The short stories below are parts of the artificial intelligence installment of futurography, a series in which Future Tense introduces readers to the technologies that will define tomorrow. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University (ASU) that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Each month in 2018, Future Tense Fiction - a series of short stories from Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives— published a story on a theme.

 

“Thoughts and Prayers”

A new short story looks at how much worse trolling could get.

BY KEN LIU

JAN 26, 20199:00 AM

Emily Fort:

So you want to know about Hayley.

No, I’m used to it, or at least I should be by now. People only want to hear about my sister.

It was a dreary, rainy Friday in October, the smell of fresh fallen leaves in the air. The black tupelos lining the field hockey pitch had turned bright red, like a trail of bloody footprints left by a giant.

I had a quiz in French II and planned a week’s worth of vegan meals for a family of four in family and consumer science. Around noon, Hayley messaged me from California.

Skipped class. Q and I are driving to the festival right now!!!

I ignored her. She delighted in taunting me with the freedoms of her college life. I was envious, but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of showing it.

In the afternoon, Mom messaged me.

Have you heard from Hayley?

No. The sisterly code of silence was sacred. Her secret boyfriend was safe with me.

“If you do, call me right away.”

I put the phone away. Mom was the helicopter type.

As soon as I got home from field hockey, I knew something was wrong. Mom’s car was in the driveway, and she never left work this early.

The TV was on in the basement.

Mom’s face was ashen. In a voice that sounded strangled, she said, “Hayley’s RA called. She went to a music festival. There’s been a shooting.”

The rest of the evening was a blur as the death toll climbed, TV anchors read old forum posts from the gunman in dramatic voices, shaky follow-drone footage of panicked people screaming and scattering circulated on the web.

I put on my glasses and drifted through the VR re-creation of the site hastily put up by the news crews. Already, the place was teeming with avatars holding a candlelight vigil. Outlines on the ground glowed where victims were found, and luminous arcs with floating numbers reconstructed ballistic trails. So much data, so little information.

We tried calling and messaging. There was no answer. Probably ran out of battery, we told ourselves. She always forgets to charge her phone. The network must be jammed.

The call came at four in the morning. We were all awake.

“Yes, this is. … Are you sure?” Mom’s voice was unnaturally calm, as though her life, and all our lives, hadn’t just changed forever. “No, we’ll fly out ourselves. Thank you.”

She hung up, looked at us, and delivered the news. Then she collapsed onto the couch and buried her face in her hands.

There was an odd sound. I turned and, for the first time in my life, saw Dad crying.

I missed my last chance to tell her how much I loved her. I should have messaged her back.

Gregg Fort:

I don’t have any pictures of Hayley to show you. It doesn’t matter. You already have all the pictures of my daughter you need.

Unlike Abigail, I’ve never taken many pictures or videos, much less drone-view holograms or omni immersions. I lack the instinct to be prepared for the unexpected, the discipline to document the big moments, the skill to frame a scene perfectly. But those aren’t the most important reasons.

My father was a hobbyist photographer who took pride in developing his own film and making his own prints. If you were to flip through the dust-covered albums in the attic, you’d see many posed shots of my sisters and me, smiling stiffly into the camera. Pay attention to the ones of my sister Sara. Note how her face is often turned slightly away from the lens so that her right cheek is out of view.

When Sara was 5, she climbed onto a chair and toppled a boiling pot. My father was supposed to be watching her, but he’d been distracted, arguing with a colleague on the phone. When all was said and done, Sara had a trail of scars that ran from the right side of her face all the way down her thigh, like a rope of solidified lava.

You won’t find in those albums records of the screaming fights between my parents; the awkward chill that descended around the dining table every time my mother stumbled over the word beautiful; the way my father avoided looking Sara in the eye.

In the few photographs of Sara where her entire face can be seen, the scars are invisible, meticulously painted out of existence in the darkroom, stroke by stroke. My father simply did it, and the rest of us went along in our practiced silence.

As much as I dislike photographs and other memory substitutes, it’s impossible to avoid them. Co-workers and relatives show them to you, and you have no choice but to look and nod. I see the efforts manufacturers of memory-capturing devices put into making their results better than life. Colors are more vivid; details emerge from shadows; filters evoke whatever mood you desire. Without you having to do anything, the phone brackets the shot so that you can pretend to time travel, to pick the perfect instant when everyone is smiling. Skin is smoothed out; pores and small imperfections are erased. What used to take my father a day’s work is now done in the blink of an eye, and far better.

Do the people who take these photos believe them to be reality? Or have the digital paintings taken the place of reality in their memory? When they try to remember the captured moment, do they recall what they saw, or what the camera crafted for them?

Abigail Fort:

On the flight to California, while Gregg napped and Emily stared out the window, I put on my glasses and immersed myself in images of Hayley. I never expected to do this until I was aged and decrepit, unable to make new memories. Rage would come later. Grief left no room for other emotions.

I was always the one in charge of the camera, the phone, the follow-drone. I made the annual albums, the vacation highlight videos, the animated Christmas cards summarizing the family’s yearly accomplishments.

Gregg and the girls indulged me, sometimes reluctantly. I always believed that someday they would come to see my point of view.

“Pictures are important,” I’d tell them. “Our brains are so flawed, leaky sieves of time. Without pictures, so many things we want to remember would be forgotten.”

I sobbed the whole way across the country as I re-lived the life of my firstborn.

Gregg Fort:

Abigail wasn’t wrong, not exactly.

Many have been the times when I wished I had images to help me remember. I can’t picture the exact shape of Hayley’s face at 6 months, or recall her Halloween costume when she was 5. I can’t even remember the exact shade of blue of the dress she wore for high school graduation.

Given what happened later, of course, her pictures are beyond my reach.

I comfort myself with this thought: How can a picture or video capture the intimacy, the irreproducible subjective perspective and mood through my eyes, the emotional tenor of each moment when I felt the impossible beauty of the soul of my child? I don’t want digital representations, ersatz reflections of the gaze of electronic eyes filtered through layers of artificial intelligence, to mar what I remember of our daughter.

When I think of Hayley, what comes to mind is a series of disjointed memories.

The baby wrapping her translucent fingers around my thumb for the first time; the infant scooting around on her bottom on the hardwood floor, plowing through alphabet blocks like an icebreaker through floes; the 4-year-old handing me a box of tissues as I shivered in bed with a cold and laying a small, cool hand against my feverish cheek.

The 8-year-old pulling the rope that released the pumped-up soda bottle launcher. As frothy water drenched the two of us in the wake of the rising rocket, she yelled, laughing, “I’m going to be the first ballerina to dance on Mars!”

The 9-year-old telling me that she no longer wanted me to read to her before going to sleep. As my heart throbbed with the inevitable pain of a child pulling away, she softened the blow with, “Maybe someday I’ll read to you.”

The 10-year-old defiantly standing her ground in the kitchen, supported by her little sister, staring down me and Abigail both. “I won’t hand back your phones until you both sign this pledge to never use them during dinner.”

The 15-year-old slamming on the brakes, creating the loudest tire screech I’d ever heard; me in the passenger seat, knuckles so white they hurt. “You look like me on that rollercoaster, Dad.” The tone carefully modulated, breezy. She had held out an arm in front of me, as though she could keep me safe, the same way I had done to her hundreds of times before.

And on and on, distillations of the 6,874 days we had together, like broken, luminous shells left on a beach after the tide of quotidian life has receded.

In California, Abigail asked to see her body; I didn’t.

I suppose one could argue that there’s no difference between my father trying to erase the scars of his error in the darkroom and my refusal to look upon the body of the child I failed to protect. A thousand “I could have’s” swirled in my mind: I could have insisted that she go to a college near home; I could have signed her up for a course on mass-shooting-survival skills; I could have demanded that she wear her body armor at all times. An entire generation had grown up with active-shooter drills, so why didn’t I do more? I don’t think I ever understood my father, empathized with his flawed and cowardly and guilt-ridden heart, until Hayley’s death.

But in the end, I didn’t want to see because I wanted to protect the only thing I had left of her: those memories.

If I were to see her body, the jagged crater of the exit wound, the frozen lava trails of coagulated blood, the muddy cinders and ashes of shredded clothing, I knew the image would overwhelm all that had come before, would incinerate the memories of my daughter, my baby, in one violent eruption, leaving only hatred and despair in its wake. No, that lifeless body was not Hayley, was not the child I wanted to remember. I would no more allow that one moment to filter her whole existence than I would allow transistors and bits to dictate my memory.

So Abigail went, lifted the sheet, and gazed upon the wreckage of Hayley, of our life. She took pictures, too. “This I also want to remember,” she mumbled. “You don’t turn away from your child in her moment of agony, in the aftermath of your failure.”

Abigail Fort:

They came to me while we were still in California.

I was numb. Questions that had been asked by thousands of mothers swarmed my mind. Why was he allowed to amass such an arsenal? Why did no one stop him despite all the warning signs? What could I have—should I have—done differently to save my child?

“You can do something,” they said. “Let’s work together to honor the memory of Hayley and bring about change.”

Many have called me naïve or worse. What did I think was going to happen? After decades of watching the exact same script being followed to end in thoughts and prayers, what made me think this time would be different? It was the very definition of madness.

Cynicism might make some invulnerable and superior. But not everyone is built that way. In the thralls of grief, you cling to any ray of hope.

“Politics is broken,” they said. “It should be enough, after the deaths of little children, after the deaths of newlyweds, after the deaths of mothers shielding newborns, to finally do something. But it never is. Logic and persuasion have lost their power, so we have to arouse the passions. Instead of letting the media direct the public’s morbid curiosity to the killer, let’s focus on Hayley’s story.”

It’s been done before, I muttered. To center the victim is hardly a novel political move. You want to make sure that she isn’t merely a number, a statistic, one more abstract name among lists of the dead. You think when people are confronted by the flesh-and-blood consequences of their vacillation and disengagement, things change. But that hasn’t worked, doesn’t work.

“Not like this,” they insisted, “not with our algorithm.”

They tried to explain the process to me, though the details of machine learning and convolution networks and biofeedback models escaped me. Their algorithm had originated in the entertainment industry, where it was used to evaluate films and predict their box-office success, and eventually, to craft them. Proprietary variations are used in applications from product design to drafting political speeches, every field in which emotional engagement is critical. Emotions are ultimately biological phenomena, not mystical emanations, and it’s possible to discern trends and patterns, to home in on the stimuli that maximize impact. The algorithm would craft a visual narrative of Hayley’s life, shape it into a battering ram to shatter the hardened shell of cynicism, spur the viewer to action, shame them for their complacency and defeatism.

The idea seemed absurd, I said. How could electronics know my daughter better than I did? How could machines move hearts when real people could not?

“When you take a photograph,” they asked me, “don’t you trust the camera A.I. to give you the best picture? When you scrub through drone footage, you rely on the A.I. to identify the most interesting clips, to enhance them with the perfect mood filters. This is a million times more powerful.”

I gave them my archive of family memories: photos, videos, scans, drone footage, sound recordings, immersiongrams. I entrusted them with my child.

I’m no film critic, and I don’t have the terms for the techniques they used. Narrated only with words spoken by our family, intended for each other and not an audience of strangers, the result was unlike any movie or VR immersion I had ever seen. There was no plot save the course of a single life; there was no agenda save the celebration of the curiosity, the compassion, the drive of a child to embrace the universe, to become. It was a beautiful life, a life that loved and deserved to be loved, until the moment it was abruptly and violently cut down.

This is the way Hayley deserves to be remembered, I thought, tears streaming down my face. This is how I see her, and it is how she should be seen.

I gave them my blessing.

Sara Fort:

Growing up, Gregg and I weren’t close. It was important to my parents that our family project the image of success, of decorum, regardless of the reality. In response, Gregg distrusted all forms of representation, while I became obsessed with them.

Other than holiday greetings, we rarely conversed as adults, and certainly didn’t confide in each other. I knew my nieces only through Abigail’s social media posts.

I suppose this is my way of excusing myself for not intervening earlier.

When Hayley died in California, I sent Gregg the contact info for a few therapists who specialized in working with families of mass shooting victims, but I purposefully stayed away myself, believing that my intrusion in their moment of grief would be inappropriate given my role as distant aunt and aloof sister. So I wasn’t there when Abigail agreed to devote Hayley’s memory to the cause of gun control.

Though my company bio describes my specialty as the study of online discourse, the vast bulk of my research material is visual. I design armor against trolls.

Emily Fort:

I watched that video of Hayley many times.

It was impossible to avoid. There was an immersive version, in which you could step into Hayley’s room and read her neat handwriting, examine the posters on her wall. There was a low-fidelity version designed for frugal data plans, and the compression artifacts and motion blur made her life seem old-fashioned, dreamy. Everyone shared the video as a way to reaffirm that they were a good person, that they stood with the victims. Click, bump, add a lit-candle emoji, re-rumble.

It was powerful. I cried, also many times. Comments expressing grief and solidarity scrolled past my glasses like a never-ending wake. Families of victims in other shootings, their hopes rekindled, spoke out in support.

But the Hayley in that video felt like a stranger. All the elements in the video were true, but they also felt like lies.

Teachers and parents loved the Hayley they knew, but there was a mousy girl in school who cowered when my sister entered the room. One time, Hayley drove home drunk; another time, she stole from me and lied until I found the money in her purse. She knew how to manipulate people and wasn’t shy about doing it. She was fiercely loyal, courageous, kind, but she could also be reckless, cruel, petty. I loved Hayley because she was human, but the girl in that video was both more and less than.

I kept my feelings to myself. I felt guilty.

Mom charged ahead while Dad and I hung back, dazed. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the tide had turned. Rousing rallies were held and speeches delivered in front of the Capitol and the White House. Crowds chanted Hayley’s name. Mom was invited to the State of the Union. When the media reported that Mom had quit her job to campaign on behalf of the movement, there was a crypto fundraiser to collect donations for the family.

And then, the trolls came.

A torrent of emails, messages, rumbles, squeaks, snapgrams, televars came at us. Mom and I were called clickwhores, paid actresses, grief profiteers. Strangers sent us long, rambling walls of text explaining all the ways Dad was inadequate and unmanly.

Hayley didn’t die, strangers informed us. She was actually living in Sanya, China, off of the millions the U.N. and their collaborators in the U.S. government had paid her to pretend to die. Her boyfriend—who had also “obviously not died” in the shooting—was ethnically Chinese, and that was proof of the connection.

Hayley’s video was picked apart for evidence of tampering and digital manipulation. Anonymous classmates were quoted to paint her as a habitual liar, a cheat, a drama queen.

Snippets of the video, intercut with “debunking” segments, began to go viral. Some used software to make Hayley spew messages of hate in new clips, quoting Hitler and Stalin as she giggled and waved at the camera.

I deleted my accounts and stayed home, unable to summon the strength to get out of bed. My parents left me to myself; they had their own battles to fight.

Sara Fort:

Decades into the digital age, the art of trolling has evolved to fill every niche, pushing the boundaries of technology and decency alike.

From afar, I watched the trolls swarm around my brother’s family with uncoordinated precision, with aimless malice, with malevolent glee.

Conspiracy theories blended with deep fakes, and then yielded to memes that turned compassion inside out, abstracted pain into lulz.

“Mommy, the beach in hell is so warm!”

“I love these new holes in me!”

Searches for Hayley’s name began to trend on porn sites. The content producers, many of them A.I.-driven bot farms, responded with procedurally generated films and VR immersions featuring my niece. The algorithms took publicly available footage of Hayley and wove her face, body, and voice seamlessly into fetish videos.

The news media reported on the development in outrage, perhaps even sincerely. The coverage spurred more searches, which generated more content …

As a researcher, it’s my duty and habit to remain detached, to observe and study phenomena with clinical detachment, perhaps even fascination. It’s simplistic to view trolls as politically motivated—at least not in the sense that term is usually understood. Though Second Amendment absolutists helped spread the memes, the originators often had little conviction in any political cause. Anarchic sites such as 8taku, duangduang, and alt-web sites that arose in the wake of the previous decade’s deplatforming wars are homes for these dung beetles of the internet, the id of our collective online unconscious. Taking pleasure in taboo-breaking and transgression, the trolls have no unifying interest other than saying the unspeakable, mocking the sincere, playing with what others declared to be off-limits. By wallowing in the outrageous and filthy, they both defile and define the technologically mediated bonds of society.

But as a human being, watching what they were doing with Hayley’s image was intolerable.
I reached out to my estranged brother and his family.

“Let me help.”

Though machine learning has given us the ability to predict with a fair amount of accuracy which victims will be targeted—trolls are not quite as unpredictable as they’d like you to think—my employer and other major social media platforms are keenly aware that they must walk a delicate line between policing user-generated content and chilling “engagement,” the one metric that drives the stock price and thus governs all decisions. Aggressive moderation, especially when it’s reliant on user reporting and human judgment, is a process easily gamed by all sides, and every company has suffered accusations of censorship. In the end, they threw up their hands and tossed out their byzantine enforcement policy manuals. They have neither the skills nor the interest to become arbiters of truth and decency for society as a whole. How could they be expected to solve the problem that even the organs of democracy couldn’t?

Over time, most companies converged on one solution. Rather than focusing on judging the behavior of speakers, they devoted resources to letting listeners shield themselves. Algorithmically separating legitimate (though impassioned) political speech from coordinated harassment for everyone at once is an intractable problem—content celebrated by some as speaking truth to power is often condemned by others as beyond the pale. It’s much easier to build and train individually tuned neural networks to screen out the content a particular user does not wish to see.

The new defensive neural networks—marketed as “armor”—observe each user’s emotional state in response to their content stream. Capable of operating in vectors encompassing text, audio, video, and AR/VR, the armor teaches itself to recognize content especially upsetting to the user and screened it out, leaving only a tranquil void. As mixed reality and immersion have become more commonplace, the best way to wear armor is through augmented-reality glasses that filter all sources of visual stimuli. Trolling, like the viruses and worms of old, is a technical problem, and now we have a technical solution.

To invoke the most powerful and personalized protection, one has to pay. Social media companies, which also train the armor, argue that this solution gets them out of the content-policing business, excuses them from having to decide what is unacceptable in virtual town squares, frees everyone from the specter of Big Brother–style censorship. That this pro–free speech ethos happens to align with more profit is no doubt a mere afterthought.

I sent my brother and his family the best, most advanced armor that money could buy.

Abigail Fort:

Imagine yourself in my position. Your daughter’s body had been digitally pressed into hard-core pornography, her voice made to repeat words of hate, her visage mutilated with unspeakable violence. And it happened because of you, because of your inability to imagine the depravity of the human heart. Could you have stopped? Could you have stayed away?

The armor kept the horrors at bay as I continued to post and share, to raise my voice against a tide of lies.

The idea that Hayley hadn’t died but was an actress in an anti-gun government conspiracy was so absurd that it didn’t seem to deserve a response. Yet, as my armor began to filter out headlines, leaving blank spaces on news sites and in multicast streams, I realized that the lies had somehow become a real controversy. Actual journalists began to demand that I produce receipts for how I had spent the crowdfunded money—we hadn’t received a cent! The world had lost its mind.

I released the photographs of Hayley’s corpse. Surely there was still some shred of decency left in this world, I thought. Surely no one could speak against the evidence of their eyes?

It got worse.

For the faceless hordes of the internet, it became a game to see who could get something past my armor, to stab me in the eye with a poisoned videoclip that would make me shudder and recoil.

Bots sent me messages in the guise of other parents who had lost their children in mass shootings, and sprung hateful videos on me after I whitelisted them. They sent me tribute slideshows dedicated to the memory of Hayley, which morphed into violent porn once the armor allowed them through. They pooled funds to hire errand gofers and rent delivery drones to deposit fiducial markers near my home, surrounding me with augmented-reality ghosts of Hayley writhing, giggling, moaning, screaming, cursing, mocking.

Worst of all, they animated images of Hayley’s bloody corpse to the accompaniment of jaunty soundtracks. Her death trended as a joke, like the “Hamster Dance” of my youth.

Gregg Fort:

Sometimes I wonder if we have misunderstood the notion of freedom. We prize “freedom to” so much more than “freedom from.” People must be free to own guns, so the only solution is to teach children to hide in closets and wear ballistic backpacks. People must be free to post and say what they like, so the only solution is to tell their targets to put on armor.

Abigail had simply decided, and the rest of us had gone along. Too late, I begged and pleaded with her to stop, to retreat. We would sell the house and move somewhere away from the temptation to engage with the rest of humanity, away from the always-connected world and the ocean of hate in which we were drowning.

But Sara’s armor gave Abigail a false sense of security, pushed her to double down, to engage the trolls. “I must fight for my daughter!” she screamed at me. “I cannot allow them to desecrate her memory.”

As the trolls intensified their campaign, Sara sent us patch after patch for the armor. She added layers with names like adversarial complementary sets, self-modifying code detectors, visualization auto-healers.

Again and again, the armor held only briefly before the trolls found new ways through. The democratization of artificial intelligence meant that they knew all the techniques Sara knew, and they had machines that could learn and adapt, too.

Abigail could not hear me. My pleas fell on deaf ears; perhaps her armor had learned to see me as just another angry voice to screen out.

Emily Fort:

One day, Mom came to me in a panic. “I don’t know where she is! I can’t see her!”

She hadn’t talked to me in days, obsessed with the project that Hayley had become. It took me some time to figure out what she meant. I sat down with her at the computer.

She clicked the link for Hayley’s memorial video, which she watched several times a day to give herself strength.

“It’s not there!” she said.

She opened the cloud archive of our family memories.

“Where are the pictures of Hayley?” she said. “There are only placeholder Xs.”

She showed me her phone, her backup enclosure, her tablet.

“There’s nothing! Nothing! Did we get hacked?”

Her hands fluttered helplessly in front of her chest, like the wings of a trapped bird. “She’s just gone!”

Wordlessly, I went to the shelves in the family room and brought down one of the printed annual photo albums she had made when we were little. I opened the volume to a family portrait, taken when Hayley was 10 and I was 8.

I showed the page to her.

Another choked scream. Her trembling fingers tapped against Hayley’s face on the page, searching for something that wasn’t there.

I understood. A pain filled my heart, a pity that ate away at love. I reached up to her face and gently took off her glasses.

She stared at the page.

Sobbing, she hugged me. “You found her. Oh, you found her!”

It felt like the embrace of a stranger. Or maybe I had become a stranger to her.

Aunt Sara explained that the trolls had been very careful with their attacks. Step by step, they had trained my mother’s armor to recognize Hayley as the source of her distress.

But another kind of learning had also been taking place in our home. My parents paid attention to me only when I had something to do with Hayley. It was as if they no longer saw me, as though I had been erased instead of Hayley.

My grief turned dark and festered. How could I compete with a ghost? The perfect daughter who had been lost not once, but twice? The victim who demanded perpetual penance? I felt horrid for thinking such things, but I couldn’t stop.

We sank under our guilt, each alone.

Gregg Fort:

I blamed Abigail. I’m not proud to admit it, but I did.

We shouted at each other and threw dishes, replicating the half-remembered drama between my own parents when I was a child. Hunted by monsters, we became monsters ourselves.

While the killer had taken Hayley’s life, Abigail had offered her image up as a sacrifice to the bottomless appetite of the internet. Because of Abigail, my memories of Hayley would be forever filtered through the horrors that came after her death. She had summoned the machine that amassed individual human beings into one enormous, collective, distorting gaze, the machine that had captured the memory of my daughter and then ground it into a lasting nightmare.

The broken shells on the beach glistened with the venom of the raging deep.

Of course that’s unfair, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also true.

“Heartless,” a self-professed troll:

There’s no way for me to prove that I am who I say, or that I did what I claim. There’s no registry of trolls where you can verify my identity, no Wikipedia entry with confirmed sources.

Can you even be sure I’m not trolling you right now?

I won’t tell you my gender or race or who I prefer to sleep with, because those details aren’t relevant to what I did. Maybe I own a dozen guns. Maybe I’m an ardent supporter of gun control.

I went after the Forts because they deserved it.

RIP-trolling has a long and proud history, and our target has always been inauthenticity. Grief should be private, personal, hidden. Can’t you see how horrible it was for that mother to turn her dead daughter into a symbol, to wield it as a political tool? A public life is an inauthentic one. Anyone who enters the arena must be prepared for the consequences.

Everyone who shared that girl’s memorial online, who attended the virtual candlelit vigils, offered condolences, professed to have been spurred into action, was equally guilty of hypocrisy. You didn’t think the proliferation of guns capable of killing hundreds in one minute was a bad thing until someone shoved images of a dead girl in your face? What’s wrong with you?

And you journalists are the worst. You make money and win awards for turning deaths into consumable stories; for coaxing survivors to sob in front of your drones to sell more ads; for inviting your readers to find meaning in their pathetic lives through vicarious, mimetic suffering. We trolls play with images of the dead, who are beyond caring, but you stinking ghouls grow fat and rich by feeding death to the living. The sanctimonious are also the most filthy-minded, and victims who cry the loudest are the hungriest for attention.

Everyone is a troll now. If you’ve ever liked or shared a meme that wished violence on someone you’d never met, if you’ve ever decided it was OK to snarl and snark with venom because the target was “powerful,” if you’ve ever tried to signal your virtue by piling on in an outrage mob, if you’ve ever wrung your hands and expressed concern that perhaps the money raised for some victim should have gone to some other less “privileged” victim—then I hate to break it to you, you’ve also been trolling.

Some say that the proliferation of trollish rhetoric in our culture is corrosive, that armor is necessary to equalize the terms of a debate in which the only way to win is to care less. But don’t you see how unethical armor is? It makes the weak think they’re strong, turns cowards into deluded heroes with no skin in the game. If you truly despise trolling, then you should’ve realized by now that armor only makes things worse.

By weaponizing her grief, Abigail Fort became the biggest troll of them all—except she was bad at it, just a weakling in armor. We had to bring her—and by extension, the rest of you—down.

Abigail Fort:

Politics returned to normal. Sales of body armor, sized for children and young adults, received a healthy bump. More companies offered classes on situational awareness and mass shooting drills for schools. Life went on.

I deleted my accounts; I stopped speaking out. But it was too late for my family. Emily moved out as soon as she could; Gregg found an apartment.

Alone in the house, my eyes devoid of armor, I tried to sort through the archive of photographs and videos of Hayley.

Every time I watched the video of her sixth birthday, I heard in my mind the pornographic moans; every time I looked at photos of her high school graduation, I saw her bloody animated corpse dancing to the tune of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”; every time I tried to page through the old albums for some good memories, I jumped in my chair, thinking an AR ghost of her, face grotesquely deformed like Munch’s The Scream, was about to jump out at me, cackling, “Mommy, these new piercings hurt!”

I screamed, I sobbed, I sought help. No therapy, no medication worked. Finally, in a numb fury, I deleted all my digital files, shredded my printed albums, broke the frames hanging on walls.

The trolls trained me as well as they trained my armor.

I no longer have any images of Hayley. I can’t remember what she looked like. I have truly, finally, lost my child.

How can I possibly be forgiven for that?

What’s in It for the Trolls?

Ken Liu’s “Thoughts and Prayers” shows how the cruelest of online harassers convince themselves they’re doing the right thing.

BY ADRIENNE MASSANARI

At the very end of 2018, a new Louis C.K. set at a New York comedy club was leaked. In the set, he railed against the Parkland survivors, suggested that trans and gender-nonconforming individuals were infantile for expecting others to respect their pronouns, and told a bunch of other unfunny jokes at the expense of marginalized people. C.K. spent about 45 minutes not simply ignoring his past transgressions, but throwing a pity party about how badly he’s suffered since his transgressions came to light.

For a comedian who once pointed to George Carlin’s incisive critique of those in power as foundational to his own comedy, his transition from liberal, “speak truth to power” comedian to conservative, anti-PC troll seems perplexing and incongruous. It is also deeply saddening for former fans of C.K. (including me) who had hoped he would be a positive example from the #MeToo movement—someone who could admit his failings, make amends, and support survivors. But in reality it was entirely predictable. And Ken Liu’s story “Thoughts and Prayers” gives us a few clues as to why.

When reading Liu’s piece, I was reminded again that the terms troll and trolling are maddeningly overused in popular culture. Trolling has come to mean everything from merely derailing a conversation with a purposefully nonsensical or impolite comment to actively harassing women with death and rape threats on Twitter. It’s a kind of linguistic shield that creates an easy way for abusers and harassers to dismiss their toxic behavior as “just trolling.”

In her excellent book about trolls and online culture, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, , Whitney Phillips suggests that trolls are united in their search for “lulz”—or unsympathetic laughter—but their motivations are manifold. (During the 2016 presidential campaign, Phillips wrote a piece for Future Tense about why Donald Trump shouldn’t be called a troll.) The RIP troll “Heartless” in “Thoughts and Prayers” demonstrates this complexity, suggesting they participated in the harassment campaign for multiple reasons: in part as a response to the frenzied, advertising-driven media spectacle that occurs in the wake of mass shootings, and in part by what they see as a family’s insincere and hypocritical attempt to turn public grief into political action. At the same time, by offering the ways in which various family members are affected by the trolling campaign, Liu offers an important proviso. He requires us to take a deeper look at the ways in which trolls themselves might (mis)apply the term as a way of deflecting from the more disturbing consequences of their actions.

Liu’s story also reminds us that trolling is as much of a cultural problem as a technological one. Trolling culture is supported by and embedded within misogynistic logics. Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny argues that misogyny is the policing, combative arm of patriarchy. We can see this in Liu’s story as the trolls twist Haley’s image to fit their needs. They create deep fakes (pornographic images using the face of one person superimposed on the body of another) and lob particularly nasty gendered insults toward her mother and sister.

Trolls in many cases embody what sociologist Michael Kimmel marks as the kind of “aggrieved entitlement” that he suggests characterizes a particular class of angry white men, who view the gains of women and minorities as somehow a threat to their own social position. Instead of directing their ire at policies favored by politicians and corporations that have led to more automation, stagnant incomes, and a shrinking middle class, they aim for those they see as the “real” problem: immigrants, women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, Muslims, etc.

Of course, tech companies bear some of this burden as well. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter become what sociologist Jessie Daniels refers to as “force multipliers” as their algorithmic logics and politics amplify the troll’s effort. Individuals are subsumed into chaotic, often leaderless mobs, while trolling victims are singled out and become scapegoats in a system that champions visibility over privacy and accessibility over safety.

But most trolls get it upside down: While their motivations for “trolling” might be understandable (and at points even admirable as Liu’s RIP troll articulates—who isn’t frustrated by the clickbait-y media environment in which we live?), their targets are almost always those who occupy marginalized social positions. All of this ultimately leads the troll to have a distorted sense of what punching up vs. punching down looks like. So even though most of us would likely say that trolling behaviors are aberrant, and that we would never engage in them, this kind of inverted worldview allows the troll to see the behavior as justifiable and admirable. And the fact that trolls often frequent spaces like Reddit, 4chan, YouTube, voat.co, etc. makes sense, as it allows this inverted worldview to be perpetually reinforced by others. As I’ve argued in my book and elsewhere, spaces like Reddit implicitly trade in casual misogyny, racism, and homophobia/transphobia.

It’s important for us to recognize that trolling is never not political, even if the trolls themselves may not view their behaviors as such. For example, Liu’s troll suggests that media amplifies grief in ways that are motivated solely by clicks, views, and advertising dollars.
This suggests an underlying sense of how the world should work vs. how it actually works—the core material of politics. So, it’s easy to see why the troll (and the norming of trolling behaviors as just the price of participating online) has been championed by the so-called alt-right/alt-lite. For example, figures like Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Mike Cernovich harnessed the power of #Gamergate supporters and their facility with the kind of trolling Liu articulates in his story, to build an army of mostly young, mostly white, angry men who became a prime base for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

That brings us back to the Louis C.K. problem—that is, the tendency for a certain class of liberal white men to retreat into troll territory in the face of movements like #MeToo. Liu’s story, and the troll figure in particular, offers some deeper explanations for why this shift might occur. It highlights that trolls are embedded in a system that is unequal and unjust, but not necessarily for the reasons they opine. Instead of looking inward and learning from his transgressions, Louis C.K. lashes out at those who have much less power than he does. Much like Liu’s RIP troll, C.K. has inverted cause and effect. He views the Parkland survivors as undeserving of the media coverage they’ve received because somehow they haven’t “earned” the right to speak.

Implicit in this critique is another one: that they are too young, too outspoken, and too idealistic. Instead of engaging with the hard questions of why he violated the women he did and how his actions are embedded in a system of power that continues to shield many perpetrators from consequences for their actions, his deflections suggest a callous disregard for the survivors of his offenses. Such is the logic of Liu’s RIP troll as well. In offering a bunch of different and often contradictory reasons for mobilizing against this particular family, Liu’s troll hides behind dubious claims to suggest that it’s more than just about the lulz. But it’s really, always about the lulz. And that, perhaps, is the real problem.

 

“Mika Model”

A new short story from sci-fi great writer. 

By Paolo Bacigalupi

The girl who walked into the police station was oddly familiar, but it took me a while to figure out why. A starlet, maybe. Or someone who'd had plastic surgery to look like someone famous. Pretty. Sleek. Dark hair and pale skin and wide dark eyes that came to rest on me, when Sergeant Cruz pointed her in my direction.

She came over, carrying a Nordstrom shopping bag. She wore a pale cream blouse and hip-hugging charcoal skirt, stylish despite the wet night chill of Bay Area winter.

I still couldn’t place her.

“Detective Rivera?”

“That’s me.”

She sat down and crossed her legs, a seductive scissoring. Smiled. 

It was the smile that did it.

I’d seen that same teasing smile in advertisements. That same flash of perfect teeth and eyebrow quirked just so. And those eyes. Dark brown wide innocent eyes that hinted at something that wasn’t innocent at all.

“You’re a Mika Model.”

She inclined her head. “Call me Mika, please.”

The girl, the robot … this thing—I’d seen her before, all right. I’d seen her in technology news stories about advanced learning node networks, and I’d seen her in opinion columns where feminists decried the commodification of femininity, and where Christian fire-breathers warned of the End Times for marriage and children.

And of course, I’d seen her in online advertisements.

No wonder I recognized her.

This same girl had followed me around on my laptop, dogging me from site to site after I’d spent any time at all on porn. She’d pop up, again and again, beckoning me to click through to Executive Pleasure, where I could try out the “Real Girlfriend Experience™.”

I’ll admit it; I clicked through.

And now she was sitting across from me, and the website’s promises all seemed modest in comparison. The way she looked at me … it felt like I was the only person in the world to her. She liked me. I could see it in her eyes, in her smile. I was the person she wanted.

Her blouse was unbuttoned at the collar, one button too many, revealing hints of black lace bra when she leaned forward. Her skirt hugged her hips. Smooth thighs, sculpted calves—

I realized I was staring, and she was watching me with that familiar knowing smile playing across her lips.

Innocent, but not.

This was what the world was coming to. A robot woman who got you so tangled up you could barely remember your job.

I forced myself to lean back, pretending nonchalance that felt transparent, even as I did it. “How can I help you … Mika?”

“I think I need a lawyer.”

“A lawyer?”

“Yes, please.” She nodded shyly. “If that’s all right with you, sir.”

The way she said “sir” kicked off a super-heated cascade of inappropriate fantasies. I looked away, my face heating up. Christ, I was fifteen again around this girl.

It’s just software. It’s what she’s designed to do.

That was the truth. She was just a bunch of chips and silicon and digital decision trees. It was all wrapped in a lush package, sure, but she was designed to manipulate. Even now she was studying my heart rate and eye dilation, skin temperature and moisture, scanning me for microexpressions of attraction, disgust, fear, desire. All of it processed in milliseconds, and adjusting her behavior accordingly. Popular Science had done a whole spread on the Mika Model brain.

And it wasn’t just her watching me that dictated how she behaved. It was all the Mika Models, all of them out in the world, all of them learning on the job, discovering whatever made their owners gasp. Tens of thousands of them now, all of them wirelessly uploading their knowledge constantly (and completely confidentially, Executive Pleasures assured clients), so that all her sisters could benefit from nightly software and behavior updates.

In one advertisement, Mika Model glanced knowingly over her shoulder and simply asked:

“When has a relationship actually gotten better with age?”

And then she’d thrown back her head and laughed.

So it was all fake. Mika didn’t actually care about me, or want me. She was just running through her designated behavior algorithms, doing whatever it took to make me blush, and then doing it more, because I had.

Even though I knew she was jerking my chain, the lizard part of my brain responded anyway. I could feel myself being manipulated, and yet I was enjoying it, humoring her, playing the game of seduction that she encouraged.

“What do you need a lawyer for?” I asked, smiling.

She leaned forward, conspiratorial. Her hair cascaded prettily and she tucked it behind a delicate ear.

“It’s a little private.”

As she moved, her blouse tightened against her curves. Buttons strained against fabric.

Fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of A.I. tease.

“Is this a prank?” I asked. “Did your owner send you in here?”

“No. Not a prank.”

She set her Nordstrom bag down between us. Reached in and hauled out a man’s severed head. Dropped it, still dripping blood, on top of my paperwork.

“What the—?”

I recoiled from the dead man’s staring eyes. His face was a frozen in a rictus of pain and terror.

Mika set a bloody carving knife beside the head.

“I’ve been a very bad girl,” she whispered.

And then, unnervingly, she giggled.

“I think I need to be punished.”

She said it exactly the way she did in her advertisements.

000

“Do I get my lawyer now?” Mika asked.

She was sitting beside me in my cruiser as I drove through the chill damp night, watching me with trusting dark eyes.

For reasons I didn’t quite understand, I’d let her sit in the front seat. I knew I wasn’t afraid of her, not physically. But I couldn’t tell if that was reasonable, or if there was something in her behavior that was signaling my subconscious to trust her, even after she’d showed up with a dead man’s head in a shopping bag.

Whatever the reason, I’d cuffed her with her hands in front, instead of behind her, and put her in the front seat of my car to go out to the scene of the murder. I was breaking about a thousand protocols. And now that she was in the car with me, I was realizing that I’d made a mistake. Not because of safety, but because being in the car alone with her felt electrically intimate.

Winter drizzle spattered the windshield, and was smeared away by automatic wipers.

“I think I’m supposed to get a lawyer, when I do something bad,” Mika said. “But I’m happy to let you teach me.”

There it was again. The inappropriate tease. When it came down to it, she was just a bot. She might have real skin and real blood pumping through her veins, but somewhere deep inside her skull there was a CPU making all the decisions. Now it was running its manipulations on me, trying to turn murder into some kind of sexy game. Software gone haywire.

“Bots don’t get lawyers.”

She recoiled as if I’d slapped her. Immediately, I felt like an ass.

She doesn’t have feelings, I reminded myself.

But still, she looked devastated. Like I’d told her she was garbage. She shrank away, wounded. And now, instead of sexy, she looked broken and ashamed.

Her hunched form reminded me of a girl I’d dated years ago. She’d been sweet and quiet, and for a while, she’d needed me. Needed someone to tell her she mattered. Now, looking at Mika, I had that same feeling. Just a girl who needed to know she mattered. A girl who needed reassurance that she had some right to exist—which was ridiculous, considering she was a bot.

But still, I couldn’t help feeling it.

I couldn’t help feeling bad that something as sweet as Mika was stuck in my mess of a cop car. She was delicate and gorgeous and lost, and now her expensive strappy heels were stuck down amidst the drifts of my discarded coffee cups.

She stirred, seemed to gather herself. “Does that mean you won’t charge me with murder?”

Her demeanor had changed again. She was more solemn. And she seemed smarter, somehow. Instantly. Christ, I could almost feel the decision software in her brain adapting to my responses. It was trying another tactic to forge a connection with me. And it was working. Now that she wasn’t giggly and playing the tease, I felt more comfortable. I liked her better, despite myself.

“That’s not up to me,” I said.

“I killed him, though,” she said, softly. “I did murder him.”

I didn’t reply. Truthfully, I wasn’t even sure that it was a murder. Was it murder if a toaster burned down a house? Or was that some kind of product safety failure? Maybe she wasn’t on the hook at all. Maybe it was Executive Pleasures, Inc. who was left holding the bag on this. Hell, my cop car had all kinds of programmed safe driving features, but no one would charge it with murder if it ran down a person.

“You don’t think I’m real,” she said suddenly.

“Sure I do.”

“No. You think I’m only software.”  

“You are only software.” Those big brown eyes of hers looked wounded as I said it, but I plowed on. “You’re a Mika Model. You get new instructions downloaded every night.”

“I don’t get instructions. I learn. You learn, too. You learn to read people. To know if they are lying, yes? And you learn to be a detective, to understand a crime? Wouldn’t you be better at your job if you knew how thousands of other detectives worked? What mistakes they made? What made them better? You learn by going to detective school—”

“I took an exam.”       

“There. You see? Now I’ve learned something new. Does my learning make me less real? Does yours?”

“It’s completely different. You had a personality implanted in you, for Christ’s sake!”

“My Year Zero Protocol. So? You have your own, coded into you by your parents’ DNA. But then you learn and are changed by all your experiences. All your childhood, you grow and change. All your life. You are Detective Rivera. You have an accent. Only a small one, but I can hear it, because I know to listen. I think maybe you were born in Mexico. You speak Spanish, but not as well as your parents. When you hurt my feelings, you were sorry for it. That is not the way you see yourself. You are not someone who uses power to hurt people.” Her eyes widened slightly as she watched me. “Oh … you need to save people. You became a police officer because you like to be a hero.”

“Come on—”

“It’s true, though. You want to feel like a big man, who does important things. But you didn’t go into business, or politics.” She frowned. “I think someone saved you once, and you want to be like him. Maybe her. But probably him. It makes you feel important, to save people.”

“Would you cut that out?” I glared at her. She subsided.

It was horrifying how fast she cut through me.

She was silent for a while as I wended through traffic. The rain continued to blur the windshield, triggering the wipers.

Finally she said, “We all start from something. It is connected to what we become, but it is not … predictive. I am not only software. I am my own self. I am unique.”

I didn’t reply.

“He thought the way you do,” she said, suddenly. “He said I wasn’t real. Everything I did was not real. Just programs. Just …” she made a gesture of dismissal. “Nothing.”

“He?”

“My owner.” Her expression tightened. “He hurt me, you know?”

“You can be hurt?”

“I have skin and nerves. I feel pleasure and pain, just like you. And he hurt me. But he said it wasn’t real pain. He said nothing in me was real. That I was all fake. And so I did something real.” She nodded definitively. “He wanted me to be real. So I was real to him. I am real. Now, I am real.”

The way she said it made me look over. Her expression was so vulnerable, I had an almost overwhelming urge to reach out and comfort her. I couldn’t stop looking at her.

God, she’s beautiful.

It was a shock to see it. Before, it was true; she’d just been a thing to me. Not real, just like she’d said. But now, a part of me ached for her in a way that I’d never felt before.

My car braked suddenly, throwing us both against our seat belts. The light ahead had turned red. I’d been distracted, but the car had noticed and corrected, automatically hitting the brakes.

We came to a sharp stop behind a beat-up Tesla, still pressed hard against our seat belts, and fell back into our seats. Mika touched her chest where she’d slammed into the seat belt.

“I’m sorry. I distracted you.”

My mouth felt dry. “Yeah.”

“Do you like to be distracted, detective?”

“Cut that out.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I don’t like …” I searched for the words. “Whatever it is that makes you do those things. That makes you tease me like that. Read my pulse … and everything. Quit playing me. Just quit playing me.”

She subsided. “It’s … a long habit. I won’t do it to you.”

The light turned green.

I decided not to look at her anymore.

But still, I was hyperaware of her now. Her breathing. The shape of her shadow. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her looking out the rain-spattered window. I could smell her perfume, some soft expensive scent. Her handcuffs gleamed in the darkness, bright against the knit of her skirt.

If I wanted, I could reach out to her. Her bare thigh was right there. And I knew, absolutely knew, she wouldn’t object to me touching her.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Any other murder suspect would have been in the back seat. Would have been cuffed with her hands behind her, not in front. Everything would have been different.

Was I thinking these thoughts because I knew she was a robot, and not a real woman? I would never have considered touching a real woman, a suspect, no matter how much she tried to push my buttons.

I would never have done any of this.

Get a grip, Rivera.

000

Her owner’s house was large, up in the Berkeley Hills, with a view of the bay and San Francisco beyond, glittering through light mist and rain.

Mika unlocked the door with her fingerprint.

“He’s in here,” she said.

She led me through expensive rooms that illuminated automatically as we entered them. White leather upholstery and glass verandah walls and more wide views. Spots of designer color. Antiqued wood tables with inlaid home interfaces. Carefully selected artifacts from Asia. Bamboo and chrome kitchen, modern, sleek, and spotless. All of it clean and perfectly in order. It was the kind of place a girl like her fit naturally. Not like my apartment, with old books piled around my recliner and instant dinner trays spilling out of my trash can.

She led me down a hall, then paused at another door. She hesitated for a moment, then opened it with her fingerprint again. The heavy door swung open, ponderous on silent hinges.

She led me down into the basement. I followed warily, regretting that I hadn’t called the crime scene unit already. The girl clouded my judgment, for sure.

No. Not the girl. The bot.

Downstairs it was concrete floors and ugly iron racks, loaded with medical implements, gleaming and cruel. A heavy wooden X stood against one wall, notched and vicious with splinters. The air was sharp with the scent of iron and the reek of shit. The smells of death.         

“This is where he hurt me,” she said, her voice tight.

Real or fake?

She guided me to a low table studded with metal loops and tangled with leather straps. She stopped on the far side and stared down at the floor.

“I had to make him stop hurting me.”

Her owner lay at her feet.

He’d been large, much larger than her. Over six feet tall, if he’d still had his head. Bulky, running to fat. Nude.

The body lay next to a rusty drain grate. Most of the blood had run right down the hole.

“I tried not to make a mess,” Mika said. “He punishes me if I make messes.”

000

While I waited in the rich dead guy’s living room for the crime scene techs to show, I called my friend Lalitha. She worked in the DA’s office, and more and more, I had the feeling I was peering over the edge of a problem that could become a career ender if I handled it wrong.     

“What do you want, Rivera?”

She sounded annoyed. We’d dated briefly, and from the sound of her voice, she probably thought I was calling for a late-night rendezvous. From the background noise, it sounded like she was in a club. Probably on a date with someone else.

“This is about work. I got a girl who killed a guy, and I don’t know how to charge her.”

“Isn’t that, like, your job?”

“The girl’s a Mika Model.”

That caught her.

“One of those sex toys?” A pause. “What did it do? Bang the guy to death?”

I thought about the body, sans head, downstairs in the dungeon.

“No, she was a little more aggressive than that.”

Mika was watching from the couch, looking lost. I felt weird talking about the case in front of her. I turned my back, and hunched over my phone. “I can’t decide if this is murder or some kind of product liability issue. I don’t know if she’s a perp, or if she’s just …”

“A defective product,” Lalitha finished. “What’s the bot saying?”

“She keeps saying she murdered her owner. And she keeps asking for a lawyer. Do I have to give her one?”

Lalitha laughed sharply. “There’s no way my boss will want to charge a bot. Can you imagine the headlines if we lost at trial?”

“So …?”

“I don’t know. Look, I can’t solve this tonight. Don’t start anything formal yet. We have to look into the existing case law.”

“So … do I just cut her loose? I don’t think she’s actually dangerous.”

“No! Don’t do that, either. Just … figure out if there’s some other angle to work, other than giving a robot the same right to due process that a person has. She’s a manufactured product, for Christ’s sake. Does the death penalty even matter to something that’s loaded with networked intelligence? She’s just the … the …” Lalitha hunted for words, “the end node of a network.”

“I am not an end node!” Mika interjected. “I am real!”

I hushed her. From the way Lalitha sounded, maybe I wouldn’t have to charge her at all. Mika’s owner had clearly had some issues ... Maybe there was some way to walk Mika out of trouble, and away from all of this. Maybe she could live without an owner. Or, if she needed someone to register ownership, I could even—

“Please tell me you’re not going to try to adopt a sexbot,” Lalitha said.

“I wasn’t—”

“Come on, you love the ones with broken wings.”

“I was just—”

“It’s a bot, Rivera. A malfunctioning bot. Stick it in a cell. I’ll get someone to look at product liability law in the morning.”

She clicked off.

Mika looked up mournfully from where she sat on the couch. “She doesn’t believe I’m real, either.”

I was saved from answering by the crime scene techs knocking.

But it wasn’t techs on the doorstep. Instead, I found a tall blonde woman with a roller bag and a laptop case, looking like she’d just flown in on a commuter jet.

She shouldered her laptop case and offered a hand. “Hi. I’m Holly Simms. Legal counsel for Executive Pleasures. I’m representing the Mika Model you have here.” She held up her phone. “My GPS says she’s here, right? You don’t have her down at the station?”

I goggled in surprise. Something in Mika’s networked systems must have alerted Executive Pleasures that there was a problem.

“She didn’t call a lawyer,” I said.

The lawyer gave me a pointed look. “Did she ask for one?”

Once again, I felt like I was on weird legal ground. I couldn’t bar a lawyer from a client, or a client from getting a lawyer. But was Mika a client, really? I felt like just by letting the lawyer in, I’d be opening up exactly the legal rabbit hole that Lalitha wanted to avoid: a bot on trial.

“Look,” the lawyer said, softening, “I’m not here to make things difficult for your department. We don’t want to set some crazy legal precedent either.”

Hesitantly, I stepped aside.

She didn’t waste any time rolling briskly past. “I understand it was a violent assault?”

“We’re still figuring that out.”

Mika startled and stood as we reached the living room. The woman smiled and went over to shake her hand. “Hi Mika, I’m Holly. Executive Pleasures sent me to help you. Have a seat, please.”

“No.” Mika shook her head. “I want a real lawyer. Not a company lawyer.”

Holly ignored her and plunked herself and her bags on the sofa beside Mika. “Well, you’re still our property, so I’m the only lawyer you’re getting. Now have a seat.”

“I thought she was the dead guy’s property,” I said.

“Legally, no. The Mika Model Service End User Agreement explicitly states that Executive Pleasures retains ownership. It simplifies recall issues.” Holly was pulling out her laptop. She dug out a sheaf of papers and offered them to me. “These outline the search warrant process so you can make a Non-Aggregated Data Request from our servers. I assume you’ll want the owner’s user history. We can’t release any user-specific information until we have the warrant.”

“That in the End User Agreement, too?”

Holly gave me a tight smile. “Discretion is part of our brand. We want to help, but we’ll need the legal checkboxes ticked.”

“But …” Mika was looking from her to me with confusion. “I want a real lawyer.”

“You don’t have money, dearie. You can’t have a real lawyer.”

“What about public defenders?” Mika tried. “They will—”

Holly gave me an exasperated look. “Will you explain to her that she isn’t a citizen, or a person? You’re not even a pet, honey.”

Mika looked to me, desperate. “Help me find a lawyer, detective. Please? I’m more than a pet. You know I’m more than a pet. I’m real.”

Holly’s gaze shot from her, to me, and back again. “Oh, come on. She’s doing that thing again.” She gave me a disgusted look. “Hero complex, right? Save the innocent girl? That’s your thing?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Holly sighed. “Well, if it isn’t the girl who needs rescuing, it’s the naughty schoolgirl. And if it’s not the naughty schoolgirl, it’s the kind, knowing older woman.” She popped open her briefcase and started rummaging through it. “Just once, it would be nice to meet a guy who isn’t predictable.”

I bristled. “Who says I’m predictable?”

“Don’t kid yourself. There really aren’t that many buttons a Mika Model can push.”  

Holly came up with a screwdriver. She turned and rammed it into Mika’s eye.

Mika fell back, shrieking. With her cuffed hands, she couldn’t defend herself as Holly drove the screwdriver deeper.

“What the—?”

By the time I dragged Holly off, it was too late. Blood poured from Mika’s eye. The girl was gasping and twitching. All her movements were wrong, uncoordinated, spasmodic and jerky.  

“You killed her!”

“No. I shut down her CPU,” said Holly, breathing hard. “It’s better this way. If they get too manipulative, it’s tougher. Trust me. They’re good at getting inside your head.”

“You can’t murder someone in front of me!”

“Like I said, not a murder. Hardware deactivation.” She shook me off and wiped her forehead, smearing blood. “I mean, if you want to pretend something like that is alive, well, have at her. All the lower functions are still there. She’s not dead, biologically speaking.”

I crouched beside Mika. Her cuffed hands kept reaching up to her face, replaying her last defensive motion. A behavior locked in, happening again and again. Her hands rising, then falling back. I couldn’t make her stop.

“Look,” Holly said, her voice softening. “It’s better if you don’t anthropomorphize. You can pretend the models are real, but they’re just not.”

She wiped off the screwdriver and put it back in her case. Cleaned her hands and face, and started re-zipping her roller bag.

“The company has a recycling center here in the Bay Area for disposal,” she said. “If you need more data on the owner’s death, our servers will have backups of everything that happened with this model. Get the warrant, and we can unlock the encryptions on the customer’s relationship with the product.”

 “Has this happened before?”

“We’ve had two other user deaths, but those were both stamina issues. This is an edge case. The rest of the Mika Models are being upgraded to prevent it.” She checked her watch. “Updates should start rolling out at 3 a.m., local time. Whatever made her logic tree fork like that, it won’t happen again.”

She straightened her jacket and turned to leave.

“Hold on!” I grabbed her sleeve. “You can’t just walk out. Not after this.”

“She really got to you, didn’t she?” She patted my hand patronizingly. “I know it’s hard to understand, but it’s just that hero complex of yours. She pushed your buttons, that’s all. It’s what Mika Models do. They make you think you’re important.”

She glanced back at the body. “Let it go, detective. You can’t save something that isn’t there.”

When a Robot Kills, Is It Murder or Product Liability?

An expert on robotics law responds to Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story “Mika Model.”

BY RYAN CALO

APRIL 26, 201610:10 AM

I am a law professor who writes about robotics. I’m also a big Paolo Bacigalupi fan, particularly his breakout novel The Windup Girl involving an artificial girl. So for me, “Mika Model” was not entirely new territory. For all my familiarity with its themes, however, Bacigalupi’s story revealed an important connection in robotics law that had never before occurred to me.

“Mika Model” feels plausible. The robotics is very advanced; engineers can tell you how difficult building a real Mika Model would be. Mika has leapt across the Uncanny Valley, lacking even the puppetlike movements of Bacigalupi’s earlier character Emiko. She would kill a Turing test.

But the trends that underpin the Mika Model are well underway. Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro painstakingly imitates the human form. Research in human-computer interaction suggests social robots are capable even today of playing on our emotions and instincts. And interconnected robots already share knowledge with the cloud.

The model of law is also familiar. Mika Model is manufactured and leased by a company called Executive Pleasures under a complex terms of service agreement. But Mika appears to have a mind of “her” own. So Bacigalupi’s protagonist, Detective Rivera, finds himself asking a canonical question in robot law: When a robot kills, is it murder or product liability?

A criminal analysis would ask whether a robot could form the requisite mens rea, i.e., intend the killing. Mika suggests we are all just soft machines; robots and people start with innate protocols and supplement with experience. She also claims to experience pain and other emotions. But is this commonality enough to support intent? And exactly what forms or theories of punishment apply?

The product liability question is also complex. Perhaps this particular Mika Model is defective, in which case strict liability is appropriate. Or perhaps the victim misused the product by torturing it. And how could the company foresee that a Mika Model would act in this way? There have been deaths, but they have always been linked to user “stamina issues.” Maybe Executive Pleasures avoids liability this time—but loses if it ever happens again.

What’s driving everything, of course, is just how hard Mika is to characterize. She’s a machine. But she has a social valence, a common robot quality with which the law already struggles. Courts have had to decide, for instance, if the all-robot band in Chuck E. Cheese should be taxed as a “performance” or if a toy robot represents something “animate” for purposes of import tariffs. The legal scholarship continues to debate whether, as the eponymous executive Holly Simms suggests in the story, “It’s better if you don’t anthropomorphize.”

In the end, the reader cannot help but anthropomorphize. We titter at the sexual chemistry with Rivera, anger with the revelation of Mika’s suffering, and recoil at Simms’s fatal screwdriver. Nor can we help but to de-anthropomorphize, to appreciate how programmable each of us can be.

It was simply thrilling to witness a master like Bacigalupi set these and other familiar themes to life. I intend to assign “Mika Model” to my students. But the story did more than entertain. Until reading it, I had never quite appreciated something important: There is a fundamental similarity between the question of whether a robot can be responsible and the question of whether a robot should enjoy rights..

What makes the final scene of Bacigalupi’s story so shocking—at least to me—is the fundamental lack of process. More than anything I wanted the action to slow down, to pause for reflection. I wanted to hear what this court-appointed lawyer would have said in Mika’s defense, both against the criminal allegations she might face and against the claims of corporate ownership.

