All These Shiny Worlds
Copyright © Jefferson Smith 2016
Edited by Jefferson Smith
Cover Art by Jefferson Smith
Copyedited by Fleur Macqueen
Published by Creativity Hacker Press (creativityhacker.ca)
All rights reserved by the authors. Neither this book nor any portion thereof may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the contributing author, except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews and commentary. The moral rights of each contributing author have been asserted by them.
First Printing, 2016 (Rev. 2018-12-31 21:17)
Printed in the United States of America
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
All these shiny worlds : the 2016 ImmerseOrDie anthology / Jefferson Smith, editor.
Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-9940795-4-1 (paperback).—ISBN 978-0-9940795-5-8 (epub).— ISBN 978-0-9940795-6-5 (mobi)
1. Fantasy fiction, Canadian (English). 2. Science fiction, Canadian (English). 3. Short stories, Canadian (English). I. Smith, Jefferson, 1964-, editor
PS8323.F3A55 2016 C813’.010806 C2016-900278-0
C2016-900279-9
Acknowledgements
Stories are included in this collection by permission of the authors.
“All the Way,” by Graham Storrs. Copyright © 2009 Graham Storrs. First appeared in The Future Fire, vol 18.
“The Ant Tower,” by Christopher Ruz. Copyright © 2011 Christopher Ruz.
“Bronwen’s Dowry,” by Belinda Mellor. Copyright © 1989 Belinda Mellor. First appeared in At The Stroke Of Twelve, from William Collins Sons and Co. Ltd.
“Heft,” by Brett Adams. Copyright © 2011 Brett Adams.
“Rolling the Bones,” by Richard Levesque. Copyright © 2015 Richard Levesque.
“Scales Fall,” by Dave Higgins. Copyright © 2015 Dave Higgins.
“The Blue Breeze,” by Regina Richards. Copyright © 2015 Regina Richards.
“The Dowager’s Largesse,” by Jefferson Smith. Copyright © 2015 Jefferson Smith.
“The First Acolyte of the Upshan Berental,” by Bryce Anderson. Copyright © 2013 Bryce Anderson.
“The First Man in the World,” by Misha Burnett. Copyright © 2015 Misha Burnett.
“The Rakam,” by Karpov Kinrade. Copyright © 2015 Karpov Kinrade. First appeared in The Shattered Islands: Part One: The Rakam, from Daring Books.
“The Red Flame of Death,” by Van Allen Plexico. Copyright © 2010 Van Allen Plexico. First appeared in Gideon Cain: Demon Hunter Vol. 1, from Airship 27 Productions.
“The Spider and the Darkness,” by Russ Linton. Copyright © 2016 Russ Linton.
“Theriac,” by Becca Mills. Copyright © 2014 Becca Mills.
“Three Demon Gambit,” by J.S. Morin. Copyright © 2014 J.S. Morin. First published in The Dark Beyond the Door, from Fictiongarden.com.
Introduction
Okay, by now you’ve probably heard how ImmerseOrDie works, so you already know that I get on my treadmill every morning and open a new indie novel, hoping it will keep me distracted from the monotony of my daily walk. You’ve heard that I do my best to stay immersed in the book, but that when my immersion fails, I make notes about what went wrong, and that if it happens three times before my journey is over, I close the book, write up a report about what happened and post it to my website.
But maybe you don’t know that ImmerseOrDie is about more than simply pointing out problems in indie books. It’s also about celebrating the really good ones. Folks may be drawn in to watch the fun as yet another novel hits a patch of ice and slides into the ditch at the side of my treadmill, but there’s another thing I’ve noticed about the people watching.
They are equally delighted by the books that do make it.
So last year, I started a new component of ImmerseOrDie. Each time a book survived my forty-minute quick sniff test, I put it on a secret pile. Those books were then subjected to a second test: a full-length read. To my surprise, a lot of them went the distance on that round, too. Before I knew it I had nine great survivors, with both great production values and a great story.
That’s when I approached the folks at StoryBundle and hit them with my proposal. Why not offer a bundle composed entirely of indie books—but ones that had been ruthlessly curated?
And so was born the ImmerseOrDie bundle, which I’m proud to say was so popular the first time we did it, in 2015, that we did again this year, and we’ll probably do it again next year as well.
What’s so exciting about these StoryBundles is that they don’t just help readers find great new authors to fall in love with. They also give those authors a kind of exposure they’ve never had. For many of them, the three weeks they participate in the bundle brings them more readers (and more income) than any entire year they’ve experienced before.
And I find it very exciting to be part of that.
But we can do more. The lesson of the bundles is that when authors mingle their audiences, everybody wins. When each of us announces a group project in our newsletters and social media streams, fans who come for one author are suddenly exposed to the work of all the others as well.
