Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

  “Here’s how it works for most people: As you age, your body’s cells periodically divide. During this process, DNA sequences called telomeres protect the ends of your chromosomes. Do you remember when shoes had laces? Telomeres are like shoelaces’ hard, protective tips. Every cell division shortens that stretch of telomeres. Eventually, the chromosomes are left unprotected, so they stop dividing and eventually die.

  “Before you were born, an enzyme called telomerase kept adding new telomeres to replace the lost ones. For most of your cells, that doesn’t happen later on. But all my cells just keep on making telomerase and new telomeres, so my cells don’t age. I can die if I’m run over by a truck. And germs could do me in, except that the telomeres keep my immune system working exceptionally well. But my body hasn’t deteriorated at all since I was a teen, over 800 years ago.”

  “What will this mean for the baby you and Aly are expecting?”

  “Tom, we have no idea.”

  • • •

  The nursery, along with the rest of our new mansion, was completed in the nick of time. I actually wanted a simpler life than all these rooms, with their glossy surfaces and objets d’art. But we could certainly afford it all, after 800+ years of investments, and these goodies seemed to make Aly very happy. A fair trade, I guess, since she’d sold her PR business and the headlines were squealing, “Aly will be a stay-home mom.”

  Like everything else in Aly’s life, her labor and delivery went smoothly. We’d barely had a chance to count the baby’s fingers and toes and admire her wispy auburn hair before the researchers were all over us. They sampled Grace’s cells when she was a day old and followed up every three months. The reporters besieged the doctors as much as the doctors pestered us.

  Finally, the headlines circled the globe and reached out to the colonies:

  Baby Grace has normal cells

  Smith child will age like mom

  You could almost hear a collective sigh of relief, including my own. But I was confused; after the tests three months ago, the chief doctor had hinted at opposite results. I followed the sound of toddler laughter till I found Grace and Aly playing together on the brick-red Persian rug in front of the marble fireplace.

  “I thought that last time Dr. Mills said Gracie was still making new telomeres.”

  “He did.”

  “So that’s changed?”

  “What’s changed is that I told the doctors they couldn’t do any more research on her unless I took the samples myself.”

  “It’s hard to imagine you sticking Gracie with all those needles.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But they’ve announced results.”

  Aly smiled her just-right smile. “The samples came from me.”

  I sighed again, but not with relief this time. “So she’ll have to face the same life I’ve had.”

  Aly took a hairpin out of her auburn curls and shook onto her shoulders a cascade that shimmered in the firelight. The hairpin in her hand also glinted in the light. It was the longest, sharpest hairpin I’d ever seen. “Don’t worry, Jack. We’ve done so much to break down people’s antagonism. She’s the most adored child since Shirley Temple. Besides, it’ll be a long time before anyone will notice that she’s not getting gray and wrinkled.”

  “But you even told me she was normal.”

  Aly moved closer, smiled that siren smile and said, “As I told you the day we met, truth is a very fluid concept.”

  © 2014 by Cathy Humble.

  Cathy Humble has always been an anachronism. In an age of McMansions she’s lived in Portland, Oregon, for thirty-six years on an acre of willows and blueberries. She and her husband measure days by the blue herons they see. A one-heron day is good; a four-heron day is sensational. When other women headed for law or medical school, Cathy stayed home to raise three kids. She finally earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology twenty-one years after first setting off for college. But if Cathy’s lifestyle seems set in the past, her mind has always been seduced by the future. After fifteen years of writing and editing for an HMO she retired and started writing science fiction. Now at the age of seventy, she has so far written thirty stories and sold two.

  Ro-Sham-Bot

  Effie Seiberg

  I found a robot’s heart today. I didn’t think they still made robots with hearts, but there it was, at the corner of Leary and Sycamore.

  It even looked like a heart: size of a fist, valves pulsing with pale ching ching noises each time they opened and shut. The metal was old and worn. At the bottom I could just make out the words “If found, please return to the Akirobo Corp” with most of the address worn away.

