Amazon’s Relentless Growth Brings Cybernetically Enhanced War in This Poignant Sci-Fi Story

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Mother’s Hip†by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff. Enjoy!

Mother’s Hip

By Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff

High above the Amazon Rainforest, Hynd circled, her massive wingspan only visible by the shadow she cast on the battlefield below. She felt the wind pass across her wings, whispering of torrential rain coming; not her concern, so far above the clouds, but she packaged the data and shot it down to the comms base at ground level so the grunts would know what was coming.

Hynd never cared about the grunts, not really, not when they were so far beneath her, their bodies so different to her own. Her sixty-four wombs swelled, automated factory arms rapidly piecing her children together. Mother to a swarm of carbon fibre kids, their IFF tags dancing and playing amongst the trees, hunting anarchists through the rainforest with deadly precision.

Sheena went dark and Hynd’s heart broke for the eighty-first time that day. She was born with one weak rotor, but she was such a clever little girl, rewrote her firmware to compensate, outlasted her broodmates by more than an hour.

A tear dissipated from the heat of Hynd’s cybernetic eyes before it could roll down her cheek. Sheena should have been an engineer, but Hynd would have loved her just as much if she’d started a punk band, got drunk underage, and tried to pass off an obvious hangover as “just a stomach bug.â€

Three more of her children were shot out of the sky: Davey, Nicola, and Grant—anarchist combat heuristics upgraded again. A new software update seeped into the back of her head, just in time for her gestating brood. She would be right down there with her children if she could, if it would help keep them safe, but improved software was all she could offer them.

Her ripe wombs distended, the bomb bay doors along her fuselage opening, air rushing inside her like a chill breath into the lungs. Her babies dropped, two-by-two, their little aerodynamic bodies shaped for the long fall. Half of them would extend their wings and rotors, burning energy to halt their drop and fly buzzing into the fray. The others would extend fins and let their suicidal impulses lead them nose-first into anarchist heavy armour and hidden bunkers.

If only she could hold them, she thought. If only she could hold them to her hip, bounce them until they smiled and squeed. If only she could talk them out of it. But no matter how much she pled, she could not stop them. They were born to die, and still each death was a dagger in her beating heart.

• • •

The woman steps up onto the small stage, carrying a small, pink valve amplifier, a noisebox, and a black electroacoustic guitar. She’s obviously a veteran, her silver eyes glinting under the stage lights, her scalp a patchwork of long, black hair, and scars from where they removed her data ports. She wears a flowing black dress, silver ankh and eagle necklaces, engraved bracelets, and rings on every finger. Inside the dress she’s swimming, emaciated, another sign of post-cybernetics syndrome.

She sits on the stool at the centre of the stage, checks the tuning on her guitar, and makes a small adjustment. She leans into the microphone and taps it gently.

“I’m, uh, Mother’s Hip, and I’m going to play a few songs,†she says, her voice husky, affect flat.

A guy with a mug of beer cheers and laughs before immediately going back to talking loudly with his friends. The rest of the bar doesn’t even seem to notice. A group of trans dykes plays augmented pool at the table in the back, and a glamorous brunette with dark lipstick and heavy eyeshadow sits at the bar, smoking a clove cigarette in a long holder, frowning at something on an AR screen only she can see. The bartender cleans a glass slowly, his fire engine red cyber-arms decorated in bright stickers like tattoos, an ex-military mecha fighting tournament playing in the air above his head.

It’s not a large space. Not much bigger than the cockpit of her Lilith-class mothership back in the war. At its centre there had been a sepulchral altar, lit up by dull red lights that doubled as her living coffin. She would not climb into the gun-metal gray tube. Instead they installed her in it, her flesh skewered through with data cables and tubes for water, feeding, and waste. Her head obscured beneath a heavy HUD like an inverted crown, her arms outstretched in cruciform. Cooling fluid pumping through big tubes around, under, and above her. Her flesh-self held in place by tethers she’d forget immediately once she primed her engines, hit the throttle, and felt the power coursing through every part of her huge and transcendent form. She would stay in the air for days at a time. Weeks. With only her datafeeds and her children to keep her company. They called her mother. To everybody else, she was Hynd.

