Lightspeed Year One

LONG ENOUGH AND JUST SO LONG

Cat Rambo

I’d never wanted to go to Earth until the doctor told me I couldn’t, that my bones were too brittle. After that, it wasn’t an obsession, just an edge to my days.

Otherwise, my life’s good.

I run a courier ship between Earth, Luna, the space stations, Mars, and the Inner Gate. You need as little mass as possible to run a snipship, and due to what that doctor called my defects, I’m one of the smallest, fastest. Good pay, and most of the time I’m low-g, which is easiest on me.

Freetime I slum around Luna, where my best girlfriend Pippi lives. Or she and I go prospecting out in the shadow of the Gate, like the dozens of other crazies, hoping to stumble on an alien artifact, make us all rich. Not too impossible a dream, though. It’s happened before.

I had a permanent cradle walker left at Luna, that’s how much time I spent there. Pippi worked as a sportscaster for the biggest Moon channel, MBSA. Her name’s not really Pippi, but she had orange braids and long legs and freckles everywhere, so what else could everyone call her?

I’m used to my name getting distorted. My parents named me Podkayne after a girl in an old story about Mars. It becomes Poddy and Special K, usually Kayne.

In college, though, they called me the Gimp. Most of the time it was affectionate. Pippi was my roommate, there from day one. She had eight siblings, ranging from twelve years to three months. A roomie with lower limb reduction syndrome didn’t faze her. I’d come in with a chip pre-loaded on my shoulder, but I relaxed after a couple of weeks.

Pippi was borderline Aspie, called it like it was, which caused her enough troubles on her own. You had to explain to her why you were angry or sad or whatever, but once she knew what was going on, she knew what sounds to make.

The Aspiness makes her an excellent sportscaster. She knows every sports score for the last half century, and a lot of pre-Net stuff too. You can’t come up with a trivia question that’s lunar sports-related that she can’t answer. That was the only thing she really got passionate about, and in a way that charmed the camera.

We never hooked up. Both of us were wired straight. Pippi had a regular friend named Trevor who was usually away on business trips. I paid for it or went virtual every once in a while, and left things at that.

We were both enjoying sunlight at our favorite park, two blocks away from Pippi’s apartment complex. Sitting beside a sculpture there I’ve always loved, spindly rails of color tumbling taller than me like animation lines, edges glinting pink and blue and purple. The smell of tomato and basil and sage filled the air.

Pippi had her face turned up to the light, soaking in the warmth. She had been indulging in tanners again. Her orange shirt and shorts were vibrant against the expanse of her brown skin.

I was more cautious. I don’t want skin tumors later on, so I keep a gauzy over-shirt and hat about me. Silvery sleeves to deflect the light were set over my arms, strapped into the walker’s maneuvering legs. Underneath the sleeves, mercurial light played over my skin.

We both saw him when he entered the park: Tourist-new, still dressed in arrival shorts and paper shirt with “Be nice, I’m a newbie” printed on the back, which guaranteed him a 10% discount at any participating business.

Pippi squinted over. “Is that . . . ”

I followed her gaze. Dark glasses gave me the advantage. “Yep. It’s an AI.”

“Not just any AI, though,” she said, eyes watering. “Unless I’m wrong?”

“Nope, it’s a sexbot,” I said.

It was just after what the newsies were calling the Sexbot Scandal, when that Senator was caught traveling with an AI and had used the momentary notoriety to call for AI rights. Now the Senator’s ’droid and several others of its kind had bought themselves free. I’d seen an interview with one while trapped in line picking up Chinese takeout the night before. Its plans for the next year were to travel with its friend, another of the bots. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

The oldest human urge: Curiosity about who or what each other was f*cking.

He had the white plastic skin most AIs were affecting that year. On his head a slouched wool hat like a noir detective’s.

He looked up and saw us looking at him. He froze, like a car grinding gears to a stop. Then he moved again, almost impatient, flinging an arm up as though against us, although I realized a second later that it shielded his eyes from the dazzle of sunlight off the sculpture. Trapezoids of colored light danced over his tunic, glittered on the lenses that were his eyes.

Pippi waved.

He stepped backwards, ducked into the tunnel.

Of course we went in pursuit.

He took the West tunnel. Moving fast, dodging between walkers moving between stations, grabbing handholds to hurl himself along. It wasn’t hard to follow him—I’m small, and mostly muscular in the chest and shoulders, so I can rocket along as far as anyone from handhold to handhold. Pippi slowed me down, kept hissing at me to wait up for her.

We emerged in the most touristy of plazas, the complex of malls near the big hotels, the public gardens. I thought I’d seen the flicker of his tunic, his hat’s crumpled feather, as he ducked into the Thai garden.

The dome overhead admitted unadulterated sunlight. There were parrot flowers and bua pood, a waterfall, and a grove full of gibbons, safely behind mesh. Trails led off to discreet clothing and lifestyle boutiques, a restaurant, and a walkway to the next mall. I saw his hat bob through its glass confines and elbowed Pippi, pointing.

She said, “He could be going anywhere from there. There’s a tube stop in the middle of the mall.”

“Where would a sexbot go?”

“Do you think he’s for hire?” she said.

The interview had said only a few sexbots had chosen to keep their professions. Most of the others had made enough to fund other careers. Most had become solo-miners or explorer pilots.

“It can’t be the first time he’s been asked the question,” Pippi said.

I hesitated. I could talk her into asking. Could machines feel embarrassment? What was the etiquette of communication? Was a sexbot, like a human, capable of being flattered by a flirtatious or even directly admiring question?

Gibbons hooted overhead. A long-billed bird clung upside down to the other side of the mesh. If we stayed here much longer, we’d have a park fee added to our monthly taxes. Two parks in a single day was way too extravagant.

We went home.

I had a run to the Gate the next morning, so I got up early, let myself out. Took the West tunnel to the tube stop. Grabbed a mushroom roll on the way and ate it on the platform, peering into shop windows at orange and blue scarves and fake ferns and a whole window wall’s worth of animate Muffs, the latest wearable animals. The sign said they lived off air impurities. They had no eyes, which to some people made them cute, I guess, but to me just looked sad.

Tourists going past in bright shirts and arcs of perfect white teeth. Demi-gods, powered by cash.

A feather reflected in the window. Behind me stood the sexbot.

This time I followed at a distance. Got in the train car at the opposite end, but kept an eye on him. Luckily for me he was getting out at the port. I don’t know what I would have done if it’d looked as though he was going further.

Maybe followed him.

Why? I don’t know. There was something charming about the way he held himself. And I was curious—who wouldn’t be?—about the experience of someone made for sex, someone for whom sex was his entire rationale for existence. What would it have been like for him (it?) awakening to that?

The port platform straddled the Dundee cliffs, overlooking the Sea of Tranquility. He was there at that flickering curtain of energy and I remembered what it did to constructs—shorted them out, wiped them clean. He had his hand outstretched, and I’m the last to deny anyone their choices, but even so I shouted, “Hey.”

He turned, his hand dropping.

