New Orbit Magazine: Issue 04, October 2018

The editor discusses an
unexpected common theme
that sprung up through this
issue and recent global news.
A real-world drama melds
with near-future technology
in this beautiful experience
of love, life, childbirth and
self-driving cars.
What are our ethical
concerns about letting
artificial intelligence take the
wheel? Are they substantial
enough?
A xenobiologist studies a
creature seemingly alien to
all human science, while
contending with the
loneliness of a distant world.
How are we searching for
alien life, and is it as
complete a search as we
need? What of
unconventional life?
A classic science fiction
trope retold in a bittersweet
tale, in which we consider
how life changes when
stretched out over centuries.

An automaton who has been
used as an experiment in AI
for another automaton tries
to escape the loop she is
caught in.
Our emotional detatchment
from humanity, terror and
crisis is represented in
an all-time science fiction
favourite: the time machine
Sophie Fooks gives a youth
perspective on modern
emotion, the meaning of
time travel, and where our
future is headed.
The immortality problem –
how do we truly quantify
living forever?
In the artistic community of
the future, we explore the
relationship between
technology and human
nature.i
Our responsibility to the
future is imperative to every
aspect of this magazine. Our
statement can be found
here.

_____________
“More an art than a science” is a
phrase we hear day in and out,
about most any kind of concept. We
say making a cake is more art than
science, not because of the level of
creativity required to complete the
task but because, despite the fact
that baking is simply glorified (or deglorified?)
chemistry, the rigid
instructions of the recipe book
alone can all too often fall short of
reality.
A little bit of art can be valuable to
most any pursuit. It has long been
New Orbit Magazine’s goal to
represent this crossover of the two
into one cultural idea, and so many
of the stories in this issue walk that
line; displaying for us how science,
technology and understanding can
so easily leave that perception of
hard lines, lists and numbers, and
become something that many would

consider to be beautiful.
A Clockwork Muse, like so many artificial
intelligence stories throughout time – Blade
Runner, I, Robot, Lawnmower Man, and
countless more – forces us to question where
that line between technology and experience
sits, what it is that turns a something into a
someone, and what that means for our desire
to package our tech into neat little boxes –
literally and metaphorically.
existent in the absence of the other. In spite
of the mostly friendly sibling rivalry between
the two, they remain just that – siblings,
cohorts, two sides of the coin that is our
human passion for and understanding of the
world around us.
I hope you, dear readers, can find as much
joy in the collusions of these two modes of
understanding as I do in experiencing the
works ahead.
Revolutions, the first story you’ll come across
in issue 04, takes the concept of the selfdriving
car, the statistical analysis of its
potential utility versus the consumer’s
proclivity to purchase it, and a raft of
technological possibilities to which it relates,
and translates those figures into pure,
heartfelt emotion through the lens of a
gorgeously written story. While the figures
will make sense to some, the experience exists
for everybody, no matter their expertise. This
is the value of art to science, to progress, and
the reason that speculative fiction has forged
ahead as a favourite theme in entertainment
for as long as science fiction has been around.
Happy musing,
Naomi Moore
Editor and Founder of New Orbit Magazine
Every story in this issue (and,in a broader
sense, every story we have or will feature here
in New Orbit Magazine) allows, encourages
and sometimes requires us to acknowledge
these connections for what they are; a
demonstration of the value that art has to
science, and the other way around. For us, as
humans, either of these would be
incomprehensible, ignored, or even non-

_____________
Eve sat in the front seat of the car with her
legs turned away from her husband. She was
slightly curled into herself as if that might have
any effect at all on the pain. When she could do
more than just cope again, she looked out her
window at the neglected fence posts leaning
down the steep slope on the side of the road.
The wind turbines in the distance echoed the
revolutions of the wheels of the car beneath her.
When the wind blew too hard the engineers let
the turbines stand still so they didn’t get
damaged. Labour was not so forgiving. Even
with all the advances in modern medicine, noone
had thought to invent a pause button to let
women avoid getting damaged.
They had left for hospital earlier in the
process than most expectant parents because
they knew the trip to the city would take time.
Eve felt the pain of a contraction starting again
and did her best not to get angry at her husband
for ignoring her pleas for a self-driving car. He
could have been holding her and supporting
her right now. She could have had enough
space to stretch out. He’d said they couldn’t
afford to spend the money with a new baby on
the way, but she knew the real reason was his
love of driving. She couldn’t really complain
though; that was why he’d agreed to live in the
beautiful rural area they now called home.
Kyle gripped the steering wheel with white
knuckles and did his best to keep the car under
the speed limit as he listened to the noises of
pain coming from his wife next to him. He tried
to estimate the number of minutes between her
contractions. Before they’d left he’d reminded
her to keep entering the times into the hospital
app that their midwife would be monitoring.
She’d gestured rudely at him and told him to

do it himself before she went back to hanging
on to the doorframe. The car crossed the centre
line a little as he took a corner on the winding
road too fast and Eve cried out in pain.
“Slow down! That makes it worse!” she said,
in between panting breaths. She was starting to
hyperventilate.
“Sorry, Love. I’m just worried we left it too
late. How often are your contractions coming?”
he replied.
“Too often,” was all she said.
They had reached the highway, 10 minutes’
drive from the hospital on a good day, when
they hit the traffic jam. Stopped cars stretched
before them like some sort of metallic ocean.
Kyle watched the dial on his dashboard drop to
zero as he braked. He checked his phone. There
had been a multiple-fatality accident ahead.
Estimated delay – 1 hour.
The self-driving car in front of him backed up
to within an inch of his front bumper and
started a series of turns to make its way to a
nearby small gap in the median barrier. Other
self-driving cars were shifting in the same way,
programmed to communicate with each other.
They worked together to get as many of them as
possible out of the traffic. One by one they
slipped through the narrow gap to make a U-
turn on the highway.
priority beacon the car would lodge a
complaint. The reversing beeps of his car
seemed to mock him. Kyle backed his car up,
begrudging even that small movement further
away from where he needed to be. He watched
in frustration as the flashing car extracted itself
from the sea of metal and sped off in the other
direction.
Five minutes later, Eve’s moans had turned
into screams. Kyle had started entering the
contraction times into the hospital app now
that they were stopped. He didn’t know what
else to do. He’d assumed his wife would run
things until they got to the hospital. He’d just
entered the latest time – 2 minutes – when the
phone started ringing; it was the midwife.
“Kyle, those contractions are progressing
really quickly. Where are you?”
“We’re stuck on the highway.”
“Why didn’t you… never mind. I’m calling
you an ambulance right now. I need to talk to
Eve.”
Kyle waited for Eve’s latest scream to subside
and then put the phone on speaker.
“Eve, it’s Michelle. You’re doing really well. I
need you to tell me what you’re feeling.”
Kyle pounded the steering wheel with a fist.
He would have risked the large fine for humandriven
cars changing direction on the highway,
but there was no way that he could even get
close to the gap.
Five cars ahead he could see a driverless car
start flashing red. The occupants must have hit
their emergency priority button, probably just
in frustration at their inability to get out of the
traffic. The drivers in front of him started
tooting their horns as their reverse lights came
on. If they were too slow responding to the
“It hurts so much. I don’t think I can do this.”
“You can do it Eve, but I need you to keep
talking to me. The ambulance is twenty minutes

away. Is there anything else you can tell me
about how you’re feeling?”
Eve started screaming again and Kyle felt
panic set in. He tried to put an arm around her
but she pushed him away and clutched tight to
the armrest instead. Through her window he
could see the face of a child in the neighbouring
car staring back at him with wide eyes. He
turned and looked out behind them while Eve
was distracted. Every self-driving car that hadn’t
managed to make it out of the traffic jam yet
was glowing red to help clear a path for the
ambulance to come through. They only did that
in emergencies. If there had been more of them
they would have looked like an airport runway,
but instead they looked like lonely signal lights
in a vast ocean.
“Can’t the ambulance come from the other
direction?” he asked Michelle in panic.
“Traffic’s backed up just the same on the
other side, Kyle. You’ll be okay. I’m right here
for you and I’ve got an open line to emergency
services. Eve, just keep breathing, in through
your nose and out through your mouth. When
you can manage, start talking to me again.”
Kyle watched in despair as a small trickle of
self-driving cars went past in the other direction
only three lanes away from him. If something
happened to Eve or their baby because he
hadn’t wanted to borrow money for a new car
he didn’t think he could live with himself.
Eve’s cracking voice came from next to him “I
think my waters broke about fifteen minutes
ago,” she said.
Kyle’s eyes widened, “Why didn’t you say
anything?”
“You were driving, I didn’t want to distract
you. It’s not a big deal.” she started breathing
fast again and whimpered, feeling another
contraction building up.
“It might not mean the baby’s coming.”
Michelle’s voice was soft and calming “But
when you’ve already been labouring for a while
it can mean it’s time to start pushing. Do you
have towels with you, Kyle? I think Eve should
be sitting in the back with more space just in
case.”
“I can’t do this,” Kyle said, just as Eve started
screaming again.
She was still moaning loudly when Michelle
started talking again. “Kyle, I need you to go put
clean towels down in the back seat and move
her back there right now. Pick up the phone
and open the door. The ambulance is ten
minutes away.”
Michelle’s calm voice had a hypnotic effect on
him and he was half out the door already before
he even realised. Once he started moving, his
brain started trying to function again. He laid
everything out in the back and opened his wife’s
door.
Kyle held tight under Eve’s arm and halfpulled
her out of the car. The towel they’d put
down on the seat stuck to her clothes as she
stood up. He reached down to pull it away from
her and stared at it for a moment in confusion.
There was large dark patch in the middle of the
towel that became bright red at the edges like
some sort of Rorshach inkblot test. For a
moment his brain tried to figure out what
animal he could see in the pattern and what
that said about him; then he realised what the
stain was.
As he was staring at the towel, Eve grabbed
onto his jacket and slid down onto the road.

Kyle heard his voice yelling towards the phone
on the dashboard as if he was listening to
someone far away, “Michelle, she’s bleeding!
There’s blood everywhere! Help me! What do I
do?”
The mother from the car next door was there
within seconds. “I’ve got her. You pick up the
phone.” She lay Eve down on the white lines of
the road between their cars and put a jersey
under her head. A ring of fascinated and
helpless faces grew around them as people got
out of their cars to come look.
Kyle’s hands shook so badly that he knocked
the phone to the floor. He picked it up from
next to the unopened packet of pacifiers that
was lying in the footwell, a last-minute purchase
in the hope of quiet nights once the baby came.
Now he hoped his baby screamed the whole
damn highway down. He couldn’t think about
the alternative.
Michelle started talking again. Her voice on
speakerphone was the only sound around
them. “You need to keep her lying flat and
calm. I’ve raised the priority of the ambulance
call. They’ve said they’ll drive up the other side
of the motorway against traffic. There’s only
self-drivers making it through on that side
anyway. You need to ask someone to wave them
down.”
A man stepped forward from the circle of
voyeurs, “I’ll do it.”
Kyle tried to say thank you but the words
wouldn’t come out. The man clapped a hand
on his shoulder. “It’ll be OK,” he said and then
made his way across the lanes of stopped traffic
to stand on the median barrier waiting.
Kyle hunched forward over Eve and held her.
The mother sitting next to her gently took the
phone off him. He could hear her answering
Michelle’s questions. “Her eyes are open but
she isn’t responding to me. Her breathing is
really shallow. There’s a pool of blood on the
ground. It’s hard to tell how much.”
He couldn’t look away from his sheet-white
pale wife. He realised he hadn’t heard her
screaming for several minutes, and that scared
him more than the screams had. The wind blew
the smell of idling exhausts across his face and
chips of gravel from the grey road dug into his
knees. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They’d
toured the hospital a month ago in preparation.
It was smooth and white and smelled of
antiseptic and visitor’s flowers. This highway
wasn’t part of the birth plan.
He didn’t even notice the sound of the
ambulance siren coming closer until a
paramedic took the woman’s place across from
him.
“You need to move aside for a moment please
sir, so we can get her on the stretcher. What’s
her name?”
“Eve.”
“Eve, you need to hang in there just a bit
longer. We’ve got you. Can you hear me? Eve?”
The paramedic was shaking her shoulder gently
as she spoke.
Kyle stumbled after them as they loaded her
into the ambulance. He sat across from her in
the back, watching the paramedic working fast.
He didn’t have a lot of experience with
paramedics, but he knew desperation when he
saw it.
A voice came from the front, “The rig wants
to do a U-turn and go through the ‘burbs
Robyn. This side is starting to clear and we’ve
got human drivers heading towards us.”
“We don’t have time. Hit the override and tell
dispatch to get the police and those SDCs to
clear us a lane. If they can save their owners’
lives, they can damn well help the rest of us
plebs too,” the paramedic replied.