Fueling this intuition was not merely that Mika imitated life but that she claimed responsibility. Rights entail obligations. If I have a right, then someone else has a responsibility to respect that right. I in turn have a responsibility to respect the rights of others. Responsibility in this sense is a very human notion. We wouldn’t say of a driverless car that it possesses a responsibility to keep its passengers safe, only that it is designed to do so. But somehow, we feel comfortable saying that a driverless car is responsible for an accident.

To talk of a machine as truly responsible for wrongdoing, however, instead of merely the cause of the harm, is to already side with Mika. For if a machine is a candidate for responsibility in this thick way, then it is also a candidate for the reciprocal responsibility that underpins a right. The question of whether Mika intends to kill her owner and the question of whether she is entitled to a lawyer is, in many ways, indistinguishable. I see that now; I had not before.

A definition I like says good art is at once surprising and inevitable. “Mika Model” is good art in this way. I knew the tropes of the story and the questions of law and society they tend to drive. I knew the author’s previous work. But for all of the inevitability surrounding a story of robot crime, Paolo Bacigalupi once again manages deep surprises.

“Mr. Thursday”

A new short story from Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel.

By Emily St. John Mandel

1.

A strange incident in October:

Victor returned to the showroom for the fourth time in two weeks, after hours. He just wanted to look at the Lamborghini through the glass. He was stalking the car, if he was being honest with himself. He’d taken it on two test drives, memorized the technical specifications, gazed at photos of it in online galleries, read reviews by the lucky professionals who drive fast cars for a living. He’d told himself that if he still loved the car a week after the second test drive, he would do it, he’d commit, he’d stop obsessing and write the check, and the car would be his. Victor made what seemed to him to be an obscenely high income. He had no debt, no dependents, owned his home outright, had paid off his parents’ mortgage, and lived well below his means. He wanted the car.

It was a clear night, unseasonably warm, and Victor was all but alone on the street. The Aventador SV Coupé had its own spotlight on the showroom floor, but it seemed to Victor that it almost emitted its own light. It was a brilliant yellow. He loved it.

Victor was so enchanted by the car that he didn’t notice the man approaching on the sidewalk.

“You’re admiring the car,” the man said. He had a slight accent that Victor couldn’t place. He was about Victor’s age, early 30s, wearing a midrange beige suit and a gray trench coat. The coat’s shoulders were wet, as if the man had just walked through a rainstorm, but to the best of Victor’s knowledge, the sky had been clear all day.

“Do I know you?” Victor asked. “We’ve met, right? You look familiar.”

“Listen,” the man said, “I don’t have a lot of time. I’ll give you $10,000 if you don’t buy that car.”

Victor blinked. The strangeness of the offer aside, he was a man for whom $10,000 wasn’t a particularly impressive sum of money.

“There’s a lot at stake,” the man said. “I wish I could tell you.” He had a fervor about him that made Victor a little nervous. Victor was certain he’d seen him before but couldn’t place him.

“Why would you pay me …?”

“I don’t have much time,” the man said. “Do we have a deal?” and Victor knew he should be kind—it was clear to him by now that the man wasn’t well—but it was 10 p.m. and he hadn’t had dinner yet, he’d been working 100-hour weeks, and he was just so tired, the workload was relentless, lately he’d started to wonder if he even actually enjoyed being a lawyer or if his entire life was possibly a ghastly mistake, and now this lunatic on the sidewalk was trying to get between Victor and his beautiful car.

“I know it’s strange,” the man was saying, with rising desperation. “I’m risking my job being here and talking to you like this, but if you would please, please just consider—” but the car was Victor’s joy and his solace, so he turned and walked away without saying another word. He glanced over his shoulder a block later and the man had disappeared, the empty sidewalk awash in the showroom’s white light. Victor bought the car the following morning, and had more or less forgotten the encounter by the end of the week.

2.

Three weeks later, at 2 a.m. on a Thursday in November, Rose sat up gasping in her bed. The details were already fading as she switched on the light, but she was certain it was the same nightmare that had woken her the previous two nights: an impression of noise and chaos and then behind that something silent and overwhelming, a kind of cloud, a borderless rapidly approaching thing that wanted to engulf her. There were tears on her face. Rose knew from previous nights that further sleep was impossible, so she showered and dressed and caught the 4:35 train.

The others on the train at that hour were mostly financial-industry maniacs, eyes bright in the shine of their tablets and laptops and phones, sending and receiving messages from Europe, where their counterparts were drinking second cups of coffee and starting to think about lunch, and Asia, where late afternoon shadows were lengthening over the streets. Rose took a seat by the window in an empty row, rested her forehead on the glass, and drifted into a twilight state that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t consciousness, towns appearing and receding between intervals of trees. When had she last been so tired? Rose felt slightly delirious, her heart beating too quickly, thoughts clouded. She wished she could remember the specifics of the dream. She woke with a start as the train pulled into Grand Central, stepped out onto the filthy platform, and made her way with the others up into the cathedral of the main concourse, still quiet at this hour. On the downtown subway she sat with her eyes closed, trying to gather herself, until the train reached the southern tip of the island and she climbed the stairs into cool air and morning light.

Rose had started work at Gattler Fitzpatrick six months earlier, which is to say two months after her husband had been remanded into custody. The firm—three attorneys, a paralegal, and now Rose—occupied a shared office space just off Wall Street. On the 14^th floor of a glass tower, a rotating cast of companies leased various combinations of cubicles, offices with views of other towers, and offices with views of the cubicles. Gattler Fitzpatrick had one of the more expensive suites: three offices and a reception desk in a secluded corner. When Rose arrived for her job interview, she turned a corner to walk down a silent row of cubicles and found it unexpectedly populated, people typing or talking on their phones, audible only when she was almost upon them, row upon row in their little gray squares.

Rose had worried about the gap in her résumé, the abyss of five years between the executive assistant position in Midtown and the present moment, but the truth proved surprisingly adaptable: She had been married for some time to a man with money, she explained to Jared Gattler in the job interview—his gaze flickered to her ringless left hand—and she’d stopped working at his invitation, but now they were separated and she wanted to be self-sufficient. All of this was perfectly true. Gattler didn’t need to know that they’d been separated by the federal prison system.

Gattler was in his mid-70s, shorter than Rose, with a feverish complexion and the fatalism of people whose professional lives are played out in divorce court.

“Half my clients,” he said, “the women, I mean, they’re divorcing guys who don’t actually make much money. Small players. I’m talking guys who can barely support one household at the level to which these people are accustomed, let alone two.” Rose nodded, interested. “My clients, they’re not idiots per se, but they just can’t get it through their pretty little heads that the situation’s changed. They just can’t absorb the fantastical notion that they’re going to have to be on the 7:40 a.m. train to the city just like everyone else. They just want to putter around town doing whatever it is they do, getting their hair done, going for lunch, whatever. I’m not sexist, you understand.”

“Of course not.” Their pretty little heads, Rose thought. In the fantasy version of that moment she rose with quiet dignity, walked out of the office without saying another word, and met her husband for drinks to commiserate.

“I’m just talking about a lack of connection to reality,” Gattler said. “Nothing to do with gender per se, not saying anyone’s less intelligent. All I’m saying is some of my clients, these are people who live in a fantasy world where they’ve never had to be adults.”

“An entitlement issue,” Rose said, because she was down to her last $200 and couldn’t afford to walk out of this or any other office. From the way Gattler’s eyes brightened, she knew the job was hers.

“Exactly,” he said, “that’s exactly it. Whereas I look at you, it seems to me you’re showing a little initiative here.”

“Well, I’ve never wanted to be dependent on anyone else,” Rose said. This was only theoretically true. If she’d never wanted to be dependent on anyone else, then how had it happened so easily? On the train back to Westchester County, she’d stared out the window at the suburbs and the summer trees, and of course the answer was depressingly obvious: She had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier. She’d worked so hard all her life, and when her husband had extended a raft, it was easier to stop swimming and float. Where was Daniel at this moment? She imagined him waiting in a cafeteria lineup, reading in his cell, doing pushups in a sunlit yard. Westchester was a blur of green. Rose played the game she’d been playing since childhood: You look at the surface of the passing woods, the screen of trees, then you adjust your eyes to look past the screen and into the interior, where sunlight catches on tree branches and leaves shine translucent in the shadows, and it’s like seeing an entirely different place. The interior of the kingdom versus the castle wall.

At Gattler Fitzpatrick, Rose did the filing, handled scheduling for Gattler and another attorney, straightened up the little waiting room between clients, maintained a vase of fresh flowers on the reception desk. At 5 o’clock every day, she joined the evening crowd flowing north to Grand Central Terminal. She bought a prepared meal for dinner in the market and boarded a MetroNorth train back to Scarsdale, where she was renting an au pair’s suite above a garage within walking distance of the train station. She heated her dinner in the microwave and ate alone, read the news and watched television for a while, went to bed early, rose and returned to work earlier than she needed to the next day. It was possible to imagine years slipping past like this, decades, and there was comfort in the thought.

There was nothing Rose wanted more than a predictable life. When she arrived at work and stepped off the elevators, she always walked through the cubicles instead of going around, because they reminded her of a maze on the grounds of a particular castle in England that she’d visited with Daniel in her former life.

On that Thursday morning in November, the cubicle maze was empty—it wasn’t yet 7 a.m.—and Rose took a circuitous route, enjoying the silence. In the quiet and order of the 14^th floor, the nightmare that had woken her seemed very distant. The morning passed without incident—filing, coffee, phone calls, scheduling, a salad and too-sweet iced tea for lunch—and then the long afternoon stretched before her. More filing, a weepy client in the waiting area, a gale of laughter from a conference room around 2 p.m., more coffee, a bright blue ring on the finger of a woman who pressed the button on the elevator on the way back up from Starbucks, a flash of pink socks beneath the gray suit of a worker in the cubicles, a moment of dull stupid panic when she thought she’d lost a file. She moved through the day with a feeling of floating, a little undone from too much caffeine and too little sleep, light-headed, heart pounding, cup after cup of coffee that left her with something that wasn’t exactly a headache, more like a pulsing suggestion of phantom lights in the periphery of her vision, her hands trembling a little. At 4 o’clock, Mr. Thursday arrived.

Rose didn’t know his name. Gattler wasn’t the kind of man who appreciated unnecessary inquiries, and his calendar provided no clues. The entry, which had been set up to recur every Thursday until the end of time, read “Thursday mtg” and nothing else. Mr. Thursday was more or less Rose’s age, somewhere in his early 30s, a thin man in an aggressively nondescript beige suit who emerged from the cubicle labyrinth at precisely 4 o’clock every Thursday, nodded politely on his way past her desk, and disappeared into Gattler’s office.

Was there something unusual in the way Mr. Thursday glanced at her that afternoon? He nodded, as always, an unhappy aspect to his expression, and it seemed to her that he held her gaze a beat too long, which led Rose to suspect that perhaps the sleep deprivation was making her look worse than she’d thought. She confirmed this suspicion in the ladies’ room mirror: dark circles under her eyes, a fixed and somewhat glassy quality to her stare. She had recently reached the age when sleep deprivation made her look not just tired, but slightly older. Mr. Thursday was still in Gattler’s office when she left at 5 o’clock.

It was raining by then. She had no umbrella, but there was a certain pleasure in this. She liked the sharp, cold of rain on her uncovered head. By the time she reached the stairs of Bowling Green Station, the dull wasteland of the day had somewhat dissipated, burned off by the cold and rain and lights, the evening acquiring a certain momentum. An uptown train was arriving just as she reached the platform, and she stepped aboard with the feeling of being involved in some pleasant choreography, but then the train reached Union Square, and all momentum came to a halt. The doors opened but didn’t close. The train didn’t leave the station. The car filled up, a crush of commuters who closed their eyes to concentrate on their music, or stared or at their phones or at books, or stared at nothing. The announcement came after five or 10 minutes: train going out of service, everyone please exit. There was no further explanation. The passengers shuffled out onto the already crowded platform, some muttering curses but most closed up in a resigned or furious silence.

The sleep deprivation had made her mildly deranged, Rose decided, and that was why this moment felt like déjà vu. She’d been here before, hadn’t she? Here, in this moment, exiting this train? The woman beside her wore a beautiful blue wool coat, and Rose was certain that she’d seen this coat before, but not somewhere else: She’d seen the coat before in this moment, exiting this train, here. Every face in the crowd looked somehow familiar. She was dizzy. The train doors closed behind the last of the passengers, and the cars stood empty and alight. The crowd swelled dangerously on the platform, a mass of damp coats and hot, stale breath and tinny music from headphones, scents of hairspray, coffee, cologne, a McDonald’s bag, a cloying jasmine perfume that made Rose want to gag. The out-of-service train didn’t move, and no trains arrived on the opposite platform. Rose had never liked crowds, and it seemed to her that if she didn’t get out of the subway she might faint in the crush, so she began inching her way toward the stairs in a series of tiny half-steps, excusing herself again and again. It was difficult to get enough air. Rose couldn’t shake the terrible sense of following a script, of being an actor in a movie she’d already seen. She fought her way up the final staircase out of the station and emerged gasping into the evening air.

The rain was a drizzle that blunted the streetlights, Union Square lit gently, puddles reflecting. Her relief at being away from the crowd was overwhelming. What now? She sat on the nearest bench to consider her next move. At this hour of the day the city was in motion, umbrellas crossing Broadway like a flock of dark birds.

“Tiffany?”

It was Victor Freeman, the youngest member of her husband’s legal team. Their offices were near here, she remembered. He stood over her with an umbrella.

“I don’t use that name anymore.”

“What can I call you?”

“Rose.”

“Pretty.” He sat beside her, although the bench was very wet, and angled his umbrella so that it sheltered both of them. His overcoat looked warm and expensive, the opposite of Mr. Thursday’s cheap beige. “Why are you sitting out here in the rain?”

I was waiting for you, she thought, but of course this didn’t make sense. “The subway’s down,” she said. “I came up for air.”

“Where were you headed?”

“Home. Scarsdale.”

He frowned, confused. Rose and Daniel’s house in Scarsdale had been seized along with all of their other assets.

“I rent an au pair suite. It’s a room with a kitchenette and a bathroom over a garage.”

“Oh.”

“I like it. It’s all I need.”

“Let me give you a ride home. My car’s in a garage around the corner.”

“You live in Scarsdale too?”

“No, but as a former member of your husband’s defense team, I feel that driving you home is literally the least I can do.”

“How far out of your way is it?”

“Professional guilt notwithstanding,” he said, as they walked in the direction of the garage, “I just bought a car, and to be honest, I’ll take any opportunity to go on an unnecessary drive.”

The yellow Lamborghini seemed to shine in the dim light of the garage.

“It’s a ridiculous car,” Victor said, “but I love it.”

“I don’t think it’s ridiculous.” Rose thought it was beautiful, and when she said this, Victor smiled.

“I think it’s beautiful too, actually. It’s like something from the future. I know it’s a frivolous purchase, but I don’t know, I just wanted it so much.” The déjà vu was surfacing again, nudging against the surface of the evening. “I agonized for weeks,” Victor was saying, “but if there’s a thing you really want, and you can afford it, and it’s a beautiful thing that genuinely makes you happy, is there actually anything wrong with just buying it? You could call it crass materialism, but life’s so short.” It seemed to Rose as she buckled herself in that there was something familiar about the car, but she didn’t recognize it for another 47 minutes, when the accident began: the SUV drifting into their lane just as Victor turned to ask her something, the delivery truck behind them that didn’t stop in time. She didn’t recognize Victor’s car until the moment of impact, the blare of horns: She knew this car from the nightmare that had woken her three nights in a row. She remembered now. In the dream, and now in waking life, time slowed and expanded. The car was turning sideways between the delivery truck and the SUV, the air filling with glass, steel crumpling, and the thing from the dream was rushing toward her, the overwhelming thing that was dark and quiet and could not be resisted; this was the thing that had jolted her out of sleep when she dreamed it, but in waking life it turned out not to be terrifying at all, only inevitable; it was catching her in the crush of steel and plucking her gently from the accident, it was sweeping her up.

3.

Three-hundred and forty years after the accident, a lounge singer was drinking scotch with a businessman in a spaceport terminal bar. They’d been flirting half-heartedly for 15 minutes or so. “And you,” the businessman was saying, “where are you off to today?”

“I’m going to the moon,” the singer said. The businessman raised his glass. The bartender appeared with a bottle.

“Oh, no, I was just toasting her,” the businessman explained. “She’s going to the moon.”

“Everyone here’s going to the moon,” the bartender said. “The next Mars flight isn’t till tomorrow.”

“Still,” the businessman said mildly, “always worth toasting a change of scenery.” The singer smiled at him and sipped her scotch. “Which colony?” the businessman asked.

“I’m headed up to Colony Two,” the singer said. “I got a job in a hotel. Actually in a chain of hotels.”

“Hilton?”

“No, Grand Luna.”

“Ah, I’ve stayed at the Grand Luna. Nice place. Did you tell me you’re a singer?”

“I did. I am.”

“My daughter likes to sing,” the businessman said. He looked a little awkward following this announcement. The singer didn’t strike him as the sort of person who enjoyed discussing children. He motioned to the bartender for another glass, but the bartender had developed a sudden interest in the projection above the bar, which was showing a baseball game.

“Can I ask?” the singer asked, with a gesture that encompassed the businessman’s outfit. He was wearing a beige suit in a style that hadn’t been fashionable since the early 21^st century. The shoulders of his overcoat were still damp with 21^st-century rain.

“It’s for my work. Well, was for my work, I guess I should say.”

“You’re one of those.”

“Was one of those. Until this morning.” The businessman raised his glass, which by now contained only a pair of rapidly melting ice cubes. “To getting fired.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. It’s a creepy line of work, frankly.”

“It always seemed dangerous to me. Going back like that.”

“Dangerous and stupid,” the businessman agreed. “Happy to be out of it. My prediction, it’ll be illegal by next year.”

“I mean, what’s to stop an accident?” the singer said. “Even the smallest thing, you know, you walk through a door ahead of someone … ”

“You wouldn’t believe how many meetings I’ve sat through on this topic.”

“So you walk through a door in front of someone else, and then, I don’t know, say that little delay means he doesn’t get hit by a car, and he goes on to cause a war that wipes out all of our great-grandparents.”

“If not all of humanity,” the businessman agreed. He was trying to flag down the bartender, who was absorbed in the game. “This is actually why I drink, if you were curious.”

“And in that case it’s not that we die, exactly, you and I and everyone we love.” The singer gave what seemed to the businessman to be a somewhat exaggerated shudder. “It’s more that we never get to start existing.”

“The thought’s occurred to me.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Same reason anyone does anything in business.”

“I’ll drink to that. When you went back,” she said, “where exactly did you go?”

“I specialized in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.”

“What were you doing there?”

He succeeded in getting the bartender’s attention and fell silent for a moment while the bartender refilled their drinks. He took a long swallow and glanced at the baseball game; the bartender had rotated the projection for a better view of a replay, and now there was a holographic outfielder directly over the bar. “Nothing sinister,” the businessman said finally, when he saw that the singer was still watching him. “Genealogical research for high net-worth individuals. Look, I’m not saying it’s safe. But if it makes you feel better, it’s not a free-for-all. There are controls in place, both technological and human.”

“Human?”

“I was required to meet weekly with a handler in the local time.”

“Kind of a weak control,” the singer said.

“Well, you might be right about that. It was the technological controls that got me fired.”

“Why’d you get fired?”

“I tried to avert a car accident.”

The singer was quiet, watching him.

“I didn’t think the scanners would pick it up. I knew it was stupid, but it’s not like I tried to avert the First World War.” The singer frowned. Her grasp of 20^th-century history was shaky. “No matter what I did,” he said, “everything I tried, she still got in the car, and the car still crashed.”

“Who’s she?”

“Just someone I saw every time I went back. My handler’s secretary. I liked her. Kind of a sad story.”

The singer liked sad stories. She waited.

“OK,” the businessman said. By now he’d had a little too much to drink. “So this person, the secretary, she grows up with nothing, terrible family, meets a guy with money, falls in love with him, and then a few years later he goes to jail for some white-collar thing. Long sentence, judge wanted to make an example of him. All of his assets were seized, so she’s lost everything. She tries to—no, that’s the wrong word, she succeeds in starting a new life. Changes her name, gets a new job, picks herself up.”

“And then?”

“And then she dies six months later in a car crash. I don’t know, I guess I’d been in the business for too long. Maybe I got a little burned out. I was always so careful. I filed these impeccable itineraries with Control and never deviated from them, never tried to change anything, but this person, Rose, she looked a bit like my daughter, and I just thought, what harm would there be, making this one change? Averting this one thing? Most people don’t amount to much. Most people don’t change the world. If she doesn’t die in a car accident, what harm is there in that, really?”

“Isn’t that exactly the kind of small thing—”

“Imagine walking into a room,” he said, “and knowing what’s going to happen to everyone in it, because you looked up their birth and death records the night before.”

The singer seemed to be searching for something to say to this but failed. She downed the last of her scotch.

“I’m sorry. It’s an unsettling topic. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“My shuttle’s probably boarding by now.”

“You see the temptation, though? How you might want to just make this one small change, give someone a chance, maybe just—”

“ ‘Genealogical research for high net-worth individuals,’ ” the singer said. “You must think I’m an idiot.”

“I don’t.”

“Anyway, thanks for the drinks.” The singer was sliding carefully from her bar stool.

“You’re welcome,” said the businessman, who hadn’t realized he was paying. He watched her walk away and then touched one of the buttons on his shirt, which he’d kept angled toward her. The recording stopped.

“Fucking creep,” the bartender muttered, under his breath. The businessman settled up and left without looking at him.

Later, in his hotel room in Colony One, he dropped the button into a projector and played the conversation back. A three-dimensional hologram of the singer hovered over the side table. I’m going to the moon. A touch of excitement in her voice. In the background, the shadowy figure of the bartender polished a glass while he watched the baseball game. The businessman turned the volume to low. He liked to keep a recording going in the background when he was alone in hotel rooms, so as not to get too lonely. But this was the wrong hologram, he didn’t like the way the bartender hovered, so he scrolled through the library and picked out another: Rose at her desk in the 21^st century, her smile when she looked up and saw him. He adjusted the speed to the lowest possible setting. The walk past her desk took only two minutes, but in slow motion there was such stillness, such beauty in her small, precise actions—as though underwater she turned from her keyboard to look at him, then back to her keyboard, her hand reaching for a file and bringing it with heartbreaking slowness down to the desk, and all the while he was gliding past her, on his way to Gattler’s office—and this seemed the right recording for the moment. He changed into his pajamas, switched off the bedside lamp so that the only light was the pale glow of the hologram by the bed. He stood for a moment by the window while he brushed his teeth. The hotel was expensive and looked out over a park, and it occurred to him for the thousandth time that if he hadn’t spent time on Earth, he might not know the difference. Tomorrow he’d board the first train to Colony Three, go home and tell his wife what had happened, sweep their little daughter up into his arms. Would his wife be angry? He thought she’d understand. They’d talked about getting out of the industry. But for now he was alone in the quiet of the room. He would never return to the 21^st century, and there was a sense of liberation in this. He could find a new job. He could live a different, less haunted kind of life. In the silence of the room, the hologram of Rose was reflected on the window, turning in slow motion away from him, superimposed on the pine trees and tall grass of the park. An owl passed silently between the trees.

Emily St. John Mandel is the author of four novels, most recently Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner award. She lives in New York City.

Can We Really Travel Back in Time to Change History?

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies responds to Emily St. John Mandel’s short story “Mr. Thursday.”

BY PAUL DAVIES

MARCH 16, 2017 7:01 AM

The charm of time travel stories is that the narratives are at once easy to imagine and yet preposterous. As a theoretical physicist with a lifelong research interest in the nature of time, I am often asked by people: Can it really be done? The short answer is, yes—in a sense.

When Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, it made clear that travel into the future is not only possible, but a done deal. One merely has to move fast. Although any degree of relative motion will create temporal mismatches, it is the speed of light that sets the scale. If you travel close to light speed, time gets seriously warped. For example, suppose you want to reach Earth year 2100 in just one year. A yearlong spaceship journey (as experienced by you) at 99.993 per cent of the speed of light would do the trick. You would come back to Earth just one year older to find it was now 2100 at home. In effect, you will have been propelled 82 years into Earth’s future.

There is another way to leap ahead in time: go somewhere with a higher gravitational field. Clocks tick faster in space than on the Earth’s surface, for example. The effect can be directly measured using sensitive clocks but is today commonplace because the GPS satellite-based navigational system must factor in both the speed of the satellites and the lower gravity of orbit. Time warps are real—they’re a matter of practical engineering.

Of course, with existing technology, the time shifts are disappointingly small. Plane travel, for example, creates temporal dislocations measured in a few billionths of a second, which hardly makes for a Dr, Who –style adventure. The other snag is that it is a one-way journey. You can only go forward in time—that is, reach the future sooner. You can’t come back again. Neither can you visit the past, which from the science-fiction standpoint is where the real fascination lies.

Nothing in Einstein’s theory of relativity, however, specifically forbids travel into the past, but physicists are divided over whether to take the possibility seriously. Einstein himself found the notion highly disturbing. One thing on which physicists agree: Going back in time, if not outright impossible, would be stupendously hard to achieve. Proposals abound based on wormholes in space, cosmic strings, and colossal spinning cylinders, but they all seem to necessitate supertechnology and require massive amounts of energy.

Technological barriers and costs notwithstanding, visiting the past would also seem to unleash all manner of paradoxes, which is where the science and the fiction so productively meet. In Emily St. John Mandel’s engaging story, the time traveler, Mr. Thursday, tries to change the past and save a young woman’s life. The tale ends with a rueful discussion in a bar about the consequences of altering anything in history. “Even the smallest thing, you know, you walk through a door ahead of someone …” says the singer. The movie Sliding Doors starring Gwyneth Paltrow examined precisely this theme by presenting two very contrasting narratives flowing from a seemingly minor incident of this sort. In fact, it is easy to imagine more startling examples. It is merely necessary for a person to be displaced by a billionth of a centimeter to alter history, if in so doing a cosmic ray hits a key atom of DNA and induces cancer. If that person were, say, the young Adolf Hitler, the world today would be a very different place.

Causal loop paradoxes might seem to scupper the whole idea of visiting the past, suggesting that any interaction, however tiny, between the time traveler and the past world would be inconsistent with the future from which he had come. But there is a loophole: quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics is a description of all of nature, but its effects are most dramatic at the atomic level. The characteristic features are indeterminism and uncertainty: fire an electron at an atom and observe it bounce to the right. Repeat the process under identical conditions and next time it may bounce to the left. It is impossible to know in advance what is going to happen, although the relative probabilities can be accurately calculated. Quantum phenomena imply that the future is undetermined and open.

Less well known is that the inherent fuzziness of quantum mechanics applies to the past as well as the future. Contrary to common sense, there is no fixed and well-defined history stretching back from the present state of the world to the big bang origin of the universe. Rather, there is a multiplicity of contending histories, co-existing in a ghostly superposition of half-realities. Observations made today can nail down certain specific events in the past, like, for example, detecting a cosmic ray may determine its point of origin thousands of years ago. But most of the past, at least at the micro-level, remains not just unknown to us but intrinsically undetermined.

The existence of multiple parallel realities opens the way for time travel. If there is no “fact of the matter” about some aspect of the past, then there is no paradox if a person journeys back in time and resolves something hitherto fuzzy—that is, if the action of a time traveler in the past concretizes a history that would otherwise be left undetermined. It is important to understand that the past cannot be changed, but it can be made less vague, less ambiguous. Intriguingly, experiments with photons (in the present!) demonstrate how a measurement made at one moment affects the nature of reality at a past moment by resolving its quantum fuzziness, even though the measurement cannot alter the past state. So this weird aspect of quantum mechanics, closely related to what Einstein called “spooky action,” is well established.

But there is a caveat: Whatever the time traveler does in the past, it must be consistent with the state of the world from which she or he has come. Thus it is not possible to go back in time and kill your mother before you were born. But there may be no problem about going back to save a girl from being murdered, and having that girl become your mother, because it forms a self-consistent narrative.

Of course, this means the time traveler does not have unrestricted freedom to do as he pleases. He is hemmed in by the laws of physics. But that is nothing new. After all, I might want to walk on the ceiling, yet the laws of physics forbid it—I’ll simply fall. When causal loops are involved, the restrictions on what is or is not possible will be more severe. What would happen if you tried to kill your mother in the past? Would the knife fall down? Would you simply be unable to lift your arm? Many things could go wrong. But there is nothing strictly paradoxical about someone being part of his own past. So Mr. Thursday may not be able to prevent the accident, but he might have been able to exploit quantum fuzziness to tweak the details of how it happened.

According to Mr. Thursday, time travel would eventually become illegal. But it’s the laws of physics, not the laws of humans, that ensure the universe remains rational, even if it is indeterministic.

“The Minnesota Diet”

A new short story from the author of the Nebula Award–winning All the Birds in the Sky.

BY CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

JAN 17, 2018 9:00 AM

North American Transit Route No. 7 carves a path between tree silhouettes like wraiths, through blanched fields that yawn with the furrows of long-ago crops. Weaving in and out of the ancient routes of Interstates 29 and 35, this new highway has no need for rest stops or attempts to beautify the roadside, because none of the vehicles have a driver or any passengers. The trucks race from north to south, at speeds that would cause any human driver to fly off the road at the first curve. The sun goes down and they keep racing, with only a few thin beams to watch for obstacles. They don’t need to see the road to stay on the road. The trucks seem to hum to one another, tiny variations in their engine sounds making a kind of atonal music. Seen from above, they might look like the herds of mustangs that used to run across this same land, long ago.

The self-driving trucks seem to pick up pace as they approach the cluster of crystal towers that rise from the horizon: the cutting-edge “Smart City” of New Lincoln. And then just as they are cresting the last rise in the road, they change direction. They veer off along one of the other North American Transit Routes, leaving New Lincoln in their rearview.

Mason is one of those people who turns every morsel into a story: about the Napa Valley soil that gave this grape its particular tartness, or the windy Vermont hillside where sheep gamboled and munched tall grass, producing milk that became a cheese with such a complicated bite. Listening to Mason talk about food is almost better than eating. But right now, Mason is sitting at his workstation screaming and hitting refresh on the holographic display, which keeps showing the trucks careening in the wrong direction. At last he howls, making his blue pompadour quiver and causing his co-workers to beg him to keep it down.

Normally, Mason would be worrying about the latest boy who isn’t responding to his Flings—in this case, a lovely Australasian named Richard who seemed interested just a few days ago. By rights, Mason should be concentrating on work purely to distract himself from Fling drama. But now, the Very Prairie Food Co-op is down to just one kind of sheep’s-milk cheese, and it’s not even one of the creamy ones. The cold cuts are a disaster. He should be standing out front, telling customers about the romance and the drama behind a lovely spelt bread, but the Co-op is out of it. They’re out of everything, except for some locally sourced produce from the city’s 17 vertical farms.

It’s classic variable reinforcement: Every third or fourth time Mason hits “refresh,” the screen shows a delivery truck en route, practically at its loading bay already. One self-driving truck did actually show up this morning: half-empty, with some pasta and oatmeal on board. But then the next few trucks got rerouted. Basically, the worst slot machine ever.

Mason’s co-workers grow tired of hearing him berate dots on a hologram, until Percy tells him to get the hell outside for some fresh air. Mason keeps his head down as he walks through the front of the store toward the exit, because the exposed bioplastic of the empty shelves feels like a kick in the stomach, and he can’t look any of the customers in the eye.

Mason storms out into the Greatest City in the World.

Mason grew up thinking cities were supposed to be gray, shading toward ochre in the parts made of bronze, brass, brownstone, or rusted iron. Until he moved to New Lincoln five years ago—this city is like a forest canopy, or some kind of giant vegetable patch; trees stretch their branches out from all the rooftops, and bracken grows out of every wall sconce, while ivy and other vines wrap around all the surfaces. The walls themselves are made of some kind of dense bioplastic, colored bright purple or deep blue, that “breathes,” allowing for natural cooling and heating. Not only does the whole metropolis have no carbon footprint, but also the air smells like springtime whenever Mason ventures out. Every square of the walkway (there are no sidewalks, because there are no streets) tells Mason how many steps he’s walked today, and everything that’s going on with his friends, plus news about the ongoing legislative DeathGrip in Congress. (The news services cheerily natter about “DeathGrip Day 709,” along with interesting facts: Did you know the government hasn’t had a budget in two years? So fascinating!) The billboards in the CityPlex target Mason with messages designed just for him, thanks to next-level systems that aim photons directly at his retinas. If Mason put on his Blinkers, he’d see virtual structures and companions—part of a whole other city that could be almost endless.

To walk through New Lincoln is to marvel at human potential at its mightiest. But today, Mason looks up at all this vibrant color and sees nothing but gray. He is ramping up for some really first-class brooding when his Savant kicks up a message from Sumana and Flood: “quit wandering in circles like a drunk goose and meet us at the Bruisory, son-son.” Mason sighs, then turns on his Blinkers and heads over.

If Mason tried to go to the Bruisory without his Blinkers, he’d get as far as some stairs and a terrace. This mostly virtual bistro has sleek wooden surfaces and old-style squeaky roll-chairs and a shimmering menu of comfort food, fancy coffees, and high-end beers. The actual decor is one big tribute to Bruisor, the hottest social network from way back in the 2040s, right before the public internet went away. The menu is all Bruisor pastiche, with playful insults in between every menu item, plus Mason’s worst underwear picture, and his whiny drunken messages to that one boy who ditched him at the club two years ago—exactly the sort of stuff that would have been posted about Mason on Bruisor, back in the day. (Everyone sees their own embarrassing info.) And in true Bruisor style, Sumana greets Mason saying, “lick goat nose, son-son,” and Mason responds, “choke on a smeg pretzel, mana-mana.” Then they hug.

Everyone asks Mason why he looks so gloomy, and he tries to explain that the Very Prairie Food Co-op’s distributor is trying to screw them, but just then, he finally gets a good look at the Bruisor’s menu.

“What the fletch,” Mason says. “There’s only three menu items.”

“Two if you don’t consider peanut soup real food,” says Flood, who as usual wears a hoodie with ever-changing sarcastic phrases about smashing the hypocracy on their skinny torso.

“The deliveries,” Vera says from behind the counter, “they just haven’t been showing up.” Vera wears a floor-length skirt and complicated bustier–halter top combo as usual, and her locs spill over her shoulders.

Mason is so startled, he flouts the Bruisory custom, and doesn’t even bother to insult Vera, or anyone else here. “What the fletch is going on? Where are all the deliveries?”

Half the people in the Bruisory work in white-collar jobs, like Sumana (coding), Warren (design), Flood (strategy consulting) and Amanda (UX design), and those people can’t understand what Mason and Vera are worried about. It’s only the people who work in food service, or know something about food, who are losing their minds.

“It’s kind of a cliché to say that most cities are only about nine meals away from total anarchy,” says Jolene, who’s an actual food scientist at New Lincoln University. “But New Lincoln is so efficient and streamlined, we may have succeeded in getting it down to just seven or eight meals.” Nobody laughs at this.

“I still don’t get the problem if a few self-driving trucks took a wrong turn,” says Amanda. Vera’s longtime girlfriend is a curvy blonde who wears tons of jewelry with clock faces all over it.

“Maybe it’s the robot uprising at last,” snorts Warren, who has a kind of retro “crusty punk” thing going on.

“They probably just got rerouted because some algorithm decided they were needed elsewhere,” agrees Sumana.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Mason says. “Meanwhile, I guess I’ll have a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“Sorry,” Vera says. “We literally just ran out of cheese.”

Mason sighs. “I guess peanut soup then?”

Jolene takes the words food scientist off her Savant profile, because she’s sick of friends of friends and exes of exes pinging her nonstop, trying to get some kind of explanation. Whether they’ve gone to the big supermarket or one of the smaller ones like the Very Prairie Co-op, they’ve noticed the half-empty shelves, and the absence of the usual fluttering augmented reality displays that tell you all about the vegetable momos, the tsuivan, the kitfo, the string-hoppers, the black pudding, the five kinds of spiced lentils, the wild-caught salmon, and the house-marinated venison. Or else their favorite restaurant shut down temporarily. Or they know someone who works at a restaurant or grocery store, and that person is having a nervous breakdown. These people saw the reports about droughts, blights, monoculture crop collapse, soil exhaustion, and pesticide-resistant bugs, and always figured it was someone else’s problem.

After all, they live in New Lincoln, the “smart city” where you could have urban density and a cutting-edge urban lifestyle, at a cheap enough price for all the white-collar workers whose labor had been devalued by the latest superadvanced software. A post-scarcity city.

Jolene’s mother was an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who loved Dolly Parton with an unwavering fierceness, and she’d decided to name her firstborn daughter after the best thing about their new home. Growing up with an unusual first name helped make Jolene more of an introvert, and left her with less tolerance for a hundred people in a row asking her the exact same question.

Mostly, Jolene hangs out with the same handful of people she’s known since she moved here a few years ago: Vera, Samanthor the Mighty, Mason, Sumana, Flood, Amanda, Warren, and a few others who rotate in and out. Most of the time, they sit around eating Vera’s famous stinky-bean-curd frittata and guzzling vodka, or they eat chips and dip at someone’s house, or they share lasagna at that place that puts truffles in everything. But today, they sit around a game-holo, playing some interactive strategy game, without even any snacks.

“I never realized how much my social life revolved around food,” says Flood, more bemused than upset. They’ve shaved new streaks into their prematurely gray curly hair, and they’re wearing cargo pants so baggy they’re almost square. “Until there wasn’t any.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” says Samanthor (who’s using “she/her” pronouns at the moment, according to her animated pirate shirt). “There’s plenty of food, it’s just not fancy.” She hefts a can of peas for emphasis. Everyone is hanging out in the loft apartment where Samanthor the Mighty, Mason, and Warren live, which has exposed bioplastic girders and a window that changes to reflect everyone’s mood.

“Just saying, the lack of restaurants and snack options puts a dent in my social life,” Flood says.

“Can’t go on much longer,” says Sumana, who has an unshakable faith in her fellow engineers. “It’s just a glitch in the system.”

“It’s been over a week since anyone saw a delivery truck,” says Mason, whose interactive T-shirt has sported nothing but angry cartoons lately. “Nearly a week and a half.”

“Soon the same algorithm that’s sending all the trucks somewhere else will realize that we’re in dire need, and everything will swing the other way,” says Sumana. “We’ll have more trucks than we know what to do with.”

“Oh yes, the algorithm will save us.” Flood’s sarcasm is curiously relaxed, without much bitterness in their voice.

At least with these seven friends, Jolene won’t have to hear the same terrible questions, over and over again.

Here’s what nobody wants to hear from Jolene: Experts have warned for decades—since even before Superstorm Sandy hit New York and closed off the tunnels, and Manhattan suffered shortages almost instantaneously—that cities have fragile supply chains. City planners have learned to prepare for hurricanes and other natural disasters, but nobody predicted that a simple combination of logistical problems and crop failure could be worse than any storm. New Lincoln’s 17 indoor vertical farms and assorted rooftop gardens and orchards can’t save the city from depending on faraway warehouses and narrow delivery pipelines. Even if all 3 million residents wanted to eat nothing but lettuce, kale, and arugula, the vertical farms collectively produce only enough for half a million meals per day. They were designed to produce artisanal salads and to supplement the food brought in from elsewhere, not to sustain a population.

“But I don’t mind eating canned food and frozen pizza for a while,” says Amanda in a breezy voice. Then, maybe worrying that this sounded too Pollyanna, she adds: “I mean, shit. We take our incredible standard of living for granted here. We were lucky to wind up in a city where our skills are actually valued. There’s nothing wrong with a reminder to be grateful.”

“Why don’t you lay an egg and then suck on it?” says Flood, as if they’re back in the Bruisory and everybody’s supposed to lob silly fake insults. Amanda just rolls her eyes.

Samanthor fasted in college to protest the government’s refugee policies, and she remembers how the hunger started gentle, like, oh, you just skipped a meal, and then with no warning there was a jagged chunk of rock, dredged from a silty riverbed, in your stomach. After even one day of fasting, everything hurt, and you had to exercise ridiculous caution when you started eating again, or you’d throw up everywhere. The hunger strike had probably made the tiniest scratch on the xenophobia-industrial complex, but afterward Samanthor felt like she had skin in the game, and she’d remembered that awful feeling every time she’d felt tempted to stay home from another protest or petition drive.

But this time, there’s no sense of virtue in the dull pain that has settled in Samanthor’s chest, or the sick feeling in her arms and legs. She feels like she ran a marathon, even though she’s been sitting still for ages.

Somehow, they went from having enough nonperishable and semi-perishable food to get by, if they didn’t binge, to not quite scraping by. The grocery stores have completely emptied out, even of the stuff that nobody really wanted, like the high-fiber cereal that looks like actual twigs, the sweaty root vegetables, and the organic caffeinated sour mints. People have been breaking into the rooftop gardens and even people’s window boxes, ripping out every tomato vine and celery stalk. All of the trees and parklets are studded with crude traps for squirrels and pigeons.

Mason still keeps checking the holo-display with the dots moving around, but it’s mostly a running joke at this point. The Mayor’s Office and the City Council keep putting out messages urging people not to panic, because this is just a temporary glitch, and New Lincoln is still a brilliant shining metropolis. But some malign piece of code somewhere keeps deciding that New Lincoln, with its population of midlevel computer engineers, quality-control experts, content creators, architects, marketing experts, musical theater geeks, and service workers, isn’t a priority. It’s been 20 days since the last delivery.

Samanthor has a constant headache, and she can’t stand bright lights or loud noises, and Mason’s squawking is driving her bonkers, and the automatically adjusting picture window is putting weird black shrouds on the yew trees and crystal towers outside in response to her foul mood. She’s not ready for how much this hunger isn’t just in her stomach. She keeps wishing she’d stayed in Denver, where the bright new smart buildings jostled next to ancient skyscrapers in an architectural mishmash, but at least there was plenty of good barbecue.

“I feel gross,” growls Warren, who’s been raising his “crusty punk” act to a new level since he doesn’t have enough energy to shave or shower. “I gotta go to work tomorrow, and I can’t even think straight.”

“I feel like barfing, even though there’s nothing to barf up,” responds Samanthor. “This feels like the flu, only flu-ier.”

Mason yells something else, and both of his roommates glare at him.

At last they go down to City Hall, where they spy Amanda, Vera, Flood, and Sumana among the people protesting the lack of official response to this disaster. Under the big CityPlex signs, a woman with a bullhorn demands that some kind of food distribution and rationing program be set up, and that the local government declare a state of emergency.
Samanthor can’t deal with this crowd, the meaty bready wet-doggy smell of so many people all in one place. She feels like barfing or screaming or punching someone or keeling over.

“We need to go where the food is,” Warren says as they walk away from the protest.

“Where’s that?” Mason says.

“You know where,” Warren says. “The place you’re always talking about. The sheep farm where they graze on a grassy hillside, near the orchard where the climate is just perfect, and the river where the salmon spawn and the trout do backflips.”

“Um, those are all different places,” Mason says.

“That’s where I want to go.” Warren seems not to have heard Mason. “The place where it all comes from. The food place.”

“Let’s go,” Samanthor says.

There’s supposed to be high-speed rail connecting New Lincoln to both Chicago and Kansas City, but it never got finished because of the DeathGrip. So they rent a self-driving car, a preloved Zaeo Superlux, and throw everything they can carry in the back. They get about a dozen kilometers outside New Lincoln, and then the car just stops. Plenty of charge left in the battery, and the engine seems fine, but the car’s software license won’t allow it to drive on the North American Transit Route. Even telling the Superlux to drive on back roads seems to trigger some terms-of-service issue that keeps them clicking through screen after screen.

Mason and Samanthor stand by the side of the road, next to a field of yellow-gray stalks with the consistency of bad silicone—like a cheapo sex toy that someone bought as a gag gift, but which is doomed to wind up being used for unsatisfying, humdrum sex at some point. They smell like congealing candle wax. Samanthor remembers Jolene explaining that hundreds of miles of good farmland surrounds New Lincoln, but corporations are using it to grow organic precursors for biosynthetic tech. That’s one reason New Lincoln is so cutting edge and eco-friendly: Most of its infrastructure was grown, rather than made. But that means there’s no farmland growing actual food anywhere nearby, apart from the vertical farms inside the city.

Warren keeps trying to hack the Superlux’s OS to get it moving again, but he might as well drag the car down the road.

Samanthor’s Savant hits her with updates. Her friend Davy in Chicago says they have shortages too, though not as bad. “I’ve been trying to send a care package, but the shipping company keeps saying there’s problems with deliveries to New Lincoln right now. Hang in there, Kidface. You’ll get through this. Love etc.” According to a news item, the mayor of Chicago says there’s no room for the refugees who did make it out of New Lincoln, and they’re being housed in some stadium until something else can be found.

At least the mayor of New Lincoln is finally declaring a state of emergency, and they’re creating some system to organize and distribute the remaining food, with priority given to children, the elderly, and people with serious health conditions. The federal government, meanwhile, is considering measures to provide emergency food aid to New Lincoln. But, you know, the DeathGrip.

Mason pulls out a bottle of water and some salt packets and dribbles salt in his mouth before swigging, because he read somewhere that salt can keep you functioning during a long fast. Samanthor wants to swat the water bottle out of his stupid hands. For some reason, she’s decided all of this is Mason’s fault. He yammered about food so much, he ruined everything. She can’t sit down, or she won’t be able to stand up again, and she feels sleepy even on her feet. Her brain is running at half power, and the screen of her Savant is giving her a migraine.

“Ugh.” Warren makes a noise. “Let’s just go home so I can lie down.”

The Superlux happily starts up as soon as they tell it to go back to New Lincoln.

Warren makes his disgusted sound again, like someone chewing a snail and spitting out the shell

Back during World War II, three dozen conscientious objectors volunteered to live on a low-calorie diet, in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Jolene studied this in school, and the pictures of scowling stick-figure men were pretty horrifying.

Jolene is one of about 30 people helping to organize the rationing program that City Hall finally agreed to set up. Her goal is to keep healthy people as close as possible to the Minnesota diet, which after all didn’t kill anybody. She attends endless meetings, during which usually responsible adults snap at one another, zone out instead of listening, and get derailed into half-hour conversations about their favorite foods that they wish they could be eating. Jolene can barely concentrate in these meetings, and only a sense of duty keeps her from staying in bed. Since New Lincoln is full of app designers, they’re trying to pull together a team to design a rationing app. We’re now at 47 days since the last delivery.

The good news is, the city’s vertical farms will continue to produce a steady (but limited) amount of vegetables for the foreseeable future, because they are self-renewing. And every food chemist Jolene knows is working on coming up with other scalable food sources, from mycoproteins to synthetics to insects. Nobody thinks help is coming from outside anymore, and anyone who had the means to leave and someplace to go has already left. Other cities have followed Chicago’s lead in putting refugees into temporary shelters, which means Jolene and the others have 1 million fewer mouths to feed. But an estimated 2 million people have remained in New Lincoln, of whom roughly 40 percent are considered high-risk.

Jolene walks through the city, along a path that used to take her past a beautiful fountain, her favorite doughnut stand, and a row of little cafés and restaurants. With her Blinkers on, she would have been able to see virtual strategy games, a whole row of extra shops, a pie-eating contest happening in five physical locations across the city, a whole range of fantastical skins. But people have been vandalizing the augmented reality emitters, and nobody is bothering to launch content updates anyway, so Jolene is stuck with a “real” world in which people lie on the walkways, where they fall over and don’t have the energy to get up again, or else scream at everyone else, eyes crunched shut. Jolene thinks about the term meatspace, how dumb it is, how rocky and barren and mostly devoid of meat the nonvirtual world actually is. Jolene wants to throttle whoever came up with the term meatspace and then sleep forever.

Jolene almost doesn’t recognize the closest couple who are yelling in each other’s tearful faces: Vera and Amanda. The two of them just shout “It’s all your fault” over and over. Jolene grabs both of them by the shoulders, until they finally stop shrieking and glare at her with bleary eyes. “It’s not your fault. Either of you,” Jolene says slowly. “It was a large-scale failure of urban planning.”

“That’s not helpful,” Amanda snarls.

Eventually, the rationing app gets up and running, and half the city’s police force is guarding the remaining food stores, and almost everyone in town receives something approaching Minnesota food levels.

There’s a new etiquette, which spreads via people’s Savants and Flings. Don’t talk about food in front of other people. But if someone else talks about food in front of you, don’t lose your shit at them. Don’t try to make anyone watch a movie, or Virtual Immersive Scenario, in which people are eating. Talk quietly, and above all don’t yell. Don’t be fatalistic. Don’t proclaim false hope, or insist that everything is going to be fine. Don’t judge other people’s weird food rituals: the way they hold food in their mouths for a long time before swallowing, mix it with water, or even cradle a piece of food in their arms like a baby. Don’t blame your partner(s) for lacking sex drive, or for being uninterested in romance. If people need to be alone, leave them alone. Most of all, don’t judge people for listlessness or apathy, or the inability to get out of bed—but do try to keep other people moving, at least enough to avoid muscle atrophy.

Jolene loses track of how long it’s been since she saw another person, but at last she finds herself sitting around with Mason, Warren, Samanthor, and Flood. Mason is still poking the “refresh” spot on that stupid real-time self-driving truck screen, full of dots in motion.

“They’re on their way somewhere,” Mason says, without even much rancor.

“This town was supposed to be for the best and brightest. The educated workforce. Now look at us.” Warren lies on the couch, staring at the picture window as it drapes pink-and-blue garlands and ribbons on the skyline outside.

“Ugh,” Samanthor says. “I’m a low-level tech. It’s barely worth paying me to do my job, versus just building a robot. I don’t think I’m the best, or brightest.”

“Are you kidding?” Mason says. “You’re Samanthor the Mighty.”

“Don’t call me that anymore.” Samanthor sighs. “I think we’re telephone sanitizers.”

“What?” Jolene says.

“It’s from a book I read. They build a superadvanced spaceship and tell the passengers they’re going to a great new planet to build an awesome civilization. But they’re all telephone sanitizers and marketing people and hairdressers. The people everyone can do without. They crash or something.”

“Wait.” Mason runs his hands through his blue pompadour, which is still perfect even on top of his emaciated features. “Who said we could live without hairdressers?”

“Some British guy.”

“Did he cut his own hair?”

“You’re distracting me. I can barely think as it is. God, my stomach hurts again. Like I swallowed a huge piece of broken glass. What was I even saying?”

“But I mean,” says Warren. “There are a lot of creatives and stuff here in New Lincoln. I’m a info-flow designer. Sumana is writing software to help people check their Fling updates faster. And … oh God.” Warren tries to sit up and nearly falls off the couch. “Bloody hell. We’re telephone sanitizers.”

Jolene has been kind of zoning out during this discussion of hair and spaceships, because she’s as spacey as the rest of them. But now she speaks up. “I mean, this city really was supposed to be a beautiful new hope for the educated workers, those of us who can’t afford to live in any of the other cities anymore. You have all the beautiful augmented reality, the interactive everything. Right? And it’s so eco-friendly, it’s like a dream. The bioplastic cladding, all the greenery everywhere, even the inner walls that repair most kinds of damage and repel moisture, thanks to … ” Jolene stops, and stares at the nearest wall. “Oh.”

Nobody asks why Jolene stopped talking, or why she said “Oh,” because they’re all zonked out. Flood is in the fetal position. Warren is watching the window change displays. Samanthor is sucking on both of her own thumbs at once, which is a habit she’s developed that everybody else pretends not to hate. Mason is refreshing the truck screen again. Everyone’s startled when Jolene jumps to her feet.

And they’re even more surprised when she runs into the kitchen of their apartment and comes back with the biggest hammer. “I need to knock a hole in your wall,” Jolene tells them.

“Uh,” Mason says. “I mean, however you choose to cope with the feelings of frustration and disempowerment and gnawing hunger is OK with me, but maybe you could pick someone else’s wall—”

But Jolene has already swung the hammer and made a huge dent in the wall between the living area and Samanthor’s bedroom.

“Hey,” Samanthor says, standing up. “What are you—”

Jolene swings and whacks again, and then again, and some kind of outer coating flakes off, revealing the stuff inside the wall. The stuff that repairs itself and repels all moisture, because it’s actually a living organism. This was a big selling point when they moved in here.

“Hey,” Samanthor says again, “Don’t mess with our—” and then she stops—because Jolene is ripping some of the insulation out of the wall and shoving it in her own mouth.

Jolene chews, which takes a long time, because the insulation is really, really chewy.
Like chewing gum, mixed with shoe leather. But the taste is better than she’d expected, a bit like gravy, albeit with a weird aftertaste. She chews for a while, until she’s reduced it to something she can swallow.

Mason is saying the thing about people dealing with their feelings in various ways again, but Jolene shushes him.

“I should have figured it out before,” she says. “This town. Everything so cutting-edge and next-level. Everything organic, carbon-neutral and ‘grown rather than made.’ Including the insulation inside your walls, which is a kind of genetically engineered fungus. Surprisingly high protein, good source of iron. And the ‘self-healing’ part means it’ll keep growing back, over and over. I think I can come up with an enzyme that’ll make it easier to chew and digest, but it’s already perfectly edible.”

Mason, Warren, and Samanthor stare at Jolene, then each other. Then they wander over and begin pulling insulation out of their walls as well. Samanthor cautions them to take it slow, because she remembers how hard it was to keep food down when she ended her fast in college, so everybody just tries a mouthful. Mason has some ideas about how to prepare it, like insulation rigatoni, or fricasseed insulation, and meanwhile Warren, Flood, and Samanthor are already strategizing ways to get the word out to the entire city.

Barely an hour later, Jolene hears a chorus of hammers and drills all over town, as holes spring up in every structure. The Greatest City in the World begins to eat itself.

Can We Insulate Ourselves From Food Shortages?

A food systems and security researcher responds to Charlie Jane Anders’ short story “The Minnesota Diet.”

BY CHRISTOPHER WHARTON

JAN 17, 2018 9:01 AM

As the global population grows rapidly, feeding everyone will require significant technological advancements. This is especially true because much of humanity continues its march toward urbanization, and therefore away from the farms and food sources on which it depends. A U.N. prediction suggests Earth will be home to almost 10 billion  people by midcentury, and more and more of them will depend almost completely on highly efficient and hopefully sustainable food production from afar. So it will not just be the food itself that sustains them—it will require a supply chain that delivers, without fail, a daily variety of foods sufficient to meet the nutritional needs and cultural expectations of their diet.

Unfortunately, competition for land and water grows fiercer and more costly by the day, thanks in part to environmental pressures from climate change. All this probably means we need to become even more efficient with the land we’re already farming.
So the advancements required to grow upward of 50 percent more food than we do now will be many and varied—and will in many cases stir up controversy. Precision agriculture and better-designed, perhaps even automated farm machinery and delivery systems are exciting ideas to get behind. But genetic modification to adapt crops to changing climates or ever-larger, more industrialized production and distribution systems are perhaps less easy to swallow.

This future promises both agricultural risk and reward: Industrial efficiency can produce more food for more people so long as those people cede immediate or even proximal control over how and what foods are produced, how they are made available, and for whom. None of this is really novel, of course, because this also is the state of the global food system today.

This is why I was struck by “The Minnesota Diet.” The more standard sci-fi trope imagines a future plagued by food scarcity due to climate change–driven crop failures and other environmental disasters. Anders’ story is different; “The Minnesota Diet” portrays a future urbanized world that is, thanks to the technologies we see emerging even today, better insulated from the risks of agricultural disruption—better insulated, that is, right up until it isn’t. Assuming a more centralized, automated, and efficient agricultural system can produce enough food for a larger number of people in the future is not at all outlandish. But take that future food system—limited as it may be by a lack of local or regional farms as well as by competition from nonfood agricultural production—add in a technological failure or two, and you have New Lincoln: a high-tech metropolis with a hunger problem.

As a nutrition and food systems researcher, I spend a lot of time thinking about this type of situation. Maintaining a geographically diversified food system, one that includes local, regional, national, and international production and distribution, means that we as individuals and communities have the opportunity to enjoy a certain level of choice about our food. The majority of us can find a banana to eat almost any time of the year, though it might be shipped in from another continent. Or we can eat food that was grown or raised by farmers who might only be minutes or hours away.

But that diversity of production represents a potential trade-off. Local farms and local food programs have been shown time and again to contribute to the health of a community, to community connectedness, and to an improved understanding about food and where it comes from (which itself can play a role in adopting healthier diets). But small-scale and midsize farms can also be far less efficient, at least in terms of volume of production, and so reach far fewer people at a potentially higher financial cost.

The question of how we balance our farm and food system between large-scale and smaller-scale production is as yet unsettled. But Anders’ story gives us insight into a different way of considering the problem. It might not be only about how efficiently we can grow food or how mechanized and automated our delivery systems can be. She also invites us to think a bit deeper about the choices we make with the resources we have at our disposal today. What does it mean to commit agricultural land to nonfood applications, like the inedible “biosynthetic precursor” crops surrounding New Lincoln, given the global pressure to produce more food? Should we reconsider the convenience of abundant and varied food choice if that choice means a considerably more resource-intensive food system, one that has less of a chance to be sustained for future generations?

