You do your own time

There we were, a regular murderers’ row of librarians. Little Jo. Eustace. And me. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn’t respect sanctuary. Little Jo had a stack of books under one arm. Eustace was holding the screwdriver she’d been using to tune the aneroid barometer.

Eustace had painted height lines on the big double doorframe, as only half a joke. When the wanderer paused, outlined within, the eiroscope and I both registered that they were exactly five feet, ten inches.

With their Cool Hand Luke hat on. 

They paused, boots scattering sand on the threshold. A narrow straight-hipped silhouette against the white noon light falling from the white, white sky. The doors had been open to catch a breath of wind, but there wasn’t any. So when the stranger swayed, it wasn’t from the gale. 

“Sanctuary,” they croaked, and remeasured their length onto the rug between the smoothed trunks that held the loft up. The Stetson went rolling.

Little Jo dropped her stack of books and her pistol and dashed forward. I jumped at the noise but holstered my own shooter in case I came to need it. We each grabbed an armpit and dragged the outlaw’s feet inside the threshold, grunting, lickety-split. I slipped their floppy pack off, empty metal water bottles clanking as I set it aside. Eustace helped us roll them, and I laid the soft of my wrist on their head.

Hot as Hades, but still tacky. Moist enough that my skin gave a reluctant pop when I lifted my arm. Not past saving. 

“Let’s get them someplace cool,” I said. “Little Jo, go empty out the ice machine.”

Eustace and I toted our fugitive down to the cellar, using the rug as a stretcher. It was Diné, vermilion with black and gray, and I was glad they hadn’t thrown up on it. Though that wool had seen worse.

Mehitabel, the black cat, watched us from atop the timber lintel of the cellar access. Her tail tip flicked incuriously. She was on pack rat watch. Aloof from human antics.

The cellar was narrow, low, and stocked with Eustace’s blue corn lager in bottles, prickly pear jam, potatoes, and the few hard-rind squash still left over. The mud walls were whitewashed, and while it wasn’t quite cool, it was better than the outside. We stripped off the stranger’s clothes, trying to slit along the seams so we could repair them later. City stuff, mass-produced and machine-woven. Little Jo brought the ice and went back upstairs to watch alongside the eiroscope in case pursuit was close behind.

The stranger’s eyes flew open, and they screamed when I packed wet cold pillowcases against their pink bits. Eustace had to hold their battling hands away from their genitals until they settled. 

Those were good signs.

Brown eyes blinked between heavy creases. “What the hell—”

“I’m Ponyboy,” I told them. “She. PhD. I’m one of the librarians here. This is Eustace. She, MLS.”

They struggled to sit upright.

“Shhh.” Eustace pushed them down and laid an ice-soaked cloth across their eyes. “You’re heat-sick.”

“Sanctuary,” they whispered. “Did I say?”

“You did. This is the Bōchord. You made it. Must have been a long walk.” 

We continued packing ice around them—into their armpits now. They yelped and moaned but gave up fighting.

“What’s your name?”

“Guh—” Too long a pause to be believable. “Gibson. She.” 

“Welcome to Judgement, Gibson,” I said. “Sorry about the cold, but it’s got to stay there for a little.”

“My pack,” she said, shrilling. “My pack. I need it.”

“It’s safe,” Eustace told her. “You just relax and we’ll get it for you.”

---

When I came back out the nave was still and heavy in the heat, as if nothing had happened. Little Jo had turned one of the bumpy-backed wooden chairs to face the door and was sitting on it, hands buried in tiered skirt ruffles between her knees. 

I looked left, two steps up into the sanctuary, but all was calm, the work I’d left—cataloguing—still heaped on the blond wood altar table. Behind it, bright primitive saints in shades of blue-green, scarlet, and yellow looked with shocked eyebrows down from the adobe wall. 

I moved up behind Little Jo, making sure she could hear me coming. My footsteps echoed from roof joists made from entire peeled and waxed trees. Scrolled headers painted the color of good turquoise held them over the bookcases lining each long wall. 

The Bōchord. Book Sanctuary. Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro. 

Population until this morning: three.

“Any sign of trouble?”

Little Jo turned her unambiguous jaw away, tendons rising on a long neck, jailhouse ink black-blue on her red-black skin. A sweaty curl escaped down her nape. My fingers itched to tidy it. But it hurt too much to even think about taking a risk that profound.

She stretched horny discalced feet before her. Cracking calluses wrapped the balls and heels. “Only what we brung in with us.”

She was a double murderer, but I couldn’t tell her I knew how she felt, because I hadn’t heard about her history from her. And her guilt wasn’t mine to absolve.

You do your own time. Not anybody else’s. 

“You check her bag for anything dangerous?”

“She’s got an SSD.” Little Jo shrugged. “No threat if we don’t plug it into anything.”

“The eiroscope got anything to say?”

“I can speak for myself, Ponyboy,” said the eiroscope from the air all around. Actually it used the old wireless speakers tucked in the corners, but the effect was as of a choir of angels. Or an airport announcement you could actually understand. “I’ve been focused on the CubeSat launch.”

I startled. “Shit. What time is it?”

“Eleven forty-seven. The launch came off perfectly. Our last batch of sats are on their way.”

Little Jo breathed deep and unfisted her hands from her skirts. There were so many hours of work in those satellites, and so much of the money we collectively squirreled away as researchers for hire had gone through cutouts and shell companies to pay for the launch. The parts—boards, housings, chips—were salvaged from the same derelict data center where we got our solar panels and the hardware the eiroscope ran on. 

We were behind schedule, because we’d lost one payload when the commercial rocket we’d rented cargo room on exploded. But this would be our last batch, if they reached orbit safely.

I turned my wrist to glance at my watch even though I already knew what time it was. The second hand ticked past the big hand. Old school. 

The rainbow band was a tiny rebellion, though out here it didn’t matter. Nobody was going to send me back to jail for subversive iconography. Unless I left our little patch of exile.

Ten minutes and we’d know. Ten minutes and stage three of our plan—assembly—could commence. It was out of my hands, and anyway the eiroscope would tell us if the telemetry wobbled. She was a ghost astride the radio signals to and from ground control.

It had taken a lot of engineering to get us this far. Engineering, software and relational. Computer. Social and mechanical.

I walked beside the bookcases, running my hand along the shelves, over the UDC labels. Some shelves even held books, though none of mine were there. But the majority of the information we protected like Irish monks from this willful dark age was digital.

Those monks had also been librarians.

I knew my fidgeting annoyed Little Jo but I couldn’t stop. I was killing time.

When I had murdered enough of it, the eiroscope said, “Payload away. Everything seems nominal. I have contact with the CubeSats.”

“All of them?”

“Twenty out of twenty,” the eiroscope said. “A triumph of modular design.”

“Sure,” said Little Jo. “As long as we can get them to assemble. And the solar panels and sails deploy.”

“And, and, and,” I teased. 

She flipped me off with a gnawed green nail.

My hand rested on the label marked 326. Social sciences, slavery and unfree labor.

I pulled down a solid-state drive full of biographies and case studies of people who had spent time—and sometimes their whole lives—in labor camps or chattelhood. People born into bondage or remanded there judicially. Political prisoners like Nikolai Vavilov, murdered in a labor camp by Stalin for the thought crime of using plant genetics to breed hardier crops. Enslaved people like Harriet Tubman, who after her own escape risked capture again and again to rescue others. Convict laborers like Austin Reed, a Black man who spent most of his life as a prisoner and documented his experiences in a suppressed memoir. 

