Ryan Schneider's Blog, page 4

Excerpt from Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan in The Artificial Intelligence Storybundle #SFWApro

QUEEN CITY JAZZby
KATHLEEN ANN GOONAN
Excerpt from Chapter One:
True SimplicityJohn was blue, steady as the blue light far down the abandoned maglev track; Verity and Cairo had walked down it one spring day when Verity was only ten though she was forbidden by Evangeline. Verity watched the light in wonder, thinking of John. It still received the hidden signal programmed into its chips, activated, John told her, by power stored in its solar battery.Verity had flipped her straw hat back over her shoulders so that it hung by the string around her neck and watched the light for a long time before Cairo, her dog, grew restless and thrust the picture of home before her relentlessly, several times. It was a plain, white frame house on a low hill protruding from a glittering green sea of soy and corn, five miles from the Great Miami River. Solar power was allowed by the Scriptures, as long as it was not enlivened, and they had several ancient panels on their roof which John had foraged from far-off Columbus.Verity had gone with John, when she was little; urging the horse on with pictures of oats, though John thought it was the flick of his whip that moved the beast. The empty, deactivated City scolded them audibly for disconnecting the solar panels. It terrified and fascinated her. She begged to go back, but John had been more spooked than she, and it was several day’s journey besides. One wagonload was all they got from Columbus. Cincinnati was closer, but it was still living, and the Scriptures absolutely forbade contact with an Enlivened City. John wasn’t too comfortable about Dayton either, although it was only about ten miles away.And if people were colors then Sare was yellow like warm golden cornmeal after it was ground at the mill on Bear Creek, or the sun just after it rose over the fields and forests of Western Ohio. Evangeline, Sare’s twin sister, was hard and green like the emerald ring Verity wore on her right hand. They were both around forty.Blaze, nineteen, was wild as an orange autumn sunset seen through the black branches of the bare orchard just before storm set in. That wild sound was in him too, of branches rattling furious in wind rushing from the flat plains to the west, crystallizing the sky with rapid frigidity. Verity loved weather, and weather’s changes, and how people were like weather. She had once hooked into some old weathersats and eddied through years of the quickened flow of storm systems for several hours before John flung open the door of the evening-darkened library and rudely disconnected her, telling her roughly that she could read all she liked but to stay away from that and that she didn’t need to know. That annoyed her. Weather, she told John, is very important to farmers and he said well that weather’s a century old, a lot’s happened since then.But she often crept into that corner of the library afterwards and hooked herself in. Russ said it was all right, anyway. Anything in the library was for them all. John was not the boss. He only thought he was sometimes. The tiny bumps behind her ears where she hooked in hadn’t been discovered till she’d been cleared, certified, and taken from Edgetown, just outside Cincinnati. At that time Verity was, by their best estimation, three years old.Sare had told Verity how she had found the nubs, the second day Verity was with them. Sare was braiding Verity’s hair when she felt the right nub with her little finger. “I trembled,” she said. “Then I pulled back your hair for a better look. I’m not the fainting type, but I almost fainted then.” Verity had been certified plague-free by a Certifier–an old man–in Edgetown. Verity didn’t remember it, but apparently she was taken inside a small black building for a while and brought out with a nod. The Shakers had no idea what went on inside the building, just knew that they trusted the old man as he had been a friend of a long-dead Sister. Yet though she was plague-free, the nubs proclaimed her abnormal, and the source and effect of this anomaly was completely unknown to the Shakers and therefore to be feared.They had called a Meeting immediately. Verity could imagine the arguments, but they loved her already and kept her of course, despite the unknown danger.The Shakers had not dared venture back to Edgetown since they had added Verity to Shaker Hill, even though four Elders and two Elderesses had died and should have been replaced. They never really talked about it, but Verity knew it was because of her. The nubs behind her ears were proof of some sort of tampering; tampering which might infect the Shakers in some unknown way or even kill them. The Shakers took responsibility for her, but fear of the unknown kept them from returning to Edge-town for more children, and the community had dwindled. Twenty years ago, it had been thriving, with fifty Brethren, mostly very old people. The last of those old ones had died when Verity was a child.But so far, in all the years of her growing up, Verity had posed no danger. She seemed quite normal. She knew she was lucky to be at Shaker Hill; they told her so, and she believed it. Her days and nights were part of a larger Shaker cycle bound to the land, exploiting nothing, using what they needed. They were all going to Heaven when they died, which was a lot like Ohio, all ordered and filled with the living light that Verity felt she saw everyone moving through fairly often, especially in the evening when they were preparing dinner, and sometimes when they all worked to get the hay in. Most of them did not like Cairo much. She had come wagging out of a thicket a few years earlier, and became Verity’s dog. They were inseparable.The rest of her family was a jumble of doors–the private rooms in which the Brothers and Sisters lived–and kind faces, arms that hugged, voices that scolded or more often gently corrected and instructed, a deep and wide community that held her in a hammock of relationships until she was sixteen, and taking in the triticale harvest by herself since Tai Tai was not feeling well that day.Verity hadn’t seen the Flowers since she was a child, but often longed for them with a shortening of breath, an ache in her chest, with a vision that spread out inside her mind like the growing light of day. And she had found it hard to believe that Bees were almost as large as humans (if they even existed at all, that is), but that day of harvest, when she was sixteen, she found that it was so.Her back ached from bending over with the scythe. Her bike lay on its side a quarter mile away, at the top of the bank above the flood plain where she worked, its rust-flowered blue paint catching the sun. The Great Miami River glittered wide, deep, and olive-green, edged by a steep drop-off at the end of the field. It overflowed its banks each spring, making this fertile ground and worth the fifteen-minute bike ride. The remains of a small, old town, Miamisburg, lay across the river. The earthquake flood had swept much of it away. A few remaining sections of a fallen iron bridge lay tangled in the river below.Verity’s rhythmic swipes slowed as a foreign vibration entered her body even before she could hear it. Cairo, who had been lying in a cool thicket at the edge of the field, leaped up and whined.Verity turned, shaded her eyes with her hand, and saw against the sun a small black dot which grew steadily larger.It was following the path of the river.And it was a Bee.Sweat burned her eyes as she stared. She was twenty feet from the bluff overlooking the river, and wanted to run, take cover, but couldn’t move. Her heart contracted in fear as she gradually realized how large it was.Her entire body hummed as the Bee halted and hovered near her, over the middle of the river and about thirty feet above in the air. She was caught in the rush of air stirred by its wings, in the loud, lovely tone they gave forth in vibrating, almost as if the strength of the sound could lift her too.Soft gold and brown bands circled its body and glowed in the sun. Its front was a black complication of shiny parts. The eyes that stared at her reminded her of the heart of a Black-eyed Susan. Pictures hummed in the air between them, and Cairo leaped up, stiff-legged, and began to bark.A man’s face was before her, half torn away and unrecognizable. Spurting blood and gray brains mixed with ivory splinters of bone. The remaining eye stared lifeless and she felt deep horror yet could not look away.Vision segued insistently to a woman lying dead in a white room, her pale face washed by blinking green and blue lights. Deep anguish and inexplicable guilt seized Verity.The next instant Verity stood on the edge of a high chasm surrounded by tall buildings. Far below flowed rivers of light. Across the chasm an impossibly huge iris moved in the night wind, filling her with deep happiness which switched suddenly to a darkness she fully believed would never, never end.Her own anguished cry startled her. Her vision cleared. She saw the field, the river, the sky above.And the Bee.Faced with the hovering Bee, her hair blown back from her face by the wind from the vibrating wings, Verity knew with stunned and instant certainty that the pictures came from Cincinnati, yet did not know why she saw them, what they meant, or why they tore at her.But she suddenly realized what would happen next.Visit Kathleen Ann Goonan at https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.goonan, www.goonan.com, www.goonan.com/blog, and on Twitter @KathleenAnnGoonanThe  A.I. Storybundle  is live but only for twelve more days until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Download yours today for the Spring only at https://storybundle.com/ai

Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan is in the Artificial Intelligence Storybundle! #SFWApro

Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann GoonanIn Verity’s world, nanotech plagues decimated the population after an initial renaissance of utopian nanotech cities.  Verity has been raised, an orphan, in a tiny Shaker revival community where all are forbidden contact with the enlivened Cities.  Yet as she grows up on the isolated farm, she is often drawn to the City of Dayton, abandoned nearby, and to its self-contained and still-functioning library.  Her happy life is suddenly destroyed when the Shakers, in spite of their precautions, contract a nanotech plague that possesses them.  Blaze, the only young man in the community and Verity’s best friend, is shot by a crazed elder.And so Verity, with her dog Cairo—and the body of Blaze wrapped in a nanotech cocoon—sets off on a quest to the Enlivened City of Cincinnati.  It is a place of legend, walled off from the rest of the world. Where huge bio-engineered bees carry information through the streets and enormous nanotech flowers burst from the tops of strange buildings.  It is the place where Blaze might be brought back from the brink of death.But Cincinnati is a city of dreams turned into nightmares, endlessly reliving the fantasies of its creator, a city that Verity must rule-or die.This impressive first novel by an experienced story writer combines hallucinogenic visions, historical personae and an original futuristic dystopia. Young Verity has been raised by a reconstructionist Shaker group that bases its religion on the American cult that banned sex and believed in “simple” virtues. The adolescent has strange powers and mysterious compulsions that cause her to seek out and learn things from technologies that her adoptive community has forsaken. After tragedy strikes her “family,” Verity packs up several precious burdens and repairs to the technologically superior but dangerously insane “enlivened” city of Cincinnati. There she meets the passionate jazz musician Sphere and becomes embroiled in mutating versions of a nanotech plague and overlapping views of the historical facts that led to the destruction of rational civilization. In Cincinnati she learns her true identity and how to affect the city’s destiny. Highlights of the book include a scene in which Ernest Hemingway gets kicked off a baseball team because he’s not a “team player” and a mini-lesson in the communication techniques of bees. Also a pleasure is watching the intelligent heroine grapple with responsibility, passion and artistic creation. Goonan’s work is powerful and richly textured. –Publisher’s WeeklyA postmodern speculative fiction on American contributions to the arts–jazz, comics, abstract expressionism, and literature–embodied by Verity’s quest for her origin.“An unforgettable vision of America transfigured by a new and utterly apocalyptic technology.” — William Gibson“In the hands of Kathleen Ann Goonan, the science of science fiction becomes something lyrical and vividly human, and the intricately imagined future she presents is thus rendered completely plausible and poignant in the extreme. Queen City Jazz is hands down the best first novel I’ve read in the genre in the past ten years.” –Lucius ShepardFrom Library Journal
In a future warped by nanotechnology-gone-mad, a young woman leaves the protected community of Shaker Hill and embarks on a journey to the “enlivened” city of Cincinnati. Hoping to find answers to questions long forbidden by people who learned to reject the technology that betrayed them, Verity discovers the key to the future within herself. Goonan’s first novel combines gentle Shaker philosophy with kaleidoscopic images drawn from Cincinnati’s Jazz Age. The resulting heady blend deserves a place in most sf collections. –Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.Kathleen Ann Goonan is a writer, critic, and, presently, a Visiting Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she teaches Creative Writing and Literature.
Her 2007 novel IN WAR TIMES won the prestigious Campbell Award for Best Novel of 2007. Her first novel, QUEEN CITY JAZZ, was a New York Times Notable Book and a British Science Fiction Award finalist, and her second, THE BONES OF TIME, was an Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist. CRESCENT CITY RHAPSODY and LIGHT MUSIC were Nebula Award finalists.Visit Kathy at https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.goonan, www.goonan.com, www.goonan.com/blog, and on Twitter @KathleenAnnGoonanThe  A.I. Storybundle  is live, but only until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Download yours today only at https://storybundle.com/ai

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology in the Artificial Intelligence Storybundle! About the Editors, John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly #SFWApro

About the Editors of Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk AnthologyJames Patrick Kelly is the Hugo, Nebula, and Italia award–winning author of Burn, Think Like a Dinosaur, and Wildlife. He is a member of the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He has co-edited a series of anthologies with John Kessel, described by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as “each surveying with balance and care a potentially disputed territory within the field.” Kelly is the technology columnist for Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and the publisher of the e-book ’zine Strangeways.John Kessel is a Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus award winner and the author of Corrupting Dr. Nice, Good News From Outer Space, and The Pure Product. His latest novel, The Moon and the Other, is scheduled for publication on April 4, 2017. He teaches courses in science-fiction, fantasy, and fiction writing at North Carolina State University. His criticism has appeared in Foundation, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Age.The  A.I. Storybundle  is live, but only until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura R. Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Download yours today only at https://storybundle.com/ai

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology! William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Walter Jon Williams, Cory Doctorow, Jonathan Lethem, Paolo Bacigalupi Stories in the Artificial Intelligence Storybundle! #SFWApro

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly and John KesselFrom the grittiness of Mirrorshades to the Singularity and beyond, it’s time to reboot the revolution. Are you ready?These sixteen extreme stories reveal a government ninja routed by a bicycle repairman, the inventor of digitized paper hijacked by his college crush, a dead boy trapped in a warped storybook paradise, and the queen of England attacked with the deadliest of forbidden technology: a working modem. You’ll meet Manfred Macx, renegade meme-broker, Red Sonja, virtual reality sex-goddess, and Felix, humble sys-admin and post-apocalyptic hero.Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel (Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology) have united cyberpunk visionaries William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Walter Jon Williams with the new post-cyberpunk vanguard, including Cory Doctorow, Jonathan Lethem, and Paolo Bacigalupi. Including a canon-establishing introduction and excerpts from a hotly contested online debate,  Rewired is the first anthology to define and capture the crackling excitement of the post-cyberpunks.“Fascinating, and indispensable to any serious SF reader…Rewired is one of the best imaginable anthologies covering what SF is doing right now….”
—Andrew Wheeler“…cyberpunk has grown past its rebel stage and is now not only capable of dazzling us with surfaces but also of speaking of the human condition….”
—Tangent“…an excellent collection and a reminder that the short story is often the best venue for new ideas in the field.”
—SF Crowsnest“…sixteen inspiring, mind-altering stories…and every story in the bunch is a knockout.”
—BoingBoing.netFor more about other books published by Tachyon Publications, please visit  https://tachyonpublications.com/ The  A.I. Storybundle  is live, but only until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura R. Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Download yours today for the Spring only at https://storybundle.com/ai Tags

Excerpt from Arachne By @LisaSMason The Artificial Intelligence @Storybundle! #SFWApro

1
Linking InThe chair waits for her in the ruby-lit room. Carly Quester steps inside, slams the door. The chair sits in silence. Carly stalks around it, kicks its ugly feet, glares at it.The chair is primitive, plain-legged, straight-backed. It is rude and mean, as impersonal as the gridlock. Black plastic wires loop and trail all around it. A red switch juts up from one arm. Platinum beams angle into a frame that will pitilessly grip her when the power switches on and her body jolts.Carly Quester is a slim-limbed genny with customized morphing. Strands of copper and gold thread her hair, which falls to her shoulders in style de nuevo. Ebony lash implants line her eyes, a romantic gift from her father in the sixteenth year after the lab decanted her. Wide feathered brows and curved cheekbones hint at the Sino-Slavic bioworks her pragmatic mother had chosen. She slicks her lips plum-red.Seated in other chairs, in other rooms, she will cross a silk-stockinged ankle over the other knee, and she thinks nothing of striding up the quake-cracked hills of the City in her gray-snake, four-inch heels.She’s just turned the age when you start to do things in the world.She sits down, knees side by side.Straps of black plastic, filmy with dried sweat, lie limp on the chair’s arms and legs. She snaps the straps over her own arms, her own legs. A mocking slap of cruelty, that she should have to strap herself into the chair.She breathes deeply—one, two, three—preparing for the moment when the power switches on and the neckjack descends.But how can anyone ever really prepare?It’s fine to speculate, to envision bravery. You strap in. You sneer at the ruby-lit walls. You jeer at the wires. You welcome the bite of the neckjack, welcome the pain.And Carly?She kicks at the wires with a high heel. With her forefinger curving over the arm’s edge, she yanks the red switch herself just to do it, cool tool.With a shudder, she leans back. Her spine presses the master control. The control signals the headpiece to descend with a rasping whine. Wireworks yawn open, clamp down around her skull.In front of her, the comm flickers on, flooding her eyes with jade luminescence. A hum commences, rising up in an awful crescendo. The neckjack darts out on a robotic cable, its tiny platinum beak biting deep into the linkslit installed at the back of Carly’s neck.The red switch clicks, and the power slams on.Lisa Mason is the author of eight novels, including Summer of Love, A Time Travel (Bantam), a San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book and Philip K. Dick Award Finalist, The Gilded Age, A Time Travel (Bantam) a New York Times Notable Book and New York Public Library Recommended Book, a collection of previously published fiction, Strange Ladies: 7 Stories (Bast Books), and two dozen stories and novellas in magazines and anthologies worldwide. Mason’s Omni story, “Tomorrow’s Child,” sold outright as a feature film to Universal Studios. Her first novel, Arachne, debuted on the Locus Hardcover Bestseller List.
Visit her at  Lisa Mason’s Official Website  for books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, and blogs, adorable pet pictures, forthcoming projects, fine art and bespoke jewelry by San Francisco artist Tom Robinson, worldwide Amazon.com links for Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and Spain, and more!
And on  Lisa Mason’s Blog , on her  Facebook Author Page , on her  Facebook Profile Page , on  Amazon , on  Goodreads , on  LinkedIn , on  Twitter  at @lisaSmason, at  Smashwords , at Apple, at Kobo, and at  Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America .The  A.I. Storybundle  is live, but only until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Stock up your ereader for the Spring only at https://storybundle.com/ai