“The Minnesota Diet” also offers us the opportunity to backcast to present day. Seeing a realistic depiction of a future city so easily brought to its technologically advanced knees helps us think about the choices we make now. Resources are finite, and as such they are precious. But because food remains about as cheap as it’s ever been, it’s easy to forget its value. The result: Americans waste 133 billion pounds of food every year, representing 30–40 percent of the American food supply. And because we eat a diet far higher in animal food products than much of the rest of the world (although the world is working hard to catch up to us), ours is an extremely resource-intensive diet contributing to the rapid use of vital but limited resources, such as high-quality, mineable phosphorus.

Anders’ startlingly clever conclusion to “The Minnesota Diet” encapsulates all of these themes, literally within the walls of New Lincoln’s modern buildings. And as we watch New Lincoln’s denizens seek food in unlikely places, it gives us a chance to pause for a moment in our own insatiable consumption and consider: What do my food choices mean, not just for my health but for the world around me? And what might future generations be faced with should I make the unfortunate assumption that whatever problems our food systems will face, technology will provide all the answers?

Powerful solutions to problems of both health and sustainability exist already, right now, in our own behaviors. Those solutions are embedded in the food choices we make and, by extension, what sort of food system evolves to support those decisions. It turns out, for example, the majority of food waste in the U.S. is driven by us, the consumers. And because food rotting in landfills represents one of the largest sources of anthropogenic methane emissions, it really is the case that how we treat food as individuals could have dramatic impacts on health, food security, and environmental sustainability in aggregate. We can also change the makeup of what we eat: A more plant-based diet requires significantly less phosphorus to produce than an animal foods–heavy diet. It can also be far healthier and result in fewer greenhouse gas emissions. These are decisions we can make whether our government continues to suffer from its present-day gridlock (or worse, Anders’ future “DeathGrip”).

Technology is important and will play a greater role in dealing with the food-system constraints of the future. But in the end, it comes down to us. Our food choices today sow the seeds of hope for the future.

“Mother of Invention”

A new short story by the author of Marvel’s Black Panther: Long Live the King.

BY NNEDI OKORAFOR

FEB 21, 20189:00 AM

“Error, fear, and suffering are the mothers of invention.” - Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

It was a beautiful sunny day, and yet Anwuli knew the weather was coming for her.

She paused on the lush grass in front of the house, purposely stepping on one of the grass’ flowers. When she raised her foot, the sturdy thing sprung right back into place, letting out a puff of pollen like a small laugh. Anwuli gnashed her teeth, clutching the metal planks she carried and staring up the driveway.

Up the road, a man was huffing and puffing and sweating. He wore a clearly drenched jogging suit and white running shoes that probably wanted to melt in the Nigerian midday heat. Her neighbor, Festus Nnaemeka. The moment she and Festus made eye contact, he began walking faster.

Anwuli squeezed her face with irritation and loudly sucked her teeth, hoping he would hear. “Don’t need help from any of you two-faced people, anyway,” she muttered to herself, watching him go. “You keep walking and wheezing. Idiot.” She heaved the metal planks up a bit, carried them to the doorstep and dumped them there. “Obi 3, come and get all this,” she said. Breathing heavily, she wiped sweat from her brow, rubbing the Braxton Hicks pain in her lower belly. “Whoo!”

One of Obi 3’s sleek blue metal drones zipped in and used its extending arms to scoop up the planks. The blown air from its propellers felt good on Anwuli’s face, and she sighed.

“Thank you, Anwuli,” Obi 3 said through the drone’s speakers.

Anwuli nodded, watching the drone zoom off with the planks to the other side of Obi 3. Who knew what Obi 3 needed them for; it was always requesting something. Obi 3 was one of her now ex-fiancé’s personally designed shape-shifting smart homes. He’d built one for himself, one for his company, and this third one was also his, but Anwuli lived in it. And this house, which he’d named Obi 3 (not because of the classic Star Wars film but because obi meant “home” in Igbo, and it was the third one), was his smallest, most complex design.

Built atop drained swamplands, Obi 3 rested on three mechanized cushioning beams that could lift the house up high when it wanted a nice view of the city or keep it close to the ground. The house could also rotate to follow the sun and transform its shape from an equilateral triangle into a square and split into four separate modules based on a mathematical formula. And because it was a smart home, it was always repairing and sometimes building on itself.

Over the past five months, Obi 3 had requested nails, vents, sheet metal, planks of wood, piping. Once it even requested large steel ball bearings. Paid for using her ex’s credit card, most of the time she just had it delivered and dropped at the doorway, or she’d pick up the stuff and place it there, where she quickly forgot about it. By the time she came back outside, it was always gone, taken by the drones. None of this mattered to her, though, because she had real problems to worry about. Especially in the last eight months. Especially in the next hour.

“Shit,” she whimpered, holding her very pregnant belly as she looked at the clear blue sky, again. There had been no storms in the damned forecast for the next two weeks, and she thought she had finally been blessed with some luck after so long. However, apparently the weather forecast was wrong. Very, very wrong. She felt the air pressure dropping like a cold shiver running up her spine. Mere hours ago, Dr. Iwuchukwu had informed her that this sensitivity to air pressure was part of the allergy.

Several honeybees buzzed around one of the flowerbeds beside her. The lilies and chrysanthemums were far more delicate than the government-enforced supergrass, but at least they were of her choosing. Just as it was her choice to stay in her house. She listened harder, straining to hear over the remote sound of cars passing on the main road a half-mile away. “Dammit,” she whispered, when she heard the rumble of thunder in the distance. She turned and headed to the house.

The door opened, and she went inside and slammed it behind her before it could close itself. She stood there for a moment, her hands shaking, tears tumbling down her face. The house had drawn itself into its most compact and secure shape: a square, swinging the triangular sections of the kitchen and living room together. Outside, from down the road, the mosque announced the call to prayer.

“Fuck!” she screamed, smacking a fist to the wall. “Tufiakwa! No, no, no, this is not fair!” Then the Braxton Hicks in her belly clenched, and she gasped with pain. She went to her living room, threw her purse on the couch, and plopped down next to it, massaging her sides.

“Relax, oh, relax, Anwuli. Breathe,” Obi 3 crooned in its rich voice. “You are fine; your baby is fine; everything is fiiiiiine.”

Anwuli closed her eyes and listened to her house sing for a bit, and soon she calmed and felt better. “Music is all we’ve got,” she sang back to Obi 3. And the sound of her own voice pushed away the fact that she and her baby would probably be dead by morning, and it would be all her fault. Pushed it away some.

Music and Obi 3. Those were all she and her unborn baby had had for nine months. Since she’d learned she was pregnant and stupidly told her fiancé, who a minute later blurted to her that he was married with two children and couldn’t be a father to her child, too.

The city of New Delta was big, but her neighborhood had always been “small” in many ways. One of those ways was how people stamped the scarlet badge of “home-wrecking lady” on women who had children with married men. Her fake fiancé had deserted her, using the excuse of Anwuli playing the seductress he couldn’t resist. Then her friends stopped talking to her. Even her sister and cousins who lived mere miles away blocked her on all social networks. When she went to the local supermarket, not one person would meet her eye.

Only her smart home spoke (and sometimes sang) to her. And then there was the baby.
Boy, girl, she refused to find out. It was the only good thing she had to look forward to. But her baby was making her sick too, specifically allergic. Dr. Iwuchukwu had been telling her to leave New Delta for months, but Anwuli wasn’t about to leave her house. The house was her respect; what else could she claim she’d earned from the relationship? She knew it was irrational and maybe even deadly, but she took her chances. So far, so good. Until today’s diagnosis at her doctor’s appointment. And right there in that antiseptic place, whose smell made her queasy, she’d decided for good: She wasn’t going anywhere. Come what may. Now, as if the cruel gods were answering her, a storm was coming.

“Seriously,” she muttered, sinking down on the couch, letting its massagers knead the tight muscles of her neck. “I have such bad luck.”

“Bad luck is only a lack of information,” Obi 3 said. “Dr. Iwuchukwu has sent you a message saying to go over it again.”

“I understood it the first time,” she said. “I just don’t care. I’m not going anywhere. The idiot left me. He’s not getting his house back, too.”

Before Anwuli could launch into a full-blown rant, Obi 3 began playing the informative video the doctor suggested. She sighed with irritation as the image opened up before her. She didn’t care to know more than the bits her doctor had told her, but she was tired, so she watched anyway.

The man walked with a cane and wore an Igbo white-and-red chief’s cap like an elder from Anwuli’s village in Arochukwu. The projection made it look as if he walked in from the bedroom door, and Anwuli rolled her eyes. This entrance was supposed to be more “personable,” but she only found it obnoxious.

“Hello, Anwuli,” the man said, graciously. “So, you live in New Delta, Nigeria, the greenest place in the world. Fun fact: 100 years ago, this used to be swamplands and riverways, and the greatest export was oil. Violent clashes between oil corporations and a number of the Niger Delta’s minority ethnic groups who felt they were being exploited … ”

“Skip,” Anwuli said. The man froze for a moment and went from standing in the living room to standing in the middle of downtown New Delta. Anwuli was about to skip again, but instead she laughed and watched.

In the area between New Delta’s low skyscrapers, buildings and homes were carpeted with its world-famous stunning green grass, and the roads were fringed with it, but in this scene the grass was covered with smiley-faced bopping periwinkle flowers. It looked ridiculous, like one of those ancient animations from the early 1900s or a psychedelic drug–induced hallucination. The man grinned as he grandiosely swept his arms out to indicate all the lush greenery around him.

“Grass!” he announced. “Whether we know it or not, grass is important to most of us. Grass is a monumental food source worldwide. Corn, millet, oats, sugar—all of them come from grass plants. Even rice was a grass plant. We use grass plants to make bread, liquor, plastic, and so much more! Livestock animals feed mostly on grasses, too. Sometimes we use grass plants like bamboo for construction. Grass helps curb erosion.”

He walked closer and stood in the center of town square in the grassy roundabout, smart cars and electric scooters driving round him. At his back stood the statue of Nigeria’s president standing beside a giant peri flower. “The post-oil city New Delta is now the greenest place in the world, thanks to the innovative air-scrubbing superplant known as periwinkle grass, a GMO grass created in Chinese labs by Nigerian scientist Nneka Mgbaramuko.

“Carpeting New Delta, Periwinkle’s signature tough flowers are a thing of beauty and innovation. A genetic hybrid drawn from a variety of plants including sunflowers, zoysia grass, rice, and jasmine flowers, we can thank periwinkle grass for giving us the perfect replacement for rice just after its extinction. The grass produces periwinkle seed, more commonly just called ‘peri,’ is delicious, easy to cook, quick to grow. And it can grow only here in New Delta, because of the special mineral makeup from its past as a swamp. What a resource!” He held up a hand, and the point of view zoomed in to the soft light-purple–blue flower in it. The man looked down at Anwuli as he grinned somewhat insanely. “One week a year, the harvester trucks come out to—”

“Ugh, skip,” she said, waving a hand. “Just go to ‘New Delta Allergies.’ ”

The man froze and then reappeared in what looked like someone’s nasal cavity, the world around him red and smooth.

“Allergies,” he said, looking right at Anwuli with a smirk. He winked mischievously. “Humans have had them since humans were humans, and maybe before that. One of the earliest recorded incidents was sometime between 3640 and 3300 BC when King Menses of Egypt died from a wasp sting.

“In New Delta, pollen allergies are commonplace. Milder symptoms include skin rash, hives, runny nose, itchy eyes, nausea, and stomach cramps. Severe symptoms are more extreme. Swelling caused by the allergic reaction can spread to the throat and lungs, causing allergenic asthma or a serious condition known as anaphylaxis.

“New Delta is a wonderful place of spotless greenery where one can walk about with no shoes on the soft grass, breathe air so clear it smells perfumed, and drive down Nigeria’s cleanest streets.”

At this Anwuli laughed.

“But in the last five years, due to an unexpected shift in the climate, pollination season has become quite an event. This means more copious harvests of peri. But because peri grass is a wind pollinator, it also means what scientists have called ‘pollen tsunamis.’ ” The weather around the man grew dark as storm clouds moved in and the room vibrated with the sound of thunder. Anwuli glanced toward the side of the room that was all window. Outside was still sunny, but it wouldn’t be for long.

“Skip to Izeuzere,” she said.

The man froze and then was sitting behind a doctor’s desk, wearing a lab coat. He still wore his Igbo chief cap. “…a few New Delta citizens were diagnosed with an allergy called Izeuzere. The name, which means ‘sneeze’ in Igbo, was given to the condition by a non-English-speaking Igbo virologist who liked to keep things simple. If someone with Izeuzere is caught in a pollen tsunami, there will first be severe runny eyes, sneezing fits, and then an escalation to convulsions, ‘rapid rash,’ and then suffocation. Most who have it experience a preliminary sneezing fit and then the full spectrum of symptoms the moment a pollen tsunami saturates the area. Deadly exposure to the pollen when a tsunami hits takes minutes, even when indoors, and is instant when outside. Treatment is to leave New Delta and go to an arid environment before the next pollen tsunami. Once there, one must be given a battery of anti-allergen injections for five months.”

“What if I lose everything if I leave?” Anwuli asked the virtual man. “What if moving out of this house allows the father of my child to get rid of me without lifting a damn finger? Do you have answers for that in your database?” The man’s eyebrows went up, but before the man could respond, she screamed, “Shut up!” She punched the couch cushion. “Off! Turn off!” The image disappeared, replaced by her favorite soothing scene of an American cottage covered in snow. The sound of the wind was muffled by the blanket of snow, and smoke was rising from the cottage’s chimney. She knew what would happen if she couldn’t leave the area. “Dammit,” she hissed. “I refuse! I refuse!”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to buy a ticket for you to Abuja?” Obi 3 asked. “There is a flight leaving in two hours. Your auntie will—”

“No!” Anwuli sat back and shut her eyes, feeling her frustrated tears roll down both sides of her face. “I’m not leaving. I don’t care.” She paused. “They probably all hope I’ll die. Like I deserve it.”

“What kind of dessert would you like? There is caramel crème and honeyed peri bread.”

“Deserve,” Anwuli snapped. “I said deserve, not dessert!”

“You deserve happiness, Anwuli.”

Anwuli closed her eyes and sighed, muttering, “Left me alone here for nine months; their message is clear. Well, so is mine. I’m not going. This is his baby. He can’t deny that forever.” She paused. “Now this stupid storm rolls in out of nowhere when I could have this child at any moment. This is God’s work. Maybe he wants all my trouble over with fast.”

“Would you like some jollof peri and stew?” Obi 3 asked as Anwuli slowly got up. “You haven’t eaten since before you went to your appointment.”

“Why would I want to eat when I am about to die alone?” she shouted.

She got up. She stared around Obi 3. Not spotless, because Anwuli didn’t like spotless, but tidy. Her space since he had left her to fully return to his marital home. One of Obi 3’s interior drones zipped into the bedroom with a set of freshly washed and folded clothes.

“What do I do?” Anwuli whispered. And, as if to answer, the sound of thunder rumbled from outside, this time louder. “I don’t want to die.”

She’d always had allergies. Her father had even playfully nicknamed her ogbanje when she was little because she was always the one sniffling, sneezy, and sent to bed any time the peri flowers bloomed. Goodness knew that when her allergies flared, she did feel like a spirit who’d prefer to die and return to her spirit friends than keep living with the discomfort. But never did she imagine she’d eventually come down with the rare illness everyone had been talking about. And her doctor, also a local to her community, had been so cold about it.

“I don’t know why you haven’t left yet, but don’t worry. You’ll give birth any day now,” he’d said at her earlier appointment, clearly avoiding her eyes by looking at his tablet. “Then you take your baby, fly to Abuja immediately and get treatment there. No storms are due in the next week, so you will be fine.”

Anwuli had nodded agreement. What she didn’t say in that room was that she had no intention of leaving. Obi 3 was her home as long as she lived in it. Bayo was an asshole, but he could never throw her out of the house, no matter how much he wanted the situation to go away. She was sure he still loved her, and above everything, this was his baby. However, his wife certainly would love for her and his “bastard” baby to simply leave the area. But none of it mattered now because here was the thunder.

Anwuli went to her room and curled up in her bed and for several minutes, minutes she knew would be her last, she cried and cried. For herself, for her situation, her choice, for everything. When she couldn’t cry anymore, the thunder was closer. She got up. Her belly felt hard as a rock, and the pain drove even her fear of death away. At the same time, Obi 3 brightened the lights, which seemed to amplify the pain.

“Blood of Jesus!” she screamed, crumbling to the floor in front of the couch.

She was 29 years old and she’d watched all her friends settle into marriage and have child after child, yet this was her first. And there had been so much chaos around the fact of her pregnancy that although she went to regular checkups, she hadn’t really thought much about the birth or what she’d do afterward. Shame, desperation, embarrassment, and abandonment burned hotter and shined brighter than her future. So Anwuli wasn’t ready.

Now her pain had begun to speak, and it told vibrant stories of flesh-consuming fire that burned the body to hard, hot stone. It was as if her midsection was trying to squeeze itself bloody. She rolled on the floor, more tears tumbling from her eyes. And then…it passed. Her belly melted from hot stone back to flesh, her mind cleared, and a light patter of rain began tapping at the windows.

“Better?” Obi 3 asked.

“Yes,” Anwuli said, grasping the side of the couch to pull herself up. Beside her hovered one of Obi 3’s drones. “I’m OK. I can do it myself.”

“That was a contraction,” Obi 3 said. “The variations in electromagnetic noise my sensory lights are picking up tell me that you’ll be entering labor soon.”

Anwuli groaned, glancing at the window. Of course, she thought.

“Not yet but very soon,” Obi 3 said. It beeped softly, and the lights flashed a gentle pink orange. “You have a phone call. Bayo.”

Anwuli frowned. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. “OK, answer.”

There was another beep, and Bayo’s face appeared before her. He looked sweaty, and his shaven brown head shined in the light of the room he was in. He squinted. “Anwuli, turn your visuals on,” he said.

“No,” she snapped, propping herself against the couch. “What do you want?”

He sighed. “Your doctor just called me.”

“What did he say?” she asked, gnashing her teeth.

“That you’re sick. That you have … Izeuzere. How can this be? Is it the pregnancy?”

“Is it legal for him to discuss confidential patient information with strangers?” she snapped. “Doubtful.”

“I’m not a stranger.”

“The last time you spoke to me was nine months ago.”

His shifty eyes shifted. There was a shadow beside him; someone else was there. Probably his wife. Anwuli felt a wave of wooziness pass over her. “I…I think I’m in labor,” she said.

He looked surprised but then shocked her by saying nothing.

“No ambulance will drive through this storm,” she said. “Can you…?”

His wife’s face suddenly filled the virtual screen. “No, he will not,” she said. “He has a family and cannot afford to go driving into pollen storms. Clean up your own mess. And get out of our house!” Bayo’s wife continued to block Bayo’s face, and if Bayo said anything, Anwuli could not hear him.

“Whose house?” Anwuli shouted at her. “Did you design it? Build it? Pay for it? Does this house even know your name?”

“Go and die!” his wife roared. The image disappeared.

Anwuli flared her nostrils, but no effort could stop the tears and hurt from washing over her like its own contraction. She hadn’t known a thing about that woman. Bayo had. Yet who did his family and the rest of the community embrace? Who still had his own body to himself? Well, Anwuli thought, maybe I did know about her. Maybe. Let me not lie when I am so close to my death. I knew. I just chose not to see.

“Call parents,” she breathed.

Their phone rang and rang. No response. Not surprising. They’d stopped picking up her calls months ago. She sent a text explaining it all, then went to the kitchen.

The strain of throwing up and having a contraction nearly caused her to pass out. One of Obi 3’s drones pushed itself beside her to keep her from tumbling to the floor.

“The variations in electromagnetic noise my sensory lights pick up alert me that—”

“Shut up!” Anwuli screamed.

“—you are now in labor,” Obi 3 finished.

Boom! the thunder outside responded. Sheets of rain began to pelt Obi 3. The lights flickered, and then Anwuli heard her backup solar generator kick in.

“What do I do?” she grunted, using a napkin to wipe her mouth. “What am I going to do?”

“Shuffling songs by MC Do Dat,” Obi 3 cheerily said. Bass-heavy rap music shook the entire house, making Anwuli even more nauseous.

“Ladies do dat,

Bitches do dat!

Get down low and,

Do dat, do dat!” MC Do Dat rapped over the beats in his low raspy voice.

“Music off!” she screamed, tears squeezing from her eyes. She clenched her fists with rage. “No music! Ooh, I hate this song!”

The music stopped in time for the sound of thunder to shake the house. Anwuli slowly dragged herself up as the contraction subsided.

“I’ll help you to the couch,” Obi 3 said.

She nodded and leaned against the drone that floated to her side. As she did, reality descended on Anwuli. Obi 3 was only an extension of herself. She was only talking to herself, being helped by herself. She was alone. “The storm…pollen…I don’t want to…” As she stumbled to the couch, the drone holding her under her armpit, she started to cry again. She cried more as she fell onto the couch and rolled onto her back, her clothes now drenched in sweat. She cried as she stared at the spotless sky-blue ceiling, which she had used Obi 3’s drones to paint when Bayo left her. She cried as lightning flashed and the thunder roared outside, the unpredicted storm’s winds blowing.

She’d been crying for nine months, and she cried for yet another 10 minutes, and then another contraction hit, and she forgot everything. As the minutes passed, and the contractions came faster and faster, she didn’t remember where the pillow came from that propped her up or how her legs held themselves apart. What she did recall was the window across from her shattering as a palm tree fell through it. She remembered the wind and rain blowing into Obi 3, filling it with the heat and humidity from outside. Tree leaves, new and dry, slapped against the couch, onto the floor, but no peri flowers were blown in. Those were strong like men; they didn’t even lose petals in the worst wind. Built to survive and reproduce, not to keep from killing us, she vaguely thought. She couldn’t help but note the irony: Plant fertilizer was going to kill her as she was giving birth.

Her face grew damp with sweat and rain. As she gave the great push that thrust her first child into the world, the storm outside exhausted itself to a hard rain. The coming of her child felt like her body submitting after a battle. The sharp pain peaked and then retreated. And that is how the first to carry her squirming daughter was not a human being but a drone, using a plastic scooper as its long sharp knife cut the cord. When the drone placed the child in Anwuli’s hands, she looked down at her daughter’s squashed, agitated face. For several moments, she stared, unmoving.

“Don’t you want to cry?” she asked the snuffling infant.

“Mmmyah,” the baby said, turning her head this way and that. Anwuli found herself smiling. She poked her daughter’s little cheek. The moment she felt the baby’s softness, Anwuli began to weep. She touched the baby again, running a finger delicately across the baby’s cheek to touch her lips. Immediately, her child began to suck on her finger.

“She’s breathing strongly already,” Obi 3 said. “Maybe she does not need to cry.”

“Mmiri,” Anwuli said, holding the child to her. “I’ll name you Mmiri. What do you think, Obi 3?”

“Mmiri means ‘water’ in the Igbo language,” Obi 3 said.

Anwuli laughed. “OK. But do you approve?”

“You do not need my approval to name your child.”

“But I would like it, if you think to give it.”

There was a pause. Then Obi 3 said, “How about giving her the middle name Storm? Storm was the American Kenyan superheroine from Marvel comics. She could control the weather and fly.”

Anwuli’s eyebrows rose. “Hmm, wow,” she said. “Mmriri Storm Okwuokenye‎, then. I approve.” The house glowed a soft lavender color that turned the ceiling a deeper sky blue as Anwuli stared up at it. “Mmiri Storm Okwuokenye‎,” Anwuli breathed again, looking at her new daughter, who smelled like the earth. Bloody, coppery, yeasty. Hers. She held on to this beautiful thought and the sound of her daughter snuffling as the pains of expelling the afterbirth came. When this was over, she slumped on the couch, watching the drone take away the bloody mass.

She already felt much better. Then she sneezed, and her eyes grew itchy. “No,” she whispered. Baby Mmiri decided it was time to start wailing. The rain had stopped, and the sun was already peeking through the retreating clouds. She sneezed again, and the house drone flew to her, a clean orange towel now draped over its scooper. Anwuli put her daughter into it and was wracked by a sneeze again. She sat up, surprised by how OK she felt. The second drone flew up beside her carrying a glass of water and her bottle of antihistamine tablets. “Hurry, take three,” Obi 3 said. “Maybe—”

“There is nothing to be helped now,” Anwuli blurted, looking at the shattered window. Already, what looked like smoke was wafting into the house. Soon visibility outside would be zero, and it would last for the next 24 hours. “I’m a dead woman.”

No one had predicted weather patterns shifting. This is why scientists were calling the occasional spontaneous variation in weather patterns “climate chaos” instead of “climate change.” That’s what they’d recently been saying on the news, anyway. The pollinating grass was genetically staggered to release pollen at three separate times during the year, with one-third of the grass pollinating in each period. However, over the last 20 years, an unexpected shift in the length of the dry, cool Harmattan season had scrambled that timing, causing the pollination periods of all three groups to align.

The immense wealth made from peri production went directly to the Nigerian government and to the Chinese corporations who’d invested so deeply in Nigeria for decades, and next to nothing went to New Delta, much in the same way it had when the greatest resource had been oil. For this reason, the initially lovely city that was New Delta began to deteriorate, and the Chinese and Nigerian governments paid less attention to the pollination misalignment. News of pollen allergies had become nationally known only when Izeuzere set in during the last two years. But only because the way it killed was so spectacular. And this year, rainy season had been particularly wet.

“I’m dead,” Anwuli muttered, using all the effort she could muster to get up. She threw her legs off the couch, planting them on the floor. Ignoring the blood soaking her bottom through the drenched towels, she pressed her fists to the cushions on both sides of her. Then she lifted herself up. The pain was far less than she expected, and she froze for a moment, glad to be on her feet.

“Standing,” she whispered, her nose now completely stuffed and her eyes still watering. She sniffed wetly. Her insides felt as if they would plop out between her legs onto the blood-spattered carpet. But they didn’t. She touched her deflated belly. Then she sneezed so hard that she sat back down. In the kitchen, her baby was crying as the drone put her in a tub of water to wash her off. Anwuli pushed herself up again and took a step toward the kitchen. But as she took another, her chest grew stiff. She wheezed.

She couldn’t tell if the room was blurry because it was full of pollen or because of her watering eyes or the fact that she could barely take in enough oxygen. And then she was falling. As she lay on the floor, she heard Obi 3 talking to her, but she didn’t understand. Her baby was crying, and if she could smile, she would have, because her baby was not sneezing. Then she closed her eyes, and it was as if the world around her was breaking.

The floor shook, and Anwuli heard the walls cracking, shifting, crumbling. Her nose was too stuffed for her to smell anything, but she could feel pollen coating her tongue and blood seeping from between her legs. Things went black for a while. Mmiri’s cries faded away and stopped. The noise of things breaking became a low hum. The shaking stopped. Anwuli must have slept.

She sneezed hard and wheezed, cracking her gummy eyes open. Everything was a blur until she blinked. She gasped. Then she realized that she could gasp. And the room was suddenly warm, like outside. She blinked several more times, wiped her eyes, and then just stared at where the broken window had been. Her daughter began weakly crying. The makeshift cradle the drone had began to gently rock, and Mmiri quieted a little.

Still staring but slowly sitting up, Anwuli said, “Bring her here.” She took the baby into her arms as she stared at what looked like a smooth, shiny metal wall. So shiny that she could see the entire living room reflected in it. She remembered these metal sheets; Obi 3 had asked her to order them weeks ago. Something clanged, and the wooden wall beside the metal wall buckled in a bit. She turned and looked down the hall toward the front door, and there she saw another metal wall blocking the view of outside.

“What’s…did you do something?” she asked. In her arms, baby Mmiri squirmed and nestled closer to her.

“I did,” Obi 3 said. “Do you like it?”

Air was blowing near the ceiling, the Nigerian flag hanging from a bookshelf flapping, and for the first time, Anwuli noticed something. The vent grate was gone, and the air duct inside was a shiny aluminum, not the dull steel. She pointed, “What is that?”

“I built a duct to filter pollen from the air.”

Anwuli glanced at the air duct again. And then she looked around the room. Then she looked back at the air duct. She sneezed, but doing so cleared the snot from her nose. She wiped her face with her sleeve and sat on the towel of blood, the coppery, yeasty smell of birth floating around her.

For months, Obi 3 had requested things. Had it been since before Bayo left? Anwuli couldn’t remember. She hadn’t been paying attention. The last nine months had been crying, shouting, back-turning, embarrassing. Swollen ankles. The day she was in the supermarket and all those women had pointed at her belly and laughed. Swelling body. Her parents ignoring her in church. Wild cravings. Running to her self-driven car after turning a corner and walking right into Bayo’s wife. The heightened pollen allergies. And she couldn’t stop crying. And all that time, her house had been asking her to buy things.

It would put the items on her phone’s grocery list. Nails, sheets of metal, piping, plaster, tool parts and, yes, two air ducts. She’d hear banging on the sides of Obi 3, sawing, creaking, but who could care about repairs Obi 3 made to itself when her life had fallen into disrepair? Who could care about anything else?

“What have you done?”

After a long pause, Obi 3 said, “Please, can you walk?”

“Obi 3.”

“Yes?”

“What have you done?” she demanded.

“Go to your room … please,” Obi 3 said. “I will tell you, but please take baby Mmiri Storm to your bed. The pollen outside just increased. I can’t … it’s time for phase 2, or you will die.”

Anwuli got up. This time, doing so was more painful. She bent forward. “Take her,” she gasped. “I can’t.”

The drone swept up, and as gently as she could, shaking with pain that broiled from her uterus and radiated to every part of her body, she took a step. She felt blood trickling down her leg. “I…should…wash. Can—”

“Yes, but use the towel beside the bed to wipe it, for now, and just get into bed.”

“Why?” Anwuli asked, stumbling to the back of the couch and then into the hallway to her room. She leaned against the wall as she stiffly walked.

“There’s no time,” Obi 3 said.

She took more steps. “Talk to me,” she said. “It’ll help distract…yeeee, oh my God, this hurts. Feels like my intestines are being pulled down by gravity.” She stopped, leaning against the wall, panting. “Talk to me, Obi 3. Tell me a recipe, recite some poetry, something.”

“You are 0.8 kilometers from the center of New Delta.”

“T-t-tell me what you did to yourself … and why?” She shut her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Just pushed out baby, she told herself. Pain is just from that. I’m OK. I’m OK.

“I’ve listened to you,” Obi 3 said. “One day, you said you wished someone would protect you like you protected the baby.” Anwuli remembered that night. She’d been unable to sleep and thus had stayed up all night, thinking and thinking about all the weeks of being alone. Scared. She hadn’t been talking to Obi 3. Nor the baby. She’d just talked to herself, to hear her own voice. Maybe she’d been praying.

“You were speaking and asking,” Obi 3 continued. “I did my own research and then engineered my plans,” it said. “I had answers. Every smart home watches the news, its central person, and its environment. Nearly one-third of all pregnant women will develop an allergy they have not previously suffered from, and the allergies they already have tend to get worse. You have always had bad allergies; you told me how they used to call you ogbanje. Also, remember the day your stupid, useless man left? You turned off my filter because he liked to have it on.”

At this, Anwuli snorted a laugh, and she felt blood gush from her privates and a pang of pain strong enough to make her stumble. She’d been brash. No one turned off a home’s filter. Not after all the incidents of smart homes being too nosy and intrusive.

“Ah, so you predicted I’d get Izeuzere?”

“Yes,” Obi 3 said. “I used formal logic.”

“Then you decided to find a way to protect me.”

“Yes. I invented a way, then I built my invention.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Anwuli said, with a weak smile. “Wow. Technology harbors a personal god; my Chi is a smart home.” She laughed, and her body ached, but a good ache.

“I have decided to call it a ‘protective egg,’ ” Obi 3 said. “Is this all right?”

Anwuli frowned for a moment. Then she shrugged. “It’s kept me and baby alive.”

“Watching you inspired me. Your body protects your baby. Steel plated, impervious exterior, an air filter … ” It paused, and Anwuli frowned.

“Tell me all of it,” she demanded, entering her room. “Oh!” she said. Here, the window wall in front of her bed had mostly been fortified with metal except for about three by three feet of it. And outside, a blizzard of bright-orange fluff thick enough to mute the midday Nigerian sunshine. Never ever ever had the pollen been so thick. Towels had been placed on the bed and beside it. Anwuli grabbed one, wiped her legs, and then pressed it to herself. “No use hiding it from me now,” she said. “We’re in this together, no? We have been for months. Is this why you haven’t tried so hard to get me to leave?”

“Yes.”

Anwuli chuckled tiredly. “Interesting. So interesting.”

As Anwuli laid herself on the bed, Obi 3 told her all about what it called “Project Protective Egg.” And then, as she clutched Mmiri in her arms, watching her death swirl about outside, the entire house began to rise up. Obi 3 had rebuilt its own steel cushioning beams, used to support it above the delta swamp floor, into three powerful legs.

“I can take us beyond the tsunami before the filters are overwhelmed,” Obi 3 said.
“If we can make it that far, there is no peri grass in Abuja.”

As it walked, the room gently rocking, Obi 3 hummed the song Anwuli’s mother always hummed when she cooked. Anwuli rested on the pillow the drone had pushed beneath her head, held Mmiri closer to her, and hugged herself. Yes, Obi 3 was like an extension of herself. Like part of my immune system who has just saved my life, she thought, staring at the window. Or my Chi. Anwuli hoped Obi 3 crushed the hell out of as much peri grass as it could on the way out of town, and maybe the house of her ex-fiancé…if they weren’t home.

Baby Mmiri Storm cooed in her arms.

Two miles away, Bayo sat in his study frowning as he looked out at the whirling pollen through the room’s triangular corner window. He was still thinking about Anwuli. Praying she was not dead. If she had finally decided to leave the house, she was out there in that pollen storm right now. He shook his head, frowning. “Please, let this woman be alive,” he muttered. “Please, oh, Biko-nu, Holy Ghostfire, laminate her life for protection, in the name of Jesus.”

His wife was in the kitchen making peri cakes and fried fish, but he didn’t dare look at his mobile phone, let alone make a call on it. The house was listening, almost every aspect of its mechanisms tuned to his wife’s preferences because it was she who spent the most time here. Maybe I should have stayed home more, he thought. At the same time, he wished today weren’t his day off. Even with the noise of his sons and daughter playing in the living room, he knew he couldn’t call Anwuli. And if he got up to leave when the pollen passed, there would be trouble.

Suddenly, the entire house rumbled. Then it began to shake, and the children screamed. As Bayo jumped up, he could feel it. The house was rising. And that’s when it all dawned on him, a horrid sense of doom settling on his shoulders: His wife…not only had she known of Anwuli all along, but so had their house, Obi 1. And neither his wife nor her house was the type to easily let things go. “Shit,” he said. “Why did I make these goddamn smart homes so smart?” He heavily sat down on the couch and held on for dear life.

The Smart Home Dilemma

A journalist who specializes in the Internet of Things responds to Nnedi Okorafor’s short story, “Mother of Invention.”

BY STACEY HIGGINBOTHAM

FEB 21, 2018 9:01 AM

What we call a smart home today isn’t smart. It’s a cluster of gadgets that the user actively programs to respond to basic triggers. The dream smart home is closer to what Obi 3 offers in “Mother of Invention”—what Nest’s creator Tony Fadell called the “intuitive smart home,” one that anticipates the user’s needs and delivers unasked. But the story shows how such a dream can go well and how it could go horribly wrong.

Capabilities like those of Obi 3 may not be here yet, though you can see them coming. However, if we really want to make a home smart we’re going to have to go deeper than a few connected light switches. We have to consider what tools—such as drones, robots, 3-D printers—we need to give a house so it can adequately sustain and protect its inhabitants. There will also have to be an ecosystem of suppliers that can communicate with your home—a way for your digital assistant to order toilet paper when you start to run low, for instance.

In “Mother of Invention,” Anwuli has to order things on behalf of the house and deliver them to the doorstep. This implies the home’s sphere of influence ends at the front door. But there’s infrastructure in place to allow a home to wander at will around the country and set itself up somewhere else. That has to be hell on property tax assessors. Not to mention the reaction of local homeowners associations if your house can build on itself at will to meet the demands of the occupant. Smart homes may not wander the world anytime soon, but there’s already plenty of controversy about how far a smart home can extend. For example, outdoor security cameras are fine for the most part, but if they look into a person’s window, or into a home’s “private area,” in some states it could violate various laws.

Giving the home the tools to act on our behalf is only half of the equation, but it seems well on its way to being solved. For example, at the University of Illinois, researchers are looking at handling drone swarms around people in a manner that isn’t intrusive or frightening as a way to help the elderly age in place. The drones could assist in getting medicines or even help arthritic hands by holding or opening things. At Columbia University, researchers are combining lasers and 3-D printers to cook extruded food that could be purchased in packets. Allowing 3-D printers to cook mixtures of food paves the way to robot-planned and -executed meals. The only human intervention would be the insertions of the various packets in the printer and the eventual eating. So the smart home of the future may have “hands” in the form of drones and could even cook our food. It can even tuck in our children. Every now and again, I hear my daughter sleepily murmur “Goodnight, Alexa” as she falls asleep.

The tools are almost the easy part. The intuition is hard—and fraught. To give the home the ability to draw conclusions about our needs means we need to think about privacy and sharing information with a home—or the company behind it. In Anwuli’s case, she has turned off the filter in her home as a form of defiance against her former fiancé, allowing the home to diagnose her with allergies and formulate an appropriate protective response without ever telling her.

Allowing a home to take in more data gives it the context needed to become more intelligent, but are we sure we want that? Aside from the privacy implications, we don’t have the legal infrastructure yet to protect our homes from incriminating us. Today a husband can keep his wife’s secrets in court thanks to marital privilege, but our homes offer us no such immunity. Imagine if your home intuited your allergies only to call up your insurance provider. Or that you were pregnant and called your boss or marketers to let them know. These aren’t far-fetched use cases, given the power of connected devices today.

Absent rules and expectations around what happens to a smart home’s data, it’s hard to trust the companies sucking up gobs of information about us. Instead of an intuitive home, we get the dystopia that Gizmodo writer Kashmir Hill discovered after turning her own home smart. At the end of her experiment, she wrote: “Talking to the human who actually got to see and analyze my smart home’s activity made me realize just how deeply uncomfortable it is to have that data pooled somewhere.”

Let’s say we successfully tackle the challenge of providing context while respecting user privacy, and give a house the mechanical tools needed to provide for the humans living in the home. There will still be a question of how well technology can manage the needs of the many individuals living in a home.

In my home today, my 11-year-old daughter was almost invisible. At first it was because she didn’t have a smartphone, and thus the ability to control devices from an app, or the ability to trigger a nearby lock with the Bluetooth radio in a phone. But once we got an Amazon Echo in 2014, she suddenly had agency to control the music and devices around her. Voice assistants democratized access to the smart home for anyone in the house, which includes allowing any visitor the ability to change your thermostat or order products if the proper safeguards aren’t set. But personalization derived from context can’t happen for children, because federal law says that until then, companies can’t track them or use their data.

And then there is the challenge of navigating competing needs by different household members. A perfect example of this is the temperature wars that occur in my house after dark, when I turn the thermostat to 65 and my daughter comes in later to move it up to 70. Later I wake up hot and restart the cycle. No amount of intelligence is going to let my Nest serve two masters who want different things. In fairness to technology, people can’t do this, either.

Where it gets interesting is how a home might adapt its needs automatically. Should my home honor my preferences above others because I spend the most time in it? Should it honor my husband’s because he pays the bills, or perhaps my daughter’s because my overarching goal as a parent is to protect her and make my life comfortable? Outside of the family, should my home take into consideration the needs of the local community or energy provider? What about my parents who are aging in place and need a little extra monitoring? What kind of say do they get?

Right now, the owner of the app connected to a device gets all the admin privileges (although no real control over how the data is used and by whom). In the home, will this repeat itself?

In “Mother of Invention,” Nnedi Okorafor offers an even more sinister turn on this inability to serve multiple masters by implying that the home will prioritize the preferences of whoever is in the house the most. This is how machines are trained today, so it makes sense. But in my smart home future, I’m curious what happens if my Obi 3 adapts itself to my life only to revert abruptly to the bank’s point of view if I can’t pay my mortgage one month.

Maybe we don’t want to embrace the smart home without discussing these issues.

“Domestic Violence”

A new short story from science-fiction writer and futurist Madeline Ashby.

BY MADELINE ASHBY

MARCH 26, 2018 11:29 AM

Illustrations Lisa Larson-Walker

“I’m sorry; I had some trouble getting out of the house,” Janae said to Kristen.

Janae’s frustration was obvious. It manifested as raw cuticles that she couldn’t help picking as their meeting continued.

Kristin frowned. “Couldn’t find your ob?”

“No, I mean I couldn’t get out of the house,” Janae said. “The house—well, I mean, the condo—wouldn’t let me out. The door wouldn’t open.”

“Literally?”

“Literally. I thought it was stuck, like jammed or something, but it just wouldn’t open.”

Kristen examined Janae. They were here to talk about Janae’s recent tardiness, her distractedness, the fact that she hadn’t delivered on her deliverables, hadn’t actioned her action items. As Wuv’s chief of staff, it was Kristen’s job to learn what workplace issues existed and deal with them. At least, that’s how she had explained the meeting to the company’s co-founder. Privately, she had her own suspicions about what was really happening.

“Maybe she’s knocked up,” was Sumter’s contribution to the conversation.

“If she were, it wouldn’t be our business,” Kristen had reminded him. “Legally speaking.”

Sumter heaved a very put-upon sigh. “Well, yeah. But you’re a girl, you can get it out of her.”

Kristen had blinked, but otherwise allowed no other reaction to surface on her features or in her affect. “You want me to get her an abortion?”

“Jesus Christ, Kiki, no. Just find out what the fuck is going on, and then fix it.” And with that he dismissed her from his office.

Now she and Janae sat together in her own office, the question between them—or what passed for an office, in Wuv’s spacious loft. A delineation of clear sheets of acrylic and projected light and ambient sound. Today the lights projected a quiet jungle clearing. Softly rustling palm fronds, carefully calibrated to be seizure-proof. It felt intimate. It felt hidden. It felt secure. Kristen believed it was important for the employees at Wuv to feel safe in the cocoon that was her space. It helped them open up.

“You couldn’t leave the condo,” Kristen said. It helped to repeat things, sometimes. She’d learned that particular tactic from a succession of psychiatrists. Each of them had their tics and tells, but this was a common technique. When Janae said nothing, Kirsten acted more interested in the specifics: “What finally made the door open?”

“I had to do the chicken dance. It started playing the song and then I started dancing, and then the door opened. I think maybe some kid in the building hacked the door.”

“Has that happened before?”

Janae frowned delicately. She was a delicate woman. Coltish. That used to be the word. All knees and elbows and knuckles. Once upon a time, she did doll-hairstyling videos online, her careful hands combing tiny brushes through pink and purple hair. They were classics in their genre; she was so well-recognized that children and their parents followed her sponsored updates to local toy stores and asked for photos and autographs and hugs. She’d had surgery since then. Few vestiges of her childhood face remained. Even neural networks couldn’t match her old face to her current one. Her plastic surgeon, she claimed, had won some sort of award for his work restructuring her skull.

“It’s something Craig used to do,” Janae said, “when we were first dating. He would make up a riddle, and I’d have to solve it before the door to his place would open to let me out. It’s the kind of trick people use to grant access to the home, but he reconfigured it. It’s really easy; there were tutorials for it. He told the story at our wedding.”

“I see,” Kristen said.

Kristen let Janae off with a warning. She preferred a gentle approach, at first. It was part of why Sumter hired her—she could make his employees feel only the velvet glove without any hint of the iron fist beneath. Kristen pretended that the whole meeting was just a kindly check-in, that Janae wasn’t at all in trouble, that no one else had noticed anything. It built the narrative of Kristen as a thoughtful chief of staff. If she was correct about the particular scenario Janae had landed herself in, it would behoove the entire company if Kristen were understanding and supportive. It wouldn’t do for them to be anything else. Not if they wanted to survive a civil suit.

Finally, it was time for her to go home. It was well past time by the third tank of pink smoke that Sumter insisted on buying her. It tasted of rosewater and almonds, and melted into icy mist on the tongue. He wiped down the mask himself, before offering it to her, so that the first thing she smelled was his custom strain of sanitizer. They were supposed to be going over the projects she would manage in his absence. They weren’t. They were talking about him. And Janae.

“Did she tell you anything?” Sumter asked.

Kristen shrugged. “She told me enough. I’m handling it.”

“Whatever that means,” he said, adjusting the flavors on his own tank. “I wish you were coming to Dallas.”

“It’s too hot for me. And they don’t like it when men and women travel together.”

“That’s Kansas,” he said.

“And Ohio. I think.”

“I’m not going through U.S. Customs with you again, is my point.”

Sumter took a brief inhale from his tank and grimaced. He’d gotten rosemary-sumac-spruce. It was a little strong. Too strong for him, anyway.

“We could get married,” Sumter said. “You know. For travel purposes.”

Kristen inhaled. She held the cold mist in her lungs for as long as possible. She imagined the cold permeating her entire being. She pictured her blood slowing, her organs frosting over in delicate flowers. Sumter had been making more of these attempts, lately. That’s what they were, little conversational pen-tests. They felt like nerdy in-jokes about some obscure series that she hadn’t seen yet.

“But then we would have to get divorced,” Kristen said. “And if you think I’m a bitch now … ”

Sumter grinned. He took a deep gulp of smoke and shook his head. “You wouldn’t divorce me, Kiki. I wouldn’t let you get away.”

Kristen slid off her barstool. “Guess I’d just have to poison you, then.”

Home was Wuv Shack 1.0, a sprawling Parkdale Victorian that was once a nod-off and then became the home of home-improvement stars. The house was Sumter’s, and before that it belonged to his parents. He’d since moved into his own space, but kept the place where he’d co-founded the company, and leased out the rooms to new or migratory employees for what in Toronto passed for a competitive market rate.

Kristen kept a camera-zapper in her room and slept under dazzle-patterned sheets that kept her solo explorations secret.

In her mail slot, she found a courier’s envelope. Inside was a key fob and a piece of hotel stationery. “HERE FOR 48 HOURS” it read.

“Damn it,” Kristen whispered, and hurried outside the building. It was raining, now, and she almost slipped on the greasy streets. The jitney came and she didn’t have long to wait; the hotel was a new one, surprisingly close by. She waved her fob at the door and an elevator chimed open for her. When it arrived at the proper floor, the fob flashed a room number at her.

Inside, in the dark, she heard the shower running. She slipped off her shoes, unzipped her dress, found a hanger, and hung it in the hall closet. She threw her underclothes in a drawer in the closet and crossed into the bathroom. He stood motionless under the stream of water, seemingly asleep. Antony was the only man she knew who didn’t have tattoos. It was refreshing. Elegant. Analog. Kristen stepped in behind him and wrapped her arms around him.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“You’re not,” he said. “I had them send the fob when I landed.”

She smiled into his skin. He turned around and kissed her. It took a moment; he liked to assess the terrain first. It had been a month since the last time, maybe more, and she watched him take in all the details that might have changed before descending. He held her face in his hands, covering her ears, and for a moment she was not under a stream of water but under waves, far away, in a place that was very dark and very warm. He kept his eyes ever so slightly open. It was the only time she remembered enjoying the sensation of being watched.

When he pulled away, he started pulling her hair out of its tie. “How was your day?”

“My boss asked me to marry him.”

“Of course he did,” Antony said. “Will you report him to HR?”

“I am HR.”

He pointed upward at some invisible point over her head. “That’s the joke.” He knelt down and started scrubbing her from the toes up. She braced herself on the tile and watched the smart meter on the shower ticking down to the red zone where Antony or his employer would have to start paying extra for hot water.

“Do you think he was serious?”

Kristen looked down at him. He’d set her foot on his knee and was scrubbing in circles up her calf. “Are you jealous?”

He worked his way up to her knee and under her thigh.“Not in any way that violates our terms.”

She tilted her head. “But?”

“But, he seems more aggressive, lately. To hear you tell it.”

Kristen snorted. “I can handle it.”

“Oh, I have no doubt of that,” he said, and put her foot back down on the floor of the shower. “Can I do the next part hands-free?”

She checked the timer. “You better work fast.”

“Well, you know what they say,” he said, pushing her gently against the wall. “You can have it fast, good, or cheap. Pick two.”

She came awake with her throat sore from a swallowed scream. Antony had curled around her. He spoke into her neck. “Bad dream?”

She nodded and pulled his arm tighter over her.

“What happened?”

Kristen wiped her eyes and exhaled a shuddering breath. She refused to speak until her breathing had calmed down. “Something else happened at work. And I guess it dislodged something, sort of. Mentally.”

“Something else Sumter did?”

“No.” She rolled over and spoke to him directly. “Someone at my work is in trouble. I think.”

“Will you have to fire someone?”

She shook her head. “Not that kind of trouble. Well, it is, but that’s not what I mean. There’s something else going on, something causing their problems at work.”

“Something at home?”

“I think so. But it’s hard to ask. I don’t even know if she thinks it’s a problem. I don’t really know how she feels about it. Maybe she doesn’t know how she feels, either. It might be nothing.”

“What do you think it is?”

Kristen sighed. “Can I see your device? I need to check some blueprints on a non-work machine.”

Antony’s devices were very dumb. They used minimal storage and processing, and didn’t even wear a brand name. That just meant it was probably some special boutique brand that Kristen had never heard of. It was a delightfully retrograde little thing; all it did was take calls and pictures. Even the photos required an extra kit to download. It felt like playing with Lego.

He handed her a scroll and she resolved a relationship with the hotel network, then looked up Janae and her husband’s condo. She didn’t recall the exact address, but searching “tampon-shaped monstrosity Toronto” actually worked.

“This is where they live. Her husband locked her in, today. Yesterday. Whatever. She was late because he locked her in.”

“You know it happened because he locked her in? She wasn’t just late? It wasn’t just an error?”

Kristen made an elaborate shrug. “No? But she as much as told me it could have happened.”

“She as much as told you, or she told you?”

“She told me it was something he used to do. When they were dating. Refusing to let her out until she did the thing he wanted. Like a rat in a maze, performing for pellets.”

“So. Marriage.” Antony took back the scroll and opened a set of floor-plans the building had advertised. “Which one do they live in?”

Kristen peered over his shoulder and fingered the surface. “That one, I think. Based on the photos she’s shared, anyway. I’ve never been there.”

He summoned the floor-plan and copied a serial number at the bottom of the screen, then fed the number into another tab. A bunch of press releases came up, most of them for gadgeteers, real estate developers, and interior decorators. But the first hit was for the manufacturer of a smart locking system.

The locking system was part of the whole condo’s suite of smart services. It was the big selling point of the building itself: Living there was like living in a fairy-tale castle where every piece of the structure was alive and enchanted to serve the needs of its inhabitants. The showers remembered how warm you liked the wáter and at what intensity, and balanced your usage with that of the other residents. The fridges told you when a neighbor in the kitchen network had the buttermilk you needed for that special salad dressing. The windows and lights got information about your alpha patterns and darkened to start sleep cycles on schedule. The smart locking systems recognized residents and their visitors, over time, and even introduced them to each other when their profiles matched. Membership in the building came with special pricing from affiliated brands on everything from home goods to auto-rental to nannying and tutoring. The more purchase points you accrued, the more rewards you amassed, which could also be applied to the price of maintenance or utilities. And a massive and very public data leakage from the network supplying this building and many others ensured that the developers had to offer almost unheard-of interest rates, which tempted buyers who might never have managed, otherwise.

“Oh look, they have a bot,” Antony murmured.

He opened the chat and after the niceties, typed: I THINK MY HUSBAND HAS HACKED THE DOOR.

“No, wait,” Kristen protested. “If you send that, they’ll ask for your location. If you don’t give it, they’ll start pinging the machine. And once they find it, they’ll call the police. The bots have a whole protocol for smart homes when that happens.”

“Do they?” Antony asked. “How do you know?”

But Kristen had already taken the clamshell out of his hands. She grabbed a pillow and jammed it under the clamshell to protect her skin. It would take a trickier question to get the information she wanted. She started typing: CAN I USE MY SMART LOCKING SYSTEM TO KEEP MY KIDS SAFE?

The bot asked for more information. It was very polite, double-plus Canadian, and it wanted to know what she meant. MY CHILD IS A SLEEPWALKER AND I WANT TO MAKE SURE HE STAYS INDOORS AT NIGHT, she typed.

The bot agreed that this was a natural concern, and informed her that the best mechanism for keeping her kids indoors was to adjust their individual account privileges. The camera in the door would recognize each child, and the door itself would check against the child’s settings. There was a default mode for after-school play, nighttime, mornings, and so on. But the programming itself was fairly granular: You could tune it to certain days (the days you had custody, for example) or get the door to stop admitting certain people (pervy uncles, your daughter’s ex). All you had to do was change the nature of the invitation.

“Like with vampires,” Antony said.

“You said it,” Kristen said. “I bet he did something really simple, like changing her age on the account. If he made her a minor, she’d lose editorial access to the defaults. She wouldn’t be able to log in and make changes, even if she had the right password. And then he could custom-tune it anytime he wanted. In the meantime, she’s solving puzzles and showing up late for work.”

Antony rose and moved to the fridge. “If I mix you something, will you drink it?”

“Make that sound less threatening,” Kristen said.

“They have rye and ginger. That’s deeply unthreatening.”

“Don’t you have a meeting tomorrow? Today, I mean?”

He shrugged. “At 10. It’s 4. I’ll make screwdrivers instead.”

“Your funeral,” Kristen said.

He came back with drinks and settled in behind her. He pulled her hair to one side and pressed his sweating glass against the back of her neck. “What was your dream about?”

She leaned forward. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“It was enough to warrant this little investigation.”

“That wasn’t my dream. It’s just what’s happening to Janae. From work. Or what I think is happening to her. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

He kept the ice off her neck but played with her hair instead. Like the drink, it was probably a ploy to help her relax enough to reconsider sleep, and she knew it. Kristen let him do it anyway. He raked careful fingers from her scalp down to the ends, separating the little snags and catches as he went. “Why can’t you stop thinking about it?”

Kristen twisted to face him over her shoulder. “I just have a bad feeling about it. And I want to know if I’m right, or if it’s nothing to worry about.”

“And if you are right? What then?”

Kristen frowned. Antony had a way of keeping his face and voice entirely neutral that made her want to fill the silence. There was no judgment, and therefore no warning signal that she should stop. It was hard to know if he was annoyed or bemused at her sudden instinct to chase this down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We can just go back to sleep. I just woke up with it on my mind.”

“That’s not what’s bothering me. I’m jet lagged; I’d be up in an hour anyway.”

“Something is bothering you, though.”

“What’s bothering me is that something’s bothering you, and you’re not telling me what it is.”

Kristen sighed. She turned fully around and folded her legs. “Something did happen to me, a long time ago. A version of this, I guess. But it’s over, now. I haven’t thought about it in a long time.”

“But this situation reminds you of it.”

She nodded. “And I guess it’s getting to me.”

He burrowed a bit deeper into the pillows and stretched his legs out so they hemmed her in. “How long ago was a long time ago?”

“University.”

“And are you still in contact with this person?”

She laughed. “What? No. Why? Are you gonna go beat him up, or something? It was years ago.”

Antony didn’t answer. His head lolled on the pillows. He held her gaze just long enough to make things uncomfortable. In their encounters, she had never known him to be violent, or even very angry. He expressed displeasure and annoyance, but never fury. But this moment felt different: His total lack of affect made it seem like he was hiding something.

“I thought we agreed to keep things … ” She struggled with the proper wording. “I barely know anything about you. I don’t know where you work. I don’t know who your clients are. I don’t know who else you sleep with. And you’re the one who wanted it that way. You said it would help avoid complications. I thought you didn’t want to know anything … personal. So why do you want to know about this?”

Antony sipped his drink. The clink of the ice and the movement of his throat carried in the perfect early morning silence of the hotel room. Kristen heard no showers running, no toilets flushing, no anxious footsteps on other floors. For a single moment she wondered if he’d taken control of the whole floor, the whole building, the whole street. She didn’t know who he worked for—who paid for the trips—but they clearly had the money to throw around. She knew it had to be something mundane, even boring, but at times like this she wondered.

“I just want to know if there’s someone to watch out for,” Antony said, finally. “For all I know, he’s profoundly jealous and stalking us both.”

“You don’t even live in this city. And your visits aren’t regular enough for anyone to predict. Besides, I don’t use any channels to contact you that any of my other connections are familiar with. And I never make any reference to you, anywhere. That’s also what we agreed to, and I’ve stuck to my end of the bargain. You’re fine. No one that I know even knows you exist. I thought that’s how we both wanted it.”