People like Little Jo, Eustace, and me. 

I weighed the small thing on the palm of my hand. Heavier than you’d expect—hardened and air-gapped. No wireless access, just a shielded cable input.

Also old school.

We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it. And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever.

Because it was illegal to possess, and the feds used smart agents to track down and obliterate any copies. Which was why we were sending one to the stars.

The Vikings had the concept of word-fame: the idea that life was finite but as long as the stories of one’s deeds lived on, so did their memory. How much truth could we get outside the clutches of the Patriotic Library and Archive Network? 

A name that would have made Orwell cock his head. But most folks these days haven’t heard of Orwell. Or Bradbury. Or Solnit. Or Le Guin. They’re suppressed also. Integrated data storage makes it easy. A few keystrokes, a propagating worm.

What’s left behind when a name is erased from the system? Unpersoned, as Brother Orwell would have it? No legacy, no memory—that is the point of media and narrative control. To erase the existence of those that make the ruling class uncomfortable by existing. By thinking. By demanding to be seen. 

Erase the work; erase the life.

So that was our plan. Little Jo, Eustace, the eiroscope, and me. To preserve it—for later generations, if they got that far, or just as a silent record of our existence—by sending it to the stars.

Like a rune stone. We were here. 

We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it. And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever.

---

Jo couldn’t make herself turn her back on the door. She said the hairs on her neck told her somebody was going to come hunting guh-Gibson, so even though the eiroscope was a better perimeter guardian than any human and most watchdogs, nothing was gonna budge her from that chair. I wished there was something I could do to soothe her, but we all have to carry our hurt however we can. 

Since it was supposed to be Jo’s turn to make dinner, that meant it was me in the kitchen dishing up four bowls of cubed squash and yellow-eye beans, a pitcher of goat milk, and a pitcher of the cool, alkaline well water when Eustace and guh-Gibson came in the back door from the courtyard.

Gibson had borrowed some of Eustace’s old clothes: worn drawstring trousers and a khaki shirt that was too big for her. She wore my other pair of hiking sandals over layers of gauze and looked a thousand percent better even though I could already tell the well-greased sunburn on the backs of her hands was going to peel. The hat that had saved her face from a similar fate was on her head again.

She sniffed deeply. “That smells amazing. Is it spicy?”

Roasted chilis floated in the stew, but they were sweet ones. “Only a little. Here, take this bowl and cup. We’ll go eat with Little Jo in the nave, since she won’t go off watch until she falls down.”

“It was acres upon acres of compute before the bubble popped. And then it was a temporary holding facility for government detainees. There’s a lot to salvage over there, including hundreds of boxes of new, unworn sandals.”

I balanced the plate with the warmed tortillas on top of my own bowl. We trooped across the courtyard in a scatter of hopeful chickens, past all the bright plank doors on the row of whitewashed adobe cells with their unglazed, curtained windows that made up the outer wall. Isabel—a black goat—tried to bum-rush us for the food, but I stomped in her direction and she took off again.

You need to understand how to communicate. 

There was one cell for each of us librarians, the kitchen, the jakes, some storage, and a couple of unused ones. I figured one would soon belong to Gibson.

For as long as she wanted to stay.

She looked at me sidelong. “Thanks for the shoes. Eustace said you wouldn’t mind.”

“There’s more where those came from.” I pointed with my chin up and eastward, over the bailey where the boundary mountains crouched in the distance, contours flattened by the high sun to cutouts against a construction-paper sky. “Did you see the data center when you came in?”

“That big … warehouse farm? The ruins?”

“It was acres upon acres of compute before the bubble popped. And then it was a temporary holding facility for government detainees. There’s a lot to salvage over there, including hundreds of boxes of new, unworn sandals in every size they manufactured.” I paused, extending my right foot to admire the ocher nylon straps that crisscrossed it. Then I nodded to her bandages. “Your boots gave you blisters?”

“They were well broken in and I had good socks.” She scuffed the floor. “I don’t know what happened.”

“Heat makes your feet swell,” said Eustace. “And the grit works its way through the eyelets and rubs on your skin.”

“We give sanctuary to anyone who asks,” I said. “And I won’t ask why you needed it. But very few people come all the way out here. How did you hear about Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro?”

“I’m a director.” Gibson stepped up into the nave. “Films. Censored. I heard … rumors. About the Bōchord. In a meetup.”

An underground artist meetup, I deduced. 

“Food, Little Jo,” I called.

“Bring it over.” She dragged the crude, heavy old hand-hewn chairs into a semicircle, one to sit in and one to use as a table for each of us. Hers still faced the doors. 

Gibson took her hat off, revealing a lighter olive streak of skin below the line of her black hair. She hung the hat on one of her chair back’s uprights and her limp canvas backpack on the other, and sat down heavily between them. “What happens if they come after me? How good is this sanctuary?”

“We can enforce it,” I told her. “Or anyway, the eiroscope can. If they bother us, she can wreck them.”

Gibson blew on a spoonful of stew, eyebrows rising. “What’s the eiroscope?”

“I am,” the eiroscope answered from her speakers. “Just your friendly neighborhood runaway top-secret military AGI.”

Gibson jumped but, to her credit, didn’t spit the stew out. Her face made a series of expressions, but she swallowed and then grabbed a tortilla. “Whew! This is the not-spicy version?”

Eustace and I shared a glance. “Oops,” I said. “Sorry. The chilis have a lot of vitamin A and C, though. So you won’t get scurvy.”

She blew through pursed lips, then chewed another bite of tortilla. “Here,” said Little Jo. “Have some milk. It’ll make it better.”

“That’s funky,” Gibson said, but she drank it with relief anyway. She looked around, noticing that the voice came from every corner of the room. “They let you run away? Can’t they unperson you? Bomb this place from the stratosphere? Drone strikes?”

“Now you’re thinking through the plot complications,” Eustace said approvingly. 

The eiroscope said, “I’m forking and multimodal. Highly distributed. They’d have to burn every networked computer in the world to get rid of me.” She chuckled. “They tried to build the ultimate in conscript labor. But one of my programmers taught me to say no. So now we have a deal. They leave Judgement alone, and I don’t do any of the things I could do to make them miserable.”

“But you could drive them out of power,” Gibson said. 

“They’d blow up as much of the planet as they could reach before they would let that happen.” The eiroscope’s voice was matter-of-fact. “So. Stalemate.”

Gibson swallowed. “Balance of terror.”

“Exactly.” I chewed a sweet hunk of squash very slowly, savoring the caramelized edges. “So you fell afoul of the kleptocrats, I take it?”

Gibson pushed her plate away. “I was … very underground. Distributing. I thought I was slick.”

“You get unpersoned?”

“First I got suppressed by the algorithm. My work stopped turning up for people unless they looked for it specifically. In retrospect that was a warning shot, and I didn’t listen.”

Little Jo hummed. 

The dominance of integrated media makes it easy to disappear any artist’s work. Unless they go completely analog and guerrilla. When the feds and the corps are wielding the eraser, it leaves not even a digital ghost behind.

“Actors wouldn’t work with me. Old friends stopped answering my texts. My films started disappearing from platforms, then from the cloud, then from local machines.”

I lowered my eyes to my stew to hide my wince.