oom. The same thought kept playing over and
over through his mind. If only they’d bought
the new car he would be holding his baby in his
arms right now.
Kyle was dimly aware of the flashing red
beacons of the self-drive cars playing across
Eve’s face as the ambulance sped past them in
the opposite direction at high speed. The tenminute
drive took five thanks to the entire
route being cleared ahead of them
simultaneously. He would have been impressed
if he wasn’t so worried that it was five minutes
too long.
They rushed Eve off to theatre as soon as they
arrived and Kyle was left sitting in a waiting
Eve had rolled her eyes when he’d said no to
buying one. She’d told him they were lucky they
had the option, that they had a responsibility to
use their privilege to be early adopters and help
bring the price down for everyone else. He’d
laughed at her and told her shopping was not a
social service. He didn’t need his savings to be
on the front-lines of a technology revolution.
The fan in the corner had something stuck in
the revolving blades and it made a rhythmic
clicking noise as it wafted air across Kyle’s face,
cooling the tracks of his tears until they felt like
glaciers creeping down his cheeks. He put his
head in his hands and he waited. ◊

Most every new technology humanity is
introduced to comes with a raft of its own
moral and ethical quandaries. Perhaps the
technology could be used for evil if taken
outside of its suggested field, or perhaps
people believe it's too much of an affront to
nature or the traditional order of things. The
basis of the ethical questions asked about
driverless cars lie within a famous thought
experiment known as the “trolley problem”,
which forces a person to make decisions
based upon the greater good or individual
value type grounds. The most basic trolley
problem would posit: “a trolley (as in a tram
or train) is approaching a fork in its track, and
you are standing at the lever which can alter
its course. Tied to track A, the one on which
the trolley is headed, are two strangers. Tied
to track B, the course the trolley will take if
you throw the lever, is one. What do you do?”
Throwing the lever will mean that you're
saving the lives of the two people tied on track
A, and ensuring one less death as a result of
the trolley accident. However, it also means
that you are actively condemning the person
tied to track B, who would've survived
otherwise, to death. Is inaction the correct
moral path here, declining to assume that you
have the moral authority to make judgements
on who lives or dies? Or is it the greater good,
utilitarianism, saying simply that two lives
spared is better than one? How does your
decision change when the single stranger is
replaced with a loved one, or the pair of
strangers are replaced with violent criminals?
Do we have the right to recalibrate our answer

ased on the kind of people we’re judging to
live or die?
In creating driverless cars, we are
attempting to create a way to take these
almost impossible decisions out of human
hands, and into AI’s.
While technologies that are capable of
safely and efficiently piloting a car without
human intervention is increasing in both
number and sophistication, mainstream
driverless cars are struggling to get off the
ground due to a few issues. One of these is
cost – as for the characters in Revolutions, the
current price for an autonomous vehicle is so
prohibitively high that normal road users can
barely consider purchasing one. This means
that there are exceptionally few on the roads,
and this in turn decreases the personal utility
of owning one – like the internet, driverless
cars are a resource that increase in personal
value with the more people that use them.
The second issue, and currently the most
important one, is the way that these cars are
programmed to react in accident situations.
These scenarios have become the modern-day
incarnation of the original trolley problem –
if someone is guaranteed to die in this
autopiloted car accident, which person
should it be? There are dozens of scenarios
that could play out, both where other road
users are at fault and where there is no one to
blame, but the accident still cannot be
avoided (several of these scenarios are set out
by professor of robot ethics Patrick Lin in the
linked TEDTalk). Turning to the principle of
minimising harm is the most obvious choice,
but in the cases where that concept is more
complex than a simple black and white
answer, programmers are getting stuck. Some
have turned to human-based input, posing
moral questions to the public and analysing
their answers to see what the general person
would like the car to do. Unfortunately, this
too often fails in constructing a clear-cut

answer, as, for example, “36 percent of
respondents would want a robot car to sacrifice
their life to avoid crashing into a child, while 64
percent would want the child to die in order to
save their own life. (Patrick Lin, Wired)”
of legal and financial benefit. After all, for the
first time they are struggling with the concept
of being held accountable (or forcing their
consumers to be held accountable) not only
for manslaughter, but for outright murder:
A further and just as pressing issue regarding
the morality here is that of liability. As the driver
of your car, you are responsible for any people
injured or killed due to your operation of it –
even if it resulted from a reflex required to save
your or another’s life. If the vehicle itself was the
cause via a defect or a structural failing, for
example, the manufacturer is liable for the
lives lost – the reason for vehicle recalls within
the motor industry. So where does the
liability fall when deaths or injuries result
from accidents between driverless cars? As the
people in the vehicle have no control over
what the machine does, they can no longer be
held accountable for it, so it is currently
understood that liability will fall largely on the
manufacturer. Vehicle manufacturers are,
understandably, not impressed with the
concept of shouldering liability for all lives
lost due to their machine and its code, which
causes many of them to forgo consideration
of the production of driverless cars at any
time in the foreseeable future. Others have
tried to find ways around taking on liability,
such as creating driverless cars with adjustable
ethics settings that are coded in by the
consumer, and not the manufacturer, to
return the culpability to them. This has its
own frightening problems. Too complex a
system could allow a customer to express
dangerous biases in ways that would've been
impossible with a traditional car; we may see
them calibrate their car to target children over
the elderly, the poor over the rich, arts
students over science students, humans over
expensive objects they’d be liable to replace,
women over men, or one race over another in
the case of an accident. Too simple a system
would fail to remove liability from the
manufacturer, incentivising them to take the
dangerous route described above for the sake
Like many medical professionals – surgeons,
vaccine makers, etcetera – perhaps autonomous
vehicle manufacturers will be given their own
special kind of legal protection for their
failing the few, given the benefit that
driverless cars provide for the many, for
society; a trolley problem in itself.

This beautiful TEDTalk by Patrick Lin elucidates a great number of moral queries we are and
should be having about the new concept of driverless cars.
It can become tempting to look at a selfdriving
car as a weapon – a tactical drone – a
complex targeting android designed largely to
plan vehicular manslaughter in the most (or
least?) efficient ways. In doing this it can be
easy to forget that a driverless car is just that –
a car. It’s a mode of transport that increases
efficiency, gives you extra time and comfort,
and will be far safer for the average person
than a vehicle controlled by a human driver –
whether that be your bus driver starting work
on a sleepy Monday morning, an uber driver
taking his 400th consecutive passenger
without break, an elderly stranger who needs
a new prescription for their glasses or is prone
to some minor road rage, or your friend who
had a couple of glasses of wine in the
afternoon but is fine (and, importantly, legal)
to drive now. Worldwide, traffic accidents kill
approximately 3300 and injure hundreds of
thousands more every day. In America, a
person dies in a traffic accident every 15
minutes; almost triple their rate of firearm
homicides. In New Zealand, that number is
nearing 400 deaths and 12 to 15,000 injuries
a year, in a country with a population of only
~4.5 million – almost one in every 11,000
New Zealanders lose their lives on the roads
every year. Artificial intelligence is not
perfect, and nobody is claiming that their
driverless cars will eliminate all road deaths.
However, there's a good chance that with a
little faith, they will get us part of the way
there; like many pursuits, the more we invest
in this kind of progress the greater the
progress will be. When that progress saves
hundreds, thousands, or even just a few lives,
perhaps it becomes our moral responsibility
to nurture it in whatever way we can.
Patrick Lin. Here's a Terrible Idea:
Robot Cars with Adjustable Ethics
Settings. Wired. August 18, 2014.
Accessed September 09, 2018.
https://www.wired.com/2014/08/h
eres-a-terrible-idea-robot-cars-withadjustable-ethics-settings/
Noah J. Goodall. Machine Ethics and
Automated Vehicles. Pre-print version.
Published in G. Meyer and S. Beiker
(eds.), Road Vehicle Automation,
Springer, 2014, pp. 93-102.
Available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-
3-319-05990-7_9
Patrick Lin. The Ethics of Saving Lives
with Autonomous Cars Is Far Murkier
than you Think. Wired. August 30,
2013. Accessed September 09, 2018.
https://www.wired.com/2013/07/t
he-surprising-ethics-of-robot-cars/

_____________
Clumsy with pain, she is borne down by the
weight of her own fractured thoughts. Light
glares. Unformed, unfocused, she cannot link
one perception to another. Minutiae pick her
apart. She is trapped in the details, present and
past transparencies overlaid to create a cloudy
mass where there is no yesterday, no before,
only now, and now, and now, neverending. She
clings to what she can.
Eventually the pain eases, resolves itself into
the stretching of her muscles, the beating of her
hollow heart. Sensation, inexplicable. She
believes she knows what it is. Her mind locks it
into its place. There, now. It is real.
She is aware of a childhood, but she cannot
hold it. The memory slips. Automata have no
past. She knows she is a construct, an imitation
of a life cobbled together from borrowed
memories. They are all true. She remembers
sitting in a field in the July sun, waiting for her
mother to spread the picnic blanket. She
remembers the slow ache of arthritis in her
hands when she shoveled the winter’s first
heavy snow. She is fragmentary and erratic in
her recollections but convinced of them all the
same. They are in her, loose as fallen leaves, and
each is real.
But she is not. Her eyes are green glass,
windows into the illusion of her soul. The man

standing in front of her sees what he wants in
them. He has imagined her into being, shaped
her and done the fine work of her machinery.
What rare elements did he use to assemble her,
his Galatea, his Eve: platinum wires, slick
titanium joints, silicon, smooth pale lab-grown
skin through which the shadow of her
composite skeleton can be seen. She is
breathtaking, inhuman, flesh over plastic
bones. She breathes.
“Delia,” he says. “Come here.”
She walks gracefully, as if she had always stood
erect on her narrow feet, balanced her mass
against gravity’s subtle pull.
His name is Stephen. She already knows it.
His hands on her shoulders, running lightly
down her arms. She feels it. She trembles,
gooseflesh rising, alive.
He assesses her. She stands still, unsure,
expectant.
“Fine,” he says. “You are fine.”
Feminine, she reaches up to smooth her hair.
Szmenski steps around Stephen, leans close to
her and places his hand over hers, following her
motion. “Yes,” he says. “You are fine.” She
knows his name as well. She glances at
Stephen, the need to do so innate.
Stephen’s mouth twitches but he stands aside
to let Szmenski scrutinize her.
Her hands are restless. She picks at her nails,
running her fingers around the edge of them
over and again.
“Stop it,” Stephen says. “You’ll ruin them.”
Szmenski gently pulls her fingers apart.
“Relax, Delia. There is no need to fret,” he says.
He guides her hands to her sides, poses her
like a demure mannequin.
“You are quite talented, Stephen. Delia,
thank you.”
Szmenski steps back to allow Stephen close to
her again. His breath moves loose strands her
dark hair. She has no sense of him.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Stephen says, never
looking away from her. Just past his ear Delia
sees Szmenski slide open a panel and leave them
to themselves. She remembers.
Beside Stephen in the quiet darkness, she
wonders. Synapses fire, electricity jumps the
gaps, makes its circuit. She thinks time may be
passing. She remembers sunrise. Her head is
full of stars.
He leads her to a seat before the window,
positions her at an angle to the light. He tilts
her chin up and away from him. She looks over
her shoulder at the clear blue sky.
“Stay like that,” he says, retreating across the
room. He picks up paper and charcoal, sketches
her outline quickly before going back to fill in
details. There are many portraits of her in the
house, the bulk of them with her face tilted
away, as though Stephen is wary of capturing all
of her.
She is curious. She lingers over the sensation
of her neck extended, the pull of the muscles.
Outside, leaves rustle in the wind.
There is a flicker in her memory, in her
vision. She can see herself sitting there. She
remembers seeing it. She feels as if she is falling.
Her limbs do not match her perception. She
loses her pose, turning back to Stephen with her
lips parted, already asking.
“What is it now, Delia? I told you to stay
still.” He is angry with her. She is finite, she is
lacking. She is not what he wants, right now.
*
*

*
Szmenski comes and goes. Sometimes he
speaks to them, genial small talk about the day
that reveals nothing; other times he watches
quietly from a seat in the studio as Stephen
paints. Delia has the feeling that she remembers
him from before, but she has no before. His
presence slots in among all the other pinpoints
of memory.
Stephen poses her again, this time standing
with her hands pressed together palm to palm,
fingers brushing her chin. She remembers
praying, fervently. Clean tears spring up in her
eyes. She does not know why. The mood fades.
She dislikes modeling for Stephen, is subtly
shamed by the multiple versions he makes of
her. He has not yet begun this repetition, is still
preparing his palette. She searches for other
distractions.
There is a fine tear in her skin along the edge
of her thumbnail. She picks at it until she can
pinch it up and pull it back. She peels her hand
like an orange. She is vaguely expecting pain,
and blood, but it does not hurt. She is not
surprised by the lacework of wires and slim rods
revealed by her picking. She keeps going,
stripping the skin from her arm in a long sleeve.
*
She remembers leaping from the cliff’s edge
into the cold deep pool. She landed badly,
slamming into the water’s surface before it gave
in to her weight and let her sink. This stings like
that did, like a raw electric current across her
chest and belly. She jumps away from it, fearing
the drowning that will follow.
“It’s okay,” Szmenski says, calm as air.
The needle glints and sparkles as it threads
her skin back together. There is pain, but it is
not hers. Still, she flinches.
“Be still, Delia,” says Szmenski.
Her body relaxes. His hands are familiar, the
slow process of reconstruction has happened
before. She watches his hands move across hers,
the delicate stitches he leaves behind. It will
heal into scars so pale they will lay like lace on
her skin. Ghosts of what will be. She
remembers it.
*
“Delia!” Stephen cries.
He reaches for her, crushing the metal bones
of her hand in a hard grip as he stops her.
Without the skin to conduct sensation, she is
only aware of pressure. She pulls her hand away,
watching the slide and flex of her machinery.
“Don’t touch anything. We have to fix this,”
Stephen says.
“I don’t want it fixed. Not yet,” she says.
“You can’t stay like this,” he says, already
moving away.
Szmenski is always the one to put her back
together. He has never allowed Stephen that
privilege. Sometimes he reconfigures her,
changes her into something slyly different. All
the iterations echo in her, dissonant and
interchangeable. Memories fade and bloom.
Once he had called her Adele.

