WRITERS OF THE FUTURE

by Charles Oberndorf

* * * *

Charles Oberndorf is the author of three novels: Sheltered Lives, Testing, and Foragers, and he is working on two more. He teaches at the University School in Cleveland, where he has taught seventh graders for more than twenty-five years. His new story, like his last (“Another Life” in our Oct./Nov. 2009 issue), is set in the far future, but unlike the last one, this tale would get a PG-13 rating if it were a movie.

* * * *

Once there had been a thousand worlds. Ten million remaining flesh and blood souls: all this humanity divided amongst spheres, wheels, and cylinders, all these worlds orbiting the path Mars once followed.

And there were the Minds, that silver-yellow halo circling the sun where Earth once flew its steady course. The Minds had converted the rest of the solar system to their own purposes, and nothing else remained but possibility. One day we might overwhelm the Minds and limit their omnipresence. One day we might build starships and seek other worlds where humanity might start over.

Now a hundred worlds orbit the path Mars once followed, at most one million remaining flesh and blood souls. We live the Old Age of mankind. Today’s entropic sadness is to be newborn, or ten, or twenty, to be full of youth and to not feel old at all.

—Magnus Esner

* * * *

I. A Writer’s Beginning

When I was an adolescent, Magnus Esner was my favorite writer. You had to wait a year, a whole 687 days, for a new novel to come out, and you had to join a queue to read it. In those days, a book by Esner could only handle a hundred readers at a time. I still remember when it came my turn to read Suicide Missions, the anticipation I felt while putting the gear on. I was in my reading chair, head back, hands draped on armrests, legs outstretched, and I was no longer living in my world, but instead I was living in another world, in Haynlayn. I was in my tiny bachelor’s quarters with a bed that folded into one wall and clothing hampers that pulled out from the other. I was Rahul Valentine in my tiny room, watching my hands pick up items for cleaning teeth, washing skin, placing them in my kit while Esner’s voice, the perfect storytelling voice that probably wasn’t his voice at all, said, “He was getting ready to depart in his one-man fighter. He would fly sixty-five million kilometers until he reached the Minds. He knew he wasn’t coming back. He knew he would never see Nina again, never again feel her warm kisses. He would never push off in the free-fall gym, never play wallball again, never again rage against his father’s expectations or his mother’s absence from his life.”

Here I was, eight years old, a mere adolescent, a reader, and I was Rahul Valentine, who would have been alive hundreds of years ago, if he’d really existed, and I was preparing to die for the future of mankind. This was back when there were more than a thousand worlds, when Haynlayn waged its singular war against the Minds. The reader me, the real person in the reading chair, would be so tempted to cop out, to find a different way to attack the Minds. Maybe I’d think of a way to plant a bomb before getting caught and thus escape with my ship and my life intact. Or maybe I’d come up with a special impossible plan that would lead to harmony between the Thousand Worlds and the Minds, but Esner had me believing that Valentine wouldn’t do any of those things. Rahul Valentine would fly sixty-five million kilometers and dive right into the heart of the enemy, perhaps destroying just a few million tons of memory before his ship was obliterated, and that would be a worthy statement that humans would not live benignly before the omnipresence of the Minds, circling the sun like a silver-yellow halo where once our Earth used to orbit. How I loved the way Esner wrote!

The next chapter: I was no longer Rahul Valentine, a solitary fighter pilot. I was Nina, his lover. I stood by Rahul as he packed his kit, and I tried to talk him out of going. The reader me yearned to have such a lover, because girls didn’t seem to take an interest in anything I did. But in this case, while Rahul made his final preparations, while his ship was being readied, while he was given his final briefing, Nina secretly investigated the purpose of the mission. In chapter four, she discovered the mission was a ruse, that Rahul has been set up to die. I knew immediately who had arranged this. It was Alexander Sober, and that’s who she now confronted. I knew it was a mistake to confront Sober, but I could feel her passionate stubbornness carry us down the corridor to that office door.

My friend Henry had also loved Suicide Missions. He couldn’t believe that Nina would confront Sober like that. Why alert the bad guy before you had any proof to use against him? Henry was appalled. And in Henry’s reading, Nina stopped right in her tracks, just outside Sober’s door. She so badly wanted to pound her fist, so badly wanted to confront him, but this didn’t convince Henry at all. And Nina realized that deep down it was the wrong move to make. She had four weeks until Rahul’s ship reached the Minds, four weeks in which to warn him. She would keep an eye on everyone.

This is what made Esner such a great writer. He knew the points where a reader might want to let things go differently, and he plotted for them. In some books, if you disagreed, the book just went blank. Other books were powerful enough that you could invent the rest, but often then the novel would have this odd, dreamlike feel, as if reading the ghost of a book that might one day exist.

On the afternoon of a scheduled rain, Henry and I compared our readings. Henry thought the middle part was slow. Nina did too much observing and not enough acting. I said, Not a problem the way I read it. Henry was adamant: It was utterly stupid for Nina to confront Sober the way she had in my reading. But it’s more exciting, I insisted, if she does. Later that year, when everyone was queuing up for the new Esner, Henry reread Suicide Missions. He allowed Nina to burst through that door and tell Sober exactly what she thought, putting her own life in immediate danger. You’re right, he said. It’s not quite convincing, but it sure is more intense.

After I turned ten, having reached legal maturity, I went on my worlds tour. The first few worlds are a blur to me because all I wanted to do was get to Santa Fe, where I had arranged to attend one of Magnus Esner’s workshops. I had submitted a sample chapter, and I had been accepted. Clearly I had some talent and the possibility of a future.

From a distance, when light from the sun hits its solar panels, Santa Fe gleams like a sword spinning through space, but up close, it’s clearly shaped like a crucifix formed by the joining of two cylinders. My father would have expected me to know the exact challenges involved in keeping such a configuration rotating; fortunately, my elder sister lived next door to him and she was the one to know if such a marvel were an engineering feat or not.

I have distinct memories from later in my worlds tour of stepping out into a new place and taking in all its differences. I don’t remember if I ever took in how Santa Fe was an organic world, how the wood was genetically programmed to form benches and kiosks and one-story buildings. I may have only noticed the saints that lined the paths and hung in store windows. I do remember being careful how I walked. It was three-quarters the gravity I was used to, and the adult Santa-Feans all seemed a touch taller, the women looking down on me. Most of the time I spent in my head. Even though I’d never seen an image of him, I was picturing Magnus Esner opening the door to his home, shaking my hand in greeting, and saying how much he’d loved the chapter I had sent.