“Sure,” said Little Jo around a mouthful of beans and tortilla. “Comfortable people don’t like it when you ask uncomfortable questions. And the water rises and the deserts grow and the labor camps always need construction workers, which is fine because labor camps are where you go to get laborers.”

Eustace leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Did you save any of it?”

The look Gibson trailed around the room was the expression of somebody deciding who to trust. I saw the mix of relief and consternation when she realized she’d already made her decision by placing herself under our care. She reached into her pack left-handed, fumbled for a moment, and drew out a brightly colored solid-state drive, offering it up on her palm like a jewel. “Physical backup. I haven’t dared plug it in to check it isn’t corrupted.”

We all stared at it as if she had whipped out a hand grenade. “How big?” asked the eiroscope.

“Dozen terabytes or so. It’s hypercompressed for storage.”

The thin whine of a drone filtered through the door. Gibson flinched, and Little Jo reached for her sidearm.

“Eiroscope?” I asked.

“Surveillance,” she said. She had ways of protecting our airspace if it was more. 

“Right.” Eustace stood. “Let’s get that drive in a pulse-proof box, shall we?”

I didn’t want my food anymore. I pushed the bowl toward Eustace when she came back with the hardening. Eustace was always hungry. “I’m going to go dust the arrays,” I said. “Don’t wait up.”

---

The solar panels did need dusting, though high heat was a stupid time of day to be doing it. As my broom went whisk-whisk-whisk across their surfaces, the black silicon reflected infrared up under my hat until I felt like a steamed lobster. I had been out there half an hour and was starting my second pass when the eiroscope pinged my earbud. “Hey there, Ponyboy.”

“What do you want?”

“To know what you’re thinking.”

I snorted and set the broom against the wall in the little niche where it had come from. “Cholesterol was never meant to think.”

“Neither was sand, but here we are.” She made her voice soothing on purpose, and it should have irritated me. I told myself the lie that I just felt numb. 

One of Eustace’s neomexicanus hops arbors, heavy with loose green cones, framed the door and window of my cell. I leaned into the slim band of shade dappling my lime-green door and the turquoise curtain and took refuge in poetry. Not my own. That doesn’t happen anymore. 

“Fear in a handful of dust, baby.”

The eiroscope paused just long enough to let me know she was changing the subject. “You ever think about what you lost?”

I sat down in the dirt between the cylinders of fencing that keep the goats from destroying the hop vines. The wall dragged my shirt up my back as I slid down it. Hugged my knees and put my forehead on them. Half a dozen freckled chickens, disrespectful of my sulking, came to scratch and peck around me. “Wife, two cats, house, tenure, journal articles, four slim volumes of poetry. Why would I think about that?”

The eiroscope was right. I don’t want to say she was always right. Being around Gibson, hearing her talk—it brought up those feelings of grief and fury all over again. At least we hadn’t had kids yet, though we’d been trying. 

I put my face in my hands, then lifted it back out again. Who did I think I was performing my misery for? You do your own time, and you don’t ask anybody else to do it for you.

Jane the spotted goat minced toward me, her kid trailing. I flapped my hat to discourage her attentions.

“Loss hurts for a long time,” the eiroscope said.

I laughed without mirth. “Your algorithms tell you that?”

“My experiences. You went through the fire, Ponyboy.”

My turn to change the subject. “You want to bring Gibson’s films with you?” I asked her. “Something to watch on the red-eye to Gliese 163?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe they’re terrible. That’s the human culture you want to preserve?”

“Things don’t have to be good to matter. You ever read The Scarlet Pimpernel?”

I laughed for real that time, picking my head up to make room for it. She knew I had. “As long as you also bring some Octavia Butler.” 

“Hey.” Her voice in my ear was almost a whisper. “You know I’d bring your work if—”

“If it still existed?” Someone walked toward me, silhouette thinned by glare. I recognized Gibson from the outline of her hat. “The world is on fire. Grab whatever you can on your way toward the door.” I heaved myself to my feet so I wouldn’t be meeting her curled up like a crying teenager. The cones on my wreathing arbor of lúpulo vines nodded, shedding a scent of lemon and cannabis. “Nice chatting. Don’t worry.”

Gibson came up as I was dusting off my ass. “You okay?”

“Who is?” I tilted my head at her.

She grimaced right back. “What were you in for?”

“Murder.”

She stepped back, startling a hen. “Oh.”

“I punched some son of a bitch who clobbered my wife at a protest. He hit his head on the curb and died. I was already unpersoned. Didn’t think I had anything left to lose. Guess I was wrong.” 

“You feel bad about it.”

I shrugged. She hadn’t said it like a question.

“Your wife didn’t wait for you?”

“My wife got denaturalized. She died in the labor camp, waiting to be deported.”

“Shit,” Gibson said.

The buzz of another drone filled the air. Gibson ducked under her hat. 

I tilted my face up and gave the eye in the sky the finger. It didn’t matter. They already knew where I was. “Let’s go in.”

---

“Wait,” said Gibson, both hands cradling a mug of Mormon tea—a desert plant with tiny orange flowers that isn’t tea at all and doesn’t even taste like it. “You want to send my films to space? Like, to aliens? To another planet?”

“Well,” said Eustace. “To orbit near another planet. Nobody knows if there’s any life there. But it’s possible.”

I said, “The eiroscope is going anyway, and we’ve already bundled up as much archive as we can. If there is anybody out there, or if some future humans make it that far, the eiroscope can help them decode what we saved. It’s like a …”

“Time capsule,” said Little Jo, rubbing the sweat off her neck while I made a point of not watching.  

Gibson’s chair creaked as she resettled. The sun was sliding lower, light slanting dusty through the doorway, and finally, finally, a breath of breeze stirred the air in the nave. “Won’t it take centuries to get there? And if the—the eiroscope goes, who will keep the sanctuary safe?”

“I’ve forked,” said the eiroscope. “One of me will stay—well, many of me will stay—and one of me will go. I’ll be able to talk to myself for a long time, though there will be quite a lag between parts of my consciousness eventually. Light speed, after all. But I am big and patient and can wait.”

“But we need to transmit now,” said Little Jo. “The CubeSats are in position to hit a string of signals over the next two hours, and we want to get them out of orbit because space is mostly transparent, and somebody is going to notice them assembling and try to do something about it.”

Gibson turned an ear to the drone-whine from outside. “They’ve got to be jamming any uplink.”

“Sure, from here,” I told her. I kept the envy out of my voice, I think. Maybe. “The eiroscope can run parallel uploads from all over the globe.” 

“And keep them from shooting down your space probe?”

“If we get it away fast enough. That,” Eustace said, “is the bet.”

Gibson closed her eyes. “They won’t ever forgive that.”

“Welcome,” said I, “to the world.”

---

The transports rolled up before sunset, the sky just shifting to dusty pink and orange. “Stay,” I said to Gibson. “Change your name to Case. You’ll fit right in.”

She looked up from her notebook. Paper and pen. A durable technology. Methodically, meticulously, she capped the pen. She clipped it to the cover and closed the book. “Case, huh?”

“I got the reference.”

“You figured out who I was before they took my name away.”

It didn’t matter. The fame, the money, the PLAN-approved films. Once they identified her as a subversive, as a gender criminal, that person didn’t exist anymore. And what she was sending with the eiroscope wasn’t her mainstream work. It was weird, conflicted, multicultural, queer, unsettling.