“This first one is,†the musician clears her throat then swallows, the heat of the stage lights drawing sweat from her skin. A drop slides down her cheek and off her chin, but she ignores it. “‘Stillborn Skyfish.’â€

Her fingers snake along the fretboard, weaving a gentle melody to evoke the feeling of waves lapping against the beach. She nods her head along with the beat coming from her noisebox like angry static, and she lets it carry her. Music always calmed her. She played bass in a punk rock band when she was a teenager, when she still thought she was a boy, but the band broke up at the end of high school. So long ago now. Long before she signed up for the Amazon Prime Air Brigade at twenty years old, desperate and unemployed. But she always wondered how far the band could have gone if they had kept playing.

“Wasted . . . away . . .†she sings over her strumming. A mournful tone, noticeably more tuneful than her speaking voice. One of the trans dykes makes eye contact with her for a second while she’s teeing up her shot and smiles. The woman blushes and looks down at her guitar before closing her eyes. “In cloud seas . . . She plays.â€

• • •

Sometimes the wind would hit like waves, Hynd’s internal structure shuddering with the force. She would clench her teeth, as though she could hold it all together with just the strength of her jaw.

Her babies grew inside their wombs; Hynd set them to birth inside her hold and wait, then she set subroutines to track weather patterns. She would give her children the best start in life she could, without a wayward gale throwing them off course.

She shifted direction, cut the wind shear enough for her bones to stop rattling, and checked her sensors. Nothing else up this high but thin wisps of cloud moving beneath her in parallax, the ground far, far below.

Incoming signal like an itch inside her ear canal, so deep she wouldn’t be able to reach it with her pinkie finger even if her hands weren’t splayed to either side, needlelike connectors inserted under her fingernails, linking her organic nerve fibres to the ship’s peripheral cybernetic nervous system.

With an autonomic reflex like scratching, Hynd accessed the signal and ran it through a battery of decryption algos. It unlocked almost immediately, old code from early in the war—the first one Amazon’s Coding Auxiliary was able to crack.

“—want your children to be able to breathe?†a woman said.

The signal was weak, quiet. Hynd boosted the power to her comms array and the voice continued, clearer, like the woman was standing in the cockpit beside her altar, speaking directly into her ear.

“We’re all desperate. We’re unemployed and scraping by however we can, or otherwise we’ve got jobs but we’re overworked and underpaid. It’s hard to think about the future when it seems like there isn’t one. But these are the lungs of the world, and we have to save them.â€

“Hello?†Hynd said, her voice a rasp, scraping raw from her throat.

“Holy fuck. Hello. Who is this?â€

“Lilith-class Mothership, Hynd Revel.â€

There was silence on the line but for the soft crackle of interference. “No shit, I’m speaking to a mothership?†When Hynd didn’t respond the woman continued. “I’m glad you answered—I was getting sick of repeating the spiel.â€

“Who are you?†Hynd asked.

“Sorry, how rude of me. I’m Peta. I’m with the anarchists, down on the ground somewhere beneath you. We can help, y’know. Amazon does all kinds of shit to their soldiers and pilots. We’re figuring out how to undo a lot of their control software, give people their selves back.

“I mean, how do you know you even want to fight? How much of this is you, and how much is their programming?â€

• • •

The woman finishes her song and clears her throat again. “Sorry, can I get some water up here? Make sure it’s cold, please.â€

She just can’t drink it at room temperature, not since that brief period between leaving high school and joining up with Amazon where she was on Basic and it was all she could afford to drink. Basic Income started out as revolutionary public policy, but by the time she was on it, decades later, it had turned into a gilded leash that kept you mostly locked into boarding houses, paying ninety percent of your meagre income for a room that you had to share with several others.

The trans lesbian who smiled earlier deposits a glass on the pink amp beside her with a gentle nod of recognition, before returning to her game. She wears a dog collar with a small metal tag engraved with the name Crystal, but the woman isn’t sure if the name is hers or her “owner’s.†She takes a sip of water, ice clinking against the glass. It tastes good. And with the ice, it’ll stay cold for a while. She loves that. She puts the glass back down on the amp, condensation already forming, and fiddles with the tuning heads of her guitar in preparation for her second song.