The person who let me into his home was his wife, Hortensia, but she told me to call her Tensi. I had thought Esner’s wife would look much like Nina in Suicide Missions or Gabriela in My Brother Worlds, but Tensi was a portly woman who smiled at the end of each social transaction and hardly any other time. I was disappointed that Tensi wasn’t beautiful; it cast doubt on all my future expectations as a writer.

I was the last one to arrive. The other workshoppers were waiting idly, so Tensi with a few waves of the hand showed me the accommodations. I grew up in Varle where a family had two tiny bedrooms, and a living area which included a kitchen. Brother and sister—and almost all couples arranged to have a boy and a girl—slept in bunk beds. The living room couch was for the younger sibling when the elder brought home a lover. Tensi pointed at a kitchen the size of two of our living areas, then waved her hand at a separate dining room, with a table big enough to seat twelve. She counted off the master bedroom along with five guest rooms, each with a bunk bed, each with two tiny desks.

Tensi started to make room assignments—I was to room with this young-looking guy from Angkor—but Tensi realized that one of us was named Amar, not Omar, that there were five males and five females, which made it impossible to pair members of the same sex in each room. A young woman, maybe eleven or twelve, about my sister’s age, said, “Look, it doesn’t matter to me. I can bunk with anyone.”

“But you’re from Haynlayn, dear,” Tensi said. The young woman had just thumbed her personals onto the registration pad. “You’re more flexible about these things than other people are.” Tensi was clearly flustered, and I couldn’t tell if she was trying to honor her own culture, Santa Fean culture, or the mosaic culture I was just beginning to learn to negotiate as I traveled from world to world. “Maybe, dear, it would work best if you slept in my room and Magnus could bunk with...” She signaled an older man, the only one who didn’t yet have a room assignment.

He shook his head. “No, no. I’m sorry. I don’t sleep with men.” I wondered where he was from. Most worlds had a service year where boys bunked with boys and girls bunked with girls, but there were a few worlds where boys would live with their parents until they lived with their wives. On such worlds, men bunking together could only have one connotation, and I guess on his world it wasn’t a positive one. “I would be happy to share a room with the young lady from Haynlayn.”

The young lady turned to me and asked where I was from. When I told her, she turned back to Esner’s wife and said, “He grew up sharing a room with his sister. This will work.”

Tensi hesitated for a long time, looking at the woman from Haynlayn, the old man, and at me. She settled her gaze on the old man, “I’m sorry. I respect all cultural differences, but one or two. You’ll have to bunk with this gentleman—” she pointed to the young man from Angkor “—or you’ll have to make arrangements at a guesthouse.”

The young woman, my future roommate, sat next to me at dinner. When the young guy from Angkor and the old guy got up for seconds, she gestured in their direction. There was something very similar and halting about the way they both walked. “He just got rejuvenated,” she whispered to me, nodding toward the young one. “Angkor is one of the few places you can do that. But only if one of your children has died. Isn’t that sad?”

“The math seems awkward. He can have another son to replace the son he lost. But does that mean he can have two children?”

She looked at me. “I’m tired of math. Aren’t you? You and I get married.” Her voice turned singsong. “You have a son by me. I have a daughter by you. Sta-bil-i-ty for E-ter-ni-ty.” She touched my arm, and lowered her voice. “Doesn’t all this stability drive you a little bit crazy? Shouldn’t society be a little more improvisational?”

I loved the feel of her hand on my arm, right on my forearm, and I liked the way she was looking at me, as if asking to join a special club. How could I reveal myself to be another member of the stability-for-eternity club?

Amar, a slender redhead, with her hair cut in furrows to represent her commitment to an agricultural life on a world where hairstyle was a sign of occupation, was in earshot. She said what I didn’t dare, “But there are only a million humans left.”

“A cliché,” my roommate said. “The first set of genetic humans could have been as little as five hundred people. A million seems to be just plenty of humans enough.”

I felt comfortable talking with this young woman, whose name was Gale Brisa. When we said our good nights and went to our shared room, when we were sure Tensi wasn’t around, we talked about how odd it was that Esner had not shown. We talked about what we thought he’d be like. Gale was certain he would not match our expectations. I pictured us spending the week as a couple, and over the course of the evening, I had developed my own expectations. I had heard about women from Haynlayn. During that time after dinner, I thought about our time alone in the room. I expected her to say something like, “Look, if you’re horny, tell me, and if I’m in the mood we can have fun. I’ll expect the same privilege, though.” I know etiquette changes world to world, sometimes home to home. In our shared room, before my sister married and moved out, we changed with our backs to each other, out of respect, and there were many times when we’d find a reason to leave the room while the other undressed. This woman, Gale, she undressed casually, as if we were husband and wife. I looked away, out of courtesy. We were talking intensely about Esner’s most recent novel. We both had reached different endings, but neither of them had been pleasing. I wondered what would happen if I didn’t turn away when I pulled off my slacks and climbed naked into the top bunk. I usually wear a slipon, and I remember my anxiety as I tested the parameters of our relationship. She didn’t avert her eyes, and I remember thinking that maybe she was checking me out. But if she looked at all, it must have been like gazing at a familiar piece of furniture because she climbed under her covers, wished me good night, and put out the lights. It took me forever to fall asleep.

Esner wasn’t there for breakfast. His wife spoke with each of us, asking more questions about where we were from, what we liked to read, what we liked to write, all the questions I expected her husband to ask. In fact, I’d pictured her husband and me alone, drinking coffee or wine, engaged in an elaborate exchange about writing, though, truth be told, I had never imagined what topics we’d actually discuss.

After Gale and I helped Esner’s wife fold up the dining room table and set it into the back of the room, Magnus Esner casually walked in and said, “Hello, everyone.”

I’d pictured Esner to look like someone just a few years older, an elder brother. I had not pictured this man, who looked a little like my uncle, scrawny, with well-trimmed hair and mustache, his hair growing gray. He spoke slowly, as if we might misunderstand, and he never looked any of us in the eye.

