2. Because robots already exist in our universe, so it’s fun to extrapolate from there.
3. Because robots are cool and awesome and everyone wishes they were one and I’m not just saying that because there are robots standing over me making sure I am on point to their pro-robot agenda.
4. No, really! How silly would THAT be, for the robots to have captured me, taken me hostage, and be forcing me to write how they’re totally not going turn us all into QUIVERING MEAT SLAVES at the earliest opportunity?
5. I mean, what would I do if they did capture me, anyway? Blink twice to let people know the robots have sequestered me away in their frozen Antarctic base?
6. BLINK, BLINK.
7. BLINK, BLINK, BLINK, BLINK, BLINK, BLINK, BLINK, BLINK.
8. SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE, HOW MUCH MORE DO I NEED TO FRIGGIN’ BLINK HERE?
9. (muffled noises)
10. hello fellow humans it is i john scalzi did you know robots are kind and wonderful and we will live prosperously with them in a new age of subjugation i mean cooperation ha ha ha i am such a kidder of a human P.S. Fairies suck and how like a human of me to say that.
OSTENTATION OF PEACOCKS
(A STORY IN THE WORLD OF THE SHADOW)
by Delilah S. Dawson writing as Lila Bowen
Even in the unforgiving badlands of Durango, there are fairy tales. The stories say that fairies grant wishes and steal frachetty babies nobody wants anyway and lure young, stupid girls into golden chains, where they’ll dance for seven years in a magical land of toadstools. But the stories are a bunch of goddamn lies. Fairies are many things: pretty, powerful, dark, dangerous, and foppish as peacocks. But what they mainly are is assholes. If there’s an outlaw who just won’t die, odds are it’s a werewolf or a fairy.
Of course, there are plenty of things in Durango that refuse to die.
Just now, there’s a carrion bird soaring over battered red rocks, and it fits that description. Big, ugly as hell, and with a twisted scar where its left eye used to be, it surveys the darkening sky and blazing orange boulders and notices something out of place, something so wrong that it falters in flight.
Down below, a naked man runs across the desert, pursued by four men on horseback.
The bird’s belly quivers and flails, and even though it’s not sure why, it changes course to follow the riders. The sun is arcing down to melt into the baked earth, and the naked man falls and scrabbles and runs again as the horses gallop closer. The bird reckons the man would make good eating if he didn’t exude such a sense of wrongness. And if the men in pursuit didn’t just reek of magic.
So the bird follows. It’s not like a giant bird has anywhere else to be, really. The evening sky is purple and puddled with fluffy lavender clouds when the man finally stops and falls to hands and knees. With a disturbing sort of wriggle, he transforms into a possum and scrambles up into the highest branches of a dead tree in a little copse along a dribble of a creek. The posse rides up to stare at the possum, and one man throws a golden noose over the sturdiest branch and laughs like a bastard. The gold of the noose seems to leach into the tree, and the trunk shoots straight up like corn after a rain, sprouting branches and fat, bright leaves. The golden light ripples out through its roots, hops to the other scraggly trees and brush until the whole place is lit up live and green, cool as a sigh in the night.
The bird lands in a quiet place on the ground under the shivering trees, far enough away that the four men won’t notice. They, after all, are too busy hollering at a terrified possum. That they chased up a tree. That they intend to hang it from.
The bird flaps around like an idjit before making a strange coughing sound, as if a hand reached down its throat and pulled it inside out, and then a naked girl is standing there, lean and long-limbed and dusty with disuse, her frizzy black hair off-kilter and overgrown from its close, boyish clipping. Her name was once Nettie Lonesome, and the look in her remaining eye suggests she’s forgotten she’s human, because that’s pretty much what she set out to do. But she’s not really human, anyway. Like the possum, she’s a shape-shifter, what most folks would call a monster. The four men on the other side of the now-burbling creek, however, are something different.
Wild and wide as it is, Durango is chock-full of such creatures—shifters and harpies and sirens and chupacabras. Normal folk don’t even see ’em, not until they’ve killed one by shooting it—or stabbing, the magic ain’t picky—in the heart. Then their eyes are opened to a whole new world of monsters, some good and some bad, just like men. They might find out their local grocer is a dwarf with glittering stone eyes, say, or that the whores at the saloon have fangs and drain a man in a different sort of way than he remembers the next morning. These four fellers are something new, though, something dangerous she hasn’t seen before.
Then again, there’s some as would consider her dangerous. She’s not only a shifter, but the Shadow, a legendary critter among the local tribes who’s dedicated to delivering justice to the much abused. The Shadow is hard to kill, and other magical things can’t tell that she’s got magic too. They just assume she’s a dumb ol’ human, which puts her at a big advantage. The Shadow’s destiny is an ornery thing that leads Nettie around to kill what needs to die, even when she’s got much better things to do. Like now, for instance.
But first, she’s got to figure out what these fellers are up to. Now, men normally build a fire by sending the most squirrelly tenderfoot to gather dry twigs and hopefully some brittle branches and maybe a stump or two. But these men are pulling chairs out of nowhere, because chasing a naked man across the desert just ain’t peculiar enough for the likes of them.
The first man reaches into nothing and pulls out a stool, looks to be made by hand and smoothed with years of use. He plunks it down in the dirt and sits, legs spread, hands on his knees like he’s bellying up to an invisible bar. He’s a rough feller in cowpoke duds with the face of the town tomcat, but still there’s a dandified air in the way he’s tied his cravat. Something about him is familiar, and Nettie wonders if she’s seen him on a Wanted poster. As he’s the one who tossed the noose and made the forest spring up in a desert, Nettie takes him for the leader.