Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 190

By Neil Clarke, Eliane Boey, Ahmed Asi and 4 more

Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our July 2022 issue (#190) contains:

• Original fiction by Eliane Boey ("The Forgotten"), Ahmed Asi ("To Be"), David Goodman ("Carapace"), Suzanne Palmer ("The Sadness Box"),  Xiu Xinyu ("The Strange Girl"), and Isabel J. Kim ("Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist").
• Non-fiction includes an article by E.E. King, interviews with Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Eileen Gunn, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642361209

Neil Clarke

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the multi-award-winning editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and over a dozen anthologies. A eleven-time finalist and the 2022/2023 winner of the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form, he is also the three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director. In 2019, Clarke received the SFWA Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons

Book preview

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 190

Table of Contents

The Forgotten

by Eliane Boey

To Be

by Ahmed Asi

Carapace

by David Goodman

The Sadness Box

by Suzanne Palmer

The Strange Girl

by Xiu Xinyu

Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist

by Isabel J. Kim

Reef Renewal Foundation Bonaire: Hope on a Small Island

by E.E. King

Mushrooms Sprout From Dead Things: A Conversation with Silvia Moreno-Garcia

by Arley Sorg

Dirty Words: A Conversation with Eileen Gunn

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: I’m Still Here

by Neil Clarke

Red Sand Planet Sightseeing

Art by Henrik Lundblad

*

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2022

www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Forgotten

Eliane Boey

It was the cockroach from the crack in the bathroom wall, tapping a defiant dance on my haptic suit, that made me pull up Sociable, to post a comment to my Constituency Administrator. I’d killed the damned thing yesterday, watched it kick its hairy legs in the air. Yet somehow, life asserts itself, and accepts all the conditions. As I shook it off my suit, I saw the number under the Admin’s name. Five million. That’s the number of users who support her every decision and utterance. I expanded the list and stopped at a name I knew, Axl Zhuang. By the looks of it, Zhuang wasn’t a passive loyalist. In the last month alone, he’d upvoted three of her new rules, joined a group, and posted positive comments. Only, Zhuang died in the outbreak ten years ago, when I was low enough on the Administration hierarchy to volunteer for processing at a triage center.

A single Admin, of the one hundred and twenty who govern thirteen million citizen-users each packed like roaches into the cracks of a territory half the size of old Hong Kong, cannot possibly have five million loyalists. For one, the dead can’t vote, not even in Lion City.

The yawning jaw of the tunnel ends in a sheer cliff over the pit of fire. In Avici, the air is so hot it expands in your throat and scalds your lungs. Blink, and your eyes feel raw. My face is set in a thin scowl, which helps my purpose, but really comes from economy of movement, when every exertion is like wading in iron slurry. My subject keeps his head down and his lips shut, in Sisyphean acceptance. This time, I’ll break him.

You call it loyalty, but you’re the one who’s locked out, while your boss is in Lion City, pushing a dangerous amount of brainpower on the streets.

A wave of heat like a manic dragon nearly pushes me off the cliff and into the blazing crevasse. Beside me, the daemon with long black hair, shirtless in his blue skin and loin cloth, waits slack-faced with folded arms. You have to admire Wei’s sick commitment to accuracy.

The subject groans in the heat. Not on the streets. It’s just one whale buying it all.

I hold the chip to his face. Who’s farming and selling the firmware?

I could drop the sensitivity on my suit and feel a warm breeze or nothing at all. But a while ago, I decided I wanted skin in. I don’t want to lose the parts of myself that can still feel.

Choke on your joystick, Maggie. He gives me the finger.

I grip my knees and sigh behind clenched teeth. Truth is, I ran out of things to say ten cycles ago. And I regret telling this runner my name, even if it isn’t what they call me outside Lion City. I’m trying to cook up something new and more intense, like how the only things you can know to be real are the lies you tell, when the blue light flashes top-right of my vision. A discreet stream of text appears below it. Then, I feel a nudge through my suit. Polite, but none too subtle. Something has to be up for Choy to use the bat signal. I hate being nudged when I’m working. I stand back and motion to the daemon, and it steps forward.

The subject spits. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

Was I really so bored the last time I was here, I started talking film and books, to this goon?

In spite of myself, I smile. At least I know what I belong to.

I don’t want to hear his reply. When the daemon throws him into the infernal pit, he’ll land on a round platform, a few feet above the fire. The platform is small, and with each new addition, some will fall into the inferno. On the platform, you’re close enough to feel the water in your body vaporize, and far enough to do whatever you can not to fall in. It doesn’t matter that you’ve fallen in, been fished out, and fallen in, over and over again.

Nobody wants to die, even if it isn’t real. I tap my optical and log out of the module.