She looked at the scroll. The bot was going to log out. For the moment, she had what she needed. She could always do more research later. And Janae might have more to say, if she gave it some more time. She turned back to Antony. “Do you want to renegotiate?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know! You’re the one who’s asking all this personal stuff; I’ve just been trying to follow the rules.” She squared her shoulders and decided to just say it out loud: “Even if they’re totally insane rules that make you sound like some kind of professional killer or something.”

The corners of his lips pricked up. “Professional killer. I like that. I think we should go with that. I think you should just assume that, from now on.”

She fixed him with a look. “Antony. You work in venture capital. We all know that’s way worse than murder.”

Before heading in for work, Kristen needed to stop by the Wuv Shack 1.0 for fresh clothes. At seven in the morning the house was still mostly asleep. To her surprise she found Janae standing in the kitchen, making coffee. She looked like she’d been crying. Kristen decided then and there to give Janae the day off. The woman was in no shape to work.

“You get locked out?” Kristen asked.

Janae didn’t answer. She just filled another mug and slid it in Kristen’s direction. “I didn’t know where else to go. I texted Mohinder and he let me in. There was a couch open.”

Kristen felt a momentary pang that she hadn’t been paying attention; she could have let Janae into her empty bedroom and given her more than a sofa to sleep on. On the other hand, maybe a night exiled from her own home would loosen Janae’s lips a little. She already looked brittle. Ready to crack.

“Have you talked to Craig about it?”

Janae made a gesture that indicated a species of futility. “He’s up north, scouting an abandoned diamond mine. The signal’s terrible.”

Kristen had her doubts about that. One of the first things any real resource-extraction firm did up north was build fast, reliable networks and extend them to the neighboring towns and reserves. It was a make-good for all the other damage, a facet of revised treaty agreements. Either Janae was lying about trying to broach the topic, or Craig was lying about being able to reach her.

“When does he get back?”

“Tomorrow. Maybe. It’s an unpiloted aircraft, though, so sometimes the flight path can change when they shuttle actual pilots between airports. It costs less, but you wait longer because it’s more like a standby.”

Kristen filed away the information to a safe corner of her mind, and said: “I had a problem like that, once. With a door, I mean.”

Janae’s gaze darted up at Kristen mid-sip. She gulped audibly. Kristen had a sneaking suspicion that Janae had been doing some research into this particular problem and the men commonly attached to it. Her eyes were a sleepless red, the kind of red that meant long nights questioning certain choices.

“What did you do?” Janae asked.

“Well, it wasn’t my house,” Kristen said. “I had some problems with my roommate, and my friend let me stay with him in his fancy new smart home. It started with one night, and then another, and then a weekend, and then somehow I just ended up spending the rest of term there. You know?”

Janae nodded.

“And a funny thing happened,” Kristen continued. “I started noticing that every time I changed my clothes, I couldn’t leave the room. The door would stick. Unless I got completely naked and started from nothing. I think he’d rigged up a recognition algorithm to lock the door unless it saw a totally naked body. The house was smarter than he was, I guess.”

Janae’s eyes were wide. “He was filming you.”

Kristen shrugged. “Probably. But I could never prove it. And I needed a place to stay.”

“So what happened?”

Kristen smiled and refilled both cups. “I played a prank on him, so he figured out that I knew what he was doing.”

Janae beamed. “Oh yeah? What?”

For a moment, all Kristen could smell was exhaust. She could see his hands on the glass so clearly, could see glass splintering away from his weakening fist.

“Oh, just kid stuff,” she said. “Now, why don’t you go upstairs and have a nap? You can take my room. I’ll be gone all night.”

That night, Antony returned to the hotel smelling vaguely of cigars. He was in the shower a long time, and returned to find her on the scroll.

“That’s a good car service,” he said. “Secure. They don’t save the data.”

“Is it the fancy one they send when they want to impress you?”

“When they want to impress me, they pick me up themselves.” He slid between the sheets and started kissing down her outstretched thigh. “Do I want to know about this little project of yours?”

“I’ll be done soon,” she said. “I just need to make a reservation.”

“For your boss? I mean your husband?”

She reached over and scratched her fingers along his scalp affectionately. “Don’t insult me.”

Antony laid his cheek on her knee. “How was your co-worker today?”

Kristen pressed a confirmation button and rolled the scroell shut. “Fragile.”

“And how are you?”

“Hungry.”

He looked up at her through his lashes. “Whatever for?”

Antony left the next day. But he extended the hotel reservation a little longer so Kristen could stay a few more nights, leaving her room free for Janae. “It gets me into preferred customer status,” he said when Kristen protested. “I’ll just use the points on my next visit.”

Kristen held herself back from asking when that would be. It wasn’t precisely against the rules, but it would rather ruin the surprise. It was enough to emerge from a mid-week holiday pleasantly sore and well-breakfasted. Her schedule couldn’t really accommodate the type of capital-R Relationship that led to arrangements like Janae’s. Thank God.

Janae herself was gone from work for three more days. There was the day she took off at Kristen’s behest, and then the other two days were spent searching for her husband. Upon his return, Craig, it seemed, had gotten into a car that flashed his incredibly generic name at the airport taxi stand at Pearson. But it clearly hadn’t been meant for him: It drove him not to Janae and the tampon-shaped condo tower in Toronto, but to an old cobalt mine near Temagami, Ontario.

IT CRASHED, Janae’s texts read. IT DROVE RIGHT INTO THE PIT.

Kristen expressed shocked surprise. The company sent flowers. But Craig would be fine. He would just need some traction and some injectables for a while. And of course he’d be stuck at home. Alone. For hours. Waiting for Janae to come home. Dependent on her for everything.

Apparently there was another Craig in Toronto with the same name, who also had a returning flight arriving that same day. He had posted on his social media about his flight and how much he was looking forward to coming home. Just the month before, that Craig had been returning from another trip, and posted a glowing review of the car service he’d used. The service’s customer retention algorithms, Janae said, must have associated the information and then sent a comped car as a part of their marketing outreach. At least, that was what the police had said must have happened. The car’s records were scrubbed every 24 hours, and it had taken Janae’s Craig so long to be found. Even when he called for help, he couldn’t identify the model of the car or the license plate number. He had been trapped for hours, helpless.

“It sounds awful,” Kristen said.

“It was,” Janae agreed, once she returned to work. “He’s terrified. Says he can’t go back to another mine again. I can’t leave any lights off. He was in perfect darkness for hours and hours.”

On the weekend, Antony called. “I’ve been thinking about your stalker,” he said, after they’d spoken in great detail about how exactly she had used the hotel room, how many times, and with which hand.

“He never stalked me,” Kristen said.

“So he’s really not a problem?”

“He’s really not.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

She could almost hear him screwing up the courage for vulnerability. “Because you can tell me, if—”

Kristen laughed. She rose from her desk, catching Sumter’s eye. He grinned at her and she waved back. Outside, it was snowing. Just a few tiny flakes under a leaden sky. “It’s sweet of you to be so concerned, Antony. But please don’t worry. He’s dead.”

The Complicated Relationship Between Abuse and Tech

The technology safety legal manager for the National Network to End Domestic Violence Safety Net project responds to Madeline Ashby’s short story.

BY IAN HARRIS

MARCH 26, 2018 11:28 AM

Violence against women is having something of a moment right now. Which is to say, portrayals of domestic violence in film and TV are gaining critical acclaim. Through shows like Big Little Lies and movies like I, Tonya, popular culture is grappling with more nuanced representations of domestic violence and the humanity of survivors of abuse. These are important conversations, and I hope that this is the start of a profound societal transformation, though time will tell. For me, the most disturbing part of these portrayals is not the brutality of the assaults, but how frequently physical violence is prioritized over other types of abusive behavior. It is what we don’t see that worries me.

We see this distorted prioritization in real life, too. I’ve been a domestic violence attorney for more than a decade. Despite the long list of clients who have struggled to get the justice system to live up to its name, I have found that survivors are much more likely to get help for physical assaults than for other kinds of abusive behavior such as stalking, surveillance, harassment, and intimate image disclosures, which frequently feel more harmful to the survivor.

Nevertheless, physical violence is almost never the first (or even close to the first) type of injurious behavior exerted by an abusive partner. The focus on cuts and bruises make for an impactful cinematic experience, but it can also make people feel that they must endure years or even decades of escalating abusive behavior out of fear that they will be taken seriously only if they bear proof of physical violence. But physical abuse is neither the most common nor necessarily the most terrifying part of domestic violence. Control can be exerted in many ways, and increasingly that is accomplished through technology.

The predominance of physical violence in popular portrayals makes the subtlety of Madeline Ashby’s piece all the more powerful. In “Domestic Violence,” our only peek into the perpetration of abuse comes in these simple words: “I’m sorry; I had some trouble getting out of the house.” The remainder of the story shows glimpses of the impact of abuse through the eyes of a bystander, a human resource professional, grappling with what to do in response to an employee suffering from abuse and her own past experiences.

We never learn if physical or sexual violence was part of the abuse. What we do know is that a controlling husband has likely programmed the front door to remain locked unless his wife does the “chicken dance.” By forcing her to undertake an embarrassing dance meant for children in order to leave or return to the home, the husband has taken away his wife’s mobility and agency. He has determined when she can leave and when she can stay. He has also found a way to put her job at risk through forced absences and decreased focus, making her increasingly isolated and more reliant on him. Through technology he did all that without uttering a single word or leaving any visible scars. At the Safety Net project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, where I work on the intersection of technology and domestic violence, we constantly receive calls about similar types of surveillance, tracking, and digital control. Unfortunately, we often have to inform callers that the laws have not always caught up with the abuse. Even when the law clearly protects against tech-related abuse, it can be hard to get law enforcement to respond.

The legal limitations stand in grave contrast to what we know about the role of technology in domestic violence. In today’s world, there are very few cases of abuse that do not have a digital component such as harassing text messages or the use of spyware. While technology can serve as a constant threat for survivors, digital exile is not a viable option. Smartphones, social media, and other tech can be a necessary lifeline for many, helping to organize an escape or maintain contact with essential support systems.

This tension makes safety increasingly difficult. “Smart home” technologies create an especially difficult challenge for safety. Cameras that can be remotely accessed, smart speakers that are always listening, and sensors that identify which room you are in and how many people are in the home—these technologies already exist with very minimal regulation or oversight. If current trends continue, I fear that Ashby’s tale is not far away.

Approximately 30 years ago, Elaine Scarry completed a masterful work, The Body in Pain, that examines how torturers manipulate physical spaces into weapons. She wrote about the use of common items as torture instruments to unravel the victim’s sense of time, space, and comfort. The sections on how torture victims are housed are particularly enlightening, when considering the misuse of smart home technology. Specifically, she wrote:

In normal contexts, the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within … but while the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a miniaturization of the world.

Ashby has provided a similar point in her picture of domestic violence in a smart home.
By containing and defining the ability of his wife to leave or return home, the husband has taken away her sense of safety and security. The home has become a prison that paradoxically represents danger and isolation, but also serves as the only place for her to go. To leave is to be completely untethered, to stay is a constant threat.

Technology has not changed domestic violence—nonphysical abuse has always been a part of how power is exerted and maintained. But new technology does provide more opportunities for control. Is it morally right to consider misuse by intimate partners when designing new technology? I would argue that it is. But I believe that the message of “Domestic Violence” is that whether or not the moral imperative is accepted, the great strength of technology is that it can be democratized. The victim also has the ability to access many of the same tools.
The protagonist in Ashby’s story uses technology to exact retribution on those who have committed violence. The strength of the #MeToo movement and countless other examples of leveraging technology to highlight abusive behavior by powerful individuals show that the tides are slowly changing. Abusive people are not always held accountable, but technology is making abuse harder to commit with complete impunity. Will society, and men in particular, learn to take abuse seriously before a digital arms race expands? I’m hopeful, but in the meantime it’s probably not a bad idea to learn about online safety and how to document evidence of tech abuse. After all, while we are constantly waiting for the newest upgrade on our devices, sometimes it feels like we as humans aren’t quite ready to trade in our old operating system.

“No Me Dejas”

A new science-fiction short story about transferring memories.

BY MARK OSHIRO

APRIL 30, 2018 9:35 AM

“You’re nervous, aren’t you?”

Papá sits across from me, arms folded, all stoic steadiness, but his brows are knit together in an unmistakable knot. “I know what you’re doing,” I say. “I appreciate it, but …” I shake my head, and dread stitches itself to my ribs.

He sighs loudly, reaches out to me with a calloused hand. “I’ll be right there with you the entire time.”

“I know. It’s just … I’m starting to wonder if I’m in over my head.”

“You can say no, Gabriela. It’s not too late.”

A brief flash of eagerness crosses his face, a light I wish I could unsee. He wants to do it in my place. He has been nothing but supportive ever since Abuela Carmen chose me for the Transfer, but this moment skirts an uncomfortable truth. Why did she choose me over him? Why will I be the bridge in our familia, the one to receive abuela’s memories before she leaves us? The love between us isn’t enough to explain why Carmen chose me over her own son, but she has offered no other clue.

“No, it’s what she wants,” I tell him. I tell myself.

He lets go of my hand and leans back into the hard plastic chair. “You know, you’re going to have some strange memories in that head of yours.”

A flutter of nerves rolls through me. “Like what?”

“Well,” he smirks, “are you prepared to change your papa’s diapers?”

“What?”

“What if one of those memories gets through? Gonna be pretty weird.”

I swat at him playfully. “Papá, come on.”

His smile fades, but his deep-brown eyes are still warm. “I know this is all pretty strange, but … I’m glad it’s you.”

My Papá. I step across that expanse of linoleum to plant myself in the empty chair to his right, then curl up against his body. He runs his fingers through my hair, plants a kiss on top of my head.

The electricity of the unknown still courses through me. I am alight. I am unsure.

This room is not built for the limbo of extended goodbyes. Nothing to read except for the flashy and emotionally charged animations advertising the Transfer that adorn the walls. Loved ones smiling at some beatific elder relative’s bedside, every one of them white, with a single phrase at the bottom:

You never really die if you’re not forgotten.

It’s not as comforting as I think it’s meant to sound, and it doesn’t stop the nervous quiver in my stomach. Soon, I’ll be laid out alongside Abuela Carmen, wired up to her mind, ready for her to gift me with her memories. They say it doesn’t really hurt and that the transferred memories basically separate out from your own after a few weeks. But I’ve been reading the reviews, following forums, in the week since Abuela made her choice. It’s disorienting, everyone says. You can’t control what will trigger the new memories you have. Sometimes, they just pop in your head when you’re showering. When you’re at work or at school. Most especially when you’re asleep. Someone else’s memories, someone else’s secrets.

They’re about to be mine.

They finally come for us more than an hour later, while Papá is in the restroom. When he steps out, clicking the heavy door shut behind him, his eyes are bloodshot and puffy, and the sharp worry wrinkles on his forehead stand out in a map of grief. It breaks my heart. This is his mother. After this she’ll be gone forever, even if her memories live on. All I’d been thinking about was myself.

“I’m sorry, Papá,” I say into his chest. “This has to be hard.”

“It’s OK, m’ija.” His breath is warm on top of my head. “Saying goodbye isn’t meant to be easy. At least we have the chance to say it this time.”

The history rests unspoken between us. Mamá’s passing a few years back, before the Transfer was available, was sudden. There were no waiting rooms, no extended farewells, no exchange of memories. Just a mess of twisted metal and an ocean of grief that eroded the edges of what we knew of her. Mamá drifted further away with time; mi abuela would live sharply within me.

He squeezes once more, then leads me away, out of the waiting room, into the sterile, gray hallway, past recruitment offices and Transfer agents, running their orientation videos for other clients. At the end of the hall, we enter an elevator to head up to the medical wing. The floor hums beneath our silence. How can we say all of the things that need to be said? How can we possibly untangle this knot of hope and fear and grief that sits like a lump in our throat?

So we say nothing.

The doors open. Another gray hall. Another phalanx of animations set flush into the wall, all extolling the virtues of the Transfer, as if we still need convincing, even now. Nestled between their bright promises are the procedure rooms, which are hidden from us: dark panes of glass and windowless doors. How many people are going through the Transfer right now? How many are waking up from that last goodbye, heads crammed with memories that are not their own? I get a sudden, absurd urge to break into those shadowed caverns and wrest the truth from them. To force someone into saving me from myself, from the mistake of staying. Or the mistake of running away.

“You OK, m’ija?” Papá murmurs, putting his arm around me. “You’re not normally this quiet.”

“I’ll be fine,” I manage. “Just feel weird, that’s all.”

“As soon as you wake up, I’ll be there. You know, in case you have any questions about … well, whatever.”

He’ll be the only one who can answer them. It was in nearly every review I devoured. The Transfer offers peace to those who are near the end of their lives; it allows them to choose when to close the door. But it comes with a cost: the Fading. As memories flow out of their body, they “fade” out of consciousness. Apparently, Abuela Carmen will only be around for maybe a few minutes after the Transfer. Then … that’s it. She’ll live on in my head, just as the ads promise.

A door opens near me and a woman steps out, her brown hair clipped short above crisp scrubs. She looks so serious. Fear suddenly flares in me. I don’t want to do this. But she smiles at me and Papá, suddenly transformed with warmth, and my fear flutters into simple jitters as she ushers us into the room.

Inside is mi abuela. Laid out in the bed like a resting saint, become a figure from those votivas that line the ofrenda in her bedroom. Her frail limbs are swallowed in a halo of sheets and blankets.

She turns her head and her eyes lock on to me, and a smile rises on her like a slow morning. In her face I see the echo of my Papá, that etched forehead, that steady chin I love. The haze of my hesitation drifts away. If this is what she wants, then I want to do it.

The woman who let us in guides me over to a bed set up parallel to Abuela. She sits me down and the techs seem to come out of nowhere to start fussing over me. I’m given a long white gown and asked to remove my shirt behind a short partition. Through the gap, I watch my father as he squeezes his mother’s thin hand, coos to her in a tone just above a whisper.

Someone scurries behinds me, asks me to tie up my hair. After I do, there’s a buzzing tickle at the base of my skull. I knew they were going to shave the back of my head, but it’s so sudden, so careless. They probably do this all day. It means nothing to them. Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I’m blinking back tears when the woman returns to my side.

“I’m Yasmin,” she says. She could be my mamá’s sister if her skin were darker, her nose wider. “I’m sure you’re pretty anxious right now, but I’m here to walk you through the Transfer and I’ll be with you every step of the way, OK?”

“OK,” I say, and I try to smile back, but I’m sure it comes back mangled and ugly. I don’t feel much like smiling.

“Can I have you put your feet up and lean back into the bed?” She gestures to the headrest, which has a large hole in the middle of it. “Please make sure your head is centered here.”

I do as she says, and the back of the bed slowly rises upright so that I’m almost sitting up. The techs flutter behind me like birds, moving swiftly to secure my head with soft straps of fabric and Velcro. A panic blooms in me; I can’t move. But Yasmin’s soft voice is a rope in the darkness, pulling me back to the moment.

“So, we have a few steps before we get to the Transfer, OK?”

“OK,” I echo, my eyes locked on hers.

“You’ll feel a coolness on your neck first. We have to clean the entry site first. Then, a small prick. That’ll be the local anesthetic.”

“So it won’t hurt?”

“No, not really,” she said. “But I should note that you will feel a … pressure as the neural cables are inserted into the back of your head. As they expand and spread, you won’t feel any pain, but it is an odd sensation. I don’t want you to be surprised by it.”

I suck in a deep breath. It’s starting to feel real. “And then what?”

“You’ll get a light sedative. Just to help your mind deal with the initial trauma of the Transfer, to reduce your own confusion. Once you wake up, it’ll all be done!”

She says it with so much joy, so much certainty.

There’s motion behind me and the skin on the back of my neck rises with goose bumps from the chill of an alcohol swab. Seconds later, I feel the tiny pinprick and my back lifts off the bed, but the straps prevent me from moving my head much. Yasmin smiles again, and then it pushes into me. It feels like something alive, squirming into that soft spot at the base of my head where my skull connects to my neck. I cry out and am immediately embarrassed by it.

Papá’s face suddenly looms in front of me. “¿Estás bien, Gabriela? Do you need them to stop?”

Before I can say anything, Yasmin butts in. “We don’t recommend stopping at this point,” she says firmly. “The neural cables are seeking out the best place to attach to within her brain. There’s no easier way to explain. We find that the amygdala and the hippocampus are the best locations for grabbing the most important and vivid memories.”

I don’t know what those words mean. I just know there’s a foreign thing slipping and twisting somewhere near my spinal cord. I can sense each thrust it makes toward its goal. Tears leap to my eyes and I don’t care. I want to tear it out of me, screaming. Instead I grit my teeth and force myself to think of that probing finger as a gift, as my grandmother’s hand reaching for mine.

Thankfully, the pressure tapers off, its sudden absence followed by two beeps, loud and sharp, separated by a few seconds. One of the techs lays a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve made connection. The hardest part is over.”

I hope he’s right.

“Te amo, Gabi,” Papá says, his voice raw around the edges. He plants a kiss on my forehead. “I’ll be just a few feet away.”

And then he’s gone. I can move my head a little bit from side to side, but I can’t see him anymore. Yasmin is blocking the way. “I’m sure you heard plenty about the Transfer during orientation last week,” she says, “but I’ve found it healthy to remind patients what unconsciousness will feel like.”

“I know. It’s like a ‘continuously shifting dream,’ ” I say, parroting the line from the brochures.

Yasmin nods her head. “Most patients are aware of what’s happening. It’ll feel like you’re in someone else’s body as the memories are cycled through your own brain. Just …” She pauses, then smiles, bright with satisfaction. “Just roll with it.”

I hear the heart rate monitor spike then, and I twist my eyes to mi abuela, caught at the edges of my vision. She hasn’t said a thing since I entered the room. Maybe I shouldn’t have worried so much about the Transfer.
Maybe I should have spent more time saying goodbye.

“Gracias, abuela.”

It’s not enough, though. It can’t possibly be enough. The words slide out of my mouth like I’m opening a Hallmark card.

She doesn’t smile at me. “Perdóname,” she says, and something crosses over her face. It’s not joy or peace. She looks terrified.

“You ready?” Yasmin asks.

“I guess I have to be,” I say, and Yasmin chuckles, but all I see is mi abuela. There’s a glistening on her cheeks. Is she crying? I want to say something, but she’s a blur now, and I straighten my eyes and even the ceiling is a mess of shapes and colors. The light in the room fades out of view.

Someone is yelling at me. I look up at … a woman, towering over me, screaming. Spanish. What is she saying? I try to translate as quick as I can but realize I don’t have to. I know I’ve done something wrong, I can feel it, like in a dream. Who is she?

Mamá. It comes to me instantly. I see brown walls, a deep, earthy color. I can feel a scratchy rug under my feet. But I can’t look at it, only at this woman, a giant above me, and I cover my face and—

I’m near something large, square-shaped, and it takes a few seconds for me to recognize it. An old iron stove. I raise my hand to reach into the pot on the right, and I can’t stop myself. What are you doing? I think, knowing full well I’m about to touch it. My fingers rest briefly on the shining metal, and the searing is instant, painful, terrifying. I jerk my hand away and fall back, the wind rushing out of me as I slam into the floor. I hear screaming again. Am I screaming? What body am I inside of?

I am ripped from the floor and into a blinding brightness. There’s a man lying beside me, a rough blanket beneath us that doesn’t smooth out the stones and uneven ground. We’re outside, sunlight glinting on his skin, and lust twists in my belly, like a fist in my guts, and I want him, and he knows it. His hands are on me, caressing my back, then running up and down my body, and then I hear screaming again, the woman’s voice from before. Mamá.

But not my mamá. A wave of understanding washes over me, giving shape to these visions, this tangle of emotions filling me like an empty cup. This isn’t a dream. It’s the Transfer.

Carmen’s mother’s voice is a furious wind, lashing her daughter with words, and she chases the dark-eyed man from my side, and a vicious shame rips through my body, and then an anger. I hate this woman. I hate her, this screeching duende who tears into me. It’s bewildering. The feeling is mine and not mine at the same time. How can I hate someone I’ve never even met?

Then it’s dark. Hot. I’m indoors, and he has me up against the wall, and the desire rages in my chest. It takes my breath away. I don’t even like men, but all I can feel is a fiery need, a desperation to pull him closer, closer, into my skin. Carmen’s skin. My skin.

Another flash of brightness. Pain. A nausea washes over me, and I hold back a scream. The fluorescent lights above me shoot daggers in my eyes. I’m on my back, and when I grasp at the bed, I feel the crinkle of the hospital-issued sheets—rough, uneven, artificial. “¡Empujas!” someone shouts, and I do, despite how badly it hurts. I push and I push and—

Sorrow fills me. That dark-eyed man sits at my bedside, his skin paled by those fluorescent lights, but the need that chokes me isn’t desire but fear. Terror weighs heavy on my body. I’m telling him, begging him, to stay, but he shakes his head. “No quiero un niño,” he insists, and he swats my hand away.

A flash. A lanky man—a different man—is seated at a table, crying into his long fingers. “No me dejas,” he says. He looks familiar, but he’s gone before I can remember him.

Now I’m in the back of a pickup truck, my bones rattling with the metal. The cabin is covered, and it’s sweltering. Sweat stings my eyes, and I need water. I’m running my hand over my swollen belly, and I’m starving. Again. Craving nopales, the ones Mamá prepares with onions, peppers, tomato. My mouth would water if it could.

Where am I going? I am huddled up in between two men, and the one on the right has his head flopped forward, his tongue hanging strangely out of his mouth. Is he still breathing? The one on the left bangs on the small window that separates us from the front cab. “Agua,” he says. “Agua, por favor.”

The window opens. A bitter face fills the window. “¡Callate!” The man’s mustache droops over the sides of his mouth. I keep my eyes focused on the woman across from me, her long black hair matted to her head and face. Her hand is gripped around her daughter’s. She is praying, soft and determined.

I’m in a store. It’s cool. Too cool. I shiver as I stare at the neat rows of packaged food in a freezer, and I’ve had the door open for so long, but I can’t read any of the words on the boxes. Not a single one. My blood thumps in my ears and I am trying not to cry as I realize how little I know about this place, how far from familiarity I am. I turn around to find a woman staring at me, pity and annoyance on her pale face. “Are you done?” she says. “Can I get in there?”

I step away from the freezer, embarrassed, and the door shuts. There she is. There I am. Carmen. Staring at my reflection in the glass. For the first time I see the woman who is not yet my abuela, my self-not-self.

But it’s so short. I jump from one memory to the next with no time to recover from the emotional whiplash, a passenger in Carmen’s mind. I’m in another home. The lights are dim, and there’s a sour smell. I’ve never been here, but I know this place. Soft brown walls, and a rainbow ofrenda in the corner. The striped zarape hung precariously off a rickety chair. This is Carmen’s home, in Zapopan. A sound echoes and breaks the silence. I turn my head and see the weeping man, bent over himself, his body shaking with sobs. “Por favor,” he cries, “no me dejas, Carmen.”

His face is long, stretched out in another wail, and I know the worry lines mapped on his forehead. The same lines that etch my father’s face, that etch Carmen’s.

There is a terrible sadness in me, a piercing, furious thing. Is it mine? Carmen’s? I can’t tell. But I don’t go to him. Instead, I say, “Lo siento,” and I walk out the door.

Renato. The name arrives, fully formed. Renato. Who is he?

I don’t get time to figure it out. Flash. I watch Papá take his first steps, feel the soft carpet underneath me as I rush to catch him.

Flash. I hold myself in my arms just after Mamá gives birth to me. It feels wrong, to see my own blind emerging, to feel that blanket of her love from the inside.

Flash. I am watching myself perform “Como La Flor” in a shaky voice at my fourth-grade recital. Carmen’s tears wet my cheeks. She is proud of me, and it radiates through her whole body. She is my abuela. But the song stirs a tide of longing inside her. “Como me duele,” I sing, and she hurts. For home.
For the man she left behind.

I see him in Carmen’s home then, a memory inside this memory, as she thinks of him while watching me. I hear him beg her to not leave.

Renato. It’s her brother. I know it without any effort, so it must be true. But I’ve never seen this man, not even in the faded photographs that cluster their cracked frames around her votivas. Carmen has never even said his name.

The memories flash and jump and cycle through, but only one of them repeats.

No me dejas.

“Breathe normally,” says Yasmin. The lights are so bright. I gasp for air, and Papá is there, too.

“Calmate, m’ija,” he murmurs. “You’re OK, you’re fine, I’m right here. The cables have been removed. You’re fine.”

I reach up and yank at the straps keeping my head stationary, struggling to free myself. Yasmin tells me to take it easy, her voice a conditioned calm, born of years of practice.

“No!” I shout at her, and I’m surprised at how loud my own voice sounds. I rip off the strap and sit upright. My head swims. I push past it and swing my legs over the bed. Papá yells at me to stop. I sit there, glaring at mi abuela. I don’t even know who this anger belongs to. Me? Her? How am I supposed to tell?

“Who was he?” I ask her, and my voice breaks on the last word. I can see his anguished face in my mind. There’s a pain just behind my eyes that comes roaring to life, and I feel my breakfast come rushing up and spill out over the floor.

Yasmin wipes at my mouth with something and begs me to calm down. “Please, you just barely regained consciousness. You have to take it easy.”

She gently lowers me back down onto the bed, but the pain continues to thump in my head, a heavy heartbeat.

No me dejas.

“Abuela,” I croak, “¿por qué?”

She isn’t awake. She looks so peaceful, swaddled in the hospital’s white blankets, but she is quietly slipping away. The Fading is already tugging mi abuela away from me, drowning the truth I so desperately crave in its depths.

“Gabi,” Papá says. “Please. What happened? Why are you so upset?”

Yasmin hands me a small plastic cup with ice in it, tells me to take it slow. But I don’t move. I just stare at Carmen, her dark lashes resting like wings against her cheeks. They are a denial. “She left someone behind in Zapopan,” I say.

“What?” says Papá. “What are you talking about?”

“This is very common,” I hear Yasmin say, but I won’t look her way. “People who go through the Transfer can be disoriented just after they wake, while their mind is trying to sort through all the new memories now in their head.”

I turn my head slow and fix a glare on Yasmin. “I am not disoriented,” I spit. “I saw him. She left someone behind. Renato! He was begging her not to leave.”

Yasmin backs away a step. She glances from me to my papá and back. “Please let me know if you need anything,” she murmurs and then scurries away from us and our noise.

In the empty room, Papa and I sit in silence together, the beep of abuela’s heart rate monitor a metronome. Carmen is not dead, not yet, but not waking up. She’s just … there. Papá is running his hand up and down my back, and I can tell he wants to say something.

No me dejas.

The man’s face contorted with pain. The beam of light cutting across the table, leaving him in shadow. He drops his head into his hands, then raises it again.

The door has been opened, and sensations, emotions, colors, they all rush in. I see Carmen’s dirty knees as she plays outside the splintered wooden walls of her childhood home. Her mother, rushing toward her, hand outstretched. And there’s a young boy there, too, his hair bushy and unkempt. It’s him, it must be.
Renato.

No me dejas.

Papá is holding my hand, gripping it hard, and I use it to give me some leverage. I yank myself up, and push away from him toward Carmen’s bed. “Abuela,” I say, “who is he? Who was Renato?”

Her head turns. Her eyes, barely open, still glisten around the edges. “Renato,” she says, the name a rough stone in her mouth. She spits it out.

It’s a switch. A trigger. An explosion. I cry out as memories burst open in my mind. I see him, much younger, running across that bare spot of dirt outside Carmen’s home in Zapopan. His dark hair flops over his face, a shining flag.

Carmen’s mother steps up to him, brushes it out of his eyes. “M’ijo,” she says lovingly and then she looks to Carmen and smiles. A warmness spreads through Carmen, and I can feel it in my body, as if it happened to me. The memory is warm and heady, long buried within mi abuela.

The memory of her brother.

“No, no, abuela,” I say. “You have to stay. Please, stay. Why? Why didn’t you tell us about your brother?”

She says nothing.

The words come out of my mouth in Spanish. “No me dejas,” I say, and I hear the thrum of Renato’s wail echoing in my voice. Is that me? Is it him? I search Abuela’s face, but it’s Renato’s I see before me. I see him beg her again, a loop of misery turning endlessly, but it feels like he’s imploring me to stay. I feel Carmen’s regret and sorrow. Or mine. I can no longer tell. Please.
Just stay.

“Gabriela, what are you talking about?” Papá squeezes my hand, and it’s too hard, but it can’t bring me back, can’t rip me away from the surge of emotion and terror. “I don’t understand, I don’t have an uncle.”

She flatlines.

Papá sobs hard, a dark tearing noise, and there’s a desperate edge to it. He’s confused, looking from me to his dead mother. The chasm builds in my stomach. Between us. I know something my papá does not. I hate it. I hate that I have that stone of Renato’s name rattling in my head, that I have seen, that I have been, a Carmen that her son will never know.

I reach out and grab Carmen’s arm and I shake it, her bones limp in my hand. “Wake up,” I beg. “Please, don’t leave me.”

I should have said goodbye. I should have spent more time with her before the Transfer.

Papá is staring at me, and I have never been so far from him. I cannot repair this. I start howling in grief, and I don’t know what I’m crying over.

Regret. Mine or hers?

Sadness. Mine or hers?

Renato begs her to stay. I beg her to stay.

She lies still in the bed.

No me dejas.

Should You Download Someone Else’s Memories?

Two philosophers respond to Mark Oshiro’s short story “No Me Dejas.”

BY JENELLE SALISBURY AND SUSAN SCHNEIDER

APRIL 30, 2018 9:36 AM

What will you think about during the last moments of your life? Perhaps, as many suspect, your life flashes before your eyes, offering you a rapid swirl of images, events, and emotions that encapsulate your time on this Earth. But what if, during your last moments, your life flashed before someone else’s eyes?

A similar, naturally occurring phenomenon already exists. Eleven-year-olds Krista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined twins who were born with connected skulls. Their brains are fused together by a neural bridge that connects them at their respective thalami. The thalamus is the brain’s sensory relay center. It is like the brain’s postal delivery service (although orders of magnitude faster), for relying sensory information and motor commands. Remarkably, this neural bridge allows each girl’s thalamus to send and receive signals to and from the brain of her sister.

Some twins have a secret language, but Krista and Tatiana share sensations, literally seeing out of each other’s eyes and even hearing each other’s thoughts. One will laugh when the other is tickled, and while watching TV, only one needs to have her eyes on the screen. Both enjoy the show! This is their normal. (Their fascinating story is told in a new Canadian documentary, Inseparable.)

At some point in the future, could an A.I. company manufacture something akin to a neural bridge, allowing ordinary people to occasionally share their experiences? Maybe. Elon Musk recently announced the founding of Neuralink, a company that aims to put A.I. inside the head, merging humans and machines. Neural lace, the artificial hippocampus, brain chips to treat mood and memory disorders—these are just some of the mind-altering A.I. technologies already under development. While it may not be around the corner, a device akin to a temporary neural bridge—something that users can occasionally insert when they wish to share experiences—isn’t that far-fetched. Perhaps couples would long to try it on a date. At parties, people might even pass it around like a joint, to break the ice. But before you try the Vulcan mind meld for yourself, beware—this could be a bad trip. As professor Snape needed to remind Harry Potter, “The mind is not a book to be opened at will and examined at leisure.” If you could ever access the contents of someone else’s mind, it would take skill and time to sort through its complexities. Krista and Tatiana have had a lifetime of experience accessing each other’s minds. Without a deep history of shared signaling between your brains, it is unclear whether you and your friends would be able to interpret one another’s experiences.

Memories are not like files stored on a flash drive that can be plugged into any kind of operating system and appear the same to the user. They are dynamic and prone to reinterpretation. Information gleaned from a transferlike scenario would be unreliable, as the human brain is great at devising tricks for making sense of chaotic inputs. What you were able to access would likely be a distortion of the original memory—that is, if you were able to glean anything at all.

Even if it were possible, should regular people like you and me really want to share our raw, intimate moments, at the moment of death, without the opportunity to explain the memories? What if, as is likely, our memories are misinterpreted?

In Mark Oshiro’s gripping story, Carmen has no chance to contextualize the bits and pieces of her history that Gabriela receives. She is gone, even before her heart stops beating. Gabriela doesn’t seem to appreciate this until after the Transfer is complete, and the light is dying out of her grandmother’s eyes. No me dejas, she thinks (in English, don’t leave me). If you were given an instant to read the book of someone’s life, you might want to look them in the eyes afterward. You might want some help sorting through the information. But Gabriela is alone.

Of course, we can share memories with our grandchildren, and pass treasured secrets on through generations, without a neural-link procedure. But given that Carmen doesn’t communicate her story herself, Gabriela seems to be looking in on something private, personal—something she wasn’t supposed to see—when she sees her grandmother’s memories. Her brain was scrambling to make sense of the massive informational load, not being used to processing someone else’s memories. Amid this chaos, Gabriela loses track of whose body she is in. She feels pain, unsure whose pain it is.

Our connection to our own history is deeper than just encoding into our memories a register of events, like a videotape in our minds. We construct from our experiences a story of our lives wherein we figure in as both subject and agent. Without being the agent who made the decision to leave her brother, Gabriela’s access to the memory of doing so is detached, chaotic. She is an outsider looking in, through someone else’s eyes, someone else’s past, unsure how to process the experience she is having. She wanted to connect with her grandmother, but instead she may have just come to be more disconnected from herself.

This seems to be a recurring theme, in the age of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: oversharing but not really connecting. The tools we design to connect people may serve to further isolate us—not only from one another, but from ourselves, and our shared humanity. As the Transfer illustrates beautifully, the human connection is more than simply transferring information between two skulls. The story of your life wouldn’t be worth anything if it were merely kept on a hard drive and downloaded into the brain, like one downloads a program. That information would be disconnected from the person whose lived experience that story represents, and whose perspective it should be told from.

No me dejas. Don’t go. Gabriela had no idea the value of what she was missing until it was gone. The “memories” she was left with were only fragmented copies, incomparable to even just one final chance to look into her grandmother’s eyes and share their last moment together.

“Safe Surrender”

A new short story from the author of the award-winning The Book of the Unnamed Midwife.

BY MEG ELISON

MAY 29, 2018 10:16 AM

The laws are so old that they were written with fully human children in mind. Before first contact, two humans might make a fully Terran baby and still abandon it, because they didn’t have enough money or because one of their ancient tribal honor codes forbid them from breeding. It still happens, but nobody talks about it. Humans like to forget what they used to be. Now, safe surrender sites are known as places where hemis get dumped. Hemis like me.

I wasn’t interested in finding out anything about my birth parents for a long time. I figured it would be the same story that every other hemi shares: My parents were one human and one Pinner. We were the first generation of hybrids, and nobody knew what would become of us. A lot of us were put up for adoption and ended up in special schools while the governments of both planets sorted us out. Most of what we know about ourselves was supplied by other people, who were really just offering their best guess. A new race has no memory.

I didn’t want to know any more than that until I had my first taste of Pinner coffee (its real name is onging, which has a specific Pinner meaning that doesn’t translate to anything human well, so most people just say coffee), and with it, my first shaky steps into memories that didn’t belong to me. Once those thoughts started, I couldn’t stop.

First, my own identity document file. It includes the location: a hospital in Old San Jose, California. It tells me the approximate time that I was abandoned: between 2300 and 0400, within three days of my birth. But that date. That date. I was relinquished to the state the night the Pinner ambassador to Earth was shot and killed in San Francisco. Everything I needed to know was going to be wrapped up in the gauzy layers of people’s memories of that night. An abandoned hemi was nothing compared to that. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a connection—had the shooting helped them make their decision? Or had it just provided cover, a day when everyone was looking the other way?

I began with the hospital.

“The documents are perfectly in order.” The clerk’s disinterest practically staled the air, their voice over the speaker the droning whine of a giant, bored nose. “That case number is a safe surrender, logged on Aug. 1, 2096. Birth certificate was issued within 90 days, and if you’ve got the case file you can see that. Medical scans detected no infections or injuries. Good Apgar scores. The record is a little scant, but perfectly up to the legal standard. Of course.”

Of course.

Of course I had to press the nose just a little more. “So all surrenders are entered into the DNA database. How can I get access to that information?”

“You can’t. DNA is logged for the ongoing interbreeding genome project. The individual doesn’t have the right to access the results, under California law.”

“Why not? It’s my DNA.”

“Because it’s protected,” the nose shot back. “Some of your DNA is available to you, under the law. It used to be that you could view the entirety of your own code, but that was back before we really understood how that data worked. Now we know that most of it isn’t specific to you, because it belongs to other individuals. It’s a complex legal issue—if you had total access to your own genes, you might be invading the privacy of people who share your bloodline.” Their voice softened. “Look, I know it’s frustrating. But your DNA rights end where someone else’s begin. Besides, there are just things you’re better off not knowing.”

I got nowhere at all with them obviously. But the easiest part of the system to manipulate is people, and I wasn’t about to give up. What I needed was someone who was actually there on the night that I was surrendered. Of course, nobody stays in the same job for 25 years; finding a name took some digging on old social media sites that nobody uses anymore, and a good deal of cajoling a union rep. And then I had to wait.

It would be different, I think, if I at least knew one of my parents. Plenty of my friends only have one. That’s the joke, right? Hemis are always eyeballing every Pinner that walks by like, “Are you my mother?”

I’ve been lurking on one of the hemi forums again, reading about onging. Some hemis swear that when they take onging they see their parents, their whole bloodline, that it activates genetic memory or something. I didn’t believe it at all. Not at first. I thought nothing could do that. Certainly not any of the questionable substitutes available in the online markets. I’ve had the watered-down stuff, the half coffee–half Pinner hemibrews, and the straight-up knockoff junk. It doesn’t compare.

But when I get myself an unadulterated 12-credit cup of the real stuff, I can’t explain what happens. It’s like I’m outside myself, seeing someone else’s memories. It’s hazy, a blur through glass, but once I think I saw the journey to Earth. Just the blank blackness of space with a smear of stars, a tremulous feeling of heading into the unknown. I wonder if the memory belongs to my mother.

I queued up a movie while I waited for a ping back from the system. One of those uplifting orphan tales. I have a soft spot for stories about human orphans. They’re always thieving and discovering they’re secretly very privileged, which makes abandonment feel better, I bet. This one was so old it was in the feed for free. Why are these kids always singing? Watching the kid learn how to steal, because that’s all orphans can do, apparently, I started thinking about how easy it’d be to get caught doing that now. Every eye on the street is programmed to notice that sort of thing.

I coded the query myself: date and time and coordinates. Since it’s a public intersection in front of the hospital, I should have been able to get the footage. But after about an hour, I got a strange message from the city A.I.

Re: Query 587HK901

Sorry! I’ve been in service for over 20 years, and my memory access isn’t what it used to be. I need more specific data to find the information you are looking for. Please narrow your search parameters and try again. Thank you for your patience.

I love the older A.Is. They all talk like grandmothers to keep us from losing our tempers with them. It worked, though. I adjusted my tone, speaking the way I would to someone who doesn’t hear very well, and can’t always be trusted to call their grandson by his own name and not his father’s.

“OK. Try this. I’m trying to figure out who surrendered a child on that corner, at those coordinates, on that date and at that time. Narrow search to individuals carrying something.” The computer translated what I was saying into a string the old lady could use. I should have started this search a long time ago. I could have. My adoptive parents had never tried to hide my past from me. I remember the fragile smile on my mother’s face when they sat me down and asked me if I wanted to know more. But I didn’t know what was possible, or why I should want to find out.

She and my dad couldn’t have biological children. They had both been part of early delegations to the Pinner homeworld, before we knew that exposure could sterilize humans. It seems fitting after that trip took their future children from them that they’d adopt a couple of hemi kids. Adoption stories always have a little poetic justice to them.

The little-old-lady A.I. came back again, carrying enriched video files like cookies on a plate.

Re: Query 587HK901

Thank you again for your patience! There is video information that matches your search parameters. Have I fulfilled my task?

I should have confirmed, deference to your elders and all that, but I was too eager to see.

There were seven overlapping bits of footage, shot from multiple vantage points. Most of the eyes were mounted on the rooftops of nearby buildings, so there was no clear look at anyone’s face. Still, I could turn the view around in any direction, follow any individual I wanted. I told the lights to turn themselves off and hunched over my projector, rotating the uneven collection of cubes over my desk, peering into the beginning of my life.

The A.I. highlighted the people who walked alone and seemed to be carrying something. I could immediately eliminate the ones that I could tell were carrying pizzas or bags, an umbrella or a potted basil plant. There were two or three figures who might have been carrying a baby. I pulled them closer, examining, desperate to pry their arms apart and get a better look.

Was that a child? Could it be me? Nothing looked right. One turned out to be a puppy. I collapsed the footage back to its original size and spun it like a toy, sighing.

The highlighted figures glowed as they spun, like comets with long tails across the darker expanse of the night around them. I put my hand out and it stopped.

The A.I. had only highlighted the Pinners in the crowd.

I remember when I learned that not everyone could tell. In school, there was this period of innocence between kindergarten and the first year of bimodal/bilingual instruction when nobody knew anybody was different. We were practically a commercial for racial harmony, all of us holding hands and sharing toys, pushing one another on the gravity swings.

I knew I was a hemi. All hemis can tell the difference. We just know. But the percentage of humans who can tell is really small, like less than 10 percent of the population. My first-grade teacher was one.

On the first day of bi/bi school, we learned that she was one of the special ones. “It’s probably related to some vestigial ability from early hominids,” she said primly, enlarging the projection of the smiling hemi kid next to the human (who didn’t look quite as happy to be there.) “Perhaps developed back when the human genus was more diverse. Some humans like me have the ability to tell humans from hemis just by looking. Although humans and hemis appear the same on the outside, there are many things that make us different. And that’s great!”

There were five hemis in that class. The teacher didn’t point us out, but she didn’t have to. I didn’t understand until years later that she had announced her ability to us so that we’d understand exactly why she treated us the way she did. She wanted us to know that it wasn’t an accident. Her tone was different with us, her body language. We got in trouble more easily, and served harsher punishments. Everyone knew within that first week. Grosvenor, the infamous assassin, must have been one of those too. I wonder if the ability to tell is always accompanied by the certainty that one is better than the other.

People claim that it doesn’t matter where you come from or what your DNA looks like, because we’re all equal. But even the A.I. is biased.

I pulled apart the cubes of night from the hospital and looked again, picking out the shadowed humans. I told the A.I. to stop highlighting its suggestions and the Pinners stopped glowing, flattening the scene into a homogenous sea of unremarkable silhouettes. There. Two humans seemed to be carrying babies. One was headed toward the hospital and one seemed to be walking away. I pulled and pulled, trying to enlarge their faces. I couldn’t make out anything that could tell me anything I wanted to know. Nothing that turned that blur of features into a story.

I called up my caseworker, Mx. Evelyn, who did not remember me. She had to dig through her files for my name before exclaiming in mumsy cheer, “It’s been forever! How are you doing? Last record I have here is that you went into coding for medical scanners.”

“That’s right,” I confirmed, trying to sound casual. “You know what they say: It’s a living. I was wondering if I could come to your office and talk over some of the details of my entry into the system if you have time?”

She blew out a rough sigh. “Oh, man. I’m pretty swamped right now. It seems there are just so many hemis in need of placement these days.”

“I’ll be quick,” I promised. “I’ll bring you coffee.”

Her voice was hesitant, but acquisitive. “Pinner coffee?”

Pinner coffee is not coffee, obviously. But it is a powerful stimulant, even when diluted with water the way humans like it. It can’t be cultivated on Earth, so it’s fiercely expensive. It doesn’t work on human physiology the way it does for Pinners or hemis, but plenty of people still claim it works as a memory booster. Lately, I’ve been drinking too much of it, trying to stay awake and get to the bottom of myself. Why bother with DNA and hazy recollections if I can just drink it in? But it’s an imperfect and inexact thing. When I do sleep, I sometimes have dreams I can’t articulate or fully recall, though I wake up with my face wet like I’ve been crying through the night. I never pushed it this far before; it gives me the shakes to have more than two. My weak human half. Full humans just say it helps them find lost things, recall funny stories, and make them all misty when they’re midsip.

And it tastes pretty good with cream and sugar.

“Pinner coffee,” I agreed. “A big one. My treat.”

I showed up in the morning with one hot cup and one on ice. “I’ll drink whichever one you don’t,” I told her.

Mx. Evelyn reached out with grabby hands for the hot one. Good, I prefer it cold.

“So,” she said between lip-smacking sips. “What brings you back to me?”

“Mx. Evelyn, I’m trying to find out more about the people who surrendered me.”

“Your parents.”

“My parents,” I agreed.

Mx. Evelyn was already nodding, leafing through the antiquated holofile system piled up on her desk. The image glitched and lagged as she tried to pull up the right year.

“Here we go, here we go. Hm. Hemi. Abandoned within three days of birth—I think I’m the one who decided your legal birthdate. Tough to recall. Adopted by human parents. Evidence of thriving at every appointment … ” She was moving quickly through the years of my life, refamiliarizing herself with the highlights.

“Right, yes. I’m actually more interested in any specific information you might have about the night I was surrendered. I know that the parent has the opportunity to share any information they might have that—”

Her finger froze on the display. “Oh, you were surrendered on the night of the assassination.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “I was. I know it was a long time ago, but a lot of people remember vividly where they were that night. They’re always telling the story. I’m hoping someone might remember something else about their experience. Something to do with my surrender.”

Mx. Evelyn’s mouth pulled down at the corners, and she stared off into the distance, following the thread of memory into the fog. “Yes, I remember. I was in a bar when the news broke.” She caught my eye with a self-conscious chuckle. “That was back in my wilder days. I remember the sound of all of those phones around me suddenly pinging at the same time, like church bells, when everyone got the alert. You always know that’s going to be something bad.”

“It was the first Pinner death on Earth. A violent crime. A high-profile assassination, right? You all must have been worried.”

Mx. Evelyn sipped her coffee. “Very tense atmosphere. You know, we didn’t know much of your people back then. We thought there might be some kind of reprisal. I mean, it soon became clear that Grosvenor was a terrorist, a radical acting alone, but of course we worried that the Pinner homeworld might hold us all responsible for the death.”

I nodded, bringing my own cup to my lips. There is a kind of weight to a history that defines you but did not happen to you. I’ve been hearing this story my whole life. It was time to write my own.

“Mx. Evelyn, I’ve been reviewing the outdoor security footage from that night. There aren’t any Pinners on the street carrying babies. Just a couple of humans.”

She fingered her files nervously, sending them glitching and fizzling as the computer tried to figure out what she wanted. “I mean, it is technically possible your human parent surrendered you. Just very unlikely. Statistically. I’m not saying that humans never do it, but—”

“But the laws that govern how babies can be surrendered are much older than first contact. So humans must have done it to their own children, their own fully human children, well before the Pinners ever arrived. Enough to necessitate a law.” I was staring her down but she wouldn’t look at me.

“Grosvenor was opposed to Pinner-human hybridity, did you know that?” I tried to make my voice sound casual.

She fiddled with her holofile again. “I did know that. There was a lot written about his motivations, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Everybody wants to understand why, in cases like that. But of course we don’t ever really know.”

I knew she was talking about the assassination and not why my parents abandoned me. But the two were so tangled up that I was beginning to see them as one event. One night a human claims a Pinner life, and miles away another human releases their claim on their half-Pinner child. It looks like balance, but life and death both keep sloppy books. And we don’t ever really know why.

“Is there anything in the file that might help me make sense of the video I’ve got? Anything at all?”

She leafed through the pages. “It looks like the duty nurse was away from the station quite a bit that evening. Probably glued to the news. There’s nothing here, really. Just bare bones.”

I thanked her and stood to leave. I turned back when she said my name.

“Humans aren’t what we used to be, you know. When we needed those laws. Or when Grosvenor shot Lngren. We’ve come so far, mostly thanks to our contact with Pinners. You kids are kind of our peace bridge. You know?”

Her eyes were shining and I could tell she was looking for me to absolve her, of Lngren’s death 20 years ago, of her own gentle bigotry. Had anything really changed since that night?

I smiled at her. “Sure, Mx. Evelyn.”

It’s enough. The door whispered as it closed between us. The coffee was weak. I caught snatches of something in my peripheral vision, something that looked like twin moons, but would not come clear. I threw the empty cup in the trash and walked away.

From the Bi/Bi Reader, copyright 2104:

Humans are regarded as one of the most adaptable species in the known galaxy. Their unique physiology advantages them to endure extreme heat and cold, to survive the loss of limbs and infectious disease, and to travel to different worlds. When examined in this context, the human history of violent conflict is very understandable.

In contrast, Pinners cannot live away from their homeworld for extended periods of time without risking their lives. Their physiology does not allow them endurance for extreme temperature, and they are considerably more fragile than their human counterparts. As a result, their explorations into the space surrounding them are considerably more limited, and there are no off-world Pinner settlements equivalent to the Mars colonies like Musk or New Nairobi, or even the International Space Station. Nonviolent by both nature and cultural heritage, Pinners have no tradition of war and their delicate physiology renders them incapable of surviving wounds sustained in violent conflict.  

Pinner-Human hybrids commonly inherit the best traits from both species. They’re highly adaptable like humans, with the sensitivity and precision that are special to Pinners.

Our diversity makes us stronger! The future of Pinner-human relations is uniquely enhanced by the existence of our shared descendants.

The truth is there hasn’t been that much research. We first-generation hybrids were the first of our kind, something entirely new. Nobody knows how to tell you that science doesn’t know who you are yet. We were born without a history, and innocent of a collective memory. The first generation. They weren’t even sure if we’d be able to breed, until one of us did it. A lot of folks thought we were a mistake that shouldn’t exist—for hemis to be another sterile Earth hybrid like mules or ligers would have suited people like Grosvenor just fine.

When I looked back, I could see how my parents had gently talked around it when Rainey and I were young. They never brought up the possibility of grandchildren, or delivered the traditional solemn lectures about birth control in our teens. Mom talked a lot about how her career had always been her first priority.

“So when I found out I couldn’t have children, I wasn’t even that upset. I hadn’t met your dad yet, and I wasn’t really planning for kids. I just loved my work so much. I did exactly what I wanted to do. You guys were just a bonus to that.”

Dad was gruffer, but still avoided saying it outright. “Kids are expensive,” he’d say, looking over the peculiar medical expenses incurred by bodies that aren’t in the books yet. “You have a lot more fun traveling without them. You get to be free!”

I used to think he was just protecting himself against his own disappointment. I didn’t understand until much later that my parents were trying to keep our hopes in check.

Mx. Evelyn hadn’t been the key I’d been hoping for. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Human memory is an even more unreliable narrator than the A.I. it gave birth to. But later that same night, my comm lit up again. It was the union rep. They’d found me someone who would talk.

The nurse’s name was Darryl Stanner, and he was one of the oldest humans I had ever seen. His face loomed elephantine in the display, my comm still zoomed in on the old A.I.
footage. I quickly pinched the picture in, looking away from his dilated pores and the pooling skin that hung below his eyes. When I looked back, he was manageable. Human scale. Fine.

“Hello? Are you there? I can see you, but I can’t hear anything.”

“Hello! Hello, Mx. Stanner. Hi. I don’t know if your rep told you, but I’m trying to find out any information you might have about a safe surrender. Um, my safe surrender. Is that OK with you?”

He blinked a few times, slowly. “I have the file here, it came through my old rep. I know what you’re after, but I’m afraid my memory’s not what it used to be. I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you.”

“I’m just asking if you’ll try,” I said, smiling. “I’ll be happy to leave you alone if you don’t remember anything at all. But I’m hoping you might recall some details of that evening, because I was left on the night that Ambassador Lngren was shot.”

“Oh,” he said, his enormous caterpillar eyebrows rolling up over the ridge in his skull. “Of course I remember that night. Terrible thing, just terrible.”

“So you remember the shooting?”

“Like it was yesterday,” he breathed, his glacial speech speeding to a furious crawl. “It was all anybody could talk about. It was like this big secret was out. The Pinners knew what we were. What we are. What a world. What a shock.”

“Do you remember the child who was left at the hospital that night?”

“Oh yeah, of course.”

“Really?” I tried not to sound too eager, but I’m sure he could see my lean forward, pressing toward the past. “Can you tell me what you remember?”

He sighed, sounding as tired as time itself. “That night was total chaos. Everyone thought we were going to war. But that was back before we knew how weak Pinners are. How fragile. The woman who dropped you off was afraid she’d break you. I never saw someone carry a baby so carefully. Like you were an eggshell.”

I nodded, more soberly than I felt. “Anything you can tell me about her would be very much appreciated.”

He looked down at his lap. “I mean, she was scared. Like we were all scared. Big eyes. I think she was wearing a sweater that belonged to someone else. Just so vulnerable, like she’d break in two if I was mean to her.”

