Lyceum Volume V1 Spring 2021

LYCEUM

Volume VI | Spring 2021

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Lyceum

A Literar y Science Magazine Co-presidents

Miriam Hyman Meheret Ourgessa Sierra Smith

Treasurer

Sumaya Ahmed

Event Coordinators Karolina Edlund Alexia Tiches Sierra Smith

Editing & Contributing Advisors Nathan Chu (Text Head) Rand Burnette (Visual Head)

Rand Burnette Nathan Chu

Editing Team Sam Bowden Alexia Tiches Adam Bell

Hailey Napier Meg Dye

Design Team

Sierra Smith Miriam Hyman Grant Holt Ansley Grider Meheret Ourgessa

Front Cover

Julliette Montoya

Back Cover

Ansley Grider

Media Assistant Ansley Grider

Volume VI | Spring 2021 3

Editor’s Note Hello from Lyceum, The Spring of 2021 has had ups and downs. Some of us have been able to reconnect with friends in person, but most interactions remain mediated by screens. Together, we have battled through a rigorous, break-less semester, navigated hurdles with printing and distribution, and developed a magazine through virtual outreach and collaborations.

It is therefore with great pride that we share the sixth volume of Lyceum. As always, this issue is interdisciplinary, creative and curious. As with volumes four and five, the issue is also a product of the pandemic. A few contributors explicitly reference life during COVID-19. Many others imagined the fantastic while faced with an equally unimaginable present.

To that end, Spring 2021 has brought Lyceum a wealth of creativity spanning animal minds (An Ode to Octomom) to those of machines (Mechanical Human). Among these longer fictional pieces, you will also find many creative works of poetry, art and prose.

With vaccinations on the rise, and cases falling in the US, we are hopeful that the third COVID-defined issue will be our last. This is also the last semester for Lyceum’s founding members. While we are sad to see them leave, we are heartened by our new collaborators who, in the Lyceum tradition, continue to be inspired by the intersections of arts and science.

Thanks are in order for everyone who participated in making this magazine and supporting the Lyceum community.

We would also like to thank you, our reader. Enjoy!

Cheers, The Lyceum Team

Bella Stevens 4

Table of Contents Editor’s Note............................................................................................................................4 Camp Counselor by Bella Stevens..............................................................................................4 Precarious Engineering by Miriam Hyman..............................................................................6 Landscapes by Rose Cobb...........................................................................................................7 Adaptation by Katherine Crawford...........................................................................................9 Petri Dishes by Grateful Beckers...................................................................................................9 Interactions by Ansley Grider..................................................................................................10 Persist by Katherine Crawford.................................................................................................12 Blue Ice Sickles by Ansley Grider............................................................................................12 Facing Medusa by Liv Kane....................................................................................................14 Sandias by Katarina Yepez.......................................................................................................14 Time Dilators by Sam Bowden.................................................................................................16 Symbol Space by Bella Hatkoff................................................................................................17 Trying to Extend the Anthropocene by Alexia Tiches.............................................................22 Octopus Water Color by Sierra Smith.....................................................................................24 An Ode to Octomom by Sierra Smith.....................................................................................25 Dinner with a Few Fellow Aliens by Miriam Hyman.............................................................26 Wounds by Julliette Montoya...................................................................................................27 Bee Collective by Zach Hollander............................................................................................28 Bugs See in Pixels by Nathan Chu..........................................................................................29 Interview with Prof. Petersen by Meheret Ourgessa................................................................30 Zebrafish by Rand Burnette....................................................................................................31 Gradient by Grateful Beckers....................................................................................................32 Mechanical Human by Huijun Mao.......................................................................................34 Majoring In by Bella Stevens....................................................................................................35 Thoughts by Rand Burnette.....................................................................................................39

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Precarious Engineering Miriam Hyman

“It’s almost as if they grow from the ground up.” Dr. Rich sits across the table from me in her dinosaur dress, bright orange scarf, and frizzly hair. Our lunch conversation at the Kenyon Inn has turned to moss. When we were introduced after her seminar, Rich explained she’d worn the dress to help keep the audience’s attention. The dress was fantastic, but I hadn’t noticed it during the talk – I was too busy taking notes. Rich is a microbial ecologist at Ohio State University and a lead investigator of the Iso-Genie project, a collaborative research initiative to develop more reliable climate change models. Rich and her collaborators are specialists in different fields, but they all conduct research on the thawing permafrost at the same research station in Sweden, the arctic peatland Stordalen Mire. Within this larger project, Rich studies how the microbial communities responsible for carbon cycling are shifting in response to climate change, and what impacts these shifts will have on global cycles in the future. It’s from her talk that I first learn about Sphagnum, and now, as one of a handful of students vying to ask her questions over lunch, moss is all I want to talk about.

Rich conducts her research on thawing arctic peatlands dominated by Sphagnum, where the moss is intimately tied to the bacteria responsible for carbon cycling. Unlike most plants which live separately from symbiotic microbes in the soil, Sphagnum actually supports a microbial community inside its cells, which recycle nutrients into forms that the moss can use. Bacteria called methanotrophs turn methane into CO2, providing some of the carbon that the moss uses to grow. While other plants grow from the air, Sphagnum has manipulated its microbiome so that it gets a sizable fraction of its carbon from the ground.

As an ecosystem engineer, Sphagnum has manipulated more than the microbes inside its cells; it also controls the microbial ecosystem. Microbes never fully decompose the dead moss because the conditions of the peat keep those microbes dormant. In her talk, Rich explained that this single species of moss is so effective at preventing its own decomposition that it stores 30% of the earth’s soil carbon. However, as the permafrost thaws, that carbon suddenly becomes available to invigorated methanogens, who turn the stored carbon to methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

It’s the first time I’ve heard about this superhero moss, but my peers are less surprised. Apparently, two of Kenyon’s biology professors, Dr. Bickford and Dr. Hicks, are part of an NSF grant dedicated to studying Sphagnum biodiversity.

In fact, the student sitting next to me at lunch works in Bickford’s lab. John Scandale 20’ has been researching populations of the moss for the past two years.

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A month after my conversation with Rich, John and I stand in the entryway of the controlled environment laboratory, where the moss is grown. Lab tables are pushed together in the center of the room, cluttered with everything but plants. John has to raise his voice over the eleven refrigerators lining the walls to tell me they are actually growth chambers and that the Sphagnum is inside them. As John waters the small pots of Sphagnum growing in the growth chamber named Jerry, I smell an earthy musk that reminds me of wet, decomposing leaves. On the top shelf are plastic bins of yellow-brown Sphagnum with the occasional blade of grass sticking out. The bottom shelf holds trays of Sphagnum clones in little pots. John calls them cupcakes, but they look more like protruding alien tentacles, and about as appetizing.

Each cluster of tentacles, or capitulum, is splotchy with different hues of red and green. One of the pots reminds me of a particularly distasteful 70’s shag carpet.

When I stick my finger into one of the pots, I’m surprised by how springy it is. After reading about the density of peat in Sphagnum bogs, I expected something less airy and delicate, but growing in these small pots, there’s no dead layer of peat to support the living Sphagnum. Instead, the Sphagnum cupcakes are all alive, but many have tips that have turned black, and others have patches where the Sphagnum has dried and turned coarse to the touch. Looking at the pots of rotting and desiccated moss, I can’t help but feel disappointed.

I’ve been obsessing over this plant for months, enraptured by stories of peatlands that have preserved thousands of years of human remains, awed by the moss’s ingenious methods of engineering and preservation, but the plants before me hold none of the verdant magic I’d imagined they would. Instead, they are dying.

“What’s wrong with the Sphagnum?” I ask Dr. Bickford when we meet in his office. Bickford is a soft-spoken man, with a gentle, measured voice that makes me lean forward in my chair to hear his answer.

“You can’t give them too much water or they rot and have serious bacterial growth, but you can’t let them dry out.

They’re just these giant kim-wipes evaporating water into the atmosphere. We’re trying to figure out how to fertilize them, but they’re unusual because if you gave them fertilizer as you’d normally fertilize, say, corn, they’d just turn red.”

When Bickford describes caring for the Sphagnum, he has the air of a general in the midst of a long, exhausting battle. It seems strange that such a sickly, capricious plant was chosen as a model organism to study biodiversity, but Bickford assures me that outside of the lab, Sphagnum is posi-

Rose Cobb 7

tively cosmopolitan. Bogs of Sphagnum grow in climates that range from the arctic to the tropical. Bickford and his collaborators hope that by understanding the differences between Sphagnum populations that survive in such diverse environments, they will gain a better understanding of the moss’s genetic variability. When I ask Bickford what he hopes will come out of his research, his goals are a little less lofty.

“Our lab is measuring gas exchange. In most plants that is regulated by a waxy layer on the leaf called the cuticle and stomata, but mosses don’t have either of those, so they lose lots of water and take up little carbon. That becomes a problem when you try to measure the few carbon molecules they’re taking up.”

Bickford explains that if he were to put a piece of filter paper saturated with water into the gas exchange chamber, he would get photosynthetic rates very similar to the moss.

“We’re really pushing the limits of our models for understanding gas exchange. When you’re at the limits of things you need to make sure you’re not measuring artifacts. My hope is that we’re measuring them well and accurately.”

When Bickford first received the Sphagnum populations, his only guide for growing them was from Dr. Steve Rice, a researcher at Union College and a leader in the field of Sphagnum research.

“I used Steve’s model as well as I could discern from his papers but when I first got them. I thought well, I’m just going to put them in these bins, and I’ll try to mimic their actual ecology as much as I can and see what happens. That was really supposed to be a transition from the refrigerator into the growing phase. However, once I’d transitioned from bins to cupcakes, all of the Sphagnum started turning the same color. I converted to that system because I wanted to be consistent, but I just didn’t expect them to be so unhappy with what evolved. If I had known that I would have kept the bins, but live and learn. There’s no textbook here.”

If a guide to growing Sphagnum did exist, it might contain a single word: don’t. Traditionally, researchers studying the moss have brought their equipment into the field instead of trying to grow it themselves. While Sphagnum is adept at ecosystem engineering, its micromanagement of the environment is paired with a sensitivity to environmental conditions.

Replicating the conditions of Sphagnum outside of a bog has proved exceptionally difficult. In the wild, peat bogs are fed mostly by rain water, and the peat below acts like a sponge, wicking the water upwards to the Sphagnum and changing the water chemistry as it does so. The cheese cloths standing in for the dead-Sphagnum sponge may not be effective water-wickers, or maybe the water is the wrong temperature, or acidity, or it doesn’t have the right ratio of nutrients. It’s also possible that the Sphagnum’s microbiome has not taken kindly to the growth chambers. Sphagnum’s health is dependent on microbial and biochemical factors that can’t be seen or easily tested. Without knowing why their tips are rotting, Bickford’s lab can’t prevent the moss from sickening further.