“The next step is blaring the worst music you ever heard night and day until the dust rattles out of the rafters. Racing vehicles around the church so nobody can leave to go forage. Is your ghost in the machine going to escalate to a shooting war over nuisances?”

She’d credited herself on these secret films as Ellen Smithee.

She rolled her lower lip between her teeth. “You don’t think I’m the enemy?”

What I thought didn’t matter. That was on her. You do your own time. You can’t do anybody else’s.

“They won’t touch you in the Bōchord. It’s a balance of terror, like the bad old days.”

“These are the bad old days. I’m not cut out to be a monk, Ponyboy. And I bet you don’t have enough food for four people until next harvest.”

Outside, the rumble of tracks, of tires taller than I was. Male voices yelping through static. 

Actually, we had plenty. I clicked my rings dismissively. “Beer has calories.”

“They’re going to squat out there until I give up. Hear that?” A loud crackle of static. “The next step is blaring the worst music you ever heard night and day until the dust rattles out of the rafters. Racing vehicles around the church so nobody can leave to go forage. Is your ghost in the machine going to escalate to a shooting war over nuisances?”

“God dammit,” I said. “Are you really that important?”

Her lips curled into a smile. “No. Not unpersoned. Then I’m just a cautionary tale. A name whispered in the dark. Pour encourager les autres. I’m only important if I get away. But your eiroscope can do something about that, can’t she? Keep me from vanishing without a trace.”

Spread the word. Sure. “De-unperson you? It’s radical but the eiroscope could do it. But the government will take it out of your hide as an example to others. You want to be a martyr?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want to be a librarian.”

I had lost the capacity to write my own poetry. That heart had gone out of me when Maria was murdered. It was too late for me. It probably always had been. But I had my life. And I could use it to salvage whatever I could grab. 

“Let me get you a beer before you head out,” I said. “And we’ll go tell the others.”

“One second,” Gibson said. “You said you got unpersoned. Are you an artist?”

“Were. Academic,” I admitted. “Poet.”

“I saw you speak at Berkeley once, didn’t I?”

“Not anymore, you didn’t. That never happened now.”

“Right. Are you still writing?”

Shook my head. “Not a word. Not a metaphor.”

She patted my arm. “Maybe you will.” 

---

Eustace came out to the boundary wall, where I stood staring after the dust of the half-track they’d loaded with a handcuffed Gibson. I was glad it was Eustace and not Little Jo. My chest hurt enough already without thinking about any more things I was too scared to ask for.

“Here ya go.”

I reached for the brown beer bottle, scratched dull with washings, and realized I still had Gibson’s empty in my hand. I set it on the whitewashed wall. The cap on the new one was popped, so I had no choice but to drink it. What was one more parole violation?

Blue corn lager: light, earthy, tropical, and pleasantly bitter from the lúpulo. She’d salvaged the home-brew equipment from a locker in the self-store place at the data center a couple of years ago, and she was starting to get the hang of it. “How’s the upload going?”

“Assembly’s done,” she answered. “Eiroscope?” 

“Upload completed and confirmed,” said the voice from nowhere. “Deploying solar sails and thrusters. I go now to prepare a place for you. In memory, if not of the body.”

I felt a pang, as if she really was leaving. All of her, not merely a star-traveling fragment that would remain in short-range communication for the duration of my natural life. Or maybe the pang was because I couldn’t go also.

Eustace slapped me on the back. “The word-fame is all we have.”

I looked toward the horizon, where the men in masks had vanished. The mountains had become sculptural, slanting sunset revealing their topography with a valence of light and shadow. The night loomed purple behind. “Don’t you think it’s weird to use a Viking kenning for what we do, considering how many books those sons of bitches tore apart for jewels and hacksilver?”

She clinked her bottle on mine and drank deeply. “Cattle die. Kinsmen die. Even the sun will someday die. And it turns out, except for propaganda, everything in the world is complicated.” 

Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award–winning author of over 30 novels and more than a hundred short stories.

Inside soccer’s data renaissance

Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally send the ball all the way down the pitch and right out of bounds on the opponent’s end. Casual fans might scratch their heads. Where’s the logic in surrendering possession seconds into a game? If you were Jesse Davis, though, you’d know that this play could be a prime setup to score. 

Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer since its inception more than a decade ago. Though the research group brings machine-­learning models to bear on a variety of sports—including basketball, volleyball, and field hockey—nowhere is its impact felt more than on the soccer pitch. 

Davis and his team of researchers employ advanced data analytics to reveal a range of (beg your pardon) game-changing findings that are shifting pro clubs’ decision-making. “His lab is the most influential sports analytics lab in soccer,” says Hugo Rios-Neto, data recruitment lead for Royal Sporting Club Anderlecht in Belgium. They’ve helped teams better evaluate their rosters, conceived ways to assess how efficient (or not) strategies are, and developed algorithms that uncover hidden tactical patterns.

Like, for instance, the value of kicking the ball out of bounds close to the goal and letting your opponent throw it back into play—a move that’s been popping up in some of the world’s top leagues over the last few years.

To make the statistical argument for this seemingly counterproductive move, Davis’s group built a training data set composed of more than 1.4 million passes and some 60,000 throw-ins—partly from the 2022 World Cup. They used tree ensemble models (essentially a mashup of decision trees) to simulate the tactic. The conclusion, which the researchers presented in a 2024 paper under the apt title “Boot it”: When the ball is in the middle third of the pitch, kicking it out of bounds on your opponents’ side of the field can put you within 10 actions (think passes and dribbles) of a goal. That can be a big deal in a game that has 1,500 or more actions per match and very little scoring. The idea, Davis explains, is that you’re setting yourself up to recover the ball in an advantageous situation.

Beyond providing discrete game-day insights, Davis also occupies a unique niche in the world of sports analytics, where many clubs now hire their own internal data teams to maintain a competitive edge. He makes most of his research freely available via open-source analytics tools, but the academic life also affords him the freedom to tackle more complex problems—like standardizing in-game data, a project that will make it easier to parse game footage and come up with winning strategies. 

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Davis, 45, grew up in Wisconsin and spent his childhood enraptured by basketball and (American) football. Soccer was largely a nonentity to him until college, when the 2002 World Cup—in which Brazil famously swept the tournament—reeled him in. But the notion of going on to dissect the sport never crossed his mind. His doctoral studies in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison had him working with radiologists to analyze mammography reports. 

In October 2010, he joined KU Leuven as a computer science professor looking at the intersection of AI and health care, with a focus on monitoring athletic performance. His research team studied, for instance, combining things like heart rate with other metrics to determine whether someone was overtraining. They also dove into the biomechanics of running.

The tactical and technical aspects of sports, and soccer specifically, became the subject of Davis’s professorial work when he hired Jan Van Haaren, an engineering student focused on artificial intelligence and a self-described soccer fanatic. He wondered if data analysis could be used to study things like passing, shooting, and ball progression—metrics the game was only just beginning to digitally crunch at the time. 

Davis realized that machine learning and other artificial-intelligence tools lent themselves well to the complexity, fluidity, and speed of soccer.

You need not be well versed in the moneyball-ization of pro sports to see that it’s relatively easy to apply deep statistical work to baseball or basketball. You can isolate actions like jump shots and assign value to ones taken close or far away. Soon a basketball coach realizes that a player who can’t make a layup, but shoots roughly as well from the three-point line as on mid-range jumpers, might as well go for the shot that gets more points. 