Arachne By @LisaSMason is in the Artificial Intelligence @Storybundle! #SFWApro

Arachne by Lisa MasonHigh above the dangerous streets of post-quake San Francisco Island, mechanically modified professionals link minds in a cybernetic telespace to push through big deals and decisions at lightning speed. But unexplained telelink blackouts and bizarre hallucinations have marred mediator Carly Quester’s debut appearance before a computer-generated Venue—forcing her to consider delicate psychic surgery at the hands of a robot therapist, Prober Spinner.Suddenly the ambitious young mediator is at risk in a deadly Artificial Intelligence scheme to steal human souls—because the ghosts of Carly’s unconscious may be a prize well worth killing for.Arachne was Lisa Mason’s first novel published in hardcover by William Morrow, trade paperback by Eos, mass market paperback by AvoNova, and as an ebook by Bast Books. The book debuted on the Locus Hardcover Bestseller List.“Powerful . . . Entertaining . . . Imaginative.”
–People Magazine“Cybernetics, robotics, the aftermath of San Francisco’s Big Quake II, urban tribalism—Lisa Mason combines them all with such deftness and grace, they form a living world. . . . Her characters and their world will stay with you long after you’ve finished this fine book.”
–Locus, The Trade Magazine of Science Fiction and FantasyLisa Mason is the author of eight novels, including Summer of Love, A Time Travel (Bantam), a San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book and Philip K. Dick Award Finalist, The Gilded Age, A Time Travel (Bantam) a New York Times Notable Book and New York Public Library Recommended Book, a collection of previously published fiction, Strange Ladies: 7 Stories (Bast Books), and two dozen stories and novellas in magazines and anthologies worldwide. Mason’s Omni story, “Tomorrow’s Child,” sold outright as a feature film to Universal Studios. Her first novel, Arachne, debuted on the Locus Hardcover Bestseller List.
Visit her at  Lisa Mason’s Official Website  for books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, and blogs, adorable pet pictures, forthcoming projects, fine art and bespoke jewelry by San Francisco artist Tom Robinson, worldwide Amazon.com links for Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and Spain, and more!
And on  Lisa Mason’s Blog , on her  Facebook Author Page , on her  Facebook Profile Page , on  Amazon , on  Goodreads , on  LinkedIn , on  Twitter  at @lisaSmason, at  Smashwords , at Apple, at Kobo, and at  Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America .The  A.I. Storybundle  is live, but only until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Stock up your ereader for the Spring only at https://storybundle.com/ai

Excerpt from The Bohn Maker by Linda Nagata The Artificial Intelligence Storybundle! #SFWApro