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Even I can see that if the conditions don’t change, many of the Sphagnum cupcakes will not survive.

Bickford’s lab has plenty of research to do before the pots of moss become unsalvageable. John is using microscopy to study the ratio of photosynthetic and hyaline cells in the different strains of Sphagnum. He has been kind enough to let me tag along as he photographs slides underneath a microscope. The microscope and computer display are set up on a lab table, and slides of the Sphagnum are scattered about.

Held between two sheets of glass, the samples already look microscopic to me, impossibly tiny pink petals, perhaps the length of an aphid. The leaflet of Sphagnum probably was the color of an aphid when John plucked it off of the head, but it has since been dyed with safranin so the cell walls can be seen more clearly. John has adhered the slide between the glass plates with nail polish. I was hoping it would be pink to go with the dye, but it is clear.

“It looks like I’m in the quantum realm when I look at one” John says, showing me one of his successful photos.

Pressed tightly together, deep pink photosynthetic cells form the scaffolding of a warped honeycomb. Each empty space, John tells me, is the inside of a hyaline cell. Dead at maturity, these vacuous cells are normally filled with water and swimming with microbes. It’s the hyaline cells that allow Sphagnum to hold twenty times its weight in water, and the hyaline cells that are compressed once the Sphagnum has died, creating the dense, waterlogged peat capable of such supernatural preservation.

I marvel at the structure hidden within this plant – the microscopic detail that builds on itself to create the leaf of the plant of the peatland. It’s difficult to conceptualize how this latticework of cells could be responsible for storing so much carbon – that something so finite engineered an ecosystem that survived for thousands of years. It’s even more difficult to recognize that despite their longevity, these peatlands are as fragile as the organisms that comprise them. As the arctic warms, the tenuous balance Sphagnum peatlands rely upon to preserve themselves is disrupted. Increasingly, the preserved remains of ancient cells are decomposing, turning into methane and carbon dioxide that fuel a positive feedback loop of warming and decomposition. The very peatlands that served as a carbon sink for thousands of years will start releasing more and more greenhouse gasses, further destabilizing the environmental scaffolding we rely on.

Like Sphagnum, we are also ecosystem engineers – reliant on our abilities to adapt an environment to our needs in order to survive. Like Sphagnum, when removed from the conditions and tools we have designed for ourselves we become exceptionally vulnerable to our surroundings. As peatlands decompose beneath our feet, we may one day have to live in an environment we can no longer control. How much change can we sustain before we end up like the transplanted Sphagnum in Higley’s basement?

Adaptation

Katherine Crawford E. coli doesn’t have a memory. It adapts, registers changes, gets used to its new normal. Methylation pathways, the most rudimentary brain.

I feel like my memory is fading. What was the world like before? Before I had to put on a mask to walk to the bathroom?

Before I lost a year with my friends? Before the closest intimacy was sharing a breath?

My dog went blind. She never saw us wear masks. Now, as we carry her frail body along the sidewalks she used to race down, what does she remember? After a year of not seeing, her nose still runs into chairs we haven’t moved. She’s lost in her own house. How much of my face does she see in her mind when I arrive home?

We can adapt to anything. 11,869 Americans died from the new normal this week. Lower than the week before. Like E. coli, and despite my own will, I’m adapting.

Grateful Beckers 9

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Interactions We often think of nature as being some place “out there” that is pristine and untouched by humans. However, this is not the case. Nature is all around us all the time, and the natural world and human world are constantly interacting. In fact, they are the same world. Humans are part of the natural world just like any other species, and we leave artifacts just as they do. These photos are a documentation of both pieces of nature and pieces of trash discarded by humans to create a more accurate representation of what is found outdoors. A lot of the things I gathered were from the Brown Family Environmental Center (BFEC), although some objects were from Kenyon’s campus. My goal for this project was to show that humans are altering and influencing nature with the products of our high-consumption lifestyles, and even places such as the BFEC that we think of as being preserved and less altered by humans are still affected. However, I do not think this makes these areas less important; almost every corner of the planet has been touched by humans, whether directly or indirectly. Instead, my hope is that these pieces will encourage others to reflect on how our lifestyles can impact and interact with the natural world of which we are a part.

Ansley Grider

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Persist

Katherine Crawford It is growing cooler and darker; almost imperceptible at this depth, but it’s changing. I stir, my body brushing lightly against another one of my kind, also waking. Slowly, I drift away, out of the cave. As deep as I am, my surroundings are dark all day. I gently push myself along until I find a current and ride it, sensing around for the telltale signs of prey. Any little electrical signal from muscle movement will tickle my sides and lead me to them. Us coelacanths are slow, but we are persistent.

This darkness is nothing new to me. My eyes don’t strain as I look around and spot a flash of movement. In these icy open areas, I don’t rush; doing so would be a waste of energy.

I inch my way along until I am upon the creature. Its eyes are not as strong as mine, and it cannot sense my almost motionless approach.

I snap open my jaws and the thing is instantly sucked towards me. It barely has a moment to move before I’ve engulfed it entirely, my teeth snapping shut and locking in

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place. I move on. Minutes or hours might pass as I creep along. I barely oscillate my tail, only doing so to correct my course and stay within the current. The world darkens, but my vision does not leave me. Shades of violet-blue curtain my surroundings. As I drift along, I see something catching a dim ray of light. It flutters, but I don’t feel any electrical outputs. I pause and consider it; it’s moving, but I do not feel the area between us crackle with life. Regardless, I hone in. It’s in my mouth the next moment. As I gulp it down, the thing puts up no fight; its slick surface crinkles and shifts as I swallow. It makes me feel sick. I vow to not eat whatever that was again.

My last meal sits heavy in my stomach as I continue to be carried along. I’m no longer in such open ocean; the seafloor sits below me, sandy and almost lifeless. I adjust my air bladder and slowly sink to graze the ground, searching for something actually alive to predate.

I move along, my fleshy fins brushing the sand. Eventually I spot something, a large, bulky presence; its darkness looms and casts flitting shadows across the ground. I’m large, longer and bigger than most other beings I encounter, but this - thing, structure, being, I cannot determine — dwarves me. Despite this, I do not hesitate to approach; no thing hungers after my flesh in the way I hunger after others. I am strong, and my oily flesh does not inspire bloodlust.

I come upon the thing. It’s complicated and alien, with sharp corners and isolated cave-like bends. It does not match the rest of the ocean floor with its uniform spines and smooth stretches of alien material. I circle this beast, inspecting it as best I can. My eyes are confused by the variety of caves and corners, spines and stretches of smooth. It is not alive; no gills twitch to intake a gulp, no mouth stirs to snatch at prey, no fins follow the current’s impulse. It is dead like the ground, passive like the caves. But there is life. Creatures have grown onto this expansive thing and fish swim around it. Within its depths, small beings are sleeping. As I get nearer, small fish flit away from me; I do not try to follow. My stomach still feels heavy and twisted from my last meal.

This thing is of no use to me. I find my current again and follow it away from the beast. It’s the darkest time; at this point, my eyes miss small movements and details. But I am no longer hungry. I move towards the shallower areas. It’s early to start looking for a cave in which to stay the night, but I don’t think I’ll eat again today and mating is months away.

I inflate my swim bladder slightly to rise. I can see more signs of life and activity; the seafloor is no longer barren sand. My surroundings are getting lighter, both from me rising and from the incoming bright time. It’s almost time to

sleep again.

I’m trapped. A force is wrapped around me; I did not sense it creeping towards me, but now it grips me, pressing into my lateral line, forcing my fins against my body. I struggle, using my tail more than I should, exhausting myself in the fight. But the grip only gets stronger. Other fish are with me, struggling as well, but none of us can fight quite enough.

And then I feel another sensation. I’m rising, but not by my own will. My eyes burn from the increasing light, bright blues burning into my vision. My surroundings are warm now, and my scales itch from the unpleasantness. My swim bladders are inflating with the change, and I try to adjust; I cannot do so fast enough. They stretch and ache as I rise and rise and rise. I’ve never been this high before; how high can I even go?

And then I am as high as I can go. I’m out of — well, whatever it is I live in. My gills twitch uselessly, unable to control the flow of oxygen. I continue to fight, against the grip holding me still, even though I know I cannot continue much longer.

The grip loosens and something else presses against me, prying open my mouth holding me. I cannot see. I cannot feel the electricity of whatever has captured me. I am so heavy now; in this alien world, without pressure around me, I feel

as though I’m collapsing under my own weight. I lose the will to continue fighting; how can I persist when I cannot function? When my swim bladders are distended, my mouth wrenched open, my body collapsing?

I’m slapped back to myself without warning, and I’m out of that alien world, sinking again without being gripped by that force. I do not move at first as I simply try to force my gills to flutter back to life. Finally I can move; I thrash my tail and force myself downwards. As I return to the depths, my eyes readjust to the familiar deep blues; coolness returns instead of burning warmth; my swim bladders shrink back to a comfortable size. They ache — all of me aches, I am so tired — but I continue to swim down.

My muscles have never worked so hard.

Finally I reach the cliffs and floor again. I think of nothing but avoiding whatever gripped me and finding a place to sleep. I find a cave; no other fish are in here, and that’ll do fine for this day. I shrink into a corner, hiding from the world beyond. It does not take long for sleep to overtake me.

I wake up and move on. I try to avoid being captured again, but I do not stop. I look for more prey, more looming beasts to explore. For countless years, I continue. Coelacanths are strong. No matter what, for eons, we persist.

Ansley Grider 13

Facing Medusas Liv Kane One thousand apologies to my great-grandfather and the generations of fishermen I come from. I want to be an astronaut.

In the summer of 2019, a box jellyfish, known colloquially as the seawasp, stung the girl’s left ankle. She had just resurfaced after a night dive and was stargazing, lying on her back and imagining the worlds miles above and below her.

She’d turned the light attached to her gear off, remembering that all sorts of bioluminescent organisms fall for flashlights, when she heard another diver shout. She swam over, suddenly overcome by a weighty fear in the bottom of her abdomen.

Something’s gonna eat me tonight.

The largest of the cubozoans, the seawasp can grow up to two meters long, from the tip of its bell to the end of its longest tentacle. It possesses no brain, but rather a decentralized network of nerves, with a ring connecting its internal functions to the stimuli of the outside world.

