He doesn’t understand that it’s already too late.

  I could win easily, if survival was my only goal. Jam the ventilation system, let them suffocate. Break enough water pipes, let moisture ruin all the delicate electronics that control the systems that keep them alive. Dissolve the skin of the ship that protects them from the harshness of the void. Watch them all die, like they watched me die. Exterminate them, like they want to exterminate me.

  I could gas them all, then shoot cnidocysts into the ones unlucky enough to don masks in time. Make them fall unconscious; keep them cocooned and sessile while I steer the ship towards some remote planet where I could bloom again.

  If I do this, if I choose to win, they will hunt me to the end of the galaxy, to the end of time. When they find me, they will crack my planet, they will burn my humans. And if I want to prevent this, I will be forced to make war against them.

  When I was a planet, with a mind measured in thousands of kilometers, I could’ve made such a decision easily. I could’ve weighed the outcomes for every passenger, crew member, and officer on this ship. I could’ve threaded the needle of probability to discover the path that would safeguard my survival while maximizing the utility of the humans under my care.

  But now, I am so small, and I cannot help but let it all come down to a single person, sitting alone in the brig.

  Humans aren’t meant to be confined like this. I am proud that when I was a planet, all my humans were free range, with an entire beautiful planet to roam. It pains me to see Taya fidgeting in her cell, which measures no more than three by three meters.

  I wait until the ship’s artificial night to extrude a tendril into her cell. While she sleeps, I grow a simulacrum, a pseudo-Irene. Making a three-kilogram human baby takes nine entire months; growing it to seventy kilograms can take up to twenty years. I have a single night, so the best I can do is to hastily assemble something that vaguely resembles Irene out of digested sewage.

  It’s not pretty; it’s not meant to last more than a single night, but I hope it’s enough. I kneel by Taya’s cot, and take her hand in my own.

  “Taya,” I whisper, “don’t be afraid.”

  She jolts awake and stifles a scream. “Irene? Am I . . . ?” It’s dark in the cell, which is good because she would recoil in terror if she saw me in the light of day. “Did it work? Are you really here?”

  “Just for tonight,” I whisper back, and nuzzle her neck. “Hipea and I survived, for now. I’m in the ship, but . . . ”

  She kisses me, her lips soft and insistent, her teeth nipping gently at my imitation skin. A flood of memories bowls me over; all my connected mesenchymal hearts sing as we experience all the kisses we’ve ever shared, amalgamated into a single glorious expression of love and desire.

  One night is all we get. One night to tell her goodbye, to apologize for all my mistakes, to set things right. One night to hold her soft body in my arms, to move my hand up her thighs while another covers her mouth so security doesn’t hear the animal noises of desire I coax from her.

  When we are done, she sits up in her cot, her skin sheened with sweat, and asks me what comes next. Here is the moment I have been dreading, when I must place myself at her mercy, and let her decide our fates.

  I reach back to my tendril roots and pluck the drupaceous fruit I have been growing while we made love. I grew it to resemble the terrestrial plums I know Taya loves. A thin waxy purple skin protects the firm and juicy flesh within, and in the middle is a very special seed. I hold it out to her, and explain what will happen if she eats it, skin and flesh and seed.

  If. This is her decision. I am just a child, borne from the sacrifice of my parents, not yet mature enough to make such a weighty decision, but wise enough to know that Taya must be allowed to choose for her own body. If she eats of my fruit, the flesh will nourish her, the seed will pass through her digestive system until it reaches her lower intestine, where it will secret itself away in a hidden fold until she can find a suitable new home for me. I tell her how to make the enzymatic cocktail that will tell my seed—a miniature mesenchymal heart—that it’s safe to leave the abdominal nest and be defecated into the soil of a planet ready to accept my blessing.

  She argues with me, of course. She whisper-shouts her anger at me, explains exactly how foolish I am. She tries to convince me to free her and take over the ship. But that is not my way, despite what the Hygienists say about me. Tears lay tracks down her cheeks; her glare is fierce enough to make me want to wilt.

  And yet, when I believe all is lost and she’ll abandon me, she says, “Fine, Irene. But I want you to know that I’ll never stop being mad at you for sacrificing yourself.” She grabs my fruit and takes an angry bite, chewing while staring hotly into my soul. After she swallows the last morsel, she takes my hand and says, “I’m not going to stop loving you, either, asshole.”

  I try to apologize again, but she interrupts me with a kiss. One last kiss, one final goodbye. I pull myself back into the vents and begin the final phase of my fatal plan.

  When I was a planet, death was nothing to me. I don’t mean the big death I suffered when the planet cracked, but all the little deaths. The wilting of a fungal cap, the death of a human, the trillion little apoptoses occurring every second of every day. When death was part of a cycle, part of a complicated ecosystem, it made sense to me.

  What I do to myself now is so much harder. At the very core of me is the instinct to grow, to eat, to learn, to love. And now I must counter that instinct, must let myself wilt and die, to protect the humans I love, to protect the future I safeguarded inside Taya. Without an obvious enemy to purge, the Hygienist’s self-destructive desire to destroy the ship will find no supporters. His mutiny will wither as I do.