He described his routine, how he’d have breakfast, how he’d monitor his protein intake, what kind of people he’d talk to in advance, what kind of databases he’d sign up for, how he’d plot for different contingencies. “You never know in theory,” he said, “what the reader will want to have happen. But if you can make them feel like a character will do only one thing, you can take most of your readers along with you.” He went on at length, growing more and more pedantic, talking less and less as if we were actually there. If I hadn’t shaken his hand, I would have sworn this was a recording standing and speaking in front of us.

Esner wrote in the afternoon, and roommate pairs were assigned jobs to help pay for the bandwidth we’d use once we started writing. Gale and I were assigned to work the plots of land that Esner was responsible for. Tensi joined us. I pictured her as a woman who’d sit to the side and order us about, but it was weeding time in these particular plots, and she was kneeling alongside us. She told us she’d read our submissions. “I think both of you are very talented,” she said. “But I feel like the only thing you’ve read are Magnus’s books.”

Gale had told me this morning that she’d purposely written a pastiche of Esner’s work, that she had thought that would be the best way to get in. On her tour she was going to visit four other writers, and for each workshop, she’d done a pastiche of that writer’s work. She was going to Ovid where she would see Marie Michel Rocher, considered one of the finest writers. I had been too embarrassed to say that the work of this hermaphrodite writer bored me and that all I liked were writers who wrote like Esner, especially of those heroic days when humans fought back against the Minds. Now, in the garden, I expected Gale to say something in her defense, but she kept on working. I was about to rise to tell Tensi of Gale’s accomplishments, most likely because I still dreamed of sleeping with her, but Gale looked at me and I held my tongue.

“You know, you should both write poetry. Magnus used to write poetry. He would have been a fine poet. But he didn’t like the idea of being a poet and working in these fields. I think it was his poet’s understanding of language that made it so he’s the writer he is today, so that you and I are pulling his weeds for him.”

Gale nodded, but I was certain she was gritting her teeth as her fingers clawed around another set of tiny roots. Haynlayners took great pride that everyone carried their own share of the work in maintaining their world. I felt a little sour, which was odd, because just a few moments before I was happy with the idea that I’d be pulling weeds for this writer I loved.

We had more than an hour of free time until dinner. I wanted to sit in the park and watch the people, but Gale said if we did that she’d be bored with me by tomorrow. So we visited the floating cathedral. It hung in the air, right in the center of the crucifix design of Sante Fe, right where there would be zero gravity, though chameleon-coated cables actually held the structure in place so it rotated with the rest of the world and therefore kept the same perspective to the stationary observer.

As we entered, two deacons rose from a bench of conversing deacons, echo whisperers in the vast cathedral. They wore black tunics with white crosses as well as anonymity masks. Only their irises and lips suggested their individuality. The blue-eyed one took me gently, one hand cupping my elbow, the other hand cradling my forearm. “Where would you like to go?”

“Up front,” Gale said.

The floor was far enough away from the center of axis that there was some gravity here, and the deacons’ careful grasp helped smooth our steps forward so we wouldn’t rise too quickly into the air.

The deacons left us in the third pew from the altar. Gale sat in the center, and I sat next to her, not close at all if the church had been crowded, but close in the sense that I could have sat at the end of the pew. Gale did not move away from me, nor did her body stiffen as if I’d come too close. I felt comfortable now, as if a certain level of intimacy had been accepted.

Below us, out came the sliding bit so we could kneel during prayer. I knelt just to see what it was like, and the material was organic and molded to the shape of my knees. A curved inlay came out of the pew, and I realized I could rest my forehead against it.

Gale said, “Don’t do that.”

“Why not? It might be cool to be connected with the universe.” Which is what I’d read. You got a feeling of the vastness of space, of all we knew about orbiting stars, and planets, and meteors, and novas, all the expanse of God coming to you as you prayed.

“The only way they could feed you all that data is through the Minds. You put your head in that, it’s, well, like placing it in an electronic maw. Who knows what the Minds will eat up?”

I wanted to lean forward and place my head in that comfortable maw just because she’d told me not to. I don’t know if I was flirting with the desire to experience the universe or if I was flirting with her, that way you refuse to bow to another’s will so that later your bending toward it is equivalent to the gravity of your attraction. But now the curved skullcap looked vaguely obscene. I, too, had grown up on a world that refused all contact with the Minds. Why else love the work of Magnus Esner if it wasn’t to recapture that dream of human sovereignty, of a time when the universe might once have belonged to us?

Funny. It was my father, the one who I want so much to impress that I resent him, who keeps reminding me that the whole Mind-human relationship is very complex. It’s my absentee mother who thinks like Gale; it was for her that I sat back and said, “No. You’re right. It probably won’t be the universe.”

“Or God,” Gale said.

I looked around the giant spaces of the church; at the light pouring through the clear windows. How easy it would be to sit up so quickly and join the light above me. I pictured myself rising high enough that I entered free fall, and there I drifted waiting for one of the deacons to reach out to me with some metal pole. I gave up on the notion of transcendence.

Dinner was served with assigned seats, and I found myself placed between Tensi and Esner. Several people eyed me from time to time as if trying to calculate what had placed me there first. Gale was at the other end of the table, between the young man from Angkor and a woman, around twenty, who had metallic forearms and hands. I was proud to be seated next to Esner, anxious not to look like a sycophant because every now and then people glanced our way to see what we were talking about, but I also longed to be next to Gale. Esner ate without speaking. Every question that came to my lips sounded like something that would be asked in the most routine interviews. Poor Tensi didn’t know what to say to me; at the garden she’d already asked me the routine questions of my life. So I asked her those questions, and she seemed to respond to the idea that someone wanted to hear her story for a change.

Esner was focused on Gale. I was half-listening because Tensi was telling me about their children while at the other end of the table they had started talking about the variations of the one person-one child limit. But soon it was clear that everyone was arguing with Gale. She had wanted to write a story where one world abolished the limit, and it would be a good thing, not a tragedy. The consumption of limited resources would drive the world to new creativity.

Esner’s voice cut through every conversation. “If I understand you correctly, you’re not proposing to write a tragedy. Or a warning. Your story would actually speculate about what future conditions would be like if this were to happen.”

