Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

Six hours later his business had been flattened twice, once by a student protest, once by askaris demanding protection money. Each time he built it up again, making brightly lettered promises to his worried customers. In the meantime he sent his painted children to school in uniforms with books and pens and crayons, an accomplishment that turned his heart to sugar. The game lacked the gloss that he was used to, but he had met the person who had created it. All of this, from three women!

An impossible thought arose in him. He refused to look at it directly. No, never. Maybe for money. Enough money. And only for a while.

“Boss,” he said, emerging from the cube, “you said your brother runs a game studio?”

“He does,” the manager said.

“Would he give me a job, do you think?”

“You should ask him yourself.” The manager closed the game of bao he had been playing on his ancient iPhone, a bashed-up brick of third-hand tech, and pulled up a number.

“Yes, I have a young man here, regular customer, plays all the new games, wants to know if you have a job for him.” He turned to Jacob. “He says go ahead, send him your portfolio.”

“My portfolio?”

“Yes, art, music, design, whatever it is you want to work in. He says he doesn’t have a portfolio. Hm? Okay. My brother says you should take courses in those things, whatever interests you, and come back when you can do something.” He set the iPhone down.

“Thanks,” Jacob said, because there was nothing else he could say. He slouched out of the Black Nile, brow furrowed with thought.

Since there was nowhere else to meet, he invited Ann and Chao to visit his spruced-up duka, where they stood around sipping virtual sodas and blocking customers from their programmed paths.

Chao said, suspicion dripping from every syllable of his Southern drawl, “Run that by me again.”

“I’m going to take some university courses so I can get a job, and then when I have enough saved up for a VR rig of my own, I’ll quit and game full-time, twenty-four-seven.”

Ann said, “I think the only person you’re fooling is yourself.”

“Don’t be like that. You have no idea how much a rig costs in Nairobi. It’s not like the U.S., where, what, one-third of your monthly stipend buys one? More like two years’ stipend for us. I want to game, but I also need to eat.”

“If you say so,” Ann said.

“Plus they’ve banned me from all Japanese-owned servers for a month, and other major regions for the next two weeks. This way I can do something.” Hearing his own words, he stopped.

“So these courses,” Chao said. “They’re in… management? Administration?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”

“Okay. That’s almost as good as not doing anything. I wish you’d said something earlier, though. We could have crowdfunded you a console, as a guild.”

“My parents would never let me live that down.”

“We’re going to miss you,” Ann said abruptly. “I mean, Robbie, and now you…”

“Hey,” Jacob said. “I’ll still be online. And I’ll still game with you, once this ban is done.”

Her character hugged his. “Don’t let the Doers get you.”

“I won’t.”

“If you see Rob—” Chao said.

“Yes?”

“Never mind.”

It was, in fact, on a gleaming skybridge of the Chiromo campus of the University of Nairobi that Jacob next saw Robert, two thick textbooks wedged under his arm. Rob walked quickly, with purpose, in the flood between classes; then, with a start, his eyes met Jacob’s, and his face broke into a pleased and embarrassed smile.

“You caught me,” Rob said.

“What are you studying?”

“Astronomy. I wanted to discover a planet, as a kid. Somehow I forgot. Then somebody reminded me.”

“You and Consolata—”

“Still together.”

“Good for you.”

They stood there awkwardly, toe to toe, as students streamed past.

“So what brings you here?” Rob said eventually.

“Intro to Programming.”

“What? Here? You?”

“And some art classes.”

“Art!” Rob laughed, his teeth flashing.

“I’m going to design games. Please don’t tell Mercy.”

“I’m not a monster.” Rob paused. “You’ll have to, though. Eventually. And if you’re serious, Ann and Chao—”

“That will bite.”

“It will. Also, so you know, I would never say—”

“I know.”

“We should play together sometime,” Rob said, punching his shoulder. “Consolata’s releasing her new game next month. It’s called Love and War: The Story of a Doer and a Don’t . There’ll be a party. You should come.”

“If the beer’s good, maybe. Maybe I will.”

The two of them knocked knuckles with half-embarrassed, half-conspiratorial smiles. The sun beat down hot and golden on the campus as they passed and went their separate ways, each chasing, in his own heart, down a twisting road, the dim and indeterminate beginnings of a dream.

Amal El-Mohtar’s short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, and her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales , The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories , and The New Voices of Fantasy ; in magazines such as Tor.com, Lightspeed , Strange Horizons , and Fireside ; and in her own collection of poems and very short stories, The Honey Month . She’s also the author, with Max Gladstone, of an epistolary spy vs. spy novella titled This Is How You Lose the Time War . Amal is the New York Times Book Review ’s science fiction and fantasy columnist, and lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats.

“Madeleine” pairs the emotional discombobulation of mourning and falling in love with the physical unease of starting experimental medication and time travel. It was a 2015 Nebula Award finalist.

MADELEINE REMEMBERS being a different person. It strikes her when she’s driving, threading her way through farmland, homesteads, facing down the mountains around which the road winds. She remembers being thrilled at the thought of travel, of the self she would discover over the hills and far away. She remembers laughing with friends, looking forward to things, to a future.

She wonders at how change comes in like a thief in the night, dismantling our sense of self one bolt and screw at a time until all that’s left of the person we think we are is a broken door hanging off a rusty hinge, waiting for us to walk through.

“Tell me about your mother,” says Clarice, the clinical psychologist assigned to her.

Madeleine is stymied. She stammers. This is only her third meeting with Clarice. She looks at her hands and the tissue she is twisting between them. “I thought we were going to talk about the episodes.”

“We will,” and Clarice is all gentleness, all calm, “but—”

“I would really rather talk about the episodes.”

Clarice relents, nods in her gracious, patient way, and makes a note. “When was your last one?”

“Last night.” Madeleine swallows, hard, remembering.

“And what was the trigger?”

“The soup,” she says, and she means to laugh, but it comes out wet and strangled like a sob. “I was making chicken soup, and I put a stick of cinnamon in. I’d never done that before but I remembered how it looked, sometimes, when my mother would make it—she would boil the thighs whole with bay leaves, black pepper, and sticks of cinnamon, and the way it looked in the pot stuck with me—so I thought I would try it. It was exactly right—it smelled exactly, exactly the way she used to make it—and then I was there, I was small and looking up at her in our old house, and she was stirring the soup and smiling down at me, and the smell was like a cloud all around, and I could smell her, too, the hand cream she used, and see the edge of the stove and the oven door handle with the cat-print dish towel on it—”