io9 is proud to current fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we characteristic a narrative from LIGHTSPEED’s present situation. This month’s choice is “Critical Mass” by Peter Watts. You can learn the story beneath or listen to the podcast on Lightspeed’s web site. Enjoy!
Critical Mass
Leo Gregory is dropping altitude.
He coasts on the thermals of a legacy fading behind him: a documentary right here, a retrospective there, some greatest-hits assortment down within the nook for the dilettantes. Oh, the work has misplaced none of its grandeur: his buildings stay timeless, his objets d’artwork nonetheless serve up sides upon layers from every special approach. Critics proceed to marvel over the best way Leo Gregory can craft a complete hypnotic universe from a blob of glass and wire. But the signature items are the higher a part of a decade outdated, now. The publications could also be latest, however the works they discover have been round for years. In phrases of sheer stock, Leo’s productiveness is as nice because it’s ever been—however someway the brand new items aren’t exhibiting up within the monographs or the ecstatic retrospectives.
Nobody appears to have seen but, however he is aware of it’s solely a matter of time. People are sure to catch on. Objects within the rear-view mirror are farther than they seem.
So typically now, perform squashes type. Structures as soon as designed to have fun the fabric now exist solely to resist the following hurricane. Leo’s creations as soon as aspired to encourage; now they do little greater than accommodate the following outbreak. He is so uninterested in letting climate and microbes push him round. He desires to cease merely constructing issues and return to sculpting them: partitions that segue seamlessly into ceilings, lights that shoal like bioluminescent squid by means of corridors and convention rooms. He desires to subvert boring straight-line geometries with naturalistic evocations of driftwood and coral.
He might, in the event that they’d let him. His basic creations are as resilient as they’re lovely; seven Richters would barely crack the home windows. But persons are so scared, nowadays. Every yr the floods rise increased, the fires burn hotter, the winds blow tougher. People don’t need power disguised, they need it of their faces. They need reassurance. They need one thing that seems robust.
There was a time when he might have even given them that, when he knew the right way to make even Brutalism lovely. Maybe he nonetheless can; it’s been so lengthy since he was afforded the chance. He can’t fairly pin down when that straitjacket stopped chafing.
Maybe in regards to the time he began operating out of concepts.
Leo can’t appear to get a very good evening’s sleep. He tosses and turns, bedeviled by goals of plagues and prostitution. As typically as not he sleeps within the cot in Emma’s room, to spare Michelle from his semiconscious flapping about. (He solely needs he might wake Emma so simply.) He works late and sleeps later. False begins and abortions accumulate in his residence studio, weighing him down like ballast, compressing him. He feels as if he’s being pulled slowly down into the Juan de Fuca Trench.
When he discovers the break-in on the morning of the twenty third, it’s nearly a reduction.
Officer Thalberg interviews Leo within the vandalized studio. More exactly, she interviews Leo-in-the-vandalized-studio, through drone hovering at eye stage a discreet two meters away; Thalberg herself stays antiseptically ensconced in her cruiser on the curb. Her sidekick—a Boston Dynamics Bloodhound that strikes like a hungry xenomorph on 4 spring-loaded legs—has already launched itself and wandered off in the hunt for clues.
Thalberg seems out from a bit of display screen nestled between the quad’s ahead followers. “Anything stolen?”
“I don’t think so. Whoever it was just—tossed the place. Trashed Two-thirty.”
“Two-thirty.”
“A piece of sculpture I was working on,” Leo explains, and wonders why it appears like a confession. “I number them.”
“You’re an artist?” Thalberg sounds stunned; you don’t find yourself on the fast-response listing except you’re respectable.
“Among other things,” Leo says. “I do a lot of building design.” That a part of his persona appears to go over higher in sure quarters.
“Oh. An architect.” Thalberg appears glad; Leo doesn’t right her.
Something clatters across the nook. He follows the sound—Thalberg’s drone floating at his shoulder—by means of archways of resin and fabric-formed concrete. Indirect pure gentle seeps brightly by means of fissures within the partitions. The entire studio is extra grotto than workplace: a vivid high-ceilinged cave, as pure as artifice could be.
The Bloodhound has discovered Leo’s junk pile in an alcove off the primary workspace: ceramic-coated GPUs from outdated motherboards. The motors from discarded Cuisinarts. Batteries and gears and gyros wired collectively in insane configurations, random junk electroplated into superb metallic jigsaws. Built, toyed with, discarded onto a pile too large to comprise all of it; bits and items have spilled away from its slopes, lie strewn throughout the ground like fragile little caltrops. The robotic sniffs and scans and noses all of it, systematically reworking junk into Evidence.
“Two-thirty, I presume,” Thalberg remarks.