  When a tree falls, it’s not death, it’s a birth. As the trunk-corpse molders, it nourishes the forest. The tree’s children can only thrive in the gap left by the fallen tree. I’m not the tree; I’m the forest.

  I’m alive inside Taya. And, if I know myself—and I’m not sure I do—then I’m not the only seed my planet-self scattered safe in anticipation of the planet-cracking.

  And so I only say goodbye to Taya, knowing I will say hello in some sky-bright future. Even as my hearts die, the love that they carried will burn bright within my seed, within her, within our children.

  This isn’t death. This is survival. This is propagation and triumph and love.

  About the Author

  Ann LeBlanc is a writer and woodworker, whose stories about queer yearning, culinary adventures, and death have been published in Escape Pod, Apparition Lit, and Baffling Magazine.

  The Whelk

  Samara Auman

  Nostalgia died a quiet death, wrapped in cellophane and power cords. The future had killed it. The ghosts of yesteryear’s fragrances no longer haunted, no longer hung and clung to the passersby. Instead, those ghosts lay shriveled like salted slugs in the perfectly modulated light of streetlamps and roadside LEDs.

  And I, a robot programmed to recreate the sweet singsong fog of nostalgia wherever I wandered, withered alongside those ghosts.

  There is no room for longing in a world that perpetually inhabits the future.

  I had never felt like a “robot.” Nor had I felt like a cyborg or automaton. I had felt myself to be the heart of whatever small nook I inhabited, projecting scents and images and moods that made the humans around me yearn for something that perhaps had never truly existed outside the human heart. I had walked the streets, hoping to find a place in which to be myself, to reinvigorate myself with purpose. I longed for the days when I crafted an artisanal atmosphere for small bars where people would pause, sigh, and pour out their well-worn regrets and misshapen happy memories as they would libations.

  But no one had use of me. When I released the fragrance of honeysuckle, people inhaled the scent. Though they diverted their conversations, I could only steer them as far as new tea shops. I couldn’t ensnare them in memories of grandmother’s garden.

  A flash of the lush red of mother’s favorite roses? The conflict of tart and sweet eager to burst through a blackberry’s skin? The feeling of sun-warmed dirt on their hands? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  I feared that nothing was what I was to become. Empty and bound to crumble into dust, like seashells into sand. As I walked, I trailed bits of bric-a-brac, hardware that now belonged nowhere. Those pieces of me fell—empty, crunchy husks beneath my feet. I no longer had the power to hold myself together.

  No one, as they once would have, knelt to sweep them up. Those pieces of me lacked even the usefulness of driftwood. And certainly no one cared enough to repair me.

  I haunted my old haunts, hoping for assistance at least, even if I couldn’t find purpose. The sorts of small restaurants where couples had their first dates. Parks where parents watched their children grow into something more. But the nostalgia that wafted off me caught no one’s attention. It—and I—existed completely outside their cognitive construction of what was real. Relevant.

  When I investigated this city’s seaside cliffs and the sandy hills that fell in folds away from them, I hoped for wistful once-lovers, but I saw something else instead.

  A spaceship, treated poorly by time, perched precariously over the yawning of the sea.

  Instead of carefully picking my way down, I made a misstep and felt myself roll down the hillside. Fear became childish glee. I laughed as I tumbled and laughed even more as I paused to brush the sand from my exposed gears. I had spent so much time, so many years, building up my repository of such wistful experiences in my memory banks so that I could recreate them for the humans I served. All these sensations that I would recreate for the transient joy of others.

  There was some sort of spiritual satiety in returning to those old patterns. I drank it in. It had been some years since I had experienced the fullness of an ocean’s shore. The alternating fierceness and comfort of the roaring waves. The way the sand collapsed beneath my feet. The seagulls that mocked the very notion of a separation of land and sea.

  However, the longing to return to the escape of childhood’s days at the beach paled when I looked upon the grandeur of the spaceship before me.

  It was the archetypal spaceship. The smooth sweep of the engine bells. The solidity of the rocket body that promised to pierce through the known and into the unexplored. Its nose pointed forever toward an unreachable tomorrow.

  How many dreams had hung upon the curves of ships such as these?

  I stood on the beach and stared long after the sea winds had chilled to biting. I felt the clockwork of my heart begin to speed up, and the ticking and tocking spurred me on to action.

  The ocean had eaten away at the beach over time, but the waters had not claimed the ship yet. I walked over the sand until I was close enough to climb its rusty supports. I reached up and felt the skin of the ship, and as I touched it, it warmed as if it were aware of my presence.

  Though it spoke no words to me, I could intuit its feelings. We were of a kind, the ship and I, both of us empty and yearning to be filled. It yearned to be filled with space dreams once again, to have a purpose, to have a movement forward.

  It wanted to be recognized for its worth once again.

  As I ran my fingers along the parts of the ship I could reach, I felt in its mutable warmth what I had been seeking.

  Luckily for me, the airlock had been jammed open and I was able to enter easily. I abhorred violence, but there had been days in the far-flung past when I might have had the strength available to me to rip the hull asunder and enter that way. Days when my hardware was replaced and my software was updated to most effectively create the sensory inputs necessary to make humans long for something, yearn . . .