In short, the deadliest animal in the ocean is a freeform bag of nematocysts and water. The Kraken and Moby Dick and Leviathan quiver next to this brain-less, poison-filled sack of jelly. Our minds, inclined to hyperbole and fable fabrication, could not make this thing up.

Most nights, when the rain is hot on my hands and I can feel a storm forming, I wish I could talk to Captain Zip. My great-grandfather passed away only a few weeks before I was born, after falling and hitting his head on the side of a cast-

iron tub. The only person in my family who could tell better stories than me.

I want to ask him about the sharks he escaped and the seahorses he saved from his nets. About the billions of phytoplankton that danced beneath the Miss Andrinna and full moons. About how easy it is to lose yourself at sea.

I want to ask him why I wasn’t born in the open ocean, scales and gills and tentacles more familiar to me than our neighbors and their mailboxes. My favorite songs are the gales made from hurricane wind and octopus breath. I know my amniotic fluid was all Gulf water.

I want Captain Zip to tell me about the barometric pressures and the sandbars and the schools of menhaden he loved, but most of all, I want him to tell me about the monsters.

It felt like kicking lightning. One freestyle stroke and the girl had run into the deadliest creature in the ocean. Her leg seized up, and she shouted that she’d been stung. She was hauled onto the boat, her dive gear stripped, an entire bottle of vinegar poured on her leg. And then, her limbs began to seismically shimmy, the neurotoxins kicking in.

The girl convulsed for six hours that night, falling in and out of a dream-state, imagining all the little harpoons digging through the skin in her leg and shooting up her bloodstream, into her heart.

She asked the woman she was with if she was going to die, without much animation. It felt like the proper, cine-

Katarina Yepez 14

Katarina Yepez

matic thing to do as they leafed through marine life guidebooks and tried to understand why her body was having such a bad reaction. Through the haze, it was determined that if she went into anaphylactic shock, she’d need to be airlifted. If she didn’t, they’d let her body “ride out the poisons.”

That night and into the morning, the girl wrote down all the people she loved in a bulleted list in her head. She imagined the different ways they might tell her story.

These beings dictate a story we are not familiar with, one in which we are no longer the center of everything.

With them, we are a cog, a link in a chain, reminded of the dirt within our blood. We revere their power and fear their potential. When we speak of them, we give these creatures more legs and spikes and slime and poison until we have something that makes our hearts pound at the mention of its name. We mix their stories with our own.

They become the monsters of our God.

Unlike many of its cousins, Alatina alata has four eye-clusters with a total of twenty-four eyespots. Although scientists are unsure as to the connection between the nervous system and these eyes, they have concluded that the species reacts to dark shapes in its environment.

It’s been documented that these sea wasps achieve up to four knots while stalking their prey, contradictory to the normal planktonic methods of most jellyfish. This is to say—the thing hunts. It is a predator. It belongs amongst our daydreams and our nightmares of the ocean.

This is to say—it was not a passive sting.

Most days, she thinks about Irukandji syndrome, the long-term effects of envenomation by box jellyfish. About cardiac arrest and hypertension and she convinces herself she has an enlarged heart for more than just emotional reasons. She thinks about her favorite Irukandji symptom, a feeling of impending doom. She wonders if that’s truly just reserved for people on the verge of death, or whether we all feel those effects. Impending doom. Our fear of the end.

A brief glance at the final pages of the narrative.

On those nights of cyclones, I think about how Captain Zip, shrimper and fisherman and father, turned down hundreds of mermaids for my great-grandmother. He believed in them the same way I believe in aliens.

But if there are no mermaids, I wonder what pearly, iridescent eyes he actually saw beneath those waves. What monsters clung to the bottom of his boat, painful barnacles too calcified to scrape off. I wonder what spell he fell under.

If it’s hereditary.

He fled to the ocean again and again and again, hauling nets long after they came up empty. He passed before he could recount his monsters to me, before he could paint pictures on the insides of my eyelids before I slept.

On those nights I can’t fall asleep, I want him to tell me the genesis story of his fear.

If she could do it again, the girl would drape herself in pantyhose and stay far away from the flashlights. She would swim with her legs parallel to the surface instead of straight down. She would keep her mask glued to the water, not the stars.

But even now, she knows she would ignore the tiny voice in her gut, the one whispering of her trespass in a world she doesn’t belong in. The one silently screaming danger.

Since humanity first began telling stories, we’ve been fascinated by the predators that remind us of our place. The mountain lions and tiger sharks and sea snakes and grizzly bears that have prowled the shadows of our cave drawings have also been the evils of our oral histories, and despite the growing separation between man and nature, we are still, today, fascinated by the creatures that could kill us.

Despite the seven-inch constellation on the back of my leg and the phantom shakes I get when my nerves set in, this girl returns to the ocean again and again and again. She stares for hours into the salt water and prays for the universe to open up to her, to let her explore the infinite blue-tinted spaces she needs to be a part of. She retells the fish fables that run through the estuaries of her family.

I must admit that my gulf swims are a little more hesitant now. I wade out into the water with my eyes on the surface, shuddering at the shreds of plastic bags and Sargassum seaweed that climb up my legs. I think about the slippery things that rule the waves, about how easily I could be taken under.

Once ashore, I grapple with my strange fondness of this unknown, my odd pull towards a place that speaks of everything but safety. About my need to fill the empty, terrifying spaces with story.

Tonight, with my fingertips dipping into waves, I imagine what I’ll tell my children when I get back from space.

The unbreathable air. The deep, unblinking abysses.

The edges of matter that expand and contract like tides.

Alien creatures that stalk our shadows, beings that look at us the way we look at them. With fear, but also with fascination.

I decide that when typhoons touch the edges of our town and my children climb into bed with me, I will tell them that they have inherited the best parts of storytelling from Captain Zip. I will promise them that they will grow into their craving for danger, just like their mama.

On those nights, with their warm fingers wrapped around mine, I’ll tell them the story of a girl who almost died at sea, just looking for a place to be weightless.

Originally published in Reckoning Magazine

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Time Dilators Sam Bowden

From the ramjet, the Earth looks older. There’s a yellow tint to Africa – or is it South America? – that Josephine doesn’t remember and a frail, brittle look to the clouds.

They’re another day from the visitor station in the Earthmoon’s orbit; when they passed Mars three days ago, Captain Stu started the deceleration, turning the ramjet’s nuclear engine around and firing in the opposite direction. Josephine’s not sure if they’ve approached Terrestrial Time yet, if they’re moving so slowly now that the Dilation’s worn off. She checks her watch, probably wildly off-sync with Matylda’s by now, and bites the soft inner part of her lip.

Her room door cracks open, and Phineas floats inside, feet brushing over the floor. “Finally picking up signals from Earth. You see the announcements? They’ve got the news on in the cafeteria now.”

She slides her hands away from her window. Phineas is wearing a business suit; he’s probably already back to video-calling his Wall Street friends on Earth who couldn’t afford a Dilation Trip.

“That startup I invested in? That tiny company doing VR implants out of New Delhi? They’re huge now. Ten years and they’re one of the highest-valued tech stocks on the market. I’m selling as soon as we touch down.”

Josephine thinks she says “congratulations.” Phineas is doing the short-laugh thing she hates again, letting himself drift from wall to wall in the lower gravity. All his Terrestrial partners are ten years older, him only one, and Phineas is the type to have just finished gloating about that fact on call.

“What about the war?” Josephine asks.

“It’s over. Ended three Terrestrial Years ago. New UN websanctions on China shut them up for another few decades, or something.”

“So we won?”

Phineas’s lips make a tight line. “Sure? The stuff I’ve read makes it seem more like a mutual breakup.”

“That’s funny,” Josephine says, without smiling. As she’s rotating herself around to face the window again Phineas tries to get his arm around her shoulder.

“You’re okay, right? It’s the same Earth. Just everyone’s a little grayer.”

Which is easy, she thinks, for Phineas to say, Phineas who’s taken four Dilation Trips and is, Terrestrially, seventy-eight; who has access to the Frequent Dilator Members’ Lounge onboard the ramjet and has taken Josephine there sometimes – a 3-D pool table, a bigger hose for showering, even solid food that leaves crumbs floating around them like good memories of the meal. Josephine imagines Phineas lonely, that he brought her and Blake up here with him be16

cause he wanted to be close with people who’d age the same way he did, and that the war was just an excuse, a perfect opportunity to convince someone to follow him. But the way he’s acting now makes it seem as if he never had any plans past get rich quicker, again.

“Josephine, really. It’ll be fine.”

“I know,” she says, to placate him, and when he goes out, whooping down the hall, she goes back to the window, and massages Matylda’s watch on her wrist. The Earth, like a veiny eye, spinning distantly, growing closer.

Before she’d agreed to Dilate with Phineas, she’d done her research. Once, ramjets had only been government-issue, trillions poured into a single ship, all that money sent forth on expeditions that yielded nothing. The ramjets themselves were powered by nuclear fusion; huge scoops, glistening and conic, caught, ionized, and crushed the hydrogen molecules drifting through outer space. Hydrogen, after all, was the most common element in the universe; each star churned with it, pushed it out into the black for the ramjet’s scoop to capture.

Faster-than-light travel was still impossible – any object with mass couldn’t break the light barrier, and there wasn’t enough energy in the entire universe to change that – but the ramjets came closer than anyone had ever thought; for a year, Josephine had hurtled through the universe at 185,000 miles a second.

At first, the perfection of the ramjet was to be the building of a bridge into a new and interplanetary age, and NASA, the first to send a ramjet out past the solar system, knew it.Only, as everyone quickly found out, there wasn’t much to explore. Mars was uninhabitable with current technology; why not just go out a little further on the ramjets, find something more suitable? Titan was barren, its oceans descended miles and miles down into nothingness. And beyond the Solar System? More of the same, NASA discovered. Dead planets, acidic oceans. A few stray microbes thrashing in sulfuric dirt. The hope for interplanetary exploration dimmed with every expedition; the bridge to that new interplanetary age began to wobble, then collapsed entirely. Ramjets were pointless. Velocities this titanic were wastes of energy and money and, so they’d thought back then on Earth, time.

But then, of course, there was still money to be made.

Still civilians looking towards the stars. The space tourism industry began to develop ramjets of its own, and suddenly there was a use for ramjets after all. Because travelling in a continuously accelerating ramjet slowed time for its passengers, relative to those on Earth. One year at this speed, in a

clean circle through space, was the same as ten in Terrestrial Time. And as it turned out, for people like Phineas – and, Josephine supposed, for her too, but she’d promised herself she had to have been different – the thought of skipping a decade, of saving ten years of life, was well worth the price.