She lies close beside Stephen as clear morning
floods She lies through close beside the windows. Stephen She as clear has not morning slept,
floods it is not through part of the her. windows. She studies She him has in not the slept, new
it light, is not the part length of her. of She his nose, studies the him texture in the of new his
light, skin, the evaluating, length of comparing his nose, it the to texture her own. of his A
skin, bird shrills evaluating, outside comparing the window it to and her he own. opens A
bird his eyes shrills at the outside sudden the sound. window From and her opens angle
his she eyes can at see the the sudden glass arc sound. of his From cornea her where angle it
she floats can on see his the eye. glass A scrim arc of of his sunlight cornea traces where its
floats curve. on She his watches eye. A the scrim spark of sunlight and scroll traces of data its
curve. flow across She watches it as comes the spark awake. and scroll of data
flow across it as he comes awake.
She blinks twice, reading her own scroll. She
is She made blinks his twice, image. reading her own scroll. She
is made in his image.
“Stephen,” she says. “We are the same.”
“Stephen,” she says. “We are the same.”
He turns his head toward her, his fine hair
rustling He turns on the his crisp head sheets. toward her, his fine hair
rustling on the crisp sheets.
“No,” he says, calm as an empty sky. “I am
your “No,” maker.” he says, calm as an empty sky. “I am
your maker.”
He is peaceful, certain.
He is peaceful, certain.
She turns away. There is no response to such
a She statement. turns away. There is no response to such
a statement.
He reaches for her, brushes her hip, her belly,
but He she reaches rolls away for her, from brushes him. The her sheets hip, her are belly, cool
but under she her. rolls She away rises. from At him. a distance The sheets she are knows cool
under who she her. is, but She she rises. cannot At a separate distance herself she knows from
who the tangled she is, but threads she cannot of the separate other lives herself she from has
the impossibly tangled lived. threads He of did the as well other as he lives could. she has He
impossibly is not capable lived. of He perfection. did as well She as he throws could. open He
is the not window, capable grips of perfection. its frame so She tightly throws her fingers open
the ache, window, closes her grips eyes its frame against so the tightly sun. her fingers
ache, closes her eyes against the sun.
Light like a downpour washes over her,
through Light like her eyelids, a downpour through washes her skin. over She her, is
through alive, she her is warm eyelids, with through it. She her is something skin. She else is
alive, she is warm with it. She is something else
than her own machinery. The facets click
than together, slotting own machinery. into place. The She facets is everyone click
together, within her, slotting mosaic into and place. whole. She is everyone
within her, mosaic and whole.
“Come back to bed, Delia,” Stephen says.
“Come back to bed, Delia,” Stephen says.
“No,” she says. “I am leaving this.”
“No,” she says. “I am leaving this.”
She is surprised by his speed, how fast he leaps
up She and is spins surprised her away by his from speed, the how window. fast he leaps
up and spins her away from the window.
Stephen slaps her across the face, hard and
fast. Stephen Pain flickers slaps her across across her the skin, face, prickles hard and like
fast. fragments Pain flickers of sulphur across burning. her skin, prickles like
fragments of sulphur burning.
“You do not get to leave,” he says. “I made
you. “You You do stay not with get me.” to leave,” he says. “I made
you. You stay with me.”
She lashes out like a cat, responding from
some She other lashes life. out His like skin a cat, rips responding under her nails. from
some Silver other mesh life. glistens, His skin revealed. rips under There is nails. no
Silver blood. mesh glistens, revealed. There is no
blood.
For a moment they are both caught in staring
at For his a machinery, moment they and are she both remembers caught in that staring he
at does his not machinery, remember. and Then she remembers he looks up that her
does and snarls. not remember. She feels his Then scentless he looks breath up on at her
and face. snarls. She braces She feels herself his to scentless shove him breath back, on her but
face. he grabs She her braces arms. herself She throws to shove herself him back, backward but
he against grabs the her window arms. She and throws feels herself the glass backward splinter
against behind the her, window hears and the feels crack the of glass the wooden splinter
behind frame. The her, sutures hears the at her crack shoulders of the tear wooden loose
frame. and she The is sutures falling. at Stephen her shoulders clutches tear empty loose
and sleeves. she is falling. Stephen clutches empty
sleeves.
The air seems to hold her, for a moment. She
hears The Szmenski air seems to shout hold inside her, for the a room, moment. but She she
hears cannot Szmenski see him. shout She has inside closed the room, her eyes. but This she
cannot has happened see him. before. She has The closed sudden her eyes. light This
has overwhelming. happened before. The sudden light is
overwhelming.
Out of her skin, she is free. ◊
Out of her skin, she is free. ◊

STEPHANIE BRETHERTON
BONE
LINES
Love is Evolutionary
“A monument to the timelessness of human
nature, and a work of art... Bretherton ignites
her characters with a life, complexity, a
personality with which any number of readers
will identify and empathise with. The author
should be as overjoyed as I was impressed with
this debut novel (the first, I hope, of many).”
Naomi Moore
Editor, New Orbit magazine
“Gracefully written, carefully researched, and
always alert to the issues it raises, Bone Lines
reaches far across time to relate the
interwoven stories of two women – a genetic
scientist addressing the complexities of
contemporary experience, and one of our
earliest ancestors in a physical and spiritual
ordeal of survival... a brave and moving
adventure of the imagination.”
Lindsay Clarke
The Chymical Wedding
“A brilliant, genre-defying read, Bone Lines
deftly unravels the wonder of oneness”
Barbara Bos
Managing Editor, Women Writers, Women’s
Books
“Like Sapiens ...if fictionalised and seen
through the eyes of two fierce and
admirable women.”
Zero Filter Books
Available to buy at:
Amazon.co.uk
Bookdepository.com

_____________
Later, as my fingers clenched around the
joystick, I would rethink my hasty trek through
the doors of the machine. Thinking back on my
naivety ‒ as I sit in a chair whose contours have
sagged and worn into the perfect imprint of
myself ‒ my willingness to take apart time and
fiddle it into something else, is foreign to me
now. Youth is a curious toxin. I remember the
fire of it running through me, though I’m sure
I didn’t register it at the time.
When the machine appeared, I was full of
heady youth and frustration, and dissatisfied
with certain aspects of my life. I suppose I
wanted the comfort of knowing I would be all
right. That was my first mistake. When I first
saw myself as I would be, I recoiled. Something
primal and instinctual snapped like a harp
string around me. I was doing wrong on a
cosmic level. It was like seeing my intestines
outside my body. I was corrupt at a base level.
All the mannerisms and ticks of character that
I should have been experiencing from the
inside were externalised. I saw myself as I was:
painfully small. An insignificant member of the
human race.
After that, I knew I could not go back. To see
that and resume normality was impossible. I
refused to wait out my future, feeling the skin
slowly sagging away from me, my arteries
constricting, my joints rusting, and mind
congealing. Losing every part of myself so slowly
I would barely register it until I woke up one
day decrepit and moaning for days gone by.
Aging was a profound and unnatural fear, its
roots reaching deep in me.
I would later remember my hands shaking as
I punched numbers into the machine, almost at
random, as if guided by something outside
myself. Seeing my future self, I was urged
desperately forward, away from it.
In the time I appeared next, I was already
dead. As horrid as it sounds, I was relieved. I
wanted no glimpse of the poltergeist I was to

ecome. Instead, I found myself at the funeral
of my dearest friend, someone I met as a child
and we had rarely parted company since. He
was the most important person in my life. There
were ornate displays of flowers. Mourners wept
throughout the room. His mother was sobbing.
As I looked on his casket, I felt nothing. All the
other people who had been dear to me had
warped in my absence. They had disentangled
themselves from my memory. Their eulogies
were tributes to strangers.
Throughout this time-hopping, I wasn’t
aging, although my fingers became wiry as they
danced over the panels of my machine. Now
that the people I loved had been wrested from
me, I was free. Free to travel further, free to find
a place I could be happy.
In fifty years, they found the cure for cancer.
Old men and women with walkers tottered
around the neighbourhood. Rosy cheeks over
withered, drooping skin. Walkers to conceal
atrophying limbs. I moved on.
In one hundred years, plastic surgery would
remove a person’s imperfections. Glossy
magazines models come to life breezed through
the streets, laughing. They frightened me, these
perfect specimens. Their skin was like rubber,
or the lustrous paper of the magazines they
read. I had a horrid feeling in the pit of my
stomach, as if at any minute the faces might fall
off, leaving the people with skin as raw as a
skinned animal, hung up to tenderise. Panic
clawed at my throat. I tugged at my hair and
moved on once more.
to settle down, to stay in one time for even a
week, I would shiver uncontrollably. I could
never sleep, so instead I roamed the streets of a
world that was always hostile and foreign to me.
I was not wanted, the buildings and streets told
me. I could no longer live in real time. I had
been expelled from the natural order of things.
The only way I could operate was always moving
on, living in time lapse.
I know eventually I may run out of time. It
only makes sense that if there is a beginning,
there must also be an end. I walk through the
dark corridor of time with no clue as to where
the precipice will be, or what will happen when
I reach it. I have seen more than any person
could have dreamed. Empires have fallen,
rebuilt, fallen again. An ambitious young man
takes too much; a foolish young woman wants
to change the world. The patterns are always the
same.
I am no longer afraid to stop living; I have
never lived. I have been life-adjacent. My
machine and I, silent observers of history,
refugees of time. No-one can miss me, because
they do not know I am missing. I exist on the
rim, observing the world find new ways to
destroy itself and patch itself up again. It is
futile. I am futile. But after so long what else
can I do?
I move on.
Understand, these futures I darted furtively
through were veritable utopias. Plague, war and
famine had been all but done away with.
Lifespans were longer, life was better, people
were happy. I was not happy. I had developed a
new state of living, here in my sequestered
bubble. It was addicting. Every time I attempted

