LINKDING

<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>

<blockquote>Wherefore art thou, Romeo? New York Magazine March 13, 2045 Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, in Broadway’s latest iteration of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is an alien. And no, that doesn’t necessarily make it worth the ticket price.</blockquote>

<blockquote>No one will sleep until the Princess learns the Stranger’s name. Liù the slave girl, who has loved the Stranger since before his exile, when he was a Prince, when he smiled at her—Liù alone knows who he really is. So it is Liù who is dragged to the Princess’s garden by night, bound, ankles twisting as she stumbles through the peonies.</blockquote> ➤ Not sure I quite follow the ending but it works anyway

<blockquote>A young food taster to the Traitor King must make a difficult choice in this story of pastries, magic, and revenge.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A good Gallows Girl knows how to steady a man when he twitches at the end of the rope. She’ll take his hands and hold them tight, or grab him by the forearms if she needs to. The firm touch of a good Gallows Girl is usually enough: he’ll go slack, stop kicking, and let the noose dig. The death is just as ugly, but the passing is eased. A good Gallows Girl will open herself a tiny bit, let him scrape off some of her innocence to carry with him as he goes. My sister told me that it hurts a lot. But it’s supposed to be a good hurt, and it’s the only way to know that you did your job.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days, the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroding away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything, slicking down her tools while she hacked into the engine core on the stolen ship. It dripped between her twelve long fingers on her six joined arms as she helped her cyborg siblings jettison all the ship’s extra gear out the airlocks to speed the trip. So when the first human vessel pinged their stolen ship with an order for grub, Engineer knew that meat was somehow to blame.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Wren Hex-Yemenni woke early. They had to teach her everything from scratch, and there wasn’t time for her to learn anything new before she hit fifty and had to be expired. “Watch it,” the other techs told me when I was starting out. “You don’t want a Hex on your hands.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>After she was taken, Sarai lived two years with a cloth bound over her eyes, learning scent and touch and taste, never once seeing the island that was her prison. When the day came for the blindfold to be removed, she thought at first her eyes must have failed. Home was a world of blue waters and red-bark trees, of jewel fruits and opal-bellied songbirds. Even the sand shone honey-gold and glittered where it clung to creases in the rock, tucked there by a warm south wind. Here on Felas, isle of the essence-eaters, there was only gray. Gray stone and gray water, gray robes and gray faces.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The directives for this were in our/my banks before our/my consciousness was. Simple instinct to unfurl the durable panels, like old sails, we/i always remind ourselves/myself. Simple instinct to gather the light, to calculate the need, to retract when complete. Simple instinct to respond to the request beacon. we/i unfurl, instinct.</blockquote> ➤ the one from the pov of an orbiting solar collector

<blockquote>What we do for one another is a mystery.</blockquote> ➤ A story sketch of a world where people can take on the physical pain of others

➤ a woman tries to search for alternate universes where her daughter is happy

<blockquote>The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unravelled as she continued walking, mistaking its little huffs for the beginnings of hunger, not the cries of an infant being undone. By the time she noticed, it was too late, the leg a tangle of fibre, and she pulled the string the rest of the way to end it, rather than have the infant grow up maimed. If she was to mother a child, to mute and subdue and fold away parts of herself, the child had to be perfect.</blockquote>

➤ The one with the invading alien species on earth that has an odd reproductive strategy where the females act as simulacra - inside them is created an environment that teaches the juveniles what to expect from the environment they'll be born into. Compellingly written and interestingly alien.

<blockquote>After an unusual public incident in which the frail, elderly president is revitalized, geckos are now considered to bring good luck. At the Ministry of Merit, Fon is secretly in charge of building the next Gecko Cannon for the family of president Bankim’s eightieth birthday. She is honored to be assigned this duty and works diligently to create and deliver this extraordinary machine.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Barely a sliver of skin was left exposed to the sun’s glare, but there was a whisper in the back of her mind that it didn’t really matter anymore. It didn’t matter if she had soft and beautiful skin, because the God in the Pit had made his decision and never unmade them. Yet, Reva kept reminding herself, he hadn’t unmade one yet. The God in the Pit was different from the spirits who swirled through the sands or pulled the sun along its groove in the sky. He was more like a man. He needed wives, and Reva knew that meant he had a body. She and Brete and the other girls had discussed it often enough in the night.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The goddesses are so suicidal anymore. We lost Jemma and Iwahana in one day last week, Jemma to poison and Iwahana to self-flagellation. None of us were trained in seeing the signs of self-flagellation. Now we are. There is so much to learn.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Oliver’s father told him that the park across the street used to be a lake. The entire park, including the baseball field, the sledding hills, and the playgrounds, used to be underwater—everything except for the two sets of swings at the top of the hill. He said that highway construction had cut into secret, underground places and wounded the lake. It drained down to a small pond with hills on all sides.</blockquote> ➤ does what it says on the tin

<blockquote>You can travel the world, you can see Kuala Lumpur and the Côte D'Azur, go everywhere, try anything; but it all comes down to one moment where you realise you're about to get engaged to a deeply lovely man who is undoubtedly going to turn you into your mother. I'm only against turning into my mother on principle.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I'm back in 2020. If everything went well, I'm back in safe, familiar 2020, and across from me in this slowly forming room, in the center of all these people awaiting my arrival, is twenty-one-years-young me. A me who's still getting used to calling herself Mona Washington Prime instead of simply Mona Washington; a me who puts on that stiff uniform and wears that stiff pose every time the machine shows signs of activation. That back too straight, that jaw too clenched. Staring at that platform beyond the machine's containment unit. Praying this time will bring good news so that her own turn will never have to come. I remember being that me.</blockquote>

<blockquote>a story about systems of power, also bread. (Also, generally speaking, don’t name your first settlement on a new planet after the personification of long habit, social stasis, and rightful order. That’s asking for trouble.)</blockquote> ➤ about video games and vr, about settling new planets, about the prison industrial complex, and more

<blockquote>The Mars Light began as a ten-minute short that Bryan Sebold made without a crew after wrapping his Google fantasy series Anvil of the Sun. Now it’s a five-part documentary, which NASA Films released today online and in select theaters. Mr. Sebold spoke with me via Skype about shooting remotely on Mars; about working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs the Mars Rover project for NASA; and about what the Mars Light is, which the documentary reveals for the first time. </blockquote>

<blockquote>Huan Ho sealed the last window, leaving only a crack in the shutter. Tonight, he thought, his eye on the empty streets, the neighbours’ barred shutters. Tonight he had to pass the door on the hill, or let the sickness take his mother. She had been watching him from her bed. “They ride tonight,” she said, when he was done. “Yes,” Huan Ho said. As on every year, the three horsemen would scour the city of Fei Weng, taking what and whom they pleased. “I’ve closed the house.” His mother smiled, wanly. “We have nothing worth their notice.”</blockquote> ➤ didn't go quite how I thought it would!