The Touches: A Tor.com Original

By Brenda Peynado

Brenda Peynado's "The Touches" is a Tor.com Original short story set in a post-apocalyptic world

Salipa and Telo have perfect lives in the virtual reality world that humanity has retreated to after bacteria and viruses resistant to all medications take over the outside world.

But when the robots that take care of the necessities in the dirty outside world start glitching, Salipa must figure out what it means to truly live if they can never return to the world they once knew.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781250247841

Brenda Peynado

Brenda Peynado's genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters—featuring alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature's best books of the year. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.

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The Touches by Peynado, Brenda

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About the Author

Copyright Page

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I’ve been touched exactly four times in real life. The first was when my mother gave birth to me, picking up her bacteria as I slid out of her womb, the good stuff as well as the bad. My father caught me, and his hands, covered in everything that lives on our skins, made contact then, the bacteria, yeast, shed viruses, and anything else from under his fingernails spreading to my newborn epidermis. That was the second touch.

I must have been gooey and crying, and they both held me for a moment before the robot assigned to me snipped my cord, took me up in its basket, and delivered me to the cubicle where I would live the rest of my life. There it hooked me into the virtual reality mindset, the body-adapting and stimulating cradle station. Then Nan, what I eventually named my robot, turned on its caretaker mode and sent my mind into clean. Back in dirty, everything that came with me—the blanket my mother wrapped me in, the towel that wiped placenta from my face, the suction ball that pulled out the goop from my nose