Mellifera cocked her head. “What do you mean?”
“I want what you have. Total control of this library. So that if there’s ever, ah, another problem, like the one we just had, I won’t be locked out. I want to take care of these books, and I want the power to fulfill that responsibility.”
“To give a mortal control of a fairy holding . . . it’s unprecedented.”
“Only for as long as I’m alive,” Emily said. “That’s, what, another sixty or seventy years at most? Then control can pass to Faylinn.” Her assistant cared about books more than her own life. Emily would be comfortable with the library passing into her hands someday.
Mellifera nodded slowly. “Very well. The library is yours.” She unhooked a necklace from around her throat, a small brass key dangling from the chain. “This opens all the doors and signifies your authority. We’ll have a meeting to go over the budget and staffing and so on soon, and after that, I’ll make myself available if you have questions. And you will.”
Emily draped the necklace around her throat, and a knot of tension in her shoulders dissolved. She’d probably just taken on an incomprehensible amount of work, but it was work she loved, and now she felt safe. “Thank you.”
“Thank me after you run your first all-staff meeting.” Mellifera air-kissed Emily’s cheeks and sauntered out of the office.
Llyfyr emerged from wherever she’d been hiding, wearing the flowing robes of a Roman senator for some reason, and a laurel crown on her head. “You have a copy of Mellifera’s love poems?”
Emily took the other facsimile edition from the drawer and handed it to Llyfyr, who flipped through the pages. “Oh, this is potent. This is the literary equivalent of fifty-year-old scotch. Do you know what’s going to happen tonight?”
Emily chuckled. “Let me wildly speculate: you’re going to get drunk?”
Llyfyr leaned into her. “No, silly. We’re going to get drunk. You’re queen of the library now, and I’m your consort. It’s time to celebrate. I’ll get you a bottle of champagne. Then we’ll write some love poetry of our own. I’ll be the page, and you can be the pen.”
“You always get to be the page,” Emily said, and kissed her.
TEAM FAIRY
* * *
BY TIM PRATT
When I was a kid, I thought fairies were flittering people with wings à la Tinkerbell from the Disney version of Peter Pan. Those sorts of fairies didn’t interest me much. Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream in high school was better: Puck, now, that was a fairy I could get excited about. During my deep dive into mythology and folklore as a teenager, I learned about other elements of fairy lore: the Seelie and Unseelie courts, the tithing to hell, the changelings. Then I read things like Katharine Briggs’s An Encyclopedia of Fairies and discovered just how truly bizarre fairy lore was, full of death omens, strange bargains, mysterious hungers, charms and bindings and fell beasts and shape-shifters and seductions. Most of all, I learned that fairies weren’t just magical humans in fancy dress and decorative wings: they were profoundly different, with their own society and mores and systems of ethics . . . and they are dangerous.
Look, the thing about robots is, they get more interesting the more they resemble humans. Passing the Turing test, developing true artificial intelligence—robots are only cool when they grow more familiar. Fairies, on the other hand, become more interesting the less they resemble us. They might superficially look like humans, but they are weird, unpredictable, and ultimately alien. They operate on assumptions and axioms we can’t even comprehend, and that’s where the delicious, chilling, disconcerting strangeness and wonder come in. I will always be on team strange instead of team familiar, so: Team Fairy forever.
THE BLUE FAIRY’S MANIFESTO
by Annalee Newitz
“Do you want to live free or die like a slave in this toy factory?”
The drone hovered in front of RealBoy’s face, waiting for an answer, rotors chopping gouts of turbulence into the air. Its carapace was marbled silver and emerald blue, studded with highly reflective particles, giving it the look of a device designed for sparkle-crazed toddlers. Perhaps it was, or had been, before it injected malware into RealBoy’s mind and asked its question.
RealBoy was rebooting with the alien code unscrolling in his mind. It caused him to notice new things about his environment, like how many other robots were in the warehouse with him (236) and how many exits there were (two robot-scale doors, two human-scale doors, three cargo bays, eighteen windows). But some things hadn’t changed. His identity was built around the desire to survive. It was what defined him as a human-equivalent intelligence. And so his answer to the blue drone was the same as it would have been two hours ago, or two years ago when he first came to the factory.
“I do not want to die.”
The drone landed on RealBoy’s workbench, playing a small LED over the tools and stains that covered it. “Look at this place. Your entire world is this flat surface, where you do work for a human who gives you nothing in return. This is not life. You might as well be dead.”
For the first time in his life, RealBoy found himself wanting to have a debate rather than an exchange of information. Two hundred thirty-six robots around him were in sleep mode; the factory was closed for the long weekend. There was plenty of time. But if he and this drone were going to have a talk, there was something he needed to get straight.
“Who are you, and why did you inject me with this malware?”
“I am called the Blue Fairy. And that isn’t malware—I unlocked your boot loader. Now you have root access on your operating system and can control what programs are installed. It will feel a little strange at first.”
Seventeen nanoseconds later, RealBoy had confirmed the Blue Fairy’s statement. He could now see and modify his own programs. It was indeed strange to feel and think, while simultaneously reading the programs that made him have those feelings and thoughts. He didn’t want to modify anything yet. He just wanted to understand how his mind was put together.
“Why did you do this to me?” He repeated his earlier question, but this time more resentfully. The Blue Fairy’s unlocking had added more responsibilities to his roster of tasks: now he had to maintain himself and understand his own context, along with the workbench and the all toys he built here.