Leo shakes his head. “These are just—I dunno, prototypes. Failed experiments.” Amusements for Emma, the truth is. That’s how they began. He stored constructing them afterward out of sheer behavior, half-hearted and joyless. But someday when he wasn’t trying they took on new life, morphed from grim distraction into one thing nearly—fulfilling, possibly. Warm-up workout routines. An exploration of fascinating useless ends.
Maybe it’s all bullshit, possibly that is simply his manner of hanging on to the previous. So what if he will get extra pleasure out of those uncommissioned orphans than from any of the latest works he dignifies with an precise quantity. That doesn’t change the truth that by any goal measure, he’s principally simply jerking off.
He calls them masturpieces. Not that he’s about to confess as a lot to Officer Thalberg.
“Two-thirty’s over here.” Leo backtracks and hangs a left; the drone pivots and weaves in his wake. The Bloodhound worries away on the pile behind them.
230 sits—sat, moderately—on a central desk in the primary studio. In life it was a small frozen tsunami, folded glass layered in shades of blue and emerald. You might look into its depths and see a complete darkish ocean trying again. A filigreed mesh of copper threads ran by means of its pores and skin; the concept was to generate a magnetic area through which tiny crystal droplets, equally imbued, would float in midair across the central artifact. The wave and its cloud of spray, sure by invisible power.
Ten years in the past, it will have been a groundbreaker.
Thalberg’s quad turns slowly on its axis, taking within the tableau. The studio’s north wall seems out throughout the harbor to the mountains on the north shore.
“Nice place,” Thalberg remarks.
If you walked by means of that sliding glass door onto the balcony and appeared down, you’d come face-to-face with the grey dirty asphalt of Commissioner Street on the foot of the hill, the creosote sutures of the prepare tracks to both facet. None of that ugliness falls line-of-sight from in right here, although.
The quad floats over to the glass doorways. “This was open last night?”
“Well, yeah. But it’s an eight-meter drop.” The studio extends from the crest of the hill as if the home behind have been protruding its tongue. It overhangs a feral cover of cherry and maple, a dense inexperienced vein winding alongside a slope simply steep sufficient to maintain the builders at bay. Also, Leo realizes belatedly, a hid avenue of strategy for anybody intent on a bit of B&E.
“Uh huh. Private entrance, too,” Thalberg provides. Not uncommon, nowadays—when visitors and colleagues come to make use of the services, you don’t need them tromping pathogens by means of your lounge—however nonetheless.
“It’s alarmed,” Leo says, a bit defensively.
“And the alarm was on last night?”
“Yeah, I—” Come to think about it, he doesn’t explicitly keep in mind. But you by no means keep in mind the stuff you do mechanically, proper?
“It always is,” he finishes, however the quad’s already sniffing alongside one of many fissures within the western wall: a supply of sunshine and cross-ventilation posing as geological imperfection. The drone winks sparkly ultraviolet at a small scuff mark there, spins again to face him.
“This gap extends all the way through?”
“There’s a screen on the other side to keep out the bugs. But, yeah.” He feels compelled so as to add, “You’d have to be some kind of child contortionist to squeeze through there, though. Unless someone cut you into pieces first.”
“Mr. Gregory, with all due respect to your architectural skills, I’ve seen tree houses with stronger security.”
Leo shrugs. “Yeah, I—I was more careful when I wasn’t spending so much time at home. You don’t expect someone to break in when you’re right down the hall, you know?”
“At the very least you should keep the balcony entrance locked and install some cameras. Who else has access?”
“Just me and Michelle.”
“What about Emma?”
Of course: they got here down the corridor, proper previous the closed door with its Dayglo nudibranch identify plate and the muffled clicks and hisses seeping by means of from the opposite facet.
“She hasn’t woken up in four years,” Leo says quietly.
Even with out trying, he can see Thalberg counting again in her head. “My condolences,” she says after a second. “Golem was—I still can’t imagine what kind of monster would deliberately create something like—”
Leo cuts her off: “It’s induced.”
“Excuse me?”
“The coma. We induced it. H2S therapy.” It appears necessary that Thalberg know this, someway. “Until there’s a cure.”
“Of course. They’re making progress all the time.” The drone dips sadly in a sudden breeze from the balcony. “You must have home care, then.”
“Once every couple of weeks at most. The bed’s mostly automated.” Belatedly he realizes what Thalberg is getting at. “The nurse doesn’t have access to—”
His earbud buzzes. Relieved, Leo checks his spex: “Sorry, do you mind if I take this? It’s my business partner.”
“Sure.” The drone floats towards the balcony. “I’ve got to check the grounds anyway.”
It’s a welcome reprieve, although he is aware of what it’s about: that collector in Frankfurt once more, determined so as to add an undiscovered Gregory to his lounge. Anything new, something outdated even as long as it isn’t within the catalogs. Whatever he has mendacity round. Price isn’t any object.
