SRSmith

I have no memory of what came before. It's as though I didn't exist prior to this moment and have just come into existence and apparated into this crowd, in this hall, surrounded by the ordered chaos of these several hundred people. We're collected here for a singular purpose, all of us waiting to bear witness, to share witness. They seem not to notice me, caught as I am in the frenetic jumble, almost vibrating in tune with the collective hum of anticipation. The reverberation rises with activity on the stage ahead and above us to crescendo as a woman appears, guitar slung low, eyes wide and bright, the room hanging on the precipice until those first chords, a familiar structure, then the space erupts into mayhem. Nothing comes close to the magic of this music, the harmony formed of hundreds of voices, of heartbeats, synchronized with the one who leads, the one whose voice and instrument eclipse the crowd, riding our energy and elevating us all to some higher plane. Beneath it all

Abby woke with a start, a conversation with someone vaguely familiar against a kaleidoscope oceanview suddenly vanishing, dulcet tones replaced with a hockey organ ringtone her ex had programmed that couldn't seem to be exorcised from her phone. "Good morning, you'll want to get a robe on, our package is about to arrive." The voice was familiar, but she wasn't expecting anything, was she? She jammed her feet into raccoon slippers, pulled on an Osaka Spa terry robe she'd liberated years ago, and shuffled towards the front door, startling as the buzzer sounded. "Sign here," the brown uniform all business, presenting a tablet and a pen, then, formalities behind them, wheeled a Pelican case taller than her into the front hall before turning and leaving without another word. There was a label stuck to the front of the case above a hand-shaped impression. "Push Here" was scribbled on the label in a typeface a little too uniform to be hand drawn. She placed her hand flat on the

Rip cleared everything off the dining room table, piling books on top of placements on the sideboard, and his discarded sweater over the back of one of the chairs. "Doris, give me a map of the continent." He'd been dreaming of making the trip from his home on the shores of Hudson Bay to Southern California for as long as he could remember. A roadtrip to end all roadtrips. "Continental map. Topographical, weather, street..." Rip cut off the disembodied voice mid-sentence. "Street maps. Local destinations, points of interest" The surface of the table was bathed in monochromatic light, a surface map of the continent in three dimensions, with a softly strobing green light at the point at the edge of the bay where they lived. "Plot me a route to Baja." A point at the southwestern point of the map glowed blue, and a spider web of light traces crawled across the map, highlighting highways and city streets as Doris carefully routed multiple possible ways of making the journey. "No

I'd never dreamed before, at least not that I could remember. Sure, a lifetime in that chair, I'd hoped for things, but that's different. Sleep was always empty, vacant. Dreamless. Ever since I've become a retread, the visions have been relentless. This reclaimed meatsuit must have been saturated in deeply emotional experiences, and when they bleached it, some of them didn't wash out. Most of these meatsuits come from habitual offenders; death row inmates, the irredeemable dregs of society. Their family gets a payout, they get off the hook early, and people like me born with a body broken in all the wrong places get another chance. Retread. I don't know where this meatsuit came from, and the plastics work had all been done before I moved in, so I can't even track down the history by likeness, but there's something about these fragments that I see when I close my eyes that are undeniable, unavoidable, unnerving. Standing here, now, at this intersection, I can understand why. The

Rachel scrolled through what passed for news on her phone, coffee slowly cooling on the kitchen table. Malcolm would already be at work, leaving her in peace for this precious little time before she herself had to get dressed and head to the office. She looked up as the kitchen light flickered and went out, and when she looked back Malcolm was seated across from her at the table. She jumped at his unexpected appearance. "What the...," she started, then froze. She could clearly see the flowery wallpaper of the far kitchen wall through Malcom's shirt, a shirt she didn't recognize, and he'd somehow managed to grow the better part of a beard since he'd kissed her in bed that morning. "Hey sweetheart," he said, his voice tinny, flat, "sorry if I startled you." She looked around the kitchen for the telltale sign of a projector, assuming that this was some kind of practical joke. "Rachel," he waited until he had her attention again, "this isn't a trick. We'll talk about this after when