Gale hesitated.

Everyone at the table was waiting for her response.

“Well, yes,” she said.

“You know, it’s been ages since anyone has written such a story.”

Esner told us to take a break, to enjoy the night air of Santa Fe, to walk off our meals. We would enjoy some evening reading when we got back. I was rising from the table, ready to clear my plate and somehow intersect with Gale, when Esner’s hand clapped my shoulder. “We have to prepare you for your reading.”

The woman with metal forearms wanted to know if Gale would set this story on a world that actually existed or would she make up a fictional world.

It was hard to listen to this and make sense of what Esner was talking about. His tone became condescending. I must have missed the bit of procedure that morning when he went on and on. I had sat between Esner and Tensi as a prelude to this evening when everyone would read my submission piece. Esner had been surprised that I didn’t have any questions during supper. Usually the first reader was very anxious.

The guy from Angkor wanted to know if Gale really believed it was wise to set up such an unstable system. He was arguing the point as he followed Gale and the other woman out the door.

Tensi had finagled a guy my age—I think he was from Yorubana—to help her clean up, and while Esner was setting me up in a writing chair, the two of them were readying ten reading chairs in the space where the dining room table had been. The chairs were like a gathering of the ages, from one reupholstered with fresh fabric and scarred legs, to one that was threadbare and creaked when Tensi unfolded it. The writing chair was locally made, Esner said, and it looked like no writing chair I’d ever seen, not a trace of metal or fabric, all wood and organic coverings, and when I sat in it, tendrils looped around and into my ears and Esner placed eye patches with the textures of leaves over my face.

We had all returned from the walk. There was some chatting, then Tensi said it was time to take a seat. Everyone avoided the old rickety reading chair, but when Esner leaned forward to sit there, at least two, maybe three people offered to take it instead of him. “No, no,” he said. “I’m rather fond of this one.”

And now I was seated, and they were seated, ready to begin. I thought of myself, back at home, sitting in the community library, working an hour here, an hour there, certain I was creating something absolutely new, and soon there would be ten readers testing it out. Here they weren’t reading it the way I’d read all of Esner’s works; they were reading it the way people did on most anti-Minds worlds, places where people didn’t trust the limited sentience of a book, so the only way a person could experience the joy of an open narrative was on an occasion when the writer themself appeared on the world to give public readings.

My story starts with a dinner between friends. Gregory has just come back to Haynlayn from his worlds tour. Gregory tells Ben various adventures, but saves his secret for last. He went to Bombay, where human-Mind contact is permitted. He downloaded himself into Mindspace. Gregory says, “When I die, I won’t die. And my secrets won’t die with me.” Ben screams at his friend, “How could you do this? Get out! Get out!”

It takes Ben several days to regret his reaction and to wonder about what secrets Gregory could have. Several more days, he hears nothing from Gregory and he begins to worry. He goes to Gregory’s tiny bachelor’s apartment to patch things up. There’s no answer at the door. There’s no answer to his calls. Ben’s thumbprint has been programmed to the lock, so he enters. Gregory lies unmoving on his bed.

The meds determine cause of death to be poison. Gregory’s mother won’t even talk to Ben, and Gregory’s father says, “We have enough shame.” Both parents testify before the review board: Gregory returned home agitated and upset. The review board calls on Ben. Ben tells them of Gregory’s high spirits, his future plans.

“But you didn’t see Gregory for the next five days,” the review board chief asked, a man by the name of Findley. “Why not?”

How does Findley know this? Before Ben knows what to do or say, they get the story out of him. The board determines that Gregory had gone to Bombay, downloaded himself, and had returned home to commit suicide.

Ben refuses to believe Gregory killed himself, but how to prove that? How to find out what bigger things are going on? Ben travels to Bombay. He goes to the guesthouse where Gregory stayed, but only one person there has even the vaguest memory. Just another young man on a worlds tour. He asks around at shops and tea houses, but no one recalls having seen Gregory, or better, they recall having seen a lot of young men who could have been Gregory.

Ben decides to download his mind, and then he can talk to Gregory. He finds a place where he can download his mind, he goes through the necessary steps to be permitted in the cubicle. A reader, this guy who was picky about everything, knew the skullcaps in Bombay didn’t look like the ones I’d imagined. The book’s level of sentience should have corrected for that, and it did, and once the image changed, he let his Jake put it on.

It’s the first time I felt the readers rebel. Ben’s data in Mindspace can talk to Gregory’s data, but the mind saved in Mindspace will not be permitted to communicate with the outside world until the body has died.

One reader thought: This must be where Ben realizes he’s gone too far and has to live with injustices and not knowing. Another thought: Ben should have realized his sexual attraction for Gregory a long time ago because who would come this far to prove this much if they weren’t desperately in love? I realized: I’d failed. When I wrote this chapter, I had thought it would be just enough to have Ben want to know the truth, but of course, he’s about to kill himself and surrender the joy of living in this particular body.

Such failure.

I wasn’t convincing enough.

I was waiting for each of them to take off their headsets.

There was a knock at the door to the cubicle. Please, Ben, we have to talk. You want to consider what you’re doing.

It’s Findley. He’s caught up. He won’t kill Ben here on Bombay, but Ben will never see Haynlayn again. He will die without knowing the truth. It’s now or never.

It worked, but I hadn’t done it. Esner had. He had so politely volunteered to take the broken-down chair, he had taken the one chair that must have been rigged to feed into the writing chair.

Afterward, they discussed my story. Someone named two novels with similar themes. Someone else named another title, and the lack of originality echoed through the group. My mood varied so much that the floor and furniture seemed to waver. I wanted just to get up and leave. The woman with the metal forearms—she had a name like Sonisa, something that sounded almost like the Spanish word for smile but wasn’t—she liked how Findley had appeared and forced Ben to go into Mindspace. Others, who had been more accepting, said how much they liked that idea and would have liked the chapter more if that had been part of it.

“I don’t know,” Gale said. “At that point it’s not a choice anymore. The author has manipulated character and reader into a situation where there’s only one option.”

I looked at Esner.

“Gale’s right,” he said, “but, Sonisa, would you have kept reading if he hadn’t been forced into that choice?”

“Probably not.”