I caught up to him. I was in the cradle walker because I was being lazy that day. I could see him taking it in, the metal spidering my lower body, the bulge where my flesh ended, where legs might have been on someone else, the nubs of my left hand—two but as useful as three of your fingers, I swear.

I said, “Want to get a cup of tea and talk about it?”

So cliché, like something you might have seen in a cheap-D. But he said, “Okay,” and his voice sounded as sincere as a mechanical voice can.

The café was half-deserted, just a couple of kids drinking coffee near the main window. We were between main shifts, and I was late for my pick-up, but I thumbed a don’t-bother-me code, knowing I was one of the most reliable usually. They’d curse me but let it slide.

It’s weird, talking to a mechanical. Half the time your mind’s supplying all the little body movements, so you feel like you’re talking to a person. Then half the time you’ve got a self-conscious feeling, like you were talking to your toaster in front of your grandmother.

Maybe it was just as strange for him. There’s a lot of Gimps up here—lower gravity has its advantages, and in a lot of spaces, like my rig, the less you mass the better. Plus times are lean—less elective surgery. Here he was in the land of the unbeautiful, the people who didn’t care as much about their appearance. Strange, when he was beautiful in every single inch, every graceful, economical move.

We didn’t say a word about any of that.

I told him the best places to sightsee, and where he could take tours. I thought maybe he had some advantages—did he need to breathe, after all? Could he walk Outside just as he was?

The big casinos are worth seeing, particularly Atlantis and Spin City. I sketched out a map on my cell and shot it to him.

“Where do you like to go?” he said.

I’m not much for shopping, and I said so. I liked to take the mega-rail between Luna and the Cluster—cheap and you could stare out the window at the landscape.

“Let’s do that,” he said.

The Cluster used to be a fundamentalist-founded station that ended up selling its space to private concerns in order to fund itself. The remnants of the church were there. They ran the greenhouses that grew food for Luna, where most of the water got processed too. The stuff at the market there was always fresh and good and cheaper than in stores.

A jazz club had bought space, and a tiny government office matched its grander counterpart in Luna. And there was Xanadu, which was a co-op of five wealthy families. Along with a scattering of individuals who dealt in rare or hand-crafted goods.

There was always music there, and it had enough reputation for being dangerous that all but a few tourists steered clear.

His name was Star. He would be all right with me. I knew enough to keep him safe.

We ate berries and sat beside rippling water. He told me about Earth—never about the people, but the landscape. Trees, pines and sycamores and madrona, maples and honey locusts and cedar. He talked about cliffs that were bound with color: Yellows and reds and deep browns. Everything grew there, it seemed.

He talked about rain, about slow gray clouds and tearing nor’easters. Rain drumming on a tin roof versus its sound on slate. Fine spring mist and the hot rain that fell during drought, coin-sized and evaporating too quickly. Rain on sand, echoed by waves. Thunderheads, gathering themselves over the ocean. He had lived beside the sea for a few years, he said.

I wondered who he had lived with.

So much was unsaid. It was like a cloud in the room. We relaxed despite it.

He didn’t know where he was staying. He had no luggage. I approved of that. I stick to plas-wear and carry no souvenirs other than the rooms inside my head. Even my ship, where I spend more time than anywhere else, is unpersonalized. I liked it that way.

I was staying with Pippi. Star had money, or so he said, and asked where a clean hotel was. I steered him to Blizz, which caters to the Gate regulars, and went back to Pippi’s.

She was surprised to see me. I hadn’t felt like going out on a trip, I said, and offered to take her out to dinner.

All the time we were eating sweet potato fries and tempeh steaks, I tried to figure out how to tell her about Star.

I don’t know what kept me from just blurting it out. That was usually the level we communicated at. Straightforward and without pretense.

I felt like a shit keeping quiet. Eventually it would come out and the longer it took, the worse it would be.

I wasn’t prepared to see him at the door the next day.

Pippi answered the door. “Bless you, my dear little friend!” she shouted over her shoulder.

“What?” I scooted back in my chair, glimpsed his hat.

“You got me a present!” She reached out her hands, “Come in, come in.”

Her place is tiny. Three of us made it feel crowded. We stood around the table, bumping it with our hips.

“How much do you cost?” Pippi asked Star.

He looked at me. “I don’t do that anymore.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I came to see Podkayne.”

Pippi was unembarrassed. She shrugged and said, “Okay.”

He wanted advice about buying into the colony, where to pick a spot. I made him buy me lunch in return for my advice, and we took Pippi along since she knew better than I where the good deals were.

“Over there in Cluster, someone told me a month or two ago,” she said. “He was saying the Church is going to sell off more space, and it’s going to get gentrified. It’s a long ways off though, over an hour by tram.” She licked barbecue sauce off her fingers. Star pushed a wipe across the table towards her.

“I don’t think he likes me much,” she said to me, later.

“I don’t think he likes humans much,” I said. “He makes allowances, but I think he’d be just as happy dealing with mechanicals only.”

“Not many mechs up here,” she said.

“Why?” I said. “You’d think it would be ideal for them. No rust. Less dirt. Fewer pollutants in the air.”

“It would make sense,” she said. “What does it say about us, we’re so crazy we pick a place even mechanicals don’t want to live?”

Maybe ten thousand on the face of the moon. The space stations ranged in size from a few hundred to a few thousand. Twenty thousand on the surface of Mars. I didn’t go back there much, even though it was where I had grown up, after my parents died in a crash. Maybe two or three thousand existing around the bounty of the Gate, another hundred pilots and vagabonds and Parasite-ridden.

The few, the proud, the crazy.

Why had Star chosen to come up here?

I asked.

He said, “There’s too many living things on the planet.”

“Why not Mars? It’s enough people to qualify as civilization.”

“They’re spread out and it’s dusty. Here it’s clean.”

“You like the sterility up here,” I said. “Then why think about living over in the Cluster? It’s the most organic spot on the moon.”

His face never smiled, just tilted from one degree to another. “It’s a controlled organic.”

“But what do you want to do?”

“Live,” he said. “By myself, with a few friends,” he nodded towards me, “according to my own devices.”

“What about sex?” I blurted out.

He froze like a stuck strut’s shadow. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. It’s just that I was somewhat interested, but only if you were.”

He shook his head, mere centimeters of rejection. “I’m afraid not.”

Words I’d heard before. Including what he said next. “We can be friends, though.”

“He’s not interested,” I told Pippi.

“Screw him,” she said. “Let’s go play Sex Rangers.”

We climbed into the virtual suits and tapped in. I found someone interested in fooling around on a rocky shore, underneath fuzzy pines. The suit’s as good as sex, any day—releases all the tensions you need released, in my opinion—and a lot cleaner.

Afterwards we logged out and ate pizza and watched a deck about boxing. Pippi said the guy had an 87 percent chance of winning (he did), 54 percent chance by knock-out (he did not).

“I asked Star to come mining with us,” I said to her when we were getting ready for bed. I took the couch; she had a fold-down bunk.

“You did what?”

