> inventory
You’re carrying the following items:
A sheaf of letters
An unlit torch, half filled with oil
> Ha! I got it, Ryder!
I don’t understand what you want to do.
> TELL Spring to light torch
Spring takes the torch from you.
He opens up his front panel, revealing the whirling gears inside.
He touches the tip of one of his steel fingers against a spinning gear and sparks fly out. One of them lands on the torch. The smell of rose fills the room, dispelling the musty smell.
Spring hands the lit torch to you.
> shake torch
You hear something rattle inside the torch, a crystalline sound.
> hold torch upside down
Some of the oil drips out, but the rest, remarkably, stays put.
You can feel the handle of the torch grow hot.
A rattling sound comes from inside the torch, eventually settling into a rapid tap-tap-tap.
“A TORCH,” you say triumphantly, “becomes a HCROT when turned around.”
Spring claps.
> move left
You are next to the wall.
The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.
> move forward
You move toward the window.
The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.
> move right
You’re standing in front of the desk.
The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.
Spring looks at you. “I don’t hear any difference.”
“I think it’s supposed to vibrate faster and make a different sound when it gets closer to the Augustine Module,” you say.
“Supposed to. Maybe we need something else.”
> inventory
You’re carrying a sheaf of letters.
> examine letters
You have a burning torch held upside down in your hand. If you try that you’re going to burn the letters before you can read them.
> hand torch to Spring
Spring takes the torch from you.
“You might as well move around the room a bit,” you say. “Try the corners I haven’t tried.”
> examine letters
You read aloud from the next letter.
Castellan,
I am utterly devastated at this news.
Please have the body embalmed but do not bury her yet. Do not release the news until I figure out what to do.
Spring has wandered some distance away. The rattling in the torch has slowed down, more like a tap, tap, tap.
You’re too stunned by what you’re reading to stop. You turn to the next letter.
Artificer,
I would like you to fashion an automaton that is an exact replica of my poor, darling Alex. It must be so lifelike that no one can tell them apart.
When the automaton is complete, you must install in it the jewel I have enclosed with this letter. Then you may dispose of the body.
No, do not refuse. I know that you know what it is. If you refuse, I shall make it so that you will never create anything again.
The campaign is so heated here that I cannot step away and let Cedric sway them. Yet, if the news is released that my daughter is dead and I am refusing to go home to mourn her, Cedric will make hay of it and make me appear to be some kind of monster.
No, there is only one solution. No one must know that Alex has died.
Spring is now in the hallway. The rattling in the torch has slowed down to an occasional tap, like the start of a gentle bit of rain. Tap…Tap…Tap…
> TELL Spring to return
Spring comes closer. Tap, tap, tap.
Spring is now next to you. Tap-tap-tap.
> TELL Spring to hand over the torch
Spring hands the torch to you. Tap-tap-tap.
“Did you know?” you ask.
“I have been with you for only four years,” Spring says.
“But I remember playing with you when I was a baby! You never told me they weren’t real memories.”
Spring shrugs. The sound is harsh, mechanical. “Your father programmed me. I do what I’m told to do. I know what I’m told to know.”
You think about the letters. You think about how vague and hazy your memories of your childhood are, how nothing in those memories is ever distinct, as if they were stories told to you a hundred times until they seemed real.
You bring the torch closer to your chest. The heat makes you flinch. TapTapTap.
You wonder where she’s buried. Is it in the garden, right underneath your bedroom window, where the lilies bloom? Or is it farther back, in the clearing in the woods where you like to catch fireflies at night?
You bring the torch even closer. The flame licks at your hair and a few strands curl and singe. T-t-t-t-t-ap.
You tear open the dress on you to reveal the flesh beneath. You put a hand against your chest and feel the pulsing under the skin. You wonder what will happen if you slash it open with a knife.
Will you see a beating heart? Or whirling gears and tightly wound springs surrounding a rainbow-hued jewel?
It is one thing to be ignorant, and another thing to be unwilling to know.
* * *
Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Liu’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was released in April 2015 by Saga Press. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories later in 2015. Learn more about Liu’s work at www.kenliu.name.
KILLSWITCH
Catherynne M. Valente
In the spring of 1989 the Karvina Corporation released a curious game, whose dissemination among American students that fall was swift and furious, though its popularity was ultimately short-lived.
The game was Killswitch.
On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the Myst and Silent Hill franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague gray and white shapes against a black background. Slow MIDI versions of Czech folk songs play throughout. Players could choose between two avatars: an invisible demon named Ghast or a visible human woman, Porto. Play as Ghast was considerably more difficult due to his total invisibility, and players were highly liable to restart the game as Porto after the first level, in which it was impossible to gauge jumps or aim. However, Ghast was clearly the more powerful character—he had fire-breath and a coal-steam attack, but as it was above the skill level of most players to keep track of where a fire-breathing, poison-dispensing invisible imp was on their screens once the fire and steam had run out, Porto became more or less the default.