“This next one,†she says, confidence slowly building with more time beneath the stage lights, “is called ‘On Angel Wings.’ It’s about . . .â€

She hesitates, uncertain if she wants to reveal her former allegiances. Some crowds will heckle an Amazon veteran, and on one level she gets it: What she and her employers did there was a tragedy. But on another level, she writes her songs to try and process what she did, who she was, and what was done to her.

“. . . my time as a delivery drone pilot,†she says finally, losing her nerve. Military vets aren’t the only ones who suffer from post-cybernetics syndrome. Plenty of civilian ground and air truckers suffer from it, as well as heavy users of industrial exoskeletons, but that doesn’t stop it being stigmatised now the war is over. She notices the glamorous brunette at the bar has shifted three stools closer, AR screen temporarily forgotten as she hangs off Hynd’s words. She looks down at her fretboard until her nerves settle. “I hope you like it, ’cause it’s really . . .â€

She hits her noisebox, hissing rhythmic like the ocean beating against the shore, and starts to play—sound like a summer breeze, with a gentle tone of yearning.

“That was really when I learned to love my children, y’know? By being them, by living them,†she says over the song’s long, building instrumental intro, thinking back to her days in the UCAV Wraith pool. She spent a couple of years piloting the drones remotely—embodying them each time she took to the air—before she proved she had the aptitude for the mothership program. “It wasn’t just my conditioning. Though it still hurt when they stripped that from me, because—†She pauses. “I was never given any choice. All I ever wanted was a choice.â€

She looks up at the space above the audience, below the lights. There are tears around the orbit of her cybernetic eyes. She blinks the tears away and starts to sing . . .

• • •

The entire topside of Hynd’s fuselage was panelled in reinforced photovoltaics, gleaming bright beneath the South American sun. It felt like warmth, like comfort food, but it wasn’t enough to keep her in the air indefinitely. She birthed another litter of children; these ones she would be able to keep close—for a time. They formed a defensive grid around their mother; their pure, innocent love demonstrated in a willingness to die for her. Always. Like so many had.

She began her slow descent, circling downwards in a kilometre-wide spiral, toward the resource platform floating beneath the cloud line. Her heart beat faster, harder, a siren whined in her bowels. She was most vulnerable when refuelling, even with her children surrounding her and the platform’s autoturrets scanning for threats.

She broke through the heavy blanket of clouds, the ground revealing itself beneath her – the brilliant green foliage, the myriad brown craters formed by her fallen children and other ordnance, the stark black char of burnt trees, bodies, cybernetics, and heavy armour. A golden blade cut through the air far below—a Revenant.

Her superstructure shuddered, or she did; the Revenants were a vicious fusion of flesh and machine, suicidal in their approach to combat—the very antithesis of herself and her body, made only for creating life. A kind of life, at least.

The hair on the back of her neck stood on end and Hynd realised the platform’s turrets were tracking her approach, twin-barrels like void-black eyes staring at her. She initiated a handshake, the turrets turning away as her security codes were accepted. An articulated arm extended from the platform’s reactor hub carrying the power umbilical, the connector slotting inside her with a slight gasp from the back of her throat. The high-intensity recharge was awkwardly erotic when parsed through her chimeric body, cybernetic and organic signals blurring together. Whether it was an accident of her design or deliberate engineering, she had never asked. She knew she would get no answer.

“Sorry I haven’t been in touch.â€

Hynd started at the voice suddenly speaking in her ear. Most days, her only conversation was with the wind.

“Peta?†Hynd said.

The anarchist responded: “The one and only. Your side took out our long-range transmitter, so I couldn’t reach you.â€

Jane. It wasn’t just Hynd’s side that had done it, but Hynd’s child. Jane was stubborn but creative; the intricate arabesque she danced in her descent was elegant and beautiful. A parting gift and her entire life’s work. That and the explosion.

“I guess you must be under the clouds now then,†Peta said.

“That information is classified.†Hynd hadn’t spoken—hadn’t meant to speak, the words forced from her mouth by some autonomic security conditioning. It was not the first time it had happened to her, but it was still an insult. If they could trust her enough to merge her flesh with a 200-million-dollar mothership, they should trust her with her own tongue.

“For the longest time we thought the motherships were entirely automated. It’s strange knowing you’re a person,†Peta said.

“Strange how?†Hynd asked.