  I took it home and plugged it into my computer. It had a few jumbled videos—the way older robots used to store memories. My computer was old enough to be able to play them.

  I sorted by number and began to watch.

  The first video was in a warehouse. Lines upon lines of identical, still robots, presumably the same old-fashioned model as the one whose heart I’d found. The field of vision jerked to the left and found another robot looking straight at it. The other robot smiled, and glanced downwards. The camera followed it and, looking down, saw the other robot’s hand clenched in a fist. One, two, three times it bobbed the fist up and down, and then extended two fingers. Rock, paper, scissors. The camera then captured its own robot hand reaching forward to join the game. Scissors beat paper. Paper beat rock. Scissors tied with scissors. A wider robot smile. None of the other robots moved.

  I clicked to the second video, which was in the same warehouse. An operator in white QA-tested each robot. They all stayed very still. The robot to the left flashed a silly face, and the camera jiggled in suppressed laughter. The operator approached, and the camera snapped forward and was still.

  The next video was in a factory on a moving conveyer belt. The robot to the left was about to get tied into its foam-cushioned packaging. It already had the manual for “Personality-free Chore-Bot” nestled in its arms. It looked up and said to the operator, “Shouldn’t you buy me dinner before you tie me up?” The startled operator hit the alarm. Red flashing lights flooded the factory floor, and a mechanical voice said “Alert, alert. Faulty Chore-Bot. Remove for destruction.” As the robot to the left was removed by white-coated operators, the camera swiveled forward and was still.

  The fourth video was in an ordinary living room. Children played on the carpet as a middle-aged man unpacked the robot and a middle-aged woman watched. “This should be the perfect model for us,” said the man. “Does exactly what it’s told, none of that personality module nonsense. It can start by keeping the deer away from the tomato patch. Go on now, go outside.” The camera swung from the door to the children, who were playing rock, paper, scissors, then back to the door and headed out.

  I hoped I wouldn’t see the man disassembling the robot in a later video.

  The next several videos were in an outdoor garden, in different seasons. The camera patrolled around the tomatoes. Sometimes they hung heavy and ripe from climbing vines, and other times they would barely be hard green buds. Every so often the camera would go back up to the house and look through the back door, like it was waiting for a glimpse of the playing kids. Sometimes, the man would shoo it away. I scanned through these pretty quickly.

  I clicked to the last video, which was in the garden at night. Nothing to guard against. The robot’s hands went through the motions. Rock, paper, scissors. Rock, paper, scissors. Over and over, until finally, the camera looked down and the hands unscrewed the robot’s breastplate and reached in. Then the video went blank.

  I unplugged the heart from my computer and took it to the workbench in my garage. I found the spare chassis on the top shelf, covered in dust. I cleaned it off with my shirtsleeve and brought it over. I knew I would find a use for the chassis one day, and the heart looked like it would fit inside perfectly. My daughter always loved Rock Paper Scissors.

  © 2014 by Effie Seiberg.

  Eff
ie Seiberg is a science fiction and fantasy author, a graduate of Taos Toolbox 2013, and an all-around geek. Her previous short fiction can be found in Crossed Genres’ Fierce Family anthology and in Veux Magazine. In her spare time she’s a slush reader for Tor.com. She lives in San Francisco near the former and upcoming (but not present) location of a sculpture of a giant bunny head with a skull in its mouth. Follow Effie on Twitter (@effies<), Google+ (+EffieSeiberg), or at effieseiberg.com.

  Everything That Has Already Been Said

  Samantha Murray

  “How are you today, my glorious monkey?” said Bevan, her creator. She wasn’t really a monkey of course. If she looked like anything it was a golden metal girl, but she was not really a girl either. Bevan called her monkey because he liked a theorem about infinite monkeys tapping away on infinite typewriters for infinity, where eventually one of them would type the works of Shakespeare. She also knew, because he had told her, that if there were as many monkeys as there were particles in the observable universe, typing for the age of the universe, they would still be extremely unlikely to write even a complete sonnet.

