"Biological Imperatives"

BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVES
By Curtis C. Chen

"You can't marry him," Donald said to his only daughter. "He's an alien."

"Oh my God, Dad!" Bree threw up her arms. "You sound like a total racist!"

Donald wasn't about to take that bait. "Sweetie, you've only known Roland—"

"Reginald."

"—sorry. You've only known Reginald for what, a couple of months?"

"Three months, one week, and four days!"

"Why get married now?" Donald asked. "You're both still young. Why not wait until you're done with grad school?"

"Dad." Bree rolled her eyes. "I'm not going to give up my life to stay home and cook and clean. I'm still going to finish my Ph.D, I'm going to get a job. My relationship with Reginald won't interfere."

"I just think you should wait."

Bree sighed. "Okay, Dad, I didn't want to mention it, but Reginald has kind of a deadline."

Donald raised an eyebrow. "Don't tell me he's being deported."

"No," Bree said, stretching the word into five syllables. "There's just some stupid thing with his visa expiring, and the UN says he can do his thesis research just as well from the Moon, so they want to issue him Lunar documents instead."

Donald nodded. He could work with this. "Who's Reginald's sponsor?"

"Professor Goslee." Bree's face brightened. "Do you think you can do something?"

"I'll make some calls." Donald scribbled on a notepad. "I'd rather not have you eloping off-planet. At least here I can try to talk you out of things like—"

Bree threw her arms around him momentarily. "Thanks, Dad! I'm going to tell Reginald! Call me as soon as you hear anything, okay?"

"Immediately."

He waited until the sound of Bree's footsteps receded down the hallway, then touched a control on his desktop. The door to the adjacent office slid open, and his wife—Bree's mother—Marney walked in, grimacing.

"You on top of this visa thing?" she asked, staring at her phone.

"I'll take care of it," Donald said.

"Last thing we need is for her to go off-planet. All that radiation exposure in transit..."

Marney still hadn't looked up. That annoyed Donald. "How's your project coming along? Found a sperm donor yet?"

That got her attention. "Finding a donor is not the issue," Marney said, stowing her phone. "Setting up the situation is proving to be tricky."

"How hard can it be to get a college girl drunk and knocked up?"

Donald regretted saying it even before Marney focused her withering scowl on him. "She has to keep the baby. We can't monitor her twenty-four-seven to make sure she doesn't pop a morning-after pill or visit a clinic for the next twenty-six weeks. She has to want the damn child."

"You know," Donald said, "we could convince her and Reginald to try artificial insemination or something—"

"I am not inviting that thing over for Sunday dinner," Marney snapped. "She marries a human or she doesn't marry at all."

Donald looked up at his wife. "Remind me again why we got married?"

Marney scoffed. "I'm sure I don't remember."



Image: Wedding bells for a soldier of Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 238, circa 1915

"Monologue Therapy"

MONOLOGUE THERAPY
By Curtis C. Chen

Look, if your last name was "Day," and your parents named you "Groundhog," wouldn't you want to kill them? I mean, not actually kill them, but have, you know, vaguely homicidal thoughts from time to time? In your imagination?

Come on, you'd at least be bitter toward them.

Not even a little bit?

Okay, see, I don't believe you. I get that you don't understand what we had to deal with growing up—the names, the costumes, the constant crimefighting—but you have to show some sympathy for parental issues. I mean, that's universal. If we can't have an honest, open relationship, then I don't see the point of these sessions at all.

Yeah, I know it's a court order, but that doesn't mean they'll be useful, does it? My sentence specifies a certain number of sessions, totaling no less than a certain number of hours, but it doesn't say anything about the content or outcome of this therapy. And you don't exactly strike me as someone likely to perform above and beyond the call of duty.

Right. You get paid either way. Must be nice to worry about something as mundane as money.

Really? I just laid my mommy and daddy issues on the table, and this is what you want to hear about? Geez, talk about phoning it in.

Okay, fine. Whatever.

It's not the money, specifically. It's just—all the ordinary stuff, you know? The normal, everyday, non-super-powered things that regular people worry about. Carpool schedules. Grocery bills. Traffic.

You've heard this before, right? What's the medical term for it? Grass-is-greener syndrome or something?

"Envy?" That's it? I guess that makes sense. It's been around long enough. One of the original seven deadly, right? Makes sense.