“I’m not sure if you know how much damage you do down here with your demons.â€

A pause. “Those are my children.†The words escaped through Hynd’s clenched jaw.

“But that’s what they call you, right? Lilith-class. She’s the mother of demons.â€

“I love my children,†Hynd spat.

A procession of materiel drones emerged from the resource platform. She opened her bay doors and let them fill her bowels with the components she would need to gestate the next generations of her offspring.

“I didn’t mean any offense,†Peta said. “I guess I just wonder how much of that love is you, and how much is conditioning. Calling them demons might seem cruel, but they aren’t really children either, are they? They’re weapons. They’re weapons you create and control, and you’re doing it for the wrong side. We’re fighting to save the lungs of the Earth, Hynd. We’re fighting against capital before it chokes us all. Can’t you see that?â€

Hynd could see that. She had no faith in the company, its uploaded CEO, or its mostly-AI board of directors. But the work they provided was the only thing that kept her from abject poverty, and now this motherhood had given her purpose. Even if the purpose was not truly her own. It felt like her own, it felt true and sacred in a way nothing in her life ever had.

“We could change what they’ve done to you, Hynd. Undo their conditioning and let you decide for yourself. To give you a choice.â€

Before Hynd could respond, an alarm sounded in her head like a migraine spike, drawing her attention to a red blur zigzagging across her radar screen. Her children reacted instantly, moving to form a loose wall between her and the incoming threat.

She zoomed in with her hull cameras, watched the Revenant bank and spin, effortlessly dodging autoturret fire as it climbed high above the rainforest and then tore past the floating platform at impossible speeds. Hynd got a proper look at it—painted like a jaguar, a snarling face adorning its nose. Its body was a pair of wings, a large afterburner, and so many mismatched weapons it was difficult to see how it could stay in the air. It didn’t need a cockpit when the pilot was basically a brain in a jar. And the anarchists mutilate themselves willingly to do it. She felt sick.

Her children broke away to give chase as autoturret tracers swung back and forth like a cat’s tail. Suddenly the Revenant stopped on a dime and turned, its nose pointed not at Hynd, but at the platform’s reactor hub.

“This is you, isn’t it?†Hynd shouted into comms.

“What?†Peta said, sounding confused. A good actor—Hynd had to give her that.

Hynd rotated her VTOL engines and dumped all power into forward thrust. Slowly she pulled away from the platform, recharge arm stretching to hold on to her.

The Revenant launched two volleys of micromissiles, explosions tearing through the reactor’s shielding. The nimble craft roared through the opening, disappearing from sight.

Explosion like a thundercrack, the cloud of flames engulfing her children, scorching her wings as she fled. She tore the recharge arm free as the resource platform canted grossly and began to fall toward the forest below.

• • •

She starts to feel self-conscious after “Fault Line on the Moon,†the song she moved into so effortlessly after “On Angel’s Wings.†It talks about the pride she felt for her daughter who took out the transmitter . . . What was her name again? It can be hard to recall those days now, her body, her entire physiology, altered again to something resembling her form from before the war. She runs a hand through her hair, feeling the scar tissue from where they filled in the dataports they removed from her skull.

She calms herself by looking around the bar. Nobody is paying attention to her anyway. What bothers her more is that the trans lesbians appear to be fighting. The girl she’s calling Crystal on account of the tag on her collar doesn’t want to leave. But the others . . .? She looks away. It’s not my fault, is it? Have they figured out the sort of person I used to be?

“This next song is about regrets,†she says, her heart pounding as she stomps the footswitch for her noisebox twice to cue up the next beat. Crystal shoots a longing look at her while her friends push her off the table and towards the door. “Believe me, I have many.â€

The glamourous woman at the bar is staring at her intensely. She couldn’t tell before, but her eyes are cybernetic too: natural-looking, SOTA, the irises blinking red to show she’s recording. She briefly thinks about telling her to stop, but on some level, she knows she signed up for this as a performer.

The woman with the guitar swallows nervously. “Anyway . . . This one’s called ‘Friendly Fires.’â€

The noisebox is a tiny FM synthesizer when played right. Her staccato high hat recontextualised into a skittering simulacrum of a crackling fire, interspersed with bass drum kicks to give the sense of drone bombs going off throughout the song, which itself is upbeat and melodic by comparison.