I’ve heard it said that every superpower is a
personification of a human desire, an
acknowledgement of our limits. We want to
read minds because we know we lack perfect
empathy. We want invisibility to avoid
judgement. Following this train of logic, time
travel would be the personification of a desire
to remove oneself from the immediacy of
events. To jump back and forth through the
time stream is to remove any vitality, any
legitimacy from the emotions life would
usually evoke. When you can move on to an
entirely different time whenever you like, an
earthquake, a war, a famine, mean nothing.
There is always another century.
I have always considered dystopias to be
intrinsically linked to the tradition of
Romanticism. The emphasis it places on
individuality, emotion and the human spirit,
I find, translates rather seamlessly into a
dystopian future. Because of this, many of the
stories I read and write that have dystopian
undertones focus on emotion. The terror
inspired by an authoritarian government, the
miasma of a society without progress, the
horror of losing autonomy over one’s self. In
writing Time Lapse I asked myself under what
circumstances could these emotions be
numbed? In what situation would a person

lose their human instinct to care, and worry
about their perceived futures?
In many dystopias this emotional numbing
can result from lack of control and
knowledge. In George Orwell’s 1984 none of
the citizens are upset about the regimes
because they lack any room for independent
thought or control over their destinies. The
characters in these stories are stifled with
ignorance, while the character in my story is
crushed by knowledge. Knowing nothing
about the world around you obviously
renders it impossible for you to respond
properly to it. Knowing everything though,
knowing the outcome of every possible event
makes responding to the world pointless in
the first place. You can’t truly live in a world
you know everything about. I remember once
I was having a lot of issues with school and
complaining to my father about how I wish I
had everything figured out. He replied that
once someone had everything figured out,
they died. That’s really stuck in my mind
since, and I think it’s partially because it
reminds me that we thrive on not knowing.
The uncertainty of the direction our lives will
take is the only thing keeping us invested. If we
already knew the destination, the journey would
lose all meaning. Having no control over the
world you live in is dangerous, having complete
control over it is just as bad.
This is what my character experiences in the
story. They are essentially handed a roadmap
of the entire universe, given ultimate power
and control. Yet they do nothing with it.
Absolute power reduces them to
powerlessness. This is because when they
distance themselves from the world, and
know everything about it, they lose the will to
care about it.
In my mind, this emotional removal from
events is one of the most dangerous threats to
us today. The way we get our news, through
our phones, our laptops, our websites, stops
us feeling the emotional impact of events. It’s
hard to muster up the energy to care about a
mass shooting when we know there will just
be another one in a week’s time. This
constant influx of tragedy overwhelms us, and
makes us indifferent to it. Indifference is
dangerous, and if we don’t care or can’t
process the problems we’re facing, we can’t fix
them.
Time travel is an extreme example of being
removed from society. The protagonist in
Time Lapse loses their humanity slowly,
feeling more and more indifferent to events
that should cause intense emotion.
Eventually, they start to take an almost
morbid delight in watching the rises and falls
of humanity. They feel immune to all the

pain others feel. Time travel, for them was a
way to bypass nature, to become immortal, to
watch the world with the removed, unbiased
eye of a god. This idea of trying to overcome
your earthly limits has been being written
about since the creation of mainstream
science fiction, with Mary Shelley's
‘Frankenstein’. I think it is such a popular
narrative because humans are inherently
driven towards progress, bettering ourselves
any way we can. With that though, comes the
fear ‘how far is too far? At what point to we
start to tempt fate?’. Dr Frankenstein in
Frankenstein and the protagonist from my
novel both take steps to far, in the name of
hubris, or the desire to become something
more than themselves. Both of them feel the
effects of this, and lose what they most value
in this pursuit of mindless progress.
Now, I’m not one to tell you that progress
is inherently evil either. It’s unlikely
smartphones are going to ruin us, and the
robot uprising seems like it’s still a few years
away. I do think, however, that progress
without thought, without debate, is a
dangerous thing. So often we do things just
because they seem like the next thing to do.
When we walk this line without careful
consideration of what we’re trying to achieve,
the lines between moral and immoral become
blurred. Is it okay to use genetic engineering
to stop the extinction of a plant species? To
promote crop growth? To decide your child's
eye colour? Everyone will have a different
perception of where that line is, which makes
collective, societal ideals hard to agree upon.
In Time Lapse, the protagonist becomes
addicted to progress. Though the pockets of
time they explore seem almost utopian, they
can’t help thinking that the grass might be
greener in the next generation.

The idea of progress, especially
technological progress runs through a lot of
dystopia and is often used as a metaphor for
humans natural urge for progression and
betterment. Though these values should be
good in themselves, they are often villainized
in dystopia. Technology has become our
modern Frankenstein, a symbol of humans
‘playing God’ and giving themselves more
power than they know how to handle. The
power technology holds in our society is
inarguable. Very few industries do not utilize
it and without it, society would collapse.
However, I am skeptical of the notion that
technology has somehow altered the essence
of humanity.
There’s always been a small place in my
heart for dystopias. Part of this may come
down to morbid fascination with the dark
and dreary. But I think it’s more likely that
my love for dystopia comes from my curiosity
about humanity in general. Dystopias rely on
tropes such as tyrannical government,
oppressive society and suppression of free
speech, but that’s not really what they’re
about. At their hearts dystopias are about
humanity and the way it triumphs, or fails to
triumph over oppressive circumstances. This
exploration of humanity has always captured
me, and I think it’s the foundation of most
literature, not just dystopia. The debate about
human nature has been ongoing and ever
changing since the beginning of time. In this
particular debate, the only certainty is that we
will certainly be having it forever. But taking
our ideas and shaping them into cohesive
stories for people to read, critique, argue and
agree with, is in my mind, one of the most
important things we could be doing.

Leonis A2 / Leonis Minor System
_____________
She was startled out of her reverie by the
sound of her own voice. After nearly four earthstandard
months alone, she had forgotten what
it sounded like. She had been trying to imagine
herself objectively, like a narrator
commentating her own life story, and the word
had just come out, escaping from her mouth as
though seeking freedom from her mind.
“Rebecca.”
Her name seemed to bounce around inside
her helmet, and she laughed a little then,
thinking how ridiculous it was that she had
managed to give herself a fright like that. Over
the last few weeks, she had begun to doubt who
she really was, as in her solitude she
painstakingly analysed all those tangled threads
that came together to form: Rebecca Toombes,
the ‘famous’ xeno-biologist.
She wondered if she might have been out solo
for too long this time. The nearest human being
was light-years away. Maybe she would look
back on this moment, when she had talked and
laughed to herself, to find it amongst the initial
signs that her train of thought had derailed for
good. She had been lying there on the dusty
ground in foetal position day-dreaming as suns
scythed across the sky. Now she stood up for the
first time in what felt like days. The piles of
orange dust that had accumulated around her
body stayed behind as she arose, leaving an
outline of her prone figure. Two suns shone
from opposite horizons, one rising large, dim
and red, while the other set small, bright and
yellow. The light between them extinguished
any shadows thrown onto the uneven ground.
Initially, this world had seemed miserably
barren and bleak to Rebecca. The orange,
yellow and red hues cast over everything by the
two suns and the pervasive volcanic dust offered
an uninteresting palette. At least that had been
her impression a decade ago when she had first

come to this star-system. But now, four months
into her second journey here, and solo this
time, the bright gold and silver colours of her
suit seemed an offensively garish visual affront
amidst the subtle tri-tone beauty she had now
come to appreciate here. Although these garish
colours made her feel incongruous to her
surroundings, she knew that it had no
detrimental effect upon her efforts to stalk her
prey, who sensed its world in ways that had
nothing to do with visible light.
The creature lay fifty meters away to the
north. It had not moved in almost two days
now, but she knew better than to try and sneak
up on it since even after months of painstaking
habituation work it had only now begun to let
her get this close. She had discovered a new
boundary to its personal space each time it fled,
and it would take hours of finding the swishswish-swish
of its tracks in the dust and then
following them before she caught up with it
again. For an animal that moved so slowly in its
everyday routine, if at all, it could sure escape in
a hurry. It would throw its long flat body up
into the thick atmosphere to flap and flip itself
through the air like a ribbon. Sometimes she
would have to travel up to a kilometre to find
where it had landed and then follow its tracks
anew. Every two weeks or so, once the creature
seemed settled into feeding off a fresh rift,
Rebecca would retreat back over a hill or ridge,
and call in her re-supply from orbit. This
avoided the fiery re-entry of the tiny incoming
capsules from her orbiting starship startling the
animal. Her top-of-the-line ‘Exploration
Standard’ environment suit had air, food, water
and waste recycling facilities that could sustain
her for up to three earth-standard weeks, but
she re-supplied every fortnight to keep a margin
of error up her sleeve.
The local days here were erratic since the
circumbinary orbit that the planet inhabited
saw it orbit two stars which in turn circled each
other, offering the sky of the rapidly spinning
Leonis A2 either two suns, a big red sun, a little
yellow sun, or no suns at all. In the case of the
latter, bright nebulae would fill the sky on these
short nights, as though a tapestry of glowing
blue and magenta had been draped over the
planet. She slept in the open, but if some
sudden storm or danger came upon her, the
suit could encapsulate her in a protective shield
of super-strong material. If anything indeed
went wrong, the automated landing-craft from
her starship could collect her and bring her
back to the safety of orbit within a few hours,
even if she was unconscious. In many ways, the
sense of ‘living on the edge' that she felt was just
a fallacy, but still, it was refreshing to be alone
this time around.
Ten years ago, the success of her initial
gamble concerning the possibility of indigenous
life on this planet had seen her sent with a large
team of xeno-biologists, technicians, security
personnel, engineers, and ship crew, along with
a representative from the nameless organisation
that was fronting up the money for that
expedition. They had mapped the planet's
ecosystem from orbit, swept for microbial
threats, and then carried out a detailed on-theground
analysis within a few square kilometres
of what had seemed like an interesting region.
But just a few weeks later they had been ordered
to pack up and depart for a nearby system
which, while being barren of life, showed
potential for the geological resources that
would actually show a financial return to the
expedition's investors. Alien life might be
scientifically exciting and make for wondrous
entertainment for the trillions of planet-bound

folk, but it didn't really make anyone rich. And
then soon afterwards humanity had found yet
another sentient species elsewhere to add to the
half dozen or so already described, which was
ironically another discovery Rebecca could take
the credit for. And so the public's attention had
moved on, and the binary system of Leonis
Minor, with its planet of peculiar flat animals,
had slipped into the abyss of humanity's
overflowing info-banks to be largely forgotten.
In the years that followed she had used her
own time and resources to pour over the wealth
of information they had gathered in those short
weeks. There were countless other distractions
that had demanded her professional attention,
but there was something about this planet, and
its flat animals, that had stayed in the front of
her mind, even as discoveries that brought
higher accolade and prestige called to her.
Orange dust would permeate her dreams as
she slept, and she would wake holding her
pillow underneath herself as though she was
either wrestling with, or making love to, one of
those long flat animals. Scientifically, there
remained many unanswered questions from
that brief expedition to Leonis A2, as there
always were, but two mysteries simply refused to
leave her mind; Firstly, what exactly were these
creatures feeding on at those volcanic rifts they
migrated between? And given that they had
found no predators at the top of their simple
eco-system, what had these creatures evolved to
escape from in such a hurry?
The time dilation from the faster-than-light
travel she had undertaken to and from the
system meant that while it had been only ten
years since their last expedition for her, one
hundred and sixty-nine earth-standard years
had passed here on the planet. Their old
laboratory had been lost under a mountain of
orange dust, yet with just the computing power
and tools available in her environment suit, and
data-linked from the computer on her orbiting
star-ship, she had stumbled across an answer to
the first question within a few weeks. The fact
that she had missed what seemed like such an
obvious answer to her now seemed shameful. In
her defence, the answer was, to say the least, a
revolutionary form of biology and, at first
glance, utterly impossible.
During the first expedition they had, after
much effort, managed to catch a smaller version
of the animal she was currently tracking. They
had taken it back to the forward-deployed
laboratory they had set up within their study
zone. There were many experienced members
amongst her crew, who had been exposed to
vast amounts of weird and wonderful alien
lifeforms over their careers, but this creature
had them truly baffled. Firstly, it had no eyes or
ears or other sensors that would allow it to have
any situational awareness of its environment.
Yet it indeed did have such awareness, because
if you got too close to them, they would flip
themselves into the air and flap off. It also had
no mouth. Indeed, they found no openings at
all in its body, and its skin did not appear to be

permeable to solids, allowing no form of
ingestion and excretion between the creature
and its environment.
The creature's skin had an almost metallic
texture, its colour fading from a dense black at
its front to the off-white of its tail. It had been
difficult to house, since while it was only half a
meter wide, it was over six meters long, and at
the most ten centimetres in height. It seemed at
pains to keep each of its ends as far apart from
each other as possible, which evidently it had
trouble doing within the confines of its two by
two meter transparent enclosure. After a short
time, just a week, the animal had died in
captivity.
Upon autopsy, they had found it to be mostly
muscle-like tissue and none of its internal
organs were recognisable or analogous to any
terrestrial or currently known extra-terrestrial
biological systems. The composition of its tissue
was highly metallic, with a complex and evenly
distributed super-conductive nervous system,
yet with no nodes of complexity that might
suggest a brain. The fluids found within it
consisted of dense electrolytes, and instead of
any bone structure, it had thin wire-like ribs
composed of lithium metal, held within its
highly acidic muscle tissue. In hindsight, if one
of the engineers from their starship had been
present, they might have nonchalantly
exclaimed "Oh, hey look at that. It's a Lithium-
Ion battery." Chalk up another sharp reminder
to engage in inter-disciplinary peer-review. They
had all missed the clues.
Here in the Leonis Minor Binary system, one
star was huge and dim, while the other was
much smaller, brighter and denser. The
circumbinary nature of its orbit created
fluctuations in the pull of gravity exerted
against Leonis A2 that made its internal geology
highly energetic, and thus its crust was split into
deep fractures through which the planets
interior heat was vented into the cold
atmosphere. It was around these cracks in the
planet's skin that its ecology was centred. These
rifts would wax and wane in intensity, and they
had discovered that the creatures migrated
between them, somehow knowing where the
nearest area of activity was. They would nestle
their black ‘heads’ right into the hot vent, and
leave their long bodies stretched out so that the
tips of their ‘tails' would remain on the cold
ground. The larger and longer the animal, the
further away their tails would be from the heat,
and the colder they would be. The answer had
come to her in a moment of epiphany, and she
had berated herself for not seeing it with the
information she already had from the previous
expedition. The implications were immediate
and obvious to her, and she knew that when
this news reached the board of investors of the
last expedition, they would gather all their
resources nearby and descend upon this planet
in droves, with capital ships and hundreds of
scientists. It would take years for them to get
here, of course, and she would be long gone by
then. There were strong financial incentives to
self-fund an expedition such as she had this
one. The intellectual property rights on this
discovery would set her up for life, and then
some.
The answer, it turned out, was that these
creatures did not have mouths, because they did
not need food. They had evolved to utilise the
energy potential contained in the difference
between the heat at one end of their bodies,
versus the cold at the other. Somehow these
creatures created electrical energy through
chemical processes, which they then stored in
their battery-like bodies. This energy was used
not only to operate their internal systems but
also extract minerals and matter through the
undersides of their bodies. They had missed
this last time since it was done by a unique
electromagnetic process that separated out the
metals at a molecular level.
At this stage, she did not understand what
these electrochemical processes were precisely,