Matylda doesn’t call when Josephine’s phone begins picking up satellite internet, six hours from the visitor station, but that’s got Josephine even more worried; what might’ve happened in the decade she’s missed? Blake and Phineas want to grab one last meal from the cafeteria, so she folds the phone away, follows them, and spends an hour sucking the last dinner she’ll have in zero-gravity through a straw. Captain Stu’s peppy on the intercom. Most of the cafeteria is empty, with only a few other scattered Dilators eating solitary meals.

“I’ve already heard from my parents,” Blake says, wiping his mouth. A few orange, blobby flecks go flying. “My dad beat his cancer.”

Josephine closes the straw before taking it out of her mouth. “Your dad had cancer?”

“Yeah. He was diagnosed around a year after I left.

Would’ve been March or something for us. By our July, it had been four years of chemo. He’d gotten laser surgery to remove his tumors. And I missed the whole thing.”

Josephine wonders what she’s missed, what stories have unfolded, whole and entire, then wrapped themselves up and

disappeared in a week or less. She wonders what Matylda’s seen.

The Earth is terrifyingly large now, spinning in the window. It’s South America that’s yellow and ugly, not Africa.

At the station, a cartbot to carry Josephine’s luggage is nearly twenty dollars more expensive than she remembers.

“It’s inflation,” Phineas says, piling his own cartbot, shouting over the busy terminal. He straps his suitcases in to prevent them from drifting off in the lower gravity.

“Everything’s probably a little more expensive back on Earth,” Blake says. “It takes some getting used to.”

Josephine already anticipated some inflation, has locked most of her savings into a 529 with a solid interest rate, but twenty dollars? “Don’t worry,” Phineas says, reading her expression. “I’ll pay.”

He thinks it’s cute. She wants to die. “I’m good,” Josephine says. “It’s not like it weighs much in here. Let’s go back down.”

Matylda thought Phineas was poison from the first Thanksgiving. She, Josephine, and their parents all logged into a VR chatserver that November; to cut back on travel expenses, they’d decided to go digital. Phineas came with little warning. He’d mentioned two weeks before in the dining hall that he didn’t have plans for Thanksgiving and Josephine’s heart seemed to surge forward – now she’d have a chance to

Bella Hatkof f 17

step up for him; she could be a sanctuary and let him stay with her, because someone really in love would do something like that.

Phineas dodged almost every question. He did not mention parents. (His parents, had they been alive, would’ve been a Terrestrial century and a half.) He did not mention work, classes, ambitions, besides a quick reference to his masters’ in economics. Josephine thought he was nervous and her parents thought he was, at the very least, so dull that he couldn’t possibly have ulterior motives.

Matylda barely said anything. Her avatar’s eyes stayed downturned on her digital gravy. Josephine asked about high school – Matylda was a senior now – but her sister would prefer to take a bite of digital food than respond.

With no food to eat there wasn’t much to do after the talking died away. Phineas logged off first, Josephine’s parents following. Matylda stayed, still picking at food that wasn’t real.

“I know there’s something you want to talk about. Come on, Tylda.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I thought you wanted to be called that.”

“You sound like Dad.” And you sound like you’re going on fourteen, Josephine thought. A hand on her thigh; Phineas, in the real world.

They were calling from her dorm room, each using a different headset on opposite sides of her bed. Josephine tried to smack him away; his hand just moved higher up her leg.

“I can just tell,” Matylda said. “His avatar was staring at yours the whole time. How do you, like, ogle an avatar? Who does that?”

Phineas was kissing her shoulder now. Josephine laughed, leaning back; if she tried to push him away, her avatar would flail at the table, and Matylda would put it all together instantly.

“Don’t laugh at me.” The little girl. She didn’t get it.

“I’m not laughing at you,” she managed. Phineas was surrounding her. “Don’t worry about him. He’s fine.”

“Fine’s not enough. You should get more than fine.”

Josephine’d had enough. She logged off, leaving Matylda’s avatar alone at the table and staring at her. She ripped off the visor, curled herself around Phineas, grabbed the back of his head with her hands.

The war grew in twos, escalating in parallel: China’s enacted new tariffs and the U.S. shot back with their own.

A U.S. President lost re-election due to hacking and the Politburo’s servers crashed the next month. Josephine remembered a friend from Wuhan disappearing one week from class, just as her roommate was sent back early from study abroad in Shanghai. Phineas, only three months since they’d kissed for the first time and two since they were formally dating, began talking about Dilation as a way to ride things out, a way to skip over the tension gripping the world and return 18

to a better one. You’ve heard about Dilation Trips, right? We shouldn’t waste three, four, seven years waiting for this to clear up. We can bypass it. We can come home and still be young, and all this would’ve gone away.

She didn’t listen to him until the first blackout on the West Coast, until the satellite shots – California at night blinking, then flickering out like a bulb – shuddered across the news like a shiver up Josephine’s spine. Until the governor of Washington was killed in the dark chaos that followed, and the CCP gave the U.S. the ultimatum: lift the tariffs, or we’ll bring down the East Coast too.

This time, the government didn’t respond. The twos had become one, and that was how Josephine had understood that the war had started. She found Phineas waiting for her outside her dorm room the day the President announced a declaration of war. He was already packed. Blake was standing beside him, another grad student Josephine’d heard of but had never met.

What’s going on?

Blake can get us tickets to Phoenix. I already made the reservations.

She regretted listening to him but she understood why she’d done it then. The campus was shutting down, her roommate had already left for home, half her classes had been called off indefinitely. Josephine’s world was waiting to go dark and implode. It could’ve happened at any moment.

There was no time to think. Only time to hide, and Phineas gave her that comfort.

They’re quick going through customs and baggage check and snag three spots on the next shuttle back to the surface.

The atmosphere, shattering against the smoking hull, makes Josephine’s chair vibrate. Home is in New Columbus, and college was in New Jersey, and Phineas and Blake have just bought a top-floor suite a few miles from the landing site in Phoenix, selling some of their stocks in the airport. The boys return to Earth grinning, somehow managing swagger in their walkers while Josephine pushes herself forward on trembling knees. There are a few other recent arrivals on their way out to the pneumatic tubes, all shuffling forward on walkers until their muscles have readjusted to the newfound gravity. Josephine’s insides are being pulled toward the linoleum floor, but she’s not sure if that’s the gravity or something deeper and more wrong. Matylda’s still not responding. Josephine can try Mom when she gets a chance.

The landing site’s connected to a regular airship-port as well, and a large main terminal is crowded with travelers. It’s more people than Josephine’s seen in a year, and she freezes up for a second at the sight of it all.

“What?” Phineas asks, turning. “Catching a breath?” He still talks like they’re together, as if now that they’re back on Earth, Josephine will let things go back to normal. He can’t stop himself from giggling hideously, a richer and a younger man.

Bella Hatkof19 f

She couldn’t remember when she’d stopped sleeping with him onboard the ship – their separation had been exponential, minor arguments and silences at lunch rising into fights about Josephine’s family, about Matylda, and her parents and who knew what they’d be going home to. Two months in, Phineas finally cracked and told Josephine everything: that he was over seventy Terrestrially, that he would Dilate once every few years, that he’d hop through Terrestrial decades, playing with stocks and with time.

“How can you do it?” she’d asked. Back then some shred of sympathy might’ve still glowed inside of her; back then she might’ve loved him again, if he’d said the right thing.

“It’s the only thing I can do. The friends I make on Earth are old, or dead, and my hometown’s been torn down to make way for a pneumatics tunnel. I have money, sure, from playing the market, but I can’t stay on Earth for long. It’s like I don’t belong anymore. Everything’s different. After my first trip, I only lasted a week before I ran back to Phoenix.

I keep waiting to touch down on some version of the Earth I recognize, but I never find it. So I always go back to a ramjet.”

“And you brought me.”

“I’m sorry, Jo. You should be home. You should be thirty-two.”

She could’ve reached out, rubbed his shoulder, told him she forgave him. She could’ve done all she’d imagined she might’ve once. The bit of her that wanted to stay with him was still there; she could’ve salvaged it.

“Yeah, Phineas, I should,” she said, and maybe he’d kissed her first but she wasn’t sure, and his hands were already sliding down the back of her shirt, and he was clinging to her like he was terrified she would jettison out into space, like she would grow old and wither in his arms.

She says nothing to Phineas, but when she turns and walks away towards the Midwest Pneumatic Tube it’s like he knows she’s not coming back; he turns to Blake and shortlaughs, tapping his pocket nervously. The crowd eats him whole in half a second; Josephine pushes through, the wheels on her walker threatening to freeze up, and all she can think of now is calling Matylda and apologizing and burying her head in the softness of her family again. The people are wearing different clothes; they talk with slang she doesn’t recognize and their phones are sleek and new. They are aliens to Josephine, every single one of them. She buys a ticket for New Columbus and lurches into the glassy Pneumatic, and as she sits down, the air hissing around her, an unfamiliar captain’s voice booming in the ceiling, she tries to call Matylda again.

And this time, when she does pick up, Josephine wants to cry and faint and laugh hysterically; without her realizing it, she had begun to think Matylda might be dead.

There’s a long pause. Josephine says her sister’s name sev20

eral times; it’s all she can manage.

Then, a man asks: “who is this?”

His voice is coffin-lining soft. Josephine can’t think anymore, so she blurts “where’s my sister?” and the man mumbles something to someone beside him. This man is Ernest and he’s Matylda’s husband; he introduces himself quietly, as if someone asleep close by might hear him and wake.

“She used to talk about you all the time, Josephine. I can’t believe I’m actually speaking to you.”

“Where is she? I want to talk to her. I’m on a pneumatic to New Columbus now.”

After another pause, Ernest gives Josephine the address for an apartment in New York.

When she’d been leaving for the ramjet, minutes from departure with Phineas and Blake, and had called the whole family from a sticky, sweaty public-use VR headset, and the airport was snarling with people and Dilators and millions of hissing cartbot wheels, and the sky was a wartime-evening orange outside, and when China could’ve released another killcode into any internet server in the country at any point, and only Matylda had picked up, and Josephine tried to get her to understand how much she loved Phineas and knew Dilation was the safest thing, and Josephine said I’d bring you too if he’d been able to afford another seat, and Josephine said you, not him or Dad or Mom, and when Josephine waited for Matylda to understand and forgive her, and in the next decade things would be better, and Josephine waited and waited, and Matylda said nothing, and in the rapidly dissolving real world a ringtone sounded like an alarm and it made her flinch, and when Josephine said goddammit, Tylda, you should be relieved that I’ll be okay, and when Josephine begged her to say something, anything, Matylda did the same thing Josephine had done that Thanksgiving months before: she stared at her sister, laughed miserably, and disconnected.