Unfortunately, bundles only work for people who can pay a bit of money to buy the collection. It can be as little as just a couple of bucks to get all of them, but you do have to actually buy them, and some people don’t want to risk money on a pile of books from nine authors they’ve never heard of, just to get a book from one who they do know.
Worse, some people may not be willing to tackle an entire novel by a writer they don’t know.
So we hit on the idea of creating an anthology. The one you’re holding in your hands right now, as a matter of fact. And then we set out to do two things that don’t happen very often with indie anthologies. First, we set up a grueling selection process to ensure that only great stories got in. And then we figured out a way to give the whole thing away for free.
To deliver on the first point, we decided to stack the deck, and began by inviting only authors whose books had previously survived the ImmerseOrDie treadmill. Then we figured that strong authors are probably a decent judge of other authors, so we asked each of the survivors to nominate one more author who they thought “had game.” This gave us a total of thirty-four authors in our pool, and to them we extended a simple invitation: hit us with your best short story. Not your newest. Not the one you’ve been having trouble placing elsewhere. Your best.
Some of those authors don’t do short stories, some didn’t have time, and one or two might have been intimidated by the process. But in the end, we received twenty-five submissions.
Then we gave each of the stories to a panel of three secret judges and told them to be ruthless.
By the time the screams had died away and all the blood rinsed from the upholstery, we were left with fifteen survivors. Just like ImmerseOrDie, but a higher-speed version, played with individual short stories rather than novels or entire collections. And every bit as grueling.
Then we ran the entire collection through two complete rounds of editing with professional editors, and now, at last, we place our polished words into your hot and eager hands.
We hope you like it. And if you do, please point all your friends at it. Why wouldn’t you? You’ll get all that cred for turning them on to some exciting new authors, and they get a great book absolutely free. Everybody wins: readers and authors alike.
And that’s what ImmerseOrDie is all about.
So we’ve done our part. All that’s left is for you to do yours. Happy reading.
Jefferson Smith
January 2016, Saskatoon
&n
bsp; For every reader who has ever dared the swamps of indie publishing,
And for the indie authors who sweat bullets over every misplaced comma,
We dedicate this collection to all of you.
May we find each other all the sooner.
The First Man in the World
Misha Burnett
Editor’s Note: Science fiction likes to forecast the future of some science or technology and then explore the implications for humanity. But it does its job best when those implications are brought into focus for just one person. Or in this case, two.
They killed him for the journey, reduced his body to a handful of genetic material crystallized at 40 degrees Kelvin and his mind to an optical storage rack that took up more space than his DNA and the multiple redundancy freezer unit to keep it frozen for the long years it would take to travel.
His last memory was seeing the bulk of the ship on the horizon.
His first memory was being inside the ship, looking down at a world the color of the filthy dust that collects in air conditioning filters.
He was thirty-eight years old.
He was newborn.
He was one hundred and eighty-four years old.
It was all a matter of perspective.
He was—and numerous court cases back on Earth had verified that he had every right to the name, despite the fact that the body that had held it originally was phosphorus-rich fertilizer by this point—Tomas Kent.
Tomas Kent woke up naked and alone in a metal coffin, skin wet and raw, eyes burning from their first touch of air, and thought, I’ve got a world to build.
The world was dead, sterile, but it had potential. Long range spectrography had confirmed the presence of liquid water and a carbon dioxide atmosphere. The rest was details.
He woke up the ship, booting up systems that had been dormant since they had left Earth. They had been designed to last, and they had. The computer analyzed the world that hung below them, and together they began to plot an act of creation.
Algae was first, bullets of engineered green glop, fired from orbit in shells of ablative resin that, in burning away, would also leave a residue of biodegradable dust to drift slowly to the surface of the sea and provide an additional source of food. The glop would survive on nothing more than sunlight, seawater, and carbon dioxide, but the organics in the burned resin would help.
World building is a game of inches. Any marginal advantage is worth the effort.
Back on Earth Tomas had named his new world Avalon.
It took forty years for Avalon’s seas to turn green.
Tomas talked to the computer, and the computer talked back to him, in a voice that was carefully devoid of personality or gender, of anything but meaning. Tomas had grown up with voice-activated equipment—he felt no temptation to personalize it.
Experiments with artificial intelligence had shown that machines were best left as mindless servants for long-term projects. Given too much time to think they became unpredictable, went off in strange directions that their designers could not have foreseen. Jobs that required the flexibility of a human mind required a human body as well.
Tomas would grow lonely, and bored, but the technicians back on Earth were betting that he would stay sane. The odds weren’t nearly as good for a mind reduced to digital storage.
He read books, or had the computer read them to him. There were vast libraries of digitized storage. Movies, too, and games.
He had work to do—maintenance on the vast seeder ship. It was designed to be self-repairing, but he could fine tune the systems, keep the parts that fixed the other parts in working order. He spent three years in the system’s asteroid belt, picking up raw materials.