ut she would soon enough. If not her, then the
next wave of researchers would figure it out.
And then a revolutionary and ground-breaking
technology would be realised. Just imagine,
being able to generate energy from any
temperature gradient? Such as the heat outside
a house versus the cold inside. Or vice versa. Or
the Intense heat of a starship's engine versus the
cold vacuum of space? If the process could be
made efficient enough, then the amount of
energy needed to create the heat could be
drastically reduced, as the energy gained from
the heat produced was then fed back into
creating more heat. And it appeared that these
creatures were generating energy very efficiently
indeed, since she had seen her subject arrive at
a hot rift after a week of travel, only to have it
dissipate and go cold a few hours later. The
creature had simply continued on for another
week until it found a new rift to feed on. And
within that period it had flipped away from her
several times, an exercise that was surely taxing
on its energy reserves.
As she followed this creature for months
on end, so much more of its life had started to
make sense. Within their initial two-kilometre
square study area they had found only seven of
them, so their population density was extremely
low. And since following this one, she had seen
it come across another of its kind only once.
That had been a much smaller example, and it
had climbed onto the back of her creature and
stayed there. It was now almost wholly
assimilated into her subject, and she could only
just make out the slight bulge and colouration
where its black head and white tail had been.
This explained how they obtained their genetic
diversity. She had kept multi-spectral scans
running on her subject through this whole
period, and she was looking forward to
analysing the data when she finally did get back
to her starship that orbited above the planet.
Her environment suit might be a marvel of
modern science, sustaining her every need as
she existed alone here, but despite its own
artificial intelligence and computing power, the
kind of in-depth analysis of the zettabytes of
information she was collecting daily was beyond
its ability. She had found the A.I. more
annoying than helpful, and so had kept it
turned off to protect her sanity for the past few
months.
The animal began to move again, so she
gathered up the tools and sensors she had laid
out while she slept, re-attached them to her suit,
and began to follow it. The creature was a slow
mover, but she had come to learn to relax into
the slightly-less-than-walking pace she needed to
maintain to match its speed. She scuffed her
feet against the ground, kicking clouds of
orange dust up with each step. Looking like
some kind of ‘flat-fish' the animal rippled the
muscles along its underside to power itself
forwards, leaving the tell-tale swishing waves of
dust behind.
By the end of the day they had covered almost
forty kilometres, and their goal came into view.
As the small yellow sun set to the east ahead of
them, it was lost into a fiercely shimmering
haze. It flickered like a strobe light across the
land, the shadows from the uneven ground
jumping further as it lowered towards the rift
that split the horizon. Finally, as it disappeared
from view behind a churning wall of superheated
air, its light was spread across the sky
behind her as though by the great brushstrokes
of a drunkard, until it vanished, and the great
arc of nebulae filled the skies overhead once
more. The creatures pace quickened, as if in
anticipation of its destination, and she had to
jog to keep up with it. There would be no sleep
for her tonight that was for sure. Rebecca kept
the night vision offered by her suit turned off,
so as not to subtract from the majesty of the
nebulae above her.
Rebecca wished then that she could travel
back in time, to whisper into the ear of her
confused and unconfident adolescent self, to

tell herself about this moment that would
come. If only she could have known that she
would one day be racing across an alien world
that she had found, to chase an alien being that
she had discovered, under a night sky
dominated by these huge and beautiful
nebulae. She had to confess that life really had
worked out pretty well for her. The sacrifices
had been worth it for this moment alone. Her
suit subtly illuminated the un-even ground that
lay in her path within the display of her helmet.
As she tired from the quickened pace, the suit
took up the workload, until she was almost
being carried along by it. According to her
navigation aids, they would reach the rift in six
hours, by which time the large red sun would
be high in the sky behind them.
This was the ninth rift that she had followed
her subject to, but it was noticeably different.
Firstly, the wall of hot air was more intense, the
hottest she had seen yet, at 350 degrees Celsius,
versus the five degrees of the atmosphere
around it. The air jetted at almost 200
kilometres per hour out of the centre of the tenmeter-wide
rift, rising into the sky like a reverse
waterfall of vapour and shimmering haze.
But the most noticeable difference from usual
was the ground leading up to the rift. From two
hundred meters away the ubiquitous orange
dust, which usually stayed constant right up
until the very lip of a rift, gave way to a mat of
moss-like material that offered a softer texture
beneath her boots. She had seen this moss
before, and at one point studied it carefully,
marvelling at yet another parallel evolution of
photosynthesis, but had never seen such a thick
and wide field of it. She stopped to cut out a
piece, which came away easily, as though her
knife was slicing through a few inches of soft
butter. Underneath it, the regular orange dust
remained.
She took a few moments to secure it in one of
her sample pouches, then turned around to see
that the hole she had cut was gone, as though it
had grown over in that impossibly short period
of time. Rebecca looked around herself, in case
she was merely disorientated, but couldn’t find
the freshly cut scar anywhere. She was about to
crouch for another sample when she realised
the creature was now only several meters away
from the rift, and that she would miss the initial
action unless she prioritised. She slid her knife
into its sheath on her thigh and sprinted
towards the rift, double checking all her suit
sensors were at maximum, while with one arm
she reached around to the back of her suit,
withdrew her small sensor drone, and threw it
into the air. It buzzed off above her to keep
station and record events.
The creature threw its head into the wall of
hot air, and then flicked its tail back as far
behind itself as it could, as though it was a towel
being fluttered out onto the sand at the beach.
A shiver ran through its body, and it shook
itself as though settling itself into the ground.
Rebecca fell to her knees twenty meters away,
the closest yet she had been to this animal by
far, and most certainly the closest she had been
to it while it fed. She was getting reckless.
Cocky. She chided herself, yet relished the
excitement of it. Barely perceptible colours
could be made out flowing along the creatures
back, subtle blues and purples, and for a
moment it reminded her of the flashing
graphics that showed a piece of equipment
charging. She brought the holographic and

multi-spectral view from the drone above her
into her helmet display and gasped at the
enhanced imagery of energy flowing through
the creature's body. Then, the ground shook
beneath her.
“What the…” The ground lurched again,
viciously this time, and she was thrown off her
knees and onto her back. Rebecca got up onto
her elbow and saw the creature had stiffened,
then it curled itself up as it did when it was
about to flip away. And the rift, the rift
was…much closer. Another lurch and she was
rolled over and over as the ground fled from
underneath her, pulling her towards the rift.
Instinctively she jumped to her feet and began
to run away from the rift and its wall of superheated
air, but the ground pulled away from
underneath her again and she fell forward onto
her face. She got to her feet and ran again,
sprinting with all of her might this time.
“Ship! Suit! Fuck!” she yelled as she ran.
The ground was racing towards the rift
constantly now, yet still she ran, but like a
mouse in a wheel or an athlete on a speeding
treadmill, she was going nowhere. A shadow fell
across her as the creature sped overhead,
flapping and flipping its way away from the rift,
back the way it had come.
“Fuck!”
It was all she could manage. Her suit had
finally cottoned on to what was going on, and
with a start, she lurched forward as it added its
own power into her running, but it was too
much too soon, and she overbalanced, falling
backwards as her legs ran ahead from
underneath of herself in a blur. She rolled a few
times, and then she tried to stand up to run
again, but the air was thick with orange dust,
and she couldn't tell which direction the
ground was moving in or which way she was
supposed to run. Her suit was yelling warnings
at her, the first time it had spoken in months,
but she couldn't concentrate on what it was
saying amidst the turmoil of the racing ground
beneath her, something about ‘temperature'
and ‘shield deployment failure'. There was only
the rushing ground, the swirling dust, the roar
of the hot air. She had one clear thought within
the panic, and it was not of herself or her safety
at all, but of the discovery.
“Suit! Ship! Transmit all! Transmit all now!”
she screamed.
She managed to sit up on the sliding ground
and was faced with a terrifying view inside the
rift that rapidly loomed towards her, the ground
flowing over into it the abyss. As she came to
the edge, she looked down and knew. In a split
second, she knew what this was, and what those
creatures had evolved to fly away from in such
a hurry. She was looking down into the bowels
of a plant, a carnivorous plant, some kind of
Sarcophagophyta-like thing that had grown
itself into the hot rift. Long wide orchid-like
tubes along its centre let the air through to reform
the unbroken wall of hot air as though it
wasn't there at all. Its insides were a mottled
collection of decaying matter, with the ‘ground'
furling back into the fronds nestled along the
inside wall of the rift that they had been grown
forth from. Thin spines curved inwards from
below the edge of the rift into the rising wall of
heated air. She wanted to close her eyes but
couldn't, she was transfixed in horror, yet still
managed to think how beautiful this Venusflytrap
from hell was. As her feet went over the
precipice, her final instinct was to fruitlessly
reach back towards the lip of the rift with her
hands, and as she did so, she caught a glimpse
a long dark shape flying towards her from out
of the orange desert.
Within moments the creature had curled its
black body around her legs and torso, and then
it lifted her upwards above the edge of the rift
as the ground still rushed away underneath
them. Then, just before its white tail came over
the lip of the rift, it flicked her away like a rag
doll. She flew fifty meters through the air to

land awkwardly upon one knee, which she felt
snap sideways underneath her as she tumbled
over and over in the orange dust. Rebecca
screamed out in agony as the pain hit her like a
piercing fire in her leg.
[Initiating sedation.]
She felt a sharp pierce in her neck, and then
numbness began to spread.
[Setting Right Leg]
Rebecca felt the suit straighten her broken
leg, by which time the anaesthetic had spread to
her feet.
[Initiating Recovery Protocol Alpha One.
Mark. ETA Seventy-five minutes. Initiating
Diagnostic Scan and…]
As the suit rattled off its intentions she went
limp, her head fell back to the ground, and as
she lost consciousness, she gazed out at the
shimmering haze that split her now vertical
horizon like a mirror. There was only orange
ground now though, no ‘moss' to be seen. And
no creature. Just orange dust. The shimmering
air. Darkness.
a few things to clear up here and then I'll come
back to civilisation.' The term ‘mum' was a
metaphor obviously since with all the faster
than light travel Rebecca had done over her
career, time dilation had seen her mother pass
away hundreds of years ago. Such was the
sacrifice of her profession.
She named them ‘Angelus Autem Calidum -
Toombes R - LMS A2’. ‘Angels of the Heat’, as
discovered by Rebecca Toombes, on Leonis A2,
Leonis Minor System. But everyone just called
them ‘Angels’ now. The emergency
transmission of all her raw-data had been
received by the information grid first, followed
a few days later by a hurriedly recorded update
from aboard her ship when she awoke, in which
pleaded for everybody to ‘please not look at the
raw-data because that is exactly what it was’, and
how ‘it would make much better reading once
she had written it up properly’, and that ‘it was
like reading the rough first-draft of lyrics to a
song before hearing the tune itself’, and that it
was ‘her intellectual property’ and that ‘she only
sent it out because she thought she was going to
die’, and ‘mum don’t worry I’m fine, I just have
The holographic recordings of her
predicament and subsequent rescue by the alien
had spread through the information grid like
wildfire, propagated by the latest generations of
faster-than-light message capsules, making her a
household name throughout the cluster. But
within her profession itself, Rebecca was wildly
derided as a ‘reckless-lone-wolf' who got lucky.
The technology derived from the following
study of Leonis A2's unique ecology most