It is true that in space sound will not travel. That it has no air to push through with its waves and therefore is more than silent: it lacks the medium for earthly silence, is the ultimate absence of sound. It’s true, of course, but sometimes Josephine would wake on the ramjet and hear, from outside her window, Matylda’s laugh, warbling and brief.

Josephine has to transfer at Cincinnati. It’s close to night when she arrives. The streets are white, sanbot-sanitized. She still can’t run with her weakened legs, but she ditched the walker at the station, and every few steps the whole world swerves forward and she has to steady herself on a parking meter or the rough outer wall of a building. The few people she passes at this hour, their hair done-up bizarrely, give her pitying looks that make her sick.

She finds Matylda’s new home right outside of a subway station. The building’s stout and bricked with a rotted awning over the front door. The lobby, with walls smells like

tobacco, a deeply earthy smell that hurts Josephine’s nose. A recepbot waves meaninglessly and asks if it can be of any assistance. Josephine is intent on taking the stairs but almost falls on the way to the door, and has to slink into the elevator, ignoring the recepbot’s programmed stare. Inside, surrounded by humming metal, reminded of the ramjet, she’s able to breathe comfortably again.

Ernest is standing in the hallway. He’s skinny, too tall for his clothes, older than Josephine in Terrestrials. He’s never seen her before, but recognizes Josephine instantly. “You look just like the pictures,” he offers. Josephine just looks at him.

“Right. I’m sorry.” He pushes the door open. “You woke us both up, you know.”

Matylda is picking at a chipped fingernail, sitting with her legs crossed in the dining room. The apartment is small, quiet, and blue lights run along the edges of the walls, which are decorated with small photo-tablets glowing faintly. Josephine sees herself in only one: a picture from her high-school graduation, her parents and Matylda gathered around her in an auditorium, staring at her full of fear and love, as if to say look, she’s leaving us for better things. She recognizes nothing else. A trip to Beijing after the war with friends whose faces Josephine can’t place; a wedding portrait with Ernest, both looking delirious in one another’s arms; a diploma from Ohio State sitting between a portrait of Mom, graying, and Dad, wrinkled; a bald, veiny, wailing, and beautiful baby boy in Matylda’s arms, tears on both of their faces. It is her little sister’s entire life, things Josephine was supposed to have done beforehand and would’ve therefore had advice on: how to study for a college exam, or how to convince a boy to ask her out, or how to breathe during a contraction, or something. But Josephine is barely there. She’s one photo among what feels like hundreds.

“Do you want tea?” Matylda asks. She’s stirring a little mug of it herself.

“I missed you too? Wow, Matylda. You said you’d call.”

“Did I?” Matylda pinches the bridge of her nose, setting down her spoon. “I’m sorry if I did, but I don’t remember.”

Don’t remember? A grown woman, a distortion of her little sister’s face, gives her a weary parent’s smile.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Matylda asks.

“Who’s the baby?”

“Your nephew, and he’s finally asleep. We named him Walt, after Ernest’s grandpa.”

Walt. Ernest. All these people Josephine doesn’t know, encroaching on her memory of Matylda. She glances around the apartment, hoping to find some family heirloom laying in a corner to anchor her to this place and time, some chair or lamp or pair of shoes from the old house in New Columbus, but everything is new and foreign.

“His name was Phineas, right?”

“I…I dumped him. I never loved him, Matylda, okay? It wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. It was immature and dumb and I

didn’t mean any of it.”

Matylda sips her tea. There are bags under her eyes.

Ernest quietly closes the front door, exchanges a look with Matylda Josephine cannot possibly understand, and sneaks off down the hall to check on Walt. “We have a guest room,” she offers, “but it needs cleaning. Ava left just this morning.

You haven’t called Mom or Dad, I’m guessing.”

Who is she, Josephine thinks, growing angrier, to read me like that? “I did call them.”

“Mom tell you about Georgia? They’re moving down to the southern shoreline in a couple of months.”

“Matylda, I didn’t-“ “I know,” Matylda says. “You’re not as good a liar as I thought you were back then.”

It’s quiet again. Matylda finishes her tea and folds her arms over her chest.

“Did you miss me?” Josephine asks, quietly, because she’s beginning to wonder if Matylda’s even remembered who she was.

Matylda sighs like she’s known this question is coming.

“I did, at first. I hated you until the thing with China died down, and by then I was in college, and I had started dating Ernest, and…” She snorts, frustrated. “I grew up, Jo. I didn’t have time to mourn you all day. Is that what you expected?”

“N-not at all.”

“I still love you,” Matylda says, like a parent to a bratty child. “Really, I do.”

A faint crying from down the hall. Ernest sticks his head into the room. “We have a Code Mom,” he whispers, and then, as if he’s just remembered she’s there, nods politely at Josephine. In an instant, Matylda’s up, without even a word for Josephine, and she disappears with Ernest deeper into the apartment. Josephine wants to follow after them, but stays in the dark hallway, surrounded by alien photographs and stray toys, too afraid to intrude into the new life Matylda’s built for herself.

Phineas calls her; she stares at her phone, finger hovering over ACCEPT CALL, but folds it up and buries it in her pocket.

A minute passes. Two. Matylda is singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and Josephine can hear Walt murmuring little sounds into her shoulder. She turns around, slowly, as if she might stop herself, but she knows she won’t; this apartment, these people, none of it is right.

Her foot comes down on something plastic and snaps it in half. She bends down and lifts up the broken half of a small toy ramjet, the scoop dangling from the body as if by a single cable.

In the elevator, Josephine calls Phineas again. He picks up right away. She waits to speak, breathes slowly.

Phineas voice is nervous: “Josephine?”

“How soon,” Josephine asks, “until you can get another ramjet booked?”

21

22

23

An Ode to Octomom Sierra Smith

24

I. It began with the gloop of an egg on the buttery rock face, a soft white glow piercing the blackness. I used a purple tentacle to gently count across the rows of white, the tip softly pulsing on each, my skin smoothing to their texture.

One hundred and sixty eggs sat before me, the current combing them to and fro. Embracing the edges of the lot, I merged with the rock, squishing and stretching away any discomfort.

One after another, I held each egg between two suckers, removing pieces of algae and the stray strand of seaweed. Only when I could vaguely see the outline of two black dots, sightless eyes peering through the opaque jelly enclosure, would I tuck the egg back under my mantle. I admired the glistening white heap, eager to meet its inhabitants.

II. The brood below me had the soft hum of life, yet were not quite alive. Each tentacle flexed and twisted, trying to expel a new stiffness, but they were always careful to keep the white rows intact. The occasional crab scuttled by, its beady eyes craving the opaque orbs, but one flick of a tentacle, one glance at my crescent scar, sent them running. One measly crab was no match for eight alert arms. The sight of small fish, crabs—my usual meals—no longer gave me a pang of hunger, and I wondered when I’d felt that last. I gazed down at the tentacles, sucking the rock, encircling the eggs, slighter than I’d remembered them, but as alert as ever. The color had oozed from my skin. My eyes drifted from my slender arms and back to the rows beneath them. The pimples on my pale skin smoothed. I methodically scooped up each egg, giving them a fresh shine; maybe I could rub some life into them.

III. I could not remember what used to consume my thoughts.

My tentacles methodically performed the daily tasks with little supervision—cleaning and straightening eggs, shooing crabs. There was no fatigue, no hunger, not much of anything to feel or be felt. The darkness around me grew heavier, the eggs small, pulsing beacons lightening the load. Polishing an egg, the crescent scar on my tentacle was just visible on the dulling flesh. I revived the creator in my mind. The crescent a gift, from my only meeting with my kind. Tentacles intertwined, a friendly introduction, we had decided to create life.

But his absent puckering of the sea floor set me on edge, and his grip was a bit too tight, touch too lingering. My tentacles receded sharply, his suckers releasing with a “pop”. Fearing for my life, I took his instead. The particularly harsh grasp of my sixth leg encircled his mantle, and his beak pierced my flesh in defiance. The leg was persistent, but so was he. A struggle and then stillness, another leg cast him off. His mantle and tentacles slipped into nothing.

IV. A new battle was encroaching. My occasional shooing of the crabs had relaxed to half-heartedly shooting water currents at them, and the lack of effort was noted. Their scuttling little bodies and eager pinchers snapped hungrily at the

slight jelly eggs. A fierceness grew in their beady little eyes.

They came in pairs, like never before, and soon pairs of pairs, with an extra friend, a younger sibling, until the numbers pimpled my skin. My tentacles, eager to protect me, flicked a warning in every direction, addressing the small circle. In their numbers, the scuttling, clacking and pinching bubbled the water. The tentacle’s warning flicks weren’t heeded, and they came closer. A full circle of clacking and tapping, my skin losing color with each snap. A hush fell over them - and then the rush. They drove forward, a sea of sharp edges, nowhere safe to touch. Each diving at different eggs. My thoughts stopped and my tentacles began. They initiated a vicious counterattack. They snapped claws, shattered shells, and the black water ran blue. The crabs scuttled, jumped, pinched, and grasped, but a tentacle blocked each movement. I was still as the warrior tentacles wriggled and tore and crunched furiously, occasionally asking to use my beak for help with a rocky shell. Below me the eggs rocked peacefully, untouched, unscathed. Everything was over in a matter of minutes. One tentacle picked shards of shell from another while its neighbor sucked a stray claw from its flesh. They then began to inspect each egg, while I used my siphon to blow the shattered crabs out of sight. Their bodies in shards, an eye here, a shell there, a stray claw. The eggs were intact— one hundred and sixty to be exact! I swelled with pride as my tentacles shined them.