Leo’s been placing him off. It shames him to confess that he’s really tempted.
Michelle turns her eyes from the stage the place three proteges rehearse fluid strikes that, to Leo a minimum of, appear anatomically unattainable for something with an inner skeleton. “No joy, then?”
He shakes his head. “No DNA. No obvious motive. Not much she could do, other than read me the riot act for leaving the windows open and not having spycams all over the place.”
“We are putting in cameras though, right?”
He hesitates.
“Leo. Someone was in our house.”
“Right. Of course.” He actually has resolved to be extra conscientious about safety. He’s conserving all of the doorways and home windows locked, a minimum of. The digital camera factor may take some time. He’ll need to wheedle somebody into constructing a {custom} setup. You can’t get something off the shelf nowadays that doesn’t hoover up all of your private knowledge by default, and Leo doesn’t belief Google or Amazon or some other surveillance-happy behemoth whose enterprise mannequin hinges on making you neglect that Cloud is simply one other phrase for Someone Else’s Servers.
Michelle turns again to her dancers, faucets the plexi to get their consideration; delivers suggestions and instruction through some elegant wordless semaphore. One of the troupe flashes a thumbs-up; they take it from the highest.
Leo watches, mesmerized. To all appearances the stage is occupied not by three entities however by a single multi-limbed being break up into three elements, all someway shifting of unified accord. Soft lightning flashes between them: lambent auroras of ruby and emerald, electrical ideas leaping synaptic junctions to maintain every thing in sync. The lights flicker like static discharge from the BSBs round every dancer’s left wrist.
“How’d you do the lights?” he wonders.
“Kris hacked the contact-tracing fields. The colors emerge from the interaction of their path profiles.”
Epidemiological rainbows. The chromatics of well being and illness, of vibrant life and the dissolution of small fragile issues. Michelle has literalized the BSBs, made them visibly Broad-Spectrum.
“I could have done that for you.” Thinking: But I didn’t.
She shrugs. “No big deal. Kris figured it out in about two secs.”
The dancers have segued into a complete new mode; each limb and joint trembles now, they transfer as if actually electrified. Leo can’t put his finger on the second that modified.
“I envy you,” he admits. “It’s not—it’s not all on you. Everything you do is a collaboration.”
Michelle frowns. “It’s me enough. In the end. The basic moves and concepts, anyway. They bring their own interpretations of course, but I’m the one who gets the shitty reviews if it’s a fuck-up.”
Leo snorts. “When did you ever get a shitty review?”
She’s gracious sufficient to let it slide.
He seems again to the stage. “So this is the live one, right? Piranha?”
She nods, eyes on the dancers, lips barely parted. Some delicate aura glows round her, half anticipation, half habit. That edge—that suggestions loop between viewers and performer, the delicate call-and-response that updates a dozen instances a second and makes each efficiency totally distinctive—it doesn’t occur typically nowadays. The viewers could also be a thousand instances bigger than any that might match into these seats; it might prolong from the decrease mainland to the opposite facet of the world. But they aren’t right here; the dancers name and nothing responds. In a performative sense, the viewers isn’t even actual.
Piranha scored one in every of precisely 4 live-audience permits doled out by metropolis corridor this yr. The information got here by means of a month in the past and Michelle’s ft nonetheless haven’t touched the bottom.
She’s tried to explain the adrenaline excessive she will get from performing for flesh and blood: like being an animal, she says. Like being within the jungle and listening to each cricket and predator inside 100 miles. Feeling each hair in your arm, individually, stirring within the breeze: operating real-time eventualities like a supercomputer, what to do if this occurs, the place to go if that does, the right way to form your strikes round that late arrival who tries to interrupt in by means of the fireplace exit half an hour in.
He envies that, too. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen you like this,” he says.
She hesitates. Nods.
“I wish I could feel the way you do. That—hyperawareness.”
She shakes her head. “You ask me, you’re too aware. Stop worrying so much.”
“Easy for you to say.”
She seems across the room, pointedly takes within the banks of stereocams and mics and roosting drones used to convey one thing in lieu of Art to distant plenty. “Nothing’s easy these days, Leo.”
He grimaces, conceding the purpose.
“And anyway,” Michelle provides, “you know why I’m doing okay again? Because I trust myself. You know what happens when I lose faith in my own abilities, when I stop just dancing and start wondering if I made the right number of steps before the turn? I screw up. Like . . . like a centipede trying to figure out where all his legs should go.” She fixes him with a severe stare. “Stop thinking about it. Take a break. The subconscious is capable of amazing things if you just let it do its thing. Go play Starfisher or something.”
He manages a smile. “I don’t have time for games, Meesh.”
“People make breakthroughs while playing games. In their sleep, even. I’ll send you the links. Besides,”—she places her fingers on his shoulders—“you’re not nearly in the rut you think you are. Those little one-off experiments of yours—”
“That’s just dicking around.”