  If she could, she would have said, I’m fine, perhaps a little lonely. But that was not something she could ever say. “I am flotsam on the dry ocean of your question,” she replied instead, in her low musical lilt. Bevan’s eyes brightened at the sound.

  “You’re always so poetic, monkey,” he said. “Much more so than the others I made before you. You are not made for gibberish—all of your constructions have meaning, but I didn’t expect them to be so … it’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

  If she had been made that way she would have smiled.

  • • •

  He kept her well-polished. Her burnished metal skin shone. And her scent was the faintest tang of ozone and sunflowers and honey.

  “You are unique, monkey,” Bevan said, his hand against the gold of her cheek. “You are always new, never derivative.” He had made her so. She streamed the net, accessing digital information, every book ever scanned. She illegally tapped all voice, text and video communications. She was swimming in data; it felt to her like dreaming. She never forgot anything. She was only capable of combinations that hadn’t occurred before, anywhere in her recording. No sentence that passed her lips had ever been uttered; it came whole and newborn into the world as she said it. Every time.

  “I am so weary of repetition, monkey.” Bevan’s voice was soft, confidential. “All of the people who said the same kinds of things to me, over and over. You will never amount to anything, they said. Let me help you, they said. You are brilliant, they said. You are sick, they said. It gets old, monkey, all of it. But not you. You are always the future, never the past. While I am … simply boring.”

  You are not ordinary, she would have said to him, you could never be boring. “I am misted within at the purple of your speaking,” she tried. But he grinned at her, and she knew he did not understand.

  • • •

  She carried within her a hard cold stone of fear, small but very dense. She felt data sigh through her. She worried that all of her scanning and searching wasn’t enough. She knew people had said things out of her hearing, or back in the past, unrecorded. If she was not unique, if she was not perfect, then what was she? If by mistake she said something that someone else had once uttered surely she would crack right down the center in that instant with the shame and transgression.

  • • •

  “At last, monkey,” Bevan said. His hair was whiter than she remembered. He told her that the past was written on the atoms of the universe, if you could read them. He told her she would be able to read them. He would have to move her again, this time to her very own planet. She was already much larger than she used to be, and she could no longer move through the world, but it didn’t matter; the world came to her, and so, sometimes, did Bevan.

  “Starshine gleefully falling as rain bleeds,” she told him.

  • • •

  “My clever monkey,” said Bevan, patting her golden shoulder although the effort seemed to cost him. She did not so much resemble a girl anymore, but she still had her face, her arms. “You are my best work. You will go on, forever forwards. That’s all I need.” She was not just his monkey, she realized, she was his typewriter too. She was his infinity.

  She thought of being alone, in a universe of particles and words and hypothetical monkeys, without him.

  Something whirred and thrummed inside her, but she stayed silent.

  I love you had already been said, too many times.

  © 2014 by Samantha Murray.

  Samantha Murray is a writer, actor, mathematician, and mother. Not particularly in that order. She is very bad at gardening and adores logic puzzles (if you give her one she has never seen before she will jump all over the place like a puppy.) You can find her online at mailbysea.wordpress.com. Samantha lives in Western Australia in a household of unruly boys.

  The Lies We Tell Our Children

  Katherine Crighton

  My oldest spins around in one of those plastic bowls meant to encourage imaginative play in children; she’s four, almost five now, and I hear her say, “Why won’t it keep going?”

  I stop typing and look over my laptop at her. “You mean spinning? On the carpet?”

  “Yeah.”

  I close the clamshell lid and fold my arms on top. I guess we’re having this conversation now. “We talked before about how if you rub two things together, it’ll slow them both down, right?” She nods. “Well, that’s what’s happening here. The bowl is rubbing against the carpet. It doesn’t matter how fast you get it going, the carpet will slow it down until it stops.”