He worked out plans to introduce higher forms of life, ran simulations on those plans, and changed the plans based on the simulations.
The computer could synthesize a lover for him and he spent endless hours customizing her, specifying the exact shade of her eyes and the texture of her hair. After a while he found his preferences drifting into areas that disturbed him. Some time after that he stopped being disturbed.
In the oceans of Avalon the patches of green thrived and spread, and Tomas grew old.
To grow an adult human being without the tedious years of childhood required doing some violence to the endocrine system. At forty years of age, or seventy-eight, or two hundred and twenty-four, depending on your frame of reference, Tomas’s body ached, and trembled, and could no longer digest solid food. He did some final checks on the ship and told the computer that it was time for him to die again.
His last memory was looking out the window at the sun rising over still green seas.
His first memory was a blue world.
Tomas was four hundred and sixty-three years old.
Or newborn. Or seventy-eight. Take your pick.
The computer had monitored both the ship and the infant world for two centuries, launching regular salvos in its war against the inorganic; more varieties of algae, lichens aggressive enough to suck the nutrients out of the bare rock, slime molds to live on the ground that the lichen had prepared.
It had also recorded incoming messages.
Not from Earth. From Camelot.
Camelot had been launched a few years after Tomas’s ship, at a far lower velocity. It held human beings, thousands of them in a cold sleep that would seem identical to death to anyone without very specialized training. Camelot’s captain, like Tomas, had died and been brought back to life to tend the machinery and then died again. While she had been alive she had sent a message, long and chatty and rambling, but the gist of it was, “We’re fine, we’re coming. See you in a thousand years.”
Tomas looked down on a world that had both seas and soil. A plowed field, ripe for gardening.
He had work to do before his guests arrived.
The next generation of plants were too delicate to simply drop from orbit. Tomas began growing a fleet of drones: gliders with a single flexible wing, an envelope for the payload, and a microprocessor. They could get from the ship’s orbit to the ground mostly intact, and once there the plastic polymer would degrade into a growth medium for the seeds.
He launched thousands of them, aiming their idiot brains for places where the sea met the land, and watched greenbelts slowly appear.
He recorded messages for the computer to encode into lasers aimed at where the Camelot would be when the light reached it. His messages rambled, too, full of the details of his day-to-day life. He’d lost the art of conversation. He included video with his messages, panoramas of Avalon taken from orbit or transmitted from the tiny eyes of the drones.
“I’m getting ready for you,” his messages said, “See you in five hundred years.”
The captain’s name was Sari Vumanipali. Tomas thought that was a pretty name.
For forty years Tomas planted. The computer had mapped the continents—five of them. Three clustered in a rough triangle, one sat by itself surrounded by the open sea, and one straddled the southern pole under a thick cap of ice.
Tomas concentrated his efforts on the more isolated continent, which he named Davidson after his mother’s father. It sat nearly on the equator and would make fine farmland once he was done with it.
Sari’s passengers would like it there, he thought.
Lichen attacked the bare rock, then fungi settled what the lichen left behind. The fungi contained bacteria to decompose them when they died, leaving behind rich soil for the plague of ferns that came next.
Towards the end of this life Tomas sent down the first of the animals, a dozen species of worms to work the soil, and stingerless bees to spread pollen. He and the computer worked out what was to be done next and he selected seeds to be thawed and grown, and sent down to the surface, along with growing tribes of insects. Most of the tiny larvae would die on the journey, so he told the computer to send them in the tens of thousands.
The next time Tomas was born Davidson was a green jewel in the Avalonian
sea. It had been six hundred and thirty-five years since he had been born on Earth. His work was more than halfway done.
There were more messages from Sari. The Camelot was crawling through the sky, and she had been busy keeping everything working. In interstellar space she had no access to raw materials and had to reuse and repair everything on the ship. Nothing critical had failed, but some of the minor problems had required ingenious solutions.
Tomas was looking forward to meeting her in person.
It was time to go down to the surface. The atmosphere was breathable and Davidson was fully forested, although the other continents were still mostly rocky desert. Tomas could only do so much. The grandchildren of Sari’s passengers would begin the work of planting forests there; the grandchildren of the grandchildren would walk under the trees.
The majority of Tomas’s ship stayed in orbit. The computer set the landing craft down off the shore of Davidson and Thomas piloted it onto the beach in a large natural harbor. Davidson City, he thought. The capital of a new world.
Tomas had brought two robots with him, dumb things that could respond to simple voice commands. He spent the first week instructing them to carry him while he learned how to walk. His mind remembered walking, and he knew perfectly well how it was done, but these muscles and nerves had never done it. During that week he stayed closed to the landing craft, eating and sleeping inside it, and probing the interior of the continent with the craft’s instruments.
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