Fearful Symmetries

by Ellen Datlow

Some places are already empty, already ruined—they just wait, long as it takes. They don’t ever go away. ’Cause they want to be found.”

Back to the fast-forward, then, the bend and the warp, till her ridiculously plausible-seeming exposition-dump seemed to come at him from everywhere at once, a perfect storm.

Yet the universe is far too complicated a place for that. And so it is that you are none of you ever so alone as you fear, nor as you hope.