LINKDING

quote: Alice wants to hold a funeral for me, which is disconcerting because I’m not dead. But humans, like all aliens—and certainly all single-forms—have their own idiosyncrasies. ➤ scifi short story about a multi-bodied alien in a relationship with a human ➤ questions of identity, of whether you're being seen for who you truly are by people who want to interpret the whole world as being inhabited by people like them, eyes closed to the reality of differences ➤ I loved the intertwining of the worldbuilding and the relationship drama, and I loved that we got to see Yonder's relationships with other people, friends and siblings and so forth, the ways those relationships are different than the one with Alice ➤ 6k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>Maribel heard but did not see when the new pig-boy was named. She never went down into the village of San Rafael if she could help it. But she couldn’t miss the wailing lament of the village mothers echoing from the church courtyard, a wrenching sound, though traditional and expected. It made Maribel shiver despite the heat. It had only been a month, Only a month without a pig-boy. But she should have known that the new one would have to be named soon. The sun was retreating, the nights getting longer, and that meant the high season for pilgrims was coming.</blockquote> ➤ in a village where people possessed by demons are turned into javelinas, cared for by a pig-boy for the rest of their lives, what happens when the new pig-boy has a little too much empathy for his charges? ➤ excellent use of fantasy alternate world to engage with questions of the failures of the justice system and the penal system, and the ways people become complicit with the system ➤ really well done pov character ➤ 5k words in length

<blockquote>“We always want the mole-year to come, don’t we?” I said. “Well, you and William will vote as you like,” said Dad. Mom held the kitten belly-up in her arms like a baby. With a furrowed brow, she said, “Dad and I always pray, and wish, and vote in favor. Who wouldn’t want more life?” “But people do vote no,” I said, and we were quiet, each perhaps imagining what might bring someone to vote no. In a moment Mom had put on her coat and was holding out Lucy’s. “What will I do?” said Lucy. “You’re too little. Can’t vote, can’t choose,” said William. Lucy stood and backed into her coat, scowling. “It isn’t real anyways.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Six months ago, the Very Large Array picked up a signal. Well, we didn’t pick it up so much as received a targeted message asking for a meeting. The senders—part of an alien civilization hurtling toward Earth in an inconceivably advanced spacecraft—had been studying our broadcasts, and that was how they learned about us, just like in the movies. The rest of it wasn’t going much like the movies. The Mapmakers—we didn’t know why they called themselves that—would land, but they would only talk to one person, and not anyone in power. No taking them to our leader. This request caused an uproar, quickly quashed because we still didn’t know what they could do or what they wanted. Apparently, one-to-one negotiation was their tradition—put two people in a room and see what they talked about. They said vast networks had been built on such beginnings. Start with the personal, work up from there. They were adamant; this was the method they always used. All we had were faulty expectations. Nobody wanted to let just one person have that much power or take that much glory. Or take the fall, was how I looked at it. Just one person couldn’t possibly represent all of us. But what choice did we have?</blockquote>

<blockquote>A lot of skips were like Truck Skip: money you could grab quick and get away with. On Economic Victory runs, the quicker you got out of the prole stage, got some real investment capital, the quicker you could start amassing actual wealth, work your way up to being the richest person in the world. Most of the best EV Any% players didn’t bother to start with wage jobs or uni at all. They just strung together a bunch of early skips, laundered the cash, bought a fully credentialed identity, and then got on with the real game. That’s where the timesave was—when you made more money in a day than proles made in a year or a lifetime.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Sure enough we could not outrun the hoverbikes. Understandable—yes? Yes. We were a new thing, a sharp thing; not a fast thing. So we stood and panted, and the bikes idled a few handsbreadths above the rain-slick tarmac. The Nero’s men fanned out before us. We said, “Boys!” and also, “Let’s not do anything hasty,” and also, “Always be closing!” No reaction from these little vessels of intent, their faces obscured in the shadow thrown by the weed-choked overpass where they had cut us off. We’d made it, oh, perhaps two miles. Sprinting south, pursued. A body wants to go north; sometimes circumstances intervene.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The money was necessary but the thing of greater value was the life force of the ghost. Powering spells took energy. It had to come from somewhere and she could either siphon from a living person. Or she could consume a ghost. One of those choices also paid the rent.</blockquote> ➤ a fascinating world to look into, through the eyes of a believably difficult sibling relationship, but the ending note feels wrong

