LINKDING

<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>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>Exile’s End is a complex, sometimes uncomfortable examination of artifact repatriation and cultural appropriation. An artifact of indescribable and irreplaceable beauty created by an “extinct” culture has been the basis of another culture’s origin stories. The race who created the artifact has survived on a distant world and has sent a representative to reclaim it, throwing everything into question. Inspired by the SF camp in Danzhai, China, which is co-hosted by the Future Administration Authority (FAA) and Wanda Group.</blockquote> ➤ the poem that's interspersed makes sense when you read it after having read the whole story