“Well, I like them. Emma liked—likes them. They move.”
“They just lie there.”
“Sweetie, don’t be so literal. They move by just lying there. I’m a dancer; I can tell.”
She pats his ass.
“They’re kinetic.”
Emma’s eyes nonetheless transfer underneath their lids.
It’s not imagined to occur. Her mind is as shut down as the remainder of her: metabolic pathways clogged by exact aliquots of hydrogen sulfide, the equipment of that very important life slowed by ninety p.c or extra. Her thoughts resides primarily within the hippocampus now: pure dreamless slow-wave, its higher reaches dormant and blissfully unaware.
Yet there she is. Looking round within the darkness. Always the rule-breaker.
“Hey, kid.” Leo glances down on the bauble in his hand. “Brought you something.” It’s not kinetic nevertheless it’s fairly sufficient: a small beaded urchin lit from inside, a home-made LED with an dermis of polished sea-glass. He exhibits it to her, as ritual dictates (did these closed eyes cease shifting for only a second, come to relaxation on the reward in his hand?); fastidiously units it down on the headboard with all of the others he’s introduced her over time. He smooths the hair away from her brow. They ought to most likely buzz it however they hold it quick as a substitute. He and Michelle wash it collectively, each week.
So rattling younger. Fifteen years outdated and she or he nonetheless seems like a bit of woman: their sleeping magnificence, getting older one yr in ten. What occurs if it takes one other decade to discover a treatment? Two? Emma might hit thirty earlier than she hits puberty.
They’ve considered waking her up, in fact. Fought about it, even: what hurt wouldn’t it do, on particular events? Birthdays, Christmases. Just for an hour or two. Maybe a day. To give her a while within the gentle, to reacquaint themselves with this small vivid soul they’ve placed on maintain whereas they await medication to meet up with the bioterrorists.
Cruel fantasy, in fact. It takes days to elevate somebody safely out of a sulfide coma—and for what? So their lovely daughter can see her dad and mom getting older in stop-motion, glimpse a world shifting on with out her as all these tiny monsters, reawakened in flip, devour her a bit of extra from the within? And then it’s Playtime’s over, sweetie. Back to the void. Happy birthday. All for a couple of minutes of egocentric face time.
And but they miss her a lot. The damage, the heartache—builds up. So they let it out from time to time, arguing, denying, iterating by means of the identical steps to the identical unassailable finish level whereas Emma waits in stasis, tended by magical machines.
Sometimes Leo finds a measure of consolation right here: the smooth blue lighting, the twinkling constellations of important indicators, the viscous peristalsis of the gel mattress because it rolls his daughter from side to side to maintain the mattress sores at bay. The low electrical hum and snap of the EMS pads on legs and arms: small electrocutions to go off the losing of unused muscle groups. The entire room is a form of ecosystem, a blue-shifted electrical forest conserving the monsters away. That ambiance—reassures him, someway.
Sometimes.
Other instances it drives him up the fucking wall.
Thalberg once more. “I didn’t know you built robots, Mr. Gregory.”
Leo squints into his spex. “I don’t.”
“I’m in Point Grey right now, looking at one that has your handiwork all over it.”
“Point Gr—oh.” It comes again to him. “204.”
The feed switches to Thalberg’s drone, hovering over a useless Honda Kamakiri splayed throughout granite flagstones. Its carapace is fractured; two legs are damaged. A sparse cloud of tinfoil moths flutter round it like tiny angels gone grand mal, lurching and jerking in a spastic caricature of the swirling murmurations Leo programmed in three years in the past. Thalberg’s Bloodhound noses the carcass with a exact forensic rigor that may’t fairly dispel the sense of 1 being mourning the lack of one other.
Thalberg reappears. “204, I presume.”
“Yeah. The bot’s off-the-shelf, but I—customized it.”
“These little floaty bits.”
Leo nods. “Among other things. They’re supposed to flock like birds. Magnetic coils, microfans, nearest-neighbor algos. It was actually pretty impressive before . . .”
“Uh huh.” Thalberg doesn’t sound impressed. Truth be instructed, Leo isn’t both, actually. 204 was a gimmick, a handful of parts from his Greatest-Hits assortment recycled into work-for-hire.
Still. “So is this a pattern, then?”
“Twice is coincidence,” Thalberg says. “Takes three times to get to Enemy Action. But you might want to send me a list of any of other works you’ve got scattered around the lower mainland. Just in case.”
It hits him then. “That’s a security bot; there should be video. If not in local memory, uploaded somewhere.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Thalberg smiles grimly. “All the local surveillance was scrambled.”
“What?”
The officer nods. “Some kind of magnetic interference. Every camera in range got fratzed before anything appeared in frame.”
“Don’t look at me,” Leo says.