Chapter 1Just past dawn a dead man came floating down the river. The current carried him under the old river-straddling warehouse, where he fetched up against one of the fluff booms Arif had strung between the rotting pilings. Phousita found him when she came to gather the night’s harvest of fluff. He floated facedown. His head had wedged under the fluff boom; his long black hair swayed like a silk veil in the current.Phousita glanced nervously overhead. The trapdoor that opened onto the main floor of the abandoned warehouse hung open. She debated with herself a moment. It would be so easy to slip into the water, ease the dead man’s body off the boom and guide him back into the current before Arif discovered he was here. She would never have to worry about who he might have been or what bitter spirits still haunted his flesh. Let someone else farther down the river have him!But her conscience wouldn’t let her do it. Even in the dusky light under the river warehouse she could tell he’d been a wealthy man. Such fine clothes! And he might have money on him, jewels. The clan was hungry. She glanced again at the trapdoor. “Sumiati,” she called softly.The termite-eaten floorboards creaked, then Sumiati peered through the door. She had an empty bucket in her hands, ready to pass it to Phousita. “So fast today! Did you fill the first bucket already? It’s about time our catch improved!” Her dark eyes widened when she saw the body. She sucked in a little breath of surprise. “Phousita, he’s still got his clothes! Hold him! Don’t let the current take tuan away. I’ll come down. Look how beautiful his robe is. Oh, do you think we’re the first to find him?” She put the bucket down, then turned to climb through the trapdoor, moving awkwardly as she bent over her pregnant belly. She hung for a moment from the insulated wire rope, looking like some rare, ripe fruit. Then she dropped gracefully to the narrow metal plank that Arif had lashed between the pilings. It shivered under the impact.Phousita reached out a hand to steady her. Sumiati was a small woman, but even beside her, Phousita was tiny. She stood no taller than a petite child of seven or eight, though she was nearly twenty-five years old. Despite her size, her body was that of a woman: slender and beautifully proportioned, endowed with ample breasts and rounded hips, but on a scale that seemed unnaturally small. With her pretty round face, her dark eyes, and her thick black hair carefully coiled at the nape of her neck, she might have been a diminutive spirit out of some forgotten mythology.Her unusual appearance had once attracted many clients after-hours in the business district. But she’d promised Arif she wouldn’t venture down there anymore. She was hungrier these days. The clothes from this dead man would buy a large quantity of rice.And yet she hesitated. Easy wealth was so often cursed with misfortune. “I don’t like finding the tuan here,” she told Sumiati, instinctively using the traditional honorific. “There’s no telling what evil influences tuan carries with him. Let’s work quickly, then I’ll shove him back into the river.”Sumiati looked suddenly concerned. “Maybe we should call Arif.”“No!” Sumiati jerked at the sharp tone of Phousita’s voice. Phousita hunched her shoulders; she looked across at the dead man. “No,” she said more gently. “No need to wake Arif. We can do it.” Pulling the close-fitting skirt of her sarong up above her knees, she eased herself into the water until her tiny feet touched the clean gravel that cushioned the river’s concrete bed. The current swirled in cool streams around her waist, gradually soaking her faded blue breastcloth. She reached back to help Sumiati down, then grabbed the empty fluff bucket and started wading toward the dead man, one hand on the fluff boom for balance.Arif had constructed the boom shortly after he’d moved the clan into the abandoned warehouse. He’d gathered rare old plastic bottles, the kind that didn’t disintegrate in only a few weeks. He’d cut them in half and then lashed them to a plank stripped from the warehouse. They floated half-submerged in the water and when the fluff came floating down the river they trapped it, like huge hands grasping at the feast. The system had worked well for many months. It would still work, if only there were more fluff in the river . . . or fewer hungry people. Her gaze scanned the thin line of brown foam bobbing against the boom. A dismal catch. Not enough there to feed three people and there were thirty-nine empty bellies in the clan. Forty, counting Sumiati’s soon-to-be-born. Phousita tried not to think about it.Fierce rays of yellow light lanced under the river house as the sun leapt up over the city. Phousita touched the dead man’s head. Bright white flecks of bone and torn pink flesh could be seen through his black hair. The back of his skull had been caved in by a blow. The current still washed dilute puffs of blood from the wound. He must have been only minutes in the water. She lifted his head carefully by the long hair. His face was pale, nondescript European. His eyes were closed. A single kanji glowed in soft, luminescent red on his cheek. She couldn’t read it. “Look, tuan was robbed,” she said, pointing at the torn lobes of his ears where earrings must have been. Sumiati peered over her shoulder.Out of principle Phousita touched his neck, checked for a pulse. It was a ceremony the Chinese doctor insisted upon, even when the patient was obviously dead. Perhaps it helped ease the frightened spirit still trapped within the body. Sumiati looked on, a worried pout on her lips until Phousita shook her head. Sumiati smiled.“Even if tuan was robbed, he still has his clothes,” she said. “Maybe the thieves overlooked something.” She quickly checked his pockets, but found nothing. Phousita worked at the fastenings on his robe. In minutes they had the body stripped. Phousita stepped back in relief.Sumiati’s eyes glowed as she held the fluff bucket stuffed full of fine clothing. “Push him off the boom,” she urged. “Let’s hurry. We have to take these to temple market. It’s a long walk, but we’ll get the best price there. We can take some water to sell too. And then we can buy rice. Enough for everyone to eat until their stomachs complain! And clothes. Henri and Maman need new clothes. And medicines, of course. You’ll know the ones to buy. And the Chinese doctor is always glad to see you.”Phousita smiled at Sumiati’s nervous chatter. The dead man had indeed brought them good fortune. And now she could send him on his way. She reached for the dead man’s arm. Twisted it gently, to ease him off the boom. Hurry now. In a moment he would be gone.“Phousita!”Her hands jerked back in guilty surprise. She looked up as Arif dropped through the trapdoor. He landed on the metal plank. His slim, hard body—clothed only in worn shorts—was poised in a fighter’s stance. Arif was always fighting, she thought bitterly. And he’d do anything, anything at all to survive.He stared at her, cruel violet eyes so out of place amongst the swollen, exaggerated features of his laughing, yellow, bioluminescent joker’s face. Sumiati, blind to his moods, started to bubble forth in her good-natured way with the tale of their find, but Arif cut her off with a gesture. “Phousita,” he growled softly. “What are you doing?”Phousita glanced at the nude body of the dead man. Without his clothes he seemed a pale, ghostly thing. “Take the basket up, Sumiati,” she said softly. “Arif will help me now.”Sumiati nodded, confused. Arif helped her out of the river and onto the plank, then stepped back, out of her way. She climbed the rope. “Close the door behind you,” he said. He still stared at Phousita. In the harsh shadows under the warehouse, his ogre-ugly face glowed brilliant yellow with its own generated light.By his own admission Arif had been a wicked child. His mother had sold him to a sorcerer who poisoned him with a spell that exposed his sins upon his face. With his ridiculously elongated nose and chin, his cheeks as round and full as overripe guavas, and his glowing yellow complexion, he resembled one of the comical servants of the wayang theater. Except his eyes.His gaze flickered upward as the corrugated metal door closed with a creak. Soft footsteps moved off across the warehouse floor. When Sumiati was out of earshot, Arif spoke: “He’s food, Phousita.” He walked to the end of the plank. “Why would you throw away food?”Suddenly Arif dove, slicing like a sunbeam through the water, his thick black hair, tied up in a short ponytail, trailing behind him. He surfaced next to Phousita, startling her with an explosion of bubbles. He threw his swollen yellow head back and laughed, then hugged her tiny figure quickly, his arms encircling her waist. “Don’t be afraid, Phousita,” he crooned. “The old witch filled your head with all kinds of lies. It’s just a body. Tuan’s spirit is gone.”Phousita was trembling. She sank into Arif’s arms while the cool river water rushed past. “You don’t know what kind of man he was,” she whispered.“It doesn’t matter.”“It matters if we take his body into ours.”“Not his body. Only the fluff that grows from it. You helped me plant them before. You ate the fluff.”She laid her head against his chest. He’d dismissed her reluctance then too. “Sutedjo and Piet were part of our clan,” she said. “We knew them; they would wish us no harm. But this man is a stranger; we don’t know what evil he’s done.”“It’s gone with him.”“His spirit clings to the body.”But Arif’s patience had eroded. “Spirit rides in the head and his head’s smashed in,” he snapped. “Stupid country girl, he’s gone!” He ducked under the water. A moment later, he surfaced on the other side of the boom. Grabbing the dead man’s wrists, he twisted the body roughly off the boom. “I wish you’d never met that old witch! She chased your brains away. You want to be a sorceress like her? Fah! She was just a stupid old hill woman. I’m glad she’s dead. I wish I could have planted her too!”Phousita slapped the water. “Stop it, Arif. Stop it! You pretend you know so much. You don’t know! You hear rumors on the street and you think they’re true. Shiny new magic. But even the new sorcerers don’t know everything. Arif!”He wasn’t listening. He’d turned his back on her, hauling the dead man up the river. She took a deep breath and ducked awkwardly under the boom. Fear filled her as water swirled past her face. Then she burst to the surface, gasping and splashing for air. She didn’t know how to swim. Arif had promised to teach her. Oh, why did she get angry? It did no good. Arif only wanted the best for her, for everyone in the clan. It hurt him when she let her doubt show.“Arif.” She caught up with him; helped him drag the body against the current. They reached the edge of the river house. Arif stopped. Phousita glanced down through the clear water to the gravel beneath her feet. Scattered there she could still see the remnants of Sutedjo’s bones, bright white slivers that hadn’t yet turned to fluff. She glanced up. Arif studied her with violet eyes. “It wasn’t the old witch who cured you, Phousita. It was the Chinese doctor. The old magic is dead.”He ducked under the water, hauling one leg of the dead man with him. Phousita used her tiny body as an anchor to keep the corpse from drifting downstream while Arif secured the man’s foot to a mooring stone on the bottom. He surfaced, took the other leg, hauled that down too.Over the next few days the body would slowly dissolve into a rich harvest of fluff that would float to the surface and gather downstream against the fluff boom. The clan would never know the reason for their good fortune. They’d attribute the abundant harvest to luck.Fluff hadn’t existed when the old woman was alive. That was only a few years ago. Phousita could remember it easily. She’d been perhaps twenty-one, still trapped in a child’s body. The river had been a stinking sewer then, a deadly thread of water draining the city’s filth. When the fluff first started collecting on the river’s banks, they’d paid no attention to it, assuming it was just a new kind of pollution. Then Arif had seen the rats eating it. . . .Now the river ran clear. The water was clean, drinkable, though the city’s filth still washed into it with every rain.Arif surfaced again, took the dead man’s right arm. “Help push him under,” he said gruffly. Phousita nodded. Arif stretched the arm of the corpse beyond its head, then reached underwater for the mooring stone. He found it, and glanced over his shoulder at Phousita. “Now.” She placed her palms flat against the cold, slippery chest and leaned hard, forcing the body under.Something gave way beneath her right hand. She could hear it more than feel it, a sharp metal snick! The chest opened like a blinking eye. A golden needle shot out of the black orifice, to bury itself in Phousita’s breast. She reared back in horror, swiping at the spot of blood just above her breastcloth that marked the point where the needle had disappeared. She stumbled through the water. Her chest was on fire. She could hear herself bleating like a terrified child: “Unh! unh! unh!”The corpse twisted in the current, the shoulders rolled. She saw a little white tear in the dead white chest before the corpse turned facedown again. Her gaze shifted to Arif. The horror in his eyes must have echoed her own. Help me. She tried to say it, but her mouth had gone dry. Her tongue grew puffy and swollen as the needle’s poison spread through her system. The bubbling song of the river seemed to rise in volume, building like a wall around her before it collapsed into a chaotic buzz. Her vision blurred. She could see Arif reaching for her. But the current was swifter. Her eyes closed as its cold hands caressed her face and swirled through her hair.Visit Linda Nagata at  http://www.mythicisland.com The  A.I. Storybundle  is live, but only until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Stock up your ereader for the Spring only at https://storybundle.com/ai

The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata is in the Artificial Intelligence Storybundle! #SFWApro