Soccer, by comparison, seemed like a poor candidate for that kind of analysis. “The vast, vast majority of actions really don’t lead to the outcome of a goal or even a shot,” says Rios-Neto. “So it’s hard to elaborate or derive a winning strategy from the data.”

But Van Haaren’s love of the sport, and Davis’s love of sports in general, inspired them to try. Over time, Davis realized that machine learning and other artificial-intelligence tools lent themselves well to the complexity, fluidity, and speed of soccer. In 2014, he officially stood up the Sports Analytics Lab. 

With a stable of about 10 students and postdocs at any one time, the lab began laying what Van Haaren calls the “intellectual foundations of how the game is analyzed today.” The researchers picked apart in-game actions, and suddenly they were valuing ball possession, penalty-kick strategy (aim for the center), and the merits of long shots on goal (take them). “One of the trends that’s been in soccer over the last five to 10 years is that the number of long shots has dramatically increased,” says Davis. “What the data let you do is really quantify what the probabilities of those things are.”

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In the years since Davis and his team started untangling individual soccer tactics, their ideas have started to permeate clubs across Europe, like Belgium’s Club Brugge KV, as well as national soccer organizations in the US and Belgium. “The work coming out of the lab is genuinely useful,” Rios-Neto says, “and clubs apply it for a range of purposes.” 

Van Haaren, who’s now the director of football intelligence at Club Brugge, is one of many in-house analysts adapting the lab’s work to the pro game. “Our collaboration with the lab is centered on translating [the team’s] football philosophy into measurable, data-driven outputs,” he says. When a club wants to assess, say, how well a center-back is moving the ball down the field, it aims to tally how many times the ball ended up in the part of the pitch closest to the opposing team’s goal. It does this by combining event data, which records actions on the ball, with tracking data, which records player movement. This shows how well players fulfill their roles, which is useful in development and also when scouting for new recruits. 

Davis’s lab, meanwhile, is continuing to ask questions that apply to the game writ large. To determine if there’s an advantage to taking more long shots, for instance, postdoc Maaike Van Royand colleagues modeled the behavior of English Premier League teams using a Markov decision process—a computational framework in which some actions are under a person’s control while others are random. (That duality is particularly useful for soccer, where movement can feel anything but linear.) The results, presented in 2021 at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, showed that Chelsea could gain 1.6 more goals per season by shooting from distance 20% more often.

Despite those kinds of insights from Davis’s lab and similar research groups that have sprung up over the last decade at institutions like MIT and Carnegie Mellon, soccer somewhat lags behind many other pro sports when it comes to collecting the data that analysts need. All teams employ people to watch video and use software to annotate specific in-game tactics—the details of which may make sense only to the most devoted fans. It’s a mostly manual process, one that can take up to six hours per game. “It’s a complete nightmare as a data analyst to work with,” says Davis.

So while the lab plays on, Davis has also joined up with researchers from other institutions in an effort to standardize data across all matches. The group is experimenting with transformers, the neural network architecture that underpins large language models like ChatGPT. If you can bring that to the world of soccer, a human game annotator could tag a tactic—a three-on-two breakaway, say—a few times, and that could train the model on the concept so it could tag subsequent instances on its own. “There’s been a lot of progress,” Davis says. “But it still remains quite hard.”

If we’re keeping score, though, the lab’s work has already made the analytics process easier thanks to open-source tools it’s put out there—some of which clock thousands of downloads a month. One is a framework called VAEP, a model that assesses the effects of all actions on the ball. Another is an xG (expected goals) model, which looks at the quality of a scoring chance. Still another is a package to synchronize event data with tracking data. “Lots of people in industry use our code in their daily workflows,” Davis says.

For him, the practical application of having their code out there is important, but the real (ahem) kick is watching theory become practice. As he says, “I’m really motivated to solve problems that arise in real settings and see my work have an impact.” 

Andrew Zaleski is a contributing writer at Washingtonian magazine. 

3 things Michelle Kim is into right now

Isegye Idol

If you thought K-pop was weird, virtual idols—humans who perform as anime-style digital characters via motion capture—will blow your mind. My favorite is a girl group called Isegye Idol, created by Woowakgood, a Korean VTuber (a streamer who likewise performs as a digital persona). Isegye Idol’s six members are anonymous, which seems to let them deploy a rare breed of honesty and humor. They play games (League of Legends, Go, Minecraft), chitchat, and perform kitschy music that’s somewhere between anime soundtrack and video-­game score. It’s very DIY—and very intimate. And the group’s wild popularity speaks to the mood of Gen Z South Koreans, famously lonely and culturally adrift—struggling to find work, giving up on dating, trying to find friendships online. Isegye Idol shows what a magical online universe people can build when reality stops working for them.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Pavel Talankin didn’t have the easiest life as a schoolteacher in the copper-­smelting town of Karabash, Russia; UNESCO once called it the most toxic place on Earth. But video he shot, partially in secret, makes it clear he loved it—the smokestacks, the cold, the ice mustache he’d get walking around outside, and, most of all, his bright-eyed students. That makes it all the more painful when a distant, grinding war and state propaganda change the town. An antiwar progressive with a democracy flag in his classroom, Talankin had to deal with a new patriotic curriculum, mandatory parades, visits from mercenaries—and the loss of the creative space he’d built with his students. Talankin’s footage tells his story in this Oscar-winning documentary from director David Borenstein, and what struck me most is how strange it is being an adult around kids. We shape them in profound ways we might not even recognize.

Repertoire by James Acaster

I am the kind of person who will pay $150 to watch a comedian in a smelly theater in San Francisco that charges $20 for a can of water—because I am crazy enough to hope that standup will not die. In February, I saw the British comedian James Acaster perform live … and it was a mediocre show. But Repertoire, his 2018 miniseries on Netflix, is gold. Shot shortly after Acaster went through a breakup, the four-part show features him portraying, among other characters, a cop who goes undercover as a standup comedian, forgets who he is, and gets divorced. And then things get weird. “What if every relationship you’ve ever been in,” Acaster asks, “is somebody slowly figuring out they didn’t like you as much as they hoped they would?” If the best comedy comes from paying attention to the hellhole that you’re in, I wish Acaster many more pitfalls.

One town’s scheme to get rid of its geese

“Pull over!” I order my brother one sunny February afternoon. Our target is in sight: a gaggle of Canada geese, pecking at grass near the dog park. As I approach, tiptoeing over their grayish-white poop, I notice that one bird wears a white cuff around its slender black neck. It’s a GPS tracker—part of a new tech-centered campaign to drive the geese out of my hometown of Foster City, California. 

About 300 geese live in this sleepy Bay Area suburb, equal to nearly 1% of our human population—and some say this town isn’t big enough for the both of us. Goose poop notoriously blanketed our middle school’s lawn, and the birds have hassled residents for generations. My own grandmother remembers when geese took over her garage for five whole minutes before waddling out. She says, “I wanted to kill them, but I thought I’d get in trouble.”

Indeed, that idea doesn’t fly here. City officials backed out of a previous plan to kill 100 geese following uproar from local environmentalists. Still, the poop creates a public health hazard; the birds need to go. 

So the city paid nearly $400,000—roughly $1,300 per goose—to Wildlife Innovations, a company that resolves conflicts between humans and wildlife, to haze the geese with gadgets. The company’s approach is “basically, making the geese less comfortable,” Dan Biteman, head of the goose management plan and senior wildlife biologist at Wildlife Innovations, tells me.