Hot rock softened into plush wall-to-wall navy-blue carpeting. It’s 2040, but the Administration maintains their virtual meeting rooms in exact replica of their offices in the Outside, when they existed, at least ten years ago. Wei sits behind her empty black steel desk. When my avatar, Maggie, materialized behind the door, the skin around Wei’s eyes tightened, prepared for conflict. I strode up to her.

You’re not getting your updates any sooner, porting me out in the middle of a cycle.

Wei bridged her fingers. It isn’t bootleg firmware that keeps me up at night.

Even a luddite like me who only understands spoken languages knows that much disposable brainpower available to the highest bidder on the black-market spells trouble. I let her enjoy the sound of her voice as I slid a finger on the top of the black leather seat across from her. Then I held its corner and spun it.

Undercover adds an air of old-world mystery to the dirty work that I do. The upside is that Maggie doesn’t resemble me. She looks like Maggie Q in the Nikita years, tanned in the Southeast Asian sun. Wei, however, as an active Monitor, equivalent in access to a Junior Administrator, has to maintain an avatar of the same name and physical appearance as her real self. With the luxury of perfectly waved silver hair and airbrushing around the sides of her mouth. She looks something like Carina Lau and smiles even less.

We are women on the wrong side of fifty, and that’s being delicate. Our peers have all tapped out, either retired while it still made sense or pushed out for things they said or didn’t. Wei is still here because she built Avici and handling me is now her only connection to it. I am still here because fetching for Wei is my only connection to what I really am.

Wei spoke. Someone is sniffing around the Administration’s loyalist count. They’re running random tests on user profiles, for verification.

Five years ago, the Administration dropped the term follower in favor of loyalist, to denote a citizen-user’s open and absolute endorsement of its Administrators, their acts, and omissions, in return for free housing in the Outside, and unlimited high-speed access to Lion City. Along with free upgrades to the latest immersion tech. In theory, it’s like a rolling subscription to the biggest predictive entertainment pack you can imagine. In practice, you can’t opt out. Some try to make their own way, paying for housing and digital access in hourly wages from the last remaining in-person service jobs, but they’re a shrinking minority.

I’ll run search history scans, and analyze check-ins of the usual suspects, I said.

"I don’t give a damn about locking out runners. I want to know why they’re doing it. Dissidents have protested, sabotaged the network, and tried to erase themselves. But they never tried to look under our hood before. Something’s different, Xi. The Renewal is next month, and we don’t need any surprises."

Her coolness as she said my name, a reminder of our lives in the Outside, made my skin peel off my bones. Something had to be different, when the open tab in everyone’s minds for months suddenly wasn’t a problem anymore. Only, I wasn’t certain we’re looking at the same problem. The Renewal cycle replaces elections of old. Loyalists’ votes are automatically cast for them each cycle, renewing the operating license of their zone Administrator. A large part of Wei’s Security directive is to safeguard this process. When I was in Ethics, my directive would’ve required me to dig deep into the questions that were making Wei squirm. Where this all falls apart is, that I now report to Wei.

The chair was still spinning when I logged out of her office.

When overcrowding and scarcity of resources in the face of cyclical epidemic waves became too much, even for a single-state territory, the Administration demanded solutions to rising crime rates. They turned to Wei, who could build worlds you hadn’t even dreamed of.

Avici is the name of the eighteenth level of Buddhist Hell, where there is no redemption or reincarnation. Wei omitted what religious symbolism she could in its creation, so it’s really a hot, overcrowded pit you can’t hit restart and log out of. Not too different in some ways from the Outside. She put her good years into Avici, and when it was done, the Administration escalated her three access levels to Monitor, far from the back end of Lion City.

Virtual time is zero-cost. In nearly all cases, Avici is more like a holding cell than an actual prison. Most people crack sooner rather than later and spill the beans or accept restrictions or monitored access, just to log back in. With rapid urban degeneration, those who can afford to have long moved away, to less dense and richer territories, abandoning this one to the poor. Lion City offered shelter and dulled their senses with nostalgia. Over the years, rants and manifestos have appeared in threads on fringe group forums, calling for its defunding—even permanent unplugging—and for the budget to be channeled into revitalizing the real territory to make it livable again. But the truth is, Lion City is the last place that most can still live decently, even if they need a haptic suit to experience it. That and copying and pasting code for a new estate with leisure grounds costs next to nothing.

Avici, and Lion City for what it’s worth, are Wei’s pride and obsession, yet lately I get the feeling that at this level, it’s just a distraction. Moving background draped over a secret door. What’s behind the door? A bonus stage, or the real, final boss?

