Stories for Chip (62 page)

You do not go home, even though she sends you two thousand dollars for that purpose.

You give the money to another lawyer to get your non-boyfriend released. The lawyer says she probably won't be able to, but takes the money anyway.

◊

Money talks, says Billy, stating the obvious again.

Eden turns on her networks and won't turn them off. Proteus, Pinqi, Polis, Mitos. She is a walking transmitter. A voluntary cyborg whose wearable software cohabits the self.

There are other people in her head when she sleeps. Her dreams are digital Dionysiums that morph into spaced-out complines and back again. She falls through the space of the others, looks over, sees their projected faces. They are flying, not falling. A fleet of beautiful superheroes.

She is pretty sure the prurient eyes of capital are there with them, lurking in shadow. The Yankee peddler inside the machine looking for innovation to appropriate and hot footage to resell. Buy low, sell high.

Billy helps her make the things she needs for her new project. She designs them the same way an instigator starts a Protean piece.

The capacity of a thousand agitated minds to imagine new tools of change is more than you think.

Billy laughs when the things stand up on the build plate. Sometimes he eats them.

◊

The political festival is in the basketball arena. It is another concrete cylinder. Eden wonders if they could fit the Hilton inside it.

She dresses the part of a Beltran fan, or the best simulation she can manage in thrift store clothes. Her sunscreen is a clandestine reflective painted on in a pattern that confounds the facial recognition. Billy wires her with the scrambler. It feels like a piece of Cleopatra jewelry, without the glitter.

They stop her at the security checkpoint. Check her press credentials. They notice something on the screen. A mass. She lets them look.

The guards kind of freak when they see the tumorous flesh of her distended abdomen. I'm so sorry, honey, says the woman in charge. She has the big arms of a woman in a propaganda ad.

Inside, the crowd is exultant under the images of Beltran. His smile animates the Jumbotron for the waiting mob. He plays with his adopted children. Walks the border wall. Raises his hand at a rally. Orates at the debates, a puckish pastor who switches from wry banter to prescriptive apocalyptica. Strokes his mastiff while he holds the old terrier in his arms.

Eden tells herself that this man is not a man, but the interface of a dark network. A network that can be hacked.

When she is inside, she reactivates all her nets. She has Monocle now, the wearable eye that looks like a crystalline bindi.

Eden is small, and brown, and batshit. People give her room when she nudges her way to the ropeline.

The music that comes through the giant speaker dongles is an orchestra of trumpets remixed as civil defense alarm. The name when the voice of the stadium says it is something more than a name. It is a chant. A magic word. A religious invocation. A network login.

Billy tells her it is all working, except for a couple of signals that are not.

The man walks the red carpet, both hands out to the crowd, drawing in the mob love energy that lights up his enhanced smile.

He does not see her until it is too late. He is pointing at the face of a screaming boy on the Jumbotron, one of the winners algorithmically plucked from the crowd for special recognition.

It happens just as she steps over the rope to get to him. You can see it in his eyes. The link is made, before she even plugs him in.

Ambient democracy.

How do you turn a panopticon inside out?

Eden is sure Beltran can see them in that second, the eyes that see through her.

Then he sees her reaching for the thing she smuggled in, hears her hand pulling it out of the homemade pouch of printed flesh.

It's like a new nerve, designed to make him feel them. It looks like a stinger made of soggy bone.

He can see it there in her hand.

It's not supposed to hurt when the thing makes the connection, but he doesn't know that yet.

The way people see what happens next is beyond what any Jumbotron can convey.

Eden rushes the stage.

We have so many thanks to give, so many grateful acknowledgments to make, that we could easily fill pages and pages with them and still leave something, someone out. So consider this just the sketchiest of sketches, a sort of preliminary study for the full portrait of loving appreciation we'll be holding in our hearts as this book makes its way in the world.

For starters, we thank Samuel R. Delany for his inspiration and his encouragement as we put together this minor tribute to his major influence in the field and on our lives.

We also thank everyone involved in the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that has made
Stories for Chip
not just a possibility but a reality, from behind-the-scenes help given by Gerald Mohamed and Carlos Hernandez; to video segments taped by Ernest Hogan, Carmelo Rafala, Geetanjali Dighe, Nick Harkaway, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and devorah major; to essays and perks provided both by authors included in the anthology and by several who aren't: Tananarive Due, Gregory Feeley, Paul Di Filippo, Mary Anne Mohanraj, adrienne maree brown, Marleen S. Barr, Russell Nichols, Cynthia Ward, Evan Peterson, Jennifer Marie Brissett, Karen Lord, Tobias Buckell, Mary Robinette Kowal, Hiromi Goto, Jeff VanderMeer, N.K. Jemisin, Nicola Griffith, and Jonathan Lethem. And without a doubt we thank the hundreds of you who publicized and/or donated to the campaign and helped us reach and then exceed our goal.

Finally, our thanks to everyone now purchasing this book. Thank you for taking a chance on the delights it offers, and sharing with all of us involved our love and respect for a man of genius.

Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell, editors

Christopher Brown
writes science fiction and criticism in Austin, Texas, where he also practices technology law. He coedited, with Eduardo Jiménez Mayo,
Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic
, which was nominated for the 2013 World Fantasy Award. His stories and essays frequently focus on issues at the nexus of technology, politics, and economics. Notable recent work has appeared in
The Baffler
, the MIT Technology Review anthology
Twelve Tomorrows
,
25 Minutos en el Futuro: Nueva Ciencia Ficcion Norteamericana
,
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
,
Castálida
, and
The New York Review of Science Fiction
.