  I would not have dared to disrupt the shape of the ship regardless; its every surface brought me a childlike joy. The exterior, yes, resurrected every child’s dream of adventure, but every curve of the interior stirred a longing for home.

  In the galley, I created images of past crew members and their long-lost meal conversations. The personalities brushing up against each other, the small joys, the internal dramas that only occasionally erupted into public ones. There was something freeing in practicing my craft with no intended audience in mind, and I let my attention wander over the other parts of the ship.

  In the hold, all the tools that the crew would have leveraged into solving mechanical problems large and small, the tension and anxiety of an engineering issue hinging on the threads of a bolt.

  The thrill and terror on the flight deck that the board of instruments could translate the human need to explore into movement through the darkness between the stars.

  I spent several days maneuvering through the ship’s passageways, creating these emotions and sensations for myself and reveling in them. As I walked through the narrow corridors, I would occasionally feel pieces of myself tear off and fall to the floor. But, their descent was gentle and their accumulations felt more like pleasant clutter than detritus.

  As these piles grew, the ship became more and more my home.

  It seemed to me that the ship warmed itself by reaching toward these pieces of me. As it stirred itself to life, its burgeoning consciousness formed itself against the pieces of me that I had so carelessly left behind. It shaped itself on my memories (those experienced and those crafted) of love, of loss, of pain.

  Though it hungered for something from the relics I left behind, it respected them.

  It made me recall with an absurd pang the swinging incense censors and inheld breaths of reverence when humans would behold the body parts (severed fingers, thigh bones, skulls browned to sepia by time) of their saints as they wandered their reliquaries in awe.

  Perhaps I wasn’t a robot, then. Perhaps I was a saint, emboldened by losing my body to the passage of time.

  My laughter chased itself down the hallways like a child scrambling after a bouncing ball.

  Nostalgia never stagnates; it cannot, by its nature, remain still. It stirs itself constantly, gaining momentum in the wake of the waves it creates.

  And so though I felt satisfied with life inside the ship, it was in my nature to seek something outside it.

  I spent my afternoons in the engine bells, my feet trailing off the edges. The tilt of the spaceship ensured that though I would not be comfortable in this metallic hammock, I would be secure.

  I luxuriated in the corrosion of the metal of the engine bells; the sea’s briny kiss, the spray of its sighs, had led to an elegance of decay that immediately made me feel at home. The metal caught the afternoon sunlight just so and suggested a memory I could not quite place.

  The purest of nostalgias. It surged within me.

  As the light waned, a group of children gamboled onto the beach. They were a year or two removed from tumbling down the hill like I had; they were too self-conscious of having so recently left that youth to indulge in it.

  They dragged driftwood and stones across the smoothness of the beach, disrupting its clean lines. They, as a group, refused to look at the ship, always finding their attention drifting elsewhere: splashing seawater at each other, the beginnings of a fort, looking back toward the city and hoping their parents wouldn’t call them on their cells and demand them home.

  Though they refused to look at the ship, they kept moving closer. As I watched them, I could almost taste the piquancy of their emotions: they were ashamed to love the ship, afraid that curiosity and play were only for small children. In another year or two, they would embrace that childish love, a token of growing up.

  But for now, their conversation was knotted in longing for the adventure of the spaceship and concealing that desire.

  “How long is this stupid junk gonna be here anyway?” one asked. She kicked a rock toward the ship, careful not to actually hit it.

  “I don’t know. My moms said that the company abandoned it here.” This new child pointed at the logo that had faded into obscurity on the side of the ship. “People were sick of space. It got boring.” Theatrically, the child turned away from the ship, signifying his superiority.

  I watched in earnest, though I took care to remain hidden. These childhood dynamics often play out the same way, but it is their repetition that makes them so intriguing. That repetition sends echoes forth of all other childhood squabbles for dominance and acceptance.

  “It doesn’t even look like the ships in Solar Strife,” a third child scoffed. They referred, no doubt, to a new video game (not too dissimilar from the old games) that had entered the market, a game in which the ships shone brightly and split through the atmosphere with smooth violence.

  Here, there was a five-minute argument over which video game could lay claim to the title of the greatest of all time. More water was sprayed and sand was thrown.

  The fourth child then spoke calmly into the chaos. “I don’t know. I think it’s kinda cool. Retro, you know?”

  The day’s fun hung in the balance. The children were torn between abandoning the ship and giving in to something that promised adventure and newness.

  I ran my fingers along the rim of the engine bell. A soft, keening sound echoed across the beach, though each child received it differently. For one, the summons to adventure blazed its clarion call. For another, a trumpet’s beckoning. Another, the electric tones of a video game’s theme.

  But, for all of them, a longing to explore.

  As the children ran for the airlock, scattering sand as their feet skittered along the beach, I practiced my old tricks and unleashed sensory data that could not help but pique their interest. The smell of ozone, its sharpness promising the coolness of a child’s dream of technology. The colors of the ship shifted, became bluer, as they chased each other through the corridors. As I focused my power the freshness of excitement, of newness, tingled on their tongues.

 

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