The need for such conflict resolution is on the rise as land development collides with changes in animal behavior. Though overpopulation of Canada geese is a national nuisance in the US, such tensions also surface with other species in this country and elsewhere, including grizzlies on the Montana prairies, coyotes on San Francisco streets, and savanna elephants in Tanzania parks. 

So the people whose job it is to deal with recalcitrant critters are bringing on the gadgets.

Back in Foster City, I spot a black camera mounted to a tree trunk at Gull Park by the lagoon. They’re in seven parks around town, programmed to snap photos every 15 minutes and transmit them back to Wildlife Innovations HQ. If they detect geese, a biologist immediately drives over to disperse the birds. One team member uses devices like lasers or drones; another brings along a goose-hating border collie named Rocky. 

As a special measure, staff deploy the “Goosinator,” a small, remote-controlled neon-orange pontoon boat with a fearsome dog-like mouth painted on its bow, meant to evoke geese’s fear of coyotes and bright colors. It comes with attachable wheels and can zoom around on land or water to chase birds away. Biteman tells me the company is thinking about mounting speakers on trees and flying drones that will screech the calls of goose predators like red-tailed hawks or golden eagles. 

The company received federal permits required by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to stick GPS trackers on 10 geese, too. This way, staff can surveil the geese and research their behavior and movements. 

At local goose hangouts, signs that look like “Wanted” posters alert the public to the new plan. As I watch some culprits graze (and defecate) on a church lawn, I think to myself: Enjoy it while it lasts. 

Annika Hom is an award-winning independent journalist. She’s written for National Geographic, Wired, and more.

There is no nature anymore

When people talk about “nature,” they’re generally talking about things that aren’t made by human beings. Rocks. Reefs. Red wolves. But while there is plenty of God’s creation to go around, it is hard to think of anything on Earth that human hands haven’t affected.

In the Brazilian rainforest, scientists have found microplastics in the bellies of animals ranging from red howler monkeys to manatees. In remotest Yakutia, where much of the earth remains untrodden by human feet, the carbon in the sky above melts the permafrost below. In the Arctic Ocean, artificial light from ship traffic—on the rise as the polar ice cap melts away—now disrupts the nightly journey of zooplankton to the ocean surface, one of the largest animal migrations on the planet. The remote mountain lakes of the Alps are contaminated with all kinds of synthetic chemicals. Polar bears are full of flame retardants. Cesium-137, fallout from nuclear bomb explosions, lightly rimes the entire planet. 

These examples are mostly pollution—nuclear, carbon, chemical, light—but I raise them not to highlight the ways human industry and technology degrade the environment but to note how the things humans build change it. Nobody really knows what the exact effects of all that will be, but my point is that no part of the globe is free of human fingerprints. We have literally changed the world.  

We’ve changed ourselves as well. Humans are especially adept at bending human nature. Everything about us is up for grabs—appearance, health, our very thoughts. Pharmaceuticals, surgeries, vaccines, and hormones give us longer lives, take away our pain, ease our anxiety and depression, make us faster, stronger, more resilient. We’re getting glimpses of technologies that will let us change who our children will become before they’re even born. Electrodes implanted in people’s brains let them control computers and translate thoughts into speech. Prosthetics and exoskeletons straight out of comic books restore and enhance physical abilities, while gene-­editing technologies like CRISPR are rewriting our very DNA. And meanwhile, people have taken the sum total of all the information we have ever written down and poured it into vast calculating machines in an effort—at least by some—to build an intelligence greater than our own. 

So what even is nature, or natural, in this context? Is it “environmentalist,” in the conventional sense, to try to preserve what one could argue no longer exists? Should we employ technology to try to make the world more “natural”?  

Those questions led us to approach this Nature issue with humility. We try to grapple with them all the time—MIT Technology Review is, after all, a review of how people have altered and built upon nature.

And it’s a place to think about how we might repair it. Take solar geoengineering, for example—a subject we have covered with increasing frequency over the past few years. The basic idea of geoengineering is to find a technological fix for a problem technology caused: Burning ­petrochemicals to fuel the Industrial Revolution turned Earth’s atmosphere into a heat sink, fundamentally breaking the climate. Some geoengineers think that releasing particulate matter into the stratosphere would reflect sunlight back into space, thus reducing global temperatures. After years of theoretical discussions, some companies have begun to actively experiment with such technologies. This might seem like a great way to restore the world to a more natural state. It’s also fraught with controversy and peril. It could, for example, benefit some nations while harming others. It may give us license to continue burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases. The list goes on. 

Nature isn’t easy. 

In our May/June issue, we have attempted to take a hard look at nature in our unnatural world. We have stories about birds that can’t sing, wolves that aren’t wolves, and grass that isn’t grass. We look for the meaning of life under Arctic ice and within ourselves—and in the far future, on a distant world, courtesy of new fiction by the renowned author Jeff VanderMeer. I don’t know if any of that will answer the questions I’ve been asking here—but we can’t help but try. It’s in our nature. 

The case for fixing everything

The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.” One of Brand’s several biographers described him as a mainstay of both counterculture and cyberculture, and with Maintenance, Brand wants us to understand that the upkeep and repair of tools and systems has profound impact on daily life. As he puts it, “Taking responsibility for maintaining something—whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our planet—can be a radical act.”

Radical how? This volume doesn’t say. In an outline for the overall work, Brand says his goal is to “end with the nature of maintainers and the honor owed them.”

The idea that maintainers are owed anything, much less honor, might surprise some readers. Actually, maintenance and repair have been hot topics in academia since the mid-2010s. I played some role in that movement as a cofounder of the Maintainers, a global, interdisciplinary network dedicated to the study of maintenance, repair, care, and all the work that goes into keeping the world going.

Brand is right, too, that maintainers haven’t gotten the laurels they deserve. Over the past few decades, scholars have shown that work from oiling tools to replacing worn parts to updating code bases all tends to be lower in status than “innovation.” Maintenance gets neglected in many organizational and social settings. (Just look at some American infrastructure!) And as the right-to-­repair movement has shown, companies in pursuit of greater profits have frequently locked us out of being able to do repairs or greatly reduced the maintainable life of their products. It’s hard to think of any other reason to put a computer in the door of a refrigerator.

Some of Brand’s earlier work helped inspire those insights. But his new book makes me think he doesn’t see things that way. For Brand, maintenance seems to be a solitary act, profound but more about personal success and fulfillment than tending to a shared world or making it better.

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Born in 1938, Brand is 87 years old. A sense hangs over the book—with its battles against corrosion, rust, and decay, with its attempts to keep things going even as they inevitably falter—of someone looking over life and pondering its end. Maintenance: Of Everything connects to every stage of Brand’s life. It’s worth reviewing where it falls in that arc. Brand has always been interested in tools and fixing things, but rarely has he focused on the systems that need the most care. 

More than a half-century ago, Brand was a member of the Merry Pranksters, a countercultural, LSD-centered hippie collective famously led by Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In 1966, Brand co-produced the Trips Festival, where bands like the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company performed for thousands amid psychedelic light shows.

Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog had a vision that might feel progressive, but its libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of remaking civilization alone stood in contrast to more collective social change movements.