“He’ll be an extra pair of eyes. Not like he’ll take up oxygen.”

She paused. “Fair enough.”

He was good enough at spotting. He learned the difference between ice and metal fast enough to satisfy impatient Pippi, who hated explaining things. I focused on getting us close to the debris that swirled in and out of the Gate. You never knew what you might find. One guy picked up a device that fueled a company in food replication and yielded over forty patents. One pilot found a singing harp. Another the greasy lump that ended up becoming snipship fuel.

You never knew.

Pippi and I had a routine. Star didn’t intrude on it much, went to the secondary display and focused on looking for mineral spikes.

Usually we chatted back and forth. There, Star was an intrusive, if silent, presence. Pippi ended up thumbing on the usual newschat channel. Nothing much. An outbreak on Mars, but small and well-contained. An ambassador stricken but rallying in order to continue his mission through the Gate. How much he looked forward to being the fifth human through the interstellar passage that allowed us access to the wild and varied universe. How much he looked forward to opening new trade channels.

Who knew what he might find out there?

“What’s this?” Star said.

From afar just a glitter. Then, closer, a silver-sided chest, the size of a foot locker but covered with golden triangles. An odd, glittery powder encrusted the hinges and catch as it spun in space.

We brought it in.

Pippi’s gloved hand reached to undo the latch. I waited, holding my breath.

Nothing hissed out. A glass sphere inside, clouded with bubbles and occlusions. As Pippi slipped it out of the gray material surrounding it, we could see oily liquid filling it.

“Could be useless,” Pippi said, her voice unhappy. “Plenty of stories like that before.”

“Could be beaucoup bucks,” I pointed out.

“Of course,” Pippi said, her voice loud and angry, “it’s the time you bring someone along, to split it three ways, that we actually hit a lode.”

“I don’t want any claim,” Star said.

Flummoxed, I stared at him. What must it be like, to have enough to not need more, to have just that one extra layer against yourself and poverty? My parents had left me enough to buy my snipship, but all my capital was tied up in that rig.

“I just wanted the company,” he said. “I thought it would be interesting.”

“F*cking tourist,” Pippi said. “Want to watch the monkeys dance? We’ll kiss for another five grand.”

He backed up, raising his hands. His feet clattered on the deck. Before he had moved quietly. Did he choose to make that sound to remind us he was a machine?

“Thought we’d just love to take the walking vibrator on tour?” Pippi said. When he remained silent, she turned on me. “See, it doesn’t have anything to say to that.”

“He,” he said.

“He? What makes you a he, that you’ve got a sticky-out bit? I bet you’ve got a sticky-in bit or two as well.” She laughed. Meanness skewed her face.

“Enough,” I said. “Let’s tag the find, in our names, Pippi.”

She dropped back. I clung to the rigging, started to thumb in figures. She pushed forward, “Let me, it’s faster.” Fingers clicking, she muttered under her breath, “Get us all home faster that way.”

I took over after she’d tagged the spot and put the coordinates in. I was trying not to be angry. Hope mellowed out some of the harsh emotion. It could be a significant find. It was nice of Star to give up his claim.

Back in the ship bay, the lights laddered his face till he looked like a decoration. Pippi was strapping our find into a jitney.

“Why not a place where there’s rain?” I said.

“That could only be Earth,” he said. “Do you know the worst thing about rain there?”

“What?”

Pippi tied a rope into place, tested it with a quick tug, glanced over her shoulder at us.

“Rain there has gotten so acidic that if I stand out in it I have to come in and shower after a few minutes. It damages my outer skin.”

I tried to picture the cold, then acid burn. Luna was better.

“I’m sorry about Pippi.”

She honked the horn.

“Go ahead. I’m taking the tram over to the Cluster,” he said.

I hesitated. “Meet me later?”

“I’ll call you.”

He didn’t, of course. We cashed in the case—a lump sum from a company’s R&D division that doubled our incomes and then some.

I texted him, “Come celebrate with us, we’re dockside and buying dumplings.” But he didn’t reply until three days later. “Sorry, things got busy. Bought house. Come out and see it.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning. I’ll make you breakfast.”

I left in the morning before Pippi was awake.

His place was swank, built into a cliff-side, with a spectacular view of the endless white plains below. He made me waffles with real maple syrup. He was an amazing cook. I said so.

“I was programmed that way,” he said, and made a sound that was sort of a laugh.

The sexbots—all of the AIs struggling for emancipation lately—had had to demonstrate empathy and creativity. I wondered what that had been like.

He was standing uncomfortably close. I leaned forward to make it even closer, thinking he’d draw back.

He didn’t.

“I’m programmed a certain way,” he said.

“How is that?”

“I want to please you. But at the same time I know it’s just the way I’m programmed.”

“It can’t be something more than that?” My arm was pressed against his surface. It was warm and yielding as flesh. I couldn’t have told the difference.

He pulled away. I bit my lip in frustration, but I liked him enough to be civilized.

I drank the last of my coffee. Real Blue Mountain blend. He kept his kitchen well stocked for human visitors—who did he hope would stop in?

As it turns out, Pippi. Next time I came through on a quick flight (I might be rich, but who was I to turn down fast and easy money?), she told me how he’d fed her.

“Pasta,” she said, rolling the words out. “And wine, and little fish, from Earth. And afterwards something sweet to drink.”

She said they’d f*cked. I believed her. It wouldn’t be her style to lie. It would never occur to her.

So I did and said I’d f*cked him too. She didn’t respond, not right off the bat, but I caught her looking at me oddly by the time I said toodle-oo and went off to sleep in my ship.

It wasn’t the first time I’d slept in there, not by a long shot.

I wished them both happiness, I supposed.

Still, two weeks later, I came in response to Pippi’s panicked call. He was going back to Earth, she said.

We both showed up at the farewell hall. He was standing with a tall blonde woman, Earth-fat. Star slipped away from us, came over with a bearing jaunty and happy, his polished face expressionless as always.

“Who is that?” Pippi said.

“A journalist. She’s going to help me tell my story, back on Earth.”

“I see,” Pippi said. She and I both surveyed the woman, who pretended not to notice us. Her manicured hand waved a porter over to take her luggage aboard, the hard-shelled cases the same color as her belt.

Pippi said, “Is this because you don’t want to f*ck me any longer? You said you liked it, making me feel good. We don’t have to do that. We can do whatever you like, as long as you stay.”

He averted his face, looking at the ship. “That’s not it.”

“Then what?”

“I want to go back to the rain.”

“Earth’s acid rain?” I said. “The rain that will destroy you?”

Now he was looking at neither of us.

“What about your place?” Pippi said.

“You can have it,” he said. “It never felt like home.”

“Will anyplace?” I asked. “Anywhere?”

“When I’m telling my story, it feels like home,” he said. “I see myself on the camera and I belong in the world. That’s what I need to do.”

“Good luck,” I said. What else could I say?

Pippi and I walked away through the terminal. There were tourists all around us, going home, after they’d played exotic for a few days, experienced zero-grav and sky-diving and painted their faces in order to play glide-ball and eaten our food and drunk our wine and now were going home to the rain.

