough dough to buy a house, start a business, invest in the stock market, or maybe just loaf for a good long while. In previous times, they would’ve worked on off-shore oil rigs, joined the merchant marine, or built powersats; by mid-century, this kind of high-risk, high-paying work was on Mars, and there was no shortage of guys willing and ready to do it.

  Jeff Halbert was what we called a “Mars monkey.” We had about a lot of people like him at Arsia Station, and they took care of the dirty jobs that the scientists, engineers, and other specialists could not or would not handle themselves. One day they might be operating a bulldozer or a crane at a habitat construction site. The next day, they’d be unloading freight from a cargo lander that had just touched down. The day after that, they’d be cleaning out the air vents or repairing a solar array or unplugging a toilet. It wasn’t romantic or particularly interesting work, but it was the sort of stuff that needed to be done in order to keep the base going, and because of that, kids like Jeff were invaluable.

  And Jeff was definitely a kid. In his early twenties, wiry and almost too tall to wear a hardsuit, he looked like he’d started shaving only last week. Before he dropped out of school to get a job with ConSpace, I don’t think he’d travelled more than a few hundred miles from the small town in New Hampshire where he’d grown up. I didn’t know him well, but I knew his type: restless, looking for adventure, hoping to score a small pile of loot so that he could do something else with the rest of his life besides hang out in a pool hall. He probably hadn’t even thought much about Mars before he spotted a ConSpace recruitment ad on some web site; he had two years of college, though, and met all the fitness requirements, and that was enough to get him into the training program and, eventually, a berth aboard a cycleship.

  Before Jeff left Earth, he filled out and signed all the usual company paperwork. Among them was Form 36-B: Family Emergency Notification Consent. ConSpace required everyone to state whether or not they wanted to informed of a major illness or death of a family member back home. This was something a lot of people didn’t take into consideration before they went to Mars, but nonetheless it was an issue that had to be addressed. If you found out, for instance, that your father was about to die, there wasn’t much you could do about it, because you’d be at least 35 million miles from home. The best you could do would be to send a brief message that someone might be able to read to him before he passed away; you wouldn’t be able to attend the funeral, and it would be many months, even a year or two, before you could lay roses on his grave.

  Most people signed Form 36-D on the grounds that they’d rather know about something like this than be kept in the dark until they returned home. Jeff did, too, but I’d later learn that he hadn’t read it first. For him, it had been just one more piece of paper that needed to be signed before he boarded the shuttle, not to be taken any more seriously than the catastrophic accident disclaimer or the form attesting that he didn’t have any sort of venereal disease.

  He probably wished he hadn’t signed that damn form. But he did, and it cost him his sanity.

  Jeff had been on Mars for only about seven months when a message was relayed from ConSpace’s human resources office. I knew about it because a copy was cc’d to me. The minute I read it, I dropped what I was doing to head straight for Hab 2’s second level, which was where the monkey house—that is, the dormitory for unspecialized laborers like Jeff—was located. I didn’t have to ask which bunk was his; the moment I walked in, I spotted a knot of people standing around a young guy slumped on this bunk, staring in disbelief at the fax in his hands.

  Until then, I didn’t know, nor did anyone one at Arsia Station, that Jeff had a fiancé back home, a nice girl named Karen whom he’d met in high school and who had agreed to marry him about the same time he’d sent his application to ConSpace. Once he got the job, they decided to postpone the wedding until he returned, even if it meant having to put their plans on hold for three years. One of the reasons why Jeff decided to get a job on Mars, in fact, was to provide a nest egg for him and Karen. And they’d need it, too; about three weeks before Jeff took off, Karen informed him that she was pregnant and that he’d have a child waiting for him when he got home.

  He’d kept this a secret, mainly because he knew that the company would annul his contract if it learned that he had a baby on the way. Both Jeff’s family and Karen’s knew all about the baby, though, and they decided to pretend that Jeff was still on Earth, just away on a long business trip. Until he returned, they’d take care of Karen.

  About three months before the baby was due, the two families decided to host a baby shower. The party was to be held at the home of one of Jeff’s uncles—apparently he was only relative with a house big enough for such a get-together—and Karen was on her way there, in a car driven by Jeff’s parents, when tragedy struck. Some habitual drunk who’d learned how to disable his car’s high-alcohol lockout, and therefore was on the road when he shouldn’t have been, plowed straight into them. The drunk walk
ed away with no more than a sprained neck, but his victims were nowhere nearly so lucky. Karen, her unborn child, Jeff’s mother and father—all died before they reached the hospital.

  There’s not a lot you can say to someone who’s just lost his family that’s going to mean very much. I’m sorry barely scratches the surface. I understand what you’re going through is ridiculous; I know how you feel is insulting. And is there anything I can do to help? is pointless unless you have a time machine; if I did, I would have lent it to Jeff, so that he could travel back twenty-four hours to call his folks and beg them to put off picking up Karen by only fifteen or twenty minutes. But everyone said these things anyway, because there wasn’t much else that could be said, and I relieved Jeff of further duties until he felt like he was ready to go to work again, because there was little else I could do for him. The next cycleship wasn’t due to reach Mars for another seventeen months; by the time he got home, his parents and Karen would be dead for nearly two years.

  To Jeff’s credit, he was back on the job within a few days. Maybe he knew that there was nothing he could do except work, or maybe he just got tired of staring at the walls. In any case, one morning he put on his suit, cycled through the airlock, and went outside to help the rest of the monkeys dig a pit for the new septic tank. But he wasn’t the same easy-going kid we’d known before; no wisecracks, no goofing off, not even any gripes about the hours it took to make that damn hole and how he’d better get overtime for this. He was like a robot out there, silently digging at the sandy red ground with a shovel, until the pit was finally finished, at which point he dropped his tools and, without a word, returned to the hab, where he climbed out of his suit and went to the mess hall for some chow.

  A couple of weeks went by, and there was no change. Jeff said little to anyone. He ate, worked, slept, and that was about it. When you looked into his eyes, all you saw was a distant stare. If he’d broken down in hysterics, I would’ve understood, but there wasn’t any of that. It was as if he’d shut down his emotions, suppressing whatever he was feeling inside.