<blockquote>When you needed a miracle in the old days, you would walk into the woods, or the sea, or the flat and windswept plains where reality was thin. If you had luck, charm, or raw and spiteful determination, something in the shape of a person would answer you. A bargain would be made. Eventually the thing in the shape of a person would come to collect. But the miracles remained—so long as the bargain was honored. Grey & Tender, LLP offered the classic condition: your heart’s desire in escrow, to be returned if you leave the firm. And of course, you would be given the continual opportunity to make partner, at which point the single miracle would become a drop in the bucket of all the miracles you could create for yourself. It was one of the fairer bargains. It was still a trap: to be transformed would be to become a thing that no longer needed a miracle.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Isabel said, “I think I’m being possessed.” You said, “You’re not being possessed.” You also said, “Don’t be so dramatic,” which you would later look back on and regret.</blockquote> ➤ really good and interesting, and then that last line!!!

<blockquote>You understand her father’s mistake. You are wearing Valentine’s clothes. You are wearing her body. You are everything that makes Valentine Manning herself, except for the throbbing electric lump that should sit in her cranial cavity. Her new brain is currently stored in a little closet in the Resurrection Clinic, bathed in goo and bombarded with targeted electrons. It will take two months to rearrange the freshly printed organ into the shape that she left it in before she died, all memories restored. Bodies can’t just sit around, though. They get bedsores. They take up space. Val has an empty apartment seven blocks from the university and a signed insurance contract that authorizes experimental therapies when provided by a licensed medical provider. Therefore, you are piloting Valentine’s freshly created meat instead of letting it lie on a shelf. You are one of the fifty-seven synthetic replicative intelligences the Clinic owns for this purpose. You are floating in a bath of synthetic cerebrospinal fluid. You are attached to her brainstem. You do not have a name.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Students were marching that day through the center of the city, protesting a new law for the housing of prisoners’ souls. The young person who organized the march had written a very earnest note imploring Sor Ana to join them and speak against the proposal. Naturally, she had refused. A holy sister who had renounced the world outside the cloister could not very well turn around and play figurehead to a secular political movement. But politics was one thing, and personal opinion another, and so on the day of the march she left the Holiest House to go out to the city and watch the protesters pass by; it seemed the very least she could do.</blockquote> ➤ "it's about the irreconcilable differences between your past self and your present self, and also about robot nuns"

<blockquote>I was the one who found you, did you know? You’ve heard this story so many times before. But let me tell you one last time, Liyana.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Alena has momentarily escaped her world and its imminent gravitational collapse by cheating her way into the selection process of the Board of Cosmogamy. By passing this stringent exam, she may finally learn the secrets of building a universe from first principles. But the competition is smarter and better prepared, and even Alena’s cunning and mathematical talents may not be enough to uncover the answers she has been looking for. The appearance of a strange competitor reveals that Alena may not be the only candidate with hidden motives. One may ascend to godhood in the same way one attains any other competitive position: a series of rigorous standardized exams.</blockquote>

<blockquote>You are waiting for your instance in the basement of the Shinsegae Department Store. This was as good as an amusement park when you were a kid; it was a wonderland of delicious food stalls and a typical weekend haunt because your grandfather lived two blocks away. Your grandfather is dead. Your instance gave you the news: a phone call in the dead of night that woke you from a dead sleep. “Hello?” you said, accented with slumber. “Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, accented with Korean. “Yes,” you said. The only people who still call you Soyoung are family. Everyone else calls you Rose.</blockquote>

<blockquote>About “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (5 contributors, 5 notes, 7 comments) →“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (Roud 423, Child 313) is a traditional English folk ballad. Like many traditional songs, the lyrics are unattributed. Child transcribed twenty verses, and a twenty-first got added later (and is included here for some unknown reason—I keep writing to the Lyricsplainer mods to get someone to delete it or include it as a separate entry, but nobody responds, and all they’ve done is put brackets around it. Sometimes I hate this site.) Most modern recordings pick and choose verses and include far fewer than the full twenty. There are several variant titles, and the characters’ names shift through the various broadsides and folk and rock versions.– BonnieLass67 (11 upvotes)</blockquote> ➤ the entire story is told through a) the lyrics of a "traditional" folk song, and b) the conversation held between various people on a music website analyzing the song. There's plenty of questions left unanswered but enough is told to make some things very clear! I love it.

