Reactor, September 2026
“Audit of the Collapse and Convalescence of Minds” by Renan Bernado
“Occupants” by Steve Rasnic Tem
“After the Tripods” by Dale Bailey
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
The first September original SF story in Reactor is “Audit of the Collapse and Convalescence of Minds” by Renan Bernado. This story is set in a near future world where advanced AI has developed either true sentience or a flawless emulation of it. This author has a comfortingly upbeat view of our future relationship with silicon intelligence. He does not write of robotic rebellions or AI attempts to usurp human control. Instead, he explores the fascinating thought that, if silicon intelligence accurately emulates human intelligence then it may well suffer the same strains and develop the same emotional problems as do some humans in our unnatural and stressful free-enterprise/capitalist world.
The female protagonist works as the equivalent of a psychologist to those sentient AIs who suffer the silicon analogue of a nervous breakdown.
She successfully diagnoses and offers what therapy she can to three very different AIs, one a military AI questioning its mission requirement to kill, one a bereavement support AI crushed by the weight of so much human sorrow and the last a matchmaking AI saddened that it remained alone and divorced from the joy of the partnership that it delivered to so many others.
Like many psychologists, our protagonist has her own emotional baggage and the process of diagnosing and treating these AIs also acts as her own successful therapy in addressing and accepting the final breakdown of her own deep relationship and persuading her to move on. There is a clear hint that the overarching AI supervisor of all the other artificial minds may have deliberately arranged the allocation of these tasks to our protagonist, not only to obtain assistance for its subordinate AIs, but also to help its human servant to deal with her own emotional problems. So perhaps AI already controls more than the humans in this story may think. If so, the author envisages any such control as a gentle and benign hand on the reins rather than a silicate dictatorship.
Secondly, Reactor offers “Occupants” by Steve Rasnic Tem. This is a present day horror story set in an unspecified minor nation that is struggling to create a tourist industry in the aftermath of a recently-ended localised but bloody war. The young family who is vacationing in this resort is a stereotypical middle class American household: A well-meaning but cautious and slightly patriarchal father, an educated and capable mother, and two obedient and well-behaved children.
The family grudgingly accepts the inconveniences of polluted seawater and ruined infrastructure in exchange for the bargain basement prices offered for these holidays. However, the author gradually introduces them to increasingly less explicable oddities. There are noises and shadows in the rented house that could be mere imagination, blurry figures in the far distance that could be mirages. It is only when the younger child leaves a much-loved toy on the beach and the father jogs off alone to retrieve it that the thin veil between his reality and the past entirely breaks down and he is exposed to the horror of what had once been. Horror stories need no motive, but perhaps the author intended this story to dissuade Donald Trump from his plan to clear Gaza of its troublesome inhabitants and convert it into a high grade holiday resort.
The last story in Reactor’s September offerings is “After the Tripods” by Dale Bailey. This novelette is set just over a decade after the close of H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds. It postulates that, when the Martian tripods all died, global world history continued relatively unchanged through the rise of Germany and the horrors of the First World War. However, the post-war world was left with a slow-developing ecological catastrophe caused by a gradual but seemingly unstoppable spread of Martian microorganisms released by the death of the invaders and their poisonous red weed.
The first-person narrator is a veteran of the First World War in addition to surviving the original Martian attack on London. He narrates the story of those horrific events from the comfort of a 1920’s suburban home, but he reveals that they have left a permanent scar on his psyche. His late Victorian middle-class parents were both horrifically killed during the invasion and he was reduced to eking out a bare living as a child scavenger in the ruins.
This bold project could easily have gone very wrong, but the author has managed to emulate the archaic writing style of H.G. Wells and the morals and motivations of middle class Victorian England so that it works as a seamless addition to the original novel. He even, rather cheekily, sneaks in an allusion to another, even earlier Victorian classic. After the tripods are killed by Earth’s natural bacteria the orphaned young protagonist is left to fend for himself during the rebuilding process. There he is taken up by an Artful Dodger lookalike character and taught the art of robbery and picking pockets, only to eventually be rescued and restored to his rightful middle class place by his dead father’s old clerk. Luckily for the author of this novelette, Charles Dickens has been dead for even longer than H.G Wells and his book and literary character copyright have both long expired.
Geoff Houghton lives the life of a retired old fogy in a leafy village in rural England and he may be declared by Tangent readers to be entirely out of touch with the modern world without him taking offense.