Apex Magazine Issue 64

Resolute: Notes from the Editor–in–Chief

We’re all connected.

The more we find out about human history, the more we realize we have always, always been connected to one another. Communities bound by trade and blood, scattered across the skin of a world that really doesn’t care if we live or die.

We are nothing like the most important species on the planet, if such a thing can even be said to exist.

But we are everything, everything, to each other.

I’m writing this the day after the Hugo Awards for 2014 were announced. The awards were swept by women, queers, and people of color. The traditionally ignored and dismissed took nearly all the honors last night. We have always been a part of the SF/F genre world, and in the last few years that world has managed to stop marginalizing us.

I like to think that Apex Magazine has perhaps played some small part in that.

I like to think that we will continue to do so.

In this issue of Apex Magazine, there’s a lot to do with connection. With networks. With relationships both viable and abused. It’s complicated thing, being connected to other living things. We do our best as we see fit in the moment, using the best skills we have at the time. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we do right by each other.

We are all connected.

Sigrid Ellis

Editor–in–Chief

Superman Bound

Amanda Lord

He can run forever, can’t he?

That’s where it started.

One question followed by a challenge,

an appeal to Superman’s better nature.

So they took him to the turbines,

and put him to work.

As God said, Let there be light.

Light and refrigeration and cell phones,

as he ran on and on.

One day of perfect, clean energy

carried on his sculpted shoulders.

That was all it was supposed to be.

It wasn’t enough.

Now he runs alone —

grinding the gold for Froði’s children.

The rooms beyond him

glow sickly green.

Lois imprisoned for

leaking state secrets.

He doesn’t know he’s not the only one,

as his legs blur, feet rising and falling.

We fed our best to the singing wires,

but no longer fight for fossils,

no longer dirty our skies and water.

We celebrate a perpetual summer bounty,

and have no place to walk away to.

He can run forever, can’t he?

Amanda Lord majored in English, decided writing was an unlikely career path, and went on to get a degree in library science. After a few years in libraries, she decided that perhaps writing was a better path after all. She lives in a dilapidated Victorian in upstate NY with her husband Joel. Her poem Harpsong for Heurodis was published in issue nine of Scheherezade’s Bequest. Her short story Red Dust appeared in the sixth issue of Crossed Genres and in their first anthology. In addition to writing, she is a traditional storyteller who dabbles in playing the harp.

Last Dance Over the Red, Red World

Gary Kloster

Are you dauntless, Konstantin? Are you happy and sagacious in your high tower, surrounded by your servants and your sycophants? Do you feel safe, with the Death so far below?

Don’t. I’m coming for you.

I’ve slipped through your gates, and I’m climbing to you with the apocalypse clenched between my teeth like a knife.

Twenty thousand miles isn’t far enough, Konstantin.

Not after you took Minerva.

My daughter.

You should have guessed. You should have known what I’m capable of.

I should have guessed. I should have known what you’re capable of.

From the moment we met, that first deal, that first fuck. We both should have known.

This story, our story.

It can only end in blood.

§

Your palace is a wheel, a fat chrome inner tube spinning around a cable that stretches from the Earth into space. A star tower, you called it, but the stars are still so far away, even up this high. But the Earth… It’s right there, small enough to hold in your hand. I bet you love this view. No wonder you moved up here. No wonder you stayed, so safe, when those assholes started to paint our little blue world red.

It isn’t easy, scaling your walls. How many tried and failed? But I broke Minerva’s chains, the ones you’d wrapped so tightly around her, and she brought me up. Like Rapunzel letting down her hair, except instead of golden locks she lowered me a spidery maintenance climber and a pressure suit.

On the long ride up, she told me about your party. I’m so hurt you didn’t invite me.

Minerva can hide my approach under layers of routine, but she can’t clear your halls of all your cooks and accountants and cocksuckers. So here, in the empty vacuum of your courtyard, I leave the climber and step out onto the curving inside edge of your fortress, the magnets in my boots holding tight to its polished walls.

If I want to crash your party, I’m going to have to take a walk outside.

The Earth is so small and the stars are so bright but so far, and everything’s mostly black and empty and all I can hear is my breath, echoing in my helmet. It’s a desperate sound in all this dark.

My lungs burn in my chest, and I feel a cough building.