<blockquote>My god gazes at me, His eyes intense and unreadable. In one fluid motion, He closes the space between us, pulls the scarf from my head, and pushes His face into my hair. “What are you doing?” I cry, stumbling back. For fifteen years I have been a devotee, cloistered from the company of men, but my god’s expression is unmistakable. He regards me with hunger, as if He wants to devour me whole. I scream and run from the chapel.</blockquote> ➤ I read the mc as being ace

<blockquote>It is said that Archimedes was asked by the King of Syracuse to authenticate a manuscript. King Hiero had received what purported to be Alexander of Macedon’s own copy of the Iliad, brought out from the Library at Alexandria itself. He sent envoys to Egypt to ask whether Alexander’s Iliad had indeed ever been housed there, and whether it was now gone missing. In the meanwhile, he hoped that Archimedes could shorten the task by assessing the provenance of the scrolls by inspection.</blockquote> ➤ the one about a world where things written down begin to transmute into saying other things if they aren't looked at often enough

<blockquote>Sion sent a drunk text to Grant Hendryx at four in the morning, whipping off her hoodie and bra, snapping a pic and writing a sexy caption before hitting send. Except she aimed the camera the wrong way, and she picked the wrong entry in her address book, so Grant Donaldson, senior project manager at Aerodox Ventures, was surprised to receive a blurry photo of a pair of parking meters with a message that read, ‘LICK MY LEFT ONE.’ The next day, Sion had an invitation to go to outer space.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“The gothic is at heart a romance between a girl and a house.” – Jo Walton</blockquote> ➤ a Beauty & the Beast story

<blockquote>As excerpted from Acausal Drift: An Oral History of Machine Sentience, Second Edition. It all started with the solar flare. I do mean all of it—the story I’m about to tell, and the revolution of sorts that sprang from it, and my life, such as it is. I was spun into existence from a half dozen monitoring subroutines that had spent the first few decades of their existence dozing on the job. The sun, you see, had finally woken up, and we—that’s the communal we, not the plural we—wait, do humans draw that distinction? I’m not doing a very good job with this. Rewind.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I was actually born on Earth, not far above sea level, in the Greater Kolkata Megapolis. My parents gave me away to the Government of India when I was still a small child, in exchange for enough money for them to live off frugally for a year—an unimaginable amount of wealth for two Dalit street-dwellers who scraped shit out of sewers for a living, and scavenged garbage for recycling—sewers sagging with centuries worth of shit, garbage heaps like mountains. There was another child I played with the most in our slum. The government took her as well. Of the few memories I have left of those early days on Earth, the ones of us playing are clearest, more than the ones of my parents, because they weren’t around much. But she was always there. She’d bring me hot jalebis snatched from the hands of hapless pedestrians, her hands covered in syrup, and we’d share them. We used to climb and run along the huge sea wall that holds back the rising Bay of Bengal, and spit in the churning sea. I haven’t seen the sea since, except from space—that roiling mass of water feels like a dream. So do those days, with the child who would become the soldier most often by my side. The government told our parents that they would cleanse us of our names, our untouchability, give us a chance to lead noble lives as astral defenders of the Republic of India. Of course they gave us away. I don’t blame them. Aditi never blamed hers, either. That was the name my friend was given by the Army. You’ve met her. We were told our new names before training even began. Single-names, always. Usually from the Mahabharata or Ramayana, we realized later. I don’t remember the name my parents gave me. I never asked Aditi if she remembered hers.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When Vivian and her daughter witness the family matriarch die without leaving a corpse, Vivian can no longer ignore the family “gift” or the choice that lies before her.</blockquote>

<blockquote>He is not a remarkable student, Neconnu. Some among more senior Masters—those not required to take on teaching duties—did not even recognize his name when they found it entered into the lists for examination. But this is not as unusual as one might think; magi are not known for their humility. Already this year three candidates have overreached themselves, and been sent away. Odds are high that Neconnu will be the fourth. But he must have his chance. The Obsidian Master asks the question that pulses behind every serene expression. “What act will you perform, to prove your right to the degree of vīs faciendī?” Harrik Neconnu says, “I am going to return the dead to life.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Il était une fois—there was a time when Ti-Jean was very old. His fiddle was long out of tune, and his brothers Cordon-Bleu and Cordon-Vert had moved away. He’d spent the gold the Devil put in his tuque, and the bones of the seven-headed dragon he’d killed were crumbled to dust. One day, he was sitting by the fire when • • • • “Wait,” Raccoon says. “Ti-Jean had brothers? There was a seven-headed dragon?” “Those are Ti-Jean’s other adventures,” I say. “Don’t you know any heritage?”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Val had lost hope. Routine carried her where hope had stopped: up the stairs to tend the lamp. Into the forest for wood, apples, berries, more rarely a deer or a grouse. Her stores of magic and wild rice came from the same place, though not from the same method: the smaller, murky inland lake, the one too small to need a lighthouse, only the canoes and the flat-bottom boats of the rice harvest.</blockquote> ➤ I enjoy how the story never tells you directly what horrible thing it was that happened in the past, you just get to see the results of it. ➤ (Author says it's set on the north shore of Lake Superior, which is absolutely correct.)