Porto’s singular ability was seemingly random growth—she expanded and contracted in size throughout the game. A Kansas engineering grad claimed to have figured out the pattern involved, but for reasons that will become obvious, his work was lost.
Porto awakens in the dark with wounds in her elbows, confused. Seeking a way out, she ascends through the levels of a coal mine in which it is slowly revealed she was once an employee, investigating its collapse and beset on all sides by demons similar to Ghast, as well as dead foremen, coal-golems, and demonic inspectors from the Sovatik Corporation, whose boxy bodies were clothed in red, the only color in the game. The environment, though primitive, becomes genuinely uncanny as play progresses. There are no “bosses” in any real sense—Porto must simply move physically through tunnels to reach subsequent levels while her size varies wildly through inter-level spaces.
The story that emerges through Porto’s discovery of magnetic tapes, files, and mutilated factory workers who were once her
friends, and deciphering of an impressively complex code inscribed on a series of iron axes players must collect (this portion of the game was almost laughably complex, and it defeated many players until “Porto881” posted the cipher to a Columbia BBS; attempts to contact this player have been unsuccessful, and the username is no longer in use on any known service) is that the foremen, under pressure to increase coal production, began to falsify reports of malfunctions and worker malfeasance in order to excuse low output, which incited a Sovatik inspection. Officials were dispatched, one for each miner, and an extraordinary story of torture unfolds, with fuzzy and indistinct graphics of red-coated men standing over workers, inserting small knives into their joints whenever production slowed. (Admittedly, this is not a very subtle critique of Soviet-era industrial tactics, and as the town of Karvina itself was devastated by the departure of the coal industry, more than one thesis has interpreted Killswitch as a political screed.)
After solving the axe code, Porto finds and assembles a tape recorder, on which a male voice tells her that the fires of the earth had risen up in their defense and flowed into the hearts of the decrepit, prerevolution equipment they used and wakened them to avenge the workers. It is generally assumed that the “fires of the earth” are demons like Ghast, coal fumes and gassy bodies inhabiting the old machines. The machines themselves are so “big” that the graphics elect to only show two or three gear teeth or a conveyor belt rather than the entire apparatus. The machines drove the inspectors mad, and they disappeared into caverns with their knives (only to emerge to plague Porto, of course). The workers were often crushed and mangled in the onslaught of machines, which were neither graceful nor discriminating. Porto herself was knocked into a deep chasm by a grief-stricken engine, and her fluctuating size, if it is real and not imagined, is implied to be the result of poisonous fumes inhaled there.
What follows is the most cryptic and intuitive part of the game. There is no logical reason to proceed in the “correct” way, and again it was Porto881 who came to the rescue of the fledgling Killswitch community. In the chamber behind the tape recorder is a great furnace where coal was once rendered into coke. There are no clues as to what she is intended to do in this room. Players attempted nearly everything, from immolating herself to continuing to process coal as if the machines had never risen up. Porto881 hit upon the solution, and posted it to the Columbia boards. If Porto ingests the raw coke, she will find her body under control, and can go on to fight her way out of the final levels of the mine, which are impassable in her giant state, clutching the tape containing this extraordinary story. However, as she crawls through the final tunnel to emerge aboveground, the screen goes suddenly white.
Killswitch, by design, deletes itself upon player completion of the game. It is not recoverable by any means; all trace of it is removed from the user’s computer. The game cannot be copied. For all intents and purposes it exists only for those playing it, and then ceases to be entirely. One cannot replay it, unlocking further secrets or narrative pathways, one cannot allow another to play it, and perhaps most important, it is impossible to experience the game all the way to the end as both Porto and Ghast.
Predictably, player outcry was enormous. Several routes to solve the problem were pursued, with no real efficacy. The first and most common was to simply buy more copies of the game, but Karvina Corporation released only five thousand copies and refused to press further editions. The following is an excerpt from their May 1990 press release:
KILLSWITCH WAS DESIGNED TO BE A UNIQUE PLAYING EXPERIENCE: LIKE REALITY, IT IS UNREPEATABLE, UNRETRIEVABLE, AND ILLOGICAL. ONE MIGHT EVEN SAY INEFFABLE. DEATH IS FINAL; DEATH IS COMPLETE. THE FATES OF PORTO AND HER BELOVED GHAST ARE AS UNKNOWABLE AS OUR OWN. IT IS THE DESIRE OF THE KARVINA CORPORATION THAT THIS BE SO, AND WE ASK OUR CUSTOMERS TO RESPECT THAT DESIRE. REST ASSURED KARVINA WILL CONTINUE TO PROVIDE THE HIGHEST QUALITY OF GAMES TO THE WEST, AND THAT KILLSWITCH IS MERELY ONE AMONG OUR MANY WONDERS.