certainly was a boon for both herself and the
investors of the initial expedition. But she
didn't like the fame, and she didn't need the
money. Rebecca longed to shed her new overpowering
fame, to once again be that original
‘her', an identity she had spent all those lonely
months contemplating and crafting in that
orange desert. Then, the investors offered her
the gig of a lifetime, leading a hand-picked
xenobiology team on what seemed to be the
ultimate expedition, one that would probably be
a one way trip across thousands of light years of
unexplored cosmos. She made them wait for a
reply, bettering her negotiation position as
though she had other options on the table, but
she was only ever going to say yes. ◊
“Where is everybody?” In 1950, these were
the words exclaimed by physicist Enrico
Fermi after a day’s brooding over an old,
unanswered question. Astronomic reports
based on 2013 Kepler space mission data state
that there could be as many as 40 billion
Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable

zones of sun-like stars and red dwarf stars
within the Milky Way Galaxy alone. Even if
only a tiny fraction of those fill all the
requirements for developing complex life,
one would think that we’d be constantly
meeting our cosmological neighbours. In a
universe so huge, so varied, and so complex,
and where it seems likely that so many kinds
of life would develop and flourish in different
ways, why haven’t we found anybody?
Fermi’s studies into this topic, particularly
in combination with Drake’s equation,
formulating the potential number of
intelligent civilisations in any given galaxy
depending on its possession of certain kinds
of conditions, came to be known as the Fermi
Paradox, and it's a problem we are wrestling
to this day.
The Fermi Paradox has a great many
potential answers, some suggesting that life
existed before or will exist after us, that there
are physical restrictions meaning they can't
find us, or we can't find them, or even
thatand why we’re alone in the universe. One
answer to the Fermi Paradox that is explored
in in Hot & Cold is the fact that there might
be alien life all around us, even within reach,
but because it is so different from us, we
haven’t even noticed it yet.
The creature in Hot & Cold was a creation
that obeyed a great many scientific rules and
laws and fits within our general conception of
“life”. However, extensive though our
present-day search for extra-terrestrial life
from here on earth may be, it is exceedingly
likely that any of the organisations on the
lookout would find it. The requirements that
we put on life in our extra-terrestrial search,
be it through NASA, SETI, or other
individual researchers, are so narrow that they
only apply to life as we already know it.
Unfortunately, as life goes, our home planet’s
inhabitants are really all we have to go on.
This is frustrating for searchers intent on
learning about our alien neighbours, as the
one thing we can be almost certain of in our
search for extra-terrestrial life is that it will
take the form of life as we don’t know it. The
Drake equation (and many of the ET
searches) usually pin their hopes on the
following prerequisites, and tend not to
watch out for much else.

– from www.space.com
We’re looking for earth-sized, terrestrial
planets with surface level water, a nice,
thin atmosphere, and orbiting a star (or
star system) in a comparable relationship
to the one we have with our Sol. This is
extremely specific, extremely restrictive,
and rules out any kind of life that doesn’t
fit within the specifications we have here
on earth – there are even earth-based life
forms that we’d struggle to conceive of
within these bounds, like microbes living
on the inside of Yellowstone’s hot springs,
creating blooming colours in a cloud of
steam acidic enough to dissolve nails – or
sharks and stingrays living in near-boiling
waters on the interior of active sea
volcanoes.
But, that’s just the problem. If we have no
idea what this alien life might look or be
like, how can we look out for it? For the
moment, we’re stuck with what we know.
By finding a planet or solar system that is as
close to ours as possible, we might be
increasing our chances of finding a
duplicate of the set of conditions that
allowed life to flourish here, and maybe the
same kind of life that we’ve got here on
Earth might have appeared there too. The
likelihood of our own life having come
about is unknown, but probably extremely
low. Abiogenesis, the phenomenon of

organic life arising from combinations of
chemicals and the way Earth’s life is
currently believed to have formulated,
could be exceedingly rare. Even if we found
an identical set of conditions in the next
solar system over, the chances of life
developing there would be just as unlikely
– we could find countless perfect goldilocks
planets and still never stumble across one
as anomalous as ours.
If we were able to broaden our search to
more varieties of potential life, we might
even have some luck searching a little closer
to home. It’s possible that life could have
developed on gas giants or seemingly frozen
moons in our own solar system, and we
haven’t yet got the technology or the
scientific know-how to seek them out (see
side quotes).

The concept that life can only come about
within the carbon-based bounds that we possess
is very restrictive. Perhaps lifeforms on the next
planet are so different from us that they are
unable to be detected via light or sound. Perhaps
they are gaseous or liquid, rather than (mostly)
solid. Perhaps, like in Hot & Cold, they don’t
require water or any means of nutrition that we
would understand. One method of lifesearching
is to monitor the atmospheres of
exoplanets for gases that would not be there
absent some kind of biological life, even
microbes or bacterium. On Earth, one of those
gases is oxygen, being constantly replenished by
plant life, and we’re on the lookout for oxygenrich
atmospheres elsewhere for exactly this
reason. We tend not to look for gaseous
sulphur, for example, as it is regularly emitted by
volcanoes and therefore fairly common – but
any sulphur-emitting life that we’re yet to
conceive of are then flying under our radar.
assumption too far. A relatively new theory
posits that if we, humans, have moved from
prototypic computers to universal, handheld
supercomputers between 1945 and today, an
alien species coming about earlier or
developing faster than us could easily have
moved on to making life of their own –
biological or otherwise. Seth Shostak, a senior
astronomer at the SETI Institute, has said
There is a whole universe
of possibilities of life forms that we are as yet
unable to search for, simply because we don’t
know how to conceive of them yet.
As it turns out, even searching out life that
is traditionally “biological” might be an
≠
Most all of our major avenues for searching
for alien life involve radio. We have been
emitting radio out into the depths of space for
decades, some incidentally, and some
intentionally. SETI’s main goal is to either
finally stumble into the firing line of some
incidental non-natural radio waves from
another civilisation, or have our own heard
and responded to. For humans, this is our
best way of attempting to communicate
outside of our solar system. Unfortunately,
this method also leaves a lot to be desired.
Drake himself (of Drake’s Equation) was of
the opinion that only one in every hundred
intelligent species would discover radio in the
capacity that it’d be able to communicate with
ours. An intelligent species might be as or
more advanced than humans and never have
invented radio, never having had the need for
it or having developed a means of longdistance
communication that doesn’t utilise
any of the wavelengths that we’re watching
out for. Not only this, but in only searching
for radio frequencies we are limiting ourselves
to potentially finding only technologically
intelligent life – and only a very fine band of it.
While stumbling upon an advanced alien
civilisation with whom we can communicate
would be incredible, so would coming upon a
lush alien landscape (seascape? Airscape?)
populated with pre-technology species which
we could study and understand. Gorillas,
dolphins, parrots, corvids, and even octopus

are earth species intelligent enough to use
tools, learn, exhibit self-awareness, empathy
or altruism, and communicate with humans
on a complex level – even understanding
theoretical concepts as well as simple physical
commands or nouns. The amount we could
learn from a species this intelligent on
another planet, in another solar system, is
unprecedented – but we’re not looking for
them yet.
Fortunately for us, our boundaries are
evolving. The more we learn about life on
earth, physics in space, and the possibilities
that science affords, the wider our search can
become. For example, a relatively recent
development in SETI itself saw researchers
turning their focus from only yellow dwarf
doppelgangers of our own home star
(expecting that a sun like ours could make a
planet like ours and therefore life like ours),
and are now actively including red dwarfs as a
strong possibility in the search after
discovering that despite their generally not
running as hot, they still have a great many
planets in their habitable “Goldilocks” zones
capable of producing life as we know it.
Binary star systems like the one in which Hot
& Cold takes place are very complex in terms
of temperature & light patterns, but also
haven’t been ruled out as places where alien
life might thrive. As with all science, the only
answers we have are the ones we’re trying to
prove wrong, and the more we prove wrong,
the further ahead we progress. Carl Sagan said
beautifully in the above linked clip, “There’s
no predictive theory of biology just as there is
no predictive theory of history. The reason is
the same. Both subjects are still too
complicated for us. But, we can understand
ourselves much better by understanding other
cases.”
Specktor, B. (2018, July 31). Strange, Scientific Excuses
for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet. Retrieved
from Live Science:
https://www.livescience.com/63208-alien-lifeexcuses.html
O'Neill, I. (2013, March 11). 13 Ways to Hunt
Intelligent Aliens. Retrieved from Space.com:
https://www.space.com/20155-hunting-intelligentaliens-extreme-seti.html
SETI Institute. (date unknown). The Drake Equation.
Retrieved from SETI Institute:
https://www.seti.org/drake-equation

_____________
Arnie took a deep breath and kept his eyes
closed. The room smelled different.
Instead of the familiar odor of antiseptics,
he smelled flowers with a faint hint of ozone
as if an afternoon rain shower had recently
passed. When he opened his eyes, he was in
a white room with soft lighting and a large
window. He heard birds singing outside.
Had he died? His oldest son had lean over
his hospital bed and hurriedly attached
wires to Arnie’s head. His other two
children had stood in the background.
“Mr. Greensway?” A soft voice came from
everywhere. “Please remain where you are.
A counselor is on his way.”
Where did they expect him to go? He’d
been bedridden for years. But, for the first
time in a long time, he didn’t hurt
anywhere. Had they done something to him
to numb his disintegrating nerves?
“Mr. Greensway?” A young man entered
the room. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you
awoke. It’s been so long since you had your
last happy first day, we weren’t prepared.
We want you to be as comfortable as
possible during your time here.”
The androgynous young man, hairless and
dressed in a white tunic and pants, seemed
part of the room.
“Where am I?” Arnie asked. He gestured
at the large elliptical window. It wasn’t a
window at all, but a large doorway leading
to an outside balcony. This was unlike any
hospital he’d ever seen.
The young man smiled. “You’re in the
Atrium. It’s a place where returnees adjust
to their new lives. I’m Jazon. I’m here to
help you.”
“Tell it to me straight, Jazon. Am I dead?”

The young man laughed. “You are not.
You can get up and have lunch now.”
“What?” Arnie couldn’t recall when he’d
last sat up in bed by himself.
“Am I using the wrong word?” Jazon
asked. “I never really understood the
difference between lunch, dinner, and
supper.” He looked embarrassed. “I rushed
through the language and personal history
tapes when they told me you were awake.”
“Your oldest, Matt, is currently on his way
to Neptune in a solar ship the size of your
fingernail, but I think he has a backup copy
here on Earth if you’d like to talk to him.
Otherwise, we’ll call him this afternoon.”
Arnie was confused. “Neptune? Backup?
What about my other children?” His daughter
and youngest son had visited infrequently,
pretending he wasn’t at death’s door.
“I’ve been sick,” Arnie said. He didn’t
understand what the stranger was saying. “I
don’t get out of bed much.”
“You’re fine now. Here, let me help you.”
Although he looked delicate, Jazon had
no difficulty raising Arnie to a sitting
position.
There was no pain. Arnie stared down at
his old body, expecting the agonies that had
become part of him. “What’s happened to
me?”
“There’s much to explain, Mr.
Greensway,” Jazon said. “Would you like
some coffee or tea?”
Arnie sat on the side of the bed, staring
down at his feet as they touched the floor,
still in shock he could move without pain.
“No. What kind of hospital is this?”
“It’s more of a resting place for returnees.
I’ll explain after lunch.”
Was Arnie a returnee? What had he
returned from?
A soft breeze came through the open
doorway. Everything in the room, the desk,
the chairs, and even the bed, were molded
in soft curves.
“Where are my children?” he asked. He
hoped his kids hadn’t left their old man
alone in some experimental clinic.
“Serena and Olivia are on their way.”
“You mean Oliver,” Arnie said. “I have
two sons and a daughter.”
“No longer. Oliver decided to come back
as Olivia,” Jazon said.
“Come back? Come back from where?”
Jazon took a deep breath.
Greensway, what year is it?”
“Mr.
“It should be 2024,” he said. “Have I been
in a coma?”
“Not really. Something wonderful
happened in 2024. The Singularity. Your
son gave us the world we have today.”
Arnie raised his right hand. A large scar,
the result of a childhood tree-climbing
accident, was gone. “Yes, Matt works in
computers. Is Neptune the name of his
company? I can’t keep it straight.”
“This is the year 2147 using the old
calendar,” Jazon said. “With the
Singularity, people had their memories and
personalities transferred to a computer.
Since it began, no one has officially died.”