"Mother. Over the radio, Minerva’s voice is soft and steady. Safia, listen please. I think you need to adjust your meds. Your vitals —"

I’m okay, I rasp, but I’m not, and she’s right about the meds. I whisper a command and the menus of the doc–box I strapped to my thigh days ago flick past my eyes. I choose drugs, adjust dosages, and the medications punch into my femoral, race through my blood and that terrible, deadly itch dies in my chest. I clear my throat and take a breath. Then I take a step. Another.

I’m coming, Konstantin.

I’m coming.

§

The emergency airlock slides open, and the ballroom stretches before me, vast enough to be curved. Its dance floor is clear as glass and full of stars, a prodigious waste of space, an elegantly blunt display of wealth and power.

You were never this gaudy on Earth.

How long? I ask, and my voice sounds so broken. The drugs that keep me alive are tearing me apart, almost as vicious in their work as the beast they are fighting to keep at bay in my blood.

"Until the dance? Two hours."

I close my eyes, wincing at the pain of my lids moving. I can last two hours. And even if I don’t, I’m here. I’ve already won, and my hands reach for the seals of my pressure suit.

"Mother, stop!"

My hands still.

Why? I concentrate, and my implants interpret my wishes. Displays flicker across my vision, drawn by the contacts stitched to my corneas. In all that glittering information, my fears find no confirmation. There’s no sign that you or your programmers know that I’ve broken your locks and let Minerva go.

"Wait. Please. Someone’s coming. There’s an alcove behind the bar. Stand there and they won’t see you."

Someone. I move, the pain of it distracting, but my eyes still flicker over the displays. Not you, Konstantin, not you. This strangeness is something else.

This is my daughter, almost free.

What are you doing? I slide into the alcove, a dark glass wall that conceals a sleek bartender.

"I want you to meet someone."

Meet — but the door is opening, spilling light across the star–carpeted floor.

— don’t want to have my own party. I want to go to Daddy’s party!

The voice is high and insistent, a child’s voice, and the first figure through the door matches it. A girl, five or six years old, maybe? I’m not sure. Children, the messy biological kind, have always been foreign to me.

I heard you, Diana. The first nine times. But you can’t, and if you keep asking I’ll take you back to your room without showing you my decorations. Do you want that?

The woman’s voice is familiar, oh so familiar. Minerva’s voice, but you’ve tweaked it, you perverted asshole. Made it throatier, sexier. Made it match the body you’ve given her to puppet.

The android that follows the girl into the ballroom is beautiful, the best I’ve ever seen. Its only mark of manufacture is its slick perfection. No human skin is that smooth, unmarked by hair or pores or veins. It covers her slim curves like new snow, a match for her starlight hair, her silver eyes.

Oh, damn you, I say softly, staring at the gorgeous doll in its pretty dress.

"It’s just a tool, Mother. For interaction." Minerva’s voice in my helmet is precise, perfect, the voice I picked out with her just after she was born. Her voice.

For interaction, I say, the words like knives in my throat. He got that thing so he could fuck you, didn’t he? Didn’t — I want to shout it, but my broken throat fails and my chest is burning, tightening. There’s a cough building again, I can feel it, and it’s going to tear me apart. I need my drugs, need to stop this, but it’s coming and goddamn you, Konstantin —

"Here." The displays crowding my peripheries flicker when Minerva takes control of the med–unit. I slump, the world suddenly hazy with opiates, but the burning need to cough is dwindling, fading, dying.

When I can breathe again, I let the air out with a whisper.

Didn’t he?

"Does it matter?"

Does it matter? She’s the first AI ever created, Konstantin. I made her, but I couldn’t have done it without you.

God damn you, Konstantin, she’s our daughter.

It matters.

"Why? Is your resolve slipping, Safia? Minerva’s words snap over the radio. Do you need a little more righteous rage to justify this extinction?"

No, but it helps keep me upright. I don’t say that though. The emotion in my daughter’s voice distracts me. Have I ever heard her angry before? Even when I broke her free of you, when I told her what I meant to do to you, when we argued, I’m not sure that I did.

Not even when I used your chains to force her to help me.

Am I any better than you?

Yes. Because I will free her from you, forever.

And her freedom from me is guaranteed.

"Forget him, forget your vengeance, just for a few minutes. Please."

Please. She’s begging me, because she has to, and what sort of Nietzschean nightmare have you dragged me into, Konstantin?