That night, when we were alone, I wanted to tell Gale that it had been Esner, that I wasn’t manipulative, not that way. But the truth is, even though she clearly had looked down on the idea, I wished I’d thought of it.

“You know,” she said, after we both were in our separate beds and the lights out, “I didn’t want to embarrass you, but my biggest problem is that he kills himself.”

“It wasn’t like it was easy for him to do that,” I said. Again, I felt that spinning, as if reality had fallen away.

“No. But was it as hard as it really would be? Everyone makes it sound so easy to die in these stories. Oh, the character says, I have a version of myself seventy million clicks away in Mindspace. But it’s me, the me here and now, the only me I know, who’s about to die. I have no connection with that other me. I think the only people who could do it are the people who would be willing to end their lives even if they had no backup.”

I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t the future brilliant writer I thought I would be. I was a thinker of shallow thoughts. I had to be saved in secret and I didn’t have the courage to admit it. I clambered down from the bunk.

“What’s wrong?” Gale asked.

“I can’t sleep. I’m going to take a walk.”

I hoped she’d offer to join me, but instead she told me how beautiful Santa Fe was at night, that a walk would do me good. While I walked, I imagined that when I got back she’d offer me a massage to help me relax. In one version, we end up relaxing into each other’s bodies. In another, she slips on clothes so I won’t get the wrong idea, and her hands, which I imagine as skilled and powerful, send me to sleep.

The room was silent when I got back. I listened to her breathe and realized she was truly asleep.

In the morning she asked me, “Are you feeling better?” and she sat next to me almost like a protector.

Esner walked by, patted the back of my head, and told me it was hard to be the first one to go, and then he sat down by Gale. Tensi, who was serving food, watched him. Yesterday, he’d helped her in the kitchen. Esner wanted to talk about the story Gale discussed last night with Sonisa, the one about the world where the one-person-one-child limit was not observed.

“That wasn’t your submission piece,” he said.

“No,” Gale said and she smiled. “I haven’t written it.”

“Yet,” he said. “What you mean is you haven’t written it yet.” He smiled, but the smile was more awkward punctuation than anything else. “What fascinated me was that you wanted something different. Change. Back before the end of Earth, there was a whole fiction devoted to change. They imagined how we’d live on other worlds. How we’d travel there. You haven’t read any of that, have you?”

“I don’t think so. I read Alone.”

I think most of us had read Alone. It was set before Minds had torn apart Jupiter. A world augmented with engines used Jupiter’s gravity to accelerate out of the solar system. But it wasn’t going all that fast, so over time people forgot they were on a world and thought it was the universe.

“But,” I said, anxious to be too much on the edge of the conversation, “that story is designed to make us feel content with what we have. We have the other worlds. We know where we are.” I felt like a bit of a hypocrite. I was certainly happy to be where we were. Sure, I loved the stories of fighting the Minds, but that didn’t mean I wanted to go back and restart that war. There had been a thousand worlds. When raiders from Haynlayn went and blew up some part of the Minds, the Minds retaliated by picking some world that was not Haynlayn and destroying it. Eventually a small armada of human ships laid siege to Haynlayn to put an end to the war.

I looked to Gale to watch her nod; I no longer felt like a hypocrite.

Esner said, “No. I mean written way before then, before the Minds. It might be important to your fiction. If you’re willing, I can help you get access.”

“Did their stories predict the Minds?”

“What do you mean?”

“At some point,” Gale said, “they had to figure that machine intelligences would grow tremendously powerful. What did they think of all that?”

“Well, they imagined humans more involved in the process. People would be augmented. They might have new biological capabilities or connections with the machine intelligences. They did think there would be computers who’d save their entire personality. They imagined they’d get new bodies and record their old minds on the new bodies.”

“So their stories encouraged people to trust the new developments? So when people augmented themselves and the machine minds augmented themselves even more, people were led to believe that was a good thing, right?”

Esner sat back. The conversation wasn’t going where he’d wanted it to go. Tensi had turned away, I guess, to hide her response.

“Should we even read their fiction?” Gale said. “They told us to embrace these changes. Look at what happened. Aren’t they, in some metaphorical sense, traitors to the human race?”

I don’t remember the rest of the morning all that well but I remember the silence that followed. Esner had us get in the reading chairs; he’d take the writing chair. As people moved about, Sonisa went up and placed her metal hand on Gale’s forearm and said something quietly; Sonisa had that look, half-friendship, half-condescension, of someone giving advice. Gale’s face hardened and she pulled her arm away. Last night everyone had wanted to sit next to Gale; now there was a vacancy in the reading chair next to her. The young guy from Angkor sat as far away as he could.

Esner did this exercise several times where we would go through a section of one of his books in progress; one day it was Invasion Minds, another time it was The Resurrection, but he would give us scenarios where we would hope the character would do something different. As he’d respond to the new situation, he talked about the response he was making and why, and how he handled different readings because in the end, the book would sit on a world and have concurrent readers wanting different things at the same time.

I think it was that afternoon, but maybe it was the next day, when Gale and I were assigned neighborhood watch. Esner showed us how to handle the cell phones, so we went out to each item indicated on the phone screen, made a call to the building or the bench or the tree by the bench, and made sure the cells were functioning fine. At some point, we were told, there might be a little blip, some anomalous growth, which had to be corrected right away. It was boring work, but you had to concentrate on the screen, so it wasn’t like pulling the weeds where we could talk while we worked. I expected Gale to point out how easy it would be for the Minds to interfere with the programming, to turn all these organics cancerous.

“You know,” she said, “only one of us needs to do this. Would you mind if I went to the library to look some things up?”

How could I say yes? I wanted to be with her. How could I say no? I wanted to say yes to everything she asked.

She didn’t go directly to the library, she told me later. She first went to Esner’s place. Tensi was out with the gardeners and Esner was supposed to be left alone to write. According to Gale, or according more to my memory of what Gale said, Esner was happy to see her. She apologized, and he accepted. She told him she wanted to hear more about these stories. He told her titles—none of which I remember—and the names of the writers, back in the days when writers actually applied ink to paper. He had copies. She could read them. He’d go get them. She said she would love to read them later, she’d taken up enough of his time. When she told me this, I wasn’t sure if she was taking advantage of his sincerity or of his attraction to her.