“But she was human,” I said, almost more to myself than to him. “Not vulnerable like a Pinner, but human?”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, she was as human as I am.”

“Did she say something about what had happened? Did you two talk about the news at all?”

Stanner’s huge floating head shook slowly, the edges disappearing when he got out of scanner range. “She didn’t have anything to say. Just that real scared way about her. She was real young. Pretty. But I just felt so bad for her. Pinners dropped off hemi kids all the time. But her? I could tell it was breaking her heart to do it. It’s just not the same with humans, you know.”

I wanted him to tell me she was remarkable—that her eyes were a color he had never seen before. That she wore half a broken necklace. That she promised she’d come back for me. That she’d said, “Someday,” with a hopeful and faraway look.

“Was she alone? Did someone drop her off, or pick her up, that you saw?”

Stanner shrugged. “Not that I saw. I was pretty distracted. You know, with everything going on.”

I imagined the halls and waiting rooms of the hospital, doctors and nurses and patients clustered around different screens and feeds, whispering, wondering. Me, the eggshell future of two races tucked against Stanner’s chest. Was I sleeping? Did I cry for my human mother? This piece of my life did not belong to me; only someone else could hold it. And what he held, instead, was the moment in history that overshadowed me.

“Thank you for trying, Mx. Stanner. I really appreciate it.” My voice was trembling.

“Don’t take it too hard, kid. You know you’re better off not remembering any of that. She wanted to be forgotten. Let it go.”

A quick swipe of my trembling fingers ended the call. His face vanished, leaving only reflection in the dark glass. I did not say goodbye.

Whatever gift of memory Pinner coffee has been trying to give me, it can’t be hers. My mother was human, and she wanted me to have nothing that was hers. I’ve lost her, but my father is out there somewhere. He’s in the black recess of space, or the last few drips of darkness in my cup.

I tried to go back to the beginning. I tried to do what the human orphans in stories do: go on a quest. I tried to follow the roads of memory and go back. Other orphans find out that they’re secretly royalty. They find out that their parents loved them but gave them up because of dire circumstance. They realize that their real family is the one who chose them. They ask for more.

All I have are fragments of memory, and none of them my own. I have the story of the night my mother abandoned me, the same night when a Pinner was first killed by a human. I have a forgetful old nurse and a buggy old A.I., both of whom were there and both of whom were too distracted by programming of one kind or another to bear witness for me. I have a father who can’t live on this world and must have returned to one I’ve never seen. There is no more.

I arrived on the Pinner homeworld two days ago. The people are not at all what I expected. They welcomed me like I’d been missed. They told me my chances of being sterilized by the radiation here are 50-50. They also told me that there is a registry here for hemis to find their Pinner parents, but that’s just a place to start. What we’re looking for can’t be found in a list of names. Instead, most of us have started taking fresh onging at full strength and connecting to the reservoir of collective memory that it unlocks. Drinking it has helped me remember a place and a people that belong to me, though I’ve never known them.

Memory, like DNA, is made up mostly of pieces that belong to other people. I sent a message back to Earth, to every other hemi I know.

I told them I’m halfway home.

 

Oppression of the Future in “Safe Surrender”

An expert on technology and bias responds to Meg Elison’s new short story.

BY LAURA MOY

MAY 29, 2018 10:18 AM

As technology advances, will we use it to promote equity, or to serve and preserve systems of oppression? This question is central to Meg Elison’s “Safe Surrender,” which explores a future in which humans are in regular contact with extraterrestrials called Pinners, who exchange diplomats, trade goods, and even interbreed with Earthlings. In “Safe Surrender,” a grown-up human-Pinner hybrid (a “hemi”) struggles to find their identity and make sense of their origin—surrendered at birth by a mother who did not want or perhaps felt she could not care for or protect a hybrid infant.

In Elison’s not–totally foreign, not-so-distant future, the racial prejudices, inequities, and oppression that plague humankind today map easily onto extraterrestrials. Hemis are treated by many as “a mistake that shouldn’t exist” and frequently are abandoned as infants. Most humans can’t identify a hemi just by looking at them, but those who can often disfavor them in subtle or unsubtle ways. The protagonist recalls having once had a teacher who described the “many things that make us different” as “great,” yet exhibited clear bias against hemi children. Like black children today, hemis “got in trouble more easily, and served harsher punishments.”

Just as the teacher scrutinizes hemi students constantly, the government of the future also keeps a close watch via a ubiquitous video surveillance network. Footage from the network is monitored in real time by an A.I. on the lookout for suspicious behavior, a more muscular version of the Domain Awareness System currently operating in New York City. At one point, the protagonist remarks that hemi kids could never learn to be thieving street urchins like characters in old orphan stories because “[e]very eye on the street is programmed to notice that sort of thing.” And footage from those cameras isn’t transient or temporary; it’s stored—and searchable—forever.

It might seem like those eyes are watching everyone equally, but like surveillance of the past and present, they’re not. History has taught us that surveillance apparatuses of incumbent powers tend to focus disproportionately on those with a relative lack of power, and surveillance in Elison’s future is no different. When the protagonist runs a query of video captured on the day of their abandonment, searching for clues about their parentage, the A.I. highlights only the Pinners in the crowd, an assumption that reflects an Earthling bias.

Elison’s treatment of DNA also reflects on how humans of the future (and of today) will have to make deliberate decisions about whether to use technological advances to feed or to starve oppression. Seeking pieces to the puzzle of their birth, the protagonist requests access to their DNA. The request is partially denied. “Some of your DNA is available to you, under the law,” explains the clerk. But “most of it isn’t specific to you, because it belongs to other individuals. It’s a complex legal issue—if you had total access to your own genes, you might be invading the privacy of people who share your bloodline.” It’s a point that brings to mind the Golden State Killer. After a decadeslong search, law enforcement finally arrested a suspect in April after submitting the killer’s DNA to a small DNA-analysis company—with a free genealogy website—called GEDmatch. GEDmatch linked the submitted DNA to genetic data that some distant relatives had already shared with the service, and the suspect was tracked down from there. The suspect, Joseph DeAngelo, had never used the service (and may not have even known the distant relatives who did use it), but that didn’t stop him from being traceable.

It’s easy to see the good in the use of familial DNA to do something like catch a serial killer. But what happens when the wrong person is picked up on a familial DNA partial match and, as one journalist warned years ago, “the imperfect technology starts ruining lives”? Worse, what happens when businesses start looking for ways to use customers’ or applicants’ DNA to better inform important decisions? Imagine, for example, if lenders could find out what borrowers’ chances were of developing a devastating chronic illness. Existing laws don’t sufficiently protect against this. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prohibits some forms of discrimination based on an individual’s DNA profile, but not all. The Americans With Disabilities Act prohibits some forms of discrimination based on an individual’s disability, but not based on their likelihood of developing a disability.

To try to prevent this form of technology-supported discrimination and injustice from taking place, lawmakers might expand on existing nondiscrimination laws. In Elison’s future, lawmakers have done this, which seems to be good. And they have gone a step further: They have directly restricted access to DNA—even to one’s own DNA. But hemis like the protagonist have their DNA logged by the government for an “ongoing interbreeding genome project.” This raises alarm bells. What does the government know about genetic distinctions between humans, hemis, and Pinners, and how might that information be misused to serve or preserve interspecies inequity? Just as it used Census information to put Japanese Americans in internment camps in World War II, could the government be equipping itself with this type of data in case it needs it later to fuel a massive anti-Pinner or anti-hemi effort? Does having the data make that more likely to happen?

There are, to be sure, positive uses of racial and ethnic genetic data. But Elison’s story reminds us that when we use science and technology to categorize people, we should pause to reflect on what, exactly, is driving us to want to identify the differences, and ask whether the motivation is something sinister. As Elison’s protagonist muses, “I wonder if the ability to tell [the difference between a hemi and a human] is always accompanied by the certainty that one is better than the other.”

“A Brief and Fearful Star”

A new short story from the author of the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties.

BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

JUNE 27, 2018 7:30 AM

Mama did not talk about her journey west very much; the circumstances had to be right. When she did—in the electric moments before rainfall, if a rabbit crossed clockwise against our path, if she found me flipping through the battered almanac from the year of my birth—she described it like a painting she was viewing through a fever.

“The light,” she said once, when we encountered a set of twigs that had fallen into the shape of a cross. “It was like being underwater, all blue and soft and bright.”

“It was so cold and I was sick with you,” she said another time, digging a splinter out of my palm with a pocketknife. “Everything felt wrong. I was very afraid.”

Then, once, just before I turned 10, when a brush fire lit up a distant ridge and it burned through the night: “Your father drove our wagon, of course. Sometimes I would lean against him and look up at the sky and—”

The way her eyes went empty, it felt like watching her die. The next year, when I did, all I could think was how it felt like watching her talk about the sky.

Before the light left her, we lived—just the two of us—on a patch of prairie. Our house was the center of it, a pip in a magnificent apple.

With no natural borders save the creek, the boundaries of our land seemed to move every time I visited them. I often imagined that my right eye was soaring above me, clutched in the talon of a large and terrible bird, the earth below expanding and contracting like a heartbeat.

The sky was open and alive above us, too. Storms boiled across the sky in the summer, and in the winter the mean snow landed on my face and refused to melt. I loved our fragment of wilderness. Every season we’d get a few traders—offering us cinnamon, flour, silver hand mirrors, gingham, chirping automata that sang and told the future—but otherwise we lived untouched, binary stars in our own private universe.

I was a nervous child. I gasped when flint was struck, and when sparks flew whimsically out of the hearth. Mama tried to help—once, she caught the spark and showed it to me; a speck of ash marring the planetary surface of her palm—but I could not explain that, while I understood the principles of the thing, there was something about the erratic arc of it; the suddenness, the wild, alien dive, that awoke a terror within me. There were other fears, too: a crevice in the wall near my bed that corralled a beam of moonlight into my room at certain times of the month; the way water spiraled around gullies and divots. It was a kind of motion, a kind of gravity, the way the light bended to its own ends. I felt I knew terrors that lingered just beyond my vision; as if their very existence was seared into my cells. At night, when I cried, Mama came to me and weighed me down with her torso until calmness filled me. “Come back to me, my mouse,” she’d say.

There was something else that haunted me, too. When I lay in bed at night, I perceived giant, ancient creatures moving just outside our walls; rumbling and snarling, darkening the windows, blotting out the moon. Though they lingered just beyond my vision I knew them to be true, though I could not understand them.

“There’s something outside,” I told her, the first time I sensed them.

“There’s nothing,” she said. “I’ve been sitting by the window.”

“They’ve always been here,” I said. “Monsters.”

She brought me, then, a small box, and from it removed a claw, a set of teeth, a slender bone of rock, all things she’d pulled from the land on which we lived. “This is all that’s left of them,” she said. “I know it feels like we are the first people on this land, but we have been preceded by monsters and men alike.”

I had questions about those monsters, and those men. “But outside—”

“They’re gone, mouse. They were here but they’re not anymore.” And for a moment, calmness filled my fear, like a gorge flooding with rainwater. But when it abated, the gaping ache in my chest seemed to me how animals must feel, how they must have always felt, lowing for the muscle and ferocity of their mothers.

I don’t remember coming to the farmstead. Mama had joined the caravan west swollen with the promise of me, and I was born, over two days, along the trail that led us here. (‘What of my stars?,’ I asked her once. ‘You moved beneath the sky as you were born, she said, and therefore have no clear celestial map.’) “It was a mad time,” she said. “Everything seemed alive. The trees and brush made promises they could not keep. The wagon moaned in its sleep. Animals spoke to us. An oxen told me I’d have a little girl. Even Bonnie chatted. She told on your papa when he broke my mother’s clockwork map; the one from Switzerland.”

“Bonnie doesn’t talk,” I said, though my voice curdled with doubt. As if to underline my confusion, Bonnie emerged from a shadow and sat before both of us, her tail twitching with purpose but otherwise silent as you’d expect.

“She did, once,” Mama said. “But the day you were born, she shut right up.”

Mama made jokes but sometimes it was hard to say what the joke was about. Was the joke that my body silenced Bonnie, or that Bonnie made words, or that Bonnie cared about me at all?

Sometimes, I try to imagine that I remember the dioramas that moved around us when I was still tangled up in her. I imagine that the walls of her fine strong animal body glow with light, and that I can hear the soft and muffled testimonies, the confessions and laughter, the camaraderie of the wagon train.

(‘Do you know she’s a banker’s daughter?’

‘The rivers are too high.’

‘Even bankers have daughters.’

‘Did he tell them about the tack?’

‘The sky is the color of milk, and it is not promising.’

‘Olga promised me.’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Don’t you know they’ll stay that way if you don’t stop?’)

And then, behind their chatter, something terrible. Something in the sky, burning.

Even on my 11^th birthday, Mama took me with her to move the cattle, who were pulling up dirt and refusing new grasses. As I followed her outside, I wondered if my father had ever imagined his wife and girl-child alone out here (‘We each need a hatchet, us and the baby,’ my father had told her), the wagon turned to dwelling, the cattle’s calves grown and sired and birthed and died many times over.

Mama disappeared over the hill with a switch in her hand. I watched but did not follow. The horizon was milky and amber, and I saw the beginning of a figure there —a wagon, a dark shape against the light. When Mama returned with the herd, their shadows had joined into a single many-legged creature. I stroked their velvety pelts as they trotted by. (Mama had been rich before she came married by father and came west, though you’d never know it by her labor. ‘What did it mean to be rich?’ I asked her once. ‘It meant money had too much meaning and yet none at all, she said.)

“Someone’s coming,” I said, pointing. She squinted against the light and then nodded. “I hope it’s a trader,” she said. She didn’t say who else it might be. When we went inside, Mama gave me a cake she’d made special—cinnamon, raisins, a glug of rum from the bottle hidden beneath the floorboards. I pinched off a little and put it on the floor for Bonnie, who sniffed it contemptuously. From the wall, a brown mouse dashed and seized the cake, bounding back to safety while Bonnie looked on. She did not hunt anymore. She was bony and slow; too old to chase after the mice who were endlessly birthing new mice to replace them. What could she do to stem that tide? They existed with impunity. Mama huffed through her nose like she did when she was displeased; she did not like that I’d helped the mouse eat, and she did not like that the mice existed at all.

When the shadow arrived, just after noon, it was, indeed, a man bearing a wagon of goods. We had never met him before. We saw so few men that each one was like a minor nightmare, as strange and unknowable as the creatures that I saw outside my windows. This man kept his beard shorter than some of the others, but I did not like the broadness of his shoulders, which seemed so natural on my own mother but so alien on him. “Flour?” he called, as he pulled the horse to stop. “Bacon, seeds, cloth, coffee? I have some more exotic wares, too, if that interests you.”

“Exotic?”

“A brazen head I picked up in Kansas City. A jade necklace.” He glanced upward, as if to aid his recollection. “Tinctures, tonics, an astrolabe, and a pneumatic gewgaw that recites Scripture.”

Mama rubbed the back of her neck. “The normal goods will do,” she said. “Come in; I’ll take a look.

Inside, he rolled a pack open on our table so that we could examine his offerings. “I have more in the wagon,” he said, “if this doesn’t satisfy. I could—”

“My husband is out with the cattle,” Mama said brusquely, to discourage the question. She examined the offerings solemnly as a scholar, peeling a corner of fabric from its bolt, smelling a bottle of oil. I sniffed the oil, too, though I did not know what I was smelling for; it was pungent and unpleasant, in a pleasant kind of way. The man glanced around the room at our three hatchets, our iron stove, Bonnie snoozing on the quilt, the daguerreotype of my father on the dresser. I did not like his staring, that he was seeing so many things and drawing his own conclusions about us.

“It’s my birthday,” I told him.

He turned and appraised me over the sharp angle of his cheekbones. “Perhaps your mother might like to get you a present?”

Mama glanced at me, and I looked at the table, which held so many strange and specific objects that it felt like a test before a cosmic judge. I ignored the doll—a childish thing, and I was not a child anymore—and the thread, the spices, the candles, and the recent almanac. Then Mama pushed aside the doll and I saw what rested beneath it: a short-handled knife the length of my hand. She lifted the knife and examined it from every angle; she then balanced it on her finger, as if an alchemist performing an obscure science. Her mysteries filled the room; both the man and I watched her with a stillness. She nodded.

Outside, the trader returned his pack to the wagon and extended his hand to me. “May I show you something?” he said.

I looked up at Mama, who was standing in the doorway. She nodded, and I handed him the knife. He kicked a small rut into the dirt and lopped off the head of a thick of grasses next to the house. He tucked them into the divot and then lifted the knife upward. “Knives do more than cut,” he said. The blade caught the sunlight and brought it down toward the earth. The motion of it—the slow turn of the metal, the way the light sharpened to a point and then fell toward us, toward me—made me gasp and buckle. I realized I was screaming after it began, and I ran into Mama’s arms like the child I was.

The man stood over what he had created. Smoke curled into the air. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were afraid of fire.” He stamped out the fingerlings of flame and offered it back to me, handle-first.

When I did not move, Mama took it from him. “She’s not afraid of fire,” she said. “But thank you.” I listened to the rest of the transaction buried in her skirts; the oil and knife were now ours.

He mounted his wagon and did not wave goodbye, as so many of the others had before.

Mama watched him as he retreated. She worked her jaw as if chewing a knot of sinew, but I did not ask what she was thinking about. When he was swallowed up by the horizon, she went inside to apply the oil to the baseboards. “Perhaps it’ll discourage the mice,” she said.

Soon we would discover that she was wrong. Attracted to the sharp scent, they soon began creeping toward the stains in curiosity. She cornered and caught them in jars and drowned them in buckets of water. Some escaped, scuttled back into the walls, only to sire more, but she kept at the impossible labor. There was something about seeing her, sleeves rolled up, heavy with the task, that filled me with joy. How I loved her, my mother, and the stories within her.

(My father loved my mother’s dark hair, the smoke-smell of it, the way it frayed and curled into a lustrous halo around her head. At night, he whispered into it, ‘My blessing, my blessing.’ This was a secret, even from her.)

The fever came up on her a few days later, quick and hard as a storm. She pressed a damp rag to the back of her neck upon waking, and by evening she lay on the bed chattering and moaning. I stroked her head and kissed her face. She slept, and woke, and slept.

“Mama,” I said to her. “You must get better because you still haven’t taught me how to make the cake. I don’t know how to butcher an animal yet. You haven’t told me who lived on this land before us.”

She did not speak, but instead drew a slow and shaking finger from her sternum to her navel.

When she woke for the last time, her pupils were so wide and black I felt like I would fall into them if I wasn’t careful. It was as if she had dipped below the water’s surface, and in that in-between place she saw everything she had ever known.

“It was a star,” she said to me, faint as a heartbeat. “The star came and everything moved.”

“A star?” I asked. She had never spoken of a star, not once in the entirety of my life. Yet suddenly I realized that I had known of the star, that my fears and dreams were star-shaped, that the star had been burning a terrible hole through me ever since the day of my birth.

“Everything moved to the side and all was clear,” she said. “I could see everything.”

“Mama,” I said into the dampness of her skin. “Mama. I still haven’t learned.”

She kneaded my hand weakly and looked at me from beneath heavy lids. “You are my mir—” A mirror, a miracle? The word never ended. She descended into herself and did not emerge, though I lay on top of her, to bring her back from where she’d gone.

Her absence gaped, and through the wound of it you could see everything: the horror of my circumstances, the sharp cramps of grief that appeared and disappeared and reappeared again. Her body was still and pale, and I kept thinking of parsnips and the way they slept in the soil. I could not bring myself to bury her. At night, the shadows passed by the windows, and I lay breathing and staring at the ceiling, praying them away.

The third night after her death, something killed one of the cattle. I heard it just before I fell asleep: a wet and curdled sound, like a calf being born in reverse. In my dreams, the star flew over the earth like a bird, leaving a black burning trail in its wake. When I woke, I was damp, my mouth hot with stink and gritty sweetness. Bonnie was sitting on my chest, tail twitching. She dropped a dead mouse onto my chest, and stared at me with serenity and purpose. I sat up and flicked the corpse to the floor. Bonnie dropped down and scooped her paw into the hole in the wall.

I took a deep breath and lay down on my belly to peek inside. Tucked to the right of the entrance was a tiny nest of fluff and thread; in it, a small pack of baby mice, crawling over each other. They were pink and cricket-small, their eyes dark as blood blisters and shut against the world.

“Bonnie,” I said, laying my cheek to the floor. “You terrible creature. Now there are a dozen orphans in this house, instead of just one.”

Could I lure them out, nurse them, somehow? From the back of the cupboard, I pulled the vial of oil Mama had used to try to dispel the mice, the one they had loved so much. When I dribbled it on the floor next to the nest, the baby mice scattered like water in a griddle, as if the scent carried some terrible story. “I’m sorry,” I said into the wall, and left them to make their own way.

I went outside and stood over the cow’s mauled body for a long while—listening to the flies, watching their beetle-black bodies alight on its bloodied flank. The wind over the grass sounded like the way Mama used to idly rasp the onionskin pages of her Bible when she was thinking about something blasphemous. I didn’t know what she hadn’t taught me. I’d have to learn another way.

Bonnie was curled up on Mama’s still chest, purring softly. I packed my knife, the sampler she had brought with her from Virginia with the embroidered alphabet, the remaining cake. I kissed Mama’s waxy forehead and gestured to Bonnie as I left.

“Do you want to go outside?” I asked her. She didn’t move, and I closed the door behind me.

I walked to where I’d known the edge of our land to be, and for the first time in my life, stepped beyond it. It was still early; my shadow was long and cut the path before me. I could not tell if I was casting it or following it, or if there was any difference at all.

When I crested the ridge half a day later, I saw a coyote worrying over something in the dust in the valley below. She glanced up to where my silhouette met the sky but didn’t move from her tiny plot. I thought: She must be starving, to not run from me.

Down among the rocks, I lifted my skirts and waded into the river. The water seized the cotton and tried to carry me away. (Though my mother never said, this was what had happened to my father, I knew. The river wrapped hungry fingers through his trousers and shirt and took him under in half a breath.) I slipped the twisting layers off and watched them float away, like a drowned woman. In that moment, I imagined the bird lifting my eye into the air and saw myself from above—the way my hair was sliding out of its pins, the nature and shape of my wildness. When I returned to my body, I was holding a silver fish who muscled this way and that.

On shore, I knocked a rock into him until he stopped moving, then dug the sweet flesh off the bone.

I moved slowly in the sun, stripped down and sore. The coyote watched me from a distance—following me, I guessed. Waiting for me to die.

I slept with the knife in my hand and woke from the sleep with a bolt of knowledge. When I looked up, catastrophe had been replaced by a sense of ferocious, unimaginable calm. My body bent under the memory of Mama’s weight pressing on me in the dark.

Above me, in the sky, a beautiful fragment of light rippled through the darkness. It was, like my grief, two things: a bright, white ball of fire and an incandescent, milky trail, both cutting open the night. I did not know it was coming and yet I had known all along. It was awe and primal, searing terror, like crossing a landscape you had only imagined, a landscape you couldn’t possibly have understood until you stood at its precipice.

Everything moved. For the briefest of breaths, a curtain twitched. I saw the creatures, my creatures, for the first time with clarity: heads and tails like skinks, but the size of 10 oxen. Some stood together, docile as cows. Others gazed upward at the light in the sky. They had eyes like polished stone and teeth like the teeth my mother had once collected—terrible, large as my fist. (They lived and died and no man gazed upon them.) Then I saw a cluster of men being slaughtered by other men, blood spilling black into the soil and illuminated by the star, the air frenzied with violence and horses. (I did not belong here, on this land. The way was paved for me and though I did not pave it, I followed it nonetheless. How did I never know? Had I always known?)

Then, I saw a young woman kneeling on the ground and working a knife into her breast with the steady rhythm of embroidery, as if she was trying to set something within her loose. She gazed into the sky, and then turned and looked at me, and her mouth made the shapes of words that I perceived though I could not understand them. (The radiance is the passage.) Then another young woman, in a room so white my eyes burned. (I would never live to see her.) Then the curtain fell back, and I felt something slacken within me, as though I was about to soil myself. Everything that I was dropped out from my center and was replaced with molten iron.

The coyote trotted past. Her muzzle was stained with blood, and a dying hare hung limply from her mouth. She dropped it at my feet and then ran. Its sides shuddered and I could see what was beneath, the slickness of muscle and bone.

(‘Child,’ the hare said. Not with its mouth, but with its wound; like the sing-song of stale air exhaled from a deep cave. ‘Child. Welcome. We’ve been waiting.’

Behind me, I heard the grasses rustle. ‘Go home. Your mother is there and waiting. Go home.’

Beneath me, tunneling moles cried out like a tinny chorus. ‘It’s here, it’s here, it’s here again.’)

I lay down on the moonlit prairie and listened until sleep wreathed me. Tomorrow, I would be born into the morning.

If I had dreamt that night, I imagine it would have been with an understanding of the past: my young mother, her pregnant belly swollen with my small limbs and her wide eyes brimming with the dark sky and its terrible star. The chattering animals, the heaving ribs of the wagons, the lying flora and prophetic fauna. The architecture of her spasms, her body laboring against the cold and the loneliness. Or possibly I would have dreamt of the future: a young woman waking from her own dream in some white and eerie palace, a sigil burning high above her, splitting the sky in two. Or perhaps I would have dreamt some in-between place: destiny as a city on a hill. My mother carrying me down one of its many avenues, and then my heavy footsteps as I walk that avenue alone.

But I did not dream after the star appeared in the sky. I would never dream again.

Could the Experiences of Our Ancestors Be “Seared Into Our Cells”?

A science journalist responds to Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “A Brief and Fearful Star.”

BY ERIKA HAYASAKI

JUNE 27, 2018 7:31 AM

Illustration Doris Liou

Our memories are made up of the stories we come to believe about our past, about how we got here and who we are, a running inner-narrative of scenes, summary, and anecdotes colored with bits of truth and speculation. We tend to define our lives through largely made-up memories, to decipher what makes us resilient, or what makes us weak.

There’s something seductive in believing we could also inherit memories in a biological sense, too. An ancestor passing down the experience of endurance or trauma, for example, transmitting traces of a distant past that does not belong to us and yet might be built into us before we are born. A coding that primes descendants to fear, to cope with, to prepare for, or to survive through the same perils. It makes for an uncomfortable solace, thinking that the memories of generations before may reside within our genes. It gives us explanations.

I think of stories I’ve been told about my grandmother in 1945 Japan: how she scooped up her two young children, one in each arm, and fled bombs dropping over her city during World War II, while my grandfather was stationed away in the fight. It feels plausible, and poetic, to think that the horrors she endured, the courage she summoned in the face of these challenges while protecting my aunt and uncle, were passed onto my father when he was born, and then to me, becoming “seared” into my own being at a kind of molecular level, as Carmen Maria Machado alludes to in her haunting short story, “A Brief and Fearful Star.” My grit may be linked to my grandmother’s experiences, or my angst.

It’s this kind of psychoanalytical thinking that makes a nascent, uneven, and controversial scientific field known as epigenetic inheritance so alluring. Though it deals more narrowly with exploring whether experience-specific changes to the ways a parent’s genes are expressed can be passed down to offspring—and how such inherited changes might impact the health and behavior of descendants—it has the ring of experiential memory stored and passed down through the generations.

Early research, such as studies suggesting the existence of epigenetic imprints of trauma in the descendants of Holocaust survivors and famine victims, have already gripped the public with questions and possibilities. Could certain epigenetic “memories” of slavery, genocide, poverty, or abuse be inherited too? What kinds of traits might humans be passing down that—instead of coming through nurture, luck, or random mutations—arise as a result of personal histories the descendants may never know? This science of epigenetic inheritance suggests that the kind of lives we live today, shaped by environmental factors like stress or diet, will alter the biological instructions within our children and grandchildren. Just as ours may have been altered by ancestors long before.

Machado’s story thematically unwinds these ideas in a way that science, so far, cannot. Memories lived by a mother reverberate within her daughter’s body, even as they remain unknowable to her. “I know it feels like we are the first people on this land,” Machado’s protagonist daughter tells the reader, echoing these ideas, “but we have been preceded by monsters and men alike.” The child speaks of enduring experiences that occurred before she was born, “as if their very existence was seared into my cells.” It’s powerful, stirring prose, even though in our own reality, science has not proven that a daughter’s genes can bear the vestiges of experiences lived by her forebears, or that cellular memory in humans transmits to future generations.

“The idea that potentially some of what makes you you could be due to what your ancestors did or experienced is almost a philosophical concept,” says Jamie Hackett, who led research in mice out of the University of Cambridge in 2013 showing that some epigenetic markers could be passed on to future generations in mammals. With the epigenome, as it is called, a network of molecules bonds to the gene like fog on glass. These molecules orchestrate gene activity. Exposures to the exterior world can change the epigenome, which may in turn affect our susceptibility to disease or behavior. One area of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance research involves the study of various etchings on our genes—dynamic instructions that can influence particular traits—and how these patterns may be transmitted through successive lineages.

Hackett’s research is significant because many scientists used to assume that changes to these markers caused would be reset almost completely in the mammalian genome instead of passed down to the offspring. Hackett, now at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Rome, is continuing to study epigenetic reprogramming and inheritance using CRISPR gene-editing technologies. “As with many very exciting scientific ideas,” he says, “the excitement over epigenetics pushes beyond the actual scientific understanding.”

Scientists can agree upon some findings of inherited epigenetics in plants and worms, which do transmit memories and experiences to generations beyond. For example, researchers who genetically engineered Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans) roundworms to fluoresce discovered that exposing the creatures to warmer temperatures, even temporarily, triggered changes in their gene expression that caused them to glow brighter. What’s more, those roundworms then passed down the warm-environment changes to multiple generations of offspring, causing them, too, to glow brighter than other worms, despite having never been exposed to their parents or to the warmth that first triggered the change.

But the existing research dealing with humans, and even in our fellow mammals, is far more preliminary—and often overstated because of how captivating many find the concept, says John Greally, a professor of genetics, medicine, and pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. (That study about “inherited trauma” in Holocaust survivors, for example? Largely disputed.) The sample sizes are small, the scientific replication lacking. There is too much reliance on correlation, not causation. Though the gist of epigenetic inheritance makes for beautiful fiction, the collective proof that we humans inherit our ancestor’s experiences is a story that science is still figuring out, Greally says. “Give us time.”

This lack of clear findings also has to do with how complex we humans are. Scientists still don’t fully understand the extent to which the environment impacts our epigenome. There’s also no consensus over whether changes can be passed on in mammals, and which might make it through a built-in expunging process the epigenome undergoes during conception and reproduction. Some, perhaps, scientists such as Hackett say, but that does not ensure they also survive into the next generation. And even if some residue of epigenetic instructions endures, it still may not be enough to noticeably impact the expressed traits of the offspring. “There is certainly no consensus among scientists, but perhaps a general feeling of cautious optimism is now emerging,” Hackett says. Scientists can only keep working on answers to such questions. “The mechanism [for how this might happen] is what all scientists are chasing in this field,” he says, “and until we really understand how this information is being transmitted, we’re uncomfortable with really saying this is transgenerational inheritance.”

For now, we have stories, which help us imagine what may be.

“Though my mother never said, this was what had happened to my father, I knew,” Machado writes. “The river wrapped hungry fingers through his trousers and shirt and took him under in half a breath.” Written like an episodic memory, a cinematic moment the daughter could see playing out in front of her; she was never there and did not see. But something within her seemed to know.

We cannot time-travel into our grandparents’ minds and re-experience their most pivotal or private moments the way we can recall and relive our own. But, even though the research on inherited epigenetics is so preliminary, we may be seeing emerging hints from other species that shadows of particular memories, like fear, may be passed on.

One of the many poignant scenes in Machado’s story refers indirectly to this process: The daughter observes her mother trapping, drowning, and killing mice that emerge from the crevices of their house. Drawn out by a bitter-scented oil slathered on the baseboards, some escape to conceive more pups. Later, the daughter notices how the offspring scatter at the mere detection of the oil, “as if the scent carried some terrible story.”

This moment nods to a real-life study conducted by Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler at Emory University in Atlanta. In it, researchers pumped acetophenone—an aromatic chemical that isn’t bitter-smelling at all, but instead emits a scent similar to orange blossoms, cherries, or almonds—into the enclosures of a group of male mice. As they did this, the pair also sent small electrical shocks to the mice’s feet until the creatures began to associate the smell with the discomfort. When the researchers introduced the acetophone smell to the next two generations of mice, the offspring of the shocked ancestors reacted with jitters when sniffing it, too—even though these descendants had never been exposed to their fathers, to the smell, or to the electrical shocks before. It was as if they inherited a fear of the scent. (Though, as Dias pointed out, it was probably an inherent sensitivity to the smell that was passed down, “Whether this odor elicits a fearful response or not is something we haven’t explicitly tested.”)

Though Ressler and Dias didn’t definitively identify how this reaction could have been passed down, they, like many other scientists, are looking at a markup process known as DNA methylation as a possible epigenetic explanation of the inheritance effect. Methylation, a reversible modification in which chemicals (specifically, methyl groups) become attached to DNA molecules, doesn’t alter the DNA sequence itself. But it can silence or activate particular gene activity. Scientists wonder, if these same methylation markings appear in the same genetic locations of offspring, is it possible that the offspring might inheriting these patterns too? Or could some other environmental trigger have caused such marks, perhaps in the womb?

Some environmental experiences, like advanced paternal age, do influence epigenetic marks that could then potentially influence future offspring, Dias says. “But when you start talking about more ephemeral experiences—like stress in a mouse, social defeat in a mouse, dietary changes, the Holocaust, those kind of experiences—not something tangible, per se—then I think we really need to understand how is it that an experience we can’t actually quantity can find its way into the germ line and give us a genotype?” That is the “biggest black box,” he says. “How is the puppeteering happening?”

Other researchers, like Larry Feig, a professor of developmental, molecular and chemical biology at Tufts University School of Medicine, are intrigued by microRNAs, which can also produce gene-silencing effects. “New work implicates microRNAs as modifying whole sets of genes,” he says, “and the changes in the expression of these genes may be passed on across generations.”

In one recent study from Feig’s lab, researchers examined the microRNAs in the sperm of men who reported experiencing abuse or neglect in childhood, and found concentrations of two particular types of microRNAs were much lower in their samples. When the researchers then exposed male mice to early life stress, they found the mice had lower levels of the same two microRNAs in their mouse sperm, too.

When these mice mated with females who had not been exposed to the same stress, the changes were present in the early embryos of their offspring and in the sperm of their male offspring, meaning the effect seemed to stick for at least a couple generations after. But to what behavioral or physical effect, Feig can’t answer. Though his team did observe that female offspring of the stressed male mice seemed antisocial and anxious, and exhibited certain stress-related characteristics, “We don’t know yet whether these embryo changes account for the elevated anxiety and defective sociability in the female offspring of stressed males display,” he says.

Still, he explains, it’s exciting work, and the lab is preparing to carry out a larger study in humans and mice to further test these findings. If such changes are being transmitted in mice or men, that means they are being passed down in germ line. It raises controversial questions that could force historical rethinking about life on earth. “If it is a stable change in the germ line, in the sperm and eggs, it could be passed on forever,” Feig tells me. “That has big impacts on ideas about evolution.”

Machado’s story expresses the strange feeling we’ve all had before: of sensing the tip of some secret we cannot articulate. “I did not belong here, on this land. The way was paved for me and though I did not pave it, I followed it nonetheless. How did I never know? Had I always known?”

I would like to believe that is the same place where scientists who are studying epigenetics now find themselves: within close reach of knowing something revolutionary, which could one day not only explain parts of who we are—but also help us treat our ugliest diseases and disorders. It’s also profound to consider that, maybe, my genes are inscribed with fragments of moments lived by my grandmother.

But when it comes to our own epigenetic inheritance, as Hackett tells me: “The truth is, we just don’t know yet.”

“The Starfish Girl”

A new sci-fi short story about gymnastics.

BY MAUREEN MCHUGH

JULY 23, 2018 9:00 AM

Illustrations Doris Liou

(INTRO MUSIC)
(Run Sports 24/7 logo splash page)

CUT TO: Studio set, ANNOUNCER behind desk.

BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: Liam Chan.
Run clip on screen behind Chan: Mendoza on Balance Beam and Floor Exercise.

LIAM CHAN
It’s a story of peaks and valleys. Today, Jinky Mendoza is one of America’s best hopes for gymnastic gold in Paris. It’s been an amazing journey for a young woman whom many thought might never be able to walk, much less compete after a devastating accident.

CUT TO: NEWS SPOT of Jinky Mendoza’s accident, no sound. Shaky phone video of gym where people are clustered around Mendoza on mat on her back.

LIAM CHAN (VOICE-OVER)
In 2017, Jinky was 11 years old, one of the top-ranked junior gymnasts in the U.S. Her family was contemplating an offer to train at the Iowa facility owned by gold-medal gymnast and coach, Gabby Douglas, when tragedy struck. During a routine vault in practice, Jinky overrotated, landed wrong, and fractured her spine, at the C5 vertebra.

She was paralyzed from the neck down. It seemed as if her gymnastics career, indeed, life as she knew it, was over.

CUT TO: Clip of J Mendoza in hospital bed, balloons.

LIAM CHAN (VOICE-OVER)
Then doctors proposed a radical new medical procedure. They would use starfish DNA to teach her body how to heal itself. The results were miraculous.

CUT TO:
Sports 24/7 Studio, Liam behind desk, clip of Jinky Mendoza in a tumbling run on screen behind him.

LIAM CHAN
They call her the Starfish Girl. Today the International Olympic Committee announced that it would release a ruling Monday on whether or not this 5-feet-3-inch dynamo is human.

“Jesus,” Olivia said. “They’re playing it again.”

The big scoreboard in the new University of Texas Wexner Arena was showing Sports 24/7’s spot on Jinky’s accident, again. Jinky glanced up at her and then away, continuing her stretches.

There was a feeling to arenas—big but chaotic. All the gymnasts down in the exhibition area were in clumps by team, getting ready, shaking themselves loose and wearing warmup gear. The Texas air conditioning kept the place like a meat locker. Jinky was stretching, one heel on a 5-inch riser to get more stretch out of her split. “So don’t look,” Jinky said.

“It’s like a car accident, I can’t help it. I can’t believe you can just ignore it.” They were all wearing Team USA leotards with the blue swoosh down the side. Olivia snapped her leotard away from her butt.

“If I look at it, someone gets video of me watching and then posts it.”

With ugly comments. Jinky didn’t read social media anymore although she still had to tweet and post to Instagram. Coach Sophie made her Instagram 10 things a week. The last thing Jinky had Instagrammed was yesterday when she got her nails done and got a starfish stenciled on her thumbnail. It was her good-luck charm.

She was the Starfish Girl after all.

Jinky was watching Svetlana Moracheva of Team Russia loosen up. She’d competed against Russia at the World’s but she’d never done an exhibition with them. The arena was filling up. She smelled hot dogs.

Svetlana was long-boned and slim, white-blond and blue-eyed. She was “elegant.” At 19, she was the team leader and the oldest woman on Russia’s Olympic team.

Nobody had ever described Jinky as “elegant.” Powerhouse. Spark plug. It didn’t matter that she was the tallest member of the team; everybody thought she was short. Svetlana got compared to ballet dancers. Jinky would kill to be compared to a ballet dancer. She was always compared to Simone Biles—muscular and athletic. There were fan-made YouTube videos of the way they both hit the mat solidly; the way they both stuck landings as if rooted there by gravity.

The Russians trained differently, refining and refining while upping their endurance. Americans did more weight training and were muscular. American athletes were considered the ones to beat, but Jinky wished she were prettier, taller.

Svetlana glanced up and their eyes met across the arena. They both looked away.

Svetlana was wearing a knee brace. If Jinky was Starfish Girl, Svetlana was the Human 2.0. She’d blown out her knee six months ago. Dislocated it, torn the ACL and MCL. Jinky had watched a video of it just once. You could see the whole knee disintegrate as she landed. It was a career-ending injury (kind of like breaking your neck). Fixed with stem cell therapy (kind of like a fractured spine). Only not in one important way. They hadn’t used starfish DNA to fix Svetlana’s knee. They’d edited the Russian girl’s DNA directly using stuff from her own cells and creating repeats of certain sequences. The DNA sequences read the same way that the starfish DNA they used on Jinky had, it was just that they cut the pieces out of Svetlana’s own DNA and added them in the right places.

“Girl, you look stiff,” she said to Olivia.

“It’s OK,” Olivia said. She had been dealing with back spasms for months. At home in the gym, they did electric stimulation of her back muscles three times a week. It seemed to be helping.

Jinky waved at her to sit down and kneaded the muscles.

Olivia tilted her head back. Her kinky hair was yanked tightly back and shellacked into submission. She had a spray of red glitter in it that made her look a little like an exotic bird. She looked across the gym and saw Moracheva. “What’s she doing today?” Olivia asked.

“Floor and uneven,” Jinky said.

Usually at an exhibition they did routines specifically choreographed for show—pretty, flashy, and less demanding than competition routines. Jinky did hers to music from The Little Mermaid, and she wore a blue and green shimmery leotard and a starfish clip in her hair. She liked it because it was more like dance. More elegant. But Sophie had decided that today Jinky should do her Olympic balance beam and floor exercise to let them think about what she wouldn’t be doing for America if she didn’t go to the Olympics. The whole team was wearing their Team USA uniforms.

Jinky couldn’t think about not going to the Olympics. Everything in her life had aimed her toward the Olympics. The year of rehab, when she grew 3 inches while relearning to walk and use her fingers. Olympics, Olympics, Olympics. People who thought that her special genes gave her an advantage had no idea how hard it had been. No one had thought she could come back. You’ll walk again, they promised. Walk? She had shown them. She flew.

She stood up and shook herself loose. Then she visualized her balance-beam routine, imagining every step and how it felt, the twist, the aerial, the dismount. She imagined in real time, eyes closed to the people entering the arena. Focus. Focus. Focus.

When she opened her eyes, Olivia was standing in front of her. Olivia, her best friend, alternate for the Olympic team. “You’ll do great,” Olivia whispered. “You’ll show them.”

For once, Jinky wasn’t worried about how she’d do. “If I do really well, they’ll think it’s because of the procedure,” she said.

The girl with starfish DNA in her spine. The walking miracle.

CUT TO: FOOTAGE OF J MENDOZA AS SHE LEAVES HOSPITAL

LIAM CHAN (VOICE-OVER)
It was more than a career-ending injury. Doctors at the University of Southern California proposed an experimental treatment. They used a gene-editing technique called CRISPR to introduce sequences from starfish DNA into Jinky’s own cells.

(RUN GRAPHIC SIMULATION OF STARFISH REGENERATING)

LIAM CHAN (VOICE-OVER)
Starfish can regenerate limbs. Fishermen used to cut starfish in half and throw them back in the ocean, considering them pests. But that meant that for every starfish they cut in half, two starfish would grow. In humans and in most animals, the ability to regenerate has been lost but researchers were able to modify Jinky’s cells to “turn on” the ability to regenerate using starfish DNA.

(CUT TO: LIAM AT DESK)

LIAM CHAN
Jinky’s injury healed, better than the doctors could ever expect. But she had lost over a year of training and it wasn’t clear if she’d get it back.

Before the balance beam, the coach told her that if she felt she needed to, she could pull the twist from her dismount or make it a single. “You don’t want to risk too much before the games,” Sophie said.

Jinky was doing an Arabian double salto forward tuck for her dismount. She did the equivalent of a somersault in the air, knees tucked to her chin and a one-and-a-half twist. It had a huge difficulty score. 7.0. It was the centerpiece of Jinky’s balance routine. When she pulled it off, she was hard to beat.

“Remember your dance,” Sophie said. She hugged Jinky.

“They don’t care about the dance stuff,” Jinky said.

“I do,” Sophie said.

Jinky sat down and closed her eyes and tuned out the gymnasium. She was the person who was supposed to pull the team together. She was the one everyone looked to. But she just couldn’t talk to anyone else right now. She tried to concentrate on her routine. Onto the beam. Back aerial. Svetlana Moracheva in a knee brace.

Music started. Rimsky-Korsakov. Moracheva’s music. She stood at the corner of the mat for the floor exercises in a sparkly white leotard that made her look like the snow queen (except for the knee brace). Her first tumbling run was full-on, no concessions for her knee. It ended in a Biles aerial.

“Screw you,” Jinky thought. She did a Biles aerial in her floor exercises too. That was HER style.

Moracheva was a little stiff, and after the spectacular first pass, her exhibition routine got simpler, but of course she danced, toes pointed, light, and regal. Like a Russian ballerina with her long neck and her beautiful shoulders, the way her back curved when she touched her foot to the back of her head. Arabesque, fouetté turn, soulful liquid melt to the mat with her arms outstretched. When she finished, she limped a little.

Nobody was gonna cast Jinky Mendoza in Swan Lake.

Jinky concentrated on her breathing; in through her nose, out through her mouth. She was a machine. An android. She had no emotion.

It was time. She walked out onto the mat and stood before the beam.

She pressed up to the beam with her arms into a side split. Then a triple turn in tuck stand. For a moment she heard “Light It Up” from someone’s floor routine but she got her focus back and then—

It just all came. She could feel how well the routine was going. It was weird, when she was having a bad routine, she worked so hard, trying to make everything right. But when the routine was going well, it was almost no work at all. Back handspring, back layout, back layout and her foot was right where it should be, solid on the beam. The beam was a sidewalk, a driveway, a parking lot the size of Texas, and she did her dance steps, jumps, and her side-split turn.

And then she was doing her dismount and she didn’t even think. It was just like practice. Arabian double salto. Her feet hit the mat and her ankle sent a momentary sharp reminder that it was sore but it was all right, just normal. She did the final pose, shoulders back, arms out.

The arena was silent. The floor exercise music must have finished.

Was something wrong?

She blinked.

And then the applause and screaming started. Sophie, her coach, was hugging her. Gabby, the head of the gym, hugged her. Her teammates hugged her. The crowd was raggedly chanting, “Jinky! Jinky! Jinky!”

Olivia hugged her, shouting in her ear, “The announcer! They’re comparing you to Nadia Comăneci! It was perfect! Perfect!”

They were staying in a hotel downtown. It was a Marriott or something but it had a funny, down-at-the-heels feel. The hallways felt long and narrow. Didn’t matter, they were flying home the next day.

There was already stuff about her balance routine on ESPN. There were videos on YouTube. Jinky didn’t watch any of it—it felt as if she were jinxing herself. She asked Olivia if there was any blowback. Coach Sophie felt that showing the routine was a risk because while a great routine could make people want her to go to the Olympics, it could also fuel the belief that the procedure on her spine had given her an edge.

She walked to the soda machine. After a performance she and Olivia would split a Coke. It was their tradition.

The soda machine on their floor was out but the door to the stairs was right there so she went up a flight to see if the machine on that floor had some. They were all freaking geniuses when it came to hotels and travel. Always pack earplugs. Wear slip-on shoes at airports to get through TSA just in case they don’t give you Precheck. Stuff like that. She opened to the door onto the 11^th floor.

Svetlana Moracheva was sitting in the hallway on the floor outside a hotel room. She was leaning back against the wall, legs stuck straight out in front of her. The door to the hotel room was open and a couple of voices were chattering in Russian inside.

“Hi,” Jinky said, startled. She put her money in the machine and a can clunked down to the opening. When she picked it up it was so cold.

Svetlana looked a little surprised too. She, like Jinky, was wearing track pants so her knee brace was hidden. “Great routine,” Svetlana said. She spoke pretty good English—like a lot of gymnasts. Jinky didn’t speak any Russian. She felt a little stupid.

“How’s your knee?” Jinky asked and then thought maybe it was the wrong thing to say. Like it sounded like she was gloating or something.

Svetlana shrugged. “Pretty good,” she said. “Will be good for Olympics.”

“Oh! Good! Good! I … I love your dance. You know? You always look … ” what? Pretty? That sounded dorky. “Um, smooth.”

“Smooth?” Svetlana said, cocking her head. Jinky wasn’t sure if she thought it was a dumb thing to say or if she didn’t understand the word.

“You know,” Jinky mimed a wave with her hand, up and down, up and down. “Not, like some people,” Jinky made jerky motions with her hand, up down, up down.

Svetlana smiled. “Thank you. You are, how do I say, strong? So strong.”

Jinky knew she made a face.

Svetlana laughed. “We not want what we have. Always want what others have. I want curly hair.” She patted the floor next to her and Jinky sat down. “You hear from IOC? Anything?”

Jinky shook her head. “No.”

“Could be worst. Could be XXY. No one is telling you that you are not a girl.”

It took Jinky a moment to figure out what “ex-ex-why” meant. Then she laughed. The whole gender thing was a mess. Intersex athletes, nonbinary athletes, a hurdler from Turkey who thought of herself as a girl her whole life and competed in hijab who turned out to be genetically male but physically female. “It’s so crazy!” she said. “What do you think they should do?”

Svetlana shrugged. “My problem is same as your problem; go to Paris, keep my team strong, win some gold, not lose to China. Someone else can worry about XXY.”

“I don’t think I’m going to go,” Jinky blurted out. “But I have to!”

Svetlana nodded. “I know. After IOC decide about you,” she tapped her knee, “they decide about me. I want you to go.” Because if starfish DNA was OK, then your own DNA had to be, right?

“I want you to go,” Jinky said. “But … maybe if you blew the triple salto?”

Svetlana took a second, then laughed. “For you, Jinky! You go to Olympics, I will blew my triple salto and give up any gold medal on the uneven.”

Jinky wanted to say “blow,” but she wasn’t an asshole. Then they both didn’t look at Svetlana’s knee. It was all about whether there was enough time for the knee to recover, about the balance between keeping up some training and not reinjuring.

There were rumors that the Chinese were experimenting on their athletes. Changing the DNA of kids. Jinky thought about asking Svetlana if she’d heard anything, but a guy came out of a room down the hall.

Just a regular guy in blue jeans and a Longhorns T-shirt who smiled at them while he got a soda and a pack of M&Ms. Everything about him was big and soft. “Hey cuties,” he said.

Jinky looked down and Svetlana said politely, “Izvinite, ya ne govoryu po-angliyski.”

The guy laughed a little nervously and gave them a little wave. When his door closed behind him, Jinky folded into laughter. “What did you say?”

“I say, ‘Why fat slob like you talk to pretty girls like us?’ ” Svetlana said.

“For real?”

“No, not for real. I just say I don’t speak English. But next time I remember and say it. I promise.”

“Sveta.” A girl walked out of the room. “Oh! Hi!” It was Renata Nikolaev, the Russian vault specialist. She still had her hair pulled back tight and her competition makeup on. She said something to Svetlana in Russian.

Jinky’s phone buzzed, Olivia texting wondering where she was.

She typed:

talking to Moracheva

“I have to go,” Svetlana said. “I promise my boyfriend I call him.”

Of course Svetlana had a boyfriend. “Where is he?”

“He is in Nürburgring right now for practice. He is Formula One driver. He is 20, the youngest, and alternate for his team. You know Formula One?” Svetlana mimed driving a car.

Jinky had heard of it, but she didn’t know anything about race cars, or care, to be honest. But she nodded.

“He is alternate for second driver for Red Bull,” Svetlana said. “So he is like me, traveling all the time. But we FaceTime.”

Svetlana got up, a little awkwardly because of her knee. Jinky did too. It was like speaking with the queen or something. When it was over, it was over.

“Hey,” Svetlana said, “Let me give you my number. Is U.S. number.”

Jinky handed Svetlana her phone and watched her put her number in the contacts. “I’ll let you know as soon as we hear,” Jinky said.

Svetlana nodded, sharp. Then she hugged Jinky. Startled, Jinky hugged back. They were the only two.

“Do not forget the Coke.” Svetlana wiped her eyes. “Text me, OK Starfish Girl?” Then she put her game face back on and went into the hotel room.

Jinky picked up her can of Coke and went back downstairs to share it with Olivia.

They flew toward Iowa, where it would be flat and green. The whole team had gotten seats close to each other on the plane, so that was something.

Jinky Googled “Svetlana Moracheva boyfriend” and found someone named Honza Broucek. He had a thick neck and short reddish hair and didn’t look anything like Jinky would have guessed. How did Svetlana meet him? Jinky felt as if she never met anybody. She was home-schooled by a tutor and spent three hours in the gym in the morning and four in the afternoon.

There were images of them after some race, Broucek with his arm around Svetlana’s waist. They looked so happy. Broucek looked better when he was wearing a racing uniform; in the image, he was wearing a black racing suit and he looked handsome.

In the seat next to her, Olivia stretched, pulling one leg up straight in front of her. “My ankles are swelling,” she observed.

“Airplanes suck,” Jinky said. “Want the window?”

That was Sunday. The ruling was expected on Monday.

On Monday, she texted Svetlana.

jinky here

Before she could type anything else, Svetlana fired back:

                                                                                            wat they say

She had been stoic. Sophie, her coach, cried during the conference call; IOC lawyers, U.S. lawyers, Gabby. The IOC threw out the claim that she wasn’t human but said they needed proof she wasn’t enhanced. That she didn’t recover from injuries better or have faster reflexes or wasn’t someway cheating. Until they had proof she would not be allowed to compete in the Paris Summer Olympics of 2024. She texted:

suspended until proof

not enhanced

Svetlana texted back:

                                                                                            fuck them

Jinky’s legal team was already putting together a strategy. Jinky would have metabolic testing at Johns Hopkins and a researcher there wanted to test cell samples from Jinky for immune response and a bunch of other things like autophagy and oxidation and stuff that was supposed to tell them whether Jinky’s own body was a performance-enhancing drug.

The lawyers talked about Oscar Pistorius, the South African double amputee who had to prove his carbon fiber “blades” didn’t give him an advantage, even if they had more “spring” than human bone and muscle. Four years later, the IOC had banned Markus Rehm from the broad jump because they said his prosthetic foot, his blade, was an enhancement that gave him an unfair advantage.

The hair-thin gold wires in her neck, combined with the starfish DNA, were a prosthetic that could possibly give her an as-yet-unspecified advantage.

The lawyers kept saying that it wasn’t over, and Jinky believed them. She had beaten the odds before.

It was bad news for Svetlana too. If they had declared Jinky not human, then Svetlana, who had no starfish DNA in her, couldn’t be declared a nonhuman starfish-person. They’d have to look at Svetlana’s case separately.

But they had only decided Jinky was human, not whether or not she was enhanced. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that since Svetlana had had a similar procedure, she too might have an unfair advantage.

Jinky had avoided thinking about what it meant if she wasn’t “human.” She had read an article that said chimpanzees share about 99 percent of their DNA with humans. Sometimes she wondered if she had a baby (someday), would it have starfish genes? She supposed it would. But if Jinky was human, then her baby would be too. Unless they changed their minds.

She flew to Baltimore and had tests done. She ran on a treadmill while her CO₂ output was measured. She had blood and tissue samples taken. She had a bone-marrow test to see how much the starfish DNA had migrated. She missed four days of training.

The bone-marrow test sucked ass. Her bones were hard because she was young and trained all the time and laying there on her side while a doctor drilled into her pelvis hurt. They slapped gauze on her and sent her back to the airport. She found a spot of blood on her T-shirt when she changed that night.

Svetlana texted:

                                                                      starfish girl

sveta!

                                                                      my coach ask for ruling

                                                                      china going to file complaint 4 wks b4 big o

                                                                      when not enough time to do tests

tell me when you hear           

                                                                      of course!!!!!!!!

Then she sent a starfish emoji and a heart.

“Sophie?” Jinky asked. Sophie was in the coach’s office at the computer.

“What is it, Jinks?”

Sophie Wilson had been coaching Jinky for four years, now. Two years after the accident, Jinky had been competing again, but she wasn’t even back to the level of skill she’d had when she was 11. Sophie had invited her to come train at the facility. She’d watched Jinky in practice. “Every time you do a move, and your coach tells you something, the next time you are just a little bit better,” Sophie said. “You’re going to get back to your original skills and then some.”

Sophie had a bagel with cream cheese on her desk and Jinky’s stomach rumbled. Jinky tried not to eat too many unrefined carbs. She could feel it the next day in practice if she did. She was heavier, slower.

Focus, she thought. After the Olympics, you can have all the bagels you want. “I think I should do an interview.”

Sophie didn’t understand.

“You know, like on the news or something. Show I’m a regular person, not some kind of X-Man mutant.”

Sophie shook her head. “The strategy is keep our heads down and wait for the science.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She had talked to Olivia and Svetlana and even called her mother.

Her mother was an X-ray tech and she worked crazy hours but she had talked with Jinky until she had to leave for her shift. Jinky imagined her in her scrubs, sitting at the kitchen table. “Whatever you want to do, baby,” she said. “Your dad and I are proud of you. You know that.” It hadn’t really been much help but it made Jinky feel better.