See, nobody ever asks for the life they get. But you normals, you have options. Choices. You got to choose whether you wanted to be a doctor when you grew up, right? Which school to go to, what specialization, where to do your residency? Because no matter how extraordinarily smart or perceptive or strong or fast you are, you're still not that much better than anybody else. You're still human.

It wasn't like that for me, my brothers, my sisters—anyone in my family. The rules are different for us. Some people might look at all the crazy stuff we get away with, all the international travel and diplomatic immunity and fame and all that, and they might think we're just lucky. Lucky that we were born with these abilities, these—powers.

Lucky, maybe. But not good luck. You have something I'll never have, Doc. You have freedom. You get to choose what to do with your life. Me? From the moment I first manifested flight, floating above my crib, my future was set.

Every kid acts out, right? Every teenager finds some way to rebel. People like me just face greater consequences when we do it.

You know what my kid sister's name is? "Arbor."

She never had a chance.



Image: Dr. debilis causa mett wurst Onkel Wart's Hungarian Summer Memories by Thomas Lieser, July, 2009

"It's in There"

IT'S IN THERE
By Curtis C. Chen

Granger sat down next to me on the couch and asked, "How is a pizza like a DVD?"

I swallowed my mouthful of pepperoni-extra-cheese-light-sauce and said, "I don't know. They're both round, and nobody really cares what the box looks like as long as the content is good?"

He smiled at me and took a swig of beer. Granger was one of those men who always looked like he didn't give a damn what you thought. One of those men who could pull off an unironic, pencil-thin mustache.

He smiled at me and said, "You always overthink these things, Lily."

It was the first time he'd ever called me by my first name. We had sex that night. Two weeks later, I pulled his body out of a Dumpster in Brooklyn.

***

The case file flopped onto my desk like a dead fish. I looked up and was surprised to see Lieutenant Humphrey.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Merry Christmas," Humphrey said, walking away.

I opened the file just as Dee sat down across from me with her morning cup of not-coffee. The top sheet was a dense grid of numbers and abbreviations. Bio data?

"What's that?" Dee asked.

"Fuck if I know," I said, flipping up pages until I got to something comprehensible. "Shit."

I stared at a crime scene photo: dead wiseguy, face down in a half-eaten calzone.

***

"Death by pizza?" Dee asked. I was driving, so she had nothing to do but talk.

"It's the sauce," I said. "Some biotech idiots figured out how to grow tomatoes with heat-resistant, human-compatible RNA. The idea was that you'd eat the stuff and it would alter your metabolism, help you lose weight."

"Guess that didn't work out."

"Problems with mutations. Gave people heart problems and hormonal imbalances. Huge recalls. Companies went out of business."

"But the technology's still around." Dee grumbled. "So you a speed reader now, or what? You didn't have that file for five minutes."

"I've seen the case before," I said. "It was Granger's before it went cold."

***

The warehouse was full of uniforms moving evidence-tagged crates. Migdale stood next to a box of fruit, reading the newspaper.

"Ladies," he said as Dee and I walked up.

"If you say so." I looked around. "I was expecting to see some tomatoes."

Migdale picked up both halves of a cut avocado, which looked more yellow than green under the warehouse lights. "Customs sliced this open, for inspection, right before they found the guns. Notice anything odd?"

"It's still green," Dee said. "Those things go brown in seconds."

"Enzymatic browning," Migdale said, "triggered by exposure to oxygen. Unless the fruit contains something to prevent that."

"So they're gene-mods. What's the big deal?"

"They were in the same shipment as illegal munitions and narcotics. Therefore, suspicious. We sent a sample to the lab, and it turns out all the fats in this avocado have been fully saturated."

"The hell does that mean?" Dee asked.

"Data," I said. "They were smuggling data."



Image: "The pizza did get cold before it was solved..." by Tiffany Berry, February, 2007

"H is for Horse"

H IS FOR HORSE
By Curtis C. Chen

Dear Exhibitor:

Welcome to the 83rd annual Horse-Shaped Objects Exposition (H-SOE)! The International Association of Horse-Shaped Object Enthusiasts (IAH-SOE) is very excited to be hosting this year's event in a new venue, the brand-new Simonsays Memorial Horse-Shaped Arena (SMH-SA) in Fortland, Uregon.

