Apex Magazine: Issue 28

By Catherynne M. Valente

Apex Magazine is a monthly science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazine featuring original, mind-bending short fiction from many of the top pros of the field.

Table of Contents

Fiction:
“Namaste Prime”
Gra Linnaea

“Frank”
Betsy Phillips

“Gemphalon”
Elizabeth Engstrom

Poetry:
“And Cut Down a Moment Later""
Erik Amundsen

Nonfiction:
“The Improbable, Inevitable Domestication of the Great Old Ones: H. P. Lovecraft's Iconic Influence on 21st-Century Fantastic Literature and Culture”
John H. Stevens

Apex Magazine is edited by award-winning author and editor Catherynne M. Valente.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apex Book Company
• Release date: Sep 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465822789

Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente is an acclaimed New York Times bestselling creator of over forty works of fantasy and science fiction, including the Fairyland novels and The Glass Town Game. She has been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and has won the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree), Hugo, and Andre Norton award. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, young son, and a shockingly large cat with most excellent tufts.

Book preview

APEX MAGAZINE

Issue 28

September, 2011

Copyright 2011 Apex Publications

Smashwords Edition

COPYRIGHTS & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Namasté Prime Copyright 2011 by Grá Linnaea

Frank Copyright 2011 by Betsy Phillips

The Improbable, Inevitable Domestication of the Great Old Ones: H. P. Lovecraft's Iconic Influence on 21st-Century Fantastic Literature and Culture Copyright 2011 by John H. Stevens

And Cut Down a Moment Later Copyright 2011 by Erik Amundsen

Gemphalon Copyright 2002 by Elizabeth Engstrom (Imagination Fully Dilated, Vol. II (IFD Publishing, 2002))

Publisher—Jason Sizemore

Fiction Editor—Catherynne M. Valente

Senior Editor—Gill Ainsworth

Submission Editors—Zakarya Anwar, Ferrett Steinmetz, Mari Adkins, George Galuschak, Deanna Knippling, Sarah Olson, Lillian Cohen-Moore, Katherine Khorey, Olga Zelanova, Patrick Tomlinson

Cover designed by Justin Stewart

ISSN: 2157-1406

Apex Publications

PO Box 24323

Lexington, KY 40524

Please visit us at http://www.apex-magazine.com

To subscribe visit http://www.apexbookcompany.com/collections/apex-magazine/products/apex-magazine-subscription

Each new issue of Apex Magazine is released the first Tuesday of the month. Single issues are available for $2.99. Subscriptions are for twelve months via direct order, Weightless Books, or through the Amazon Kindle store and are sold for $19.95.

Artist Bio

This month's cover art is by Carly B. Sorge.

Carly currently lives in her hometown Fort Wayne, Indiana, with her boyfriend Chris, who created the robot seen on the cover. She recently graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design and works as a graphic designer and freelance illustrator. While she specializes in digital painting, she dabbles in all kinds of media, from comics to printmaking to sculpting to leatherworking. When not working she tends to her small jungle of plants and animals that live in her apartment.

Visit Carly's website at http://www.cbsorge.com .

Table of Contents

--Fiction--

Namaste Prime

Grá Linnaea

Frank

Betsy Phillips

Gemphalon

Elizabeth Engstrom

--Poetry--

And Cut Down a Moment Later

Erik Amundsen

--Nonfiction--

The Improbable, Inevitable Domestication of the Great Old Ones: H. P. Lovecraft's Iconic Influence on 21st-Century Fantastic Literature and Culture

John H. Stevens

Interview with Grá Linnaea, author of Namaste Prime

Stephanie Jacob

Interview with Betsy Phillips, author of Frank

Stephanie Jacob

Namasté Prime

By Grá Linnaea

New Ishvara, as a designated party city, maintained its celebrated image by making the streets dance 24/7. Tether slid easily through constricted masses of dancers glutting Nysta Street, his hands floating belt-high to brush knuckles lightly on the people he passed. He wished he had somewhere to go, someone to see. Still, freshly home from offworld business, he basked in the comfort of bone-vibrating music.

The music, micro-bursts of bomb-bass gabber, slipped like daggers through his iso-shield, bombarded out of ever-present wall speakers. Sheets of nano-amplifiers made every building a subwoofer, every window a tweeter.