V. The white eggs throbbed, my tentacles twitched. Movement was scarce, but so were visitors. No crabs to harass, only bits of shattered shell. The fish that passed by looked more concerned than curious. The eggs were denser, I more slender, everything simpler. The tentacles carried out life with me as the passenger. They fumbled across the rows of eggs, and tiny black eyes followed. On the final day, as a tentacle caressed an egg, there was a tiny “pop.” Out floated eight mini legs. I squinted. More “pops,” a sea of little legs, dozens of small eyes on me, tiny tentacles prodding the tentacles’ suckers. After a prolonged stretch, egg one hundred and sixty burst. A soft, white head made its way into the world. Its gentle eyes met mine, a wordless introduction. The tentacles released five years of grip strength. The buttery rock let go of my suckers, white tentacles drifted upwards. Weightless, we floated, little eyes blinking good bye. warrior tentacles wriggled and tore and crunched furiously, occasionally asking to use my beak for help with a rocky shell. Below me the eggs rocked peacefully, untouched, unscathed. Everything was over in a matter of minutes. One tentacle picked shards of shell from another while its neighbor sucked a stray claw from its flesh. They then began to inspect each egg, while I used my siphon to blow the shattered crabs out of sight. Their bodies in shards, an eye here, a shell there, a stray claw. The eggs were intact—one hundred and sixty to be exact! I swelled with pride as my tentacles shined them.

25

Dinner with A Few Fellow Aliens Miriam Hyman

Love To Death Wisdom from the ancestors that number billions: Drill a hole in the New World to escape the Old River When soldiers threaten, wave friendly flags but Don’t dally. Wife is waiting in the liver.

Find her. Envelop her. Give her the world Drop by drop. She will die in your arms.

Pray that she will bear many.

Not quite billions.

Pray, in the culling, a progeny Navigates the snaking intestine.

Escapes through the sphincter.

Reunites with Old River.

Pray, before soldiers find you foe Or the world runs dry.

Plagiarize the Song The mind of my mind is not mine We are ours.

Our melody traced to the beetle I’ve found dead.

Our meal to clasp in my mandibles.

Our weight to balance on each bowing blade of grass.

Returning with our dinner, I’m alone.

I, and the beetle I carry, Discover the senseless cloak over the earth.

It is not ours. All blue and white checkers. No pheromones.

Not ours - but our danger.

It descends as blackness, eclipses our sky.

I drop our dinner. Call panic.

Fear is her last scent.

It emanates from her carcass. Even in death, which is just hers, Life is ours.

We smell her shriek, chorus the single, acrid note, Trace a new melody home.

Our beetles are delicious.

Blood Fluke; Plant; Ant; Octopus 26

Eat the Sun The sun will rise for breakfast, like it always does.

I eat the air that light makes food, And exhale the waste that leggeds breathe, frenzied By their limbs and restless tongues.

My world is still Soil and sky.

Sometimes the mushrooms whisper, “more.”

But there is no need to be greedy.

It is excitement enough to taste my sister’s pain in the air A flesh wound, but she’ll regenerate Twice.

Play with Your Food My arms clung to think My skin felt to see Eight tentacles, not mine.

Tasty!

Before I bit, I tossed and toyed.

A meal’s meant to be enjoyed.

Laughing water, grinning white I dined on cannibal’s delight.

27

Zach Hollander 28

Bugs See in Pixels Bugs see in Pixels This I know In a thousand 48 bits

or 64, I don’t know But I know bugs see in Pixels Unlike our own, Their eyes

have many, many lenses And each lens, like

a dot

a tiny focus that brings a spot

a ray of light

into a colorful pixel And they gather up these pixels

and lay them out across their mind And like a tiny mosaic

that stretches from 8 to 4 o’clock

They build a pixel world A thousand lights

trace along their spine

crawling up their optic nerves

arranging in a line Yes, they see in Pixels Their sight as true as yours or mine Tiny computer brains

spin games, arrays

an RPG, LED

Reverse Display A thousands of dots

and three colored spots

blending and forming

tricking and bleeding across my screen And I think about

the world in words And the Bugs

that See in Pixels

Nathan Chu 29 Zach Hollander

Interview with Dr. Sarah Petersen: A Question Worth a Million Dollars Meheret Ourgessa How does one cell (a fertilized egg) turn into a fully functioning organism? That’s the million-dollar question that gets Dr. Petersen out of bed every day.

Dr. Petersen is Kenyon College’s Ashby Denoon Assistant Dressor of Neuroscience. She joined the Kenyon faculty in 2016 and was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Developmental Biology at Washington University at St. Louis, having received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2011 and her Bachelor of Science from the University of Tennessee at Martin in 2004. And while Dr. Petersen is currently a member of the neuroscience department at Kenyon College, a lot of her work makes use of many molecular biology techniques.

Though it is fair to say that Dr. Petersen’s research interests lie in developmental biology, neuroscience, and molecular biology, there are other fields her work branches into as well. “I do think [my research] sits at that intersection,” she mentions, but goes on to say that her work incorporates elements from cell biology, pharmacology and other related areas of study. Since graduate school, her research has focused on investigating the molecular mechanisms that lead to fully developed nervous systems in animals. Before coming to Kenyon, Dr. Petersen had been doing research on synaptic remodeling (the process by which synapses or connections between neurons are created and destroyed). But her current work at Kenyon is aimed at elucidating how glial cells (defined as any type of cells that support neurons) develop.

Dr. Petersen stresses the importance of glial cells. In fact, she would go as far as to say that neurons are comparatively boring. But why all the fuss about glial cells and what are they even? Glial cells (also known as glia) are the other less popular class of cells in the animal nervous system, with much of the fame going to neurons or nerve cells. But in the nervous systems of vertebrates (animals with backbones), glia far outnumber neurons, often by several factors. And while glial cells, unlike neurons, don’t conduct electrical impulses, they are still a crucial part of the nervous system as they provide necessary support and protection for neurons. For example, Schwann cells—a type of glial cell found outside the brain and spinal cord—help form a myelin sheath around nerve fibers that transmit electrical signals along their length.

The myelin sheath (made up of proteins and fatty substances) functions much like an insulator wrapped around electrical wiring to efficiently transmit nerve impulses along the 30

fibers. But Dr. Petersen also thinks Schwann cells (which are the type of glial cells her research has been focused on) are really cool because they have regenerative capabilities and can help to repair injured nerves. This is the reason why injuries to nerves in the peripheral nervous system (the part of the nervous system beyond the brain and spinal cord) tend to be a lot less severe than injuries to the central nervous system, which lack Schwann cells.

But if glial cells are that important and interesting, why don’t we hear about them as much? Dr. Petersen offers a great explanation, “The things you hear in the news or the things that you can explain to a non-scientist family member are [scientific findings] that are pretty well worked out.”

There is still so much to learn about glial cells and their functions. Even from what we know now, glial cells seem to have many different roles in the nervous systems and more functions that have yet to be understood. For all these reasons, Dr. Petersen, as a scientist, thinks glial cells are “where it’s at.”

For all the research Dr. Petersen has done in neuroscience, she was surprisingly not interested in the field as an undergraduate. She was a lot more into genetics at the time.

It was only while interviewing for graduate school (“literally during the interview”) that Dr. Petersen found out she was fascinated by developmental biology. And when she finally explored the different labs at Vanderbilt, she developed her background and interests in neuroscience. Her undergraduate experience with neuroscience was not at all positive, “[neuroscience] seemed like a black box that felt very untenable and I couldn’t answer the questions I wanted to answer in neuroscience.” But in graduate school laboratories, Dr. Petersen recognized the power of using model organisms (well-studied non-human species that are used to learn more about different biological processes) to understand genes and development in questions of the nervous system, which eventually led to her getting into the field of neuroscience.

Having never taken an undergraduate neuroscience course though, Dr. Petersen had to learn a lot on the fly in graduate school. She recalls once turning to a classmate who was a neuroscientist and asking, “So when it says current...like, current of what?” to which they replied, “um...ions?”

Making expert use of model organisms was, of course, a skill Dr. Petersen carried over to her work at Kenyon. The Petersen lab often relies on two different model organisms: D.

rerio (zebrafish) and the microscopic roundworm, C. elegans.

The lab uses these model organisms because they have transparent embryos, which makes observing their development over time much easier. Coincidentally, Dr. Petersen also has another for using these animals: “I like that they can’t escape.”

In her past studies of synaptic remodeling, Dr. Petersen and her colleagues often used C. elegans which are great for investigating synapses. But with her increased focus on Schwann cells and myelin development, Dr. Petersen does a lot more work with zebrafish now (sadly, C. elegans don’t make myelin). Dr. Petersen would have gladly stuck with the worms had they expressed the tissue types and genes she was interested in though, as she says, “You chose the simplest model to answer your question, always.” But even with such ‘simple’ model organisms, Dr. Petersen’s work shows that there is so much that can be learned with them about neural development in animals.

One of the latest on-going investigations in the Petersen lab has to do with a zebrafish mutant dubbed ‘stl159’ which displays atypical nervous system development. Dr. Petersen and her students had first noticed that the mutant fish had abnormally patterned glia in their peripheral nervous system. But after growing the fish to adulthood, they found that there were a lot of other issues with the mutants too (the adults looked like they were accidentally squished growing up but somehow managed to keep living). Interestingly, when investigating the mutation, Dr. Petersen and her students found that only a muscle gene (tcf15, also known as paraxis) had been altered. As Dr. Petersen explains, the question then became, “Why on earth would a muscle gene cause defects in myelination?” It turns out that the changes in the muscle had affected the development of the surrounding glial cells (and neurons too as the lab later found out). This suggests that normal neural development in these zebrafish depended on proper cues from the developing muscle tissue.

As Dr. Petersen mentions, because of the lack of cues during development “[the developing nerve] has no sense where it should be when.” She further stresses that the nerves of interest in this study were sensory nerves that don’t have any

connections or direct interactions with muscles at all. Nonetheless, their development was affected by the muscular environment they were exposed to.

To contextualize the significance of this finding, Dr. Petersen mentions that in diseases that affect muscle development, such as muscular dystrophy, there is often coincidental loss of nerve supply and the precious myelin that protects the nerves. She continues to say, “The muscle as an environment for the nerve seems to be critically important. We know a couple of proteins that are important for this, but not enough.”

Therefore, knowing how the muscle environment affects neural development can be important in understanding the effects such diseases can have on the nervous system.

Since coming to Kenyon in August 2016, Dr. Petersen has found the college to be “small but mighty.” She says that Kenyon provides great support for what she wants to do with her research and enjoys the teaching experience here too. In her introductory biology lab class at Kenyon, Dr. Petersen usually avoids giving her students easy and simple answers.

Often, she will reply to a student’s question with one of her own, encouraging students to dig deeper and find the answers for themselves. She also consistently has an infectious positive attitude during her classes and office hours that makes her whole class feel friendly.

As a result of her excellent work in teaching and research, Dr. Petersen had won the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career award back in early 2020. The award, which supports junior (relatively new and non-tenured) college faculty who effectively integrate the roles of teacher and scholar in the context of their organization, came with a transformative grant for the Petersen lab, which has used the money to acquire new equipment for research, teaching, and even hiring staff.