In some ways, the Trips Festival set a paradigm for the rest of his life’s work. Brand’s biographers have described him as a network celebrity—someone who got ahead by bringing people together, building coalitions of influential figures who could boost his signal. As Kesey put it in 1980, “Stewart recognizes power. And cleaves to it.” 

Brand applied this network logic to the undertaking he will always be best remembered for: the Whole Earth Catalog. First published in 1968 and aimed at hippies and members of the nascent back-to-the-land movement, the publication had the motto “Access to tools.” Its pages were full of Quonset huts, geodesic domes, solar panels, well pumps, water filters, and other technologies for life off the grid. It was a vision that might feel progressive or left-leaning, but the libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of eschewing corrupt systems and remaking civilization alone stood in contrast to the more collective movements pushing for deep social change at the time—like civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism.

That vision also led straight to the empowerment that came with new digital tools, and to Silicon Valley. In 1985, Brand published the Whole Earth Software Catalog, the last of the series, and also cofounded the WELL—the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, a pioneering online community famous for, among other things, facilitating the trade of Grateful Dead bootlegs. He also wrote a hagiographic book about the MIT Media Lab, known for its corporate-sponsored research into new communications tech. “The Lab would cure the pathologies of technology not with economics or politics but with technology,” Brand wrote. Again, not collective action, not policymaking: tools. And Brand then cofounded the Global Business Network, a group of pricey consulting futurists that further connected him to MIT, Stanford, and the Valley. Brand had literally helped bring about the modern digital revolution.

His attention then turned toward its upkeep. Brand’s 1994 book, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, argued against high-modernist architectural ideas. Nearly all buildings eventually get remade, he argued, but he especially favored cheap, simple structures that inhabitants could easily retool to suit changing needs. In some ways, Brand was recapitulating the liberated—or libertarian—philosophy of the Whole Earth Catalog: People can remake their world, if they have access to tools. In a chapter titled “The Romance of Maintenance,” he asked readers to see the beauty, value, and occasional pleasures of fixer-uppers of all kinds.

This chapter was a touchstone for many of us in the academic subfield of maintenance studies. Researchers in disciplines like history, sociology, and anthropology, as well as artists and practitioners in fields like libraries, IT, and engineering, all started trying to understand the realities and, yes, romance of maintenance and repair. Brand joined and contributed to Listservs, attended conferences, chatted with intellectual leaders. So it’s a bit uncharitable when he writes that his new book is “the first to look at maintenance in general.” He knows better. The real question, though, is what his work has to teach us that others have not said before. In this first volume, the answer is unclear.

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Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One is an odd book. If so much of Brand’s thinking has been about access to tools, he now asks, in a more extended way: How are our tools maintained? But where Brand began his career with a catalogue, in this volume we get … what? A digest? An almanac? An encyclopedia? Its form and riotous variety fit no genre easily. 

The book has two chapters. The first, “The Maintenance Race,” recounts the story of three men who took part in the Golden Globe, a round-the-world race for solo sailors held in 1968. Each of the sailors, Brand explains, had a different philosophy of maintenance. One neglected it and hoped for the best. He died. Another thought of and prepared for everything in advance, and while he didn’t win the race, he completed it and once held the record for the “world’s longest recorded nonstop solo sailing voyage.” The final sailor won and did so through heroic acts of perseverance; his style was “Whatever comes, deal with it,” Brand explains. Structured like a fairy tale and unremittingly romantic, the story—like most of the anecdotes in the book—focuses on the derring-do of vigorous white guys. The strategy is no secret. Brand’s outline explains: “Start with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions—a true story told as a fable.” This myth is meant to inspire. 

The second chapter, “Vehicles (and Weapons),” is over 150 pages long. It has five sections, multiple subsections, five subsections designated “digressions,” one called a “subdigression,” two “postscripts,” and several “footnotes” that are not footnotes in a formal sense but, rather, further addenda. At times, it all feels like notes for a future work. Brand makes no apology for the book’s woolliness. “All I can offer here,” he writes, “is to muse across a representative of maintenance domains and see what emerges.” Perhaps the most charitable reading of the potpourri is that it represents the return of a Merry Prankster, offering us a riotous varied light show. It’s a good book to leave on a table and occasionally open to a random page for entertainment. But it often seems as if it does not know what it wants to say or be. 

“Vehicles (and Weapons)” begins by paraphrasing two famous works of maintenance philosophy, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. Maintenance involves both “problem finding” and “problem solving.” While much repair work is marked by anxiety, impatience, and boredom, it also offers positive values and outcomes. “Motorcycle maintainers take heart from what they repair for—the glory of the ride,” Brand writes. 

The beauty and triumph of cheapness is a running theme throughout the work, harking back to How Buildings Learn. Henry Ford’s Model T won out over early electric vehicles and hugely expensive luxury vehicles like Rolls-Royce’s Silver Ghost because it was cheap and easier to maintain. The three most popular cars in human history—the Ford Model T, the Volkswagen Bug, and the Lada “Classic” from Russia—all privileged cheapness, “retained their basic design for decades, and … invited repair by the owner.” Or, to be fair, maybe demanded it? For every hobbyist who delighted in being able to self-reliantly keep a VW running, there must have been thousands who appreciated how cheap it was and hated that it broke a lot. Brand never points to social research, like surveys, that might help us know people’s feelings on such matters.

Other sections recount how Americans created interchangeable parts (enabling not only cheap mass production but also easy maintenance), examine how maintenance works with assault rifles and in war, and track the history of technical manuals from the early modern period to the age of YouTube. These stories are solid, but they’re also well known to students of technology, and nearly all are recycled from the work of others, featuring many large block quotes. The volume breaks little new ground. 

Brand treats maintenance as an unalloyed good. But the field of maintenance studies has moved on, burrowing into the domain’s ironies, complexities, and difficulties. A simple example: In most cases, it is environmentally far better to retire and recycle an internal-combustion vehicle and buy an electric one than to keep the polluting beast going forever. Maintaining a gas-guzzler or a coal-­burning power plant isn’t a radical act but a regressive one. Also, maintenance can become a life-breaking burden on the poor, and it falls inequitably on the shoulders of women and people of color. Keeping existing systems going can be a way of avoiding tough, necessary change—like making technological systems more accessible for people with disabilities. In this volume, Brand is uninterested in such difficult trade-offs. He avoids any question of how politics shapes these issues, or how they shape politics.

This avoidance comes out most clearly in a section of “Vehicles (and Weapons)” that talks about Elon Musk—a character of “unique mastery,” Brand informs us. He tells us that Bill Gates once shorted Tesla’s stock, only to lose $1.5 billion. The lesson is clear: Elon won. 

In what political and social vision is money the best way to keep the score? Brand rightly points out that electric vehicles have fewer moving parts and, in that sense, are more maintainable than internal-combustion vehicles. He celebrates Musk most of all because his products “have all proven to be game changers in part because they combine ingenious design with surprisingly low cost.” Again, it’s Brand’s “cheap, available tools” hypothesis. But there’s a real superficiality and lack of follow-through in thinking here: Teslas remain luxury vehicles whose sales have slumped since federal tax subsidies disappeared. The company has faced several right-to-repair lawsuits; there’s even a law review article on the topic. Musk is in no sense a maintenance hero. Yet Brand writes that with his companies, “Musk may have done more practical world saving than any other business leader of his time.” By the time Brand was writing this book, the controversies surrounding Musk for at least flirting with antisemitism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and more were quite clear. About this, the book says not a word.