The pummeling noise slowly helped him unwind. Other planets were disturbingly subdued compared to the crazy visual assault of Ishvara. His polarized eye lenses adjusted constantly against thousandfold neon colors and epileptic flashes from sidewalk billboards and floating holograms. Every light synchronized into a billion suns going nova, winking out, in, out, in, to the four-four drumbeat of bomb-bass gabber apocalypse.

He didn't have any friends to look up, but one hour off ship he already had a job: find and apprehend--specified alive--one Dirvis Ejiri.

Ejiri was a reincarnation manager at the cognitive backup center. The job was beneath Tether's considerable talents, but someone wanted Ejiri found and would pay good lucre for it. Back in the day he would have shopped all his jobs through the community, but he had driven many of his old friends out of the business. He told himself it didn't matter.

He shopped thirty percent of his wet-ware to the scan, leaving enough attention open to, well, drift around in hot human funk and be bored.

He loosened his face into a lazy mask of feigned drugger slack, contrary to the hyper-amphetamine mix stewing in him. He fingered sub-dermal keys on the sides of his thumbs to control micro doses of cyclo-xylamines and altered phenethylamine into his brain stem. Each tap an acrobatic adjustment, maintaining the thin and precarious balance of quantities of psychoactives, amphetamines and psychedelics prodding and burning his brain.

Unlike posers with their blood-surfing nano drug-systems, Tether drug-surfed manually. He took absent pride in squeezing an extra twenty micro-grams, constantly poised on the edge of overdose.

Even though he was the go-to person for physical presence infiltration, these days it was still hard to garner enough lucre to maintain his high-ticket tech and drug systems.

His ankle-length coat twitched fitfully like a cat tail, its woven AI flagging Tether's attention to something amiss. He thought-triggered a weapons sweep when cool mist blurred his vision. His retinas burned and his heads-up display flashed as his defense system failed. The airborne nano-virus caused his defense bots to congeal over his body in a fetid silver lather. Before his fingers even brushed his burner's holster, he had three brain scramblers pressed against his skull.

The guns' owners, two genblurs and a testo-male, formed a tight orbit, almost muting the constant dance assault around them. One of the genblurs pocketed a palm gun, probably what had delivered the virus that had fried Tether's defense system. Pedestrians flowed past the group like water around a stone.

A periphery systems check told him his secondary defenses were also dampened by a suppressant. Some new sys-virus. His wetware was a mess. The def-shield would cost him thousands to repair. At least his drug system still worked. He thumbed calming THC derivative into his bloodstream.

The right-side genblur leaned close to Tether's ear, fizzing past the iso-shield. He/She whispered silkily through pouting lips, No trouble or we'll wet you right here. His/Her breath hot on Tether's ear. Billy-Billy wants to see you.

Shit.

Tether'd done a share of work for BB, most of it after ditching the community, but tried to keep his face-to-face time to minimum. Billy-Billy was intense, especially now that he'd found God.

Rumor had it that he had a new thing about purity and cleanliness, following the one path of divine righteousness. It didn't sound like any of the peace and love ideals had gotten through, though.

Tether scraped his incisors against his lower teeth, blew out a hot breath and thumbed Ecstasy into his system. Empathogen fought with testosterone, unwinding his muscles.

Herded through the crowd, he slushed dead nano slime off his jacket, movements slow and deliberate so as not to spook his captors.

Too much downer, he felt slack and dopey. Lacking a meaningful escape strategy, he continued the scan and match for Ejiri, flicking jittery eyes to each face he passed. He bumped his staticy AI to put seventy percent resources onto monitoring his peripheral vision. It was hard enough for him to identify anyone when one-in-five pedestrians ran flashing adverts across their faces. He cleared the buffer of nearly constant low-level false positives.

Ejiri had disappeared a fortnight ago; Tether's guess was he’d flipped from the utter tedium of his managerial job. The reincarnation process was intensely complex, but entirely managed by AIs. He was sure all Ejiri managed was machines and his own boredom. Yet, the stat-sheet had only been posted an hour ago and six hundred had already signed on for the search.

The genblur on his left said, You was supposed to be hot shit.

Hard to tell genblurs apart. It was the one with the lips. Jet lag, Tether said.

The testo-male prodded Tether in the ribs. Shut it.

Tether ventured a smirk. It's shut.

The genblur smiled. Name's Pat. Of course.

The guards marched him to the black-tech district. The testo-male ducked Tether's head under the arm of a neon goddess-statue. The three guards followed and