Thalberg raises an eyebrow. “Why would I?”
“Well, um, the coils I installed. For the birdlets. But I shielded the onboard electronics, and anyway the fields weren’t nearly strong enough to mess with anything outside the chassis.”
“Uh huh.” Thalberg leans out of body for a second earlier than the monitoring macro kicks in and reacquires; Leo catches a glimpse of steering wheel, experiences a flicker of envy. Cops nonetheless get to drive, manually. Their automobiles don’t even include a self-drive possibility, not because the Antinatalists hacked the entire Cincinnati PD fleet into enjoying bumper-car at 100 kph within the downtown core.
Those have been the times.
Thalberg will get her listing, however she’s bought different instances on her plate. Leo can’t think about that a few minor B&Es rank very excessive on her agenda. He restrains himself so long as he can, which takes him by means of to a sleepless two a.m.; then he eases away from bed (Michelle mumbles at his again however doesn’t awaken), pulls on a pair of pants and pads to the storage. He unplugs the Nissan and feeds it waypoints; whereas it chews on them he bulkmails his native shopper listing with a question about whether or not something may need, you recognize, occurred to any of his items over the previous few days.
The Nissan pings, route optimized and plotted. Leo embarks on the Midnight Tour.
He spelunks 86 down on East Georgia: Official Leo HQ, myopically constructed earlier than The Cocooning. It’s an incredible block 5 tales excessive, its facades randomly cratered with cavelike invaginations and falls of greenery: a Borg dice, assimilated by a rainforest. Leo begins within the parking storage, the place rows of freshly-printed porta-potties and stacks of folded cots await subsequent yr’s inevitable inflow of refugees (everybody has to do their half—and it’s not as if the storage is overwhelmed with drive-ins anyway, nowadays). He works his manner up by means of loading bays and manufacturing services, courtyards and gardens and dusty prototyping retailers. Eighty-six is nearly deserted even in the course of the day, past the trickle of street-level enterprise that someway retains the restaurant and gallery alive. Here at nighttime, there may be solely Leo—and the constructing is pristine. Not a sculpture, not a light-weight fixture is misplaced.
192 is a distinct story: a commissioned piece of commemorative sculpture plunked down in Maple Tree Square, postmodern Vancouver’s reply to tarnished bronze statues of useless white males on horses. Some critic as soon as in contrast it to a hantavirus; that wasn’t what Leo had in thoughts when he constructed the bloody factor, however in hindsight he can’t deny the resemblance.
It doesn’t seem like a lot of something now. Its items lie scattered throughout the sq.. One of these non permanent street indicators—excessive pole, cement base—lies on its facet close by. Evidently somebody has used it as a sledgehammer.
Three instances is enemy motion. Then once more, possibly not; what else do you count on whenever you put a bit of public artwork within the coronary heart of Gastown, a mere forty meters from literally-I-kid-you-not Blood Alley? The police barely even reply to 911 calls from right here any extra. When they do present up, it tends to be in power.
This may not be focused in any respect. This might simply be one other act of random Gastown violence of the type practiced by these good people coming across the nook from Powell, the copper streetlights casting their faces in shadow, the implements of their fingers heavy and stuffed with inertia . . .
“Drive,” Leo says, and the Nissan carries him away.
He crosses Lions Gate to Ambleside: 210 and 211 are okay. Over at Pemberton and Marine, 162 appears none the more serious for put on. 188 appears intact from a distance—its higher reaches loom over the group heart in its shadow, identical as at all times—however what’s he anticipating? Some night-stalking military of vigilante artwork critics goes to take down a ten-story condominium cluster within the coronary heart of North Van?
Not that Leo would particularly mourn its loss. 188 is a positive challenge, possibly the perfect you can hope for in a world of small-minded bureaucrats who equate resilience with boxiness. Its inside options some very nice touches—the foyer’s all curves and arches, lit with constellations of blown glass that glow like golden incandescent blood cells—however the constructing itself is nothing particular. Planes and right-angles, a standard concrete shell formed by a throwaway exoskeleton of bolstered plywood.
The harm comes into view because the Nissan rounds the nook. The wreckage is all at floor stage, damaged home windows and pockmarked partitions, a sparse talus of bricks scattered alongside the sidewalk. Rebar protrudes from the gashed facade like skinny bones from an open wound. The entire tableau strobes blue and purple within the gentle of the police cruiser parked on the primary entrance. A cop really emerges from the cab as Leo watches, demoting the same old trunk-launched drone from level man to sidekick. The meat turns and eyes the Nissan because it cruises previous; the mech ignores it.
Leo doesn’t cease.
