El Alma Perdida de Marguerite Espinoza

by Jeremiah Tolbert

Marguerite Espinoza took her last breath as the sun slipped behind the Salt Mountains outside the expansive windows of her third floor bedchamber. Alvardo nearly missed the moment, eavesdropping to the gathered family’s whispered conversations. He had falsely predicted her passing four times in the past three days, but the passing was unmistakable. As Maestro Eusebio had said many times, “When the moment comes, you will know.” And he did.

The color from her eyes drained, leaving only pale white marbles that matched Alvardo’s own. Before the vessel could expel its final breath, Alvardo covered her lips with his own and inhaled sharply and deeply. There was no emotion in the act. It was a fact of his training, something that he must do.

(Continue Reading…)

Far as You Can Go

by Greg van Eekhout

I didn’t go to school because I was allergic to the neuroboosters, but that didn’t mean I was stupid. It just meant I had a lot of time on my hands. Mostly, I hung out with Beeman, scrap-combing all over Ex-Town and trading metal and electronic bits and whatever for food and goods and services. We were good businessmen.

Beeman was a robot, only it didn’t matter so much to me because all the skin on his face was torn away so you could see his plastic cheeks and hear the whiz-whirr of his eyes when they moved. This made him okay, because he wasn’t pretending to be a person or anything else he wasn’t. He wasn’t trying to be fake.

We were going over our day’s take the afternoon that I first smelled the Far-away. The grey outlines of the downtown towers faded into the sky like sick ghosts, and over our heads, police stingers whined, invisible in the haze. Beeman and I sat with our backs against a crumbled section of concrete wall. At my feet was a can of split-pea soup, not too far out of date, a couple of nine volt batteries, a coil of O-net cable, and two stainless steel rods that were maybe chopsticks.

“Good trade,” Beeman said, his words beginning and ending with a little click that I wished would go away. The click hadn’t always been there in his speech, but I figured his voicebox was a little broken.

“Except for the soup,” I said. “I’ll bring that home to my mom.”

“Your mom is fat and eats too much.”

“Shut your grill.” I banged the soup can against his head, but not hard enough to dent either. Beeman wasn’t trying to be mean. He just had some bad lines of code.

Excision

by Scott H. Andrews

We started immediately.  Scolast Giazla had a series of rabbits she’d infected by treating their grafts with offal.  I selected the most advanced sample, a brown spotted one with a cat’s striped forepaw, to perform the control.

I closed my eyes and pressed my palm to the rabbit’s warm shoulder. I focused on the weak energies simmering in its body, and the spherical image of its vita appeared in my mind.  A foreign strand wriggled across the round core:  the necrotia from the infection.  I reached my mind forward to grab it, but I couldn’t get a firm hold.  I tried twice, with no success.

We couldn’t use the control animal again or we would compromise the trials.  So I extracted all the remaining vita to extinguish the rabbit.  The rush of energy swirled in my head.  I felt a pang of shame as I remembered the Nüthren exumancers in their white shrouds. Those savages had no laws forbidding the draining of vita from living beings, even humans.  We only used vivomancy to save peoples’ lives.

I prepared the first trial with the hot water bath.  The feverish rabbit fell unconscious after a minute in the water.  Scolast Giazla lowered her knobby hand to its shoulder, above the septic graft.  The sinews quivered in her wrist.  She finally broke contact with a strangled gasp.