This did not have the intended effect. The word “beloved” piqued the interest of committed, even obsessive players, as Ghast is not present in any portion of Porto’s narrative. A rush to find the remaining copies of the game ensued, with the intent of playing as Ghast and discovering the meaning of Karvina’s cryptic word. The most popular theory was that Ghast would at some point become the fumes inhaled by Porto, changing her size and beginning her adventure. Some thought this was wishful thinking, that if only Ghast’s early levels were passable, one would somehow be able to play as both simultaneously. However, by this time no further copies appeared to be available in retail outlets. Players who had not yet completed the game attempted Ghast’s levels frequently, but the difficulty of actually playing this enigmatic avatar persisted, and no player has ever claimed to have finished the game as Ghast. One by one, the lure of Porto’s lost, unearthly world drew them back to her, and one by one, they were compelled toward the finality of the vast white screen.
To find any copy usable today is an almost unfathomably rare occurrence; a still shrink-wrapped copy was sold at auction in 2005 for $733,000 to Yamamoto Ryuichi of Tokyo. It is entirely possible that Yamamoto’s is the last remaining copy of the game. Knowing this, Yakamoto had intended to open his play to all enthusiasts, filming and uploading his progress. However, to date, the only film that has surfaced is a one-minute-and-forty-five-second clip of a haggard Yamamoto at his computer, the avatar-choice screen visible over his right shoulder.
Yamamoto is crying.
* * *
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton; James Tiptree, Jr.; Mythopoeic; Rhysling; Lambda Literary; Locus; and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
TWARRIOR
Andy Weir
“Connors,” Jake said into the phone for the fourth time. “C-O-N-N-O-R-S.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Connors,” said the woman on the other end. “I’m not showing any citations under that name. Did you get the ticket within the last three days? Sometimes it takes a while to get into the system.”
“It was over a month ago.”
“Maybe you misunderstood the officer at the time? Maybe he just gave you a warning.”
“I have the ticket right here,” he said. “Speeding: fifty in a thirty-five zone. And I’m guilty as sin, by the way. No argument there. I just want to pay the damned thing. But I need to know what I owe and where to send it.”
“You don’t owe us anything, sir. You have no outstanding citations. Your last citation was three years ago on May thirteenth and it’s paid in full.”
Jake groaned. “I just know this is going to bite me in the ass. I’m going to get a Failure to Appear and I’ll owe thousands.”
“I don’t know what to do for you,” she said. “I’m looking at the database and there’s just no ticket.”
“All right,” Jake said, exasperated. “Thanks anyway.”
He hung up.
He turned to his computer and brought up his online banking site. He shook his head forlornly at the balance. If that ticket ended up being more than $500, he’d be eating instant noodles for the rest of the month.
After a long career in the computer industry, he had somehow managed to avoid the wealth and prosperity most engineers found. Three decades of working for charities, causes, and other well-meaning (but broke) organizations had left him with a tiny apartment and no savings. “Making the world a better place” hadn’t been a lucrative career path.
With a sigh, he closed his browser.
Before he had a chance to turn off his monitor, an instant-message window popped open. The message read “faggot.”
He scowled and checked the title bar for the name of the sender, but it was blank.
“Fuck off,” he typed back.
“whats ur problem?” came the immediate reply.
“The fact that there’s an asshole messaging me,” he responded.
“wrong. whats ur problem?”
“We’re done here,” Jake typed.
He brought up the options menu and selected “Block messages from this sender.” An error popped up in response. “Unable to execute operation.”
He tried again, and the same error came up.
Then another message appeared in the window. “u cant block me.”
Jake stared at the computer in shock. Most likely he’d been hacked. That was bad enough, but to make things worse he’d just been at his banking website. So his online banking password was probably also compromised. He’d have to change it as soon as possible, but it’d be reckless to do it from a hacked system.
He frowned at the message window, then typed, “Who are you?”
“Twarrior. whats ur problem?”
The name sounded familiar somehow, but he couldn’t quite place it…
“i fixed ur speeding ticket,” Twarrior said. “but u called county clerk. u no liek?”
How did the hacker know Jake had made that call? He looked over at his phone suspiciously. Had it been hacked, too? He returned his attention to the computer and typed, “Are you some kind of wannabe hacker?”
“no u.”
“What does that even mean?”
“u r hacker. not me.”
“I’ve never done anything like that.”
“yah u did. u doin it rite nao. u just fixed ur parking ticket.”
“No, *you* did that.”
“no u!”
Jake sighed. “Lemme guess, you’re some 12-year-old kid and you think you’re awesome because you found a password fishing script?”