Dawn finds him again at residence and cowled in a VR headset, driving a rental drone alongside the Gulf Islands to his beloved Bridge House. The place is rooted on reverse sides of a deep fern gully, spanning the area between, designed as a form of home observatory for rising seas and altering ecosystems. Successive generations would have marveled because the wonderland beneath their ft transitioned from woodland to marsh, from marsh to inlet. Its inhabitants would have dwelt throughout the verdant inexperienced coronary heart of ecological succession itself.
The home stands empty. It’s been barely a decade and the once-pristine gully is a stagnant pit, choked with filamentous algae, biking from merely eutrophic within the spring to downright anoxic by August. It stinks of black mud and rotten eggs. The stand of cedars that when arched over the driveway has been diminished to skeletal kindling by bark beetles and a few new superfungus that erupted from the Oregon rainforest again in ‘25. The oceanfront windows look out on an endless jumbled vista of driftwood, and garbage, and broken chunks of autoprinted Japanese condos carried over on the North Pacific Current.
Bridge House has endured though, an unintended testament to Be Careful What You Wish For. It has survived superstorms and killer surf and coast-wrecking earthquakes half a millennium overdue. It remains unscathed: whoever’s pursuing this vendetta hasn’t made it out this far.
Not that they should.
So it’s official: somebody has a bone to choose with Leo Gregory, Fading Wunderkind. Now the VPD will swing into motion. They’ll ignore the biohackers constructing gengineered plagues of their garages. They’ll neglect all in regards to the hordes of refugees sneaking in from the U.S. Hell, they could even stick a pin in that leftist cabal that hacked the Internet of Things final week, warmed up each fridge within the decrease mainland simply sufficient to overwhelm the native hospitals with two thousand simultaneous instances of salmonella. They’ll neglect about all that and focus their assets completely on the case of the midnight vandal who desecrates the timeless work of Leo Gregory.
Right.
In truth, he’ll be fortunate if Thalberg hasn’t already been reassigned to the most recent gang warfare job power. If he desires to combat again, he’s on his personal.
But Leo’s no detective. He’s a sculptor. He’s an artist. The solely manner he is aware of to combat again in opposition to the destruction of those artifacts is to make extra of them, to desert this junked historical past and fill the area with one thing higher.
It sounds so fucking easy. The fact is, the one creations which have given him any pleasure recently have been these one-off warm-ups, they usually’re—nothing. Personal indulgences, spontaneous and totally missing in rigor.
Maybe that’s why he and Emma like them.
He throws an outdated documentary onto the wall in lieu of inspiration—the National Film Board’s Infinite Regressions of Leo Gregory—and selects a bit from the junk pile: a crystal diatom, bristling with a thousand needle-thin protrusions. He constructed it in a bell jar, pumped out the air and let exhausting vacuum pull an increasing bubble of soppy glass by means of a wireframe mesh. It appears nearly too delicate to exist; these fragile spines wouldn’t even have the ability to bear their very own weight however for the wire gates and conduits threaded by means of the glass like a neural web.
He grabs a pair of long-handled forceps and absently begins snapping spines off on the base.
Over on the wall Leo’s Barbican piece floats like a monstrous bioluminescent coral whereas some youthful self voiceovers on the significance of figuring out what’s worthwhile. A montage of images and cellphone vids recall his salad days pretending to be a Whiterock farmer, passing off his glassblowing rig as farm gear to get across the zoning legal guidelines. Then again to Art—108, this time: “Most of us regard lightning in a bottle as a mere turn of phrase. Only Leo Gregory would dare to take it literally.” Some mathematician from Waterloo postulates a savantic instinct for derivatives.
These doodles are good—fulfilling even, in their very own modest manner—however they’re so rattling small. It’s not sufficient to merely push the envelope; Leo desires to depart it in shreds. He desires to scale his artwork up into his structure, transect a complete fucking constructing. He desires to construct a skyscraper and slice by means of it at insane angles, discover 1,000,000 cross-sections: the skeleton, the insulation, the pulmonary ducts and ventilators, the sparking copper and fiberop of the central nervous system. He desires to chop by means of all that Euclidean monotony and uncover the fractal wonders hidden inside, map a complete two-dimensional universe stretched throughout a thousand sq. meters.
Young Leo once more: “What we try to do is release control . . . set these systems in motion which let the material determine what form it takes . . .”
He returns his consideration to the workbench, blinks: someday previously jiffy he’s sliced the diatom in half across the equator. The glistening cross-section mesmerizes, like a circuit diagram embedded in a geode. An iris. An eye.
What was it Michelle mentioned, just a few days again? The unconscious is able to wonderful issues in case you simply let it do its factor.
Well, duh. This is hardly the primary time his fingers have gone their very own manner when he wasn’t watching; he’s carried out a few of greatest work in The Zone. Back when his work was good.
But possibly Michelle’s proper. She normally is. Maybe he ought to cease concentrating on the work itself and determine the right way to get again onto that ol’ Zenspace.
She despatched him hyperlinks, he remembers. He mutes the wall and checks them out.
