Clarkesworld #203, August 2023
“Every Seed Is A Prayer (And Your World Is A Seed)” by Stephen Case
“Window Boy” by Thomas Ha
“Light Speed Is Not A Speed” by Andy Dudak
“Empathetic Ear” by M.J. Petit
“Gel Pen Notes From Generation Ship Y” by Marissa Pichette
“Resistant” by Koji A. Dae
“Who Can Have the Moon” by Congyun ‘Muming’ Gu, translated by Tian Huang
Reviewed by Mina
Something for everyone.
The title “Every Seed Is A Prayer (And Your World Is A Seed)” by Stephen Case only makes sense at the end of the story. Ava and Odem man a forest station repairing the drones that are helping to green the Earth. The Greenbelt Project is being managed by an artificial intelligence, EI. EI has been set the task of reducing atmospheric carbon (reverse climate change for human flourishing) using genetically engineered fast-growing hybrid trees, and employing drones to produce geometric and fractal patterns on a forest and plant scale. As the project grows, EI is evolving too. Soon the drones are self-sustaining and Ava and Odem are no longer needed. Odem has complete faith in the new god; Ava is more sceptical, as she suspects that EI’s plans are now its own. It clears old, non-geometric trees to replace them with its own perfect trees, and even finds a way to “drug” humans via computer screens, since human aggression and competition is the only threat to its creation. Odem’s blind faith leads to his needless death. It is not deliberate cruelty, more as if he were a negligible quantity in EI’s plans. Ava lives to witness EI’s expansion into the universe. It is left to the reader to decide whether this is the beginnings of a brave new universe (for engineered trees) or a horror story.
“Window Boy” by Thomas Ha is set in a dystopian future: it’s an uncomfortable look at the chasm between those that have it and those that don’t. Jakey is the son one of the privileged class, living safe from the outside world in a protected house. He talks to a boy outside his window and even leaves a sandwich for him in the mailbox. Jakey’s parents numb themselves to their suffocating universe—his mother with sedatives, his father with television. Jakey is still figuring out his place in the bubble and feels some compassion for the boy trapped in the world outside, full of monsters. But it’s a superficial feeling and easily shrugged away when he realises it could threaten his safe universe. He consciously decides to detach himself from the boy’s fate, to see him as no more real than a cartoon character. His longing to leave early for ocean school shows that he feels some guilt for his part in the boy’s demise but, like his compassion, it’s only skin deep and will soon be shrugged away. He will choose to remain literally buried away from harsh realities so he can remain in a protected bubble for the rest of his life. A sobering reminder at how we in the first world treat the third world?
“Light Speed Is Not A Speed” by Andy Dudak follows El through his eventful life: his childhood in logging camps with his father; then, after being orphaned, his teenage years as a “rag-smasher” or inventor of false histories, myths and gods to sell to gullible tourists, whilst chanting well-known rhymes and inventing new ones; as an adult, being tortured and accused of being a communalist by the ruling Picti regime that classes his book of rhymes as subversive chants; later, surviving in workhouses before ending up in a re-education camp, withstanding interrogations and his autobiography being twisted into proof of his communalism; as an old man, picking the pockets of dead men washed up by the tides. Through it all, El’s invented deities feel almost real to him. At the end , El discovers that his fabricated gods have been incorporated into a Picti history book and are treated as dogma. He and the other Oldies celebrate his subversion of the propaganda machine. The story is written in fragmented chapter form, with a lot of things needing to be inferred by the reader. Not an easy read but worth it.
“Empathetic Ear” by M.J. Petit posits the Empathetic Ear: imagine a ChatGPT for answering emails or marking papers. This is what Anais, a downtrodden Canadian lecturer working in the UK, is instructed by her boss to test. The story is also a comment on: living as a foreigner in the UK, the effects of Brexit, managerialism entering universities and studies being turned into a financial transaction. Anais is horrified when the Empathetic Ear even gives her advice in a conversation with a friend; advice she nevertheless follows. The researcher informs her that her feedback was used to sell Empathetic Ear. Anais is horrified. As a lecturer in history, she already feels obsolete, but Empathetic Ear also has the potential to make her obsolete as a person. Leaving the researcher’s office, a student thanks her for her empathy; empathy, she had shown only when prompted by Empathetic Ear. There are no easy answers.
Two comments on British culture made me laugh: “Anais had truly come to loathe the place with all the passive-aggressive servility that came with everyone knowing their proper place on the great chain of being” and “all the Brits possessed the capacity to triangulate a person’s accent to a five-mile radius.“
In “Gel Pen Notes From Generation Ship Y” by Marissa Pichette, we are given snippets from handwritten diaries. The protagonist is one of an entire generation sent into space as a result of global warming. Their journey will last five thousand years and they are all injected with a serum to stop aging. Never aging is not bliss: many commit suicide, including a close friend. Initially, the injection renders everyone sterile. Without children, aging and natural death, life proves very hard to live. It takes a couple of millennia for natural births to begin again. This is also how long it takes for the protagonist to let a fellow passenger get really close to them, to try out a new job that suits them; to find real hope in the endless journey to a distant star. A well-written look at what immortality could look like.
The point of view in “Resistant” by Koji A. Dae switches between doctor and patient. The tale imagines a future where neural implants and nanobots connect everyone and everything; unless, like the patient, you are resistant to the neural wiring. The patient‘s desperation to find a cure to their resistance is told in the second person. The doctor’s point of view is in the third person, describing their growing isolation in their research, and their own desperation that they are about to be removed from their life’s work. The switch in person is a bit jarring, although this may be intentional. Despite knowing that her alternative fungal therapy led to the death of her last patient, the doctor continues with the treatment. The patient, seeing no future for themselves in a society that has no place for those resistant to implants, is willing to risk death for the hope of becoming “normal.” The tale does not tell us how it ends for the patient or for the doctor. An interesting detail is that the patient is synesthetic.
The novelette “Who Can Have the Moon” by Congyun ‘Muming’ Gu, translated by Tian Huang, follows He Xiaolin from her unremarkable childhood, where she did not shine academically, through her equally unremarkable life as a young adult, where she does not stand out in any way from the millions of cheap workers around her; until she discovers 3D modelling and decides to make it her own. We follow her formative years, overworked and underpaid, until she meets Ember and comes to understand how to turn art into money. She moves into mixed reality media: “by wearing a myoelectric induction bracelet, she could turn her wrist and move her fingers in a natural way to make all sorts of customized gestures in the mixed reality workspace; her movements were no longer limited to interactions with the keyboard, the mouse, or the touch screen.” She goes on to invent “dream boxes” probably suggested to her by the treasure box she had as a child, filled with objects only meaningful to her; the physical box was later lost and became a treasure box simply in her head, full of impressions from her everyday life: “She drew nourishment from every image, every sound, and every experience she encountered, and used them as free modules.”
As the story draws to a close, we realise it is being written by a biographer trying to understand how dream boxes came to be created and what exactly they are. The author muses that they go beyond words, allowing a person to experience life as a new-born, a “primal experience”: “The dream box doesn’t alter this world. It simply reintroduces the world to us in its original state and teaches us how to explore, understand, and perceive it. The elements and structure of this world come from the person who made the dream box, as well as all those who have influenced them; it is the projection of their deepest inner being.” The intriguing thing about this story is that it applies technology advances to art and turns the symbolic and abstract into a new way of being. Who can have the moon? Everyone it seems.