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Pepper’s vision fades slowly away in the empty midnight as he tumbles end over end. His eyes frost over, moisture crackling and icing over pupils, hardening against his eyelids. The pinpoint stars fracture behind the fractal cold of the ice, then shatter into a multitude of glittering refractions. Unseeing, he still stares wide-eyed into the vacuum.
“I still hate this,” Trevor said. “That you’re doing this to Becky.” “So you’ve told me,” I said wearily. “Many times.” We sat in the clinic waiting room, done in Martian rust reds, very trendy for such an illegal operation. But, then, this was very upscale illegality. Trevor, who had so much money he never […]
I’ve sought a world with a higher-than-average ratio of sunny days and a pharmaceutical industry that developed a decade before my own. Sun, of course, improves mental health. And a more developed pharmaceutical industry implies a more liberal outlook towards chemical intervention, a more specific range of treatment plans. It isn’t easy to write equations for these variables.
Many have written on this subject to confess failure; who am I to claim success? The objections line up like policemen: Alien intelligence does not, in fact, exist. So when we try to describe it, our thoughts do not connect to any object except ourselves. The words we put into an alien mouth, the feeling into an alien heart, the tools into alien hands, what can they be but imitations of our words, feelings, tools?
Come-from-aways think it’s the tides that brings the wreckage in, but any local child will tell you the truth of the matter. You can have fifty fine days in a row and the beaches will be clean and empty, except for the usual haul of rockweed, driftwood, and old plastic bottles. Fifty fine days, and then there’ll come a thick, foggy night of the sort we do so well around here.
Negelein is at his workstation working on the Lafferty file when the bone spear arcs over the sea of cubicles and strikes just above his right ear, penetrating his skull with a wet crunch. Oblivion is not quite instantaneous; his neurons all fire at the moment his brain goes soggy with blood, giving him, in his last instant, an overwhelming taste of peppermint.
The Surrogate walked past Casey’s window. She watched its shadow slip across the shade, then she stood and zipped up her flight suit. This was the day. No matter what. The doorbell rang. It was polite, the Surrogate. It had manners. It rang the doorbell. It said please and thank you. It had saved Casey’s life, twice, and the first time she had been grateful.
It is customary to begin one’s memoirs at birth. As I was not “born” in the gross mammalian sense, I shall begin instead at a more logical point in time. To wit: I was borne to Earth on cosmic winds, falling through chance and the grace of the heavens to root in the soil of Notting Hill. There I grew rapidly to adult stature, devoured a lady’s maid who had the misfortune to come too close to my tendrils, and assumed her form.
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