“We’re still tall,” said Tillman wryly. “We never understood why you left.”
“Then you’re not just tall; you’re blind,” said Clover. “We left because you wouldn’t listen when we said we needed a better plan than ‘huddle under the Hill and hope humanity will go away.’ The mermaids couldn’t leave the oceans. The unicorns were dying. Don’t even get me started on the manticores. We needed to move, and so we moved, and left you behind.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” said Adam. “Who knows you’re here?”
“Everyone,” said Tillman. “I’m here with full authority from the Queen.”
Clover threw her hands up. “I told you that you should have let me kill him.”
“She doesn’t know you’re here.”
All three kobolds turned to look at Tillman. He shook his head.
“I wasn’t looking for you. To be honest, no one is. We haven’t the resources anymore. I’m here because we’d heard that the management was wasting all their time on low, simple places, animatronics and machines. We thought we could show them something better.”
“Roller coasters,” sneered Clover.
“Yes, supported by elf magic, capable of ignoring the laws of physics. We thought that might be enough to buy us a new home.”
“A new home?” asked Adam.
“Our palaces are collapsing.” Nothing in Tillman’s words sounded like a lie: they were spoken quietly, calmly, and with an utter lack of haughty pride. He was telling the truth. Whatever good it might do him. “The first one fell a year ago. Long after you’d gone. I suppose, in part, we could blame you; you’d always done the maintenance, and we didn’t have any idea how to keep the foundations strong in your absence. But really, it was our fault. We should have learned how to maintain our own infrastructure.”
“That sounds almost like humility, elf,” said Clover.
Tillman looked at her blandly. “Maybe it is,” he said. “The collapse is coming faster all the time. I’m here because we hoped that this might be a place where palaces could be built.”
“Most of our attractions are biological at this point,” said Adam. “We’re replacing the mechanical pieces with the real thing a little more every quarter. The last animatronic unicorn will be retired this winter, when the herd from Scandinavia finally gets here. All the mermaids are real. About half the pixies.”
“The other half are probably on fire right now,” said Clover. “We’re wasting time we don’t have. We need to get rid of him.”
“Please,” said Tillman.
The kobolds stopped. Even Clover.
“What did you say?” asked Adam.
“Please,” repeated Tillman. “We need you. We need a place to go. There’s room for us all here, and we can help. We know where the dragons sleep, where the last of the yeti are hiding. We can bring them to you, and we can all be safe and protected, hidden by a veneer of plausible deniability. Please.”
Adam and Clover exchanged a look.
“We’re not going back to doing whatever you say,” said Clover. “We’re free now. Independent. We have health insurance.”
“At this point, all we want to do is survive,” said Tillman.
Adam smiled.
“All right,” he said. “This is what we’re going to do. . . .”
*
“This new staffing agency Mr. Tillman found for us is amazing,” said Mr. Franklin, radiating contentment as the pixies swirled around him. “They fit right into our culture, and they work without complaint. I can’t begin to say how happy I am. I told you an efficiency expert could help us.”
“I guess so,” said Clover.
“Thank you again for being willing to show him around. I’ll think of a suitable reward.”
“Just keep the doors open,” said Clover. “That’s all any of us could possibly ask for.”
Mr. Franklin smiled at her benevolently. “My dear, this park is going to last forever, and you’re going to build me a wonderland.”
“Good,” she said.
In the tree behind them, another pixie burst into flame.
TEAM FAIRY
* * *
BY SEANAN MCGUIRE
Robots are great and all, but we have to build them. Robots don’t and can’t exist without human intervention (unless they are alien robots, and then all bets are off). Fairies, on the other hand, probably don’t exist, but my family comes from Ireland, and we’ve been playing the “probably” for generations. Oh, it’s probably okay to go play in the mysterious mushroom ring down by the forest’s edge, but maybe don’t? Unless you want to disappear? So I’m Team Fairy on the off chance that they exist and might otherwise get pissed at me.
I am also and forever Team Theme Park. I spend more time than is strictly healthy at Disneyland, and I adore the way the Park engineers can and do shape the environment to control what the guests see, hear, and experience. It’s like entering a fairy hill in a lot of ways, and I wanted to spend some time with a group of engineers who took that aspect of park design very, very seriously. Enter my fairy smiths, who’ve turned their eyes toward a different, somewhat more candy-colored future. . . .
QUALITY TIME
by Ken Liu
“Welcome to weRobot,” said the chipper HR representative. “Jake and Ron and the rest of us are all so looking forward to your contributions!”
“Are you a true believer?” the woman next to me asked in a low, conspiratorial voice. I looked at her, puzzled; her name tag said AMY.
She took a sip of her coffee, frowned, and then rapped her knuckles against the conference room table. The little coffeemaker in the middle of the table, a retro-looking, squat black cylinder with a chromed dome top, spun around until its single camera was aimed at Amy, who smiled and beckoned to it.
“A true believer in what?”
I whispered. I couldn’t help it. I knew I should be paying attention to the benefits presentation—Mom had emphasized no less than five times on the phone last night the importance of contributing to the 401(k) at my first job out of college. But I was feeling nervous (the slide on-screen at the moment actually said Our Impossible Mission), and Amy—forties, short-cropped hair, a tattoo of two fairies playing Nintendo on her left arm—looked like she had wisdom to share.
“The Myth of the Valley,” she said.
The coffeemaker rolled toward Amy, its motor humming softly. It stopped a few inches away and flashed the ring around its camera eye. Amy leaned forward to dump out the contents of her mug in the waste disposal chute at the side of the robot.
Then, instead of discreetly tapping out her new order on the touch screen, Amy leaned back in her seat and said aloud, “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”
Some of the other new hires—almost all of them my age—looked at Amy disapprovingly for this interruption; a few others chuckled. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” said Amy, a satisfied grin on her face as the coffeemaker filled her mug with the new beverage.