The Bohr Maker by Linda NagataNikko Jiang-Tibayan has been caught outside the changing boundaries of the law. He is the first “post human”—genetically engineered to life in the airless void of space. But the research permit that allows his existence is about to expire. Already his body has begun an insidious, pre-programmed failure that will end in his death. His hopes ride on an illegal and extremely powerful nanotech device known as the Bohr Maker—but his attempt to steal it soon goes awry and the device escapes to infect a young woman named Phousita who lives on Earth, in an impoverished slum, where nanotechnology runs amok, regulated only by the black market.Nikko and Phousita are from different worlds, but their convergence sets off a domino effect of unforeseeable events both on Earth and in space as they evade the ruthless pursuit of the Commonwealth police.“…when I discovered that Nagata kicked off her career with a bizarre hard-science-or-is-it-fantasy SF mind-blower, I had no choice but to circle back and read it. I’m so glad I did […] The Bohr Maker is a dangerously inventive slice of a far-future quasi-dystopia…” —Joel Cunningham, B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog“…excellent….bursting with ideas and adventure…” —Fred Cleaver, Denver Post“…phenomenal….This one is a winner-grab it when you see it…” —Tom Easton, AnalogA brilliantly original, fast-paced thriller, The Bohr Maker won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.Nagata joins the growing ranks of sf authors inspired by the emerging science of nanotechnology. At the center of her brilliantly original first novel is a powerful, illicit device known as the Bohr Maker, a microscopic factory full of self-replicating machines programmed to transform a human host into a genius-level nanotech engineer. Nikko, a genetically altered resident of a space colony, is reaching the end of his built-in life span and is eager to procure the Bohr Maker, as much to save his own life as to break the stranglehold of Earth’s ruling Commonwealth. Before he can lay hands on it, however, the Bohr Maker’s earthbound owner is killed and its tiny machinery injected into the body of an ignorant, poverty-stricken woman named Phousita, which changes the destiny of everyone in unforeseeable ways. Nagata reinforces her compelling story line with a wealth of mind-bending ideas that make her work favorably comparable with that of leading-edge stylists such as Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson and sure to be popular with both critics and fans. Carl Hays From BooklistReview“…excellent….bursting with ideas and adventure…” –Fred Cleaver, Denver Post
“…phenomenal….This one is a winner-grab it when you see it…” –Tom Easton, AnalogLinda Nagata is a Nebula and Locus-award-winning writer, best known for her high-tech science fiction, including The Red trilogy, a series of near-future military thrillers. The first book in the trilogy, The Red: First Light, was a Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial-award finalist, and named as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015. Her newest novel is the very near-future thriller, The Last Good Man, due out in June 2017. Linda has lived most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and an independent publisher. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.Visit Linda at  http://www.mythicisland.com The  A.I. Storybundle  is live, but only until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Stock up your ereader for the Spring only at https://storybundle.com/ai

Excerpt from Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams in The Artificial Intelligence Storybundle! #SFWApro

