Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 198 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, Science Fiction And Fantasy, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2023-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Shih-Li Kow is a former chemical engineer and real estate manager. She is the author of a novel, The Sum of Our Follies, and a short story collection, Ripples and Other Stories. Her short fiction has also been published or is forthcoming in Fusion Fragment, ParSec, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. She lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Zeta-Epsilon

Isabel J. Kim

Start at the cleave of it, not at Zed’s meat death or Ep’s centuries-long destruction, but at the moment that Zed halves his own mind and walks away. Or as was reported in the internal memorandum, the moment when Pilot-Commander Zeta San Tano killed himself at his infinite post on the M.K.S. Epsilon, leaving behind an empty airlock and a crippled starship unable to communicate, limping its way home after battle, carrying a full complement of soldiers.

When the ship returned to base, the staff at Amalgam Research tried to parse whether the M.K.S. Epsilon was aware of Commander Zeta’s upcoming suicide. It must have been. The M.K.S. Epsilon was functionally equivalent to Zeta San Tano. To speak of one was to speak of the other.

But without Zed, Ep was silent.

Zed is 1.8 Imperial meters tall, with dark hair and dark eyes that turn to hazel in the sunlight. He has a chip on his left incisor from when he bit on a fork when he was fourteen. He has a chip in his heart that was inserted when he was seven. He has a small circular node embedded near his amygdala, which was nudged into place when he was three days old.

Ep is a humming black sphere the size of a bedroom.

“They’re setting a party up for you in rec room four,” Ep says, pinging through Zed’s brain all electric, seamless except for the way that Ep’s mental voice is different in register. Something soft about her, like she’s the biological one.

“They should be setting it up for the both of us,” Zed says back. He nods to a passing crewmember. The man salutes and Zed returns it with a haphazard flick of the wrist. The man falls into step.

“Anything to report?” Zed says with his mouth and vocal cords. He pairs the speech with an easy smile because both him and the crewmember are on the off-duty deck, except for the fact that Zed is never off duty. Zed will be off duty when he dies.

“No sir,” the crewmember says while Ep injects the knowledge of who the crewmember is into Zed’s headspace. This is second shift officer Jya San Yore. Epsilon slides Zed a few recorded memories: Zed talking with Jya in line at the caf, Zed playing drinking games with Jya and a few other crewmembers. The memories are tinged with the slightest lilt of reproach. Ep thinks that Zed should try harder to remember people. But when Zed tries to match faces to names to memories, it’s all out of his grasp, the same way addresses and dates and times need to be fed to him. His long-term memory storage is a muscle that he never learned to use.

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