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The feminine one had stood up and taken a step toward them, as if to intervene, and Swan turned and pushed her off her feet, so that she splashed hard into the shallow water. “What are you doing!” the girl cried fearfully, and Swan popped her on the mouth with a left jab. Immediately the girl’s head flew back and her mouth started to bleed, and she cried out and rushed away. The two nondescripts splashed between her and Swan, blocking Swan from her, shouting at Swan to get back. Swan raised her fists and howled as she pummeled them, and they splashed backward to get away from her, amazed and appalled. Swan stopped following them, and after they climbed out of the pool they stopped and huddled together, looking back at her, the hurt one holding her mouth. Red blood.

Swan put her hands on her hips and stared at them. “Pretty interesting,” she said. “But I don’t like being fooled.” She slogged through the water toward her clothes.

She walked back around the cylinder, looking up at a herd of wild horses and kissing her sore knuckles, thinking it over. She wasn’t sure what kind of things she had spent the day with. That was strange.

W hen she got back to their hilltop yurts, she waited until Genette and she were again the last two up, and then she said, “I ran into a trio of people today who claimed to be artificial people. Androids with qube brains.”

Genette stared at her. “You did?”

“I did.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I beat the shit out of them.”

“You did?”

“A little bit, one of them, yes. But she had it coming.”

“Because?”

“Because they were fooling with me.”

“Isn’t that kind of like what you do in your abramovics?”

“Not at all. I never fool people, that would be theater. An abramovic is not theater.”

“Well, maybe they weren’t either,” Genette said, frowning. “This has to be looked into. There have been reports on Venus and Mars of various incidents like this. Rumors of qube humanoids, sometimes acting oddly. We’ve started keeping an eye out. Some of these people have been tagged and are being tracked.”

“So there really are such things?”

“I think so, yes. We’ve scanned some, and then of course it’s obvious. But we don’t know much more at this point.”

“But why would anyone do it?”

“Don’t know. But if there were qubes that were mobile, and moving around without being noticed, it would explain quite a few things that have happened. So I’ll have my team take a look at these people you met.”

“I think they were people,” Swan said. “They were putting on an act.”

“You think they were real people, pretending to be simulacra? As some kind of theater?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Why would a person get in a box and pretend to be a mechanical chess player? It’s an old dream. A kind of theater.”

“Maybe. But I’m going to look into it anyway, because of these odd things happening.”

“Fine,” Swan said. “But I think they were people. Anyway, say they weren’t. What’s the problem with these things, if things they are?”

“The problem is qubes getting out in the world, moving around and doing things. What are they doing? What are they supposed to be doing? Who’s making them? And since there is a qube component to the attacks we’ve seen, we have to wonder, do these things have anything to do with that? Are some of them involved?”

“Hmm,” Swan said.

“Maybe they all come to one question,” the inspector said. “Why are the qubes changing?”

Lists (7)

inadvertent fracking-failed seal-bad lock-bad luck-hyperbaric spark fire-carbon monoxide buildup-carbon dioxide buildup-design flaw-engine housing crack-sudden air loss-solar flare-fuel impurity-metal fatigue-mental fatigue-lightning strike-meteorite strike-accidental critical mass-brake failure-dropped tool-tripped and fell-coolant loss-manufacturing flaw-programming error-human error-containment failure-battery fire-distraction-AI malfeasance-sabotage-bad decision-crossed wires-recreational mental impairment-cosmic ray impact-

(from The Journal of Space Accidents vol. 297, 2308)

Extracts (8)

Charlotte Shortback’s periodizing system was very influential. Of course, the idea of periodization itself is controversial and even suspect, as it seems often to be a matter of squinting hard and waving one’s hands in belletristic fashion to make sock puppet myths out of the dense “buzzing and blooming confusion” of the documented past. Nevertheless, there do seem to be differences in human life between, for instance, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment and the Postmodern; and whether these differences were caused by changes in modes of production, structures of feeling, scientific paradigms, dynastic succession, technological progress, or cultural metamorphosis, it almost doesn’t matter. The shapes invoked make a pattern, they tell a story that people can follow.