We didn’t look at each other. I didn’t know how long Star’s shadow would lie between us. Maybe years. Maybe just long enough for sunlight to glint on forgotten metal, out there in the sky. Maybe long enough and just so long.





THE PASSENGER

Julie E. Czerneda

It was a pilgrimage and he was its goal.

This understanding had taken years, had the passenger the means or desire to measure them; decades to be convinced of any purpose beyond curiosity to the parade outside his walls. In the first months, he had cowered behind the furnishings, terrified almost to insanity by the ceaseless, silent mass of flesh quivering against one side of his prison.

At any moment, he could slide his eyes that way and make out a hundred bodies, hung with broad-tipped tentacles, moving with a boneless grace as if the atmosphere outside his prison were liquid. It could have been, for all he knew.

A hundred bodies: they could be the same as the hundred before or different. He still couldn’t tell any of them apart. Were only those of the same size and shape allowed to see him? They wore and carried nothing. He was fond of the notion that there were some religious or cultural mores that said they should come before him as he was, for they had never provided him clothing.

Other things, yes. Every few days, or weeks, or months, a panel on the far wall from his bed would glow. He’d learned to set his fingers properly in the seven slots beside the panel to trigger it to slide open. Behind the panel would be a box.

He would open it, of course, despite what he’d come to expect of its contents. At first, the sight of charred and melted wood and plastic, stained with blood, had provoked him to rage. He had cursed his captors, spat at the transparency keeping him from them, them from him, tried with ingenuity to kill himself with whatever sad relic or trophy they’d provided. They had never reacted, beyond simply causing him to slip into unconsciousness while they repaired what damage he’d managed to inflict on himself.

Eventually, he’d stopped. What was the point? The pilgrimage of watchers never ended. The boxes with their pitiful cargo continued to come. He began to sort their contents carefully. When he slept, anything he hadn’t touched or handled would be removed from his prison. He made sure to touch it all. When a new box was due, anything he had left on the floor would also disappear like a dream, so he began to sort out what mattered to him.

There was nothing useful. Bits of fabric—never enough for clothing, even when he tried to hoard some. The smell of burned flesh usually clung to it. Metal and plastic, usually bent or damaged beyond recognition. Once in a while, a package that seemed intact. Another passenger’s personal possessions, he assumed, better protected than other things.

While these were the most distressing gifts from his captors, he treated them with care. The opaque walls of his prison were uneven, with plentiful ledges. He filled these with trinkets from the dead. He slept watched over by the images of other men’s mothers and wives, and spent hours contemplating the fates of children whose faces were not reflections of his own.

If he slid his eyes that way, to watch his watchers, he knew it would be the same sight as every other minute since he came to be here, but the thought brought the involuntary glance. Tentacles, overlapping either because they wanted to or there was no room to avoid touching, made the same corrugated pattern as always. Each body was topped with seven small red eyes, pupilled in black, rolling in unison to face him, to track him as their owner moved along from one side of the wall to the other.

He looked away. There had been a time when he tried to communicate or at least learn by watching the watchers. After that had been a time of anger and depression, of attempts at self-destruction when nothing in the room could be defaced—attempts that availed him only intimate memories of futility.

Then he had stopped caring. He had remained motionless, waiting to die. They wouldn’t allow his body to fail. He would wake to find himself nourished, no matter how hard he resisted sleep. But he could allow his brain to die. And he tried.

And had almost succeeded. But that was when his captors, though they seemed incapable of communicating with him or understanding him, began giving him the boxes of belongings. Every item tore his heart; every one reconnected his humanity.

At last, one gave him a purpose to match the unknown one sending the aliens sliding past his prison day in, day out. It was a child’s box of markers. He held them against his cheek when he found them, breathing in a faint scent of corruption as well as the clean promise of colour. He cried for the child who had lost them, then, with painful care—he’d never been an artist—used the markers to draw a stick figure child on the floor.

He expected the vivid lines to be gone when he awoke, fingers cramped around the markers. But his captors had left them. So he added a dog, a ball, a tree, a house, a rabbit, a book! The markers failed him, dry halfway through the shining red of a bicycle. He flung them away, and cried, turning his back to the wall of watchers.

Sleeping, he dreamed for the first time in years of home, a dream that for once didn’t spiral into the nightmare of chase, burning, struggle, and capture, a dream that gave him up peacefully to reality.

There he found his captors had left him something of their own. On the floor was a seven-sided sheet of white. There was a tray containing greasy sticks, each about the length of his hand, in a variety of colors. They were awkward to hold, but he grabbed them eagerly and waved them happily at his watchers as if they’d respond. Or as if he’d recognize a response if they did.

Another hundred beings slid past. It took each exactly fifteen heartbeats to glide from one end of his wall to the other. Always.

Sixty-three years had passed since. He knew precisely, because that sheet of white had marked the beginning of his purpose. There were a few years lost in the beforetime. Ten years ago, the sad packages from other passengers had stopped appearing behind the panel. It didn’t matter. He no longer remembered his age when he arrived in this place, but he could rely on nature ending his imprisonment in the not-too-distant future, regardless of the devoted attention of his captors.

He surveyed this day’s work. The colors were subtle, layered in explanations of light and shadow, refinements he’d begun several pieces ago. The centerpiece, a bridge, swept upwards, its luminous archways of stone almost hanging in air. The Legion marching across moved in trained synchrony, save for the eyes of one man looking out as if wary of surprise attack. There were storm clouds on the horizon, and dewdrops on the moss in the foreground.

There were probably errors throughout the scene, he worried, as he always did. But the errors were irrelevant; he’d done his best. This one was ready to go. He rolled it up, the motion inflaming the soreness in his joints, and leaned it against the panel. Like all the others, it would be gone when he awoke.

Boneless grace studded with eyes; could any even see the colors he intended?

He’d learned his art. It was, after all, a way to communicate, and he’d hoped until hope died this medium would be the breakthrough allowing him to reach the intelligence that held him here, that marched in unending ranks just to look at him. But there had been no response beyond the disappearance of only finished works, those he rolled up and placed near the panel. He didn’t bother wondering anymore if they valued his art or washed off his colors to return the paper to him in some frenzied economy. It was enough he completed each image.

It took three sets of hands to open the roll safely. When it was spread on the seven-sided table specially built for this purpose, they ever-so-gently slid the holding bars over each edge, each bar locking in place with a light snick of contact. Only then did they release their careful grip.

The lights around the table dimmed, isolating the brightness glowing down on colors and shapes. The encircling six didn’t speak for a long moment, their faces lost in shadows, their thoughts in reverence. They were a close group, drawn together years before by common interests and goals, held together by a responsibility none could escape. These rooms, the automated equipment, and, most importantly, the wonderful artwork such as the latest supine before them, had been their discovery.

“The Romans,” said Dr. Susan Crawley softly, drawing in a slow breath around the unfamiliar word. “I’ve read about them. Earth, early 13th century, I think. They were conquerors, builders . . . definitely pre-Industrial.”

