The Faithful Soldier, Prompted

Short Story by Saladin Ahmed
Read for Escape Pod (Free Text and Audio) and Starship Sofa (Audio Only) by Rajan Khanna

Ali is a veteran of the great Global Credit Crusades whose wife is dying of a bioengineered disease spread by one side or the other during the war. Ali doesn't know which side is at fault, and it doesn't really matter, his wife is dying. He can't afford the expensive serum she needs to be cured, and soon won't be able to afford even to keep her alive.

Ali has given up all hope when he starts receiving strange prompts on his glitchy cybernetic interface, which usually just spits out demands that he report for uniform inspection or shop at Honest Majoudi’s. He isn't sure whether these are messages from God, or the beginnings of some sort of psychosis, but with no other hope, he sets off for Cairo at the prompts' direction.

Not so much a story of the physical journey as of Ali's need for something to believe in, a man willing to latch onto any hope that presents itself. He starts as a not very religious man and ends up sounding like a crazed fanatic, and noticing this change in himself.

I love the world Ahmed develops, frequently conveying volumes in tidbits of description and trivia about the war. Ali himself is quite the badass when it comes right down to it, but he finds himself powerless to save his wife from collateral bioweapon damage because he can't afford the exorbitantly priced medicine. The best thing is that 90% of the story actually takes place before, after, or between the lines of the actual narrative we read, and this is done quite deftly.

A particularly nice touch is that we still don't know whether the messages were sent by oddly tricky criminals, some godlike AI manipulating people from behind the scenes for reasons bigger than the scope of the story (my favorite), or an actual supernatural entity as Ali comes to believe.

And a note for the many people who miss the point of the ending, this line near the beginning is very significant:

"His thoughts went to her again, to his house behind the jade-and-grey marble fountain"

4 Nanohanced tigers out of 5 need no credit rating.

Originally Published in Apex Magazine #18

The Insurance Agent

Short Story by Lavie Tidhar
Read for Escape Pod by Christian Brady (Text & Audio)

"It was a bit of an unfair fight as Reagan was young, pre-presidency, circa-World War Two, while Nixon was heavy-set, older: people were exchanging odds and betting with the bar’s internal gaming system and the general opinion seemed to be that though Reagan was in better shape Nixon was meaner."

The story opens with this fun description of a boxing match. I just wish it had run with that concept, rather than immediately veering off into the pointless and surreal for surreality sake.

A bodyguard is hired as "insurance" for a god/alien/"Supernatural Entity". These aliens seem to be most of the figures who have gained any kind of following in our history, from Elvis to Jesus to Uri Gellar. The setting is neat, and we get two particularly vivid scenes described in a rather surreal world, but in the long run there is no plot that makes any sense, the main character is poorly developed and doesn't seem to have any reason to go along with these plans he doesn't understand, and as far as anyone besides "Kim" is concerned, there aren't really any stakes to this story, and the reader doesn't even know what they are for Kim.

Tidhar seems to be going for a theme of people fighting for their ideals and perhaps something about the level of stupidity of what kinds of ideals people will fight over, but not much comes through beyond a sense of vaguely mythological-style symbolism.

A pointless tour through rather neatly described scenery. 2 out of 5 gamblers bet on Reagan in that boxing match.

Originally Published in Interzone, 2010

Kill Me

Short Story by Vylar Kaftan
Read for Escape Pod by Mur Lafferty (Audio Only)
Text Available Free from Transcriptase

Kaftan sets up an extremely interesting world in which memory downloading and uploading into clones is possible, but due to "sanctity of life" legislation just dumb enough to be right up Congress's alley you can't have backups of yourself or otherwise more than one copy at any one time. Oh, and less plausibly with our current society, but I'm willing to assume society has changed, this allows for women to be hired out to get murdered, and then revived later, under the logic that this will allow psychopaths to vent some of those urges and not go after non-consenting women.

Our protagonist, Ada, is a professional masochist who owed a great deal of money to pay for her new body and upload after a car crash. Due to planned obsolescence, she has to buy a new body every few months, and they are too expensive to save up more than one or two in advance. In this way, the resurrection company has her in a kind of indentured servitude to be constantly murdered by psychos and brought back every few months.

Right here, Kaftan has a killer premise, and one I'd love to read a story about. Indeed, the opening third of this story is great. It establishes the messed-up ugly world, Ada's situation, and the fact that she doesn't mind her job all that much, although she doesn't really get off on it anymore. I'd have loved to keep reading about Ada trying to get out of her job, or to read about another woman who can't bear the work she has to do in order to keep herself in a new clone body every few months.

But rather than any of the several promising and interesting directions we're presented with, Ada gets a mystery client and Kaftan throws us for a sharp left turn that takes the middle of the story into a long, boring ineffectual let-me-tell-you-my-evil-plan rant, and the last half turns into a completely different, drawn-out, story of her general dissatisfaction with life. Kaftan is trying to tell a story here about gaining power by relinquishing it, hence the submissive BDSM references scattered throughout, but this only partially works. The ending is not very convincing, and it is trying to be profound. And the big evil plot doesn't actually make any damn sense when you think about it, especially considering it's nearly unenforceable nature.

I liked the world, I liked a lot of the options Kaftan set up, but I wasn't satisfied with the story she ended up building out of this world and character.

2.5 out of 5.

Originally Published in Helix, 2007

Signals in the Deep

Short Story by Greg Mellor
Text and Audio at Clarkesworld

A mother travels through the Solar System to Pluto to visit her son, who has never written back to her. On the way, she muses on child-rearing, and by the time she gets there, she realizes she has no more to do:

Such a blind thing I had become, journeying all this way with the answer in my back pocket. It was that paradox that all parents face at some point. He was always going to grow up despite my good intentions and overbearing guidance. It just happened a little sooner than I expected, or rather sooner than I was willing to acknowledge.

On the way out, we get a nice little tour of the Solar System, before she finds out what job her son is doing and how much he has changed since she last saw him. He has adapted exceptionally well to do the job he needs to do, and although at first she barely recognizes him, she realizes he is still her son and he promises to write home once in a while.

Heartwarming SF space story. The mother and son dynamic is well written, as our the other people she meets on the way out. We can actually imagine the thoughts their respective mothers have about most of the characters we meet. A tad dull, but sweet, and an interesting future backdrop.

3 alien starfish arrays out of 5.

Pack

Short Story by Robert Reed

Text and Audio at Clarkesworld

A post-human who consumes his courage from dispensers lives alone in his castle, one of several such lone castle dwellers among the sparsely populated world. He considers himself and his neighbors the last remnants of humanity.

One day, he adopts a dog, and a pack of them start to live outside his castle, living off his scraps. Reed never describes exactly what a dog is, but they use guns and talk and cry. My theory is that they are the last bits of unmodified, low-tech humanity, no longer acknowledged as human by the post humans, and maybe not even by themselves. They live in packs, surviving off nature and the scraps of the post humans.

The pack continually push our post-human narrator's boundaries, seeing how many he will feed, if he will protect them, break up fights, or help them in a war with another pack.

Reed leaves the setting extremely sketchy, few descriptions of anything, no history lessons, and names and personalities left ambiguous. But he establishes the dynamics between the Post-Human and the dogs, and establishes that the dogs are smart enough to be dissatisfied with the current arrangement. A fun, strange little story about the future of humanity. More sketch of the social order than character study or plotted plot-heavy thriller.

3.5 wolf empires out of 5.