“You mean I’m in a computer? None of
this is real?”
Jazon shook his head. “No. This is real.
You’re real. You were created by an organic
3-D printer, and your memories were loaded
into your body.”
“I need air.” Arnie had died and now he
was back, but something was wrong. Why
had it taken them so long to build him a
new body and dump in his stored
memories?
“Certainly.” Jazon took Arnie’s elbow and
helped him stand.
Arnie, amazed how well he felt, walked
unaided to the open window.
He wasn’t dead; he was dreaming. On the
balcony, soft light came from a ceiling far
above and illuminated other balconies,
thousands of them, in a gently curving
atrium lined with ferns and flowers. Far
below, trees dotted walkways and waterfalls.
Birds nested in the trees and flew through
the air below.
“What the hell?” Arnie asked. “Where are
we?”
DNA molecule. We’ll never run out of
room to store returnees.”
Arnie placed his veined and wrinkled
hands on the railing. “Can we come back
younger?”
“Certainly,” Jazon said. “You’re more
comfortable when you return at this age.”
“You mean I’ve returned before?”
“Yes,” Jazon said. “Yours is a peculiar
situation.”
“Since my wife died before 2021, I don’t
suppose she’s here?”
“I’m afraid not. In fact, you were the first
person to be converted to digital data. You
probably shouldn’t have been part of the
Singularity, but your son is hopeful that he
will correct the original glitch in a few more
centuries.”
“Glitch? What kind of glitch?”
“According to our records, being forthright
works best with you. Your son attempted to
scan your brain into a computer before the
process was fully understood. You died while
you were being scanned.”
“We’re deep underground, Mr.
Greensway. We left the surface to
reestablish itself decades ago. We’ve
thousands of these subterranean cities. We
biologicals need habitats to work and play
in. When our organic forms wear out, we’ll
be read into the computer, and create any
bodies we wish.”
“But if what you’re saying is true and
nobody dies,” Arnie said, “there must be
billions of returnees.”
“Most remain in virtual reality or emigrate
to the outer planets. Our technology has
advanced since you left the first time. We
can store terabytes of information in a single
“So, I’m incomplete?”
“No,” Jazon said. “Physically and
mentally, you’re fine. Unfortunately, your
thought processes only exist for twenty-four
hours before they break down.”

Arnie watched a passing bird. “You mean
I live this same day over and over?”
“Yes. When a returnee comes back, we
always say, ‘Happy First Day!’ and have a
party, but that would be cruel since you
come back so often and can’t recall it.”
“How often?”
“It varies. Some days you spend with your
children, some you explore the Atrium.
Some you research what has happened since
you passed away. Less frequently, you brood
and tell us not to resurrect you again.”
“Why do you?”
“Because you relish this one day,” Jazon
said, “even when you know it will pass
without remembering it. Before you go to
bed tonight, you’ll tell us when to wake you
next time.”
“It’s diabolical.” Arnie’s throat tightened.
“Forcing me to live one First Day over and
over.”
“You do request to return less frequently
as time goes on. But one day you may have
other options. Don’t give up. In the
meantime, we have your schedule for
today.”
Arnie considered hurling himself over the
railing, but they’d probably resurrect him
tomorrow to try and figure out why he’d
done it. For all he knew, they’d done it
before. “What schedule?”
“We are having lunch with Serena before
speaking with Matt on his ship.”
“Grandpa!” A small boy ran forward and
gave Arnie a hug around the waist. In the
doorway, Serena stood with several younger
children. The young woman behind her
must be Oliver.
Arnie returned the boy’s hug and smiled.
“I see why I keep scheduling my return.
Happiness can be just as wonderful in a day
as a lifetime.”
Jazon nodded.
Arnie.” ◊
“Happy First Day,

more feasible fiction on which to attach our
hopes for never-ending life.
But how feasible is it? As we begin to
develop real science and technology to explore
ways of housing a human consciousness, how
much stock can we put into the practicality of
immortality within our lifetimes, or ever?
“Type” and “Token” are philosophical terms
used to describe an object’s relative identity.
There is a simple linguistic distinction
between the two that can be described in the
following example:
Examples of the transferral of human
consciousness to achieve immortality is a
hugely prevalent theme throughout the
history of multiple genres of fiction. Both
Isaac and Janet Asimov’s writings explored the
subject (in short story The Last Question and
novel Mind Transfer respectively). Richard K
Morgan’s Altered Carbon (recently adapted into
a Netflix Original TV series) sees human
minds coded onto “stacks” and rehoused into
newly grown (or more dubiously acquired)
bodies. Black Mirror episode San Junipero
explores the idea of uploading one’s mind into
a virtual reality as a proxy for the afterlife.
Consciousness transferral is science &
speculative fiction’s answer to the otherwise
pure fantasy idea of human immortality – a
Say I have on my mantelpiece a tissue box.
Somehow, one day, it accidentally gets
knocked into the fire and completely
destroyed – erased from existence. Although
that item is gone forever, I am an able to
procure a tissue box that is wholly identical,
down to the number of tissues remaining and
the exact dimensions of the box with
subatomic accuracy, to replace it with.
Generally, in language, we would say that the
new tissue box I place on my mantle is “the
same”. This is only half true. The only
difference between the destroyed tissue box
and the replacement one is a numerical
difference. This exact kind of tissue box – one
with this exact number of tissues remaining,
these exact dimensions, etc – is a type, and
each the destroyed box and the one now on
my mantle, are tokens. While they are
qualitatively identical (and members of the
same type), they are numerically separate.
This seems like an intuitive but not
particularly practical way to communicate
identity. After all, the tissue boxes, physically,
bear no difference at all – there is no value to
me in their distinction as two tokens of one
type. My life doesn’t change in the slightest
with the destruction of the first token as long

as there is a second ready to take its place. This
changes significantly when combined with the
concept of consciousness, or of personal
identity.
Now, let’s say that you, rather than the
tissue box, are completely destroyed. Your
mind and body are absolutely erased from
existence. Luckily, your friends and loved ones
have a back-up you; a qualitatively identical
copy, from your haircut to your genome, from
your sense of humour to the number of cells
in your right femur. Whatever hole that you
left, your loved ones fill with this qualitatively,
not numerically, identical copy of you, which
goes on to live your life exactly as you would
have done otherwise.
Now that sentience is involved, the value of
this distinction starts to become clear. This is
the situation that Arnie awakens to in the
story we have just read.
It’s often said that a person changes over
time; for example, “I am not the man that I
was ten years ago”. However, generally, we
intuitively believe as humans that our identity
persists; while the man I may have been ten
years ago and the man I am today might have
palpable and significant differences, they are
still, numerically, the same item, and they are
connected by that one all-important thing; our
consciousness. The fact that it is the same
incorporeal entity that experiences the
thoughts, memories and emotions all shared
by that body across its existence is what makes
us believe that the person we wake up as in the
morning is the same one that we fell asleep as
the night before.
When we cut that connection, as science
fiction does all the time, our intuitive belief
wavers. If you were to transplant every
thought, experience, piece of knowledge,
memory and personality trait from my brain
onto a USB drive, remove it from my body,
and reinstall it into another, in what way is it
the same consciousness? Is it that same,
numerically identical entity? Or is it a second
token; a consciousness with all of my
memories, including being taken out of my
original body, and already accruing new
memories, like being placed into a new one? If
I take my consciousness and put it in a brandnew
shell every ten years for the rest of time,
have I achieved immortality?
Unfortunately, we tend to think not.
Rather, in this scenario, I have opted to cut
my own life short and create, every ten years,
a brand-new entity that simply thinks it’s old.
This new being has no connection to the
consciousness that was back in my original
biological body, apart from some everdecreasing
qualitative similarities.
This problem has kept humans up at night
throughout history. One of the integral
themes of gothic literature is the usurpation of
personal identity; twins, clones and identity
theft are used to push the stories further down
into the uncanny valley. Even further back,
ancient European folklore told of a creature
called a “Changeling”, which entered the

human world when a newborn baby was
swapped out by malicious beings for a fairy
child, physically identical to the original but
cursed and inhuman.
Today, we struggle with new forms of selfduplication.
Is that connection between
today’s me and yesterday’s me broken if I
suffer a significant enough brain injury? If I
die for a few minutes and am successfully
resuscitated? What about the ever-increasing
popularity of cryogenic freezing? Will the me
that resurfaces in 100 years’ time have any
connection to the me that they freeze?
Start-up company Humai is making their
own attempt to hack into human mortality by
measuring and quantifying the way one’s
living brain works, and then after death,
transferring that brain into a robotic body and
replicating the collected actions and
behaviours to approximate a resurrection. In
their own words:
True, we already have prosthetics and robotics
that can be controlled with input from human
brainwaves, and nanotechnology already exists
for some forms of microscopic biological
repair, however almost none of the technology
required to transcript the patterns of the
human brain (nor to replicate it on a
functional scale) yet exists. Despite this, CEO
Josh Bocanegra has claimed that his team will
have resurrected their first human some time
within the next 30 years.
The Arnie Greensway we meet in Happy First
Day! is one product of a technology like this.
Interestingly, he is little preoccupied with his
identity as a single token of a well-populated
type. After all, as the outcome of such a
problem, not its originator, the fear of
replacement completely loses relevance; I have
everything to lose in transferring my
consciousness into a new body, if it turns out
that a new consciousness is created and mine
extinguished, rather than my original one
being moved. The new consciousness,
however, not only
identifies as me, but
has already been put
into the new and
improved vessel. She
has nothing left to fear.
Can we say that this
consciousness, because
it is new or a duplicate,
has any less value than
the consciousness of
an original human?
Outside of our integral
human anxiety about
replication and being
replaced, there’s not
really any reason that
we can. My new and
improved clone is a
person just as much as
I was, with thoughts

and feelings and as deserving of moral
consideration the same as any. While, given
the choice, I might feel I have the right or even
the responsibility of destroying my double
(most likely out of self-preservation rather
than some more altruistic goal), in my absence
there would be no feasible argument to treat
them any differently than I’d be treated
myself.
As is usually the case with our deepest
human desires, immortality persists as far a
more complex endeavour the closer we get to
understanding it. Though we’re closer to
staving off death than we have ever been in
human history, it may pay to wait until a few
more pressing questions are answered before
we safely send our consciousnesses off into
brighter futures.
Belluck, P. (2017, August 4). Gene Editing for ‘Designer
Babies’? Highly Unlikely, Scientists Say. Retrieved from
The New York Times:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-start-up-wants-totransfer-your-consciousness-to-an-artificial-body-so-youcan-live-forever
Wetzel, Linda, "Types and Tokens", The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.):
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/
types-tokens/.
Kuhn, R.L. (2016). Virtual Immortality: Why the Mind-
Body Problem is still a Problem. Retrieved from Closer to
Truth:
https://www.closertotruth.com/articles/virtualimmortality-robert-lawrence-kuhn

I woke up this morning with a head full of
doggerel. The poem bore the stamp of youthful
enthusiasm, if not of quality. A quick search
through my diaries revealed that I wrote it on
my sixteenth birthday. You would doubtless
recognise the source of my inspiration, Leroy, if
I recited that piece to you now.
_____________
There once was an artist who pickled a cow,
Then sliced it in half with a chainsaw.
He encased it in glass,
Did the same to its calf,
Yet was mocked for creating an eyesore!
In truth, I was never much of a poet, as you
reminded me whenever you read my
scribblings. Even so, those clumsy lines evoke
the delight I felt on hearing that Mother and
Child Divided had won the 1995 Turner Prize.
The furore whipped up by the tabloids was
sheer inspiration to a wild-child who delighted
in raising hell in her GCSE arts class. Back
then, Damien Hirst was to die for. Soundtracked
by Damon Albarn, of course.
Two years before Britart’s finest hour,
the State of Texas executed a murderer by lethal
injection. Showing laudable, if ironic, concern
for the future, Joseph Paul Jernigan donated his
body to science. A magnetic resonance imager
scanned Jernigan’s cadaver, slicing him into
pixel-planes thin as salami. The so-called Virtual
Human was uploaded onto the Web. Some
people thought the images macabre, others
called them art. By papering the walls of your
studio with them, you placed yourself squarely
in the “art” faction.
Giddy with ambition and blitzed on acid, we
brought our influences to bear on one
outrageous project after another, melding
digital media and roadkill into surreal
installations that became a cause célèbre on the
fringes of the British arts scene. But after four
years of partying and three years of marriage,
our relationship ended in acrimony. Once

