Sunday Shorts—Binaries by S.B. Divya

[image error]This flash fiction piece from People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction has a super-clever narrative conceit: it rolls out over a binary progression of years of the main character’s life. She’s 1. Then she’s 2. Then she’s 4. Then she’s 8, 16, 32… You get it. That it progresses beyond the 64-128 is where the science fiction kicks in, and the ways in which it does so are fantastic.

What is human once we’ve found a way to progress beyond a “normal” human lifespan? What is human once we’ve decided our bodies aren’t necessary? What is human once we’ve gone so far past what we were that memory of what we were is difficult?

In this case, Divya spins the story around a single loss in the character’s life before many of these leaps in technology and state of being, and the end result is a kind of anchor for the tale, and the way it loops around back to this point was science-fiction perfect.