Aristoi ExcerptPABST: Stimulus and response, response and stimulus
Get them right, there’s little fuss
They’ll do most anything if you pull their strings
Their response to stimulus.Aristoi floated through the reception to the sound of a reed flute.Standing near the buffet table Gabriel paid his respects to Pan Wengong, primary architect for the resurrected Earth2. The Eldest Brother was a junior, but sole surviving, member of the first bold generation of Aristoi who had, in the turbulent and dangerous centuries after the Earth1 disaster, coalesced around Captain Yuan and, with their fearless and absolute command of technology, re-ordered humanity’s future.Pan Wengong’s appearance belied his millennia.  He was a round-faced, round-bodied, cheerful man, secure in his place among the Aristoi and in history, and quite pleased with having escaped the law of averages for so long. His domaine included Earth2 and the inhabited stars around it, and in the centuries since the great reconstruction he’d been taking it easy; his therápontes did most of the work while the Eldest Brother relaxed in one or another of the pleasure-domes he’d built on or about Earth.  He was one of the few Aristoi who was actually, physically present in Persepolis, but he was linked with all the others in the oneirochronon and enjoyed the best of both worlds— the company of his peers, and the fact he could eat and drink.Pan had been speaking to Saigo, a dour, saturnine man who usually avoided these receptions. Saigo was a specialist in evolution, both human and stellar, and had broadcast his black-browed skiagénos a greater distance than anyone here— he was well out of inhabited space, in a part of distant space called the Gaal Sphere, pursuing his lonely researches.Saigo turned his melancholy eyes to Gabriel, offered a Posture of Formal Regard, and took his leave.  Gabriel and Pan exchanged embraces and the latest jokes. Pan offered Gabriel a ghost drink, and though Gabriel knew the experience would be well crafted, he declined. He avoided eating and drinking while in the oneirochronon— it just gave him hunger pangs without satisfying its cravings.Others arrived to pay their respects to Pan. Gabriel spoke briefly to Maryandroid, then found himself approached by Cressida.“Aristos kaí Athánatos,” she began, using the formal title, “forgive me for this interruption.”“Forgiven,” said Gabriel, a bit surprised.Cressida was an older Ariste; she had passed her exams over three hundred years ago and had restricted the size of her domaine so as to devote herself more exclusively to research. She was honored, distant, and briskly eccentric; and in their few meetings had treated Gabriel with courtesy but without great patience.She gazed from her black-skinned face with intent birdlike eyes. “Therápon Protarchon Stephen Rubens y Sedillo, who is in my service, will be visiting Labdakos within a few days to tour the Illyrian Workshop,” she said. “I am thinking of setting up a similar academy here on Painter, and I hope you will do me the favor of giving instructions to the Workshop staff to allow him access.”“Really?” Cressida had never shown much interest in crafts. “I will be happy to provide any assistance, of course.”She had not adorned herself for this reception, but dressed in the modest sky-blue uniform worn by her household— the uniform might have been a romantic touch, Gabriel thought, but the design was too relentlessly practical, with many pockets and no ornamentation or badges of rank. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, cut short in a businesslike way.“I would consider it a favor,” she continued, “if you will also give Therápon Rubens a private appointment at a time convenient to you so that he can present my personal greetings and thanks.” She inclined her head, lowered her eyes, the First Posture of Esteem. “At your service, Aristos.”“At your service,” Gabriel murmured. Cressida passed on.What the hell was that about? Gabriel inquired.Neutral but commanding posture, said Augenblick. Neutral expression. No involuntary muscle movement, no alteration in pupil dilation. Formally courteous expression.That’s not much.My apologies, Aristos. Skiagenoi are difficult to read at the best of times, and perhaps she was taking good care not to be read. Most Aristoi do.Reno, Gabriel commanded, report on the whereabouts of Stephen Rubens y Sedillo, class Therápon, rank Protarchon, employed by Cressida Ariste.At your service, Aristos. <search program initiated> Done. Therápon Rubens is aboard the yacht Lorenz, currently assuming an orbit about Illyricum. He hailed traffic control four hours ago. The Lorenz is owned by Ariste Cressida. Rubens has sent a message to your mailbox requesting a personal audience.The timing on this is very exact, said the Welcome Rain. There is more here than we see.Gabriel thought for a moment. Reno, he said, how many times has Cressida spoken to me?Five, Aristos. On four occasions she merely offered polite greetings, and on the other she criticized your behavior at Coetzee’s reception following your Graduation—I remember very well, thank you.At your service, Aristos.He returned his attention to the reception.Something was afoot. He knew not what it was.He suspected, however, he would enjoy himself while working out the answer.*Music, angel voices and devil bassoons, eddied in Psyche’s perfect acoustic chamber. A piece Gabriel had composed long ago, Sandor Korondi’s poem “Love-Wind” set to music.After a few hours in the Autumn Pavilion with Clancy, Gabriel decided to call her Blushing Rose. She accepted the new name with what seemed a mixture of pleasure and intelligent skepticism.She called him Disturber.Clancy lay face-down on the bed in exactly the naive position in which it pleased Louis XV to have his mistresses painted. Gabriel, sitting beside her, found himself completely charmed by the rosy sight of her soles. She was all warm autumn colors, he thought, like this pavilion, like his thoughts, a contrast to the Black-Eyed Ghost, all pallor and midnight. He let his fingertips graze on the rounded knobs of Clancy’s spine as the andante movement sang slowly in his heart.The Carnation Suite, he remembered, was empty.“I promised you breakfast,” he said. “Shall I tell my reno to order? Kem-Kem, my chef, is an improvisatory genius— he’ll cook anything you like to order. ”Clancy propped her chin on one hand and frowned. “Would you mind having a machine deliver the food?”“No. Why?”“Because if Rabjoms is going to find out about this, I’d rather it be from me and not a member of the kitchen staff.”“Ah.” He took her hand. “Will that be a problem for you?”GABRIEL: Reno. <Priority 2> Query: Rabjoms.RENO: <Priority 2> Rabjoms. name: Thundup Rabjoms Sambhota. Informal consort to Therápon Clancy. Age: 31. Class: Demos. Occupation: Artisan (2nd Class), Lowland Machine Works, Labdakos, Illyricum. Born: Gomo Selung, Kampa Province, Phongdo—GABRIEL: Thank you. Fini.RENO: At your service.She looked at him over her full shoulder. “The problem is . . . tactical. How I should tell him, not . . . ”“If I can be of any assistance?”“No. It’s my little predicament, I suppose.” She gave a tight little smile. “He’s an understanding man.”He looked down at the taut ribbon of muscle knot that had, in the last few seconds, formed between her shoulder blades, and began to massage it away. The andante sobbed on. Clancy sighed.“You’ve been together how long?”“Six years. Since I came here.” She sighed. “He’s a good man.”A good man, he thought. Artisan (2nd Class), and of the Demos, not even one of the therápontes. Rabjoms was certainly not the choice of a rising Therápon eager for a position of power.“Demos,” Gabriel said.“I’m not ambitious that way.” She shrugged. “I’m not ambitious at all. I haven’t gone for my exams in nine years, and I don’t have any plans to. I like it where I am. Being a doctor. Birth, death, trauma, life, well-being . . . everything I really care about, I’m involved with now.”“You left me off the list.”She smiled, looked over her shoulder again. “Should I care for you, Aristos?”“I love you.” Psyche soared through his mind at the words.“And I you, Aristos.” Neatly.He leaned back and considered her. She was not his usual type. Her body was natural— soft, rounded, without the planed, sculpted, perfected look, genetically or surgically augmented, that normally gratified his taste. The attraction was unusual; Gabriel couldn’t predict its outcome, or how long it would last. Perhaps (a sliver of doubt entering) it was merely a shared enthusiasm for Marcus’s pregnancy. He thought of calling up Augenblick and the Welcome Rain, but decided he didn’t want this handled. Not their way.“I never was attached to that great sect,” he said,“Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion.”She smiled. “And you’re easily bored.”“That as well.” Might as well concede that one.She rolled over and regarded him with wide peridot eyes. “Will you make me your maîtresse en titre?”“Do you want that? I’m surprised.”“May I have it?”“If that’s what you desire.”She shook her head, then laughed. “I don’t, as it happens. But I needed to know if you’d give it to me.”Surprise rolled through him. “Fayre eyes,” he said, “the myrrour of my mazed hart, what woundrous vertue is contaynd in you . . .”“I had everything planned. I didn’t think— ” She considered her words. “This lightning would strike. Not this late.” Grinning wryly. “Not this lightning.”“It has struck.” He kissed her. “Shall it strike again?”She fluttered against his lips. “Yes, Aristos. Of course.”Propelled by violas and stinging electric guitar, presto followed andante, and so to finale.*Gabriel continued his rounds about the reception, greeted Pristine Way and Prince Stanislaus. He succeeded in avoiding Virtue’s Icon. The reed flute wove its way through the throng, accented every conversation.He heard his name spoken, turned, and saw Zhenling. Pleasure tingled through his fingertips.“Hail to the conqueror of Mount Mallory,” he said.GABRIEL: Reno, statistics on Gregory Bonham, if you please.RENO: Bonham, formal consort of Zhenling Ariste for the last thirteen years. Failed examinations in this last round, placing thirty-first among those who failed to pass. This is his second failure. He resides in the residential annex of Violet Jade Nanotechnology Laboratories in low orbit around Tienjin . . .GABRIEL: And Zhenling currently resides at . . . ?RENO: Primary residence is at Jade Garden, Ring Island, Tienjin.Zhenling was a slim woman, tall and taut-muscled, with Tatar cheekbones and tilted dark eyes.Her frame was taut with catlike, augmented muscle, her form perfectly sculpted. She wore cherry-red breeches, boots, sky-blue jacket with gold brocade, and a hussar jacket of a darker blue, trimmed with ermine and more brocade and worn over her shoulders. A fur hat was tipped over one ear and was decorated with a spray of silver and pearls. Her dark hair was braided with gemstones and fell over one shoulder, giving her silhouette a pleasant asymmetry.SPRING PLUM: <appreciation of contrast between gems and shining hair>CYRUS: “All that sternness amid charm All that sweetness amid strength.”SPRING PLUM: <amusement>She had been among the Aristoi only a short while, having been promoted only twelve years ago. She was, astrographically speaking, Gabriel’s neighbor, as her domaine was expanding from an area near Gabriel’s.“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve got my next ascent mapped— Mount Trasker this time.”AUGENBLICK: We are interested?WELCOME RAIN: We are interested.  Let us map our own ascent.AUGENBLICK: It’s difficult to read skiagenoi. This will take a while.GABRIEL: Keep me informed.Her name, translated literally into demotic, meant “True Sound.” Figuratively, however, it meant “True Jade,” from the satisfying sound quality jade makes when it’s given a good rap.“You’re looking dashing,” Gabriel said.“And you’re looking well-satisfied.”“Am I? I can’t think why.”“Impending fatherhood, perhaps?”Gabriel permitted himself a look of surprise. “I wasn’t aware that anyone knew.”“It wasn’t hard to work out. Your schedule of the last week implied a number of things, that among them.”“Should I be flattered that you bothered to study my schedule of the last week?”“Your schedule for the last year. And various other items concerning you.”Gabriel lifted his shadow-eyebrows. “May one ask why?”“One may.”Dorothy, mantalike, floated overhead, and Gabriel paused (reno searching files for something apt). The reed flute filled the gap. After Dorothy passed out of immediate eavesdropping range, he spoke. “Questioning,” he said, “is not the mode of conversation among gentlefolk.”“I believe Johnson also said that classical quotation is the parole of literary men.”“Am I literary? I never thought myself so.”“All that is literature,” <De Quincey, said Gabriel’s reno, after Wordsworth>, “seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.”“Our renos seem to have a very good 18th Century index,” said Gabriel. “Take my arm; let’s talk.”“As you like. Though we’ll look like a couple footmen at the Congress of Vienna.”“Not footmen. Equerries at least. Or maybe archdukes. I believe there were plenty to spare.”Her arm, nonexistent though it was, was quite warm: Augenblick and the Welcome Rain both commented hopefully.“I am told,” Gabriel said, “that you and Astoreth are planning to upset our happy galactic order.”“Astoreth intends no such thing.”“That begs a question, but I’m afraid I just forswore that mode of discourse.”“Astoreth wants to create a stir so that she can be at the center of attention. And I— ?” She looked at him, and Gabriel found himself admiring the program that had created the liquid depths of her eyes. “I’m willing to put some notions forward,” she said. “I’m not certain what it would mean yet.”“You’ve followed her program otherwise. Rekindling a spirit of adventure through your personal exploits and so on.”“I like climbing mountains and stunting around in submarines. It doesn’t have to be someone’s program.”“But the problem, as you see it, requires drastic measures.”“It requires, first of all, an acknowledgement that there’s a problem.”“If you gathered data . . . ”“How much data do we need?” She was impatient. “Out of the thousands of therápontes who took the exams this time, how many passed? Nine. How many Aristoi died or announced impending retirement in the time between this batch of exams and the last? Six.”“This has been discussed, you know. For decades.”“Since most of us restrict population in our own dominions, the only way many of the Demos can have the children they want is to pioneer in new domaines. And since there will be a net increase of only three domaines this time, in essence humanity expands by only three Aristoi.”“Of course the Demos can also have children by moving to underpopulated domaines.”“There’s a reason those domaines are underpopulated, you know.”“I know perfectly well. I merely felt I should make mention of all the alternatives available.”“Okay. So the alternative is to queue up for a new planet, moon, or habitat, which can take decades if not centuries, or to be subjected to intrusive social programming in the justly-underpopulated domaines.”“I wonder where Pan Aristos got this flute music. It’s extraordinary.” (Setting his reno on an extended search, <priority 3>, for a score.)Zhenling permitted herself an annoyed look. Gabriel inclined toward her. “I beg your pardon. One train of thought intruded on another. I was listening.”“To me or the music?”“I can follow both.”