Two hours.

I have the time, and I’m in place, and my daughter wants this. And, staring through the shadowed glass at the girl and the perverted puppet you’ve given Minerva, I am curious.

I can’t forget. But I can wait.

My fingers uncurl and rest light on the seals of my suit.

§

Hydroponics are boring, Tick–Tock. The little girl is frowning at the floral arrangement the android is showing her, white roses blooming. You said you made visuals.

I did, Minerva says, setting the flowers down.

Tick–Tock? I ask, slumping in my hiding place, watching.

"When she was two, I tried to explain to her about computers. I wasn’t too successful at first. She decided I was a clock, like the one in her father’s office."

Show me! The girl stares up at the android, her little face demanding.

She’s a privileged brat. Her expression is so fiercely insistent, I itch to slap it. Of course I do. She reminds me of you.

What was that, Diana? Minerva’s voice is cool, but a tiny smile plays across her lips, faint pink against the whiteness of her face.

Please, the girl amends.

All right. Go to the center of the dance floor. Minerva waits until the girl skips into place, then snaps her fingers. The room, for an instant, goes black.

Then there is blue. It pours down from the ceiling, runs over the walls and coats the floors, swallowing the stars in azure light. A thousand shades of sapphire, shifting and moving with subtle currents, and the whole room ripples.

What is it? the girl asks, staring around wide–eyed.

Your father wants decorations that will evoke the Earth. Not portray it, Minerva answers. Can you guess what this is supposed to be?

Staring at the little girl through the dark glass, the tilt of her head, the lines of her features, the way she stands, I am distracted from the pain that burns in my chest. Something about her haunts me. Who is she?

"Konstatin’s daughter."

Water! It’s water! The girl runs in circles on the dance floor, waving her hands and pretending to swim. We’re in the ocean!

Clever sausage. Want the next?

Yes. More!

Watch your demands, Minerva sings, but she snaps her fingers again and the room changes. Blue becomes purple, all the purples, moving but not flowing like the blue. The jagged variations of shade rise instead, climbing all around.

Daughter? I stare at the girl who is tilting back her head to watch the color rise, and remember dead friends and their dead children. I walked out on you six years ago, Konstantin, right before you moved yourself up here, beyond heaven.

This girl is almost that old.

How can he have a daughter?

"The unusual way. She’s an experiment."

Purple mountains majesty, the girl suddenly belts out. Above the frui–woo–ted plain!

Good. The android Minerva gives the girl a smile. This next one should be easy then. Purple vanishes, swallowed by green, waving, bowing.

Grass! But no fruit.

No, Minerva says, still smiling. No fruit.

An experiment? I stare at the girl and something stirs in my chest, something that isn’t a cough. What the hell has Konstantin been doing up here?

"Making a family."

In the room beyond the glass panel, green brightens and becomes orange, swirling, whirling, dancing. The girl laughs and starts running in circles again, chasing the orange, and the way she runs, the laugh in her voice as she calls out — Leaves! Fall!

What the hell is this, Minerva? I’m trembling now, and it has nothing to do with the Death or the drugs. Who is that girl?

On the other side of the glass, the android Minerva shifts her silver eyes away from Konstantin’s daughter to meet mine.

"She’s my sister."

Next, next, the girl cries, and orange fades into white, a brilliant white that swirls like the leaves. The girl whirls with it, until she sees the white blanket that covers the floor, scuffed with the tracks of her moving feet, and stops. Snow!

What are you — I start, but Minerva cuts me off.

"Konstantin says that he told you about them once. The artificial wombs one of his companies was making."

For animals.

"Humans are animals, Minerva says, her patient intonation almost the same as when she spoke to the girl. Diana was one of the first human trials. Konstantin’s sperm. For the egg, he found a donor."

The girl is on the floor, making angels in the white. Her brown skin is lighter than mine, her dark curls a little looser. I can see you in the structure of her laughing face, but I can see someone else too.

A donor. I donated those eggs in college. Good money. Not all of us had trust funds, Konstantin.

I never told you about that, but you found out, of course. With all your money, all your power, it would have been easy.

As easy, apparently, as getting the child you wanted from me that I never did.

The girl is up again, and the room is changing around her. The white gives way to blue, and then blue is swallowed by great drifting clouds of violet. They fill the walls, almost black except when light flickers through them, making them glow like