The sky is a glow of apricot, which cools to a near-neon pink and loses its way in the wisps of white clouds, before touching the first stars of an indigo sky. It’s always dusk in Lion City, and you can see slices of the sky between the humble low-rise buildings, at the perfect changing of the guard between day and night. The air is cooled to a mild twenty-five degrees Celsius, which hasn’t naturally returned to this hemisphere in years. The public housing estate I’m in was demolished in 2005, when Wei and I were fresh Administration trainees. I’ve been here, and I remember barbecued stingray and an oyster omelet with my parents, at the tables in the open, by the hawker center. In the Outside, the plot that supported the hawker center alone is now a work-life complex with cells housing twenty thousand users.

The amount of detail in the rendering of the estate is astounding. As a Monitor, I have the latest haptic suit, gloves, mask, and opticals that aren’t readily available to citizen-users. But even a user with a three-year-old kit would be able to feel the grains of sand from the playground between their fingers and see the legs on the red ants marching in a line up a tree. The sounds are accurate too. The hiss of the air brakes in the red and white buses, and the chime of the primary school bell. Groups of avatars sit at the hawker center, with sugarcane juice, to watch children play on the climbing frame. Virtual occupation limits are in place, to maintain the true feel of a small public estate of the noughties. The Administration has taken great care to ensure that experiencing the estate, and others like it in Lion City, is as good as living in it in the Outside, or better.

Today, I’m not here to sightsee. Something tells me the firmware racket, which does brisk business farming and peddling contraband plug and play AI code on the black market, has something to do with the non-user-controlled loyalist. So, I’m looking up Axl Zhuang at his registered Lion City address. It’s possible I was mistaken, and either he didn’t die in the plague ward, or I recalled the wrong name. I want to be mistaken.

Inside, the flat looks like how I might have remembered my Popo’s home, if she hadn’t died when I was nine. The front gate was unlocked, so I let myself in. This historic three-bedroom flat would house four families or core units today. There are things in the flat that I intuitively know to belong, even if I have no memories of them. Like the wooden sideboard painted avocado green, with panels of textured glass. The beige hot water flask with five upturned glasses on an enamel dish painted with roses. The page-a-day horse racing calendar sponsored by Union Gas, in bold red lettering on wafer-thin paper, torn to 27th May 1984. It’s a little further back than the nostalgic sweet spot of the median user age, but it makes sense if it’s designed to invoke a late afternoon at your grandmother’s flat, minutes before dinner.

Except, there is no Popo calling you to dinner, nor sounds of cooking from behind the cloth curtains over the doorway to the kitchen. That’s unusual, given the needle-carved level of detail in the inanimate objects. The living room has the eerie absent presence of desertion. Where are the NPC grandchildren waiting to be fed? Where are the cooking smells? Eyes sweeping the room, my heart jumps when I notice the back of a spiky-haired man at a far corner of the room, in a swivel chair at a control screen near the window. He’s been sitting there all along, in silence. The screen he’s using is from years ago, the sort the elderly hang on to, claiming the lower resolution and image speed gives them fewer headaches.

Mr. Zhuang? I approach with caution. I’m from the Community Befrienders group about a new initiative. I hope you don’t mind I let myself in.

The avatar doesn’t not move or acknowledge my presence in any way. I’m near enough now, to see that his fingers are typing, so I know he is at least functional. I suddenly find myself wishing I brought more than balls with me. I place a hand on my hip and hope he’ll make his assumptions and not do anything stupid. Then, I grab his chair and spin it around.

Where his face should be is an unresponsive mass of gray pixels.

I graduated from the last philosophy cohort before the National University closed its arts department for good. Lucky for me, the newly restructured Administration was handing out jobs to warm bodies. Wei found her home in systems design, while I tried to stay busy at the charmingly hopeful department of Virtual Ethics and Algorithmic Transparency.

Things got murky when the Administration declared a war on virtual identity fraud. That was about the same time that artificial intelligence became fully regulated, with defined capability types and maximum intelligence in each band, pegged to a fixed weightage of current median human intelligence. Virtual identity misrepresentation becomes fraud when a user wrongfully gains from the appearance of their avatar, relative to their actual appearance and identity in the Outside. In effect, it’s legal to exist in Lion City with a unicorn’s or a fish’s head on your shoulders. But if you want to teach mathematics at virtual school, you can’t do it looking like a middle-aged male with a receding hairline, if you’re a young woman with green hair who’s a hairdresser in the Outside. Even if you knew the math. I’m keeping it simple, but if you can see at least five ways this is problematic, you’re on the right track.

An initial citizen-user feedback hotline had lukewarm success. Old-fashioned ratting on your neighbors requires knowing who they are. Yet with each year, fewer people lived active lives in the Outside, where their bodies sat in sanitized cells and were delivered the essentials of corporeal life. No one stayed logged out long enough to connect goings on in Lion City to real-life users. What the Administration needed was a Superuser, who would move between the promise and plenty of Lion City,