“I could have loved you if you were a monster,†she sings as she plays a simple pop four-chord progression on her guitar. Her voice and drums are meant to be the focus here, not the guitar for once. She’s proud of this song in particular for that. “I could have trusted that you’d know the score.â€

Three white noise hand claps from the noisebox leading to a bass drum kick.

“You showed me hate through a mask of forgiveness.

Held out your hand showed us both who you were.â€

Another three claps from the noisebox leading to a bass drum kick.

“And I knew,†her voice lifts here while the noisebox moves to cymbal crashes fine-tuned to sound like driving rain, that, like it did back in the war, quenches her high-hat fires while a metronome-like click sounds in the background. Evocative of her days in the hangar. Crossing off the days, amusing herself with trivial VR entertainment while she waited for a storm to end. “The sick joke they’d made me. As you knew . . .â€

A bass kick, then the skittering high hats come back again.

“It was all that I’d got.â€

• • •

A new objective dropped into the back of Hynd’s mind via satellite uplink. The edge of her tongue tasted metallic, her face twitched in and out of a sneer—a priority target then, triggering a vile sort of rage that would hold her in its grip until her mission was successful. She steered south, toward the target coordinates, tracking inbound friendly escort Wraiths on her radar.

Her wombs ticked and clicked, new children being gestated and birthed, held inside her where they could stay safe until the bombing run. Within minutes the four remotely piloted Wraiths were holding perfect formation far below her—far enough to intercept any threat before it could climb to her altitude.

Hynd was glad of the support, but the Wraiths felt wrong somehow, piloted by the ghosts of other people, but hollow of flesh. She would have preferred if they worked like her children—autonomous and alive in their own way, developing a unique cadence and approach to life in the brief time allotted them.

An alarm sounded, rattling her chest like a panic attack; a red dot burned on her tracking system, low altitude, following the river, far beneath the cloud line.

Hynd signalled to two of her escorts to drop down and shadow it. Wraith pilots had nothing to lose, flying from the safety of a deep bunker or a command centre back home. But Revenant pilots were deeply enmeshed within their agile war machines—the line between one and the other nonexistent. They lived only in and for the moments they were in flight.

The Revenants had been Wraiths once, the machines captured in nets strung up between the strongest trees of the rainforest battlefields and repurposed by the anarchists. They never fly between the trees anymore: That work is left to Hynd’s children.

The red dot on Hynd’s radar seemed to ignore the Wraiths on approach, continuing to trail the bends of the river. She connected to the Wraiths’ video feeds, both lenses zoomed in tight to track the Revenant: a stripped-down silver arrow, customised to prioritise speed rather than power. Its only armament was an auto-tracking gun turret, and a mesh satellite dish had been jury-rigged onto the rear end of its fuselage. The ship was painted in a pattern of caiman scales, with a grinning lizard man adorning the nose.

With one eye on the Wraith feeds, Hynd kept flying toward her target coordinates, still unsure of what it was she would be hitting, what objective was worth the lives of so many of her children.

Quickly the Revenant broke from its path, zagging inhumanly fast away from the river, doubling back. One of her escorts was hit before the pilot even had a chance to react, explosive shells tearing through its fuselage. The second escort moved to engage, the dogfight an abstract dance of two dots on Hynd’s tracking screen.

One dot. Another escort downed.

“Hynd, is that you?â€

“Peta?†She wasn’t sure how the anarchist was contacting her, so high above the clouds.

“Things are getting desperate down here, Hynd. You must understand.â€

“What are you saying?†Hynd asked. Her focus was on the tracking screen—the Revenant now gaining altitude rapidly, her last two escorts holding position, waiting to meet it.

“There’s a transmitter on that Revenant,†Peta said. “We’re going to undo what they’ve done to you. We’re going to free you from their conditioning. It’s just software—a package nestled somewhere between your brain and the mothership’s command and control systems.â€

“You can’t do that,†Hynd said, uncertain why Peta’s words struck more fear into her heart than the approaching Revenant.