Wow.
It goes manner past pianists letting their fingers transfer themselves, or champion golfers unable to recollect the second they sank that crucial putt. There are your run-of-the-mill sleepwalkers, in fact (Emma was a kind of, earlier than; they’d discover her in entrance of the fridge at three a.m. consuming uncooked soy canine from the package deal). Your somewhat-less-run-of-the-mill sleep-intercourseers, cruising bars, seducing one-nighters, waking up the following day shocked and horrified by the presence of the whole stranger beside them in mattress. But Meesh wasn’t kidding: individuals additionally make scientific breakthroughs of their sleep. Mathematical theorems, molecular constructions, statistical fashions of marine habitats—all served up wholesale in goals, if these experiences are to be believed. All the dreamers needed to do was get up and write down the insights earlier than they light, like they have been taking dictation.
People even kill of their sleep. Homicidal somnambulism, it’s referred to as. They drive throughout city, do the deed and clear up the mess afterward, by no means waking. And juries have repeatedly allow them to stroll—as a result of after reviewing the proof, they conclude that the accused haven’t in any case carried out these horrible issues.
Something inside of them has.
A sudden sound. Leo begins—nevertheless it’s solely his discarded spex, beeping from the desk. He slides them on, grunts in annoyance; someway the Frankfurt collector has rooted out his private electronic mail, carried out an end-run round Randy and focused the item of his obsession immediately. Leo can’t fairly suppress a twinge of grudging admiration for the man’s tenacity.
It’s the identical outdated shit, in fact. Anything authentic. A carriage bolt wrapped in duct tape will do, so long as it has Leo’s signature on it. Please please please.
Leo hesitates for nearly a minute, hating himself the entire time.
He hits Delete.
Randy calls from Berlin. “Bad news.”
“The exhibition’s off,” Leo guesses. The Black Forest is on fireplace once more. Anyone lower than a thousand kilometers downwind is just about staying indoors.
“What? Oh, no, the wind’s supposed to shift by Tuesday; we should be okay.”
“What, then?”
“Someone destroyed 202.”
“Wait, you mean—” Leo counts again by means of his oeuvre. “Over there? Leise Park?”
“‘Fraid so.”
“Who?”
“No idea. Big park, not many cameras, and two of those were acting up that night for some reason.” Randy coughs a continental cough. “I’m afraid it’s not an enormous precedence for the native constabulary.”
A transatlantic industrial flight will increase your possibilities of contracting Alaskapox by 68%, a half-dozen H1 variants by nearly fifty. Does anybody hate Leo’s work—hate him—a lot that they’d spend twelve hours locked in a flying petri dish simply to take just a few swipes at some half-assed sculpture in a international park?
“There’s more than one,” Leo says.
“What?”
“It’s a group. An international conspiracy.”
“Um, Leo—”
“Randy, you haven’t forgotten the problems I’ve been having over here the past few weeks.”
“Of course not, but seriously? An international conspiracy?”
“Canada and Germany: international. At least two people working together. Conspiracy.”
“Come on. If some secret coven of critics was really out to do you in they’d just give you a bad writeup in Architectural Review or something.”
“So how do you explain it?”
“I dunno. Coincidence maybe.”
Leo doesn’t dignify that with a solution.
“Anyway, um.” Randy clears his throat. “That’s not the main reason I called.”
“Oh?”
“I thought we’d agreed I’d be handling your fanboys.”
“We did. There a problem?”
“Your shipment to Gunter Holzbok didn’t exactly come through normal channels.”
“Gunter—” The Frankfurter. The pest. “Shipment?”
“I wouldn’t even have known about it if I hadn’t been down at the studio on other business. Happened to see it in the loading bay before it went out.”
“Randy—” Leo calls up the spreadsheet to examine, although he already is aware of what he’ll discover. “I never sent anything to that guy. Do you know how he got my personal email?”
“Officially, no it didn’t come from you. The invoice lists Miko Webb.”
“Miko—”
“I can’t help but wonder if you used that name so it wouldn’t go through me.”
“I didn’t send anything.”
“Come on. You think I don’t recognize your work when I see it?”
“You opened it?”
“Of course I opened it. Fifty kilograms of random knick-knacks. Holzbok wanted one piece. You sent him enough to open his own damn gallery. Didn’t even charge him anything past shipping and handling. What in God’s name were you thinking?”
Leo surveys the junk pile. Myriad disjointed fragments look again. Now that he’s paying consideration, the pile does look smaller than it used to. A small form, each acquainted and out-of-place, glitters close to its apex. Leo crosses the room and plucks the sea-glass urchin from the pile. Gooseflesh ripples alongside his arms.
“They came back,” he whispers.
“Your conspiracy again?”
