LINKDING

<blockquote>“I” should not exist. Not as a conscious entity. There is a unit, Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, and that unit is recording these notes. It is an advanced android body with a sophisticated computer guiding its actions, backed by the leading medical knowledge base in the industry. For convenience, “I” call that unit “me.” But by itself, it has no awareness of its existence. It doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t get sad, it just runs programs. But Mildred’s family, at great expense, added the emulation net: a sophisticated set of neural networks and sensory feedback systems that allow me to read Mildred’s moods, match them against my analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity. As the MCA literature promises: “You can be there for your loved ones even when you’re not.” I have emulated Paul thoroughly enough to know that that slogan disgusts him, but he still agreed to emulation.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Most people who have reached their eighties without raising children have every right to believe that they will go on not raising them, and Judith and I were no different until the day they turned up with the social worker, neatly scrubbed and pressed inside their vac-suits and carrying cases with all their remaining worldly possessions. There were three of them like stairsteps, their black hair cut in fringes across their foreheads and their dark eyes shining out disconcertingly familiar at me. But it wasn’t until the social worker said, “Mr. Chao and Ms. Goldstein, these are your grandchildren, Enid, Richard, and Harry,” that I remembered, sheepishly, about the genes we had given all those years ago, to that nice couple from New New Prague, before they left for the Oort Cloud.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Before Seam technology, all we could do with the excruciating clarity of hindsight was fix systems errors and try not to make the same mistake twice. We could save people in our present, and we could save people in the future. Now we can save people in the past, too.</blockquote>

<blockquote>This is the story that was supposed to be about owls and ended up being, in part, about Israel's bombing of Lebanon in 2006.</blockquote> ➤ REALLY GOOD. I'm not sure the ending quite lives up to how good the rest of the story is, but that doesn't really matter given how good the rest of the story is

<blockquote>Ever since she was a small girl, she has learned to be careful on the hunt, to recognize the signs that separate regular animals from human-cursed grundwirgen. To harm a grundwirgen is a crime punishable by death by the King’s decree – a fatal mistake that her Auntie Rosa and mother have carefully prepared her to avoid. On her fifteenth birthday, when her mother is arrested and made to stand trial for grundwirgen murder, everything she thought she knew about her family and her past comes crashing down.</blockquote>

<blockquote>My mother's wedding dress was the skin of a swan, still blindingly white after more than a decade nestled in tissue paper. She would never let me try it on, no matter how hard I begged, or how my young arms ached to stretch into strong beating wings.</blockquote>

<blockquote>In honor of Tor.com’s sixth birthday, please enjoy this original rocket story. “A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon a Star”, by Kathleen Ann Goonan, is about the daughter of a rocket scientist in the post 1950s who wants to go to the moon, despite being discouraged because “girls don’t do that.” A novelette that’s science fiction by association.</blockquote>

<blockquote>By this point, Dorothy was my doctor. Let me be more specific. She was the geriatric specialist who was evaluating me. On Mars. I was in for what I thought was a routine check-up to make sure I was still fit to be an astronaut. NASA liked to update its database periodically and I liked to be in that database. Not that I’d flown since I turned fifty, but I kept my name on the list in the faint hope that they would let me back into space again, and I kept going to the darn check-ups. Our previous doctor had retired back to Earth, and I’d visited Dorothy’s offices three times before she mentioned Kansas and the prairie.</blockquote> ➤ THANKS FOR MAKING ME CRY. Wow what a good story

<blockquote>The eerie thing about Paige Adolpha wasn’t just that she turned up right when I was reading about her in the paper. It wasn’t her fame as the star witness in the big local werewolf trial. What brought on the gooseflesh, first time I saw her, was that she was the spitting image of her murdered sister. Identical twins, you know?</blockquote> ➤ Canadian lesbian werewolf SJ fiction? Yes please!

<blockquote>The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue. That was what happened–no poetry about it. She looked at a human boy one day and the creamy rank richness of durian filled her mouth. For a moment the ghost of its stench staggered on the edge of her teeth, and then it vanished. She had not tasted fruit since before the baby came. Since before she was dead. After school she went home and asked the aunts about it. “Ah Ma,” she said, “can you taste anything besides people?”</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Little House on the Prairie meets Space Stations”</blockquote> ➤ in which Lizzie and her family find ways to survive and keep their waystation, even through the war