Mysterion, May 2026

“From the Light” by Larry Ferrill

Reviewed by David Wesley Hill

I rather enjoyed “From the Light” by Larry Ferrill, the May offering from Mysterion, and I will recommend the story—although I wouldn’t consider it science fiction. The story takes us to a near future dystopia created by AI, where the country appears even more divided between the haves and the have-nots than it is today. The protagonist, Haden, through a combination of personal misfortune and the loss of his livelihood—he was a programmer who was put out of work by, you guessed it, AI—and is now living on the streets among the homeless, the “shadow people”—when he becomes friends with another unfortunate, Cyrus, and together they rescue a broken doll-like STAASI—a “Synthesized Test Animal with Artificial Synaptic Intelligence” named Stacy. The background stories of all three characters are heart-breaking, and up until this point the tale is a rigorous extrapolation of a potential future. Then Haden notices that the hat Cyrus uses to beg for alms, which he gives away to other Shadow People, never empties, and we learn the point of the story, which is that our higher power can touch even the humblest individual, even a broken STAASI … or a broken man. Sentimental in a good way, I can recommend the story as a good read with the caveat that it’s really not SF … although if you read Mysterion regularly, you already knew that.