IMPORTANT: If you are a returning exhibitor, please make sure your shipping company has the correct venue address and current transport licenses for all your Objects. The Uregon customs inspection service operates under much stricter import regulations than most of the forty-seven other continental United States, and recent events in the city of Fortland have made local law enforcement very sensitive to any unusual Objects. (Please refer to our web site for guidelines on how to pack your fragile Objects for shipment.)

As always, the IAH-SOE strives to organize a peaceful and loving event for all H-SOE exhibitors, dealers, panelists, sponsors, and participants. We have received feedback from many past attendees about space issues at our previous venues, and we hope the move to SMH-SA will alleviate a great number of those problems for many years to come.

IF YOU ARE A DEALER, the marketplace will be open starting at 6:00 PM the night before H-SOE begins to allow you to set up your table. Please consult the enclosed brochure from SMH-SA to determine what supplies you are allowed to bring into the arena.

IF YOU ARE A NON-PROFIT, the display hall will be open starting at 12 NOON the day before H-SOE begins to allow you to set up your booth. Please consult the enclosed brochure from SMH-SA to determine what baptismal equipment you are allowed to bring into the arena.

IMPORTANT: All non-alcoholic liquids are banned in the city of Fortland. However, SMH-SA offers a variety of pharmacological aids to maximize hydration and minimize intoxication. Visit any of the "Liquidation Stations" located throughout the arena for complimentary lozenges or tinctures. (If you are unable to ingest medications orally, please visit SMH-SA's basement dispensary to receive a hypodermic or suppository sirup, also free of charge.)

Your enclosed exhibitor badge is required for admittance to all H-SOE event areas. Please wear it whenever you are inside the SMH-SA security perimeter. Do not laminate your badge or place it inside any protective covering, and make sure the fix-shaped metagraphic seal is clearly visible at all times. If the arena's automated scanners cannot read your badge data, security forces may be paged to your location.

If you have any questions about H-SOE, SMH-SA, or anything else related to IAH-SOE events, please contact Sister Judy Phileman. (If you have inquiries regarding revenues or taxation, please contact Sister Octavia Caesar. All other correspondence should be sent to our principal shrine in Jer-Salem, Ohio.)

We look forward to seeing you in Fortland! And remember:

"For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." (Matt 18:20)

Yours in Horse,
Brother Jonn Timoth



Image: Matchless Beauty by kelsey_lovefusionphoto, June, 2010

"Meet Brute"

MEET BRUTE
By Curtis C. Chen

"That another alien puzzle?"

Linda looked up from her diagnostic table, where the artifact sat inside a vacuum chamber. She didn't recognize the man who had just walked in holding an uncovered mug of coffee.

"It's an artifact," she said, "and you can't have that drink in here, Mister...?"

He switched the mug from his right hand to his left hand, making Linda cringe as the liquid inside sloshed around, then extended his right hand.

"Bell. Marty Bell."

Linda shook his hand, then placed her palms back in the waldo control wells. "You're not allowed to have uncovered liquids in any lab or computer areas."

"Sorry, I didn't know. First day here..." He looked around the empty lab.

"Kitchenette around the corner. Leave it there."

"Thanks."

He returned a minute later, beverage-free, just as Linda was turning over the artifact. There were no symbols on the exterior, but sometimes the surface grooves lined up to make characters in the Az-Orpic language.

Marty said, "You're Linda Tanaka? I'm supposed to report to you." He pulled a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket.

Linda locked the waldos and took the paper. It was a transfer order from the company's weapons division to the advanced research group. That meant Mary already had the proper security clearances, but—

"I'm sorry," Marty said.

Linda looked up and into the barrel of a small revolver.

"Seriously?" she asked.

"Open the chamber," he said, "and step away from the table."

"Okay, you understand why we keep these artifacts in vacuum chambers, right?" Linda said. "Some of these materials react poorly to atmosphere."

Marty hesitated. "Well, how do you transport them, then?"

"It'll take me about fifteen minutes to prep a transfer crate."

"Oh no," Marty said. "You tell me how, I'll do it myself."

"You don't have the training. And it'll take both hands—"

Marty reached into his back pocket and slapped a handful of plastic zip ties down on the table. "Tie yourself up. Ankles first, then wrists."

