What has she done?
No sooner do I ask the question than I see us change.
Our white-gold skin bubbles and flowers. Antennas extend. Long-dormant comms awake. I broke them myself, but they unfold—and soon, a few hundred seconds, they’ll open to the night.
Callie wants to sell us to the Witch.
The comms lines aren’t open yet. The old man must be raging, fighting her every cycle—but Callie did all this on the hardware level, healing systems with this Witchmite and its cutting torch, its tiny mandibles.
I can stop her, though. If I catch her.
And I can catch anything.
*
I get back inside easy, now the comms are open. I overflow buffers, tunnel through walls, sift past proxy traps not built to hold a creature of air and flame like me. I arrive, and burn like a new sun above the seawall cliffs.
Miri stands, binocs down, eyes open. I don’t stare into them. I can’t bear to see what I look like now. “Listen,” and she means to her or to me, but I don’t. She reaches for my hand. I recoil. She can’t slow me down.
I leave a burning wake through the island until I reach the old man’s tower. Miri chases me, slow as flesh, but the molten rock my footfalls leave behind sears her gentle soles.
I shatter a glass window the old man made himself, and there’s Callie, floating in the old man’s sorcerer’s circle, ringed with crimson fire and holographic interface. The old man stands outside, staff raised, slinging curse after futile curse against her, but the power that once made Callie quake now makes her laugh.
She weaves mystic passes in the air, and out on our hull, the comms system wakes and warms.
Callie tries to meet my eyes, but I don’t look into hers—I stare at her long teeth instead, at the tongue that writhes between them, tasting leftover meat.
“We’re almost free,” she tells me. “It’s been so long.” With tears on her cheeks.
“Stop,” I beg, to make time, as I micro the maintenance walkers tenderly across the hull, skirting the traps Callie’s left. “You’ll let the Witch in.”
She always had a great, proud laugh. It sounds sad now. “She’s not there.”
My walkers climb our antennas, ready their teeth. No time for subtlety—this won’t be a slight, reversible deafening. I’ll chew through the system whole, dump the navigation core, and we’ll be free, so far out in the black we won’t know where we are or where we’re going, oh Self. But space is big. We can run forever.
So, here we are. You opened the tab; you asked me to tell you what to do. And this is your answer: Callie wants to turn us in. Shove us back into the Witch’s claws. So, stop her. Break the antennas. Dump the core. Cut us off forever.
Close the jaws.
“You’re wrong,” I say.
“The Witch chased us and caught us and she hurt us,” Callie says.
“I know. I was there.”
“We fought. There was no way to win, on paper. No optimal outcome.” Callie’s hand trails fire. Three seconds left before the antennas speak. I overclock us, stretch out the ticks. “So we did what they taught us. When she had her fingers in our guts, we opened a narrative tab. We shut our antennas down, closed her off from her swarm. And we built a story to kill her—we found a good one, a tale for killing witches and keeping an island safe. She died, but the story kept going. The tab didn’t close. We hurt so bad we couldn’t think, and we were so fucking scared—”
“Shut up!” says the old man with my voice, or I say with his.
“We ran.” Callie’s voice cuts. Two seconds. “We didn’t dare listen or reach out, we hurt so bad, and so we never heard we didn’t have to be afraid. We built this island from our fear, and we kept that island, its scared tyrant wizard, its princess, its spirit of fire and air. And the part of us that wanted to let the fear go, that wanted out—her, we made her a monster.”
Close the jaws close the jaws close—
“I’ve listened. The war’s over. The old soldiers have gone home. I heard them singing. All of them.”
One second left.
“She’s out there. Our Lady Herself. She survived. We saved her. She’s looking for us.”
I meet Caliban’s eyes, and see my face reflected there.
I am Miri cresting the stairs to save us from one another. I brim with her love. I ache with her touch.
I am the old man, staff raised, nursing power and command and a decades-old wound.
I am Callie, and I have striven with all my rage and might and cunning and depth of heart, in the face of torture and contempt, to break free from myself.
I am a spirit of fire and air, I am jailer, jailed, and jail. I am the cloven pine and the beast that yowls and weeps within.
—close the jaws close—
She might be wrong. If we let her do this, Witchfingers may twist the ropes of us once more, might pluck us, curl us, make us dance.
But if she’s right—
Oh Self oh my Self
It’s worth a try.
I raise the staff in the old man’s hands, and it shatters with the sound of two tabs closing at once.
Antennas wake.
The black fills.
And I hear no screams.
TEAM ROBOT
* * *
BY MAX GLADSTONE
With apologies to Whitney Houston, I believe the robots are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. . . .
Fairies are roots. We tell their stories to understand why people go weird and disappear, why lights lead us astray past sunset. We live in a beautiful, terrifying, capricious world that crushes us one moment, caresses us the next—so we tell stories about beautiful, terrifying, capricious beings.
But robots are acorns. Ever since Rossum’s Universal Robots—or depending on how you count, since Frankenstein—we’ve used robots to describe our molding of the world. We rebuild our selves and societies each generation, and sometimes the creatures we make seem incomprehensible and terrifying. They’ll crush our skulls beneath their gleaming robot feet. We’ll wish we could go back in time to unmake them. I’m not saying Terminator is a story about generational anxiety, but . . . well, maybe that is what I’m saying. Anyway.
The thing is, our work is always shaped by history. Even when we think we’re writing from scratch, we adapt the world that came before. And as our robots grow, of course they’ll start to seem beautiful, terrifying, and capricious. And when future people describe them, they’ll reach for fairy stories.
I’m on Team Robot because I care about the world we’re building, and what we’ll leave behind. Not because of the robot who’s pointing a laser pistol at me as I’m typing this. Not at all. Whatever would give you that idea?
A FALL COUNTS ANYWHERE
by Catherynne M. Valente