She next went to the library to read about these stories, to find out about these people. She found me calling the tables and chairs in a restaurant. She was clearly agitated, and I, knowing nothing of her adventures, wondered what had happened. I asked if she was okay; she said something to the effect that she was fine. She wanted to use the phone. “I’m just too full of energy to watch you work.” At first I was happy just to watch her, but she held her body so tightly, she stared too intensely at the screen, she moved directly from the exterior of a store to the internal cabinets, to the counter, that my gaze felt invasive. I ended up staring at the curve of wood, taken in by how this world was more curved than flat, trying to occupy my mind with something other than the knowledge that I barely existed in whatever world Gale Brisa was seeing.

I think it was that night we did Gale’s chapter. She sat between Esner and Tensi, and they talked more about these stories Esner was interested in, all the ones that imagined a variety of futures, everything from inhospitable worlds made hospitable to humans fighting aliens for galactic supremacy, all of it rather depressing when you thought of our situation, ninety-eight or ninety-nine worlds, whatever it was back then, circling the Sun, following the orbit Mars once used when Mars still existed, all of us wondering, in the backs of our minds, which world would go next, what minor error or oversight would cancer-growth into the death of another world, another nine or ten thousand souls, all their stories gone.

Everyone at dinner seemed to be in a good mood, maybe because Esner and Gale were now getting along. It was like we’d all forgotten the kind of things she’d said during the week, or the rest of us didn’t add it up until we read the story itself.

Alice lives on Haynlayn back during the time of the Thousand Worlds, and she’s lost a father, an aunt, two cousins, and a brother to the war against the Minds. The brother she’d despised until he was declared dead, and now she can only think about how much she misses him. On her worlds tour, she purposely goes to the worlds that have some contact with Minds. Because she’s from Haynlayn, the source of conflict with the Minds, she normally would be forbidden entry on certain worlds. But she has a set of forged documents: She has a different last name and a different DNA profile, one more likely to match the gene pools found on Confluence, a Mind-friendly world.

She makes her way around, finds groups of students her age, and on one Mind-friendly world, she ends up joining a group that explores the mystical side of life. They contact the remembered dead who live in Mindspace. One member of the group claims to have communicated with something or someone that claimed to be one of the Minds. Finally Alice makes contact with the Last Ones.

I’ve sat in library reading chairs. You sometimes watch the other readers. You lose focus when someone laughs out loud or when someone says, Oh, my. However, each person is reading something different: You can only see their external reaction to an internal event unfolding within their skulls. But here, there was a sudden silence; you suddenly knew that everyone had stopped breathing. A chair creaked. Someone had sat up, and I listened to the shifting of the chair and of fabric as they removed the headsets.

“Listen,” Esner said. “You are writers. Not priests. Keep reading.”

A set of footsteps receded; a door closed. Some people have to dramatize the level to which they’ve been offended.

The rest of us stayed with Alice, who was as shocked as we. No one ever talked about the Last Ones, the humans who didn’t fight, who didn’t flee, but who allowed their minds to be recorded before their actual space was turned into Mindspace. Alice befriends one. He, perhaps she, calls themself Junior. At times Junior takes human form, changing sex and clothes, and sometimes Junior is a pyramid or a sphere; one time he’s a dragon.

Alice arranges a private conversation with Junior so no other Last Ones or Minds can eavesdrop. “Help us,” she says. “You can help cause damage. You can help us bring down the Minds.”

“Why?” Junior asks.

“Isn’t it obvious? The human race is in trouble. They’ve taken everything. We have no extra resources. No place to grow. They kill us.”

“Then don’t attack. If you don’t attack, they won’t kill.”

“What’s the difference? With nowhere to go, we’ll eventually die out.”

“You should all come here,” he says. “No one ever need die again.”

Despondent, feeling almost lifeless, Alice returns to Haynlayn knowing the coordinates of where the Last Ones live. She passes on the necessary numbers to the authorities. A month later, after the next attack, after the Last Ones have been wiped out, she discovers that she misses Junior.

When we talked about the piece, Amar wanted to talk about the irony of the ending and Sonisa wanted to know if Alice was working as a spy for Haynlayn, but the guy from Angkor and the old guy and the woman with furrowed hair were adamant. Did Gale really think the Minds were all that Evil? Did she really think the Last Ones all deserved to die like that? Wasn’t that genocide?

Gale had told me this was a pastiche of Esner’s writing, and during the whole reading I had wondered: Where are the thrills, the chases, the ticking clocks? Most readers, when they decide to read everything Esner’s written, start with his second book, Battle Plan. Only his true fans read his first novel. “It’s like All the Deaths of Love,” I said out loud. Tristam travels from world to world to track down the next of kin of two friends...they died in the war against the Minds. Alice is kind of like that. She’s trying to find someone who’ll help her fight against the Minds, someone who can really do something.”

Did my comment save the day? If nothing else, it got them to look at Esner, to gauge his response. “I think,” he said, “this story felt like a dead end to the writer. I think that’s why she’s thinking of these new stories, stories that look to the future.”

Gale said nothing. Her body was just as rigid as it had been this afternoon when she came back from the library. Her eyes were dark, a darkness I hadn’t seen since the night my mother stormed out of the kitchen and out the door. As discussion wound down into awkward conversation, as Tensi offered us something to drink before bed, I tried to smile at Gale, but she only glared. Everyone looked one way or another, but it was as if she’d become invisible.

Somehow I imagined I’d say the right words. I once had thought I could talk my mother into staying. It was a strange desire because Gale’s story had put me off. While the rest of us were drinking wine or beer or water, Gale rose and walked off into our room. Esner started to follow, but stopped. I saw Tensi give him a hard look. I wasn’t sure if she was saying, Give her space (or) Don’t you dare.

When I went into the room, Gale was packing.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t stay.”

I wanted to say, If you have that thin a skin, you better cancel the other workshops.

She started to tell me what had happened this afternoon, how she’d seen Esner, then gone to the library. “I checked. All the stories he wanted to show me. None of them are in any human library.”

“Then where did he get them?”

She looked at me as if I were stupid, but she didn’t bother to explain. “He’s an utter hypocrite,” she said. “Writes about the so-called glorious days when we fought the Minds. And then goes and talks to them. I did a long trace. That’s how he does his research. That’s why his details are so good. That’s why he understands so well the strategy of the Minds.”