Linda's company-mandated security training flashed through her mind. She bent down, tied her ankles, then stood up to grab another zip tie. She lost her balance, wobbled, and fell to the floor, landing hard on her shoulder.

"Ow!" she said.

Marty pushed the rest of the zip ties onto the floor next to her. "Hurry up."

Linda picked up a zip tie. "The crates are in that cabinet by the back wall."

As she hoped, Marty turned to look. Linda placed both palms on the floor to brace herself, then swung her legs hard into Marty's shins, knocking him down.

The revolver skittered across the floor. Linda kicked her legs free—she hadn't tied them very tightly—and scrambled over to pick up the weapon. She sat up, turned around, and aimed it at Marty.

He was smiling at her. "Right. Like you know how to use that."

"Smith & Wesson Model 36. Double action, five rounds, .38 caliber."

Linda cocked the hammer. Marty's smile faded.

"Now," Linda said, "who are you working for?"



Image: Sphere/cube vacuum chamber by Jeff Sherman, September, 2005

"A Place in Time"

A PLACE IN TIME
By Curtis C. Chen

Transit always made Judy a little dizzy. As soon as she emerged from the vortex, she found an empty bench and sat down, surveying the park while catching her breath. The people of this century looked so different from her contemporaries—like short, stocky, hairy statues.

To her surprise, she saw movement off one edge of the grass field.

"Not possible," Judy muttered. Then she remembered what the operator had told her before one of her previous transits:

"Well, it's not actually a technical limitation, ma'am. Sure, we gotta comply with commerce regulations and not send too many people each transit, but the technology lets us slice down to the nanosecond level, so we can avoid traveler collisions. And that's only because one nanosecond is the half-life of the positronium stream. Resolution's getting finer all the time, and pretty soon our transit capacity's gonna be pretty much infinite, or close enough that it won't matter..."

Dark hair, cut short, exposed ears, noticeable discoloration over exposed skin areas—this other traveler must have come from an era before her own, and was clearly a man. Judy let out the breath she'd been holding. At least she wouldn't have to confront the thorny issue of what to say if she ever met herself in the past. Not yet, anyway.

She watched the man approach and considered the entertainment value of remaining still a little longer, pretending to be one of the people frozen in this preserved slice of the past. But then she decided her own appearance would give herself away.

Judy stood up just as the man stepped onto the grass. He jumped when he saw her move.

"What the—!" Definitely from the past; that twang was unmistakable. "Who are you?"

"A traveler, like yourself," Judy said. "I'm from the year 3014."

"Three thousand? Wow. I didn't think humanity would last that long—" The man shook his head. "You know what? We shouldn't even be talking. You might accidentally tell me something I shouldn't know."

"Oh, don't worry about that," Judy said. "The Novikov principle dictates that we can't change anything. Determinism and all that."

"Yeah, and exactly how much time traveling did Novikov actually do?"

"I'm told the mathematics are quite airtight."

"You're from the future. Anybody figured out quantum mechanics yet?"

"Not as such."

"Right." The man pointed behind him. "So I'm just going to leave now before we cause some kind of paradox that destroys the universe."

"Wait!" Judy raised a hand. "Perhaps I shouldn't tell you anything, but you can give me information. Time's arrow only flies in one direction, right?"

The man frowned. "What could I possibly tell you?"

"Why are you here?" Judy asked. "That is, why travel to this event, this moment in history? It's not terribly significant, in the grand scheme of things. Most people in my time don't even remember Professor Muntrona."

"Yeah, well, that's my name," the man said. "I'm Frederick Muntrona."

Judy raised an eyebrow. "I had a great-grandfather named Frederick."

Frederick's eyes widened. "Okay, now I really should leave."



Image: squirrel without honor, Washington, DC, July, 2008

"Time is Not on My Side"

TIME IS NOT ON MY SIDE
By Curtis C. Chen

I'm not going to tell you the story you want to hear.

I know what you're going to ask. You want to know how—and why—we "vaccinated" Hitler. Everyone wants to know how we avoided all the other time patrols, how we're still keeping the secret to prevent other incursions from the future. Right?

Well, one way is by not spilling the beans to every green apple who asks.

Anyway, that's a boring story. I'm going to tell you something that really matters. I'm going to tell you how we discovered the singularity limit.