Chesya Burke
is an MA student in African American Studies at Georgia State University. Burke wrote several articles for the African American National Biography in 2008, and she has written and published over a hundred short stories and articles within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her thesis is on the comic book character, Storm from
The X-Men
, and she is the Chair of Charis Books and More, one of the oldest feminist book stores in the country. Burke's story collection,
Let's Play White
, is being taught in universities around the country.

A graduate of Clarion West and the Manchester Met Creative Writing MA,
Roz Clarke
has lately exchanged the world of corporate IT for a life of writing, editing, and con-running in Bristol. She has been published in several magazines and anthologies, notably
Black Static
and Colin Harvey's
Dark Spires
. Alongside Joanne Hall, she is the editor of the anthologies
Colinthology
and
Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion
. She has been a member of the BristolCon organizing committee since its inception in 2009. You can find out more about Roz at her website
www.firefew.com
.

Kathryn Cramer
is a writer, critic, and anthologist, and coeditor of the
Year's Best Fantasy
and
Year's Best Science Fiction
series with David G. Hartwell. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and has received numerous nominations and awards for her work as editor. Her fiction has been published by Tor.com,
Asimov's
, and
Nature
. She is a Consulting Editor for Tor Books. She lives in Westport, New York.

Vincent Czyz
is the author of
Adrift in a Vanishing City
, a collection of short fiction. He is also the recipient of the 1994 W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction and two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts. The 2011 Capote Fellow at Rutgers University, his short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including
Shenandoah
,
AGNI
,
The Massachusetts Review
,
Georgetown Review
,
Quiddity
,
Tampa Review
,
Tin House
(online),
Louisiana Literature
,
Southern Indiana Review
,
Camera Obscura
,
Skidrow Penthouse
,
Wasafiri Journal of International Contemporary Writing
, and in Turkish translation.

Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey,
Junot Díaz
is the author of
Drown
;
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and
This is How You Lose Her
, a
New York Times
bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is the fiction editor at
Boston Review
and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Geetanjali Dighe
was born in a small town in India and eventually found herself in Mumbai, a city of twenty million people. She has traveled to the UK, USA, Oman, Bhutan, and Mauritius, and thinks the world needs fewer borders. In 2009 she moved to London with nothing but a suitcase. Four years later she attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle as an Octavia Butler Scholar. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and is currently working on her first novel. She loves astronomy, mythology, and pretty much any science that ends in a “y.”

Thomas M. Disch
(1940-2008) is the author of
Camp Concentration, 334, On Wings of Song
, and numerous other novels. He published popular works (
The MD: A Horror Story
was a bestseller, his novelization of the television series
The Prisoner
remains in print after forty-five years, and his children's books
The Brave Little Toaster
and
The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars
were made into animated Disney films) as well as poetry collections, plays, opera libretti, anthologies, theater criticism, and numerous celebrated short stories, including “Angouleme,” which formed the basis of a critical study,
The American Shore
by Samuel R. Delany.

L. Timmel Duchamp
is the author of the five-volume Marq'ssan Cycle (which won special recognition from the James Tiptree Jr. Award jury),
The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)
,
Love's Body, Dancing in Time
(shortlisted for the Tiptree),
Never at Home
(also shortlisted for the Tiptree), many uncollected stories (which have been Sturgeon and Nebula finalists), and numerous essays and reviews. She is also the founder of Aqueduct Press. A selection of her work is available at ltimmelduchamp.com.

Hal Duncan
's debut,
Vellum
, was published in 2005 to much acclaim. Subsequent works include the sequel,
Ink
, and various collections gathering short fiction, essays, or poetry. His second short story collection,
The Boy Who Loved Death
, is forthcoming in 2015, along with a new novel,
Testament
, and
Susurrus on Mars
, a novella-length collection of Erehwynan idylls. A member of the Glasgow SF Writer's Circle, he also wrote the lyrics for Aereogramme's “If You Love Me, You'd Destroy Me” and the musical,
Nowhere Town
. Homophobic hatemail once dubbed him “THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” (sic) He's getting a t-shirt made up.

Fábio Fernandes
is a writer, editor, and translator based in São Paulo, Brazil. He has stories and poems published and upcoming in
Kaleidotrope, StarShipSofa, Scigentasy, Steampunk II, The Apex Book of World SF 2
, and
The Near Now
. Two-time recipient of the Argos Award (Brazil). Co-editor of the post-colonialist SF anthology
We See a Different Frontier
(Futurefire.net Publishing, 2013). He is a member of the Codex Writers Group, of BSFA, and of the Horror Writers Association. Fábio attended the Clarion West Writers' Workshop in 2013, and Samuel Delany was one of his instructors. He is currently writing his first novel in English.

Jewelle Gomez
is the author of seven books including the double Lambda Literary Award-winning, Black, lesbian, vampire novel,
The Gilda Stories.
City Lights Books is publishing a 25th anniversary edition in 2016. Her adaptation of the novel for the stage,
Bones and Ash
, was commissioned and performed by Urban Bush Women Company in 13 US cities. Her fiction has appeared in hundreds of anthologies, most recently in
Blood Sisters
. Her play about James Baldwin,
Waiting for Giovanni
, premiered in 2011. Follow her on Twitter @VampyreVamp.

Eileen Gunn
is a short-story writer and editor. Her most recent collection,
Questionable Practices
, was published in March 2014 by Small Beer Press. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the US and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and World Fantasy awards and short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. award. Gunn was editor/publisher of the Infinite Matrix webzine and an influential member of the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She thinks Samuel R. Delany is the bee's knees and the most brilliant writer-thinker of the last half-century. Fortunately, she is not alone in that thought.