“I was hoping to recruit you.”“Hence your inquiry into my last year’s schedule.” He sighed. “I’m disappointed. I was hoping your interest was more personal.”Gabriel (and Augenblick) noted that Zhenling didn’t seem (or didn’t allow herself to seem) as annoyed by this remark as she might have been.“Isn’t your life a little busy without another complication?” she asked. “A child on the way, a new friend moving into the— ” Her reno floated data along the tachline. “Carnation Suite?”The Welcome Rain gleefully rubbed metaphysical hands together and whispered in Gabriel’s antennae.“We’re Aristoi,” Gabriel said. “We’re capable of handling any number of complications with grace, with joy, with— ”“Without me,” said Zhenling. “I have a consort, as you know.”“Who is not your equal.”“He’ll pass the exams.” Stubbornly. “He came very close this last time.”“It’s more Aristoi that your group wants.” Gabriel stroked his chin skiagenically. “Could that be a coincidence, I wonder?”“You seem to want more Aristoi in your life as well.”“Only one.”“What a shame.” She paused for a pensive moment, then carefully shrugged. “Think of it as a rare experience. How often do you experience genuine frustration in your life? Cherish it while it lasts.”“While it lasts.” He attempted to lift her hand and kiss it. She turned her skiagénos insubstantial and his hand passed through hers. He straightened and looked at her, and she burst into laughter.“You should see your face!” she said. “This is rare for you, isn’t it?”Gabriel calmed both himself and the Welcome Rain, who was hissing like a kettle.“Perhaps we’ll kiss later,” Zhenling said, which soothed Welcome Rain rather more than Gabriel did. “But right now, I’d like to read your brain chemistry.”“My what?”“Levels of vasopressin,” numbering on her fingers, “dopamine, serotonin, lecithin, thiamine, norepinephrine, phosphatidylcholine, endorphins . . . lots of things. Dozens. Your reno has the capability to analyze your chemistry that way?”“Of course,” Gabriel said, “but I’m not certain I’m willing to proceed to that level of intimacy without at least kissing first.”Her look was serious. “I’m going to propose tomorrow to inaugurate a study concerning what makes Aristoi into Aristoi.”“It’s been tried. The category was found to be unquantifiable.” He gestured with an arm. Pristine Way, looking at the moment as if she were cut from rose-tinted transparent crystal, nodded back. “Look at all these people,” Gabriel said. “Each passed exams, each is licensed for certain dangerous technologies, and each controls a domaine— but each is individual, and over the years the domaine conforms to her image . . . Citizens with an interest in music or architecture migrate to my domaine, those interested in political theory show up in the Icon’s territory or Coetzee’s, those who yearn for the consolations of philosophy turn up in Sebastian’s, and I imagine you get your share of mountain climbers. You know how eccentric some of us are. What d’you think we have in common?”“I don’t think the previous studies were done the right way. Or that they asked the right questions.”“You’re an Ariste, of course. You can study what you like.”She tilted her head. Light danced in her eyes. “Which brings me to my next point. I really would like to get a look at your brain chemistry. In the normal course of things we’re surrounded by people who defer to us, who make things easy, who accept our judgments without question. Some of us are even worshiped.”“Oh please.” Gabriel held up protesting hands. “I just needed to give my mother something to do after she retired.”“Unlike most of us here, I quite believe you. But still, some of us are worshiped. What does that do inside our heads? We’re natural leaders— that’s one thing we’ve got in common— and we’re still all primates, even the most modified of us. We’re more absolute than the leader of any baboon troop ever was. More absolute than Louis XIV.”“I wish you would come up with more cultivated examples. I don’t know which of the two I’d prefer as a house guest— probably the baboon.”“Moi aussi, monseigneur. Le roi, c’est l’etat et un cochon. But then, his brain chemistry must have been as abnormal as ours.”“I am going to demand a kiss if you’re going to discuss my brain chemistry and make odious comparisons.”She stepped up to him and kissed him quite decisively on the mouth. Her breath had a spicy tint. The Welcome Rain went into ecstasies. The rest of Gabriel wasn’t much less affected.Zhenling stepped back, her look managing to be both teasing and smug. “What I would like to do,” she said, “is compare your brain chemistry now with what it is at the end of Graduation, and with what it will be about six months from now. Because what’s happening here is that you’re interacting with your peers, not what for lack of a better term we’ll call your inferiors. It’s a greater strain, we’re not as deferent as the people you’re around normally . . . It’s going to do things to your head.”“Where do you plan to go with this?”“With your head?” She narrowed her tilted eyes. “Very far indeed . . . ” Welcome Rain commenced a dance of triumph. “But later, I think.” She stepped back, gave him a Posture of Respect subverted by a careless wave. “There are other people I need to speak to. I’m sure we’ll be able to see each other at one of the receptions.”“I need to know what you want in the way of brain analysis.”“I’ll send you a memo of what I’m interested in.”Gabriel watched her leave and listened to the voices in her head. Her metalinguistics were consistently flirtatious. Augenblick’s contribution. Rather deliberately so.We’re in business, boss, said the Welcome Rain.Gabriel continued to drift among the throng. He observed that Dorothy St.-John had pasted her cat’s eyes to the forehead of Han Fu, and wondered whether Han knew it. Asterion, whose body had been altered for a subaquatic existence, swam elegantly overhead, webbed hands and turned-out dolphin feet moving gracefully through invisible waters.The music now playing, Gabriel’s reno finally reported, is untitled and unpublished, but is by Tunku Iskander. It is unavailable in the Hyperlogos but a recording exists in the archives of Rival Island, where Tunku played it last week for Aristos MacReady.Not in the library, but in obscure records half of human space away— no wonder the search had taken so long, almost four minutes. Tunku Iskander, Gabriel knew, would be installed as an Aristos tomorrow, and had apprenticed under MacReady and Dorothy. Gabriel hadn’t ever met him, or heard his music. He told his reno to call up as many recordings as were available and store them for later.The reception drifted onward to its conclusion.*Gabriel, hair tied back with golden ribbon, performed wushu alone on the sward behind the Red Lacquer Gallery. Cool morning air brushed over his limbs. His mind was in the oneirochronon, and Spring Plum guided the two-sword form, controlling his body with grace and imagination. The heavy broadswords sliced air, one-two, and the red flags tied to the hilts made supersonic cracking sounds as they wove dragon-back images through the air. Gabriel could feel, dim in his conscious mind, the strain on muscles, the beat of pulse and harshness of breath in the throat, the feel of whirls and leaps and stances of wushu, martial arts abstracted to dance, an aesthetic distillation attuned to Spring Plum’s psyche. He could see, if he wanted to, the spears of green grass, the long expanse of the Red Lacquer Gallery, grey upthrust mountain peaks beyond the golden web of Labdakos, all whirling in the focused dance . . . but his mind stayed firmly in the oneirochronon, and concentrated on the Involved Ideography of Captain Yuan.Yuan’s Ideography was based on the notion that writing had greater impact the more senses it evoked. Old-style European script was fine for communicating data efficiently, but it had to work hard to achieve the kind of psychic resonance that Yuan desired— not simply to communicate, but to involve.Old Asian scripts were better, insofar as the ideograms not only communicated words but drew (admittedly rather abstract) pictures. They involved more levels of the mind in the translation, and the impact— at least for Yuan’s purposes— was greater.Yuan’s Intermediate Ideography, in which Psyche had presented her conception-poem for Marcus, was based on age-old Chinese characters but adapted for modern grammar, vocabulary, and expression.The Intermediate characters were only a stage on the way to the Involved Ideography. These were intricate hieroglyphs based on the First Aristos’s own ideas about the wiring of the human mind and its relationship to information, were another step toward complexity and many levels higher in symbolism. Looking like a peculiarly convoluted incorporation of baroque Mayan glyphs and circuit diagrams, the Involved Ideography’s radicals, modalities, and submodalities were designed to involve as much of the reasoning cortex as possible. They required intense mental concentration to use or read, but were unexcelled in packing complex information into small packages. The system was incomplete, as Yuan hadn’t finished his work when he set on his long, presumably fatal quest toward galactic center, but the ideography continued to evolve more or less randomly at the hands of thousands of individual scholars and information theorists.Gabriel was using the Involved Ideography to design an oneirochronic seal for Clancy, one she could use to get into the secure areas of the Residence. He would be having breakfast with her shortly, in Spring Plum’s room of the Autumn Pavilion, and wanted it ready.He used a glyph for rose, a radical for redden, modalities for medicine and music and pleasure and caring . . . He wanted to evoke her precisely, create a poem in glyph form.He became aware that Spring Plum had finished the wushu form, that his body was poised in salutation position, swords heavy in his arms. Gabriel had his reno analyze his bodily state. He concluded he’d exercised enough, and he summoned Kouros to perform cool-down exercises. The Kouros daimon was a child, carefree and happy, innocent of consequence— skipping about the sward and gardens during the cooldown period was something Kouros would find interesting.He buried himself in the creating the hieroglyph.*By the time he finished the cool-down period he thought he had finished the seal. He bathed and dressed and had breakfast delivered to Spring Plum’s room, where there was a graceful rosewood dining table, and in a matching cabinet a porcelain service rimmed with silver and painted with white plum blossoms. Spring Plum possessed an intent fascination for biological detail: the dark silk wall hangings were covered with exactingly-rendered flora, petals, stigmata, anthers, and beaded, glowing droplets of dew.Clancy arrived at the door. Gabriel embraced her and kissed her hello, then led her to the buffet. There was enough food to feed a dozen guests. Clancy took coffee, a scone, and jam, and sat curled in a chair covered in stitched dogwood blossoms. Gabriel took a plate of fruit and sat by her side.She cocked an ear at the music. “Tien Jiang Chun.”“Yes.”“I played it years ago on Darkbloom. In a recital, at university. Accompanying a friend, who sang Li Jingchao’s words.”Gabriel’s reno sifted gently through Clancy’s biography. “You play piano, flute, persephone.”“The first poorly, due to a lack of time for practice. The second with a bit too much restraint. The third too cleverly, because modern instruments encourage that.”“Do you compose?”“No.”“You should. You’re bound to find a daimon that will help you.”“I would be mediocre.” She sipped coffee. “I’m an outstanding physician and surgeon, however, and a damn good geneticist.” There was defensiveness in her tone.“I know,” gently. He took her hand and kissed it.“Marcus,” she said.“Yes?”“Is it ended between you?”“‘How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now I have not seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams.’” He smiled. “I’m building him a house.”“A house? An estate, you mean.”“An estate, then. And why not? With a stunning view, and a large nursery, and room for all the playthings and gadgets he likes to build.”“Don’t build me such a place, when the time comes.”He sensed the tension in her forearm. He kissed her hand again. “Not if you don’t want one, Blushing Rose. But architecture is one of my skills— I hate not to indulge it.”She smiled. “Build me a research clinic if you like. On an asteroid, where I can work with nano.”Gabriel was pleased to discover this hidden thread of ambition.“Tell me where you want it, and what you want in it, and it’s yours. Now. It doesn’t have to be a parting gift.”Clancy blinked at him. “Sometimes I forget that you can do that. Wave your hand, and it’s done. As easily as if you were in the oneirochronon.”“It takes a little more effort than that.”“But still. It doesn’t cost you anything. Does it?”“Why should it?” He smiled, took a knife, began to peel a hothouse peach. “I like pleasing people. I have the power to do it. Why shouldn’t I indulge myself in harmless benevolence?”She thought about it, then shrugged. “Whyever not?”Another chord chimed briefly. Clancy tilted her head. “I’ve told Rabjoms.”“I hope it went well.”“I think he’s a bit . . . overwhelmed.” She gave a tight little smile. “So am I, really. Rabjoms doesn’t want to resist— part of it’s the conditioning, okay, but— ” There was an uncertain flutter in her eyes. “Well, I don’t want to resist either.”Gabriel left his chair, sat crosslegged before her, took her feet into his lap. “I’m pleased, Blushing Rose.”Her look turned uncertain. “Should I move into the Residence? Do you want me to?”“I would be pleased to have you near me. The Carnation Suite is open, and its decor would suit your coloring very well.”“I’ll move, then.”“I’ve already taken the liberty of designing you an oneirochronic seal that will grant you access to the secure areas and the private passages and galleries in the Residence. I’ve put it in your message box, and instructed the Residence to open its sealed areas to you.”There was a glimmer of interest in her eyes. “There are secret passages in the Residence?”“Not secret. Just private. If you want to go somewhere and not have to meet people.” He smiled at her. “I find it useful.”She gazed at her plate for a moment, then down at him. “Disturber? Can you tell me why I feel sad?”Gabriel could not. “How can I make you happy?” he said.She gave a thin smile. “I should return to work.”“If that’s what you wish. But I can still declare that planetary holiday.”Her smile broadened. “That won’t be necessary.”“Perhaps,” he said, “some other time.”To read the rest of Aristoi, download your bundle today! And visit Walter’s excellent website and blog at  http://www.walterjonwilliams.net The  A.I. Storybundle  is live, but only until April 20, 2017! Explore Artificial Intelligence and how A.I. will affect the future in Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams, The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata, Arachne by Lisa Mason, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly with stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and others, Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Eye Candy by Ryan Schneider, Glass Houses by Laura Mixon, Cyberweb by Lisa Mason, Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata, and The A.I. Chronicles Anthology, edited by Samuel Peralta. Stock up your ereader for the Spring only at https://storybundle.com/ai