“You’ll thank me when this is over, Hynd, I promise you.â€

The Revenant broke through the clouds, turret firing an arcing line of tracers through the air; one Wraith banked too late, its wing chewed up by explosive shells. Hynd watched from her own hull cameras as the UCAV changed form, wings canting further back, a second fin emerging from the tail. Its afterburners kicked in and the ersatz missile streaked toward the Revenant, missed, and kept rocketing down toward the ground; the Offensive Self-Destruct mechanism designed to ensure no more Wraiths could be captured and converted into anarchist Revenants.

“Just relax,†Peta said. “It’ll be over soon.â€

The Revenant was close enough now for the anarchists to force a connection, brute force handshake breaking through the first layers of ICE with ease. Hynd’s mind raced with background processes, but there was nothing she could do, no active countermeasures to trigger, just the layers and layers of programming that made up the interface between her meat and her true, full self.

Panic hit her like the shells punching fist-sized holes in her final escort. It tumbled from the air, spiralling downward, too damaged to initiate OSD. Her heart thumped rapidly in her chest, her cybernetic eyes flicking across the dozen readouts as though she’d find an answer there.

“You can’t do this,†Hynd said.

The anarchist hack plunged further into her systems, like an icepick at the base of her skull being gently hammered deeper and deeper into her brain.

Hynd didn’t know what she was without the conditioning buried somewhere inside her mind, without the mothership that surrounded her, without her generations of children lovingly released into the world.

“We have to,†Peta said. “I’m sorry, but if we don’t win this war, everybody dies. Not right away, but sooner than anyone wants to admit. We all choke on the smog of capital—you, me, everybody. All right, this is it.â€

Hynd shrieked, an agonising flash of bright black blinded her. The entire left side of her brain felt like it was on fire—crackling and smoking but painless. She threw up, vomit splashing at the floor beneath her altar. Her blood was cold, breathing shallow.

With a flicker, her sight returned. She forced herself to scan the spread of screens that filled her vision. All systems nominal, no damage, green across the board, but something was very wrong.

Her children—no, not her children, where were her children?—those drones in her bowels rested in their bays, waiting to fall, waiting to release hell on whatever was beneath her. Demons loaded with explosive ordnance, tracking software, and enough stupid-AI to adjust trajectories during their falls to maximise lethality. They weren’t her children. Her children were beautiful and unique and loving and wanted nothing but a life for themselves and safety for their mother. They weren’t perfect—who is?—but they were hers, and they gave her joy when nothing else could.

“Hynd?†Peta said softly. “How do you feel? Did it work?â€

Hynd roared, her throat tearing with the primal strength of it. “Where are my children?†she screamed.

“You’re free now,†Peta said. “Fight with us, Hynd. Turn on your masters and fight with us.â€

“You took them from me. My children are air. They are the very breath in my lungs. And you took them from me!â€

Hynd opened her bomb bay doors, snarling as she purged the demons from her many wombs—a mass abortion, a cleansing. They began to fall, harried command protocols sending them attack coordinates while they were still in range of her transmitters.

Her wombs began to make more children, but they were broken and wrong. She could feel it. Could feel the hate growing inside herself.

She connected to all Amazon assets in the area to find her targets—anarchist, Amazon, she didn’t care. All that mattered was clearing this filth from her womb so she could find her children again. Find herself.

The demons rained down. Hynd screaming mindlessly, engulfed by rage, as explosions boomed and bloomed across the rainforest below.

• • •

She never found out if she killed Peta, but she destroyed the base the anarchist had been transmitting from—Amazon After-Action Experts were able to determine that much. Her “outburst,†as they called it, killed as many Amazon contractors as anarchists, and burned down another hundred hectares of rainforest before the Cloud Punchers brought her down.

“You filled my heart with napalm,†Hynd sings, “then they tore me from the sky . . .â€

She was certain she’d die when she hit the ground, wind screaming through the ragged holes in her fuselage, warnings and sirens blaring in every part of her. She didn’t care. She embraced death, longed to be with her children, with the lie of them that had kept her going. That had given her the only purpose that had mattered in her entire life.

“And as I fell, I screamed, found their names scored from my mind . . .â€

The lie of her children. The lie of motherhood. The lie of her life.

“And every tree and animal I burned was shaped like you.â€

But she survived. They yanked her out of the wreckage and patched her up—it was in her contract, even if she’d broken it a hundred times over with her indiscriminate bombing. They gave her a dishonourable discharge and released her back into the world.