“Well, this proves what I have been saying all these years,” Dr. Tom Letner’s voice held its customary fine and precise diction in the dark, as if those lips never slurred into shipslang after a few beers. “He must have been an historian.”

Someone keyed the room lights to full brightness again. Bedlam erupted as others vehemently countered the physicist’s assertion. The loudest voice belonged to Lt. Tony Shrib. “All it proves is He was well-read. Susan here is an engineer, for star’s sake, and she knows about these Remans.”

“Romans,” Susan corrected under her breath. She ignored the continuing, well-worn arguments. What was new lay before her. Her eyes moved hungrily over the scene on the table, feasting on its complexity; she admired the stonework of the bridge, the odd moisture on a plant whose name she would have to look up in a text. All were images strange and exotic to the shipborn. Of those party to the secret of this art, only Master Electrician Huong Trang could claim to have set foot on the planet glorified by the Artist and Huong stubbornly refused to discuss what he remembered, as if the memories were sweeter for the hoarding.

Typically, it was Huong who interrupted her pleasure. “My friends,” he said in his gentle, clear voice—the voice that had reproached them so many times before. “My colleagues. Is it not time?”

The good-natured bickering faltered and stopped. The others, all officers or senior scientists, found good reasons to look anywhere but at Huong’s stern face. He recaptured their attention by placing one blunt-fingered hand firmly on the surface of the art.

Dr. Natalie Emil, a trim woman in her late forties whose love for the art was matched only by her love for her patients in the ship’s hospital—and truth be told, for her mother’s legacy of Earth chocolate—cried out, “Careful!”

The sacrilegious hand stayed where it was. “Is it not time?” Huong insisted, looking from one to the other in turn. “Has He not suffered long enough?”

The ship’s senior psychologist, Dr. Wayne Simmons, shook his mane of heavy gray hair, his eyes troubled behind their thick lenses. “We don’t dare release Him from the sim program. You know that, Huong. We can’t predict what the effect on His mind would be. We don’t have the facilities on this ship to ensure His recovery.”

Huong lifted his hand, prompting at least one sigh of relief, then waved it eloquently over the artwork imprisoned on the table. “And we don’t want this to stop, do we.”

Susan felt the blood draining from her face. She didn’t need to glance at her colleagues to know they too would be showing signs of shock. How dare Huong accuse them of—of what?

“We cherish the Artist’s work,” she said involuntarily. “How is that wrong? Despite His weakness, He’s valued by all of us.” Susan looked pleadingly at her peers, was strengthened by Natalie’s nod of support, by Tony’s smile. “You’ve seen for yourself how our shipmates flock to the Gallery to see His images of our heritage. We’ve arranged school tours. We let anyone order a reproduction for their quarters. We—”

“We imprison Him in His dream of Earth. We ensure He continues to produce what we crave,” Huong said heavily. “And we wait for Him to die and release us from our conscience.”

“No! How dare you—” Wayne’s hand touched hers briefly. Susan calmed herself but refused to back down. “You’ve never been comfortable with our decision, Huong. I understand your feelings about it—”

“I don’t think you do. I don’t think any of you really do.” The Master Electrician walked to the side of the room they usually avoided. He activated the sole control on its surface, turning the blank surface into a one-way view of a room, larger than most of the quarters on the colony ship Pilgrim III. The room’s sole occupant squatted naked and old on the floor, colors in those marvelous hands poised to coax shape and texture from the empty page.

Just as the Artist had done each and every day since they had discovered His existence. Almost ten years ago, yet Susan remembered it as if it had been yesterday. They’d searched for the release catches, frantic to rescue the imprisoned stranger, only to be stopped by Wayne and Natalie, their medical experts. It was obviously a sim chamber, like enough to the hundreds on the Pilgrim III to be recognizable, if far more elaborate. The planetborn visited the sims regularly, having come on-ship with their private recorded scenes from the verdant world left behind ready to comfort them when the shipworld became too strange to bear.

The shipborn entered the chambers as part of their schooling, a refresher course built from open skies, scented winds, and uneven ground. It was a matter of pride to avoid them as adults, to prefer acclimation to the Ship, though all recognized the coming generations would need the sims and more to prepare for their new home.

But no one lingered in the sims more than a day at a time. Only those who could accept leaving Earth had boarded the Ship; to admit otherwise was to unsettle one’s own sanity and disturb those around you. And there was work to be done, the carefully planned busyness designed to occupy minds tempted to hold on to the past. Survival for all meant looking to the future, not dwelling on what was now forever beyond their reach.

The sim chamber hosting the Artist was quite different from those offering education or a harmless moment of blue-skyed nostalgia. It was capable of full life support even if the Ship failed, of remote functions better suited to quarantine facilities. That had been one of their early fears: that He had been a carrier of some disease perilous to the Ship. They’d used the remotes to run tests as He lay unconscious, until they were sure He was nothing more dangerous than a puzzle.

There were recording devices, notes left behind in this secret place. Those had been studied too, though all they offered was a seemingly endless lists of bodily functions, chilling evidence the Artist had indeed been in this chamber every minute since launch.

As vividly, Susan remembered the morning when they’d met, here, to listen with horror as Wayne presented their conclusion: they must do nothing to disturb the Artist within His sim chamber with its automated, if bizarre, treatment. He and Natalie had been utterly convinced and so convincing: Releasing the Artist from his dreams of Earth, replacing them with the here-and-now of the Ship after all this time, would only shatter whatever reality His mind still recognized.

And, unsaid but understood, it would very likely stop His Art.

So they resigned themselves to being His keepers, to hiding the dark secret within the bowels of the Ship, and to sharing the Art with as many as possible. Huong wasn’t the only one to have nightmares since. How dare he set himself as their conscience!

Huong’s small eyes glittered at Susan, as though he heard her thoughts, or as though he were close to tears. His emotions were becoming embarrassingly public as he aged, perhaps a consequence of outliving most who had walked onto the Ship with him. “I’ve found out where He came from,” he said calmly enough. “I know the truth.”

“What?” Tony, the ship’s senior stellar cartographer, ran one hand over his close-cropped hair, then down over his face as if to smooth away an expression he’d rather not share. “How? Where?” Susan understood his dismay. Tony had taken the greatest risk of them all, using his clearance and knowledge to search the Ship’s records for any clue as to the origin of the Artist on the Ship. He’d found nothing: nothing to explain how the ship’s senior psychologist, Dr. Randall Clarke, had been able to requisition then hide the construction of this chamber at the edge of livable gravity inside the immense core of Pilgrim III. Nothing to identify the Artist, even when they’d taken advantage of the automatics and obtained DNA samples from His unconscious body.

Nothing to challenge their assumption that the Artist suffered from some delusional state, some flaw Dr. Clarke had been treating him for in this private, hidden place, some condition too severe to allow exposure to the Ship’s environment or company.

“Our past is recorded in places other than the Ship’s systems, Mr. Bridge Officer,” Huong said with deliberate irony.