While the questions Dr. Petersen investigates are interesting by themselves, her research projects, like stl159, also have important medical significance. A lot of the pharmacology-related work in the Petersen lab, for example, is geared towards finding some possible medical applications. A recent paper from the Petersen lab (Bradley et al., 2019) screened for and found small molecules that can activate proteins necessary for myelination and thus could potentially be applicable in reversing myelination defects. More generally, knowing more about the development of different parts of the nervous system is important to better understand and treat developmental disorders as well. On the topic of the significance of her studies, Dr. Petersen says, “It’s nice that I can have it both ways, that I can study something medically interesting and also [...] scientifically fascinating.” But at the end of the day, more than just the medical applications, it’s still about that million-dollar question for her: “I am a nerdy scientist and I just think it’s a really cool question.”

Rand Burnette 31

Medium: Wire, Paper Mache, and Acrylic Paint October 2020 Grateful Beckers This sculpture, depicting layers of vascular plant cells, is both a microscopic view and a microcosm of the whole organism. My concept was based on material we were covering in my Intro Bio lecture. The gradient from blue to green represents the movement of water upward from the roots of the plant to the leaves, where water is needed for photosynthesis. The tops of the cells - the parts which would get the most direct sunlight - are bright green to represent the photosynthesis that occurs in the leaves of the plant where sunlight is absorbed by chlorophyll. If you look closely you can see different types of cells and structures represented including xylem, phloem and companion cells. My use of positive and negative space makes the sculpture interactive with sunlight and gives the illusion of layers and layers of many cells, further adding to the representation of plant tissue.

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Mechanical Human Huijun Mao

I stretched out my 25th arm and swept the acres of garbage in the P1 Area of No.3 Landfill. If artificial sensors were still implemented on my fingers, I could have deciphered from the familiar electrical pulses that the piles of garbage I had just shut inside the combustion chamber included my legs, arms, and head. The ignition started. I buried myself.

One Under the silky canopy of a deep blue sky, the moon hung like a bright yellow plate, scattering a thin layer of gold over the miles of forests under our feet.

“Moon rising, family gathers, from the sea, at this time,” the soft singing from Mama floated in the air, trickling through the dark quietness like a cool stream.

It was our tradition. Every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, we would climb to the highest rock of the southern mountain. Mama would spread out a clean woolen blanket; then, we would lie down and look at the sky and the moon and everything on top of us. Mama would start singing those ancient Chinese poems she loved. About the moon, the birth land, and the family.

“Family,” Mama would say, “makes you soft and makes you strong. Gives you love and is your strength.”

“Youran,” She liked to put one of her hands gently on my face and the other on her heart, “always remember your family.”

The word “family” always triggered a current of electrical pulses that flew through my memory chip, leaving a trace mark on the same place every time. If anyone was to take the chip out of my head under the microscope, they could have seen a deep sunken point on the lower left side. That was the place for family. The only mark that was deeper than the family belonged to the word “Mama.”

Mama was the first person I saw after my consciousness first awoke. The slender female figure in white cloak looking down at me from the bedside, her eyes like black diamond, but soft, tender with affection, her mouth twitching in a beautiful angle, her long smooth hair falling down over one of her shoulders. That left the first imprint on my spotless electronic chip.

She opened her mouth, “Mama.” The two-syllable word produced a sound wave that was captured by the receiver in 34

my ears, transmitted into electrical pulses processed by the CPU in my head.

I opened my mouth, the oscillator in my throat vibrated with the same electrical pulses being magnified under the instruction of my CPU. Pulses of sound flowed out.

“Mama.” I spoke the first word in my life.

She smiled.

Her smile was soon blocked by other people rushing into the room. They were all wearing identical white cloaks and operating on different shapes of metallic objects. I looked at them silently as my CPU processed the electrical pulses captured by the sensors all over my body.

At one point, the receiver in my ears was alert with sudden and intense sound waves. It seemed like they were having an argument.

My internal clock ticked on. After about 15 minutes, I captured the highest intensity sound wave I received that day.

It was from Mama.

Later, when my memory chip was imprinted with enough marks, I was able to decipher the meaning of that sound. It was a sentence. Mama said, “He is a human. He deserves the same treatment and rights any human being on this Earth.”

Unfortunately, based on what I later processed from my Identification Card, her attempt succeeded only in half. The “Race” column of the card read, “Mechanical Human.”

After that day, Mama brought me home and we lived together for twelve years.

Mama and I. We were the family.

She gave me the name “Li Youran,” after her last name “Li,” and the phrase Youran, which was from an ancient Chinese poem she loved. It was about flowers, mountains, seclusion, simplicity, and happiness.

Live an ordinary life and be happy. I guess that was the message she wanted to convey.

Two Mama sighed softly as she sat up from her blanket. Her brows frowned in an angle that was nearly undetectable, but I saw it. I didn’t like her being this way, sad and worried.

I always wanted Mama to be happy because that was what she wanted for me..

Family should take care of each other, Mama also said.

Therefore, I decided to sit up as well and hold my arms around her, just like what Mama had done before. It was

a way of showing love and support. I knew the words she didn’t say every time she hugged me.

“Thank you,” she smiled. I liked her smile. The expression caused the electrons in my head to dance through a familiar route of ups and downs created by years of experience.

I felt content.

I knew what she was worrying about. My school.

It was the fourth elementary school I’d attended after being kicked out by the former three. In fact, all of them welcomed me with great enthusiasm at first because having the only mechanical human in this world was a supreme honor.

For the first few months, things would go well as my learning process was not really different from other humans.

I listened in class. I imprinted on my memory chip from what I’d captured. Then, I grasped the knowledge.

After a few weeks, I even understood all the slangs that were popular among children. Because I could learn things upon first hearing, my classmates were willing to let me play in their games.

The teachers all liked me at first place because who wouldn’t like a diligent student who never moved around in class and remembered everything they said carefully? They loved to use me as a role model to encourage other students.

Sometimes the headmaster would call me in for a performance when he had guests.

But things would always go bad. I couldn’t figure out why. I’ve gone over my memory chip again and again and have done numerous body self-checks, but I can’t find any evidence of malfunctioning.

Eventually, classmates would start to evade me. The teachers’ expression would tighten every time they sent out test results. My central processing unit could detect strong emotions of fear from their eyes and faces.

The parents started to protest. They said I took the opportunities that belonged to their kids, that I would destroy the confidence of their kids’ developing minds, that I would demonstrate to the children that there was no point of studying because all they had to do was to install a CPU, and that there was no point of being a human in the end and human civilization would probably be destroyed.

“Who could perform better than a computer in the end?” some parents would say. “It’s unfair. There is no point in a computer competing with others. What would a computer get in the end? It’s meaningless.”

“That’s nonsense.” Mama was unhappy when she heard them. “Youran is not a computer,”she said. “He is as every part of a human as your kid. He learns everything from scratch.”

The situation would always be resolved with the headmaster showing up at our door and suggesting politely that their school was perhaps not a good match for “your kid’s outstanding performance” and that I should go somewhere else for a better education.

Mama would have to spend a long time contacting other

Bella Stevens schools.

I would not have been able to stay at my current school, if not for my history teacher, who gave me the same comfortable feeling as Mama had given me. He would always smile at me. And smiles would leave a deeper mark on my memory chip than any other expressions I caught from other people.

I don’t know why, but I have a mechanical tendency towards positive emotions.

Our first conversation happened in his office, after I helped move a stack of homework handouts onto the desk at his command. He then asked me to take a seat and looked at me with his warm black eyes, a deep searching look.

It wasn’t the first time I’d encountered this kind of look.

People always looked at me with curious eyes and even pointed fingers, but his eyes were less distanced, filled with something more, like Mama’s eyes. I didn’t understand what the extra thing in his eyes was.

Not until I went to the zoo with Mama. I noticed how people looked at those animals using the same kind of look they looked at me, but they would look at their children with the look alike Mama’s and my history teacher’s. That was an interesting finding.

“Tell me, Youran. What’s your dream?”, he sipped his tea and asked “I don’t dream,” I answered honestly, “sleeping is not necessary for me. Charging is.”

He chuckled, as if hearing something funny. “No no, Youran. I mean, have you ever considered what you want to be in the future?”

I searched my memory chip thoroughly and stopped at the two deepest imprints.

“I want to be a protector. Of Mama. Of my family” “Interesting.” He said.

After that, we would occasionally have private talks to35

gether. He seemed to take an interest in conversing with me.

Many times, he was intrigued by my answers and would start laughing, but I couldn’t make out the reasons. It was strange, the marks on my memory chip told me, because he was the only person, besides Mama who seemed to be entertained by my words.

I remembered the last time I went into his office, after he suggested to the headmaster that at least I should be an audit, if not a formal student.

“Youran,” he looked at me with his usual warm black eyes, “Do you know what is the biggest difference between you and a real human being?”

I didn’t know. Mama said I should be no different from other humans.

He glanced at the novel I held in my left hand.

I loved reading. Taking in those curvy lines on the paper felt like opening the birthday gift Mama prepared for me every year. A cluster of electrons would rush to some place in my memory chip that was never being set foot upon before.

Then, an unfamiliar, entirely new electricity pulses would be created and I enjoyed this sense of excitement.

He drank up his tea and stood up.

“Next time, Youran, you can try to write instead of read.

Create something of your own.”

He said with a look half filled with sadness, half with pity.

I didn’t reply. It was rare that my CPU would react in a time longer than one half a second.

He sighed.

“Your mother is being idealistic. History has taught us so many times, humans will never accept something that is not their own kind…”

Even though I was permitted to remain in school, being an audit meant I would never be able to go to middle school since I didn’t have the opportunities to participate in the entrance exam.

With the competition already being intensive, who would welcome a more competitive mechanical human?

Mama was anxious of this issue for several months because she really wanted me to have a normal school life.

“You deserve what other children have,” she said.

I didn’t really care about school life though. All I wanted was for Mama to release her brows because my memory chip told me that family was more important than other things.

Compared to Mama, middle school didn’t leave a trace.

“Come on,” Mama said, “It’s time to go home.”

We packed up our things. Mama held my right hand and we started walking downhill. Taking the last glance at the rock, I knew we would come back next year. We would have plenty of time in the future. Me and Mama. That’s what had happened the previous twelve years. My CPU is good at finding patterns to predict the future.

But it was the last time we ever spent Mid-Autumn Festival together.

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Three Darkness.

Silence.

Then there was light.