matters were in the hands of our lawyers, we
never spoke again. With good reason I might
add, for I had every reason to hate you, didn’t I
Leroy?
Until a week ago, I thought that the passage
of time had blunted my anger, but I felt its
familiar sting when I recognised your
handwriting on that old-fashioned manila
envelope. I was on the point of turning down
your invitation when my Homebot relayed the
news of your death.
As I walk down the long ramp that leads into
the vast chamber of grey-painted brickwork and
black-steel girders that houses the Tate Modern
gallery, it occurs to me that I, Tanya Roberts,
may be nothing more than an early work to be
dusted off and put on display in the exhibition
of your life. I feel sure that you are manipulating
me, just as you did a quarter of a century ago.
Manipulated or not, I cannot help but
be impressed by this, your ultimate creation.
The hologram of a nude, middle-aged man
towers over me, so tall that his scalp seems to
graze the skylight. Your ruggedly handsome face
is tilted downwards and your eyes are closed, as
if the drone that suffuses the Turbine Hall has
lulled you to sleep.
The cultural commentators have heralded
this piece as your definitive bid for artistic
immortality. To a world-famous artist afflicted
with a terminal disease, the temptation to create
some kind of grand summation of one’s life’s
work must have seemed irresistible. But the title
of the piece, You and Me in Disunity, is pregnant
with implication. Perhaps that is why you
invited me to attend a private viewing, before
the cognoscenti descend en masse.
My mind conjures up a vision of the Turbine
Hall swarming with the smug-looking, dressedto-impress
darlings of the Establishment,
gossiping and name-dropping and guzzling
champagne. I dismiss the image with a shake of
my head, glad to have left that world behind.
Determined to obtain the best
possible view of your hologram, I climb the
stairs to the second level, then make my way to
the barrier at the end of the platform. My head
is at the same height as your feet, which float in
mid-air ten metres from me. Only at this close
range can I confirm my suspicion that your
body has been sliced into sections, as if filleted
by an invisible cleaver.
Hyperslice installations are nothing new to
me, but the sight of a slice detaching itself from
your thigh is enough to make me shudder. The
slice spins on its axis as it spirals towards me,
images flickering over its exterior like a magic
lantern. I glimpse a gang of youths pushing a
sports car along a rain-soaked street. A bottle of
vodka passes from hand to hand, then
pinwheels into the chocolate-orange sky. One of
the voices is achingly familiar.
The slice lifts away before it reaches me,
following a trajectory that will return it to your
body. Presumably the incident it records dates
from your late teens, a few years before we met.
The thought that I might experience some of
your subsequent memories makes me tremble.
In spite of my fears, I feel compelled to
interact with the hologram, just like any
member of my generation. I speak a few of the
usual commands to no discernible effect. Sign
language and arm waving also fails to stimulate
a response. It seems that even in death you must
retain complete control.
Amused rather than angry, I watch as a
second slice peels away from your body, this
time from the groin. As the slice settles over me,
insubstantial as a soap bubble, I’m reminded of
that moment of profound emptiness one
experiences when an orchestra is about to strike
up. Then, as if on cue, your sensory impressions
engulf me.
The woman who has caught your eye at the
Students Union disco is almost unrecognisable
to me. Her voice is too strident, her eyes too
wild. And as for her hair! If I remember rightly,

that crimson dye-job was an attempt to emulate
the singer of my then-favourite indie band.
Fuelled by cheap vodka, we dance for hours
to the latest Britpop tunes and end up in bed.
Next morning, the black-and-white
photographs that adorn your bedroom walls
catalyse the woozy afterglow of our one-night
stand into a full-blown relationship. Pablo
Picasso, Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst seem
to be vying for artistic supremacy amidst a
mosaic of press cuttings that celebrates the
icons of Formaldehyde Art.
In truth, I was seduced by your influences.
Contrary to expectation, our relationship
thrived. The sex was amazing, messier than a
Jackson Pollock. A year passed before we began
throwing crockery at each other. An argument
about contraception provoked that first fight. I
sport a tiny scar just below the bridge of my
nose as a memento.
The barrage of teacups has just begun when,
without warning, the slice pulls away. Twitchy
with anticipation, I wait for the next slice to free
itself from your body. At first the background
hum provides the necessary balm, like aural
cotton wool, but soon the sound of whispering
usurps it. The effect seems calculated to irritate
me.
Another slice begins its descent, leaving a gap
in your belly. Hopefully, this one will not pick
up the story where the previous one left off...
I needn’t have worried. For me, this was the
highpoint of our entire relationship. You must
have felt the same way too, judging by the
warmth that permeates your memories. Perhaps
that is why, this time, she really looks like me,
sounds like me.
Four years after our first dance, we are
honeymooning on the Atlantic coast of
Morocco. Having bartered away the afternoon
in the souks of Essaouira, now we are racing
each other along a crescent of sand beneath
glittering stars. Your deliberate trip sends me
tumbling into the surf. Our goose-bumped
limbs entwine, sublime as seahorses. The tang
of brine mixes with the smell of sex. Your
fingernails rake my back, sharp as razor-shells...
The memory ends too soon.
At the time, I wanted that moment to last
forever. I think you did too. Was this the
memory you fixated on when the neural flush
consigned your mind to oblivion and your
memories to posterity? There is no way to be
sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I glance up at your body, still haunted by the
question. The next slice is easing out of your
ribcage even as its predecessor binds back into
your belly.
Once again, your memory of me clashes with
my remembered self-image. Aren’t pregnant
women supposed to glow? Not me, apparently.
As I offer up my belly to the ritual of the midterm
ultrasound scan, you see a woman who
looks dowdy, undesirable, burnt-out.
Offended by your attitude, I make a
concerted effort to ignore your impressions of

the scene and concentrate on my own
memories instead.
I remember squirming as the instrument
head smeared gel across my belly. You squeezed
my hand as if to remind me that I would not be
allowed to skip this particular check-up.
Ultrasound does not harm the foetus, the
consultant had asserted in a tone that seemed
to chastise the defiance I had shown nine weeks
earlier.
At first all I could make out on the TV
monitor were pulsing waves of dark and light
grey. Then the image sharpened, revealing our
child-to-be. She looked like a wax model that
had softened in the sun.
As I turned my head away, I realised the
consultant was frowning.
“Is she healthy? Is she normal? Is she...?”
Three days later, after a demoralising series of
tests, we were called back into the consultant’s
office. He mentioned a virus that caused foetal
malformations; the details passed me by.
Finally, he suggested I have an abortion. I felt
no remorse at the time, only relief. The foetus
was microcephalic. Not viable.
The same was true of our marriage, as it
turned out, though it would be another six
months before I learnt that the hard way. But
you knew already, didn’t you?
You should try again, said the consultant, his
gaze bisecting the two of us.
Needless to say, we did not try again.
The slice lifts away, leaving me to my tears. As
I gaze up at your body, I notice that its successor
contains a piece of your heart. The slice
envelops me before I have a chance to steel
myself for the trauma to come.
Two days before the opening of your first solo
exhibition, you reveal its centrepiece to me.
Within seconds our fists are dancing like alpha
particles in the heart of the sun. Now that sex
cannot bind us together, fission rather than
fusion is the only possible outcome.
The critics hail Mother and Child — Blighted as
your breakthrough work. That the public
unveiling comes so soon after our break-up only
adds to its poignancy in their eyes. They
applaud the unflinching way you weaved our
personal life into a hyperslice constructed from
that first ultrasound scan. My virtual womb
contains an archive of scribbled notes, intimate
emails and playful camcorder clips: a subjective
record of four-and-a-half months of anxiety and
anticipation. Pointedly, you leave an empty
space inside the head of the foetus.
But while you were basking in the adulation
of your peers, I was dissecting your computer’s
hard disk with an electric carving knife. I
realised it was a futile gesture even as I pasted
the slivers onto the walls of what was once our
studio, for you were always meticulous in
backing up your work onto remote servers.
Even so, I felt much better for making that
gesture, childish though it was.
Following our break-up, you produced a series
of hyperslices that attracted universal critical
acclaim, whereas I retreated into obscurity. I
frittered away a couple of years in a rented
studio in Brixton, fashioning barbed wire and
horsehair into expressions of my anger. Finally,
I summoned up the courage to exhibit a few
pieces in one of the more fashionable London
galleries. The derision of the critics
extinguished my desire to create art once and
for all. Instead, I decided to build a new life, a
life that did not contain you.

A glance upwards reveals that the slice has
returned to your body. By rights, it should be
the final one, since we never met again. So why,
then, has your head ejected another slice? No
answer comes to mind during its descent. And
if the whisperers know, they seem disinclined to
tell me.
This time there are no images or sounds, no
sensory impressions of any kind, only darkness
and silence and emptiness. I close my eyes,
preferring to contemplate a void of my own
making. In doing so, I’m reminded of that
powerful feeling of anticipation an artist
experiences when something is about to emerge
from nothing.
The whispering starts up afresh, distracting
me from my meditation. Annoyed by the
interruption, I open my eyes. A moment later
my mouth gapes open, too. Now there are two
holograms floating in the Turbine Hall, facing
away from each other. The woman is middleaged
and naked, just like her companion.
I am still pondering the meaning of this
apparition when your rich baritone emerges
from the susurrus, urging me to tell my side of
our story.
Realisation comes swiftly. Not content with
portraying the disintegration of our
relationship, now you intend to highlight my
failure to emulate your stellar career. The
comparison you make is a stark one; it was then
and it is now. This pair of hyperslices is
supposed to demonstrate that, artistically, I was
nothing without you.
Oh Leroy, this is too much! I thought that my
hatred of you was a thing of the past, but by reentering
my life, however vicariously, you have
rekindled that feeling.
I turn away from the holograms, shuddering.
“Leroy was right all along...”
“In terms of creativity, Tanya was a
lightweight.”
“Do you remember her solo exhibition?”
The erstwhile whisperers are laughing now.
“Leroy was always the strong one...”
“Such a unique talent...”
“Such a sad loss...”
This isn’t the private showing you promised
me, is it Leroy? Oh, I don’t doubt there will be
a formal unveiling tomorrow, with the
interminable speeches and ersatz emotions that
such events entail. But you couldn’t resist one
last manipulation, could you?
“You can prove them wrong, Tanya.”
The sound of your voice still makes me
tremble, and not just because of the bad times.
I, too, have memories that I treasure.
“You can do it, if you really want to.”
“But why should I bother?”
It’s a stupid question to ask a dead man, but
your proxy has been programmed to give me an
answer.
“No one, not even me, has created a
hyperslice ‘live’ in front of an audience. Think
of it as performance art, if you like. It will be
your unique achievement, Tanya. Something
for posterity.”
Hundreds of remote viewers flicker into
virtual existence as I return to my vantage point
at the edge of the platform. These ghostly
figures flit around the Turbine Hall, occluding
each other in a frantic search for the optimum
viewpoint. They behave as if my decision was
never in doubt.
Very well then, something for posterity...
Inspiration buzzes through me like adrenalin,
just like the old times. Guided by your proxy, I
begin downloading files from my personal
archive into the installation. The digital records
of my life will have to suffice, for I have no
intention of emulating your terminal mindflush.
Not now, not ever. But even though I
cannot match your absolute commitment to
art, there are elements I can introduce to this
event that your devotees may find challenging.
You thought that I would load this blank
hyperslice with my perspective on our time
together, didn’t you Leroy? Giving me the right
of reply must have seemed fair to you, a final

alancing of the books. The death of love
observed from two irreconcilable viewpoints;
the ultimate artistic collaboration. It must have
amused you to think of the critics deliberating
over which version of the Morocco sex scene
they preferred. I have no doubt that mine
would have been dismissed as a naive work, not
fit to be compared with the ultimate
achievement of the great Leroy Haines.
If that was your plan, I must apologise for not
sticking to the script. But I have a quite
different story to tell, one that is so much richer
than yours.
My story tells of a new start and a change of
direction. It tells of a woman who gave up art to
teach English; who got lucky and met a man
who would, in time, come to adore her. Most
important of all, it tells of the three daughters
they brought into this world.
There’s Jennifer, her blonde hair streaming
past bony shoulders, her eight year-old face
beaming with pleasure as the playground swing
lifts her high into the air.
And that’s Emma, slimmer and darker than
Jennifer, her typically serious expression
breaking into a shy little smile as she receives a
rosette at her first gymkhana.
And there’s Katie, her face smudged with
chocolate, giggling as she toddles around the
garden, pursued by her father.
Already, I can hear peals of laughter echoing
around the hall. Not that the verdict of the
critics worries me in the slightest, not any more.
What do I care if they think of my hyperslice as
sentimental dross?
I stand on the platform with my head held
high, waiting for the laughter to die down. It
seems to take an eternity, but eventually a hush
settles over the Turbine Hall. Moments later,
the silence is broken by the sound of footsteps.
I greet my family with hugs and kisses. Emma
and Jennifer wriggle free of my clutches, much
keener to play with a hyperslice than to bond
with its creator. Within seconds they have
worked out how to replay the video sequences.
“So embarrassing!” I hear Jennifer cry.
My husband slips one arm round my waist
and tickles my hip, making me giggle. His other
hand is tickling Katie, who is riding on his
shoulders. Not for much longer, I fear, for she
is growing fast. Time always forces us to give up
those things that we want to cherish forever.
Leroy, I’m not one of those people who think
of their children as works of art. But I do know
for certain that they represent the only kind of
immortality that matters to me. ◊

_____________
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