“Tell us what you’ve learned,” Wayne ordered impatiently.

Huong spoke slowly, methodically, as if to impress each word on them all. “Did Randall mention his wife to any of you?”

They didn’t look at Susan, but she felt their focus on her. Everyone knew she and Randall had been lovers until his death. “Is this relevant?” she asked coldly.

“Very.”

“Then, no. I didn’t know he had ever married.”

“Oh yes. In fact, Randall was supposed to board with his wife. Yet Tony’s checked the manifest; Ship’s records clearly show Randall arriving alone.”

“Where did you find this information?” Tom demanded. He’d found the datacube giving directions to this place in Randall’s cabin safe—otherwise they might never have discovered it. Sometimes the thought made Susan weak. The beauty and richness of the Artist’s work, languishing as dust-covered rolls on the floor where the automatics dumped them. No classes of school children seeing His work, awed by their own past made manifest. They’d have reached orbit around New Earth 17, moved to the surface and started their new lives all unaware, while the great seed ship reconstructed itself as an orbital platform, its automatics sweeping up and recycling the dead organics of the Artist and His Art. She shivered.

Their attention was distracted by the Artist as he stretched then scratched one wrinkled buttock absently before settling back to his labours.

“Corridor sale.”

Susan blinked, trying to imagine staid, conservative Huong visiting one of the hundreds of junk sales that went on throughout the colonists’ section of the ship. They weren’t particularly legal, but the Captains had long ago relented, second-gen officers tending to be more practical than those raised and trained Earthside. Besides being a useful diversion for the colonists, the sales redistributed personal goods no longer obtainable from their source.

“I picked up a collection of gossip mags in the last one.” Huong paused patiently as Natalie laughed. “It was worth it. I found our late psychologist—and his wife.”

“In a gossip mag?” Susan said with disbelief.

“The wife, Charlette d’Ord, was an athlete turned sports broadcaster. A bit of a celebrity in her way. I found several images of them together—the captions refer to Randall only as her husband, but you can see him plainly enough. Here.” Huong drew a datacube out of his pocket and tossed it to Susan.

Numbly, she walked over to the nearest reader panel and inserted the ’cube. The rectangular screen produced an image of a group of people at some public event. Randall’s thin face with its surprisingly sensual lips was easy enough to recognize despite the passage of years. He had one arm possessively around the shoulders of an incredibly beautiful woman. Susan smoothed the skirt over her ample hips before she could resist the impulse.

“I know that face,” Natalie breathed.

So would anyone on the Ship, Susan thought. Those classic features and warm smile were straight from the Artist’s most popular work. Almost every cabin had its copy of the angelic figure hovering, arms spread to shield the Earth from the dark of space, the serene loveliness of the perfect yet so-human face a comfort to folk all too aware they were separated from vacuum by only a hull and skills both a generation stale.

“Pull up the faces behind them,” Huong ordered, as if this revelation wasn’t enough.

Susan did so, watching with the others as three faces from the background became clearer. The centermost, a young man, was plainly not paying attention to the photographer or event. His dark, familiar eyes were fixed on Charlette. Susan turned off the image, inexplicably frightened by the longing captured in that one look.

Huong didn’t object, trapping them instead with his slow voice. “Charlette died in a car accident six months before Pilgrim III began final assembly. The accident took place over one hundred miles from their home. The car contained her luggage and there was an unconfirmed witness’ report that someone else had been driving the car. Randall was apparently questioned by police then released. After all, he was going offworld for the rest of his life. What point in pursuing an investigation?”

Wayne moved closer to the viewscreen covering the opposite wall, his face shadowed and grim as he stared at the Artist. Susan wanted to refuse his vision, to see a patient under sophisticated care, not a victim. Her lips moved numbly: “You’re saying the Artist is that young man in the image. You’re accusing Randall of murdering his wife and somehow arranging to kidnap and imprison her lover, bringing him on the Ship.”

“Randall was on the planning team,” Natalie said reluctantly. “He had the access and opportunity to make modifications.”

“Why?” Susan breathed. “Why—like this?”

Huong answered. “We can guess. Revenge. Randall could be ruthless. We all knew that about him.” No one disagreed. Pilgrim III was immense, as colony ships had to be. It would be their children’s children who reached humanity’s latest new frontier. In the meantime, the Ship was a world onto itself: shelter, workplace, and space for growth. Yet her thousands of inhabitants existed within smaller, insular communities, communities that had to get along or fail to function. The scientific community was one, and Randall had not endeared himself to many in it. Susan was the first to admit that her social standing with her peers had improved after her lover choked to death on his favourite synthetic sweetmeat.

“Now you know what I believe. The Artist is no madman, cared for in an automated sim to calm his delusions and keep him functioning. He is—or was—as sane as any of us before being tortured by our colleague, a man who perverted his knowledge to harm, not heal. The Artist does not belong in this travesty of a life. And so we agree,” Huong said, swiveling to look at each of them, his hand rising slowly as if to lift some curtain. “It is time.”

Wayne shook his head, an identical gesture to his first response to Huong’s plea, and Susan felt her heart starting to pound for no reason she cared to admit. “No,” Wayne replied. “We can’t.”

“Why?” Huong’s eyes blazed. He raised his fists in the air. “In the name of justice! Why not? Don’t you believe me?”

Susan answered when no one else spoke. “It doesn’t matter. The Artist lives in His own World, at peace. You know that, Huong. And if we free Him now, so close to His end, what are we offering Him in return? Your theory that all He has suffered was to satisfy one man’s desire for revenge? That whatever purpose He found to sustain Himself has been a lie?” She paused for emphasis. “That His very world is gone?”

Huong’s face was deathly pale. “What do you care about Him?” His finger stabbed the air, first at Natalie, then at Wayne. “You’d keep Him locked away just to hide your mistakes.” His finger stabbed at Tom, “You, for an excuse to break the rules.” Then at Tony, “You’re terrified of the Captains’ judgment. And you.” Susan stared at the now-shaking fingertip targeting her. “You want to keep your lover’s legacy for yourself, don’t you? I know you believe His Art belongs to you.”

“Rant all you want, Huong,” Natalie countered, her voice a shade too calm. “Whatever you think are our reasons, you’ve missed the most important one of all: Our shipmates. They believe the Art they love is the secret work of someone among us, someone keeping our heritage alive in a way no datacube can. Do you wish to tarnish their feelings for His work, turn His accomplishments into this sordid melodrama? We must not consider this one individual above the good of the Ship.”

There was a murmur of agreement; Susan sensed their resolve hardening. So did Huong. “At what cost?” he asked, his passion drained away at last, replaced by disgust. “At what cost,” he repeated.

Susan found nothing to say. Huong turned and left the room, his feet dragging with each step.

“Will he go to the Captains?” Tony asked.

It wasn’t a meaningless concern. They’d used their privileged ranks to hide what they’d found, to produce the Art as if by some miracle. If Huong told now, they would all become suspect. At the very least, they would lose control of their departments to underlings and have their work scrutinized for the remainder of their lives. In many ways, Pilgrim III was not a large ship at all.

