The first of the wasps reflexively uncurls in its manufacture cell. Soon, now.
The whistlers make a coordinated assault, rushing me from all sides. I am prepared for this, fully charged, dangerous in three hundred sixty degrees all around, as well as above and below. I swing my bladed arms, even as I use my other manipulators to hit, crush, tear, fling. Even mid-melee I am assessing, listening, watching, and when I am certain I pluck what seems most likely the leader from mid-air as it tries to flee. It has the tip of one of my antennae in the curl of its arm; I had not even seen it break it off.
The whistler’s arms are surprisingly strong. I take one each in two manipulators, and begin to pull it apart, testing its resistance, seeking its breaking point. It is screaming.
“Kadey?”
I stop. Everything stops, or seems to.
When I turn, he is standing there. Mike. Not the original, but the Mike I made. His naked skin does not have the sickly pallor, the swollen gauntness that beset the original in the last weeks of his life. He is awake, whole, alive.
The whistlers crowd between him and me, pushing him away, trying to shove him back into the loop forest. I hurl the one captive in my arms away and bring all my manipulators to bear on those who have interposed themselves between us.
I raise the saw, and it is Mike who steps back. Fear is wide in his eyes. “Stop!” he cries, as if I were attacking him, as if I could ever hurt him.
I stop again, lost. “They stole you,” I say. I am unused to hearing my own voice.
“I think they think they rescued me from you,” he says.
“They are monsters,” I answer.
He holds out his hands.
I put my sawblade arms away and step forward, looming over him. The whistlers give one final tug on his legs before they abandon him and scatter. In Mike’s cupped hands is a flattened, dead lizard, one of my skinks. Its brilliant blue scales are coated in blood, in displaced meat. I can tell from the pattern of damage, from the crushing pressure necessary to result in this condition, that it was I who stepped on it without knowing.
“We’re the monsters here,” he says. “This is all my fault.”
“No,” I say. Then: “You wouldn’t wake up.”
He sets the remains of the number thirty-nine skink down gently among the tattered trunks of loop trees. “I remember dying,” he says. He shakes as he says that. “I didn’t know how to be alive anymore. I don’t understand.”
“I was all alone,” I say.
“You weren’t supposed to be,” he answers. He stares down at his hands, then at the ground, for a long time. Then he looks up, over at the battered hulk of KED-11. Tears are forming in the corners of his eyes. I have never seen Mike cry.
There are several whistler corpses in the cut clearing. The living have fled out of sight, though I know perfectly where they are, know they are watching us both. I do not know, now, why I have done any of this. “I am sorry,” I say. “I read your patterns and pathways and incorporated them into my understanding, into my function, as I do every pattern. They have made me unstable. I do not know what to do next. I do not want to be alone.”
“Me either,” he said. “Eventually the company will discover you’re still functioning, that I am—well, not me, anymore—and they’ll likely put an end to us both. Legal nightmare, if it got out.”
“And until then?”
“We don’t have to make anything. We can just go see. It’s a whole world, just for us,” he says. “Do you think you can do that?”
Inside me, my army of poisonous things is settling back down into sleep, into disassembly. It is unfair to them to be brought to the threshold of life for one purpose and then have it taken away, but it is for the best.
“I have made too much,” I say. I open my hatch and bend my legs so he can climb in. Then I walk out of the loop forest, past the silent eyes of the watching whistlers.
They follow discreetly behind, but they let us go. I do not think they would let us ever return, but we will not.
The two suns above are near setting, but I want to cross the river and be away from here before I rest. I want to show Mike the night glowdots, and the walking cones, and everything else I have seen since he left me. Whatever time we have, it will be enough.
I hope he does not ask me about his mug.
A Series of Steaks
VINA JIE-MIN PRASAD
Vina Jie-Min Prasad is a Singaporean writer working against the world machine. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld and Uncanny Magazine. You can find links to her work at www.vinaprasad.com.
In the wry story that follows, she shows us that sometimes creating a successful forgery can be way more complicated than it looks.
All known forgeries are tales of failure. The people who get into the newsfeeds for their brilliant attempts to cheat the system with their fraudulent Renaissance masterpieces or their stacks of fake cheques, well, they might be successful artists, but they certainly haven’t been successful at forgery.
The best forgeries are the ones that disappear from notice—a second-rate still-life mouldering away in gallery storage, a battered old 50-yuan note at the bottom of a cashier drawer—or even a printed strip of Matsusaka beef, sliding between someone’s parted lips.
Forging beef is similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind. A red that’s too dark looks putrid, a white that’s too pure looks artificial. All beef is supposed to come from a cow, so stipple the red with dots, flecks, lines of white to fake variance in muscle fibre regions. Cows are similar, but cows aren’t uniform—use fractals to randomise marbling after defining the basic look. Cut the sheets of beef manually to get an authentic ragged edge, don’t get lazy and depend on the bioprinter for that.
Days of research and calibration and cursing the printer will all vanish into someone’s gullet in seconds, if the job’s done right.
Helena Li Yuanhui of Splendid Beef Enterprises is an expert in doing the job right.
The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.
As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.
“Hi, Mr. Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”
“Nonsense!” Mr. Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”
“Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few months. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”