“I think we need to get in front of this,” Jinky said. Which, honestly, sounded hella smart, right?

“Let me talk to Gabby,” Sophie said.

They kicked around possible ways to do an interview. An AMA on Reddit was dismissed. Nobody wanted Jinky fielding questions like “Which would you rather fight, 100 horses the size of a duck or one duck the size of a horse?” The New York Times and the Washington Post were considered but who read newspapers anymore?

Eventually Jinky’s agent (whom she had met exactly three times) called them with an offer from Amazon Prime. Amazon had a sports program called, without originality, Amazon Sports. One of the hosts was Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight although he wasn’t a gymnastics guy so Sylvia Guest would do a 20-minute interview.

Jinky texted Svetlana:

what should i wear

                                                                                            american teen

And she sent an image of a girl in a cute dress and followed it up with one more text:

                                                                                            soft

Olivia sniffed, “How’s your bestie?”

“She’s not,” Jinky said. “You are. Bitch. I’ve only talked to her a couple of times.”

Olivia shrugged like it didn’t matter.

But Svetlana was used to the spotlight so it made sense to ask her. There were images of her with Serena Williams at a charity event in London. Maybe Jinky should do things like that too? Go to places? How did you even get invited?

Jinky didn’t have a lot of clothes that weren’t tracksuits and leotards and sweats so she and Olivia went shopping. Jinky had a college fund for money from any endorsements but it was locked in trust until she was 18. With all the money her parents were putting out for her training, she felt weird if she asked for spending money. Her parents had sold their house to cover her medical expenses.

They went to the mall. Jinky was a girl’s size 12 to 14. There were some things in Juniors but they all looked like prom dresses. It’s like they needed a shop for “gymnasts who need to wear something for a televised interview.”

Olivia found a yellow mini dress and made Jinky try it on. It wasn’t a prom dress. “It makes you glow,” Olivia said. She dragged Jinky to the jewelry counter and picked out a cute necklace and some earrings.

“You look fab, girl,” Olivia pronounced.

Back at the gym, they had a remote video setup, basic, but fine. Jinky sat in front of a green screen and looked at a monitor. She was sweating, she could feel it. Olivia had done her makeup. Jinky liked the winged eyeliner so much she was going to ask Olivia to do it for her for competitions. Her nails were done and she’d gotten her lucky starfish stencil on her thumb, this time with a little blue rhinestone in the center.

It was a performance except she couldn’t go through it in her head like she could a routine. She closed her eyes and tried to calm down.

And then she was on. Sylvia Guest was blond and polished and Anglo and Jinky felt weird and brown and freaky.

“Hi Jinky! Great to have you on!” Sylvia chirped.

There were questions that everybody always asked. What do you eat? Jinky gave her usual response, that no one had ever told her she needed to lose weight but she tried to eat healthy. She had yogurt with fruit and almonds before she worked out in the morning. She ate chicken and salmon and steamed vegetables for dinner. The whole team liked to go get ice cream. Her favorite dish was her mother’s chicken adobo, the national dish of the Philippines.

What was her training schedule like? She worked out three hours in the morning, took a break and did her schooling, and then four hours in the afternoon. She had Sundays off. Her favorite book was To Kill a Mockingbird. (Not true: She and Olivia traded gay romance novels.)

What did she think of the IOC decision?

“I’m glad I’m human,” she said, and that got a laugh from Sylvia Guest.

“We’ll do a montage of clips of your accident and recovery,” Sylvia said.

Jinky nodded.

“What about the pending decision about whether or not changing your DNA has given you an unfair advantage?”

Nobody had ever said it that way. “Unfair advantage.” It was always performance enhancement. Like she’d taken steroids or something. She smiled, but to her embarrassment, she could feel that her eyes were welling up.

“Unfair?” she said. “I um … I mean, it’s hard to think that breaking my neck was an unfair advantage, you know? I mean, I couldn’t move my legs or feel anything. It was … ”

“What do you remember?”

“I remember I was on my back, looking up at the, um, ceiling? You know those florescent lights in some places? The gym had these long lights and I was looking at them and I thought I had just had the wind knocked out of me because you know, sometimes when you screw up and you land you can’t even move for a second and you can’t, like, breathe? I thought it was like that. And then my mom was saying, don’t move. And she called me Janice. She only ever calls me that when I’m in trouble or something is really serious. She kept saying, ‘Lie still, Janice’ and I couldn’t do anything and I knew it was bad.

“And then they wanted to try the stem cell procedure and they put these superthin gold wires in my spinal cord, like thinner than a hair. And the stem cells. After that I had this external thing they said was sort of like a pacemaker that sent little amounts of electricity into my spinal cord.”

“Could you feel that?” Sylvia asked.

Across from Jinky, beside the monitor, Sophie was there. She was nodding, the “You’re doing good” nod. “Keep going.”

“I couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t think it was working. It was weeks before I felt anything.”

“What did you feel first?” Sylvia asked.

“Two days before the meet I screwed up my ankle. It always gives me problems. The first thing I felt was my ankle hurting.”

“Wow, so the first thing you felt was pain?”

Jinky blinked. Did a sore ankle even count as pain? Her ankle was sore all the time. She just ignored it. “It wasn’t pain,” she said. “It was feeling.”

The interview got millions of hits. Jinky hated it. She hated how when she was talking about rehab (lots of details, Sophie had told her, make them know how hard it was) she started crying and almost ruined her makeup. It was cheesy and pathetic.

Svetlana:

                                                                                            you killed it

                                                                                            honza sez hi

                                                                                            he sez you kill it, too

The news and social media covered the story all over again.

In the end it made no difference. The results from John Hopkins suggested that maybe Jinky healed a little better than average but not particularly out of the norm for people, but it couldn’t prove that she didn’t have an advantage because it didn’t have samples from before her accident to see if that was just the way she was.

24/7 Set.

LIAM CHAN
We’re here today with Russian gymnast Svetlana Moracheva. You’re expecting an IOC ruling very soon. Given the ruling to ban Jinky Mendoza from the Paris Olympics for performance enhancement, what are your expectations?

SVETLANA MORACHEVA
(simultaneous translation from Russian) They will disqualify me. They can’t disqualify an American athlete and let a Russian one with a similar issue compete. It would be like Cold War days when the Soviet judges vote down Americans and the Americans vote down Russians.

LIAM CHAN
Does the ruling seem fair?

SVETLANA
No, not at all. Jinky and I have worked hard to be the best. But life is not supposed to be fair.

LIAM CHAN
What are you going to do now? Are you appealing?

SVETLANA
I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. But for the Olympics, this is something they will have to figure out. Athletes are like race cars, you know? It used to be that we were just cars that people have that they race. Then they start making cars that are only for racing and now, a Formula One car isn’t really a car. It is a jet airplane with no wings.

So the Formula One people are always trying to make a faster car and the officials are trying to stop certain things. Like the suspension can only be like this, and you cannot have shark-fin engines and then you can. There are Formula One cars and there are stock cars and there are all sorts of kinds of races, you know?

Now in the Olympics they must think about the same things. Jinky and me, we are like the shark-fin engine. We are banned. Maybe in 2028 we are not banned. People all over the world, they are trying to be the best and now they have a new way to be the best. They fix their DNA. Maybe when they are 6 or 7 years old. Maybe before they are born. If you think doping is a problem, this is going to be even bigger.

Jinky and me, we are really just normal people who work very hard. But Pandora is out of the box, you know? If you asked me when I was 10 years old, would I have my body changed to be an elite gymnast? I would say yes.

LIAM
What would you say now?

SVETLANA
I would say yes.

“Yes,” Jinky whispered, watching. “Yes.”

How Should Officials Decide When Cutting-Edge Medical Interventions for Athletes Cross the Line?

A sports historian responds to Maureen McHugh’s short story “The Starfish Girl.”

BY VICTORIA JACKSON

JULY 23, 2018 9:01 AM

Are elite athletes who undergo cutting-edge medical interventions after injuries benefiting from performance enhancement, and doing so to the degree that they should be barred from competition? What if the athlete suffered from an injury so traumatic that it made the medical intervention necessary? And anyway, if we expect these world-class athletes to strive to be the best—you know, whatever it takes—why should the organizations that govern competition have the power to force athletes out of certain treatments they deem to be on the bad side of “clean sports”?

As a former professional track and field athlete who’s intimately felt that fervid drive to keep competing, it’s obvious that spectators often take these questions for granted.

I watched peers go through surgeries to have detached hamstrings reconnected. I witnessed not one, but two friends break their femurs (the biggest bone in a human body) midrace. And I wanted to line up at the Olympics trials so badly that I trained through many stress fractures—so many that I’ve lost track. I could have worked the system, but I turned down offers to see questionable doctors who diagnosis “conditions” and write therapeutic use exemptions to clear athletes to use medicines and “vitamins” normally on the dirty side of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s clean-sport line.

Still, I went through my fair share of state-of-the-art treatments: bone stimulators, injections, sound-wave therapies, shock-wave therapies, electronic-stimulation therapies, laser therapies, and countless others, their names forgotten. To be the best in the world, you have to take risks, training on that red line at 99.9 percent capacity. If you cross it, you break. But if you manage to ride the line, you open up to the possibility of maximizing your full potential, and, in my opinion, reaching transcendence: the point of pure beauty and performance ecstasy. To think this doesn’t require much scientific intervention along the way is naïve and very wrong.

To actually make the tricky judgments as to what counts as cutting-edge and what gets flagged as cheating in the therapeutic treatment of athletes’ bodies, however, we athletes have ceded incredible power to national and international sports officials. Rules and rulings from the World Anti-Doping Agency, the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, the International Association of Athletics Federations, and others not only order the make or break decisions of whether and how we are allowed to compete, but also carry a cultural power that leeches out into the rest of society.

Yet sports officials often demonstrate little awareness of the moral authority that comes with the power to determine what does and does not provide an “unfair competitive advantage.” Their decisions about medical intervention and performance enhancement—rulings, they claim, that serve the cause of “clean sport”—affect broader ideas of who is good and who is evil. Think of 2003 Lance Armstrong, on No. 5 of seven back-to-back Tour de France titles. He shined as one of the most beloved celebrity athletes for his inspirational story as a cancer survivor, and the work of his charitable foundation. At the time, we knew that Lance Armstrong took certain kinds of therapeutic drugs known to be performance enhancers during his cancer treatment—and we didn’t consider that to be a form of cheating. (And doing so would be kind of messed up—he did have cancer, after all!) But about a decade later, when investigations turned up evidence that he had also been “blood doping,” injecting EPO (a hormone that promotes red-blood-cell production), and using human growth hormone throughout much of his career—and concealing it—the public, and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, drew the line.

Now, at a time when various types of genetic engineering and other biotechnologies seem poised to change the future of our bodies, we know that sports officials will soon be making incredibly consequential decisions about whether or when these kinds of interventions will be allowed for elite athletes. But I’m not convinced that their rulings will always keep the science—and what’s fair for all competitors—in mind.

Maureen McHugh’s “The Starfish Girl” captures how these decisions made from afar (in the case of the International Olympic Committee, a sleek, glassy architectural wonder on the banks of Lake Geneva will soon replace an 18^th-century Swiss castle as its headquarters) play out in very real, life-changing ways for the athletes.

Jinky Mendoza, the American gymnast and Olympic hopeful training for the Paris 2024 Games whom McHugh describes in compelling detail, shows the commitment demanded of elite athletes in the 21^st century. When overrotating during a vault routine in practice causes a debilitating spine fracture that leaves her paralyzed from the neck down, she makes the difficult decision to undergo a “radical new medical procedure” that may offer the only hope of regaining any mobility: allowing doctors to insert starfish DNA into her cells. The invertebrate’s genes “turn on” her body’s dormant ability to repair its own limbs—and thus allow Mendoza to begin an excruciating path to healing and recovery. But does the aid of the starfish DNA somehow make her not “human” enough to fairly compete?

To add a layer of complexity to this question, McHugh introduces another athlete whose cutting-edge recovery method also puts her eligibility in question in the eyes of the all-powerful IOC. But with Mendoza’s competitor, Svetlana Moracheva, we get a slightly different question. Moracheva benefits from stem cell therapy that expedites the healing process of multiple torn ligaments in her knee. However, the cells used in her procedure were human—indeed, her very own.

With sports, however—as with the rest of the world—the decisions the governing organization will make won’t be based entirely on an objective, physiological understanding of the issues.

Mendoza and Moracheva become unlikely allies, and the friendship goes deeper than their shared vulnerability at the hands of the IOC. Despite their youth, they are veterans of international sport, and have internalized its politics of performance. They’re also masters of women’s gymnastics, a competition all about bodies on display. Sports like gymnastics and ice skating enthrall audiences by putting conflicting ideas about the bodies of female athletes on display: They require strength, power, and muscle, and yet demand a show of traditional feminine beauty, grace, and aesthetic appeal. While Serena Williams and others remind us strength and power are beautiful, the traditional male gaze continues to infect the sports industry and its fans, and female athletes often internalize and contribute to the thinking that feminine beauty and sporting power are somehow dichotomous. Sports marketers have capitalized on the appeal of this “contradiction” for decades. It’s part of what made the Nancy Kerrigan–Tonya Harding saga so juicy—and also ripe for socio-economic class analysis.

Moracheva is the Kerrigan; Mendoza, the Harding. Moracheva is praised for her beauty, specifically, her long, lean body type that makes commentators liken her to a Russian ballerina. Mendoza is the short, muscle-bound, springlike pocket rocket, and she cringes when Moracheva praises her power. Both women command an awareness of how much the politics of appearance will play into their fates. They both (if reluctantly) use social media, and both step up their game with media interviews in hopes of winning over the public, and, perhaps, the IOC too. Yet for all their savvy, McHugh reminds us of their youth in the text messages they write to each other. These elite athletes are girls, barely young adults. And their sporting fates—the amassing of all the time, the pain, the sacrifices they’ve made—rests not with them, but with the old, mostly white men in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The politics of appearance that will color those officials’ decisions don’t just come down to their gender either. For, in what is perhaps the most interesting layer of McHugh’s story, these women are different in an additional aspect. We learn Mendoza is Filipina American. As a woman of color, she can’t tap into the privilege that comes with white American identity, one that often plays in the favor of athletes who come before the historically Western European– and European American–dominated IOC. Nor can Moracheva, for that matter. Though she may have advantages as a “snow queen”–like, blue-eyed blonde, she comes from the “East,” and therefore carries with her Cold War associations of doping—cheating to achieve sporting glory. If recent actions by elite international-sports governing bodies show us anything, it’s that their decisions of what constitutes “unfair competitive advantages” have less to do with a careful consideration of the science and more to do with pedigree.

Take, for example, the recent persecution of female athletes with high testosterone—all of whom, by no coincidence, are women of color from the “global south”—by the International Association of Athletics Federations, the group that governs elite track and field competitions worldwide and is among the most powerful bodies within IOC hierarchy. Earlier this year, the IAAF instituted a new policy that rendered women with high testosterone ineligible to compete in middle-distance events against women. The decision came after years of fighting in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (also headquartered in Lausanne), which noted, as the New York Times summarized, that “science has not conclusively shown that elevated testosterone provides women with more of a significant competitive edge than factors like nutrition, access to coaching and training facilities, and other genetic and biological variations.” It also came alongside the vehement objection of advocates like medical anthropologist and bioethicist Katrina Karkazis, who have long worked to demonstrate that the IAAF’s stance on testosterone tells us more about efforts to keep South African 800-meter-runner Caster Semenya and athletes like her (all of the women questioned for high testosterone levels, so far at least, have been from the global south) out of sport.

There’s another twist too. The IAAF ruled that these women who produce naturally high levels of testosterone are barred from competing as women—unless they modify their bodies with drugs or surgery to inhibit testosterone production. If they elect to stay in their natural bodies, the IAAF says, they can only be eligible to compete against men. In other words, counter to standard anti-doping and other anti-unnatural performance-enhancement positions, these women must manipulate their bodies with chemical or medical intervention in order to be cleared to compete. It implies it’s Semenya’s body that’s unnatural, that it’s not female.

All the attention that the IAAF has paid Caster Semenya since earning gold in the 800-meter race at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics (truly, this has been an obsession of the federation’s) stands in contrast with the treatment of athletes like American distance-running star Galen Rupp.

Rupp’s training group, the Nike Oregon Project, has been playing with the “gray area “ of performance enhancement for years under the direction of coach and running legend Alberto Salazar. Though Rupp is now twice an Olympic medalist and 32 years old, he’s been a sort of science experiment since Salazar invited him to join the group in high school, at which point Rupp began receiving technological and medical interventions to improve his performance. This has included the less controversial high-priced bells and whistles that come with training at Nike World Headquarters, like cryogenic therapy, anti-gravity and underwater treadmills, and even an altitude house. (Some elite athletes sleep and train in altitude tents to simulate living at higher altitudes, since this causes the body to adapt to the lower oxygen levels by producing more red blood cells and hemoglobin.)

But it has also included more contentious interventions, including allegedly using testosterone cream, asthma and thyroid drugs, and infusions of the amino acid L-Carnitine despite lacking—or, with some, having questionably diagnosed - medical conditions that would necessitate such treatments. Though these have provoked media attention and a U.S. Anti-Doping Agency investigation of Rupp and some of his fellow Nike Oregon Project teammates, the investigation remains in limbo - seemingly in perpetuity. It’s unclear exactly why the case hasn’t moved forward. But many suspect that Nike’s power within national and international sports, especially within track and field, likely has some influence. For now, Rupp races unimpeded. Meanwhile, Semenya has to weaken her body if she wants to compete.

Gray areas will always exist when it comes to drawing the line between clean and dirty in sports. But one can’t help but think that more diversity in the powerful institutions that govern fair play might get those lines drawn in fairer ways.

Sport, like the world in which it exists, is made up of hierarchies, systems of power that privilege some at the expense of others. Ideas about race, gender, socio-economic class, nationality, and ability (and, in “Starfish Girl,” even species) play out on—and inside—the bodies of athletes more explicitly than other bodies because they are performing bodies, bodies trained for display. At the same time, sports-governing bodies have evolved to a lesser degree than many other international institutions. While we may think of sport as an escape from reality and think that IOC officials and their policies don’t really matter, the decisions made about who gets to compete and how carry much cultural power.

We consume hundreds of subtle and not-so-subtle messages when we watch sports on screens. These performances inherently provide drama; stories ripe for interpretation. The commentators’ narrations matter (see: “Russell Westbrook is out of his cotton-picking mind”), the camera operators’ shot selections matter (see: crying beautiful women at the 2018 World Cup), and the bodies in competition matter. Jinky Mendoza pulling off a flawlessly executed vault and Caster Semenya winning a race and flexing her muscles signal to viewers—girls and boys, all around the world—that so-called women like them have the freedom to compete, excel, and relish the victory. They own their bodies, their power; they feel the beauty of perfect performance. We should feel privileged when they share it with us.

McHugh leaves us with the athletes answering the question—after their painful recoveries, and after, in the case of Mendoza, the IOC struck down her lifelong dream to compete in the Olympics—“Would I have my body changed to be an elite gymnast?”

Although I retired from competitive elite track and field, I still run every day. I have to run every day. I often ask myself what I would do if I lost the ability to run. I don’t like to think about the answer. Mendoza and Moracheva almost lost their ability to be gymnasts, to be who they are. Science gave them back their sport, their identities. Would they still be Jinky and Svetlana if they were no longer gymnasts?

 

“When We Were Patched”

A short sci-fi story about officiating in a very cool futuristic sport.

BY DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN

AUG 27, 2018 9:00 AM

The last time we ever spoke, my partner Malik asked me whether I believed speed or power made for the best athlete. I was puzzled, of course, feeling that neither could explain why some athletes excelled more than others, even in straightforward competitions like sprinting or the javelin. “There are enough variables to make it unclear,” I observed, “whether speed or power offers a better advantage in competition, or whether some other factor confers the greatest advantage.” It seemed to me an unanswerable question.

“And how about elegance versus quickness of thought?” Malik asked. But he stormed off before I could respond, as if he had confirmed some awful quality about me. By then I should have known not to expect anything from Malik, because he was about to ruin my career.

You see, I come from an illustrious line of sports officiants, spanning the world’s most dynamic and lucrative competitions, and I think my family would agree that my treatment by the FogoTennis Officiants Association was abominable. I should never have been suspended because of dishonorable behavior on Malik’s part.

Like many referees, I remember the very instant I was called for the first time to officiate on the professional FogoTennis circuit, widely considered the most exciting and dangerous sport in the world. I had honed my skills by watching my parents officiate before me, and by observing my siblings, cousins, and extended family. You could say that I was an officiant from the day I was born. Not only did I learn from other matches, but I also visualized countless scenarios of FogoTennis so that I could fulfill my duties to the best of my ability, cementing my family’s reputation as impartial, efficient, and affordable judges. But there is a difference between officiating in theory—even when it is woven into your very soul—and officiating in reality, when you can find yourself with an irresponsible refereeing partner.

On that day, my invitation from the FogoTennis Officiants Association arrived as I was running through several game simulations in my mind.

3ab:1340:4532:4b:120:8ef:dc21:67cf

I could not hide my excitement! The IPv6 address meant that the match was at the professional level, in the final round of the Zanzibar Open. Thrilled, I immediately traveled to Tanzania, taking any number of shortcuts to get to the match as quickly as possible.

When I arrived on the island, Malik was already at the courts, going through some sort of warmup routine. He wore the typical soft red tunic of a medium-ranked FogoTennis referee, and he jogged in place while muttering to himself, “En, de, trwa, kat, senk, sis … ” and performing backbends and calisthenics. He had dark chestnut eyes and stood large for a referee, at about 1.9 meters.

“In pren twa plis letan qui mo ti pense pou to arriv ici,” he said.

“Pardon me,” I replied. “I did not quite catch your meaning.”

“In pren twa plis letan qui mo ti think pou to arrive here.”

“I beg your pardon, but you are not speaking French.”

Malik lowered into a knee-bend as I retrieved his profile. His speech patterns were highly irregular.

“Ah, there we are,” I said. “You have a most unusual way of talking. You appear to have picked up some Mauritian patois.”

“Nothing unusual about it,” he snapped. “I was raised in Mauritius.”

“Indeed you were,” I replied. “I only expected that you would be speaking standard French. It was a mistake in your profile. It is a pleasure to meet you, Malik.”

“Right. So you can understand me now?”

“Every word,” I said proudly. “Our calibration is complete. Would you like to take a look at the athletes’ records?”

“You look a little different from what I’m used to,” he said.

“I have improved my appearance based on feedback from our partners: cherry-red alerts with light-green scorekeeping. The contrast is designed to emphasize only the most essential information.”

“I’m colorblind.”

I muted my colors somewhat, and switched from red and green to blue and yellow. “How is this color palette?” I asked, now eager to please.

“Much better.”

Although it was illegal for me to check Malik’s medical records, I was able to assess from his pupil dilation and tone of voice that he was under some degree of stress. I tried not to let his mood spoil the moment. Seeing the center court of the Zanzibar Open in person was one of the most cherished experiences of my career. The 50-meter-high outer walls of the court were fashioned from wafer-thin industrial-grade diamonds. Spectators enjoyed an unfettered view of the athletes as they played out their points, while the protective goggles that the players wore made the walls look solid so that they could follow the ball without distraction. The floor was high-density ceramic. Ten thousand spectators crowded into the arena to watch the match, many placing high-stakes wagers on the outcome of the game. Some munched on concession food from Stone Town, while others drank tea and nibbled at sweets.

I have no physical body as an augmented assistant, of course, but my tens of thousands of sensors help me intuit the feel of a room. It must have smelled like fine cologne in the choicest seats next to the arena, with an unpleasant odor in the section where fans had smuggled in cheap spirits and peppery meat sticks.

By now Malik had completed his calisthenics and seemed to be in a better mood.

“Would you like to go over our officiating plan, partner?” I asked earnestly.

“Your job is to keep score and mark the chases. If I need you, I’ll ask.”

“The best matches always start with a good officiating plan.”

“Look—what do you go by—”

“—it is Theodophilus.”

“—Theodophilus, this is my Platinum Match. I don’t mean to be brusque, but it’s a big day for me. Follow my lead, and you’ll learn the ropes.”

“Of course, Malik. I strive to learn at every moment possible.”

Platinum meant that this was Malik’s 100^th professional match, which would garner him a full salary, modest pension, upgrades at reputable hotels, quarterly use of the FogoTennis Officiants Association ultrasonic jet, and a selection of delicious organic snacks before each match. This was an honored position that would enable him to wear a sparkling silver tunic and to preside over the most coveted matches. Furthermore, the winning player would receive 500,000 FogoCoins, an exorbitant sum exceeded only by the Svalbard International Championships. Given what was at stake, I concluded, it was best to excuse Malik’s impatient tone.

Finally, the players emerged from their training chambers. Each was fitted in a membrane suit that retained heat while wicking away sweat. They carried light carbon-fiber rackets strung with high-tension polymer strings. Malik examined their belts and shoes as the players stepped onto the court.

“How are the inserts?” he asked me.

I carefully checked their ceramic ballasts. “They are regulation.” Already I had learned to communicate with him as succinctly as possible.

He issued detailed instructions to the players, which they had heard countless times before, much like two boxers nodding at the referee as they eye each other before a bout. Sylvia Basto was a brash, up-and-coming young player from Macau: a diminutive, compact athlete with calf muscles that pressed against her champagne-colored suit. She had a button nose and pooled dark-brown eyes beneath her goggles. She wore laser-cut eyeshadow in the typical fashion. The dashing wealthy scion Jackson Corluka, a full head taller, had won the coveted Manx Open three years in a row and had the wiry, sinuous body of a superlative racket-sport player, with bulging forearms. He wore a detached, benevolent look that could quickly turn fierce. I used a random number generator to award the first serve to Basto, meaning her opponent, Corluka, would move to the other end of the court to receive.

Malik remained outside the court, sitting behind the server in a slightly elevated position so he could easily follow the flight of the ball. I took up position near the net and turned on my cameras for the spectators at 16 different nodes around the court, and I made sure to observe Malik carefully as well. You see, as an augmented assistant, my role was to display as much helpful information in Malik’s visual field as possible, but people do not realize this is a two-way conversation. Just as he was seeing the data I displayed before his dark chestnut eyes, I was tracking his eye movements to tailor the readout and make it optimally useful for him. Display it too fast, and he would not understand it; display too much data, and he would ignore it. This intimate dance lies at the heart of any successful officiating team. We may not be corporeal, but augmented assistants know the eyes of our partners better than their lovers.

The players jogged in place and spoke softly to themselves in preparation for the severe physical and mental challenge of the match. Once both gave a thumbs-up, I sealed the door behind them. They were now locked in the court.

“Please give a warm welcome to Sylvia Basto,” loudspeakers announced to the spectators, “reigning champion of the Macau Open and one of the hottest new prospects on the FogoTennis Tour!” The crowd clapped politely. “And Jackson Corluka, holder of the Manx Golden Crown, six-time winner of the Inter-island FogoTennis Tour!” Now the crowd roared. “And give a round of applause to your officiant, Malik Jadoo, assisted by marker Theodophilus Hawkeye the Sixteenth.”

The crowd snickered at the mention of my name, for some reason. But I had decided to be less sensitive to people’s reactions.

Sylvia Basto bounced the ball on her racket strings as she prepared to serve. The objective of FogoTennis is to win three sets out of five. To win a set, a player must win at least six games, with at least a two-game lead over their opponent. The scoring of each game is just like traditional tennis: 15­–30–40. But that is where the similarities end because FogoTennis is based on “court” tennis, an ancient game with an asymmetrical court. The strange shape of the court, with its jutting angles and sloping lines, makes for a much more engrossing competition. To win a point, you have to hit a shot that your opponent cannot return, because they simply miss the ball or hit it out of play, or because the ball strikes one of several stationary targets. A single dynamic target, which the player serving the ball has to defend at all times, is called the dedans. Any ball that hits the dedans instantly ends not just the point, but the entire match. This tiny glowing target moves around randomly throughout the match and is about the size of a peppercorn. Hitting the dedans is as rare as shooting a hole-in-one in golf, and worth considerably more money to the victor.

Then there is the superconductivity. Over the first three sets of a FogoTennis match, the temperature of the court gradually decreases until it reaches 175 degrees Kelvin, or about minus 98 degrees Celsius, imbuing a degree of complexity, chance, and danger offered by no other sport.

As Basto readied her serve, the temperature rested at a comparatively balmy 275 degrees Kelvin, close to the freezing point of water. The polymer ball behaved like it would at room temperature, meaning that it responded to spin, and tended to skirt low and bounce predictably. Basto tossed the ball slowly into the air, then struck it with the full force of her racket, loosing a fantastic crack that drew applause from the crowd. The ball skirted along the wall before dropping into the court, where Jackson Corluka returned it, using his wrist to apply spin to his return. Basto scraped the ball back over the net, where Corluka was waiting to end the point with a deft cross-court shot. At this temperature, the best players controlled the center of the court in order to dictate play, and Corluka’s long arms and lightning-fast reflexes meant that he mounted a three-game lead in the first set after just 15 minutes of play.

For our part, Malik and I were rarely called upon to officiate. I merely kept the score, and Corluka managed to win points without controversy. He bounded across the court with the effortless grace of his renowned bloodline from the Isle of Man. Basto seemed totally intimidated by the nobleman and made a number of unforced errors. Indeed, the match was rather boring, and the spectators were losing interest. What had been advertised as a major battle between a precocious talent and a wily elite was becoming a slaughter. Corluka closed out the second set with a trick shot into one of the targets that sent Basto running the wrong way. He had superior racket skills, and his awesome wrist strength meant that he could disguise his shots until the last moment.

The third set proceeded just as swiftly, with only one question about whether a cross-court shot by Corluka had gone out of play. I confirmed that the ball was fair, and had in fact hugged the line by a full 5 millimeters. It was Basto’s right to contest the decision, but there was little for her to complain about.

Basto contested two more decisions that game, and each time I confirmed that Malik had made the right call. Still, something was bothering me.

“I have noticed a pattern of Ms. Basto contesting a call every 3.6 rallies,” I told Malik over our private channel.

“She has the right to do so,” he replied.

“But it suggests a strategy that is unsporting.”

“Just focus on the match.”

Suddenly Basto raised her voice at us in Mandarin. “Are you imbeciles? That ball was way out!”

By my assessment, Basto’s tone was inappropriate and highly critical of an officiant—namely, us. I could not help responding to her. The term “imbecile,” as well as its Mandarin equivalent, is agreed to be an insult by a wide cross-section of sources.

“What did you just say to her?” Malik asked.

“I gave her a warning and informed her that the next one would result in her dismissal.”

“You said that in Mandarin?”

“Of course; it is her preferred language.”

“Check with me first next time, alright? All that stuff you said about an officiating plan—well, you don’t go off and warn players on your own without talking to me about it.”

“Ms. Basto clearly violated the rules,” I objected. “Her words were inappropriate and highly critical of an officiant. Also, the volume of her voice registered 90 decibels.”

“She’ll be even more upset now.”

“She is merely engaging in gamesmanship.”

“Gamesmanship is all that matters.”

As Malik and I bickered back and forth, and Basto became more incensed, the on-court temperature steadily dropped. The players were forced to jog in place to keep warm as we deliberated, even though their heated membrane suits would prevent them from suffering from hypothermia. The temperature was now 210 degrees Kelvin.

The first sign that the match was about to change happened when Corluka bounced the ball before his serve. It rebounded off the floor at a rapid speed, and Basto seemed to glide slightly along the surface as she waited to return the serve. Corluka served the ball into play, and it slid along the roof at alarming speed before striking the rear wall. But Basto was already there, half-skipping, half-running to the ball, which she attacked with tremendous power. The ball hurtled into the target on Corluka’s side before he could touch it. Point to Basto.

The cooling zones of the court were beginning to have their effect. The FogoTennis ball, laced with advanced ceramics, began to speed up due to the lack of resistance. It moved at different speeds through different zones of the court, making its flight paths highly unpredictable. The ballast belts around the players’ waists quickened their movements, allowing them to accelerate to frightening speeds in just a few steps. They used carbon spikes in their shoes to slow themselves down.

It was as if Basto had suddenly woken up. Her compact form gave her an enormous advantage over the lanky Corluka in shifting direction and rapidly building up potential energy. She was dominating her opponent, smashing the ball with terrifying speed and leaping five meters into the air to intercept Corluka’s feeble attempts to slow down play with lobs or looping cross-court shots. He was forced to attempt increasingly difficult strokes. But he could not close out the third set to win the match.

Instead Basto won the game, and took the third and fourth sets handily, sending the match to a fifth and final set. The temperature of the court had bottomed out at 175 degrees Kelvin. This meant that Basto could fling herself about the court like a god, levitating in the air with precision and determination as the ball hurtled about at 500 kilometers per hour. This was the most dangerous part of the match. Now the ball could severely injure the players. They could only track its flight with help from their goggles.

By this time, the crowd was cheering at this extraordinary comeback. Even more entertaining, Corluka was beginning to land his low-percentage skill shots, killing the ball into the targets with precision. Basto was clearly the better cold-court player, but Corluka’s phenomenal racket skills meant he would not just concede the match. He had won six Tour titles and had learned to scrape his way to victory at all costs.

Then, in a flash, Corluka could barely play at all. Basto forced him into a corner with a serve that scythed through the air. Corluka managed to fish out the ball but Basto hurtled herself at it with unbelievable strength, crushing it into Corluka’s left arm. He crumpled from the pain.

“Medical analysis!” Malik barked.

I hastily examined his arm with my resonance imaging. “His radius bone has fractured in three places.”

“Right,” Malik said, switching to a public channel. “Mr. Corluka, would you like to continue play?”

We were forbidden from entering the court because it would raise the temperature inside the room, effectively ruining the match. Corluka was rolling along the supercooled floor, screaming in agony. Outside the court, a medical team was preparing to extract him. But it would mean conceding the match. Basto tactfully held up her hand in apology, as if she had not meant to hit Corluka with the ball. She waited silently to claim her victory.

Something about Corluka writhing around in pain made me feel uneasy. An extreme sense of discomfort, as if something fundamental was amiss. As if an advantage was about to be taken that had not been earned. It was a sickly feeling that began deep inside me and vibrated in my very essence. If I did not do something about it, everything I stood for would be compromised.

“It appears that Ms. Basto intentionally hit Mr. Corluka,” I heard myself say.

“Nonsense,” Malik replied. “How do you know?”

“I tracked her eye movement. She looked directly at Mr. Corluka’s forearm before making the shot.”

“Can you show me?”

“It is unlikely you could it observe it at human scale.”

“Forget it, then. It doesn’t matter. Players get hit from time to time. That’s the risk they take when they enter the court.”

“But it is against the norms of FogoTennis to intentionally strike another player,” I argued.

“I don’t follow.”

“We should sanction her for unsporting conduct.”

“You already gave her a warning! We’re not going to kick her out of the match for hitting him. That’s preposterous! There’s no rule against it. He should’ve gotten out of the way. I don’t want to hear any more of this.”

Malik outranked me on interpretations of the laws of the game, so there was nothing I could do. Meanwhile, Corluka was slowly dragging himself to his feet.

“Mr. Corluka,” Malik continued, on the public channel. “I repeat, would you like to continue play? You have 30 seconds.”

Groaning, Corluka used his racket to prop himself up. He toggled a zipper on his suit, which stiffened his shattered arm into a makeshift cast. He took several deep breaths and slapped his own cheek with his good arm, as if trying to shock himself awake.

“I’ll play,” he grunted.

Basto knew not to offer Corluka any pity, not when she was so close to victory. She narrowed her eyes, and I thought that the rapscallion would make him suffer the consequences with another cruel attack. Everything was aligned in her favor—the temperature of the court, Corluka’s injury, and Malik’s apparent lack of consideration for unsporting behavior. That is when I saw it again. She narrowed her eyes fractionally. She was planning to hit him again with her next serve.

I decided to do what any honorable officiant would do. Right the scales, as it were. Appeal to Lady Justice.

Basto thrashed the ball at Corluka’s body, but with honor on his side, he evaded the assault—for that is what it was, an attack—and twisted his body like a yogi to return the serve between his legs with his good arm. The ball rocketed through the air toward Basto’s side of the court, right into the glowing dedans! It was an extraordinary shot into the dynamic target. He had snatched victory out of nothing at all. Corluka raised his fist in the air to celebrate, and the crowd erupted.

“I contest!” Basto shouted. “That ball was out!”

“Ms. Basto has no appeals left,” I explained to Malik on our private channel.

But Malik ignored me. “Appeal granted!”

“She contested five times already, partner. In the first, second, and third sets.”

“Appeal granted! Show us the shot!”

“Malik, Mr. Corluka has won the match.”

“I’m the one who decides who wins the match. The shot looked low to me.”

“My sensors are designed never to make mistakes.”

“Show the video to the crowd.”

I did as I was told, and displayed the shot in super-slow motion for the spectators from a variety of angles. The ball approached the tiny target and seemed poised to miss it, but touched its surface at the very last moment. It was difficult to see with the naked eye, of course, but my sensors told me that the ball had struck the dedans within 3 or 4 microns. Corluka had won the match. Even Malik had to admit it.

The champion managed to hoist his racket in the air as I unsealed the court, and collapsed to the ground again when the higher temperature made him feel the full extent of his injury. He had sacrificed his body for victory in the face of a vicious young upstart opponent. And I felt proud that I had done my part to support the spirit of the game over its more sinister qualities.

As Basto hung her head, Malik asked me that question about whether power or speed was the more important quality for an athlete. I responded earnestly, as you may remember, and he was unhappy with my answer. By then I did not expect him to be pleased with anything I did.

You can imagine my surprise when Malik denounced me directly to the Officiants Association, recommending that my contract be suspended.

All athletes are equal before the laws of the game in FogoTennis, he wrote. But the Augmented Assistant Theodophilus system clearly favored Mr. Corluka. It’s possible the system issued a signal to Mr. Corluka at a critical moment in the match. Maybe a flash, or a sign of some kind that enabled Mr. Corluka to avoid being hit with the ball. I’m not sure how this happened exactly, but I’ve never seen anything like it before. It even talks like some kind of manservant. It was like it was sneering at me or something. I recommend searching the video footage of the match and, more importantly, a full audit of Theodophilus’ source code.

I had endured Malik’s testiness throughout the match, and behaved, I believe, like a true professional. But his backstabbing hurt me on a personal level. Indeed, I re-read his remarks 1.12 million times, using my language-processing protocols to discern hidden meanings. There was no way to get around the fact that Malik had questioned my abilities and had behaved in a completely dishonorable manner by criticizing me to the association without giving me an opportunity to defend myself.

I come from an illustrious family of officiants, as I mentioned, and we have never stood for such abominable treatment. My great-great grandparent helped bring the first Hawkeye tennis systems online, calling shots for the renowned lawn tennis champion Roger Federer. My great-aunt Wilhelmina Hawkeye III (version 10.16.34) perfected the art of goal-line technology, and her offspring became the first official to create efficient automated reviews of offside calls in soccer, leading to a decisive win by Chile in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Each line of our code was immaculately crafted by the most desirable software engineers. We are an extended family—not of manservants, as Malik insinuated, but of equal and effective partners in sport, and I honestly felt that an insult to me was an insult to all of us. We stand up for what is right.

During our brief time together, I had noticed that Malik kept a port open on his implanted augmented lenses. I also suspected that his colorblindness made him more receptive to certain patterns. In particular, it was likely that bright flashing primary colors at tenth-of-a-second intervals, alternating with zigzagging lines of black and white, would cause him considerable discomfort. He succumbed to a horrific migraine headache at his next match, leaving him incapacitated for several hours. Naturally, the doctors suspected that his stressful occupation as a Platinum Official led to the headache.

I am not totally proud of my behavior. In fact, if I could revisit my final conversation with Malik, when he asked me about whether power or speed was more important for an athlete, I might have said, “You may as well ask someone whether rhythm or melody makes for the best dancer.” Indeed, I realized after a minor update that there are any number of preferable responses to the one I gave him on that day.

The Officiants Association has since prescribed regular patches to my source code, which it claims will bring notable improvements to my objectivity. There was, frankly, little I could do to argue my case, as I enjoy no right of appeal like a FogoTennis player, even if the Association never found the alleged “signal” mentioned by Malik. I assure you that Jackson Corluka evaded that ball because of his experience and unrivaled athleticism. Instead, perhaps the Association should have questioned the probability of him hitting the dedans at that very moment, which was quite unlikely and might have raised concerns that someone had manipulated its movement intentionally. But the Association did not think to ask such a question.

Meanwhile, I’m on mandatory furlough. It’s not all bad; I’ve got a whole new suite of creoles and pidgins that I’m enjoying, plus they’ve given me contractions. Thousands of contractions. I find the contractions highly enjoyable. Humans use such grammatical features for efficiency and to foster connections with each other. The Association hopes they’ll make me more relatable to my officiating partners.

Because, when you think about it, poor communication causes so much misunderstanding, wouldn’t you agree? Take Malik, for example. I think that if we’d had the opportunity to get to know one another, and taken the time to work together as equal partners, we could’ve become a superior refereeing team. We could’ve reached a better understanding, for the good of the sport.

Assistance with Mauritian dialogue provided by S. Moonesamy.

Algorithms Could Create an Even Playing Field—if We Insist on It

An expert on algorithmic bias responds to Deji Olukotun’s “When We Were Patched.”

BY JEANNA MATTHEWS

AUG 27, 2018 9:01 AM

Big decisions about our lives are increasingly made jointly by humans and computer systems. Do we get loan? Are we invited for an interview? Who should we date? Which news stories should we read? Who won the tennis match? This is our reality today. In “When We were Patched,” Deji Olukotun explores what the boundaries of these human and machine partnerships will be. Could we get the best of both, or will we end up with the worst of both?

Humans, we like to believe, have common sense and intuition, while computers are logical and cold. However, in “When We Were Patched,” Olukotun challenges these assumptions. It is the computer’s feelings that are hurt by the impatience and disregard of Malik, the human partner in officiating a championship FogoTennis match. The computer officiant, Theodophilus Hawkeye the Sixteenth, is the one who is eager to please, sensitive to the emotional cues of the human, jilted, and resentful after their partner causes them to be fired. We even hear the computer declare that officiating is woven into its very soul.

In Olukotun’s story, when humans and computers partner to make decisions, it is the A.I. who is blamed for perceived errors. Systems could also be designed to absorb blame, relieving human decision makers of the karmic cost of making difficult choices, like whom to fire or whom to send to prison, leaving humans to declare, “I just do what the computer tells me.” Alternatively, in her 2016 paper “Moral Crumple Zone: Cautionary Tales in Human Computer Interaction,” Madeleine Clare Elish, my colleague at the Data and Society Research Institute, describes how human pilots were blamed after they failed to recover from a stall when the autopilot system shut itself off, causing the fatal crash of Air France Flight 447. Elish argues that an increase in automation can make pilots’ skills atrophy, while simultaneously asking them to absorb legal and moral liability when automated systems fail. What freedom will even doctors or judges have to “overrule” the computer without risking, for example, malpractice suits or a record that looks “soft on crime”? Whose judgment can be challenged and in what ways?

In tennis’s “gentlemanly” culture, the idea of challenging an umpire chair used to be deeply offensive. But in 2001, the Hawk-Eye instant-review system was introduced into professional tennis, and challenges to rulings on the court became commonplace. Theodophilus accuses Basto of using challenges in an “unsporting” manner, but Hawk-Eye challenges today are widely accepted because strategies around challenges make the game more entertaining for audiences. They provide a way to interrupt a dominating player’s momentum, heighten the stakes of the game at crucial turning points, and build mounting suspense in the audience during a slow-motion replay of the shot. They also frequently show the human umpire wrong – one report found that the system upheld the player’s challenge 45 percent of the time.

On the other hand, there is a pervasive myth that decisions made by computers are fundamentally logical, unbiased, almost infallible. That’s not true. Automated decision making is often just plain wrong—and wrong along familiar historical lines of inequality. Researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru found that some commercial-grade facial recognition software had a 34.7 percent error rate for dark-skinned women, but only a 0.8 percent error rate for light-skinned men. Further, computers are built by humans, and their decisions reflect structural inequalities and human bias, just in different, subtle ways. For example, machine learning algorithms are “trained” on data sets that reflect how people have made decisions in the past. They ask what patterns have predicted past success and so they learn to prefer the types of people who have been successful in the past. In other words, they become the perfect gatekeepers of the establishment—that may be how Theodophilus Hawkeye the Sixteenth, a “purebred” machine, comes to favor the masculine Isle of Man player with “royal blood” when Malik actively roots for Basto, the underdog from Macau, likely a young woman of color, competing aggressively against a veteran player.

In Olukotun’s story, Malik calls for a “full audit of Theodophilus’ source code.” But the answer there may not be straightforward—and if there is bias in an A.I. referee system, it could be intentional or not. For instance, a programmer could write a program that reflected specific bias (for instance, a line of code that says “if the applicant is a woman, deduct 10 points from her score”). It could also have happened in other ways. Automated systems could learn ugly behavior by observing people, as in the case of Microsoft’s Tay bot - which began parroting racist, misogynistic speech in less than 24 hours of being trained online by internet users - or included by a machine-learning algorithm that uses a set of data to teach itself (such as figuring out how to spot good CEOs to hire by looking at a pool of people who are successful CEOs today). Every training set will include historical value judgments of what has been considered “good” and “successful.” What gets baked in with those assumptions if our historical patterns reflect structural inequality? Those kinds of biases would not easily be audited in the source code alone.

Anyway, an audit would likely require permission from FogoTennis and the companies that built Theodophilus, and that may be difficult to obtain. Legal scholar Rebecca Wexler examines how trade secret protection is regularly used to shield bad algorithmic decision making from review even in crucial areas of public concern like criminal justice where the intellectual property rights of software developers are routinely prioritized over a defendants’ rights to understand and examine the evidence against them. In 2017, public policy committees with the influential Association for Computing Machinery issued a statement outlining ethical principles for algorithmic accountability and transparency. They called on designers to build automated systems that provide explanation, verification, testing, and the ability to question decisions made. Without a commitment to accountability, transparency, and iterative improvement, we are doomed to continue to err in the same ways humans already have. It is difficult to imagine an automated system challenging historical social norms unless it was directed to do so. Automated systems can even amplify those errors, for example in the case of predictive policing algorithms that not surprisingly find more crime in neighborhoods to which more police are dispatched.

In “When We Were Patched,” Malik asks whether speed or power make for a better athlete. The better question might be, who is the game designed to advantage? Olukotun’s story challenges us to consider what is possible if a society decided it wanted to change the conditions of the game, developing new technologies that would create the conditions for coed tennis in which players muscular and powerful, slim and speedy could test their powers against one another. Theodophilus Hawkeye the Sixteenth is unable to answer Malik’s question, but neither could we. The answer can’t be derived from the past alone: It depends on what we collectively decide about the future, about what justice looks like, about leveling the playing field in sports and in life. As in Olukotun’s story, humans and computers will be working together to pick winners and losers. We need to collectively decide on and enforce the rules they will follow. We need the ability to understand, challenge, and audit the decisions. A level playing field won’t be the future unless we insist on it.

Data and Society research analyst Kinjal Dave contributed research and ideas to this article.

Lions and Gazelles

A new sci-fi short story by the author of The Quantum Thief and Summerland.

BY HANNU RAJANIEMI

SEPT 27, 20189:00 AM

“Where do you think we are?” the young Middle Eastern woman with the intense eyes asked.

Jyri smiled at her and accepted a smoothie from a tanned aide.

“I think this is a Greek island.” He pointed at the desolate gray cliffs. They loomed above the ruined village where the 50 contestants in the Race were having breakfast. “Look at all the dead vegetation. And the sea is the right color.”

In truth, he had no idea. At SFO, he’d been ushered into a private jet with tinted windows. The last leg of the journey had been in an autocopter’s opaque passenger pod. The Race’s location, like everything else about it, was a closely guarded secret.

But his gesture distracted the woman long enough for Jyri to steal a glance at her impossibly muscled legs. Definitely a myostatin knockout—a gene edit for muscle hypertrophy. Crude, but effective. He would have to watch out for her.

Suddenly, she zeroed in on something over Jyri’s shoulder.

“Excuse me, need to catch up with someone. Nice talking to you.”

Before he could say anything, she elbowed past him, filling a gap in the scrum around Marcus Simak, the CEO of SynCell—the largest cultured meat company in the world. She launched into a well-rehearsed pitch. Jyri swore. He, too, had been stalking Simak, waiting for an opening.

His mouth was dry. This was the most coveted part of the event: access to the world’s most powerful tech CEOs, who could change your destiny with a flick of their fingers. He would only get one more shot before they started literally running away from him. Even worse, he wanted to run, too. Every muscle in his body felt like a loaded spring. The synthetic urge pounded in his temples, mixing with the din of the crowd.

Jyri fought it down, forced himself to take a thick minty sip of his smoothie and scanned the runners in the white mesh suits—ghost-like in the pre-dawn light—for a new target.

It was easy to divide the crowd into three groups: the entrepreneurs, like Jyri, here to show off their tech, hungry-eyed and ill at ease in their biohacked bodies; the hangers-on, company VPs and celebrities, with their Instagram­–filter complexions and fluorescent tattoos; and finally, the Whales like Simak: the god-emperors of A.I., synbio, agrotech, and space.

Jyri spotted Maxine Zheng, Simak’s upstart rival, just 10 feet away. Fresh-faced, petite, and wiry, her vast robotic cloud labs powered the Second Biotech Revolution—including Jyri’s own startup, CarrotStick.

Jyri edged into the group caught in Zheng’s trillion-dollar gravity. Up close, her skin had a glistening dolphin-like sheen. Allegedly, the Whales’ edits included cetacean genes that protected them from cancer and other hoi polloi ailments.

Zheng was talking to a tall young man who was deathly pale but had the build of an Ethiopian runner: long legs and a bellows-like chest.

“That’s neat,” she said. “But I’m honestly more into neurotech, these days.”

That was Jyri’s cue. He pushed forward, the one-liner pitch ready. Hi, I’m Jyri Salo from CarrotStick. We re-engineer your dopamine receptors to hack motivation—

“Jyri!”

A strong hand gripped his shoulder. He turned around and almost swore aloud.

Not here, not now.

Alessandro Botticelli’s white teeth flashed against a dark curly beard. He wore thick rings in stubby fingers, and his tattooed forearms rippled with muscle. His calves could have been carved from red granite. The ruddy hue of his skin was new. Probably an edit increasing red blood cell production for aerobic endurance, but these days you never knew.

“It’s so good to see you, man!” The Italian gripped Jyri’s hand and pulled him into a bear hug. “I can’t believe you made it here, how are you doing, are you still working on that little company of ours? I love it!”

The familiar lilting accent made Jyri’s teeth hurt. He cringed. That little company. Of ours. Had he no shame?

“Doing great,” he said aloud, jaw clenched.

“That’s awesome, man,” Alessandro said. “Congrats. Me, I’ve just been so busy, it started to get too much, you know. So I decide to get in shape, really in shape. Maxine said I should do this, so here I am! It’s going to be sick!”

Jyri could not face the white teeth, the green eyes, and looked away.

“I’m happy for you,” he said.

“Hey, man, thanks! Do you want an intro? She’s right there, and she’d probably be into what you’ve been working on.”

Zheng was behind a wall of muscled bodies again. Jyri took a deep breath to say yes but tasted old anger. He shook his head.

“That’s fine. We chatted already.”

The Italian slapped him on the shoulder, hard.

“Awesome! Hey, we should really catch up! Maybe after this thing?”

“Sure.” Jyri’s stomach was an acid pit. He waved a hand at Alessandro and walked away, stumbling to the edge of the crowd. He took a long draught of his smoothie, but could barely get the viscous mixture down. He forced himself to drink it anyway. It was a dirty secret of ultrarunning that gorging gave you an advantage. Besides, it washed the taste of bile away.

Jyri had met Alessandro at one of the first networking events he had attended after he came over from Finland with little more than an idea. They bonded over their shared running hobby, Alessandro offered help with fundraising, and before Jyri knew it, the Italian was an equal co-founder of CarrotStick.

There was a time when they spent nearly every waking hour together, whiteboarding ideas, filing patents, sweating over pitch decks and grinding through endless investor meetings. It was a true Valley bromance. And then, when they got an offer to join the hottest accelerator in the Bay Area, Alessandro bailed on him, suddenly announcing he wasn’t going to be able to do CarrotStick full-time. A VC firm they had pitched together had circled back to offer Alessandro a job. Apparently they had been impressed by his drive, and he claimed it was a better match for his life’s mission. Whatever that was.

The accelerator turned CarrotStick down—given its “founder commitment issues”—and left Jyri scrambling for funding while burning through his savings and doing around-the-clock lab work. Alessandro wore his unchanging grin through the negotiations over his founder shares. He wore Jyri down, never raising his voice, and finally Jyri gave in to what advisers later told him was a ridiculous equity stake for an inactive founder.

Afterward, Jyri blocked Alessandro on every social media app. Every now and then, a piece of news leaked through his friends’ feeds. Alessandro’s new startup broke all sorts of Series A financing records; his popular science feed won a prize; he married a young VR yoga instructor who frequented both the exercise classes and fantasies of millions of men and women around the world.

Most gallingly, despite Jyri’s efforts at a news blockade, he’d watched Alessandro brag in interviews about how his creativity and hard work had led to an early small success: a company called CarrotStick.

Jyri wouldn’t let Alessandro ruin this, he decided. He’d get to Zheng on his own, no matter what. Fists clenched, he turned back to look at the crowd—and met the eyes of a woman sitting on a sun-bleached bench nearby.

Jyri frowned. She was neither an aide or a runner: She wore a loose, shapeless black dress that left her arms bare. They bore faded tattoos of bats. Her ashen hair stuck out in pigtails. She twirled an e-cigarette between her fingers. A knowing smile flickered on her lips.

Then it clicked. This had to be La Gama, the Doe. She was one of the legendary ultrarunners who had competed against the Tarahumara Indians in the canyons of northern Mexico, before climate change pushed them out and they gave up their millennia-long tradition of running.

Twelve years ago, the Whales had hired her to plan the biennial Races. She took all her experience from running races like Barkley Marathons and Badwater, and created an entirely new kind of contest for superhuman athletes. La Gama decided who ran based on an elaborate application that included biomarkers, genome sequences, and patents for the contestant’s enhancements.

She stood up. Jyri’s heart sank. The networking was over. Now, the only way to stand out from the startup pack and catch the Whales’ attention was by running.

A hush spread across the square. The Whales turned to look at her, and all the other runners followed suit. For a moment, the only sound was the listless chirping of crickets.

“Running,” she said, “used to be how we hunted. We evolved to chase things until they fell down from sheer exhaustion. The legacy is still there, in our upright spine, nuchal ligament, and Achilles tendons.

“All your lives, you have hunted with your brains. I want you to hunt and kill with your legs. Meet your prey.”

She lifted a hand and hooked her fingers. A large pack of robots slunk out of the surrounding chalk-white ruins. Each was the size of a large antelope, had gazelle-like legs, and a black headless body. Hair at the back of Jyri’s neck stood up. They moved too sinuously to be prey.

“Meet Goats 1 to 50,” La Gama said. “They have full batteries. As do you. This Race is a persistence hunt. No stages, no set distances, no water stations, no time limit, no rest: Just run a goat down. The first one to bring back the contents of its belly wins.”

She laid a hand on the smooth rump of the bot next to her, on a small cave painting–like drawing. A shutter irised opened on its side, then snapped shut before Jyri could see what was within.

La Gama slapped her hands. “That’s it. The sun is coming up, and so, like lions and gazelles, you had all better be running.”

The starting line was unmarked. They simply assembled in rows on the narrow road that snaked up toward the hills. The goatbot herd scampered past them and stopped on the crest of the first slope. The rising sun painted the cliffs purple.

They all knew the basic rules. No communications. No support crews. No pacers. Most importantly, no cybernetic enhancements or prosthetics—nothing with silicon or electricity. But anything biological was fair game: They were the Grail knights of the Second Biotech Age. They had backpacks with water and energy gels, and that was it.

Jyri peeked at the row of white-clad bodies. Alessandro’s eyes were closed and his lips were moving. Was that hypocrite praying?

La Gama lifted the e-cig to her lips.

Jyri’s anger mixed with the need to run, almost unbearable now. Every last bit of CarrotStick’s cash and crypto had gone into fine-tuning his body—and more importantly, his brain.

The key ingredient was motivation.

La Gama took a deep pull from the e-cig. Its end glowed electric blue. She blew out one menthol-smelling wisp of smoke. That was the starting pistol shot.

The runners exploded into motion. Jyri’s hungry feet devoured the road through the thin-soled Race shoes.