“No,” Wayne said, going over to gaze down at the image of the Legion captured in time. One Legionnaire looked back at him, as if seeking an unknown enemy. “Huong protests. He goads us to do what he believes is right. But he also knows we have no choice. The Artist will live a year more at best; perhaps only months. Whatever fantasy fills His mind, whatever beloved view of home comforts Him, let Him keep it. Let Him finish His work. When He is gone—then it will be time to tell His story.” Wayne sighed. “At least, as much of His story as we choose to tell.

“Thanks to Him, humanity will not forget its past.”

There was a blank seven-sided canvas ready underneath. He sat on one corner of it, half his mind already planning, the other half gently engaged watching his watchers sliding past, tentacle upon tentacle, eyes rolling from side to side. He believed he understood now. Both their purpose, and his.

He picked up an alien crayon, nodded a proud acknowledgment to the race that forced its guilty millions to parade in shame before him, and prepared to record another piece of human history. As long he lived, Humanity would not be forgotten.

For like that precious bird, kept until death in a glass cage for all to see, wasn’t he the last passenger of Earth?





SIMULACRUM

Ken Liu

[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.





—Susan Sontag

Paul Larimore:

You are already recording? I should start? Okay.

Anna was an accident. Both Erin and I were traveling a lot for work, and we didn’t want to be tied down. But you can’t plan for everything, and we were genuinely happy when we found out. We’ll make it work somehow, we said. And we did.

When Anna was a baby, she wasn’t a very good sleeper. She had to be carried and rocked as she gradually drifted to sleep, fighting against it the whole time. You couldn’t be still. Erin had a bad back for months after the birth, and so it was me who walked around at night with the little girl’s head against my shoulder after feedings. Although I know I must have been very tired and impatient, all I remember now is how close I felt to her as we moved back and forth for hours across the living room, lit only by moonlight, while I sang to her.

I wanted to feel that close to her, always.

I have no simulacra of her from back then. The prototype machines were very bulky, and the subject had to sit still for hours. That wasn’t going to happen with a baby.

This is the first simulacrum I do have of her. She’s about seven.

-Hello, sweetheart.





-Dad!





-Don’t be shy. These men are here to make a documentary movie about us. You don’t have to talk to them. Just pretend they’re not here.





-Can we go to the beach?





-You know we can’t. We can’t leave the house. Besides, it’s too cold outside.





-Will you play dolls with me?





-Yes, of course. We’ll play dolls as long as you want.





Anna Larimore:

My father is a hard person for the world to dislike. He has made a great deal of money in a way that seems like an American fairy tale: Lone inventor comes up with an idea that brings joy to the world, and the world rewards him deservedly. On top of it all, he donates generously to worthy causes. The Larimore Foundation has cultivated my father’s name and image as carefully as the studios airbrush the celebrity sex simulacra that they sell.

But I know the real Paul Larimore.

One day, when I was thirteen, I had to be sent home because of an upset stomach. I came in the front door, and I heard noises from my parents’ bedroom upstairs. They weren’t supposed to be home. No one was.

A robber? I thought. In the fearless and stupid way of teenagers, I went up the stairs, and I opened the door.

My father was naked in bed, and there were four naked women with him. He didn’t hear me, and so they continued what they were doing, there in the bed that my mother shared with him.

After a while, he turned around, and we looked into each other’s eyes. He stopped, sat up, and reached out to turn off the projector on the nightstand. The women disappeared.

I threw up.

When my mother came home later that night, she explained to me that it had been going on for years. My father had a weakness for a certain kind of woman, she said. Throughout their marriage, he had trouble being faithful. She had suspected this was the case, but my father was very intelligent and careful, and she had no evidence.

When she finally caught him in the act, she was furious, and wanted to leave him. But he begged and pleaded. He said that there was something in his make up that made real monogamy impossible for him. But, he said, he had a solution.

He had taken many simulacra of his conquests over the years, more and more lifelike as he improved the technology. If my mother would let him keep them and tolerate his use of them in private, he would try very hard to not stray again.

So this was the bargain that my mother made. He was a good father, she thought. She knew that he loved me. She did not want to make me an additional casualty of a broken promise that was only made to her.

And my father’s proposal did seem like a reasonable solution. In her mind, his time with the simulacra was no different from the way other men used pornography. No touching was involved. They were not real. No marriage could survive if it did not contain some room for harmless fantasies.

But my mother did not look into my father’s eyes the way I did when I walked in on him. It was more than a fantasy. It was a continuing betrayal that could not be forgiven.

Paul Larimore:

The key to the simulacrum camera is not the physical imaging process, which, while not trivial, is ultimately not much more than the culmination of incremental improvements on technologies known since the days of the daguerreotype.

My contribution to the eternal quest of capturing reality is the oneiropagida, through which a snapshot of the subject’s mental patterns—a representation of her personality—can be captured, digitized, and then used to re-animate the image during projection. The oneiropagida is at the heart of all simulacrum cameras, including those made by my competitors.

The earliest cameras were essentially modified medical devices, similar to those legacy tomography machines you still see at old hospitals. The subject had to have certain chemicals injected into her body and then lie still for a long time in the device’s imaging tunnel until an adequate set of scans of her mental processes could be taken. These were then used to seed AI neural models, which then animated the projections constructed from detailed photographs of her body.

These early attempts were very crude, and the results were described variously as robotic, inhuman, or even comically insane. But even these earliest simulacra preserved something that could not be captured by mere videos or holography. Instead of replaying verbatim what was captured, the animated projection could interact with the viewer in the way that the subject would have.

The oldest simulacrum that still exists is one of myself, now preserved at the Smithsonian. In the first news reports, friends and acquaintances who interacted with it said that although they knew that the image was controlled by a computer, they elicited responses from it that seemed somehow “Paul”: “That’s something only Paul would say” or “That’s a very Paul facial expression.” It was then that I knew I had succeeded.

Anna Larimore:

People find it strange that I, the daughter of the inventor of simulacra, write books about how the world would be better off without them, more authentic. Some have engaged in tiresome pop psychology, suggesting that I am jealous of my “sibling,” the invention of my father that turned out to be his favorite child.

If only it were so simple.

My father proclaims that he works in the business of capturing reality, of stopping time and preserving memory. But the real attraction of such technology has never been about capturing reality. Photography, videography, holography . . . the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize.

People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality.

The simulacra are the latest incarnation of this trend, and the worst.

Paul Larimore:

Ever since that day, when she . . . well, I expect that you have already heard about it from her. I will not dispute her version of events.

We have never spoken about that day to each other. What she does not know is that after that afternoon, I destroyed all the simulacra of my old affairs. I kept no backups. I expect that knowing this will not make any difference to her. But I would be grateful if you can pass this knowledge on to her.

Conversations between us after that day were civil, careful performances that avoided straying anywhere near intimacy. We spoke about permission slips, the logistics of having her come to my office to solicit sponsors for walkathons, factors to consider in picking a college. We did not speak about her easy friendships, her difficult loves, her hopes for and disappointments with the world.