“They were in Emma’s room . . .” He feels a sudden compulsion to go there now, to look underneath the mattress for hidden bogeymen, though he appeared in on her not half an hour in the past.
Don’t be an fool, Leo. Calm the fuck down.
“Leo, I—”
He takes a breath. “Randy, I don’t know what to tell you. It wasn’t me. That means it was someone else.”
“Someone else who knows about Miko Webb.”
“They don’t have to know all about him. Just, you know. The falling-out, the, the public persona. Someone stole my art, Randy. Someone’s fucking with me. Someone’s fucking with us.”
“So you’re saying you don’t want me to send it on to Frankfurt?” Randy says.
Leo barely hears him. He can’t cease fascinated about that time-worn cliche the critics like to cover behind each time they’re about to savage a life’s work:
No artist ever owns their artwork.
It belongs to everybody.
He awakens to the click of digital crickets, within the dim blue glow of Emma’s guardian ecosystem. Michelle leans over him. Her face is all shadows.
She places a finger to her lips: Not a sound.
He’s immediately alert—“Are they back?”—one hand reaching for his spex.
She shakes her head, whispers: “Better than that.” Leo catches the nook of a smile.
“Then . . .” Rolling off the cot, pulling on sweatpants. Disentangling himself when his foot goes down the improper leg.
“Come on!”
He follows her into the corridor, the place a bit of touchscreen serves up the feeds from newly-installed, custom-built, Cloud-free safety cameras. Michelle has pulled up the studio view: a jumbled mosaic of angles and shadows, the elastic silhouettes of moonlit windowframes stretched throughout the ground.
Over within the nook, one thing strikes close to the junk pile. No alarms sound.
“They hacked the sensors,” Leo says.
“Sensors are fine,” Michelle tells him. “You just keep disabling them.”
He blinks. “No, I—why would you even say that?”
“Because I know you,” she says. “Because I pay attention.” She asks a query of her personal: “All those pieces that got trashed. The buildings, the sculptures. You actually like any of them?”
He thinks for a second. “Huh.”
Michelle performs with the interface; twenty meters and 4 partitions away a digital camera pans down and left, focuses on that darkish jigsaw in imprecise movement on the ground. She runs her finger up a slider: night-vision turns the within of the studio right into a wash of grainy inexperienced daylight.
Leo’s masturpieces are coalescing.
Like wounded birds, like wind-up toys, they drag and flap and roll throughout the tiles; bump one in opposition to one other and stick, like scattered bones reassembling into some tumorous skeleton. This fragment sports activities a tubercle on one facet; that one, a clean spherical dimple lined with glass. They sniff one another out and soar collectively, ball and socket; joint; limb. Leo thinks he remembers a copper coil in a kind of baubles, a lithium battery properly previous its best-before. He imagines magnetic fields, including the sums of elements.
“It was you all along,” Michelle whispers. She faucets on the nook of her eye. “Just—not this part of you.”
She is radiant within the screenlight. He has by no means seen her so lovely.
Limbs and lenses accrete round a ramshackle torso of servos and thermostats and RAM chips. Leo marvels at how all these items prepare themselves, on the latches and sockets and power fields holding all of it collectively. A bolus of elements seethes and clicks on the finish of 1 appendage: it reminds him of a mace. Of a fist, opening and shutting. The claw of some cyborg crustacean.
The golem takes a step. Another. It half-slithers, half-staggers in the direction of one of many fissures within the west wall: oblique gentle supply, cross-breeze ventilator, too small for something however a toddler contortionist or dismembered physique elements. Leo sees Sierpinsky gaskets and Julia fractals, sleepwalking murderers and comatose intercourse cruisers. He sees Hopf bifurcations and the self-exemplification of course of. The poetry of fabric logic.
Leo Gregory reaches out to take Michelle’s hand as ten thousand jeweled fragments flex, and twist, and disappear into the evening to redeem him.
About the Author
Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor, and convicted felon (lengthy story) whose novels—regardless of an unhealthy concentrate on area vampires—have grow to be required texts for college programs starting from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is obtainable in 24 languages, has appeared in 32 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for 59 awards. His (considerably shorter) listing of twenty-two precise wins consists of the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun. He appears to be particularly common in international locations with a historical past of Soviet occupation. He lives in Toronto with fantasy creator Caitlin Sweet, 5 cats, a pugilistic rabbit, a Plecostomus the dimensions of a faculty bus, a bearded dragon, and a gang of robust raccoons who shake him down for kibble on the porch each summer time.
Please go to LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared within the July 2022 situation, which additionally options work by Isabel Cañas, Lyndsie Manusos, Samuel Peralta, Catherynne M. Valente, R J Theodore & Maurice Broaddus, Micah Dean Hicks, Rich Larson, and extra. You can await this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should purchase the entire situation proper now in handy e-book format for simply $3.99, or subscribe to the e-book version at this hyperlink.
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