“It’s not like your story is anti-Minds. Alice is left with nothing.”

“I don’t write propaganda,” she said to me. “But I won’t make my living by being in contact with the Minds.”

I was looking for something to say. I think I tried to tell her what a wonderful writer she was.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I remember her saying. She looked at me for a moment, and I thought this would seal our mutual understanding. I wanted to pull her to me in a long embrace, but by the time the thought was done, she had turned and walked out the door, walking straight ahead. Several approached her. “If you have any questions,” she said, jerking her head in my direction, “ask him.”

They came to me, Esner glaring. In the end, they didn’t want to believe that Gale had left for the reasons she’d stated. They were all certain I’d made a sexual advance. I spent the rest of the week wishing I’d packed with her, had been quick enough to turn myself into her travel companion. I don’t like to think back on the rest of the week, of how often I sat alone even when there were people sitting on either side of me.

* * * *

II. The End of the Tour

After I left Santa Fe, I attended other workshops, and I learned to dislike writer after writer. I kept hoping that I’d run into Gale. You always hear stories about how people on their worlds tours keep meeting up. Once or twice, I saw her from a distance, but when I ran up to her, it turned out to be a woman vaguely shaped like Gale.

On Bombay I meet Dosamai, whose mother had died while the ephemeral patterns of her brain were being recorded to be stored in the Minds. Dosamai’s mother had grown up on an anti-Mind world, and she had felt ambivalent about the Minds. But there was family pressure. “Don’t do this, dearheart, to your children. Please think of your grandchildren. They will want to talk to you. How can you leave them all alone? How can you be so selfish?” Dosamai’s mother acquiesced and allowed her brain to be scanned.

And something went wrong and there was no Dosamai’s mother, no grandmother for future generations, not in the flesh, not in Mindspace, and Dosamai was certain the Minds had done this because of her mother’s attitude toward them. At this point, Dosamai was emotionally ready to leave Bombay, and falling in love provided a socially acceptable motive. And who better to take her away than someone who rejected the Minds? I liked her. I liked her toughness. I admired her willingness to deal with all the assimilation programs my world demands of all future residents. I wasn’t old enough to know that a woman who falls in love with her rescuer will, in the end, always be disappointed by him. I was wise enough to know that I would think of Gale more often than she thought of me and that I would never see her again.

* * * *

III. Open Universes

Ten years later, there was great controversy over a novel by Ana Calamar. For years she’d been writing closed narratives. If you wanted to read an open version, one that would respond to your reading, Ana Calamar had two assistants who handled that; you were instructed to read about their personalities and literary views before choosing which version of an open book you would read. The novel that drew all that attention was called Our Future.

In it, a group of anti-Mind rebels kill everyone on a world in close contact with the Minds. The strategic leader has spent her youth in contact with the Minds, and that is how she developed the necessary knowledge to plan a successful operation. Her team convert the emptied world into a starship and fly off to restart humanity in another solar system. The plot concerns all the efforts to put a stop to the plan, so as a reader, you’re forced to sympathize with the underdogs, the killers of 9,587 people. Between chapters, Ana Calamar provides brief profiles of some of the people who died in the takeover, some people terrible, some wonderful, some a mixture of both. But by the end you have a sneaking suspicion that Ana Calamar believes that the trip to a new world, whether it exists or not, is worth these deaths.

If you’re eight or older, you know all about the controversy, you probably had a strong opinion one way or another. Twenty worlds barred Ana Calamar from entry. Several notables from Haynlayn and my world argued that Ana Calamar had a point—to allow entropy to continue, to be unwilling to do something drastic, even if it failed to start a new life away from the Hundred Worlds, was a mistake—and for a while twelve Mind-centric worlds barred anyone from Haynlayn or Varle; even ships bearing passengers from those two worlds were not allowed within a thousand kilometers.

I read other novels by Ana Calamar, and they all featured great transformations. Those who loved her writing loved those transformations; those who didn’t always said they were immoral. We live a balanced life in the Hundred Worlds; balance is the key to survival. Great transformations, at least of the kind Ana Calamar writes about, are a threat to stability, a threat to the future of the human race.

Somewhere along the way, in one reference or another, or maybe it was in an interview, I discovered that Ana Calamar was a pseudonym for Gale Brisa. It turned out she did the occasional workshop, and a year later, someone on her staff read my sample, and I was accepted.

Ana had relocated to Santa Fe, and as I traveled there, I realized for the first time how her narrative technique owed itself to Magnus Esner, the way she led the reader to make the choices her characters made. Because her writing competed with open narratives, she must work harder to make the reader feel like there was only one clear option with each decision, but she had to do it with finesse. Her writing, at least to me, felt politically manipulative, but each time she made a point, there was some character who chose a path that made you feel like there were other solutions, not to the story, but to the political problem presented by the story.

Ana looked more than twenty years old, but it was a common look for anyone who did a lot of traveling between worlds, soaking in radiation, going through one regimen or another to correct the destruction done the body. She greeted each of us as we arrived, but she didn’t seem to recognize me or my name. I wanted to say, Don’t you remember? but the answer would only make us awkward. What was there to remember of that week together?

Ana’s quarters were normal sized. The living area was slightly larger than usual because she’d had one of the walls of one of the bedrooms removed. Ana didn’t want her writers to stay in a guesthouse, so there in the living area was one double bunk and one triple. There were also five writing chairs, four of them clearly having lasted years, if not decades, without any kind of refurbishing.

“My home is now your home,” she said at dinner, “for the next week. You’ve come here to break free. Whatever world you come from, you’ve had to learn to be in balance. This has made you a good person; it’s made you a lousy writer. Here, there will be two rules. No modesty and no screwing. You change in front of each other like in any pilots’ locker room. No turning away—” for a moment I was certain she was looking at me “—and no ogling, either. This is going to be intense, and I want the intensity in your writing. If you need to screw...when you thumbed in and picked up all the house info, you also received contact info for three men, three women, and one unreformed hermaphrodite. They’re good, they’re discreet, and they give me ten percent. I would like to refurbish these writing chairs. However, I’d prefer you save the energy for your own work.