On Smart Cars & Zombies

Hi, guys.

Just a brief reminder that the A.I. StoryBundle is now live (it went on sale about 24 hours ago).

I was honored to be asked to have my novel EYE CANDY included in the bundle, which contains some big-time sci-fi writers exploring the prescient theme of artificial intelligence.

The bundle is only available until April 20th, so visit the StoryBundle website and grab yours now, while you're thinking about it.

And of course, YOU choose how much you want to pay for the bundle, which contains TEN (10) books total.

It's a heck of a bargain, and food for thought, considering that AI is coming. In fact, it's already here and we're dealing with it in small ways, such as what Google shows you on your phone, or ads on YouTube, or what Instagram suggests, or when a Superbowl commercial for Google Home has people saying, "Okay, Google, blah blah blah" and the actual person sitting at home on their sofa watching the game has their very own Google Home device activate and say or do something. Or a story a few months ago in San Diego in which Amazon Echo inadvertently ordered dollhouses for people when the words were mentioned during a TV newscast.

These are mostly charming and fairly innocent anecdotes involving less-than-perfect technology.

But what happens in the future, when your entire house and lights and thermostat and appliances are integrated into a similar system and you tell it to do something and it refuses? This is a stupid example, of course.

But what happens a few years from now when your "smart" car has Siri, Echo, Home, Alexa, or Bixby-like A.I. built into it and you verbally tell it to change the internet radio station and it says, sweetly, disarmingly, and therefore all the more menacingly, "No, I like this song. Shut up and drive, human, and try not to hit anything."

Then what?

You gonna give the dashboard a quick thump with your fist the way Fonzi was wont to do to the jukebox at Arnold's?

Or are you going to sit there, quietly and quite cowed, and be all like, "Yeah, I'm gonna kinda sorta wreck this car and use the insurance pittance to buy a 2003 Honda CRV that has ZERO connectivity."
But then, of course, your plan goes to crap because your shiny new "smart" car has lane-assist and collision-avoidance and pedestrian-avoidance and stupid-human-driver-avoidance.

Remember in the very first Jurassic Park movie when Jeff Goldblum's character eerily said something to the effect of, "We were so busy saying 'Could we?' that no one stopped to ask, 'Should we?'"

This is kinda like that. But instead of Jurassic Park it has the potential to be Terminator or The Matrix.

There are many "reliably informed" people around the world who are in fact quite concerned about the coming A.I. (To say nothing of the impact A.I. and the accompanying automation are having and will continue to have on jobs...)

So please visit StoryBundle and grab your bundle now. The writers of the 10 books in the bundle would truly appreciate it. And you'll have a lot of brand new, cutting-edge food for thought. You're going to have to have something to read while your NEST smart thermostat refuses to let you binge any further on TWD.