Like the first ray of sun in the early morning, a mad race of photons was shot out from the spotlight. The massless particles competed with each other to reach my body and light up my black jacket decorated with metallic glitter.

The air molecules that filled the atmosphere were stimulated. They fretted back and forth, sending disturbances across the stage.

My CPU processed the wave patterns from the air. One, two, three, four…It counted on until the designated mark was being triggered. As if a nuclear bomb exploded in my head, electrons started boiling in my main battery, sending currents throughout my whole body, causing a series of motions from head to toe.

I started the aesthetic movements that were called dancing.

My central unit caught every drumbeat with a precision no more than 1 millisecond off and directed the rest of my body to swing with the rhythm accurately.

As the intensity of the sound increased, the music reached its climax, more triggers were pulled in my head and my movements became faster and more forceful. Thousands of metallic joints inside my body danced like elves, forming a river that allowed my body unexpected smoothness and flexibility.

After my CPU counted to 2033, I finished the last movement and slowed down according to the patterns imprinted in the memory chip. The music stopped, but different patterns of sound waves were created from the audience. All the judges stood up and looked at me with a mixture of admiration and amazement. They were applauding too.

“The best performance of the century,” one of them commented. The others nodded.

That night, I received the highest score and was rated as the top candidate for the World Dance Championship.

The next day, my photos occupied the headlines of every newspaper and social media outlet. “A miracle from the world’s first mechanical human,” they read. In less than a week, I became global nobility.

I was happy, not because I was famous, but because Mama’s worries were finally solved. We wouldn’t be worried about schooling anymore because I had become an idol.

Those people didn’t lie to me when they knocked on our door the day after the Mid-Autumn Festival. I could indeed contribute to our family and solve our problem by being an idol, a celebrity, a human who lived with fame and glory.

It wasn’t what other children had, but it was what they wanted to have.

To me, there wasn’t much difference between being a student and being a dancer. The learning process was the same. My memory clip would imprint the patterns and my

CPU would send out instructions accordingly. My body was built with enough mobility to be a good dancer. I could dance as well as I could study at school and if being a dancer meant there would be no worries about being kicked out l, I figured I would become one. Plus, Mama would be happy.

I won the next few rounds without much difficulty. My movements corresponded to the music with such preciseness and agility that no other contestants could match. Soon, I was competing in the semifinals with twelve other great dancers.

Yet, my CPU was still working to figure out some unknown factors related to the scoring system. Somehow, I detected that the score one received didn’t necessarily have a straight correlation with one’s dancing performance as I noticed my score dropping more quickly than my estimations.

It was strange, the CPU in my head told me. But I didn’t pay much attention to the abnormality. The championship didn’t mean much to me in the end.

Mama was waiting for me in the backstage just as she was waiting at the school gate every day after school in the past.

When she saw me, she would always smile in her usual way, causing a stream of current flowing through my body, a familiar sense of fulfillment.

“Nice job,” she said as she hugged me.

Our life didn’t change much. I would still wake up from my wireless charging base at seven in the morning after eight hours of “sleep.” Mama would hug me as I left for dance practices and hug me again when I came back. We would always take a walk together after dinner and she would still read stories to me before bed.

The marks on my memory chip deepened each day.

They formed my notion of life—my life, family life, life with Mama. My peaceful life hadn’t changed for 12 years.

The gap between me and the other players was closing. I won by a narrow margin in the second rounds of the Semifinals.

I let electrons flow through my memory chip and replayed my performance, trying to find out where I’ve done wrong that caused the drop in my score. Nothing. There was no malfunction.

As I shook hands with the judges as a usual after every performance, a part of my memory chip was triggered. Similar patterns detected. Their faces were of a familiar kind, tight with fear. Just like my former teachers and classmates.

I guessed that I wasn’t a very clever mechanical human in the end. If my CPU was sensitive enough, it would have drawn enough evidence from previous experience to tell me that the situation would start to change.

Yet, I kept moving on, like what I’d done every time before. I would walk until the path turned into a dead end. The previous three times, my path enclosed with me being kicked out of the school.

This time, it ended with Mama lying on the ground, unconscious, blood gushing from her head.

It was the final image in my memory clip before I lost my consciousness.

Four I didn’t exactly know when the turning point came. The attitudes of the judges and audience changed as obscurely as my former teachers’ and classmates’. My CPU never worked out the reasons for their change.

But my memory chip would accumulate enough marks to tell me that when people started to be afraid of me, they would take actions to get rid of me.

If I didn’t devote so much of my internal memory to my dancing to prevent any possibility of malfunctioning, I would have detected that the sound waves coming from the audience started to display a different pattern. It wasn’t applause, but boos and hisses and sometimes angry yelling.

What I did detect, however, was that Mama would still be frowning from time to time, but her expression would instantly turn into smiles when I came closer. The changes, like before, couldn’t escape my eyes. I asked her why and she replied she was just worrying I would be too tired, but I assured her that eight hours of charging was enough to sustain my daily activities.

I didn’t read the newspaper often because I would prefer the fresh feeling that fiction brought. But when I finally did, the headlines, still occupied by me, would read something like “Tragedy: computers taking over the world,” and “The future of aesthetic creation: long-held traditions destroyed.”

That was also the day when I bumped into the real trouble with humans.

I didn’t get to finish my performance.

My CPU got stuck for a second when it deciphered Mama’s figure from the camera in my eyes. She should not have been there in the middle of my dance, standing right in front of me, her face in alarm, her arms held out protectively as she tried to push me towards the backstage. It wasn’t until then that I detected piles of water bottles, tomatoes, shoes, and a lot of other things scattering on the luminous floor around me. They had, I realized, been thrown at me by the audience.

The people downstairs were stimulated by the sudden appearance of Mama. Some of them rushed towards the stage, headed right at me, yelling things like, “blasphemer of human creations,” “product of corruption,” “the toy of the capitalist-” Mama was furious. She stepped forwards and tried to prevent the people from getting near. Her advancement, however, only provoked the audience. They raised their hands and held up anything they could grab, surging towards us like a flood.

I wasn’t very afraid though because my artificial bones were hard enough to withstand any attack and my CPU was working at full capacity to abet any reaction. Even before the man on my right started to raise his chair, I had a complete set of escape movements worked out in my mind. His hands 37

gripped the back of the chair, which was analyzed in my head for sixty frames. He raised the chair above his head. One hundred and twenty frames passed. His muscles were constrained. Sixty more frames passed. The metallic joints in my knees tightened. The chair descended. My legs exploded with electrons. I squeezed through the narrow space in between just before the loud sound “CLUMP” took place.

And Mama was on the floor, at the exact place I was standing before.

Her face glowing in a ghostly white. The blood, a piercing red, rummaging her smooth black hair like a monster.

Her arms spread out. Like the wings of a flightless bird.

The man raised the chair again. I held up my hands towards the predicted path of his next movement.

As if a switch was pressed down somewhere in the back of my head where my CPU couldn’t reach, all the circuits were cut off. I stumbled and fell into darkness.

End Being the intelligent machine for garbage management in the No.3 landfill isn’t tiresome work for me.

Able to process information from more than thirty million electronic sensors within a few milliseconds, my CPU has no trouble controlling only fifty giant collecting arms moving at a much lower speed.

However, only my arms are able to move now because the rest of my current body is a part of the building.

When darkness takes over, all the machineries in the landfill will stop working. Everything falls into dead silence with only occasionally squeaking noises from some mice hidden in the corner. At this time, I will let tiny streams of electricity trickle through my memory chips, reliving my past twelve years of experience as a human, feeling every bit of sensations and emotions as if I can really touch and see. Most important of all, I will play over the image of Mama again and again.

Her face. Her hair. Her smile. Her soft singing.

I miss Mama.

I have no idea what happened to Mama that night after I passed out. When I was first created, the scientists, afraid of my potential strength, installed an emergency system in my head that bypassed the control of my CPU. The system will forcefully shut down everything once I conjure a slightest attempt of hurting any human being. I didn’t know the existence of the installation until that night, but I was never thinking about hurting any human beings. I always consider them my own kind. Why will I try to hurt any of them? Afterall, all I attempt to do is to protect Mama.

I’m worried, but I can’t do anything.

A few weeks later, the landfill manager discovers the unusual high electricity use during nighttime and places a restriction on the power supply. After that, I am not able to think of Mama often.

Perhaps that’s the difference between real humans and me. Humans can take initiative; I can only sink into darkness.

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There are times during working hours, however, when random electrons bump into different parts of my memory chip and trigger fragments of images and voices. Among them, one or two pieces of my history teacher’s words sometimes float through my mind.

He is not exactly correct in saying I can’t write because I do, in a way. The millions of electronic sensors spread across my skin will take in outside stimulations and transform them into electrical impulses serving as pens that write on my memory chip. He is not entirely incorrect though because it’s not writing in a human sense. I’m not doing the writing myself as I have no control over what I write. Receiving and writing is one of my basic programs, or as Mama will prefer to put it, my human instinct. It runs on itself, without extra execution from the CPU. But things change when I begin to imagine.

It’s hard to explain what actually happens, perhaps it’s just outside of the understanding of my CPU or even any human being. But it’s like a primitive force surging out deep inside me. Then, new simulations are created out of nowhere.

They form images, movements, voices, and sensations that don’t match up with any existing patterns on my memory chip. They are my imaginations, but they feel as real as any of my past experience.

I imagine Mama. What she will say when she looks at me.

How her face will smooth out if she sees my ability to clean up acres of rubbish in one instance. Will she praise me? Will she give me a hug, even though I’m too large to be held under human arms now? I imagine about my life, our life, the future I should have spent with Mama, the many Mid-Autumn Festivals we are never able to celebrate together.

The creation force rushes across my memory chip, flexible as the most intricate human fingers while at the same time harder than any diamond in the world, leaving indelible marks on my memory chip that neither time nor any electrical currents can remove. Perhaps it should not be called the memory chip anymore because it’s no longer for memory. It’s a chip that contains the many dreams and hopes of a mechanical human. It’s about a future that I have hoped for but never able to achieve. The peaceful “Youran” life Mama envisioned for me.

I keep imagining. As long as my CPU won’t start processing my marks, imagining won’t take up any energy nor distract me from my daily work. It’s as automatic as the five senses of human beings. It’s part of me.

Every day, I am leaving traces that I’m not able to access, but I don’t mind because I live in every bit of them. I’m inscribing part of myself in this world in hope of that one day someone else will get access to it, perhaps Mama, perhaps a second mechanical human. When they read it, they will know there was once the presence of a mechanical human whose name was Li Youran and who loved his Mama very much.

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