Category: issue 9

I was among the first to upload to VelleSomnia, an armored, fridge-sized satellite surrounded by a football field of solar collectors in geostationary orbit over the Pacific. Despite occasional jitters and fickle object permanence, the ten thousand of us beta testers had the run of hardware meant for ten million digitized souls. However, like all good things—romances, highs, balanced ecologies—the beta run eventually ended, and the fees and charges started.

When night leaks into the sunset, you flip the gate latches. They aren’t so much there to keep the cloud sheep in, more to signal that it’s time for them to roam the hayflower fields below the Sister Crescent Mountains—twin peaks standing side by side, sharing winding roads and sloping valleys. Each sheep unfurls their wings, bristles their hide, and rubs their horns against one another or a nearby tree trunk—the vibrations wake their siblings and relatives perched on the branches as thick as their bodies, hidden, partially, by head-sized leaves.

“I only want to be seen for who I really am,” I tell my friends. Only two out of three made it over, and I’m trying not to feel too many feelings about that fact; I’m already delicate enough after the gallery opening today.

One thing I learned about Bradley Zhao before he graduated was that sometimes, it was best to let him talk until he ran out of energy.

They had been digging a hole for quite some time. That was fine, though—what was childhood for if not endless digging?—and there was nothing more exciting than digging in the middle of the night with no adults around.

Another one of my brothers was killed today, which really spoiled my Friday afternoon. And I saw it, too, which made it even worse. He was sitting in the street, and of course they’re always waddling around in the street so it’s not like that was anything new. Usually my boys would fly out of the way in time, but this guy was beginning to lose his hearing. Too long spent around city traffic, I think. Taxi turned the corner and the rest of his brothers fled. He couldn’t hear.

There are few places as nightmarish and cold as hospital rooms whose corners are manned by solemn grim reapers waiting for loved ones to succumb to their grief and release the tethers binding them to this world.

My sister sent a messenger urchin to wait for me in the journeyman dormitories where I lived. The kid was almost asleep on the doorstep when I finally finished. Autumn was our busy season. But Milla wouldn’t have sent for me for no reason, so I gave the kid a copper and postponed my dinner to see what she wanted.

The old Victorian house loomed, its windows dark as dead monitors. The once-lawn spread before it like a keyboard, scraggly wires of tall grass jutting out in clumps around old flagstones, decaying solar shingles, and assorted human flotsam. The sun above shone laser bright, threatening to overwhelm Zinc IV’s optic sensors when it focused them too high. Clouds reddish brown with nitrogen-dioxide rolled over the mountains and would block the sun soon enough, certainly for hours, maybe for days.

“It’s hideous,” I say, because I’m too sleep-deprived to be polite. The stuffed cat is just the sort of gift a carefree, childless sister would buy for a newborn. It regards us now from its place on the changing table with huge, glassy eyes. Its sparse black fur covers an anatomically unlikely body that emits a tinny meow when squeezed, and its tag confirms my suspicions: made from 100% unnatural substances, probably carcinogenic. My sister must have purchased it as an afterthought from some overpriced airport store as she jetted out to see her new nephew.