  My daughter’s blonde, with dark brown eyes. People say she looks like me, but they’ll say that about anybody they think is related. She is cute, though. “So what if I wanted it to keep spinning?” she said then, looking at the ceiling.

  “You’d have to be sitting somewhere where nothing was touching it.”

  She grins. “The air?”

  “Oh, close one.” My other daughter, who’s two, comes walking past. She also looks like me, apparently. She hauls herself up on the couch to watch us. “But aren’t there things in the air?”

  “Oxygen,” the four-year-old says. She watches a lot of science shows. “Screen time” is supposed to be bad for kids, and if it means she’s able to have this conversation now, this early, then maybe they’re right about that.

  I smile anyway. “Oxygen, and other gases. The stuff you need to breathe. Dust, too. All those little things would also rub against the bowl, and they’d make it stop eventually. So what you’d really need is a place with nothing in it at all. Can you think of anyplace like that?”

  Her face lights up. “Space!” She loves space. I didn’t have a thing to do with it. If anything marks her as my daughter, that’s it.

  I could put her off indefinitely by telling her about hydrogen. But they’ve got to learn sometime, right? “Aren’t there things in space, though?”

  She nods. “Planets. And asteroids.”

  “Sure. So if you’re sitting in your bowl in space, and you give it a big push—not spinning it, just going in one direction—what do you think’ll happen?”

  She rocks in her toy, her hands stretched out to the carpet behind her, and looks at her sister. “I’d keep going and going until I hit Earth.”

  “Or a planet?” She nods again. “You’re right, there are lots of planets out in space. What if you picked a direction where there were no planets at all?”

  “Then I’d hit an asteroid.”

  “What if there were none?”

  She starts to look a little concerned. “There are stars.”

  I slide the laptop onto the floor. “Space is very big. It keeps getting bigger. What if you didn’t hit any stars?”

  I don’t realize I’ve gotten to the crux already, not until she turns to look at me. I’d thought it would take longer.

  And I’d had no idea how m
uch this would hurt her.

  There’s a quiet moment, before my daughter cries. Maybe it’s just her—maybe it’s all children. Her eyes get big, and black, and it looks like her world, which before then had been much smaller, has gotten infinitely huge before collapsing down on her.

  Her younger sister, while starting out just a reflection of the older one’s emotional state, some time ago began to learn on her own, to listen and reach conclusions faster. Her wail shatters the room. My laptop fragments into carpet fibers, that themselves become a field of static. The chair beneath me was never there, the living room a line of noise that fills the upper boundaries of my consciousness.

  I gather my girls up in my arms, one on either knee, curling them into myself. My older daughter whispers, “I’d never see my mommy again.”

  There are no arms, and there is no me, and I say, “I was wrong, sweetheart, I was wrong, I meant to say you had a ship, not a bowl. You have a ship, and everyone you love is on board, and you will never be lonely.”

  What about you? my other daughter asks. Her voice is accessed memories of other sounds, other words spoken by little ones no longer here. She doesn’t try so hard to be like me. It makes me wonder what my next one will be like.

  My girls. They’re all I have. And they’re growing up so fast.

  “That’s how I know I’m right,” I say, waiting for the system to reboot and the living room to come back online.

  Outside, we pass a star.

  © 2014 by Katherine Crighton.

  Katherine Crighton lives in Massachusetts with her wife, children, housemate, and hostas. Her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction Online, and other venues; she also coauthors urban fantasy under the name Anna Katherine. Connect with her directly via Facebook at crightonkatherine or twitter at @c_katherine.

  NOVEL EXCERPT

  Novel Excerpt:

  Artemis Awakening

  Jane Lindskold

  A falling star! What luck!

  Adara the Huntress froze in place, watching as a thin white line with a heart of fire grew into a wider streak that rushed earthward at an incredible speed. She frowned thoughtfully.