They'd tested it, of course, but she was the first person they'd installed it in. The injections were painful, and numerous, the material marching through the subcutaneous layers of her flesh like an army of angry ants, and when it was done, she wore the material as a complete second skin, just beneath her own. When they turned it on it was surreal, the loading screen and debugging information scrolling down her back, and her bare chest and across her stomach before being replaced with their logo, a lengthy copyright text, all in high contrast, glaring white against skin turned to charcoal, before clearing and settling into a tanned skin tone with a subtle, shifting, luminous hue. The control unit was implanted through her navel, tucked safely behind the stomach wall, a port available for updates. They offered wireless, but the risk of being hacked was too great, so she opted for physical access only. There were light sensors in the substrate that adapted the visual output based on

"Traffic's wild tonight," the driver offered, making brief eye contact in the rearview mirror. She gave him a thin smile but didn't respond. She caught her reflection in the Plexi partition and wondered if he noticed her eyes. Wondered if this disguise would survive the evening. She reapplied lipstick and steadied her nerve. She could hold it together a little while longer. On arrival, the driver was paid without a word, a cash transaction and an unremarkable tip. She wondered if he'd even remember her in the sea of faces and fares on just another California evening. The security seemed laid back and lax, but there were familiar bulges under loose-fitting jackets that spoke of imminent violence should the need arise. The gentleman receiver scanned her invitation and checked against the guest list. "Weather's mild tonight," he spoke without looking up, "you're all set. Welcome, I hope you have a pleasant evening." She smiled a practiced cocktail smile and drifted past him without

It's cold here. Inhospitable. We've been stranded for an age, near starving, not even enough energy to move from this place, much less try to find our way home. From time to time, some small animal, a rabbit, or a field mouse will venture too far from safety, and a fox, or in rare cases a hawk will hunt, and in those moments fear and panic ripple in waves across the barren ground. We're not proud, we take what we can get, we're survivors after all. The sun is down, busy blistering the other side of this rock while we wait out the night in absolute darkness. In the great distance above us, pinpricks of light blink in and out, mocking. There's a sudden roar of approaching motors, and bright fingers of light split the night, bobbing and weaving together to form an opalescent lattice above the winding road on the hillside across the field. This is a treat. There's the slightest hint of exhilaration, of excitement perceptible even at this distance. The throaty rumble doubles and

He woke from a deep sleep, the room still dark. Had there been a noise? It was quiet now. He reached in the darkness and lifted his phone, the display coming to life just as the alarm sounded, the unexpected noise startling him fully awake. He thumbed the display blindly to silence the alarm. Six am. He hated waking right before the alarm like this, it wasn't natural. His body clock had never been so attuned, definitely not to a minute prior to his alarm. He sat up, found his glasses, and shuffled to the bathroom before heading down to the kitchen to make coffee. With the coffee ground, the machine filled, he started the brew and... Something wasn't right. He had a cartridge coffee maker, not this... He woke, sat bolt upright in bed, sweat beading on his brow. He looked down toward the nightstand at his phone as the alarm sounded, startling him. He reached for it, desperate to silence the racket but only managed to knock it off onto the floor. Swearing, he turned on the light

He'd spent forty years running rescue and salvage operations in deep space, had hundreds of engagements, many responding to distress beacons, but he had never experienced anything like this. His entire ship resonated at some experiential but otherwise unmeasurable frequency. His instrumentation registered nothing, it wasn't designed to analyze whatever this was. Rapierre himself felt more than heard the signal, and as he navigated the ship, zig-zagging in the direction where it became stronger, he found there was a sweet spot where, if he pointed the nose of the craft directly into it, the sensation became something more, a kind of beautiful, barely perceptible subliminal song, pulling at the edges of his consciousness. There was nothing to lock his navigation system onto, only the sensation in his mind, so he flew manually for days, maybe weeks, time gradually losing meaning. He slept at intervals strapped into the pilot's seat, trusting the ship's collision avoidance systems, and