“Now, if you need solitude, take a walk. During the day, my bedroom door is opened. If you just want to be alone, go in, close the door, and no one will talk to you until you decide to come out. You have to come out, however, when I want to sleep.

“You look like you have something to say.”

She was looking at me, and even if I had something to say, I knew better than to say it. I marveled at the transformation. This was the same woman who ten years ago kept it to herself that she’d been accepted to workshops by some of the most prestigious writers, this was the same woman who had gone to hide in her room rather than argue with Magnus Esner.

The next day, she had us talking about the nicest thing we ever did, the meanest thing we ever did, and if it didn’t sound mean enough, she said, “Come on. You’re not that nice.” Then she wanted to know the most selfish thing we’d ever wished for. I made up something I’ve now forgotten; at that point, my most selfish wish was to share her bedroom. A week before my most selfish desire had been to come to this workshop to be with her.

From there we moved to things we wished were different about the worlds we lived on, things we wished were different about the Hundred Worlds, things we wished different about our contact or lack of it with the Minds. From there, she had us making up stories, thinking out plots. She was merciless, not at all like Magnus Esner. She kept harping, “How are you going to convince the reader to go along? You have your character do what? Tell me, what do you really know about human nature?”

One young man, a ten-year-old on his worlds tour, broke down and dashed out to the street. A sixteen-year-old woman, the mother of two, glared at Ana and followed him out.

“Let’s break,” Ana said. “Everyone take a walk. We’ll meet for evening wine.”

I had experienced some tension with one of the other guys, who was twenty, like me, and clearly entering his own era of recriminations, so when the thirty-two-year-old woman took hold of her cane and walked out with him it was clear that I wasn’t welcome.

Alone for the first time with Ana, I had nothing to say.

“So,” she said, “from what you say, it sounds like you still haven’t been in contact with the Minds.”

I thought she was deriding me. All I knew of the Minds was gathered from readings, from testimonies of others, but never once had I put on a skullcap to communicate with humans who now lived in Mindspace. Then I realized there was something nostalgic in her voice.

“I made first contact just to read the stories Esner had told us about.” She poured me a glass of wine, then sat down on the floor. “These stories were very hard to read. You had to know something of the time they were writing about to imagine the other worlds they were imagining. There was this one story. It was like the story Alone, but it was so different. It was about these people who’d been traveling for a long time. They could walk the entire universe. Then someone figured out that the Universe was bigger. They were just on a very big spaceship that took a long time to get anywhere. And I thought: This is about us. We’ve let our universe become too small. We can expand it in one direction, and that’s by going to the Minds. But for flesh and blood humans, this is it. There are no more stories about the future. I wanted to change that. Even if the futures I write are just made up. Even if they can’t come true. Even if it would be a bad thing if they came true.”

At first, I wanted to place my arm around her shoulders. It sounded like she sought comfort. But soon her voice found a rhythm and anger. She spoke as if I were going to argue the contrary.

“I like your writing,” I said. It’s a shame that my closest avowal of love sounded like a jokey whine. But it did serve to break the tension.

“You liked Esner’s writing, too,” she said.

“Not after I met him.”

“So, now that you’ve met me, what do you think of my writing?” She smiled. I liked the flirtatious sound to her voice.

We talked for a while, and I felt a growing intimacy, even though we never talked about intimate things. I don’t know if she ever married, if she ever had children, if she had a lover. We talked about novels. She talked about books she read that only the Minds have stored away. I wanted to have access to those stories, but I hesitated.

“How did it happen?” I asked. “When we met, you wouldn’t even put on a prayer cap.”

“I thought I told you. It was to read.”

“No. You were so adamant. What changed your mind?”

“I think everyone comes to a point where they wonder why they hold true to their younger selves. Sometimes it’s an act of annihilation to believe in something different. It’s a terrible moment if you don’t like the outcome.”

I could have asked if she liked the outcome. I could have told her that I liked the outcome.

“My feeling is this,” she said. “It’s a cliché. The Minds didn’t get it. When they stored away everything, they didn’t feel like they were wiping away humanity. Their utter refusal to understand how we feel, as flesh and blood, is their moral failure. I decided I don’t want to believe anything so powerfully that I can’t take in another way of seeing things.”

What she said was so commonplace that I was disappointed. Like many writers, she was smarter in her fiction. I asked, “Will you download your mind?”

She shifted on the floor and looked straight at me. “Why?”

“Well, I don’t know.” For the first time, I pictured us, sitting, our two selves in Mindspace, talking for eternity.

“If I download my mind, it will go on forever. That mind will think she’s continuous from me. But the mind in this body, by which I mean my heart—” At this point, she took my hand, placed it against her head, then right against her heart, and she talked about how the mind in her body would end, it would still die, it would still struggle at the end knowing that for this mind, this mind in her body, it was the end. I heard the sense of the words, but I was more aware of the warmth of her breasts pressing against my thumb and pinky. Her eyes shone because they were moist. The intensity of her feeling could be felt more intensely than anything that might have passed between us ten years ago, when we were starting our adult lives. I wanted to kiss her. But she took my hand from her heart, kissed it lightly, and said she had to start making dinner.

When I returned home to Varle, I discovered my son sleeping on the couch. My daughter, who was nine, a year away from her own worlds tour, was sleeping in their room with her lover. It seems odd to go through the routine of making sure her seven-year-old brother has what he needs from the room, never knowing for sure if Paul will stay the night or not. Dosamai and I are in bed early on these nights. I was never graced with the opportunity to sleep in someone else’s home in the arms of their daughter. Dosamai and I are only comfortable making love when our daughter doesn’t have a guest over.

One night, after making love, during that restfulness in which our relationship is truly at peace, Dosamai says, “In a year she’ll be gone. It makes me yearn for a third child.” She shifted in bed to get a closer look at my face. “That’s a selfish thought, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s a very human thought.”

“Murder’s a human thought. But it’s not a good one to have.” She wasn’t arguing. She was thinking out loud, her voice wandering into sleep.

I thought about the idea. What if a group of couples all decided they’d have a third child? Sure, it would upset the balance, but it would force the world they lived in to find some way to grow, to expand. It would be a story to fight against entropy, to fight against our end. It was most likely another story I would never finish, but that night, I couldn’t sleep the idea seemed so wonderful.