My wife is dead. She died on a Sunday morning, driving home from the market, while I was still asleep. It was an accident. Nobody to blame, nothing to fix so it wouldn't happen again to anybody else.

But of course I wanted her back. And I had a way to save her.

I'd already used my mulligan, the one every cadet gets after graduation. But I was a supervisor by then, I was coding missions, I could sign out injectors whenever I wanted. And I had nothing but time.

I waited. Six months, seven, eight. Started seeing other women so my bosses wouldn't suspect I was planning a breach. I didn't let myself love any of them. I knew what I wanted, and what I wanted was in the past.

Nine months, twelve days, three hours, sixteen minutes. That's how long it was between the moment she died and the moment I went back to save her.

Except it didn't work. Not the first time, not the second time, not the fifteenth. I kept trying until they caught me, and that's when I finally broke down. I hadn't ever cried for Audra, because I always knew—always thought I'd get her back.

The thing is, the universe doesn't care what happens to us. Humans, I mean. Our lives are insignificant on the cosmic scale. We just don't matter. That's why we couldn't figure out the rules of time travel for so long.

Whether one human lives or dies doesn't affect the life of the universe. But a gravitational singularity that destroys a planet, maybe even a star system? That's against the rules. The restrictive action principle will prevent that.

We thought we were so clever, linking the people we considered important to the universe's physically enforced consistency. We thought we'd figured out a way to once again bend the world to our will. Smart monkeys, that's all we are. Banging our useless tools against the fabric of reality.

Audra was one intervention too many. That's the limit: Eight hundred and eighty-nine artificial singularities at one time. A completely random number. It's just the way things are.

The universe doesn't care. You understand? It's up to us to decide what's important, what's meaningful, what we want. But there are always limits. We have to come to terms with the things we can't change if we're ever going to find any happiness in these brief lives.

I'm not drunk. Oh, you'll know when I'm drunk.



Image: Time machine 3026 Steam Punk Assemblage by Don Pezzano, August, 2008

"Meet Suit"

MEET SUIT
By Curtis C. Chen

The public defender, Lirrina Banefs, pulls a small disk out of her briefcase as the three of us sit down around the bare table in the police station "lounge." She places the disk on the table and taps it with two fingers. The disk glows white, and a dot of red light sweeps around its outer edge.

"Jammer?" I ask.

"It's not that I don't trust the police," Lirrina says. "I've just seen one too many monitoring technician accidentally forget to stop recording. And Grunsharii courts are notoriously lenient when it comes to evidence collection methods."

I was prepared to dislike this one, but now she's starting to grow on me.

I look over at Driftis. He's slumped back in his chair, picking at his fingernails. That's not a good sign. What does he want to avoid talking about?

"Unprovoked assault, on the other hand," Lirrina continues, "they're not so keen on. Do you want to tell me what happened, Captain Degge?"

"What does the police report say?" Driftis asks.

Lirrina stares at him for a second. "I usually get two kinds of clients, Captain. There are those who think I can help them, who really hope I can get them out of trouble, and are willing to cooperate and do whatever it takes to assist in their own defense. Then there are those who don't trust me, who think I'm only here for show, and do their best to withhold any information they think might be self-incriminating. I don't have to tell you which kind does better in the end.

"But then there's a third kind. These are people with their own agenda. Maybe they've been in the system before, maybe they just think they know things. They want to manipulate the proceedings for some personal reason. Sometimes they lie to me, sometimes they tell me too much. They're unpredictable."

Lirrina leans forward and folds her hands. "I don't like these clients. I don't like how they work against me, I don't like how they think they know more about my job than I do, I don't like how they think they're smarter than the system. Because these are the people who screw everything up for the rest of us.

"We are a civilized society, Captain. Our rules exist for a reason, and our justice system, while it may not be perfect, is the way it is because of centuries of use and refinement. I don't like people who think they're better than all that. I don't like people who disrespect what I've dedicated my life and career to."

She leans back and spreads her hands. "But I'm still going to defend you to the best of my ability. Because that's my oath. I just want to know what kind of relationship we're going to have here, Captain."

Driftis nods. "You give that speech to all your clients?"

Lirrina shrugs. "More or less."

"Pretty good speech."

"Thanks." Lirrina almost smiles. "So. What happened out there?"



Image: Oranjello...laying[sic] in the briefcase by ClintJCL, July, 2008