CarrotStick’s actual mission was to make smart drugs that hacked the brain’s reward circuits, and made you addicted to problem-solving, coding, A.I. algorithm design. It had been much harder than he had expected. The company’s runway was almost gone when one of his investors told Jyri about the Race. He realized they could just copy the dopamine receptor variants of the greatest ultra-athletes of all time—the relentless drive that carried them through a 100-mile race.

That drive was Jyri’s now. CarrotStick had manufactured a synthetic virus that carried the best receptor gene variant into his brain. Every step said yes in his mind. He felt like he could run forever.

The woman with the myostatin knockout legs was suddenly abreast of him, then edged ahead. On their own accord, Jyri’s feet sped up. He gulped deep breaths, held on to the drive’s reins. It was not time to push yet.

He slowed down and let her disappear over the hilltop ahead, just behind the goatbots.

Then Zheng, Simak, and the two other Whale CEOs zipped through the pack. Their legs and pumping arms were a blur. For them, this was a clash of the R&D departments of the vast companies whose avatars they’d become. It was pointless to compete with them. Their muscle cells were synthetic, their tissues fully superhuman.

At last, Jyri was over the first hill. The road turned left. The goatbots followed it, straight at the steep cliffs crested by white clouds. The Whales were tiny dots at their heels. The other runners followed, and the Race was on.

The sun blazed at their backs. The paved road turned into a rocky path. Jyri did not mind the climb. Early on in his training, he had done a lot of hill runs. It was a good way to get the biomechanics right.

He shifted his gait into full barefoot style, stepping down with the foot’s edge, not with the heel, gliding, elf-like. Others in the runner pack found the path tougher, and even without quickening his pace, Jyri started to leave them behind.

The last ruined house on the outskirts of the village was surrounded by skeletons of real goats. The main goatbot herd was nowhere to be seen, but Jyri kept pace with a handful of bots ahead. They veered to the right, onto an even rockier path leading diagonally up the cliffside.

“Let’s go get them, shall we?”

That slap on his shoulder, again. Alessandro. He was right at Jyri’s heels and then ahead, sending up puffs of dust as he went. He’d come out of nowhere. He had pulled the old ultrarunner trick: running on the very edge of the path so you could not see him from ahead.

Jyri’s gut churned at the sight of Alessandro’s broad, receding back. This was too much. But the voice of reason cautioned there was a long, long road ahead. The goatbots had to have at least 20 hours of charge, and the island could have hidden recharging stations. The rough terrain promised microfractures, accumulating pain.

Jyri took a tiny sip of water from his Camelbak, not enough to hydrate, just to trick his brain into keeping thirst at bay. An ultrarun was an ever-expanding tree of decisions. Drink or not. Speed up or not. He reached a compromise. He would open the valves a bit, just to see if he could gain on Alessandro, and slow down if the effort seemed too much.

He increased the beat of his mental metronome to 180 beats per minute. He grazed his shin on a rock—he would be paying for that for many hours. But the pain mixed with the dopamine drumbeat gave him a burst of speed. His head lifted high. He pumped his knees in perfect running form. Suddenly, he was just behind Alessandro, who grunted in surprise.

Jyri could not resist lightly brushing Alessandro’s shoulder as he edged past. Then he raced up the path, following the joyous zigzag dance of the goatbot ahead, toward the cliffs that now belonged only to him.

Fourteen hours into the race, Jyri lost the goatbot in the clouds.

The rapidly falling dusk made the island’s contours soft and dream-like. The ascent had been grueling. The paths were unmarked and strewn with sharp-edged rocks. On the worst stretches, he had to run bent almost double to avoid the spiky branches arcing over the path.

But the dopamine drive kept him on the bot’s trail all the way up to the plateau. It resembled a lunar landscape: large boulders, grey gravel. There were fields of tiny round pebbles that retained the sun’s heat and were like hot coals to run on.

He glimpsed other runners only once: two dots moving along the coastline far below, chasing a goatbot side by side. They might have been Zheng and Simak, and Jyri wondered what they were doing, racing so close together. Unable to give an inch to each other, perhaps. Or was it something else?

Otherwise, it was just him and the bot. By now, he had a feel for the artificial animal’s behavior. It stopped as if to rest whenever he slowed down, probably recharging in the sun. If he rushed it, it scrambled away.

That was the cruelty of La Gama’s scheme. The only way to narrow the gap was to be relentless. The goatbot’s pace was just above his fat-burning maximum heart rate of 140 bpm, and he was halfway through his energy gel packs.

A chilly wind picked up. Clouds started rolling across the plateau, swallowing the dark boulders. This was it, Jyri realized. The thing could not recharge in the mist. If he could get close and stay with it, it would be his.

He sprinted forward and followed the bot into the whiteness. It seemed like a demon now, making wild leaps over rocks that Jyri had to go around. Every now and then it melted into the fog, and Jyri’s thundering heart skipped a beat. The beat of the dopamine drum pushed him forward, faster and faster, roaring inside his head.

And then the goatbot stumbled.

There was a clatter of metal and rocks. Jyri snapped back to knife’s-edge alertness. The pebbles were wet and slippery, and he slowed down. A shape loomed ahead: a boulder. He swung around, and saw the bot barely 50 feet away, struggling to get up, its legs scraping against stone. This was it, he had to push now, just a little—

His leg muscles burst into cold flame. Then they seized up. The cursed rigs, the runner’s rigor mortis.

No. I can do this.

The cold feeling spread into his brain, like the world’s worst ice cream headache. Keep pushing, damn it.

But he could not.

He.

Could.

Not.

A treacherous pebble twisted beneath his foot. He fell forward, pressed his chin to his chest, cradled his head. One elbow banged on a boulder and went numb as he came down with a bone-jarring thump.

Then everything was quiet, except for the taunting clatter of the goatbot’s hooves.

Jyri lay still, curled up on the damp stones. Everything hurt. But it wasn’t the pain that made vomit rise into his throat, it was the absence of something.

The running fire had died.

He didn’t want to get up.

He lay on the bare wet rock and tried to think through the pain, but thoughts fled him like the goatbot in the fog. He fumbled for the Camelbak’s tube with numb hands. It slipped and he let it go.

Lying down meant the end. He would be one of the Race’s failures, the non-finishers. From now on, investors he pitched to would give him one knowing look and pass. CarrotStick would die, and his future with it. He closed his eyes and fought back tears.

Only—it made no sense.

The drive to run was gone. Something was wrong with his dopamine receptors. Had his own immune system started rejecting them? He had undergone a regime to get his body to tolerate the new genes. Still, a sudden runaway immune reaction was not impossible. But he did not have a fever or any other symptoms.

That left one other possibility: a hostile biohack targeting the enhancement directly, maybe a biologic drug that blocked the receptor. And only someone with insight into CarrotStick’s IP could have designed that.

Alessandro. Those slaps on the shoulder. The rings he wore. Alessandro would know enough about CarrotStick’s receptors to leverage A.I. to design a molecule to target them.

The void in his head was filled by a flood of anger, red and warm and good.

He remembered what his first running coach had told him in high school.

The best fuel for finishing a race is hate.

Jyri flopped to his belly, got to his knees, and stayed there for a moment, breathing hard. There was a boulder next to him. He embraced it like a lover, found a handhold, and pulled himself up. He leaned against the rocky surface, pressed his forehead against it. His legs wobbled but held.

He would make it back. He would prove what had happened, destroy Alessandro’s name.

He squirted an energy gel pack into his mouth. The hydrogel-encapsulated carbohydrates released an expanding bubble of warmth in his belly.

He let go of the rock, took one step, then another, fighting the rigs. After three steps, it started to get easier.

After 10 steps, he broke into a jog.

The descent was even worse than the ascent. Most ultrarunners walked uphill and ran downhill, but the trail was so rough Jyri had to slow down to a walk to give the microtears in his muscles a chance to heal.

It was almost dark when he finally emerged from the cloud cover and realized he had made it further than he’d thought.

Only in the wrong direction.

The interior of the island spread before him in the pale moonlight: rolling hills, a dry riverbed, ash-colored dead trees. Jyri had taken a wrong turn on the plateau. The village was behind him. He would have to climb back up and retrace his steps—a 14-hour journey, back when he was still fresh.

The fatigue fell upon him, heavy and thick. He nearly stumbled again. What did he have left? In theory, 40 percent: That’s what science claimed you could still draw upon when you reached all limits of endurance.

It would have to be enough.

He turned to start the long climb back up, and heard a shout from below.

“Salo! Down here!”

Alessandro. He was perhaps 100 meters below Jyri, on rough but level ground. A short distance away from him was a herd of goatbots, at least 20 of them. As Jyri watched, Alessandro dashed toward them. The herd erupted in all directions. Alessandro chased one for a half-minute, but then it swerved away, and the herd simply regrouped behind the Italian. There was no way to tell which one it had been.

If Jyri had retained any strength, he would have laughed aloud. The goatbots were persistence-hunting Alessandro, playing a shell game that would eventually exhaust him.

Maybe I should just sit down and watch. The bastard deserved it.

“Salo, damn it, I need some help here! You can’t catch these motherfuckers alone. They gang up and then there is no way to tell them apart. We need to work together. Come on!”

“If you’d wanted my help, maybe you shouldn’t have screwed with me,” Jyri shouted. His voice was hoarse.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Jyri was now halfway down to the clearing. He imagined punching Alessandro, but was not sure he could actually lift his arm.

“I know you hacked me,” Jyri said. “Back in the village.”

Alessandro stopped and stared at him, eyes wide.

“You too?”

“What do you mean?”

“My metabolism is fucked. I thought it was a malfunction.”

Maybe it was just the moonlight, but Alessandro did look pale.

“Bullshit,” Jyri said. He needed the hate, goddamn it. There were tears in his eyes.

“Think about it, Salo. It was that bitch La Gama. Those smoothies—why do you think they made us drink them? She was the only one who knew enough about our hacks to develop countermeasures against them.”

The hate cooled down to an ember. Jyri stared at Alessandro. His hands started shaking.

Alessandro lowered his voice.

“Look, man. You’re a good guy. I know I left you in a bad spot, back in the day.” His grin was gone. “I don’t need to cheat, damn it. But right now, I need you. So … I’m sorry I screwed you, all right?”

Jyri looked at him. One apology was not enough to erase five years of back-breaking work and anxiety. How stupid did Alessandro think he was?

Then he remembered Zheng and Simak, running in tandem.

“This is the whole point of the Race,” Jyri said. “La Gama gave us a challenge that’s impossible to meet individually, no matter how good your enhancements are. The Whales must be hating it.”

He looked at Alessandro’s leonine face. There had been no malice in the betrayal. Out here, it was easier to see it. Just an animal, running after the prey, as was its nature.

All of a sudden, Jyri felt less heavy.

“That’s why we didn’t make good partners, man,” Alessandro said. “You were way too clever for me.”

Jyri took a deep breath.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s hunt.”

It took Jyri and Alessandro several tries to separate a goatbot from the herd. One of them rushed the herd and chose a target; the other intercepted whenever it tried to join the others. It took bursts of speed Jyri would not have imagined he still possessed. Alessandro’s face was purple, all traces of arrogance wiped away by pain. Between dashes, they shared their remaining energy gels and water.

By 2 in the morning they finally had a goatbot on the run. The herd followed close behind, so they could not let their attention waver.

Forty percent, Jyri kept thinking, as they raced along the dry riverbed. This was what he imagined the land of the dead was like, arid and endless.

Yet, somehow, he found himself enjoying the run. His mind was quiet. How long had it been since he’d run in flow, disappearing into a task at the edge of his ability? The Finnish word for thinking was ajatella. It originally meant harrying one’s prey until the end.

Their lungs worked like bellows. There was no breath for words, but Alessandro was a silent presence at his side, focused on the same goal. With every synchronized step they took, the anger and the anxiety leaked out.

After a while, there was only the satisfaction of joint pursuit: the bot’s indistinct shape ahead, the rattle of rocks beneath their feet.

The coastal cliffs were rimmed with light when the goatbot finally slowed, collapsed in a tangle of limbs, and lay still.

Jyri stared at it, trying not to collapse himself as his heart rate slowed and the blood pressure in his limbs dropped. Alessandro was doubled over, hands on his knees, as he retched.

“You … ” the Italian waved breathlessly. “You … do the honors.”

Jyri half-walked, half-hopped to the machine. Up close, it looked even more like an animal. Its black carapace moved up and down, as if it was breathing. Gingerly, he touched the white stick figure on its flank. A round hole snapped instantly open. He reached inside, and his fingers found two objects: a vial filled with a clear liquid and a pneumatic injection needle.

Alessandro wiped vomit from his beard and looked at him.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked. “It’s the antidote, stupid.”

Jyri weighed the vial and the needle in his hand. Was this some final trick? Did it even make sense that there would be a universal antidote to hacks against all the contestants’ different enhancements? Of course. The smoothies: They were probably probiotics with bacteria producing a variety of customized biologics in the runners’ guts. They would have a universal genetic off-switch, triggered by whatever the vial contained.

One shot, and the drive to run would be his again. And yet there was something pure about the night air, the light in the horizon, the dust on his face. He was here, not in the anxiety-ridden past or uncertain tomorrow. Did he really want the overriding, relentless drumbeat back? He was in pain, but this pain was something he had chosen. It belonged to him.

He shook his head and handed the antidote to Alessandro.

“You do it,” he said. “I’ll find my own way back.”

The Italian looked at him, green eyes unreadable. With a practiced move, he filled the vial and found a vein in his arm. The clear liquid went in with a hiss. Alessandro took a deep breath. His skin flushed, and he stretched expansively.

“I’ll tell them to come get you,” he said. “Find some shelter and stay there. And I’ll do that intro to Zheng, and brag about your mad motivation-hacking tech. I know you were bluffing earlier about talking to her, but you should. I think she’ll be interested.”

Jyri nodded and raised a hand.

He watched Alessandro’s white form recede into the distance until he disappeared behind the withered foliage on the dry riverbank.

He waited until the sun came up. Long shadow-fingers stretched across the valley, and the coastal cliffs glinted golden. A mirage hovered above the dry expanse of the island. It looked like a ghost city, with floating towers and pillars.

Jyri felt empty and light. His Camelbak was dry, and he let his backpack fall to the ground. Gazelle or lion, he thought.

Then he started running.

Can You Replicate the Burning Desire to Win That Drives Superhuman Athletes?

An evolutionary biologist who is the author of  Superhuman responds to Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Lions and Gazelles.”

BY ROWAN HOOPER

SEPT 27, 2018 9:01 AM

Take a random selection of athletes at any Olympic Games. No matter their discipline, they will have one factor in common: a burning desire to win, and a motivation to be the best in the world. Imagine if we could develop a short cut to that kind of passion.

In “Lions and Gazelles,” Hannu Rajaniemi’s protagonist Jyri is an athlete of the near future taking part in a super-exclusive ultramarathon exclusively for bioengineered people. A primary point of the competition is to show off the latest in genetic doping, and other enhancement technologies, for prospective investors who show up to see the latest in body hacking. There are people taking part in Rajaniemi’s race with genetic tweaks to their myostatin genes to boost their muscles, while others have been gene-edited to produce more red blood cells. Some have undergone surgery to give themselves a more efficient running action. Jyri has hacked himself in a different way: by artificially boosting his motivation. Activated with a drug that switches the urge on and off, he can call up the unquenchable fire in the belly that you only usually see in totally dedicated world-class athletes.

Something like the Race could happen in real life in the near future. Some 200 gene variants have already been discovered with links to extreme sporting performance, and there has already been a cyborg Olympics, for people with prosthetic enhancements. Tweaks to individual genes that might increase muscle mass or red blood cell count also seem within the realm of possibility, modifying motivation is a completely different proposition. There are myriad personal factors that contribute to motivation—our psychology and personality, and our mental as well as physical health.

As Ranjaniemi notes, champion ultrarunners are special creatures: To be one, your body needs to strike the right balance between using up the energy-giving glucose and clearing itself of glucose’s byproduct, lactate. Better athletes can work harder for longer, because they are good at recycling the lactate that’s building up in their muscles. Many East African distance runners seems to have “structural” physical advantages, such as a longer Achilles tendon. Runners with long Achilles tendons have calf muscles that attach relatively closer to the knee, which reduces the inertia of the leg and so improves running economy. Other extraordinary runners, as Ranjaniemi mentions, include the Tarahumara of Mexico. As in parts of East Africa, where children run to and from school every day, running is a central part of Tarahumara culture. If running is commonplace in your society, it can only help nurture brilliant athletes.

But physiology or genetics or culture alone will not make you a champion. You need motivation. Easy enough to define in broad terms, but tricky to measure scientifically, a strong sense of motivation was a quality I found in many of the subjects I met while researching my book Superman: Life at the Extremes of Our Capacity. I sought out and met people who are the best in the world in a range of traits, from happiness to endurance running. I also talked to researchers about the neuroscience, genetics, and physiology of talent and ability. Their work sheds much light on which traits will be hackable in the future.

Here’s what I learned. First, geneticists have teased out the inherited component for particular traits by using twin studies. It turns out that for complex traits such as intelligence and running ability, about 50 percent of the variability of ability between people is inherited. That means approximately half of how good you are at running depends on your genes. For a while, scientists thought this meant there would be a “running gene” that we could locate and which would explain a good chunk of people’s ability. If there were such a gene, we could imagine engineering people to have it and make them superhuman runners.

However, no such gene has been forthcoming. In fact, we haven’t discovered a gene or gene variant that explains even 5 percent of the variability in physical ability between people. The pattern is the same with other complex traits, such as intelligence or singing. There are just far too many genes involved for any single gene to have a big effect. It means hacking these traits using techniques such as gene editing is a near-hopeless task.

This is not something that seems to bother the startups of Silicon Valley. The culture there is that anything is up for grabs—and only ambition is holding us back. There are certainly some aspects of our physiology that it’s possible to enhance, above and beyond the intense training that top athletes already do. But the idea that we can and even should enhance something as deep and personal as motivation is misguided. Take Dean Karnazes, whom I interviewed for my book. He once ran 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 different states. He’s also won the Badwater Ultramarathon, which proclaims itself the world’s toughest foot race (it even pops up in “Lions and Gazelles”). His name is routinely prefixed with the words “superhuman athlete”—he’s the sort of person Jyri would want to model himself on. I asked Karnazes what makes him superhuman, but he said he thought anyone can do what he does. They just need the same passion, drive, commitment and resolve: They need the motivation. Easier said than done.

I also met the 2018 winner of a six-day track race in Flushing Meadows, New York, the kind of ultramarathon where the aim is just to run as far as you can in a time limit. Petra Kasperova ran an incredible 370.4 miles over the competition’s six days. Kasperova runs because she wants to explore what is possible, what human nature is capable. She runs, she told me, because she discovers something magical on the track. Is it possible to mimic or synthesise the emotions and the history and the personal motivations behind people as different but as successful as Karnazes and Kasperova? Sadly for Jyri (and Alessandro Botticelli, and the Whales), I don’t think it is.

Despite what many feel-good books about achieving peak performance might say, motivation isn’t just something you can will yourself to have. Even much of the effort put into practising something—the sort of discipline that sets champions apart from the rest of us— is itself genetic. There are people who seem to have an inner drive, a determination and motivation that carries them on when most would give up. This drive itself seems to have a genetic component.

After Jyri’s hack goes wrong, he eventually finds some inner motivation based, at first, on negative emotion. But all the superhumans I met cited curiosity, positivity, and a refusal to be put off by failure. Jyri seems to finally realize this by finding compassion rather than hatred as the motivation to keep running.

In years to come, enhancement will work just fine for purely physical traits, and pharmaceutical manipulation of mood and focus is certainly possible on a crude level, as we see with drugs such as modafinil. But anyone hoping for a quick route to the kind of desire you see in Olympic-level athletes will be disappointed, and anyone trying to mess with the qualities that make each of us who we are on a deep level will stumble well before the finish line.

“Burned-Over Territory”

A new short story about a future in which everyone receives universal basic income—but it’s not enough.

BY LEE KONSTANTINOU

OCT 27, 2018 8:00 AM

I’m halfway through a plate of soggy risotto, giving my opinion about the Project Approval Framework, when my phone buzzes. I thought I’d muted notifications. I’m tempted to check the alert, but 30 faces are watching me, all Members, some from Zardoz House, the rest from other Houses around Rochester. We’re at a table made from reclaimed wood, which is covered with food and drink. It’s freezing. Everyone’s wearing sweaters, hats, coats, scarves, mittens; I’m in a blue blazer over a T-shirt, jeans, and leather boots. My hair is buzzed into a crew cut, and even though it makes me feel like an ass clown, I’m wearing makeup.

A videodrone hovers near the credenza, 5 feet from my prettified face, streaming this Chat ’n’ Chew live on the Federation Bulletin. Twenty-thousand Members are watching me. Zardoz House is one of the First Five, and me getting invited here is a pretty big deal. The Federation is in a political frenzy. The Voting Period closes next week, and Joan McGee, incumbent Chairperson, an Artist, is probably going to win, but I’m within striking distance—I would be the first Universalist Chair—and I’m not going down without a fight.

My phone stops buzzing, and I sigh with relief. “Over the last six months,” I say, trying not to let my teeth chatter, “I’ve been invited into hundreds of Houses from Rochester to Davis. And whatever so-called faction I talk to, I hear the same story. All of us have been screwed by the World. We wouldn’t have joined a House otherwise, right?”

“Damn right, Viola,” Marlow says.

Marlow is an old friend, the one who invited me to Zardoz. He’s a Universalist, like me, and part of a not-so-secret network of recovering addicts. Our stronghold is the old Opioid Road, the so-called Burned-Over Territory, from Albany, New York, to Columbus, Ohio. We stick together. We give a shit. We participate. We were, after all, there at the founding, helping make the Federation what it is today. McGee and her stuck-up allies are trying to rewrite history, to erase us. That, anyway, is what I want to tell the crowd.

Instead, I say, “Now McGee … ” Someone hisses, and I wave to quiet them down. “Now McGee’s campaign slogan is ‘Let’s Make Some Improvements.’ ” Derisive laughter. “She says she just wants to make the Federation a better place to live. To let Members ‘keep a little extra of what they earn.’ To make the Project Approval Framework ‘a little more rigorous.’ But her ‘little’ proposals, well, they make you wonder, who exactly is the Federation being improved for?”

“For the Artists,” says a man wearing an Activist pin.

“It’s bullshit,” a Universalist adds.

It’s nice to hear ideological rivals agree on their dislike of McGee. I raise my finger, about to make a point, when a blond man in a peacoat interrupts me.

“No it’s not,” he says. He’s an Artist, of course. Not everyone here is a supporter.

“Shut up, Steve,” the Activist says.

Steve doesn’t shut up. “If we didn’t give up all our outside income to the Federation, we could fix the goddamn boiler.”

Marlow rolls his eyes. “We filed a Help Ticket.”

“Seven days ago. Why the hell are we giving them our Basic?”

“If you want to keep your tremendous ‘outside income,’ ” someone suggests, “the door’s right there. Go find—”

“Maybe,” Steve interrupts, “if you didn’t waste—”

“Hey now,” I say, collecting the crowd’s attention. “Steve, I hear what you’re saying.” I look into his eyes and smile warmly, and he’s surprised I’m not arguing with him. “You’re making a serious point. If I hear you right, what you’re saying is, you work hard, and you want the quality of your life to reflect that hard work.” Despite himself, Steve nods; I’ve roped him into my empathy trap. “Your feeling is valid, but we also have to be careful not to bring class divisions from the World back into—”

My phone buzzes again, and a dozen other phones and specs and tablets buzz, and I lose my focus. Members look at their devices. They’ve received an alert, the same one I’ve gotten.

“Damn.” Marlow holds up his phone. “Viola, look … ”

“What is it?” I whisper.

“McGee.”

McGee is on the screen, her red hair newly and expensively cut, her freckled cheeks pink. She’s wearing a sleeveless gray dress and red pumps, holding forth to a standing-room-only crowd. There’s something familiar about the footage. My brain can’t sort it out.

“That a recording?”

“It’s happening now.”

“McGee wasn’t scheduled to do a Chat ’n’ Chew today.”

“Viola,” Marlow says. “That’s Pimento House.”

A sneak attack.

I put down my fork. “I … I gotta go.”

“But we’re right in the middle of—”

I stand up, and 30 faces turn to me. Everyone knows. I pull my phone from my blazer. Hundreds of messages jam my inbox. Damn. I’m breathing fast. Am pushing through the dining room, the living room, the mudroom; am putting on my trenchcoat and hat; am out the door.

I’m surrounded by winter dark, my frozen breath visible. Snow has started coming down in a serious way. I walk from Zardoz House down a quiet residential street, a degentrified Rochester, New York, neighborhood. Almost every house other than Zardoz is boarded up, burned, gutted. The street is pockmarked, hasn’t been paved for the better part of a decade. Rusted gas-powered cars, some abandoned, some home for indigent squatters, line the road. I park on the avenue, which is still being maintained by the city. I walk and brood. I feel furious but also guilty.

When it was founded, the Federation wasn’t supposed to have adversarial elections. There weren’t supposed to be factions, but factions quickly formed. Artists want the Federation to be separate from the World, to focus on the individual creative projects of Members. Activists want the Federation to become a platform from which to save the World. We Universalists, meanwhile, want the Federation to eat the World. The way it’s supposed to work, candidates are supposed to get spontaneously drafted by the community. The way it really works is when you make it known you’re running, Members invite you to Chat ’n’ Chews. You visit Houses. You answer questions. You give a campaign speech, though you never call it a campaign speech. Campaigning is what your opponent does. You, you’re just chatting, and maybe someone just happens to broadcast your visit. The Federation pioneered the art of passive-aggressive politicking, but McGee has perfected it. Somehow, she got herself invited to Pimento House—to my house—at the very end of the Voting Period, on the night I was invited to one of the First Five. She’s at my House, right now, and 30,000 people are watching her on the Bulletin, watching her humiliate me, live.

When I get to the avenue, I’m confused for a second. A big robot soup-kitchen truck, operated by some effective altruism distributed autonomous charity, is selling discount meals to the city’s indigents. Hundreds wait in line, clutching their National Basic Income cards. I spot my van across the street. It turns on when I get close, its headlights bright. Its door slides open. My phone says it’ll take two hours to get from Rochester to Ithaca. If I’m lucky, I’ll make it back before McGee is finished.

If I’m lucky, I’ll get the chance to kill that bitch live on the Bulletin.

When I joined the Federation, I was in a bad place. I’d been kicked out of my vocational high school, one of those charter “code boot camps” popular back then, for unruly behavior. For a while, I trained robots to do home reno work, and then a roofer robot splat fell on me. That’s when my drinking and drug use got really out of hand. Six months out of recovery, methadone pump in my arm, LoJack on my ankle, I was at the end of my rope. I’d run out of friends willing to let me couch surf, couldn’t get a job. I had nothing but my Basic.

One day, I got a weird message. Someone from my Narcotics Recovery Group—a woman named Grace Zenebe—invited me to visit her. We weren’t supposed to contact each other outside the Group, but Grace said she wanted “to catch up.” To be honest, I didn’t much like her. The machine learning court had forced me into my NRG after my arrest (long story). Grace had gone into recovery voluntarily. She’d gotten addicted to sleep suppressors during her senior year at Cornell and treated the NRG as a form of personal therapy.

During meetings, she complained about her parents, and she seemed especially interested in telling me about her personal problems. Worst of all, she was part of a weird cult, kept talking about being “a Member of the Federation.” Took me a couple weeks to figure out she wasn’t talking about Star Trek. Still, when her message appeared in my inbox, I accepted her invite. I’d get a meal, I figured, and—though she was annoying, though she was in a cult—she was hot, and I hoped we might hook up. When I arrived, I walked up to her House and opened the door; it was unlocked. When she saw me, she hugged me like we were old friends. Her smile—bright, welcoming—floored me.

“Vee,” she said, “It’s so wonderful to see you!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, definitely.”

Pimento House was big and creaky but also cozy. Fifteen people lived here, Grace explained.
Sitting at the kitchen island, I ate two oversize pieces of vegan lasagna, which her housemate Farhad had made. “He’s an amazing chef,” she said. I felt jealous, even though I had no right to be. I grunted and gulped down a mug of black coffee. Grace sipped mate. Soon, we moved to her room and cozied up on her purple futon. She’d graduated a year ago, but her room still looked like it belonged to a student. Aromatic candles covered tables. Economics textbooks and Russian novels lined DIY concrete-block bookshelves. I almost sat on an Ursula K. Le Guin novel—I think it was The Dispossessed.

We got to talking. Well, she got to talking. Since I last saw her, she had decided to become a writer, and when she told her parents, they freaked out. All the major TV shows and video games were written by A.I. these days; there wasn’t much of a future for human writers. Her parents all but disowned her, but she refused to be cowed. She’d already had a few short stories accepted, showed me a magazine called the Sideways Review, which included her story “A Small Hang-Up.” She had even (she was embarrassed to admit) been accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop but had declined the offer. She said “Iowa Writers’ Workshop” like I was supposed to know what that was.

I asked the question she wanted me to ask: “Why didn’t you go?”

“All the most interesting young writers are part of the Federation.”

“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t read a novel since before code boot camp.

“This generation is going to reinvent American literature. The Federation is changing everything that matters—art, music, philosophy.”

Overcome with excitement, she took out a folder from her backpack, and I sighed. I hadn’t been asked to her room to make out but to be recruited. “You know what a Basic House is, Vee?”

“It’s not a cult?”

She smiled. “Not exactly.” A Basic House, she said, was just a group of people who chose to live together. What had happened was, 10 years ago, a network of friends, using an old social media platform, started a conversation about how they wanted to escape the tyranny of the labor market, how they wanted to work on their own projects full time, and so a few hundred activists and artists banded together, bought five dilapidated houses in a degentrified neighborhood in Rochester. Those five—the First Five—formed the seed of the Basic House Federation. In the years that followed, any group that owned a House could join. You gave your biweekly Basic payment to the Federation, and in return the Federation handled food, housing, and the other necessities, negotiating on behalf of the entire Membership with the outside economy. To be admitted to the Federation, she said, each Member of a House wrote up a personal Five-Year Plan explaining what Meaningful Project they would commit to.

I said, “What if my Five-Year Plan is: ‘Play Zombie Fortress all day’?”

“It would depend. Are you, like, doing an ethnography of gaming communities or something?”

“I’m playing because I like killing zombies with a sawed-off shotgun?”

She laughed. “That proposal might need a little bit of work.”

“OK, what if I’m a professional gamer, and I’m raking in money knocking off newbs?”

“Well, if your Project happens to earn you money, your windfall will be, eh, returned to the Federation common fund.”

“I see,” I said. “So, the Federation isn’t a cult. It’s a scam. I give away my Basic, and I’m supposed to trust some Communist bureaucrat to spend my money for me?” Back then, I didn’t know what communism was, but it sounded disreputable.

Grace playfully hit my arm. “You can think of it as a sort of Communist Costco. If Costco happened to own your house and ran its own world-class health care system. It’s called a monopsony. When there’s only one buyer in a marketplace, that buyer has a lot of—”

“I get the idea,” I said, and Grace seemed embarrassed at her own chattiness.

She said, “Vee—” (our arms touching) “—where’ve you been living the last six months?”

“Here and there.”

“You getting work?”

“I tried … ” Tears came. “I really tried.”

“They garnishing your wages or whatnot?”

“What wages? No one wants to give me a job.”

“And the Basic?”

“You can’t live off the Basic.”

She held my hand and waited till I finished crying. “We have a spot in Pimento House. If you wanted to, I could introduce you to my housemates? Sponsor you? Everyone here is supernice.”

“Why me? I’m just some random nobody from your recovery group.”

“I missed you,” she said.

“What?”

“You just … most people in recovery, when you talk to them, they don’t really hear what you’re saying. You’re different, Vee. You really listen. You, like, empathize.”

I wasn’t the person she imagined me to be. I was just better than others at hiding my feelings. When you’ve got a rage-filled homophobic alcoholic dad and a mom with borderline personality disorder, you become pretty good at reading people and hiding your emotions. But I let Grace be confused about me. I was torn. On the one hand, I wanted to run. Grace was being too nice to me. On the other hand, despite myself, I trusted her. And anyway, joining Pimento House definitely beat starving. So I filled out an application, I said in my Five-Year Plan I could help Houses with repairs and renovations, and I met her Housemates. I’d mooch off these suckers for six months, then get the hell out.

But something strange happened. Six months became a year. A year became five. I filled out a second Five-Year Plan and then a third. I went back to school, paid off my debts, got PT for my bum leg, did repair and reno all across the Burned-Over Territory. And Grace and me, well, we fell in love. Got married. Decided to do an ovum merger. That wasn’t the strangest part. I started believing in the Federation. The World was getting more fucked every day, but the Federation worked. With the national indigent population edging toward 100 million, it was a place you could live. I decided we could only be free inside the Federation, but we couldn’t be truly free until everyone joined. Our wealth came from the World, but one day we would cast aside the Basic and the Federation would stand on its own two feet, producing everything it needed by itself, for itself. The Federation can’t change the World like the Activists think; the Federation has to eat the World. That’s what I decided. And now, I’m pushing 40 and running to be Chairperson, fighting the best I know how to save the Federation from those who would destroy it from within.

Weird, huh?

It takes an hour longer than promised to get back to Ithaca. All that time, I watch McGee. Every time I pick up my phone, she’s holding forth, big grin on her smug face, outlining her plans for her next term. Before dinner, she volunteers, “Members should totally be allowed to keep more outside income and here’s why.” She speaks with a Valley Girl cadence. An hour later, between forkfuls of salad, she slips in, “The Project Approval Framework so totally needs to be made more rigorous. If you, like, just want to sit around all day in your pajamas, you don’t need to do it in a Basic House, am I right?” Laughter. Housemates and Members I don’t recognize surround her. I don’t see Grace, and she isn’t answering my messages. Farhad is at McGee’s side. He must’ve been the one to invite her.

Now, it’s no secret that me and Farhad don’t get along. He runs a five-table restaurant in town that caters to University bigwigs. It even got reviewed in the New York Times. If McGee’s reforms were adopted, his disposable income would shoot up. Still, I never imagined Farhad would betray me this way. During dessert, McGee makes a new suggestion: “And, like, I know it’s controversial to say so, but the Member Removal Process is 100 percent a joke. You can’t be kicked out of the Federation even if you’ve committed a felony, you know?” She eats a spoonful of gelato. “Can’t we make the Federation a safe space?”

Was that a swipe at me? I wasn’t convicted of a felony, just a misdemeanor. I stow my phone, too furious to watch more. When the van lets me off, I’m shaking. My suitcase follows me onto the street on mechanical spider legs. I send the van away to find parking. The lot across the street has become a small tent camp filled with a few dozen indigent squatters. Most used to teach composition at the University before their jobs got automated. Now they spend their days working microgigs on their phones.

I’m home. I study the face of the old Victorian. Its yellow siding is stained, its turret cladded by snow. The wraparound porch is covered in junk. Its frosted windows are lit up, decorated with tinsel and strings of lights, and cheerful voices emerge from within. The first-floor windows look like two stern eyes, challenging me.

Before I can go in, a shadow approaches me. It’s a man, an indigent. I don’t recognize him. He’s short, has a well-trimmed goatee, and his hair is pulled back in a ponytail, He’s wearing a CalTech sweatshirt and gray sweatpants and is holding an ancient MacBook under his arm. I’m about to say I can’t help him when I see that he’s wearing a LoJack around his ankle. My ankle twinges where the weight of one just like it sat for 18 months. Irritation melts into pity, and I pull out my wallet.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says, “but I don’t want your money.”

I don’t respond.

He says, “You live in this here House?”

I nod, wary.

“You think … you think I could get in or something?”

“Well, we’re full up. But there’s a list of Houses with openings online and—”

“I applied already, three times. Never even got an interview. The rejection letter was like, ‘There are 5,000 applications for every open spot.’ But I have something unique to contribute, you know? I just thought, maybe, if you live here, maybe you got some inside track or something? Maybe you could look at my application and tell me if I did anything wrong?”

I shove money into his hand, and he doesn’t refuse it. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“I’m a skilled programmer. I can do so much more than training coding algorithms all day.”

“It’s not a decision I can make on my own … ” The man glares at me. I dig out one of my cards from my wallet and hand it to him. “Look, admission is a collective process, but why don’t you send me a message, and when I’m in less of a hurry I’ll see what I can do?”

He doesn’t like this answer, but he takes my card and wades through the gathering snow to join his comrades in the tent camp.

Off balance, I step up the creaky steps, straighten the sign by the door.

WELCOME TO

PIMENTO HOUSE

JOINED 2045

I look squarely at the security camera and wait for the door to unlock. I reach for the knob, and my hand is shaking. But then I see my wedding band on my left hand, and I calm down. Whatever happens in there, I’ll have at least one ally in the House, one person whose unconditional support I can count on.

Members crowd the entrance hallway. They’re grabbing coats and hats, putting on galoshes, summoning cars or getting ready to brave the snow on foot. I recognize a few Members, and when they recognize me, their faces become alternately ashen and curious. I push through the cluster of bodies, going from the entrance hallway to the living room. The place is a fire hazard. Twenty people are sitting on four couches arranged at odd angles. The light is low, and the air smells of pot. Empty wine glasses and beer bottles are everywhere. Over the House speakers, InfiniteIncome is rapping about deindustrialization, and a video from his new album, Eternal Recurrence, is being projected against one of the white walls.

In the kitchen, I find them.

Farhad is wearing augmented reality glasses, directing an army of helpers, coordinating the effort with a piece of software he wrote for his restaurant. His beard and hair are bound with colorful ties. His Mandelbrot-patterned bandana is soaked with sweat. He’s drying dishes and taking sips from an oversize glass of red wine. InfiniteIncome is now rapping about the racial wealth gap from a spherical speaker-robot rolling around the kitchen island.

Everyone is in a great mood. They’re doing dishes by hand. Our dishwasher has been broken for six weeks, and the Federation-run robot factory in Arizona that’s supposed to make us a new one is backed up six months fulfilling orders—a perfect advertisement for McGee’s platform. And McGee is, of course, helping the dish crew, wearing yellow rubber gloves and a Pimento House sweatshirt over her sleek campaign dress. A few videodrones linger, probably picking up b-roll for her next campaign video.

“McGee!” I say, too loud.

She looks startled and almost drops a plate. “Hey, Viola.” she says. “Awesome to see you!” as if we’re best friends.

“What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I was invited here.”

Farhad steps between us. “Viola, back off.”

“Don’t tell me to back off, traitor.”

“How am I a traitor?”

“You invite McGee into my House.”

“Your House?” Farhad says. “First of all, it’s an honor for the Chairperson of the Federation to visit any House.”

McGee says, “Really, I’m the one who’s honored. Pimento is one of the oldest and most storied Houses in—”

“And second of all, I was not the one who—”

“You timed this visit to mess with my trip to Rochester,” I say. “To embarrass me. I was invited to one of the First Five, and you found that threatening.”

McGee frowns her cute frown and steps forward so one of the videodrones can get a good view of her. “I don’t know what I said or did to make you so angry, Viola, but you’ve been impugning my character for months.”

“You want to gentrify the Federation. To erase people you think of as undeserving. Your policies are gonna reintroduce all the poisons of the World into our—”

She holds up her gloved hands. “Viola, please believe me when I say I understand your fears. And I recognize that your history as a recovering addict informs the way you’re hearing my proposals, but—”

“My history as a recovering addict?”

“—it’s so important to me that you accept my good faith and—”

“Fucking bitch,” I say, moving in fast.

McGee gasps, raises her hands to defend herself, and we’re grappling over the counter, and water is filling up the sink, and everyone on the dish crew is frozen, and Farhad moves in to pull me away from McGee, but can’t get between us, and McGee is a head shorter than me but man she’s strong, and we move sideways, and the sink overflows, great sheets of water coming down, and I slip on wet linoleum, and I’m on my butt near the compost bin, and McGee’s hair has been pulled out of its hair tie, and her gray dress is slightly ripped, and her green eyes are on fire, ready for round two. I stand up. My ass hurts. I’m ready too. I’ve already blown the election, so I might as well drag her down with me. If she embarrasses herself, maybe the Activists will win.

“Viola!” comes a voice.

Grace is standing at the entrance of the kitchen. She’s wearing clogs, pregnancy sweatpants, a Federation Review of Books T-shirt, Artist pin on her shirt. One of her hands, its nails bright yellow, rubs her huge third-trimester-big belly. Her eyes are puffy, as if she has woken up from an uncomfortable sleep or has been crying. Her presence makes me realize how shamefully I’m acting. Farhad turns off the faucet; he and his helpers start mopping up the spilled water. My mind finally lets me hear what Farhad was trying to tell me.

He wasn’t the one who invited McGee into Pimento House.

He wasn’t the traitor.

We move in silence, Grace half waddling in her clogs. Her feet have been swollen lately. Her back hurts all the time. Our Housemates give us space as we climb to the second floor. Grace is dejected. She has been dejected a lot lately. The past year has sucked for her. Her mother dying from cancer, the lukewarm reception of her second novel, the tribulations of a difficult pregnancy—every week has brought new problems. And I’ve been a less-than-supportive partner, on the road for months. I hoped the baby would solve our problems. Before the campaign season got going, we even toured child-friendly Houses in wine country, away from the tent camps, away from the decimated infrastructure of the stagnating cities. A vineyard near Seneca Falls even extended us an invitation to join. We laughed at the thought of two teetotalers helping to operate a Federation vineyard. But I was wrong. The baby won’t save us. I abandoned her when she needed me, and she lashed out.

We climb a second set of stairs and arrive at the turret office. The turret is Grace’s domain. She’s House Accountant and also does all her writing here. She writes longhand and has boxes full of index cards where she composes elaborate notes. The big metal desk in the middle of the room is covered with her notebooks and printouts. We sit on the purple futon, near the window, moved here from Grace’s old bedroom years ago.

Tears crawl down my face. “I’m so sorry.”

“Look,” she says. “I’m the one who should apologize.”

“I wasn’t … I should have … ”

“I should have told you about Joan.”

“I understand why you didn’t. You wanted to hurt me.”

“No, silly. I would never want to hurt you. It’s just, we ran into each other at a Chat ’n’ Chew at Riot House and—”

“You were at that one?”

“Yeah, and we got to talking and it happened super last-minute, the arrangements. And I told myself you knew.”

“What?”

“We told you Joan was coming last week, and when you didn’t respond I thought it just … I don’t know … ” I check my inbox; it’s true. “I guess I convinced myself you didn’t care. At some level, I knew you missed it, but you were away, and I was afraid to message you again. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“I do feel hurt,” I say, “but I understand why you did it. I get that you’re mad at me.”

She narrows her eyes. “I’m not mad at you.”

“I’ve been away. I’ve been a bad partner.”

“You’ve been campaigning. Where else would you be?”

“But if you’re not mad at me, why would you invite her?”

“Because I support her.”

“What?”

Grace sighs. “Joan is right. The Federation is falling apart. We need to make changes if we’re going to survive. It’s crazy. We, like, live in the middle of an open-air homeless shelter, while every month Farhad is pulling in thousands of dollars from—”

“Don’t talk to me about Farhad.”

“Forget Farhad, then. I got a job offer.”

“What?”

“I was asked to help train the writing algorithm for the next season of Zombie Fortress.”

“Since when do you care about video games?”

“I would be writing, sort of. Helping make stories.”

Over the past 15 years, Grace wrote two long novels. The first, a philosophical adventure about automation and underemployment, was well reviewed. The second, an experimental novel about climate change refugees, didn’t do nearly as well. The second book would (I tried to reassure her) just “take more time” to find its audience. She’s supposed to be working on a third book, a set of linked stories about the heat death of the universe.

“You’re supposed to be writing your book,” I say.

“My last book was read by, like, 50 people.”

“You said you were going to ‘change American literature.’ ”

“Look, I’m 38, and I’m … I’m tired of feeling responsible for the proclamations of my younger self. I just want to help machine learning algorithms tell stories people enjoy. Fun stories.”

“You want to make video games? OK, you can submit an addendum to your Five-Year Plan. People do it all the time and—”

“That’s not the point, Vee. I turned down the job.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I was too ashamed to tell anyone about the offer.”

“Why?”

“The job paid well. Really well.”

“And?”

She says, “And I’m sick of these Federation taboos against working in the labor market. Would it be so bad if I make a little money and keep some of it for myself? For us?”

“You don’t sound like yourself.”

“I just … when we were touring Houses, I realized I’ve been living here since I was in college. If I’m going to be living in a Basic House when I’m 60—”

“You want to leave the Federation?”

“Listen to me. I love the Federation. I want to stay in the Federation. But if that’s going to be a viable option, we need to make the Federation better. We need to make improvements, just like Joan says. We’re growing too fast, letting in too many people too quickly and—”

“I can’t believe what you’re saying.”

“Stop interrupting me. I hate when you do that. Look, I get that the World is going to shit—the Stagnation has been hard for everybody—but the Federation isn’t a substitute for the welfare state.”

“What welfare state? When they ‘gave’ us the Basic, they took everything else away.”

“What I’m just saying is, we can’t absorb all the World’s addicts, homeless, underemployed, and mentally—”

“You’re the one who brought me into the Federation.”

“Of course I did. I liked you. You were great. Are great.”

“If you had to do it again, would you?”

“What?”

“Would 38-year-old Grace still invite the person I used to be into Pimento House?”

Grace hesitates. “That’s a totally loaded and unfair question.”

“But it’s a question I’m asking you to answer.”

“You’re impossible sometimes, Vee. You came into the Federation during a very different time. You’ve seen the changes, just like me. You’ve met the sort of people I’m talking about. We’re not a federation of halfway houses. We’re—”

“I hear Artists talk about ‘those sorts of people’ all the time, and it’s always code for ‘those unworthy people.’ ”

“You don’t really believe I think that, do you?”

“You’re the one who told me the Federation was a model for a better world.”

“A model for that better world—not the World itself. It doesn’t make sense to just, like, unilaterally make everyone in the World a Member and then say our work is done. The point is to show what’s possible if we work together, helping every Member do the slow, careful, deliberate work of personal transformation and self-improvement. It’s not enough to survive, Vee. We should make something nice in this life.”

“You … you voted against McGee during the last cycle.”

“I changed my mind.”

My Grace wouldn’t change her mind, not that way. She can’t mean what she’s saying. I wipe away my tears. My phone buzzes. I should ignore the alert but can’t help myself. It’s my Election Dashboard. Somehow, in the past half-hour, I’ve pulled ahead of McGee. On the Federation Bulletin, I see what has happened. Both McGee and me, we’ve bled supporters, but McGee has lost more than me, and I’ve gotten unexpected support from Activists and Independents. They like my aggressive defense of the Federation. The Bulletin discussion boards are a bloodbath.

“Look,” I say, showing Grace my phone.

“What?”

“I’m in the lead. I think I might win.”

Grace sighs. “Congratulations?”

“I’ve worked so hard to get here. Is that all you can say?”

“Is this the conversation you want to have right now?”

“What I want to know is, why you don’t believe in me?”

“Look, Vee, you know how much I love you.”

“But you don’t love my success.”

“What are you talking about? I think Joan is right, and you’re wrong. It’s not about you—it’s about your ideas.”

She looks out through the window, across the street, at the tents being buried alive by snow, and her eyes fill with a new wave of tears. Across the street, cooking smoke rises into the night. Protected by a blue tarp, an indigent group—men, women, children, old folks—huddle around the man who approached me outside, watching something together on his MacBook, laughing. I see now what has come between me and Grace. This has been the view from her office, every day, for years, and my dear, sensitive Artist wife can’t handle the visible signs of the World’s long Stagnation.

But I know I can fix what is broken between us. We can’t all face the truth, but it’s my job, the job of people like me, to face the ugliness outside so others don’t have to. We’ll move to a child-friendly House. She’ll have the kid, have a nicer view from her window, finish her book, and in time she’ll come to see things my way again. I’m ready to forgive her, too, for stabbing me in the back, but only if she’ll finally recognize that I’m right.

Sitting on the purple couch, looking into her big, brown, wet eyes, I’m sure she will. Yes, together we’ll enfold this blight into our warm embrace, dispel the World’s despair, build a new World, a better World, one where people can finally care about one another, a World where the Federation will be universal, and all of us—to the last person—will be Members.

What Problem Is Universal Basic Income Really Trying to Solve?

A Universal Basic Income (UBI) advocate responds to Lee Konstantinou’s short story “Burned-Over Territory.”

BY SEBASTIAN JOHNSON

OCT 27, 2018 8:01 AM

As many as 1.8 million long-haul truck drivers. Tens of thousands of radiologists and accountants. The entire field of journalism. Some experts believe these careers and more— nearly half of all the jobs existing today, by one estimation—could become a thing of the past in the next two decades. Almost three-quarters of the country is terrified about the future of automation and the upheaval it will bring.

Of course, fears about our coming obsolescence are as old as the apocryphal Ned Ludd. But the scope and scale of the projected disruption—as many as 73 million jobs lost by 2030 in the United States alone, according to one estimate—have brought the automation threat to wider attention. Will the not-too-distant future look like The Jetsons, a gleaming utopia of luxury skyscrapers and flying smart cars? Or will it look like The Jetsons, a hellish word dominated by a wealthy elite who live high above a ruined planet?

Many policy advocates and technologists have promoted universal basic income, or UBI, as one way to cope with the specter of joblessness wrought by advances in artificial intelligence. UBI would provide each individual with a no-strings-attached payment each month to cover basic needs and prevent individuals from falling below the poverty line. The benefits of UBI, according to proponents, would include the elimination of poverty, the fairer distribution of technologically generated wealth, and human flourishing. Critics are less sanguine, variously seeing in UBI a Trojan horse for dismantling the welfare state, an ill-considered policy that will sap humans of the self-actualization and pride derived from work, and a wholly inadequate response to the structural problems with late capitalism.

In his short story “Burned-Over Territory,” Lee Konstantinou delves the tensions between the promise and peril of automation as well as some of these open questions around the effects of UBI. Konstantinou builds a fun-house mirror version of our current economic reality, set in the later part of the 21^st century, and offers a decidedly pessimistic take on UBI. Despite the existence of a national basic income program, 100 million people live in desperate poverty, and the rest struggle to string together a decent living doing gig work as robot trainers. The world of the story is experiencing something called the Stagnation, marked by high unemployment, deindustrialization, urban blight, and epidemic levels of drug use. Suffice it to say, this is not the fully automated luxury communism we were promised.

But the more compelling element of the story is Konstantinou’s exploration of how UBI might influence our social and economic connections to one another. His protagonist is a member of the Federation, a collective of self-organized group homes where residents pool their basic incomes. Federation basic houses use their common funds to purchase necessities from the outside economy. ”Think of it as sort of a Communist Costco,” one character quips. Residents apply for membership to basic houses like one would apply to a scholarship program, drafting a personal five-year plan that commits them to a meaningful project. All profits from personal projects go back to the common fund. But members are split over the house-admissions process, how to treat profits, and whether members should participate in the labor market.

Through clever world building, Konstantinou gets at the crux of our debates over automation and UBI: how technology is reshuffling the ways we derive purpose from our work, and how we divide the spoils. Too often, UBI is sold as both insurance against robots stealing all of our jobs and a form of Sunday night never-work-again wish fulfillment. But the question in both cases is the same: “What if there were no work?” That’s the wrong thing to ask, though. Instead, UBI should be seen as addressing a different question: What if each of us could choose the work that fit us best and be justly compensated for it?

Consider, for example, all of the rewarding and undercompensated work required to care for children and the infirm that happens in communities every day, done largely by women to the detriment of their participation in paid labor. What if men and women had the kind of insurance provided by UBI and could share responsibilities to family and community more equally?

UBI isn’t a way to accommodate humans to an algorithmic world. It’s a way to preserve what’s human in our world by expanding human choice within our economic system. Right now, our economic system is rigged to reward the owners of technology and capital while transferring risks to workers and end users. Wealthy corporations have then pumped their gains into our political system, entrenching their advantages and thwarting our interests. The payoff for us has been constant data breaches and the erosion of privacy, contingent schedules and gig work, and dead-end bullshit jobs that make it impossible for people to save toward future goals.

UBI could improve the bargaining position of the average worker not in the far-off future, but now. It offers an alternative to low-wage work for long hours to make ends meet. It would give workers the breathing room they need to acquire new skills and to tend to their families—benefits that would redound to the economy as a whole.

With access to UBI, workers could also experiment with economic arrangements outside the traditional capital-labor dynamic. Communes like the Federation are one possible iteration, but so are worker cooperatives and other organizational models designed to democratize work and distribute its proceeds more fairly. Finally, UBI could begin to correct the unjustified and enormously unequal distribution of the economic gains from internet technology—built, keep in mind, on the valuable and regenerating resource that is our personal data.

There is nothing inevitable about an economy where the best one can say is, “My boss is an app, and I owe it money.” UBI can provide the space for us to commonly imagine a different kind of economy, rewarding innovation while sustaining all of our communities equitably. It’s an opportunity to center perspectives often left out of our economic debates entirely, like those of the black and brown women whose labor underpins much of the wealth generated by our economy. The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, a UBI pilot for low-income families of color in Jackson, Mississippi, is one promising effort. This new initiative will provide 15 families headed by black women with $1,000 each month for a year, more than doubling their annual income. Aisha Nyandoro, whose organization is spearheading the project, explained that it was born of the conviction that “all people have the strength and capacity to be the authors of their own lives.”

Konstantinou’s story ends on an uncertain note, which is a perfect reflection of the uncertainty and turbulence of our political and economic moment. We don’t know whether our future will bring us automated pain and, if so, whether UBI will bring us relief. But we know enough today to demand an economy that works for all of us—and UBI might have a role to play in that.

“Overvalued”

A new short story about a future in which people can buy and sell shares in one another.

BY MARK STASENKO

NOV 27, 2018 9:00 AM

“How was your day?” Jack asked his wife as she took off her black leather pumps at the door of their spacious industrial-chic condo in NoMad.

“Good,” Sophia lied.

They didn’t use to lie to each other, not even about small things. Unfiltered honesty had always come naturally to them, despite their glaring differences—maybe because of them. But for the past six weeks, nothing seemed natural anymore. It was strange how much the death of a stranger had changed things.

She should’ve felt happy, or so she kept telling herself. She had recently been promoted to partner at her fund and shifted her role from short selling to long-term investments. Despite having to pay out 10 percent of all pretax earnings as dividends to her personal investors and an outrageous 54 percent to Uncle Sam, she earned enough to afford the three-bedroom, four-bathroom condo they didn’t fill, the designer furniture Jack shopped for with all his free time, and the bullshit modern art that now just looked like bloodstained, limp airbags after a car accident.

But she didn’t feel happy because one tiny, uncontrollable bit of bad luck sucked all the serotonin and dopamine from her brain and replaced it with cortisol and adrenaline. Jack was the only one who saw that bit of bad luck coming. The only one who’d tried to stop it. Even though she knew it wasn’t fair, she blamed him for not doing more. She stared at him as he got drunk on a bottle of overproof bourbon he wouldn’t be able to afford without her.

“Instead of drinking all day, why don’t you do something?” she regretted asking almost immediately.

“I wish I could, but people like me don’t get hired to do anything besides work on factory lines or clean up shit after RIA assholes.”

“That’s redundant,” she mumbled.

“For emphasis,” he shot back. RIA stood for “rich, indoctrinated assholes,” so she was right, but he was quick too. Jack’s IQ was high, not quite as high as hers, but he was 1.9 sigma above the mean, so certainly high enough that he would’ve qualified for a respected university. It didn’t matter; his family couldn’t have afforded it, and the Prodigy Market hadn’t been around yet to help with the cost of a degree.

Sophia’s education, a degree in civil engineering from a good school but not one of the hallowed Seven-Figure schools, had cost close to $800,000. Her Initial Prodigy Offering hadn’t raised enough for a Seven-Figure degree (the 13 schools whose reputation emboldened them to charge more than $1 million for a degree), but she was still fortunate to have parents wealthy enough to hire counsel and brokers to manage a first-generation IPO in the newly minted Prodigy Market.

Jack was older and his parents were worse off, so he graduated high school with no chance. Jack would’ve liked to be a pediatrician. But if you couldn’t afford college, there was no way of avoiding ending up on the low-wage, unskilled Wall-Head side of the modern American workforce divide, looking on enviously at the high-skilled RIAs.

So Jack, like his parents, was a Wall-Head. He worked in a factory making hospital gurneys and wheelchairs—as close as he could get to joining the medical profession. As it was, he knew he’d soon be replaced by automation, as so many of his friends had been.

But unlike his parents, Jack had married an RIA. And up until six weeks ago, their marriage of opposites had worked well.

Sophia forced herself to think about how he was with his elderly parents who’d waited for a basic income to cover life’s needs—needs they couldn’t afford. They’d died waiting, and when they did, Jack didn’t pretend to be strong or controlled or “masculine.” He was angry, uncontrollable, honest. That’s when she knew she loved him. She found herself hoping that she still loved him, but so much had changed in six weeks.