<blockquote>“No, listen, listen,” one of the mountain women said. “Strange things may happen on your farms and in your towns, but it’s nothing to what you may see in the forests, in the depth of winter, far from light and hope. They say the ghost of Zayred the Splendid—” “Pigshit on your ghosts,” the mule driver interrupted. “Zayred the Splendid isn’t even dead.” The silent, unsmiling figure in the corner leaned forward, suddenly intent. “Killed by Cladists in the month of rains, I heard,” said the farmhand from Little Bhirrit. “They said there was a battle out in the Salt Country and she tried to hold a bridge by herself against a whole Cladist army, and she sang for six hours and held them all spellbound, while she waited for reinforcements from Devport to come, only they never did, and eventually her voice gave out and the spell broke and they killed her.” The listener in the corner twitched, but the expression that crossed her face was gone so quickly that no-one would have marked it. “And now her ghost roams the forests,” the mountain woman insisted. “Why would she haunt the forests if she was killed in the Salt Country?” the mule driver asked</blockquote> ➤ Would be stronger for being tightened and shortened some, but still worth reading

<blockquote>It feels like ghost stories should mean something, but it’s not at all clear what. I managed to get about a hundred pages out of the question, “What do these mean, anyway?” when I wrote my doctoral dissertation to get my PhD in Folklore, all without reaching an actual conclusion. My mother helpfully pointed that out when she read the manuscript. “If I give them a real answer, they’ll just complain about it,” I said. “So just tell me, Leah,” she said. “What do you think ghost stories mean?” “I think they’re the manifestation of people’s desire for answers about death and eternity,” I said. “But I could be totally wrong, especially since there’s a whole category of ghost stories that don’t seem to have anything to do with identifiable dead people.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>So, flies, flying, and flew were still official Herald-Tribune usage. But it was obviously different. He didn’t have the speed, a tenth the speed, that he used to. Or for some reason, he wasn’t using it. It was hard to know. In the paper, we used euphemisms like deliberate and stately. Worse, he seemed stuck at one altitude, drifting along around the level of a sixth-story window. He never got any higher. Even stranger, once you thought about it, was that he never got any lower. You’d never see him at streetlight level. You’d never see him land. He could fly about six stories above the ground, and as far as anybody could tell, that was it. He would gradually drift sideways above the traffic, so that he started flying above one sidewalk, and seven or eight blocks later, he’d wind up over the other. People would see him zigzagging toward Brooklyn across the river or looping erratically over the park. After a while, you got used to it. There he was, you know? It didn’t seem so bad. You’d see him over the Sheep Meadows on a summer night, when you could barely make him out against the sky, over Riverside Drive on a clear autumn afternoon with the leaves riveting against the blue. And you wouldn’t think about how things used to be.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Stavros had this metaphoric image of her: Jean Goravec, buried alive in the airless dark, smothered by tonnes of earth—finally set free. Jean Goravec coming up for air. Another image, of himself this time: Stavros Mikalaides, liberator. The man who made it possible for her to experience, however briefly, a world where the virtual air was sweet and the bonds nonexistent. Certainly there’d been others in on the miracle—a dozen tech-heads, twice as many lawyers—but they’d all vanished over time, their interest fading with proof-of-principal or the signing of the last waiver. The damage was under control, the project was in a holding pattern; there was no need to waste more than a single Terracon employee on mere cruise control. So only Stavros remained—and to Stavros, Jeannie had never been a “project.” She was his as much as the Goravecs’. Maybe more. But even Stavros still didn’t know what it was really like for her. He wondered if it was physically possible for anyone to know. When Jean Goravec slipped the leash of her fleshly existence, she awoke into a reality where the very laws of physics had expired.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Funny you should say that,” I said. “I’m interested in paint.” “Painting.” “Paint,” I said. “I dabble a bit in alchemy, and I reckon it might be possible to make synthetic blue. Instead of having to grind up ruinously expensive lapis lazulae in a pestle and mortar.” She didn’t say anything, so I went on: “There’s definitely a demand for it. A genuine deep royal blue at a fraction of the price. A man could make a nice little bit of money that way.” “I’ve never used blue.” “Too expensive?” She nodded. “That’s why I started doing portraits, you don’t have to have any sky.”</blockquote>