Anna stopped speaking to me completely when she went off to college. When I called, she would not pick up the phone. When she needed a disbursement from her trust to pay tuition, she would call my lawyer. She spent her vacations and summers with friends or working overseas. Some weekends she would invite Erin up to visit her in Palo Alto. We all understood that I was not invited.

-Dad, why is the grass green?





-It’s because the green from the leaves on the trees drips down with the spring rain.





-That’s ridiculous.





-All right, it’s because you are looking at it from this side of the fence. If you go over to the other side, it won’t be so green.





-You are not funny.





-Okay. It’s because of chlorophyll in the grass. The chlorophyll has rings in it that absorb all colors of light except green.





-You’re not making this up, are you?





-Would I ever make anything up, sweetheart?





-It’s very hard to tell with you sometimes.





I began to play this simulacrum of her often when she was in high school, and over time it became a bit of a habit. Now I keep her on all the time, every day.

There were later simulacra when she was older, many of them with far better resolution. But this one is my favorite. It reminded me of better times, before the world changed irrevocably.

The day I took this, we finally managed to make an oneiropagida that was small enough to fit within a chassis that could be carried on your shoulder. That later became the prototype for the Carousel Mark I, our first successful home simulacrum camera. I brought it home and asked Anna to pose for it. She stood still next to the sun porch for two minutes while we chatted about her day.

She was perfect in the way that little daughters are always perfect in the eyes of their fathers. Her eyes lit up when she saw that I was home. She had just come back from day camp, and she was full of stories she wanted to tell me and questions she wanted to ask me. She wanted me to take her to the beach to fly her new kite, and I promised to help her with her sunprint kit. I was glad to have captured her at that moment.

That was a good day.

Anna Larimore:

The last time my father and I saw each other was after my mother’s accident. His lawyer called, knowing that I would not have answered my father.

My mother was conscious, but barely. The other driver was already dead, and she was going to follow soon after.

“Why can’t you forgive him?” she said. “I have. A man’s life is not defined by one thing. He loves me. And he loves you.”

I said nothing. I only held her hand and squeezed it. He came in and we both spoke to her but not to each other, and after half an hour she went to sleep and did not wake up.

The truth was, I was ready to forgive him. He looked old—a quality that children are among the last to notice about their parents—and there was a kind of frailty about him that made me question myself. We walked silently out of the hospital together. He asked if I had a place to stay in the city, and I said no. He opened the passenger side door, and after hesitating for only a second, I slipped into his car.

We got home, and it was exactly the way I remembered it, even though I hadn’t been home in years. I sat at the dinner table while he prepared frozen dinners. We spoke carefully to each other, the way we used to when I was in high school.

I asked him for a simulacrum of my mother. I don’t take simulacra or keep them, as a rule. I don’t have the same rosy view of them as the general public. But at that moment, I thought I understood their appeal. I wanted a piece of my mother to be always with me, an aspect of her presence.

He handed me a disc, and I thanked him. He offered me the use of his projector, but I declined. I wanted to keep the memory of my mother by myself for a while before letting the computer’s extrapolations confuse real memories with made-up ones.

(And as things turned out, I’ve never used that simulacrum. Here, you can take a look at it later, if you want to see what she looked like. Whatever I remember of my mother, it’s all real.)

It was late by the time we finished dinner, and I excused myself.

I walked up to my room.

And I saw the seven-year old me sitting on my bed. She had on this hideous dress that I must have blocked out of my memory—pink, flowery, and there was a bow in her hair.

-Hello, I’m Anna. Pleased to meet you.





So he had kept this thing around for years, this naïve, helpless caricature of me. During the time I did not speak to him, did he turn to this frozen trace of me, and contemplate this shadow of my lost faith and affection? Did he use this model of my childhood to fantasize about the conversations that he could not have with me? Did he even edit it, perhaps, to remove my petulance, to add in more saccharine devotion?

I felt violated. The little girl was undeniably me. She acted like me, spoke like me, laughed and moved and reacted like me. But she was not me.

I had grown and changed, and I’d come to face my father as an adult. But now I found a piece of myself had been taken and locked into this thing, a piece that allowed him to maintain a sense of connection with me that I did not want, that was not real.

The image of those naked women in his bed from years ago came rushing back. I finally understood why for so long they had haunted my dreams.

It is the way a simulacrum replicates the essence of the subject that makes it so compelling. When my father kept those simulacra of his women around, he maintained a connection to them, to the man he was when he had been with them, and thus committed a continuing emotional betrayal that was far worse than a momentary physical indiscretion. A pornographic image is a pure visual fantasy, but a simulacrum captures a state of mind, a dream. But whose dream? What I saw in his eyes that day was not sordid. It was too intimate.

By keeping and replaying this old simulacrum of my childhood, he was dreaming himself into reclaiming my respect and love, instead of facing the reality of what he had done, and the real me.

Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep his or her child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood, when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love, the dream that Lear had about Cordelia.

I walked down the stairs and out of the house, and I have not spoken to him since.

Paul Larimore:

A simulacrum lives in the eternal now. It remembers, but only hazily, since the oneiropagida does not have the resolution to discern and capture the subject’s every specific memory. It learns, up to a fashion, but the further you stray from the moment the subject’s mental life was captured, the less accurate the computer’s extrapolations. Even the best cameras we offer can’t project beyond a couple of hours.

But the oneiropagida is exquisite at capturing her mood, the emotional flavor of her thoughts, the quirky triggers for her smiles, the lilt of her speech, the precise, inarticulable quality of her turns of phrase.

And so, every two hours or so, Anna resets. She’s again coming home from day camp, and again she’s full of questions and stories for me. We talk, we have fun. We let our chat wander wherever it will. No conversation is ever the same. But she’s forever the curious seven-year old who worshipped her father, and who thought he could do no wrong.

-Dad, will you tell me a story?





-Yes, of course. What story would you like?





-I want to hear your cyberpunk version of Pinocchio again.





-I’m not sure if I can remember everything I said last time.





-It’s okay. Just start. I’ll help you.





I love her so much.

Erin Larimore:

My baby, I don’t know when you’ll get this. Maybe it will only be after I’m gone. You can’t skip over the next part. It’s a recording. I want you to hear what I have to say.

Your father misses you.

He is not perfect, and he has committed his share of sins, the same as any man. But you have let that one moment, when he was at his weakest, overwhelm the entirety of your life together. You have compressed him, the whole of his life, into that one frozen afternoon, that sliver of him that was most flawed. In your mind, you traced that captured image again and again, until the person was erased by the stencil.

During all these years when you have locked him out, your father played an old simulacrum of you over and over, laughing, joking, pouring his heart out to you in a way that a seven-year old would understand. I would ask you on the phone if you’d speak to him, and then I couldn’t bear to watch as I hung up while he went back to play the simulacrum again.

See him for who he really is.

-Hello there. Have you seen my daughter Anna?