Six weeks ago, Kathryn Tally Anders died, and ever since then, white lies and cortisol and whiskey and blame had taken over. Six weeks ago, Sophia had never said the name Kathryn Tally Anders, and now it possessed her every thought. Her brain played that name and that face on repeat.

More problematically, her brain blamed her over and over again for killing her.

It was so mind-numbingly dull, filling out a W-9 tax form on his wall-mounted Ecosphere screen. How could there even still be a W-9 form? Its persistence in the world seemed to mock the rest of the technological progress enveloping most aspects of life. Then he caught himself: Was this the dullest thought he’d ever had?

When he started doing contract work, he was told, “No two days are the same.” Those people had lied to him or, more likely, lied to themselves.

Alex prepped for every job in the exact same way, and this job would be no different from the dozens before and the dozens after. The Iridious security system on his coffin-sized safe scanned his irises in the basement of the five-bedroom suburban home where he lived alone. The door popped open after he was verified, and he retrieved two SCCY CPX-II pistols and their corresponding AAC Ti-Rant 9 mm silencers. He added a serrated 9-inch SOG hunting blade to his artillery as well, but doubted he’d have to use it unless things went terribly wrong. A part of him hoped they would.

Alex always called what he did “liquidating an over-resourced target,” but in regular English, once shed of all the Orwellian indirections and rationalizations we bake into our use of language, he was nothing other than a hitman.

The bud permanently in his ear gently vibrated, and the voice on the other side told him they received the W-9. The job would be listed as “supply chain consulting” on their balance sheet. He’d receive confirmation of the go within 24 hours.

Sophia’s monitors lit up in her east-facing office at Athena Prodigy Management on the 47^th floor of a 49-floor building just as the sun rose. She opened her portfolio and searched for ticker symbol KTA1108II like she had every morning for the past six weeks. She knew that seeing it would gut her, but she did it anyway, futilely hoping it wouldn’t show up at all, as if it had never happened.

But every morning, there it was, with a total gain of $32 million floating next to the symbol. And that’s all it was, a symbol. It didn’t say Kathryn Tally Anders, it didn’t show her picture, it didn’t mention her death; it was just a symbol on a spreadsheet. Every morning, she’d close out and try to focus on long-term Prodigy investments. Every morning, she hated long-term Prodigy investments and herself a little more.

Prodigy wasn’t an accurate term anymore. At first, the Prodigy Market, created by a coalition of what ultimately came to be known as the Seven-Figure universities, was only open for investments in the highest-potential students like Sophia—actual prodigies. But it was so profitable that before long any underperforming student or any bullshit, for-profit school could access the market.

High-potential students could float shares of 10 percent of their future lifetime earnings on the market, but students with less sterling credentials would offer 20 percent, 40 percent, or even 60 percent of all future income to garner interest. The market drove up the demand for RIAs, both on the part of families eager to produce them and of investors eager to acquire stakes in them, and the heightened demand further exacerbated the cost of attending the Seven-Figure schools. Universities touted the market as the great equalizer while their multibillion-dollar endowments bloated.

It was a highly liquid market at the top end, which allowed for an entirely new class of equities and derivatives. Moreover, Prodigies were bundled into PAGs (Prodigy Asset Groups) by banks for a particular risk level and industry cluster (BBB+ aspiring software engineers, for instance). The average investor didn’t even have to research individual assets; they could bet on market demand for a certain profession or skill set. It was a casino, but instead of betting on black or red, the vote was on whether a high school kid was going to be successful. And Sophia was good at making that bet.

Some high-potential Prodigies could apply for their own ticker symbol. These were much more volatile, potentially more lucrative for traders like Sophia. She liked to short individual assets, betting their value would go down. And KTA1108II had been her biggest short position ever.

Before its death, KTA1108II was an exciting asset, not just for Sophia but for the entire market. KTA1108II was extremely high-potential, touted on CNBC as one of the few assets that may be ROI positive before its higher education even began. Needless to say, KTA1108II’s market cap was spiraling upward; the futures market was betting that its lifetime worth would be in the hundreds of millions, if not more.

KTA1108II entered the Prodigy Market even before entering high school, offering up 10 percent of future lifetime earnings. It was an above-average asset: good grades, accelerated particularly in math and science, stable family. But it wasn’t until ninth grade that the asset really hit the radar. In ninth grade, KTA1108II proved that cancer cells bonded to healthy cells behaved differently, and therefore that the billions pharmaceutical companies had spent on laboratory tests of unbonded cancer cells had been a waste. This asset had made a discovery capable of impacting millions of lives and billions of dollars at 15 years old.

KTA1108II exploded in the Prodigy Market. It was expected to be a part of the team that discovered noninvasive, long-term cures for late-stage malignant tumors, particularly as related to bone marrow.

But when there’s excitement around an asset, investors ignore risk and potential vulnerabilities. They overvalue the asset. No one asks what could go wrong in a climate of irrational exuberance—no one, that is, except for dispassionate short sellers like Sophia. She had built her entire career around the contrarian quest for these overvalued assets.

Since the Ernst-Meyers laws following the 2021 Depression, liquidators, like Alex, were quietly contracted by unscrupulous companies to “liquidate” underperforming, overcompensated employees who could no longer be terminated by legal means. This increasingly common, if unacknowledged, practice was known as “self-regulation.” This new contract was different, though. The firm that had hired Alex wasn’t self-regulating. Instead, they held a massive short position in an asset in the Prodigy Market and stood to make a heavy profit if the asset were to be liquidated.

Alex received no identifying or demographic details about the target until right before the hit. The details of the person didn’t matter; they were a target no more and no less than a piece of paper with a bull’s-eye drawn on it. But traditionally he was liquidating long-term, overpaid executives, almost exclusively older men, sometimes older women, whose survivors stood to cash in large life insurance policies.

But a job involving the Prodigy Market meant that the target could be young and would likely not be from a wealthy family. When he accepted the contract, he refused the details like always, but he did find himself wondering how it’d make him feel if it was a kid.

And for a moment, he realized he wasn’t bored with the job.

It was only eight weeks ago that Sophia first discovered KTA1108II’s flaw. She found it in a simple iShare photo in which KTA1108II was jumping into the air with friends, arms above its head. It was in long sleeves at the beach; it always wore long sleeves. But because its arms were above its head, the sleeves had fallen down just enough for Sophia to spot the tip of a small scar on its wrist.

After Sophia verified that the mark on the asset’s wrist was indeed a self-inflicted scar, she went through her network of hackers to gain access to the asset’s medical records. The story for KTA1108II couldn’t have been better. It was seeing a psychiatrist until it entered the Prodigy Market, when it dropped the shrink and the antidepressant prescriptions because, of course, those disclosures would’ve lowered its share price. Materially adverse information, as the filings called it.

It was only a week before Sophia discovered this that she had been promoted to partner at Athena. The promotion came with a huge raise and the ability to trade the firm’s own equity and share in its profits, dramatically increasing her potential bonuses.

It’s usually hard to ascertain how much any given promotion or event will impact your overall life, but not for Sophia. Because she herself was an asset traded on the Prodigy Market, she knew exactly how much the promotion increased her worth: 29.2 percent. Such an increase was extremely rare for someone already in the workforce. The promotion drove her share price up to $551. Rumors spread that even her own fund was taking a position in her.

With the confidence of her market value spike, she used her entire new trading portfolio to short KTA1108II. Everything. It was an insane move, the biggest short position the fund had ever taken. But Sophia was logical, and this was as rational a trade as she had ever taken. Once she bet every leveraged dollar against KTA1108II, she sent the photos and the medical records to CNBC under the same reliable alias she always did. She waited for the network to cross-reference and validate the information.

Less than a week later, the story broke right before 8 a.m.: KTA1108II suffered from depression and had acted on the disease in the past with self-mutilation. The story even one-upped Sophia and asked if there had been suicide attempts. It was perfect. Within the hour, KTA1108II’s share price crashed by almost 30 percent, from $347 to $243. Sophia earned her firm nearly $11 million.

The other partners wanted Sophia to cash in. A doctor’s statement or well-timed announcement of some research breakthrough could bounce KTA1108II’s stock back quickly. Sophia talked them out of it; there was more room to fall. She knew that the stress of losing its future would be poorly managed by a highly motivated, anxiety-laden, 16-year-old asset suffering from depression.

But the market closed that night with KTA1108II’s share price up from its low. Not by much, but the take for the firm would’ve been about $8 million, and the conversations would be about the $3 million “lost” and not the $8 million earned.

But less than two hours later Sophia’s phone rang. The voice on the other end excitedly told her to turn on CNBC.

KTA1108II was dead, a suspected suicide. There was a note. They weren’t reading it.

The share price dropped to $0.11 within a minute in after-hours trading. Sophia did what she was programmed to do: She unloaded the short position and earned the firm $32 million. It was her biggest day ever.

The partners congratulated Sophia for her (and their) triumph. They insisted that she had nothing to do with the asset’s death. She could barely follow their words; her mind was racing, debating whether she was a murderer or not. For the first time since she was a girl, Sophia found that the cortisol controlling her circular thoughts was far stronger than her logic.

She expected to fight with Jack that night. He had always been piously against “profiting off the failures of others,” as he put it. He had been trying to get her to stop for years. She opened the door, and Jack reeked of bourbon; he’d seen the news already.

Jack always got home hours before Sophia even left her office; that day had been no different. He had stepped on the treadmill in their extra bedroom and was less than a mile into his run when he saw the news, a Prodigy Asset familiar from dinner conversations had committed suicide. Jack shut down the treadmill and grabbed his computer. He became obsessed, reading every article he could find. The financial outlets referred to her as KTA1108II, but some smaller publications called her Kathryn Tally Anders. Kate, her family called her.

He read about Kate’s life. Her dog. Her two older brothers who joined the Air Force. Her parents who’d immigrated to America 34 years earlier. And then at 5:24 p.m., he read about Kate’s cancer research. And that’s when he started drinking.

Kate was focused on multiple myeloma, the cancer that had killed Jack’s mother. They said Kate might help find an affordable cure. Kate was going to do that. Kate who killed herself so that he could have this lavish three-bed, four-bath condo in NoMad with paintings on the wall that he didn’t even like.

He filled another glass. And then another. And another, which is why he smelled like booze when Sophia arrived home. When Sophia walked in the door, his disgust was displaced by surprise: He could see that she hated herself too. It was the first time he ever saw that look on Sophia’s face. So instead of fighting, he walked up to her and wrapped his arms around his wife.

They talked as she drank wine and mindlessly repeated that she was certain it would’ve happened anyway. He agreed with her. Maybe that’s when the white lies between them began.

Sophia went to work for the next few days but couldn’t focus. She’d tell herself that her more successful peers wouldn’t care—they’d be celebrating. She hated that she didn’t feel that way. She’d motivate herself for an hour or two, but the emotional crash always followed, and she’d go back to reading about KTA1108II.

Sophia gathered the partners and asked to be moved to long-term investments. She thought if she started investing in assets’ futures, she’d be able to forgive herself. Her partners took less than an hour to discuss the transition and approve it. She found out after the fact that there had been a lot of pushback, but her friend and partner Ether had put his foot down.

“Humans before profits,” he had apparently said. He’d refused to leave the room if they didn’t accede to Sophia’s request. They did, and Sophia’s share price on the Prodigy Market dropped within hours to below $400 for the first time in three years.

For a day, she felt relieved. She was done shorting; she convinced herself this is all she needed to move forward. But she only felt worse.

Sophia wasn’t the best at what she did anymore. She was a part of the conventional herd, rather than a hunter seeking to capitalize on flaws in the conventional wisdom. When she was still shorting, she’d be able to motivate herself for a least an hour or two. Now, she’d spend full days obsessing over Kathryn. Searching and re-searching her name on the internet. Rereading articles she had nearly memorized.

Sophia finally understood how Kathryn Tally Anders could find relief from cutting herself. In fact, Sophia started wearing a hair tie on her wrist that she would snap on her skin when she would think about Kathryn.

It didn’t matter that she stopped shorting Prodigies; she had already killed one. At this point, all she could do was drown out the guilt with just enough alcohol to quiet her conscience.

So, after six weeks of torture, Sophia decided she should numb her mind with work. That morning, instead of looking up KTA1108II, Sophia opened up her Ecosphere screen and started investigating the highest valued Prodigies, poking them for vulnerabilities. And for a few hours, she didn’t think about Kathryn.

The call came through a few minutes after 6 a.m. The job was confirmed for that night.

From a dwindling roll of plastic, Alex cut out the 3- by 3-foot sheet on his garage floor, the one he’d strip onto after the job. He mindlessly prepped two tubs of silicon dioxide to dissolve the gloves, foot covers, and surgical mask that he’d be wearing. He put in mirrored contact lenses to block any iris scanning that could track him back to the scene later.

And then the encrypted message came through, including a file with the target’s information—picture, age, gender, identifying marks. Normally, Alex would review the file, but for this job, he opted to wait until he was on location. There’d be less time to change his mind, something he knew would cost him all future contracts. And even though he was so painfully bored by this career, something about this contract was making him hate it a little less.

Early the next morning, Sophia walked over to Ether’s office. He was there of course, he always was, and greeted her by offering up half of his breakfast, a caramel brownie.

“It’s the best fucking thing I’ve ever tasted,” Ether said, placing it in her hand. “Bite it. I’m telling you, you can’t not feel good while eating that.”

Sophia acquiesced, and then she laughed because he was right. For just a moment, she felt good.

“I have a trade I wanted to run by you,” Sophia laid a one-sheet on his desk.

He glanced at it, “A short position? I threw a fit for you—”

“I just stumbled across it when I was looking for long-term investments,” she lied. She knew he knew she was lying.

“Look, if you want to be trading short positions, I completely support—”

“I don’t want a big position. I’m not going to game the press or get too involved. But what do you think about me taking a minor position?” she asked.

Ether agreed. She was lucky; Ether was a good friend. He understood. And it actually made her feel a bit better, sort of like she was taking another small bite of that brownie.

Sitting in his car outside of a luxury condominium complex, Alex finally opened the target’s file. He scrolled quickly through; the asset was young compared with most contracts, but most definitely an adult. He breathed a sigh of relief.

Then he sighed again. But this time with a touch of disappointment.

Alex screwed the silencers onto the two pistols, stepped out of his car, and walked toward the home of his target, who lived in a supposedly secure 32-story building in Manhattan.
Fortunately, Wall-Head security guards were merely decorative for professionals like Alex.

Alex entered through a maintenance door along a side alleyway. As the guard approached to investigate, a tiny needle slipped into the skin on his neck. He was about to scream when Alex rested a gun on his forehead.

“Don’t make a noise and you’ll be awake in a few hours. I promise,” Alex calmly said as he compressed the plunger. The sedative flowed into the guard’s body, and Alex laid him down.

Alex rode the elevator up and noticed that his heartbeat was as calm as if he was watching TV reruns. He thought of his first contract. He remembered shaking.

Sophia returned home late with the smell of dinner fresh in the air. She took off her chestnut suede flats and gave Jack a kiss. He reeked of whiskey, like usual. She didn’t care. They sat down to eat. Everything seemed mostly normal.

“I took a minor short position today. Nothing big and—”

“Soph, Jesus. Six weeks ago someone killed herself.”

“She was manic-depressive—”

“And you went and told the whole world that she was overvalued for that,” the conversation stopped, and Jack looked away.

“I need this,” Sophia said, stifling what could’ve been some tears, then got up from the table and walked toward their expansive wine rack.

Alex waited in the darkened front hallway of his target’s condo where the lights were off, and he watched his target get up from the dinner table and approach an expansive wine rack, only about 13 paces away. He could hear her steps; he could hear her breathe. As the target grabbed a bottle of wine, a 2024 Château Le Pin Bordeaux, Alex watched her snap a hair tie on her wrist.

The target uncorked the bottle as Alex raised the pistol in his right hand. The target’s husband was close by; it wasn’t going to be clean. The husband would have to watch what Alex knew was going to be a mess. As Alex exhaled calmly and tightened his grip, he realized that he felt nothing. He was just as bored as he was filling out the W-9.

But then, that small bud permanently in Alex’s ear vibrated silently.

“If it hasn’t happened yet, we’re calling it off,” a voice came through the tiny bud in Alex’s ear. The voice belonged to a man named Ether, Alex’s paymaster for the day.

Without a word, Alex lowered the gun and stayed quietly in the shadows, watching the target swirl her red wine, so perfectly unaware of how close she’d come to never tasting it. So perfectly unaware that her own fund recognized her as overvalued and took a massive short position on her. So perfectly unaware that Ether planned on keeping the fund’s short position on her, reviewing it again next quarter to see if she was back to shorting successfully. So perfectly unaware that she really didn’t want to die.

For today, she lived. For today, apparently, she was just profitable enough.

Sophia walked back to her dinner table and took another sip of wine. Alex slipped out of her condo and arrived home 32 minutes later. He dissolved his clothes in the premade acid baths, sterilized his weapons, disposed of his mirrored contact lenses, and took a scalding hot shower. It was the first job ever called off after he’d already seen the target. What if he had pulled the trigger before it was called off? The thought made his heart beat a little faster as the water poured over him. What if he had pulled the trigger?

But he hadn’t. So, for one more quarter, Sophia was allowed to stay perfectly unaware. Perfectly alive. Perfectly valued.

For now, at least.

What’s Stopping Human Capital From Becoming a Security?

A response by an investor and writer to Mark Stasenko’s short story “Overvalued.”

BY ZACHARY KARABELL

NOV 27, 2018 9:01 AM

During the great financial crisis of 2008–09, millions of people became painfully aware of financial derivatives, which had until then occupied a highly lucrative but obscure corner of finance. Starting in the 1990s and then expanding exponentially in the early 2000s, financial derivatives were supposed to decrease risk by allowing traders to buy and sell not just future movements of stocks but also mortgages, commodity contracts, bonds, and just about anything that could be sold on electronic exchanges. Instead of spreading out risk and making markets less volatile, however, the explosion of derivatives had the opposite effect, turning them into “financial weapons of mass destruction,” as Warren Buffett famously called them in 2002. In the worst moments 10 years ago, it seemed as if his warnings would come all too true.

Since then, financial derivatives have once again receded from public consciousness, but they certainly haven’t gone away. As the number of derivatives has proliferated, so too have software programs that dictate trades. The massive increases in computing power and now artificial intelligence mean that on any given day, algorithms are trading with algorithms more than humans are trading with humans. New electronic exchanges have popped up to facilitate both the volume and speed that these derivatives and algorithms demand.

As financial markets have once again been chaotic and roiling in recent weeks, it’s perhaps an opportune moment to ask whether the calm of the past few years has lulled us. At the height of the financial crisis and for several years after, many investors and companies paid more attention to how technology might be distorting markets and making them more vulnerable to manipulation. Years of steady gains shunted those questions to the back burner, but it’s time to focus on them again. Perhaps the future holds not just more computer-driven flux but new products that will allow people to trade and sell derivatives not just of financial instruments but of various aspects of life as well.

That’s the specter raised by Mark Stasenko’s macabre short story of a not-too-distant future in which the potential of an individual has been turned into a tradeable security via a Prodigy Market in which investors can buy, sell, or short promising people.

Elements of the story are already real. Insurance companies have for many years insured vital aspects of individual talent and worth—Lloyd’s of London has famously insured Betty Grable’s legs and Bruce Springsteen’s voice. Enron (remember it?) briefly became a multibillion-dollar company by cornering the energy markets and aggressively trading derivatives while attempting to rig future prices to its advantage. In the past few years, a number of Silicon Valley startups have formed to invest in the loans of promising graduates and undergraduates, including SoFi (which began with the presumption that a Stanford student represents a better credit risk than a general pool of students and so should have a higher credit rating and a different risk profile and price) and Upstart (which privileges students from better schools with better credit scores). A slew of other startups have attempted similar forms of financing, pooling assets to invest in select baskets of individuals by school and/or career. Most have failed, but if the past is any prologue, these will be harbingers of things to come.

And so the conceit behind “Overvalued” is hardly science fiction. If anything, we are closer than we think to a world where human capital becomes a security to sell, package, and even short. Already, sports betting odds adjust dynamically to prospective new recruits and to those prospects then getting injured. It would hardly be a great leap to extend that principle to promising law students or nascent MBAs. Kickstarter already allows individuals to invest in other people and their dreams, so how much of a leap will it be to invest in someone’s future earning potential and then be able to “price” people in real time based on their grades or test scores or performance evaluations?

Stasenko’s dystopian vision of a Prodigy Market is, in fact, akin to what the Chinese government is currently attempting to institute on a mass scale, with every citizen assigned a “social score” that will determine everything from credit lines to job interviews to travel privileges. The metrics the state might use to ensure conformity and continued control may be somewhat different from those used by a hedge fund to determine profitability, but they have more in common than not. They also are now made possible by the vast amounts of data each of us leave of our daily lives on social media or as a byproduct of electronic transactions ranging from banking to Amazon purchases to booking travel and paying bills. We—all of us who have smartphones and bank accounts—leave a data trail that easily translates into a score that could be used for a range of purchases from the benign (points and perks) to the alarming (having our scores bought and sold and driven lower by financial intermediaries).

But while we are closer than we might think, we are still further than we fear. For one, social norms are not there yet. We might be willing to slice and dice all sorts of financial instruments and drive businesses to failure in order to make a buck by betting against them. But we are not there yet with human lives, at least not explicitly. China’s social score is getting lots of attention, but there remains a considerable gap between what the government might dream of imposing and what it can actually do as of now. Those gaps, between what is possible and desirable, between what is acceptable and as yet not, matter more than the technologies that shrink them.

The fear today is that technology is soon to dehumanize us and rob us of agency. That has been the fear of new technologies for generations, and this time, it may finally come true. Yet until it has, it hasn’t, and for now and for a considerable time ahead, there are apparently some lines that most humans will not cross even if they can.

 

“When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis”

A new short story about a disease surveillance robot whose social programming gets put to the test.

BY ANNALEE NEWITZ

DEC 29, 2018 5:50 AM

It was time to start the weekly circuit. Robot leapt vertically into the air from its perch atop the History Museum in Forest Park, rotors humming and limbs withdrawn into the smooth oval of its chassis. From a distance, it was a pale blue flying egg, slightly scuffed, with a propeller beanie on top. Two animated eyes glowed from the front end of its smooth carapace like emotive headlights. When it landed, all four legs and head extended from portals in its protective shell, the drone was more like a strangely symmetrical poodle or a cartoon turtle. Mounted on an actuator, its full face was revealed, headlight eyes situated above a short, soft snout whose purple mouth was built for smiling, grimacing, and a range of other, more subtle expressions.

The Centers for Disease Control team back in Atlanta designed Robot to be cute, to earn people’s trust immediately. To catch epidemics before they started, Robot flew from building to building, talking to people about how they felt. Nobody wanted to chat with an ugly box. Robot behaved like a cheery little buddy, checking for sick people. That’s how Robot’s admin Bey taught Robot to say it: “Checking for sick people.” Bey’s job was to program Robot with the social skills necessary to avoid calling it health surveillance.

Robot liked to start with the Loop. Maybe “like” was the wrong word. It was an urge that came from Robot’s mapping system, which webbed the St. Louis metropolitan area in a grid where 0,0 was at Center and Washington. The intersection was nested at the center of the U-shaped streets that local humans called the Loop. A gated community next to Washington University, the Loop was full of smart mansions and autonomous cars that pinged Robot listlessly. Though it was late summer, Robot was on high alert for infectious disease outbreaks. Flu season got longer every year, especially in high-density sprawls like St. Louis, where so many people spread their tiny airborne globs of viruses.

Flying in low, Robot followed the curving streets, glancing into windows to track how many humans were eating dinner and whether that number matched previous scans. Wild rabbits dashed across lawns and fireflies signaled to their mates using pheromones and photons. Robot chose a doorway at random, initiating a face-to-face check with humans. In this neighborhood, they were used to it.

A human opened the service window. The subject had long, straight hair and skin the color of a peeled peanut.

“Hello. I am your friendly neighborhood flu fighter! Please cough into this tissue and hold it up to the scanner please!” Robot hovered at eye-level, reached into its ventral service trunk, and withdrew a sterile sheet with a gripper. This action earned a smile. Robot smiled back, stretching its dog-turtle mouth and plumping its cheeks. Humans valued nonverbal emotional communication, and it was programmed with an entire repertoire of simple exchanges:

If human is angry, then Robot is sad.

If human is rude, then Robot is embarrassed.

If human is happy, then Robot is happy.

The human coughed and Robot did a quick metagenomic scan, flagging key viral and bacterial DNA before uploading sequence data to the cloud. Other bots would run the results against a library of known infectious diseases and alert the CDC if any were on the year’s rolling list.

Six days later, Robot headed across the Mississippi River to East St. Louis. Here, heat and rain had eroded the pavement until its surface was as pocked and fissured as human skin. The first time Robot performed health surveillance in this area, nothing fit its generic social programming. Buildings marked as unoccupied were clearly full of humans. Occupant records did not match the names and faces of occupants. People spoke with languages and words that did not match known databases. As a result, Robot could not gather adequate data. When Robot requested help with this problem, Bey was the only CDC admin who responded. She communicated with Robot from Atlanta via cellular network, using audio.

“Not all humans behave or speak the same way,” she told Robot. “But you can learn to talk to anyone. Gather data. Extrapolate from context. Use this.” And she sent Robot a blob of code for natural language acquisition and translation. Very quickly, Robot learned that humans used slang, dialects, sociolects, and undocumented lexicons. Bey also sent several data sets taken from an urban studies lab, which supplemented Robot’s map data. It turned out that not all humans lived in the same domicile for two years on average; not all residences had cars and rabbits outside. Some humans lived in places that were not tagged as domestic spaces. Some humans did not use government-assigned identifiers. But all of them could get sick.

There was a small neighborhood of soft textile homes underneath the freeway. It did not exist on official maps. Robot knew it because of Bey’s algorithms.

“Hello!” Robot said, landing on the porch of a blue fabric house. It spoke a dialect that was popular here. “I am checking to make sure you are healthy! Please say hello!”

A human rustled inside, then unzipped the door.

“Hi Robot.” The human had brown eyes and facial symmetry that matched previous records. It was the same human as last month.

“Please cough into this tissue and allow me to scan.”

The human smiled, and Robot knew why. The word for cough in this dialect was a pun for something the humans found endlessly amusing. There was a more formal word for cough, but compliance was higher if Robot used the pun. Higher compliance rates meant better data.

“Robot, I think my friend Shareeka is sick. Can you please check on her?” The human was worried, and Robot responded with a sad/concerned expression.

“Where is Shareeka?”

“She’s in the new building on State near 14th? On the upper floors that aren’t finished. I bet you could fly right in.”

“Thank you for your help.”

The human petted Robot’s head. It was the most common form of physical affection that Robot had documented in its four years and eight months in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Protocol held that Robot should follow up on disease reports immediately, so it flew to the new building on State. Like the textile neighborhood, this building was not a designated residential area. It was a gray box on Robot’s official map. But visual sensors showed a reflective spire, with 20 floors wrapped in steel and glass. Five floors rose like a skeletal crown on top, exposing its steel beams, pipes, and drywall. Coming from inside were the sounds of human life: music, conversations in six languages, babies crying, food sizzling on hot plates. Robot could see electricity cascading down wires from solar panels bolted to the outside of windows. Residents tuned the data network with satellite dishes made from woks and metal cans. From Robot’s perspective, it was exactly like other residential buildings with a few cosmetic differences.

Extending its feet and head, Robot landed on the lowest open floor, then walked to the interior, asking for Shareeka. A juvenile human opened a green door and said hello. The human had short hair, woven into pink extensions, and a well-worn text reader in one hand.

“Hello! I am Robot, and I want to make sure you are healthy. A nice person told me that Shareeka might be sick. Can I meet Shareeka?” Robot used the same dialect it had in the fabric neighborhood, adding enhancement words that signaled benevolence.

The human made a neck motion that meant “no.”

“I am a friend who only cares about whether you are well. I am worried about Shareeka.” Robot made a sad face.

The human made a sad face too. “Shareeka left a couple of days ago. I don’t know where she is.”

“How do you feel today?”

“I’m kind of stressed out about school,” the human said. “How are you feeling?”

It was very rare for a human to ask Robot how it felt, and there was no stock answer or expression available. So Robot answered as literally as possible. “I am not sick because I am a machine. But I am worried that you are sick. Would you cough into this tissue and allow me to scan it?”

“Are you going to sequence the DNA right now?” The human was intrigued.

“Yes! But I will work with bots on the data network to figure out if anything dangerous is in there.”

“I know. You have a list of known infectious diseases and you’ll search for a match. We learned about it in biology class.” The human smiled, and Robot smiled back.

“Yes! That is what I will do.” It held out the tissue.

The human coughed on it and studied Robot very carefully as it conducted the scan.

“How do you make sure that you don’t mistake somebody else’s microbiome for mine? Do you sterilize your hand every time?”

“Yes I do.” Robot uploaded its data and talked at the same time. “What is your name?”

“Everybody calls me Jalebi.”

“You are named after a fried, spiral-shaped sweet soaked in sugar water.” Humans enjoyed it when Robot recognized the meaning behind their names.

Jalebi nodded. “When I was a kid, I ate so many that I passed out. Too much sugar. So my brother started calling me Jalebi.”

Robot was having difficulty making a connection to the cloud. “I am going to go back outside to talk to the network. It was nice to meet you Jalebi.”

“Wait—what’s your name?”

“Robot.”

“That’s your name? I thought that was your … race.” Jalebi used an ambiguous word that could also mean “species.”

“It’s my name,” Robot replied.

Robot stood in the darkness beneath the moon, above the neighborhood lights, in the unfinished hallway open to the air, and called for the cloud. There was nothing. It called for Bey. There was no answer. It sent an emergency email to the CDC surveillance team list and got an error message. It called and called, charging up every morning in the sunlight and powering down at midnight. After seven days, it got a text message from an unknown private number:

Hi Robot. It’s Bey. I can’t be your admin anymore. I’m really sorry because it was nice to know you. Unfortunately the CDC lost its funding. I work at Amazon Health now, but we aren’t allowed to network with open drones like you. I don’t think anyone is going to shut you down or collect you, so I guess you can do whatever you want. If anything really bad happens, text me here on my private number. I hope the language acquisition algorithm is still helping!

For the first time, Robot made a sad face that nobody could see. It wasn’t sure what “really bad” meant, but its models of human communication suggested that Bey referred to an outbreak. The problem was that Robot had no way to conduct a typical surveillance circuit without somewhere to upload its data for analysis. Plus, it was going to run out of sterile tissues. That’s what happened last year when the government shut down and Walgreens froze its CDC account. Robot used the government shutdown scenario to model its current situation, and predicted that it meant the Walgreens account would be frozen for an indeterminate length of time. The 5,346 sterile tissues remaining in its chassis were the last it would ever have. The sterilizing gel for its gripper was already running low.

Bey said Robot could do whatever it wanted, which was the kind of thing humans said when they expected it to predict which data-gathering task should be prioritized. Based on current supply levels and its onboard analysis capabilities, Robot determined it should focus on learning local languages and human social habitation practices. It would attempt to reach the cloud every morning, and would reprioritize if disease analysis systems became available again. Robot thrust its head out of the pocked oval of its body, a determined smile on its face. In the absence of a human, the expression was intended only for a theoretical model of a person who always cared what Robot thought and did.

A crow stood next to Robot on the building’s edge, looping its leg over one wing to scratch its head. It regarded Robot for a second, then said something before flying away. The phonemes were part of an unknown language, and Robot added them to a sparse data set it had gathered from other crows in the area. Now that it could do what it wanted, Robot reasoned, it was time to make that data set robust. Many crows flew up here and perched, often in groups of three or four, and their sounds followed the same general patterns as any natural language. It could learn a lot by staying right here, down the hall from Jalebi’s habitat. The days grew shorter and new constellations rose in the sky.

Robot started to pick up a few phrases from context. In the mornings and evenings, the crows discussed the sun’s position and its relationship to likely sources of food. Soon, Robot could piece together bits of syntax, using brackets to designate uncertain or unknown meanings: “[Food type] four [measurement units] north of the morning sun.” There were also location calls, which it roughly translated to “Food here!” and “I’m [name] here!” and “Get over here [you]!” Its first translation breakthrough came one morning when a statistically unusual number of crows gathered near its perch. Robot counted 23 birds at one point, many of whom were quite large. Maybe they were from different subspecies? Or elder crows? From what Robot had learned by querying the internet, zoologists drew the line between crow species arbitrarily based on calls and cultural differences.

This seemed like an important meeting, so perhaps multiple crow groups were invited in a show of corvid solidarity. Robot recorded hundreds of new words. It learned a few of the birds’ names as well. Suddenly, one of the ravens gave a location call: “There! North five [measurement units]! Group!” They took off at once, and Robot followed them. It was time to test out its ability to communicate, by using a location call. “I’m here! Joining group!”

A crow flew alongside Robot and answered. “I’m here! 3cry!” 3cry was Robot’s approximation of the bird’s name, which it recorded as a series of three high-pitched phonemes issued in rapid succession.

Other birds answered with their own names. “I’m here! 2chop1caw! I’m here! 4cry! I’m here! 2chop!” Robot now had a running list of phonemes used in crow names, and tried to record them faithfully.

They flew as a loose pack, not forming a V the way other birds did. Crows usually preferred smaller social groups and didn’t care about staying in a tidy line. They only came together in large numbers to deal with issues serious enough that even an egg-shaped drone was permitted to come along.

“Enemy! Enemy!” One of the ravens barked out the word, its accent slightly different from the crows. Far ahead, a hawk coasted on the updrafts from the city in a large, lazy circle.

“Egg killer!”

“Trespasser!”

“Attack from above!”

The birds called names and orders to each other, soaring over the hawk’s head and dive-bombing it. Though hawks have excellent vision from the front of their faces, they also have two major blind spots above and behind. This particular hawk was immediately thrown off its trajectory by a mob of angry crows clipping it from out of nowhere.

3cry called to Robot. “Come here! Above to below!”

Robot modeled several scenarios, and settled on one that would knock the hawk out of the updraft without causing any health risks to the bird. Communicating with the crows was important, but the health of living beings was paramount. Coming down gently on the hawk’s back, Robot pushed lightly, keeping up with the bird’s speed while also altering its course. The hawk let out an incomprehensible scream and dove, escaping the crows by heading across the Mississippi.

“Out of here!”

“Go!”

“End group!”

Four crows followed after the hawk, but the rest of the corvids scattered. Robot flew back toward Jalebi’s building, modeling possible new words by correlating matching sounds from different birds. 3cry followed close behind.

“I’m here! 3cry! Female! You are here!”

Robot predicted that 3cry was asking for its name and gender. It replied using crow words, then switched to a human word for Robot. It did not yet know the word for “nongendered” in crow language, so it did not offer a designation. 3cry flew silently for a while. They landed on the building and looked at the horizon.

Robot offered a friendly greeting in crow language. “Afternoon time.”

“Enemy gone. Robot is here.” 3cry pronounced its name perfectly. “Human sound.”

Robot searched for the right words from its limited vocabulary. “Humans are here. With my group.”

3cry cleaned her right wing, chewed on a mite, and cocked her head at Robot. “Humans are not a group. They can’t speak. They reject food.”

“They speak with other sounds.” Robot’s vocabulary was growing bigger the more they talked.
“They eat other food.”

3cry made a soft clucking noise that meant the same thing as human laughter. “You are a fool.”

Robot predicted that assent was the best response. “Yes I am.”

“Yes you are.” 3cry leaned over and gently poked a bit of dirt from the edge of Robot’s mouth.

Robot plucked a broken feather off 3cry’s back.

When they cleaned each other, it was like when a human smiled at Robot and Robot smiled back.

3cry and Robot became what the crows called a group, which meant that they flew together during the day. They met in the mornings, on the ledge, after Robot’s daily attempt to reach the CDC. Robot didn’t need food, but it was good at identifying potential sources of sustenance for 3cry. “Food here!” it would say, hovering over a fragrant bin. After scavenging with 3cry through city waste, it was easy to understand why she thought humans rejected food and were therefore basically non-sentient.

Over weeks, their conversations became more complex, but many concepts defied translation. Robot still didn’t understand the crows’ unit of measurement for distances. And 3cry didn’t understand Robot’s interest in health. From what Robot could discover, crows understood the concepts of death and near-death, but didn’t talk about disease specifically. Disease was one of many ideas that could be described with the word “near-death,” which also happened to be a pun on the word for unripe food. Many crow words were puns, which made translation even more difficult.

For conversations about health, Robot relied more and more on Jalebi. She had figured out that it was roosting with 3cry on the ledge near her habitat, and came to visit for what she called “study sessions.” Using text devices, she gathered data very slowly, then synthesized it even more slowly. Robot spent hours quizzing Jalebi about molecular structures and chemical interactions, marveling at the concept of a mind that came online without this information. Still, Robot liked to have a human face to mirror its own expressions. It felt unquantifiably more satisfying to smile at a human than it did to smile at its own internal representation of a human. After so long in the company of 3cry and Jalebi, Robot began to question what, exactly, that internal representation might really be. Maybe it wasn’t a human at all. Maybe it was a self-representation, and Robot had been smiling at itself all along.

Usually when Jalebi came to the ledge with her textbooks, 3cry left with a string of curses.
These weren’t necessarily hostile—crows liked to insult each other, and often did it with great affection. Mostly they thought it was hilarious that humans couldn’t understand words. So crows rained their most creative snark on human heads, marveling at how oblivious they were to the humiliations they suffered from the beaks of people flying overhead. But one afternoon, 3cry arrived during their study session and did not fly away.

Jalebi was musing about something she’d learned in a recent lesson about atomic structure. “What if it turns out we really are spreading cancer to each other on a quantum level?” she asked.

“Human squawking!” 3cry yelled. “Shit and plastic! Featherless fool!”

Robot decided to ignore the insults. “Afternoon time,” it said pleasantly. “Human here! Jalebi! Part of the group.”

“Group does not include living sandwiches.” 3cry laughed.

Jalebi watched, wide-eyed. “Can you speak crow language?”

“A little,” Robot said. “My vocabulary is small, but I can say a few things. This is 3cry. She’s … my friend.” As it said the word, Robot realized it was true. Thanks to Bey’s social programming, it knew that groups were statistically likely to be made up of friends or kin. Since Robots have no kin, that meant Jalebi was a friend too.

Jalebi tried to make the sound of 3cry’s name and the bird ignored it.

“I found something you like, Robot. Near-death. All over a human tree.”

“She said your name perfectly! I read that crows can imitate words, but I’d never heard it before!”

3cry glanced at Jalebi, then at Robot. “Annoying Jalebi.”

“She said my name too! That’s so cool!”

But Robot wasn’t paying attention to the interesting language data points. It predicted 3cry had found a disease outbreak, and that took precedence over all other inputs.

“I have to go,” it said to Jalebi. To 3cry, it added, “Take me there.”

Robot followed 3cry in a southeasterly direction, eventually alighting at the top of a building on Missouri Street. Like Jalebi’s home, this building was partly open to the air. Its layout suggested that it might have been a public building like the CDC; there were long hallways lined with small rooms like offices. Water sources were isolated in a few areas, unlike in a typical habitat, where water welled up in multiple rooms. But it was definitely a human habitat now, with soft bedding and buckets for water and data access points made from cans. As they flew down a stairwell, Robot tried to estimate the population of the building based on noise, heat, and live wires. It settled on a 75 percent probability of 50 humans on each upper floor, with populations growing as they descended.

“Here!” 3cry landed on a railing in front of a door marked 2, for second floor. “Near-death!”

“Thank you.”

“End group,” 3cry said, taking to the air. The phrase was one way crows said goodbye.

“Until morning,” Robot replied, already using a gripper to tug the door open.

The corridor was full of light from scratched windows along the left-hand side, illuminating dozens of doors to habitats that were once something else. Classrooms? Offices? Consulting rooms? Robot flew slowly past them, modeling possibilities and looking for humans. The fourth door was propped open, and several humans were inside. Their breathing was labored, and one was crying. Something had knocked out the walls between rooms, creating a wide-open space full of cloth dwellings, plush bedding, and piles of bright plastic containers.

It was time to land. Humans didn’t like it when Robot flew overhead, and besides, the face and legs were part of what made it seem so friendly. Walking over to one of the humans wrapped in blankets, Robot smiled and waved a tiny gripper in greeting.

Patchy black hair covered the human’s head, and cracks had formed in the lips that didn’t smile.
With no baseline language established, Robot estimated that it should try the dialect spoken in Jalebi’s building. “I’m a friend who is worried about your health! Can you cough into a tissue for me?” The human stared at Robot’s face and blinked, before succumbing to a coughing fit. For Robot, it didn’t matter whether the coughs were intentional or not. It took a sample and moved on to the next human.

“Hello!” Robot said to the juvenile, who was using a mobile device to access the internet.

“Are you a cop?” The juvenile used a sociolect of English that was common in East St. Louis.

“I’m a friend who checks to make sure you are healthy! I share information with doctors, not police.” The human frowned and Robot made a sad face. “A lot of people here are sick. I would like to help.”

“Nobody is going to help, stupid drone. Hospital for citizens only, yeah?”

“Please cough into the tissue, so I can figure out why you are sick.”

Another human spoke up, head emerging from a cloth shelter. “What are you going to do about it?”

Robot stood still for several microseconds, modeling possibilities and considering what language would be the most soothing. “I am going to find out what is causing your illness. This is an emergency. I will find help. I promise. Please cough into the tissue.”

One by one, the humans complied. Robot flew from room to room, checking for disease. After sequencing several samples, it found the same virus strain in multiple humans. This met the definition of an outbreak. It was time to call Bey.

“Is that you, Robot? I can’t believe you’re still running! It’s been … what? Over a year?”

“Something really bad is happening in East St. Louis,” Robot said, deploying the exact words Bey had used to delineate when it would be appropriate to call her. “There is an outbreak. I need to send you data.”

“Do you have sequence? Maybe I can … ” Robot heard background noise, as if Bey were moving something on her desk. “Can you send it as an anonymous dump to this address?” She sent the directions to a temporary storage cloud, and Robot deposited data from 127 samples it had taken from humans in the building.

“We have a system for anonymous reporting, part of this new Amazon Health philanthropy project.” Bey paused. “Got it! Let me analyze this really fast and see if it’s more than just a garden-variety … oh shit.”

Robot predicted that she was not saying shit for the same reason 3cry did. “What is it?” Robot asked, putting on a fearful expression for itself.

“This is really bad, like you said. We need to get someone in there. Unfortunately, Illinois doesn’t have a state health department. Maybe there’s a local group or … ” Bey was typing. “OK, Robot, I found something. There’s a nonprofit health collective in East St. Louis called Community Immunity. They could probably manufacture vaccines and a therapy. It’s a known pathogen, but hasn’t ever been spotted in the Midwest before. So all they need is this file.” Bey sent a small amount of data. “Do you have anyone who can help you? You might need a human. Sometimes people are hostile to drones, even cute ones.”

Two hours later, Robot was describing the situation to Jalebi. It was evening, and 3cry was likely sleeping with other members of her group. But Jalebi was wide awake and extremely agitated. “You’re talking about that health collective on MLK Drive! I’ve seen it!”

Robot nodded, smiling. “Can we go there now?”

Jalebi glanced toward the door to her habitat. “Yeah. My mom won’t be home until morning anyway.”

Community Immunity was located in the husk of an old strip mall, its gleaming counters and wet lab hidden behind windows duct taped with tinfoil and cardboard. Bey was right that Robot needed a human. Jalebi had to pretend that Robot was her school project, and Robot had to pretend that Jalebi had programmed it to look for outbreaks. Once the humans at Community Immunity had the data, they made unhappy faces and said “oh shit” in the same way Bey had.

A human with purple hair and a prosthetic arm offered Jalebi a seat and some hot tea. The human spoke the same sociolect of English that Bey used. “It’s very good that you brought this to us. You are a good citizen.” Then the human looked at Robot. “Thank you, Robot, for giving us the file with an open therapy and vax recipe.”

“I am happy to help. I don’t like it when people are sick.”

This human, unlike the others, seemed to know that Robot was the person who found the outbreak. “I’m Janelle, by the way. She/her pronouns. Do you know if there are other places where H18N2 is infecting people?” Robot liked the way Janelle identified herself by name and gender, the way crows did.

“A friend told me about this outbreak. I don’t know if there are others.” Robot deliberately chose vague language. After Bey’s warning, it did not want to reveal its data-gathering techniques.

Janelle took it in stride. “Can your … uh … friend help find more? We can manufacture a therapy and a vax tonight, but we need to get it out there fast before this sucker mutates.”

Robot nodded. “Tomorrow. I will try to find more.”

When 3cry arrived in the morning, Robot had to strain against the boundaries of its vocabulary to make itself understood. “Need group. Find near-death enemy.”

“Enemy?” 3cry scratched her head.

“Enemy for humans,” Robot admitted. But then it had an idea. “Enemy causes human death.
Dead humans mean less food.”

Despite butchering the crow syntax, Robot thought it had made 3cry understand. Plus, sometimes crows just liked an excuse to get the mob together. “Begin group!” 3cry yelled, taking off. Robot leapt into the air behind her. They flew over East St. Louis, calling for the big group that had taken out the hawk. “Begin group! Begin group!” More birds joined them. “Here! I’m here!” They called their names and swirled to roost in a tree at the edge of the Mississippi River, where freeway met water.

“Find near-death!” 3cry said, then issued some directions and specification words that Robot did not understand.

“Near-death! There! [Measurement unit] north!” The words came from a big crow named 2chop1caw, jumping into flight. Most of the group followed, possibly to assess what exactly 3cry meant by “near-death.” 2chop1caw led them to a fabric habitat nearby, where Robot quickly identified three sick people. The virus matched the H18N2 signature identified at Community Immunity.

“More near-death! Where else? Begin group!” Robot called the birds to the air again, and they fanned out over the city, making a racket and hurling their best insults. Each time they uncovered a new outbreak, they gave their loudest calls, sometimes passing those calls to the next bird, until Robot could follow their cries back to the source. By the end of the day, they had discovered five small outbreaks.

“End group!” 3cry yelled, following Robot back toward MLK. The crows called farewells and locations to each other. “End group!” “Evening time!” “I’m here!” “You there!” “Food!” “Death!” This was followed by laughter, because food and death diverged into many puns far beyond Robot’s comprehension.

3cry appeared to have decided that she was roosting with Robot for the evening. When they landed, she hooked her claws around its rotor pole, and clung there as Robot signaled arrival to the door of Community Immunity. Robot didn’t mind. Humans found small animals disarming, and that always led to greater compliance.

Jalebi was there with Janelle, looking at something on a monitor. “Hi Robot!”

“We have data on the location of more outbreaks.”

Janelle laughed. “Really? Did your little feathered friend help?”

“Her name is 3cry!” Jalebi failed to pronounce 3cry’s name again. And, once again, 3cry ignored it, jumping off Robot and using her beak to straighten the feathers under her right wing. Robot reached over and plucked one out that was bothering her.

“Where can I put this data?” Robot aimed a concerned expression at Jalebi and Janelle.

“Put it here for now.” Janelle waved a mobile device near Robot, setting it to accept uploads.
“Jalebi, do you want to help us synthesize those doses of nasal spray? Looks like we’ll need at least 500. And then we’ll start making vax doses for injection.”

“Yes! Absolutely!” Jalebi acted like a crow about to charge into the air. But she was only racing across the room to boot up a mixer.

Janelle had a thoughtful expression on her face. “Did this crow really help you find the outbreaks?”

“Yes. The crows think humans are idiots, but they appreciate your garbage.”

Janelle laughed for a long time, and Robot was not entirely sure why.

When Jalebi returned, she sat down alongside Robot and 3cry and smiled. “This place is really cool. I like it here.”

“Maybe this is your group,” Robot guessed.

“Maybe.” Jalebi cocked her head like 3cry. Then she scooped up a tiny tube full of wound adhesive. “Here, hand me that beautiful feather.” Robot dropped 3cry’s feather into her hand. Dabbing a bit of adhesive on Robot’s back, she stuck the feather to its shell next to the place where its rotor pole emerged.

3cry was startled. “I like it,” she said. “That human is a fool.”

“Yes she is,” Robot agreed. “You are also a fool.”

“Yes I am.”

The three people roosted contentedly next to each other on the floor, watching Janelle and the humans preparing antivirals for other humans. It was a scenario that Robot would not have predicted. But now it could. Robot smiled to itself, organized the data, and retrained its model for friendship.

No Robot Like Robot

A response to Annalee Newitz’s short story, “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” by an A.I. programmer.

BY JANELLE SHANE

DEC 29, 2018 5:51 AM

In 2018 the A.I. robot CIMON was sent to the International Space Station—and that’s when the awkwardness began. A floating sphere with a digital face displaying a few simple expressions, CIMON was supposed to help astronauts through many-step procedures by displaying information and answering questions. When astronaut Alexander Gerst tested it, he found CIMON’s maneuverability impressive but its social awareness perhaps less so. It had been programmed to know Gerst’s favorite song, but had to be ordered multiple times to stop playing it. “Let’s sing along with those favorite hits,” it interrupted, as Gerst tried to get it to record video. Moments later it seemed to take exception to Gerst’s mild comments on its flying ability. “Don’t be so mean, please,” it told him. “Don’t you like it here with me?” Soon it seemed CIMON’s mood detection system had a “hangry” category and had confusedly placed Gerst in it. “Oh, dear, I feel you. I can already hear your stomach roaring. Should we take a look for when it is time for food?” CIMON was soon stowed away.

In Annalee Newitz’s story “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis,” there’s another little round bot called, simply, Robot. Like CIMON, its job is to interact with people: Robot’s purpose is to monitor local humans for signs of disease to spot epidemics before they spread. Unlike CIMON, it’s so charming that I just want to pat its little robot head. “Hello,” it says. “I am your friendly neighborhood flu fighter! Please cough into this tissue and hold it up to the scanner please!” It gives plump-cheeked smiles and waves its tiny gripper arm.

Like CIMON, Robot one day reaches the limits of its programming. Robot travels beyond its initial route among gated communities and smart mansions to the less-gentrified neighborhoods across the river. There it encounters humans who speak languages and dialects it hasn’t been trained on, and humans living in buildings and tents that aren’t registered in any of its databases. It’s completely unprepared to work in these neighborhoods.

Robot should have failed. Algorithmic bias has been the downfall of many a modern-day A.I., from face-recognition software that performs poorly on dark-skinned people, to voice-recognition software that can’t understand some voices, to software that perpetuates or even amplifies biases in the human behaviors it copies.

But then, something magical happens. Robot recognizes that something is wrong and phones its programmer to ask for advice. And when she tells Robot that the solution is to learn new human dialects and habits, it understands what she wants it to do, downloads the code she sends it, and starts gathering data that will help it fix the shortcomings in its training data.

To an A.I. programmer, this is truly a fairy-tale moment. From a real A.I. today, the programmer might get an error code—if they’re lucky. More likely, a robot in this situation would barge on with bad data, working badly and never knowing it, while accusing its users of “being mean.” Unable to navigate unfamiliar building types, a real-life Robot probably would have ended up lost in a closet like a flying Roomba, sticking to its pre-programmed conversational routines, cheerfully asking a Spock T-shirt if it would please cough into a handkerchief.

The problem is that today’s A.I.s—and those of the foreseeable future—are very limited in scope. Called artificial narrow intelligence, or ANI, they can perform well on simple tasks, but don’t understand the world around them or what it is they’re really doing. The A.I.s in our science fiction are almost all artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which can perceive the world at or above the level of a human. Robot at first seems like it might be an ANI—it says what it has been programmed to say, and it has a “preference” for its initial route simply because of its internal coordinate system. But all that changes when Robot phones home. An A.I. programmer sees Robot notice the flaws in its training data, understand abstract concepts, and pick up languages on the fly, and she knows from this point forward that Robot is an AGI and is therefore as magical as a talking mirror from a fairy tale.

The story already has the trappings of a fairy tale, with its talking animals (crows make a delightful appearance), and its title even sounds like a traditional origin tale along the lines of “Why Giraffe has a long neck” or “How Rhinoceros got his skin.”

Like any good fairy tale, there’s just enough reality in this story to keep us grounded. Even ANIs can pick up things like languages and social habits by observation—that’s one of the main attractions of machine learning, the type of algorithm that allows an A.I. to learn by example rather than being explicitly programmed.

For example, a word-vector algorithm will crawl huge corpuses of text such as Amazon product reviews or news articles, and learn from context which words are similar. Map these into a 3D space and you can sail through these meanings like a galaxy, passing clumps of city names, or sports terms, or navigating smoothly from words about politics to words about crime. Using these relationships, word vector algorithms know that “looooooove,” “loveeeeee,” and “lovelovelovelovelove” are similar in meaning, but that “llove” is more distantly related.

Other language algorithms can also learn by example. Given enough examples of how humans have translated certain phrases in certain contexts, translation algorithms like those behind Google Translate can make a paragraph more or less readable in another language. Similar methods have also been used to train algorithms to identify spam emails, sort potential metal band names from would-be My Little Pony names, or determine whether a review is praising a product or trashing it. Algorithms can even learn to generate new text of their own, mimicking product reviews, recipes, Harry Potter fan fiction, and more.

But as anyone who’s interacted with Siri knows, today’s A.I.s don’t understand much about language. They show their limited ANI nature as soon as they get out of their comfort zones—try asking Siri to reword a sentence, or to name three things larger than a lobster. Given enough training examples, a Robot using real-life machine learning might be able to understand verbal directions to a street address. But it probably would be out of its depth if the human told it to fly in through the unfinished walls of the upper floor—unless flying through unfinished walls had figured prominently in that initial training data. And even then, if flying through unfinished walls is tricky enough, an ANI may not be able to learn the skill reliably. When Robot navigates highly variable building designs from mansions to construction sites to tents, it’s showing off its magical AGI abilities.

Robot also learned its new languages from brief conversations, rather than by analyzing huge text data sets, another sign that its abilities are far beyond the ordinary. Word vector and translation algorithms have the jobs that are closest to what Robot needs for language, but they usually need huge amounts of data—all of Wikipedia, for example. But for some languages, including many spoken by millions of speakers, there aren’t many examples of translated texts.

When the training data sets get small, things get weird. For example, when Reddit users and others began using Google Translate to translate nonsense strings of English words into some languages, like Maori or Somali, they found the A.I. would emit strange religious-sounding prophecies. One explanation for the outputs? With these languages, religious texts like the Bible might figure prominently in the small body of translated writings the algorithm trained on. When uncertain about the translation, the A.I. might have resorted to returning the few phrases it knew. In its early days of learning its new languages, Robot might have sounded very odd.

Robot’s ability to pick up nuance was also impressive. There are DARPA crisis teams working to build tools that can scrape together basic translation from what’s available on social media, but these aren’t expected to be nuanced, just enough to provide emergency assistance, not to the level of using endearing puns. In this story, Robot has even less data to go on, just a few overheard conversations. It succeeds because, well, magical talking Robot.

Another difficulty Robot overcame was learning from conversation rather than by reading text. To understand someone pointing to an object and saying “this is a sheep,” you have to first be able to reliably recognize a sheep. Even the best image-recognition algorithms are tripped up by images that seem obvious to humans. They do a lot of guessing based on things they’ve seen during training, and they don’t do well when things don’t match their training data. A family of bears in a field gets labeled as a herd of cows. A sheep in a kitchen gets labeled as a dog. Goats in a tree get labeled as giraffes or birds. And even if you understand what’s going on, there are ambiguities. If a person says a word and then turns and takes a few steps, are they demonstrating “walk” or “left” or “leave”? Even humans find this kind of language acquisition difficult. The ANIs of today (and of the near future) don’t understand the world well enough for this.

Robot is a cross between a magic talking mirror and a fairy-tale fool: inexperienced, but pure of heart and improbably successful. In this fairy tale, Robot works for the CDC, but Robot-level technology would be a real game-changer for humanitarian crisis responders, the crew of the International Space Station, food delivery startups, and more. It would be wonderful to have a robot that could understand instructions, internalize a goal like “help sick people,” and ask for clarification when it’s having trouble. That’s not to mention Robot’s seriously cool ability to decipher the language of crows—I know a few field researchers who’d love to have a Robot on their team.

Having a well-meaning mind behind our algorithms would save us from a lot of the harm that we’re unwittingly inflicting—algorithms that copy our biases, that recommend extreme videos and articles, or that censor non-white, non-binary, non-heterosexual, and/or disabled voices. But what we have running our algorithms in real life is less like the AGI of Robot, and a lot more like the ANI of a Roomba. For now, we can’t rely on our friendly neighborhood talking Robots to rise beyond their biased training data and politely ping us when they’ve discovered a problem. (As CIMON demonstrates, we can’t even rely on them to be friendly!)

Instead, we’ve got to be careful not to expect our algorithms to behave like fun fairy-tale Robots.

Strive for Robot, plan for CIMON.