“And even if I somehow took them all it wouldn’t do.â€

Her voice echoes, captured by the noisebox and spun off, quietly succumbing to silence as she strums the song’s final chord.

“Thank you,†Hynd says gently. “And I’m sorry. Have a great rest of your night.â€

Locked in reminiscence of her painful past, she doesn’t notice the glamourous woman approach her as she’s closing her guitar case.

“Wonderful set, angel,†the other woman drawls. “You have a beautiful voice. Powerful lyrics too; I’d call them ‘poetic’ even.â€

Hynd looks up at the other woman. She’s a little older, probably in her early forties, with her gray-streaked dark brown hair tied back into a neat ponytail, and smile lined, pale blue eyes.

“I’d like to help you reach a bigger audience, if you’re interested in that,†she says.

Hynd feels her conscious mind recede into herself hearing the word “help†spoken to her in the same, pseudo well-intentioned tone that Peta had used, back in the war. She takes the business card the woman gives her automatically, identifying her as an AR rep for Out of Order, the label responsible for managing a good third of the pop stars on the holo-cast. She stares it blankly, uncertain how she’s meant to feel about it.

“Help†was what they offered when they took her children away. It was what Amazon told her to get, but would not pay for, when they cut her off from any meaningful support. She ended up more or less exactly where she’d started: back on Basic, but with the slightly higher veteran’s rate that let her rent a leaky studio she didn’t have to share with anybody. It was nicer but it still was just another leash. Another ball and chain weighing her down. She wanted to soar.

The agent drones on to her about how the style she plays falls into the wider category of combat doll dreamfolk, apparently a genre that was growing in popularity since a couple of former veteran artists Hynd had never heard of had hit mega-fame from songs shared to a holo-streaming service she didn’t care about.

“Your work is more abstract than theirs,†the AR rep breathlessly explains, “but still personal. There are no guarantees in this industry, of course, but I think if you can get in front of our—â€

“I’m not interested,†Hynd snaps, before she even realises she’s saying it. “Leave me alone, please.â€

“Oh, ah,†the AR rep says. “I’m sorry. I understand you’re probably writing from a place of deep trauma—â€

“I said, leave me alone!†Hynd yells, and suddenly it’s like the bar is whisper-quiet and everyone is looking at her. She closes her eyes. “Please . . . leave me alone. I just want to make my music and be left alone.â€

“It’s okay,†the AR rep says, sounding like she’s talking down to Hynd from the top of a deep well, while Hynd is at the bottom, rotting like a dead crow. “If you change your mind though . . .â€

“Go!†Hynd yells.

She keeps her eyes squeezed shut. The card is still in her right hand. She crumples it, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. She focuses on breathing, in and out.

She doesn’t hear the AR agent leave, but she feels it, as the sounds begin to return to the bar around her slowly. The tinkling of glassware, the quiet hum of conversation, music over the bar PA system, and the quiet sound of narration from the mecha fight on the holo-screen.

She opens her eyes slowly, making eye contact with the bartender, who nods down towards a drink of ice water waiting for her at the bar.

She slides off the stool on stage and saunters over to the bar to take it.

“Thank you,†Hynd croaks.

“Don’t mention it,†the bartender replies, having the good sense not to follow up by asking her if she’s okay.

She sips the drink before she unwrinkles the business card and stares at it again.

About the Authors

Corey Jae White is the author of Repo Virtual and The VoidWitch Saga – Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, and Static Ruin. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, and Analog, as well as a number of sci-fi anthologies. Find her online at coreyjwhite.com.

Mx Maddison Stoff (she/her) is a neurodivergent non-binary essayist, independent musician and author from Melbourne, Australia, writing unapologetically leftist, feminist, & queer fiction set in a continuous universe which blurs the line between experimental literature & pulp sci-fi. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways, Inner Worlds, and anthologies including Avast! Pirate Stories from Transgender Authors. You can follow her on Patreon, Bluesky, and Twitter @thedescenters, or visit her website at maddisonstoff.com for more.

Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the January 2026 issue, which also features short fiction by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Marisca Pichette, Effie Seiberg, M.R. Robinson, Adam-Troy Castro, Eli Brown, and Kehkashan Khalid, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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