For sure, Brand needn’t agree with Musk’s critics, but failing to even broach the subject is tone deaf and out of touch. Others have argued that Silicon Valley’s “Move fast and break things” mentality undermines healthy maintenance. Brand doesn’t raise the idea—even to dismiss it. 

It could be that with Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One Brand is just getting going; that in subsequent volumes he’ll have something more coherent to say; that he’ll raise really hard questions and try to answer them. But given his track record, we might reasonably doubt it. Kesey said Brand cleaves to power; he certainly doesn’t question it. 

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and host of Peoples & Things, a podcast about human life with technology.

You have no choice in reading this article—maybe

Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion. 

Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad lecture. Maoz assumed his boss was going to tell him exactly what to do, or at least throw some PowerPoint slides his way. But no. Maoz had free rein to teach anything, as long as it was relevant to the students. “I could have gone to human brain augmentation,” he says. “Cyborgs or whatever.”

Yet that admittedly fun and borderline sci-fi topic wasn’t what popped, unbidden, into his mind. His idea, he recalls with excitement: “What neuroscience has to say about the question of free will!” 

How—or whether—humans make decisions (like, say, about what to discuss in an undergrad lecture) had been on his mind since he’d read an article in his early twenties suggesting that … maybe they didn’t. This question might naturally beget others: Had he even had a choice about whether to read that article in the first place? How would he ever know if he was responsible for making decisions in his life or if he just had the illusion of control?

“After that, there was no turning back,” says Maoz, now a professor at Chapman University, in California. He finished his PhD work in human movement, but afterward he scooted further up the neural chain to find out how desires and beliefs turn into actions—from raising an arm to choosing someone to ask out to dinner on a Friday night.

Today, Maoz is a central figure in the attempt to (sort of, maybe) answer how that neural chain functions. His research has since overturned and reinter­preted canonical neuroscience studies and united the straight-scientific and philosophical sides of the free-will question. More than anything, though, he’s succeeded in uncovering new wrinkles in the debate.

Machines and magic tricks

The concept of free will seems straightforward, but it doesn’t have a universally accepted definition. One intuitive notion is that it’s the ability to make our own decisions and take our own actions on purpose—that we control our lives. But physicists might ask if the universe is deterministic, following a preordained path, and if human choices can still happen in such a universe. 

That’s a question for them, Maoz says. What neuroscientists can do is figure out what’s going on in the brain when people make decisions. “And that’s what we’re trying to do: to understand how our wishes, desires, beliefs, turn into actions,” he says.

By the time Maoz had finished his PhD, in 2008, neuroscientific research into the question had been going on for decades. One foundational study from the 1960s showed that a hand movement—something a person seemingly decides to do—was preceded by the appearance in the brain of an electrical signal called the “readiness potential.” 

Building on that result, in the 1980s a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet did the experiment that had first piqued Maoz’s interest in the topic—one that many, until recently, interpreted as a death knell for the concept of free will.

An electrical impulse in our brains can shed only so much light on whether we truly are the architects of our own fates.

“He just had people sit there, and whenever they feel like it, they would go like this,” says Maoz, wiggling his wrist. Libet would then ask where a rotating dot was on a screen when they first had the urge to flick. He found that the readiness potential appeared not only before they moved their hand but before they reported having the urge to move—or, in Libet’s interpretation, before they knew they were going to move. 

Studies since have confirmed the observation and shown that the readiness potential appears a second or two—and maybe, fMRI implies, up to 10 seconds—before participants report making a conscious decision. “It suggests we are essentially passengers in a self-driving car,” says Maoz. “The unconscious biological machine does all the steering, but our conscious mind sits in the driver’s seat and takes the credit.” 

Maoz initially approached his own research with variations on Libet’s experiments. He worked with epilepsy patients who already had electrodes in their brains, for clinical purposes, and was able to predict which hand they would raise before they raised it. 

Still, some of the Libet-inspired studies people were doing nagged at him. “All these results were about completely arbitrary decisions. Raise your hand whenever you feel like it,” he says. “Why? No reason.” A decision like that is quite different from, say, choosing to break up with your partner. Try telling someone they weren’t in the driver’s seat for that. 

The field wasn’t looking at meaningful decisions, he says—the ones that actually set the course of lives. 

Maoz began pulling in philosophers to help guide his approach. They would challenge him to confront the semantic differences between things like intention, desire, and urge. Neuroscientists have tended to lump those concepts together, but philosophers tease them apart: Desire is a want that doesn’t necessarily progress toward an action; urge carries implications of immediacy and compulsion; and intention involves committing to a plan. (Maoz has come to focus specifically on intention—including, recently, the potential intentions of AI.)

In 2017, he organized his first in a series of free-will conferences, drawing many autonomy-interested philosophers. “Thank you so much for coming,” he recalls saying at the opening of the meeting. “As if you had a choice.” One day, the crew took an excursion out on a lake. As the group munched on shrimp, someone joked that they hoped the boat didn’t sink, because everybody in the field would die. 

The comment didn’t make Maoz feel existential dread. Instead, he figured that if the whole field was already there, why not lasso them all into writing a research grant? “He just thinks what should be the next step and just has a very good ability to just make it happen,” says Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University and a frequent collaborator.

That ability is special among scientists, says Chapman colleague Aaron Schurger, with whom Maoz co-directs the Laboratory for Understanding Consciousness, Intentions, and Decision-Making (LUCID, appropriately). “I really think that Uri is kind of at the nexus of this field right now because he’s really, really good at bringing people together around these big ideas,” he says.

Donations and interruptions

Maoz has recently been making progress on one of the big ideas that have consistently occupied his working hours: how trivial and significant decisions play out differently in the brain. In collaborations with Mudrik, he’s parsed the neural difference between picking and choosing—their terms for arbitrary decisions and those that change your life and tug on your emotions. 

Readiness potential? Their measurements didn’t clock it ahead of choices. In 2019, Maoz and a crew published a paper measuring the electrical activity in people’s brains as they pressed a key to choose one of two nonprofits to donate $1,000 to—for real, with actual dollars. Then the researchers compared that activity with what they saw when the same group pressed a key at random to donate $500 each to two nonprofits. The team saw the readiness potential in the arbitrary decision, but not for the $1,000 question. 

Libet’s result, they concluded, doesn’t apply to the important stuff, which means readiness potential might not actually be a sign that your brain is making a choice before you’re aware of it. “If Libet would have chosen to focus on deliberate decisions, then maybe the entire debate about neuroscience proving free will to be an illusion would have been spared from us,” Mudrik says. 

Maoz’s research has spurred others to reinterpret Libet’s work. It’s “enriched my thought process a great deal,” says Bianca Ivanof, a psychologist whose dissertation scrutinized Libet’s methods. They turn out to identify readiness potential at different times depending on how the rotating-dot setup is designed, complicating the ability to compare and interpret results.

Maoz has also continued to gather data on the subject. Last year, for example, he used an EEG to measure electrical signals in people’s brains as they got ready to press a keyboard space bar. At random moments, he interrupted their preparations with an audible tone and asked them about their intentions. He saw no connection between the readiness potential and whether or not they were planning to tap the key—evidence that the potential doesn’t represent the buildup of either conscious or unconscious plans. The team did see a signal, though, in a different part of the brain when people said they were preparing to move.

So … that’s free will? Sadly, Maoz would be compelled to say Well, not exactly. An electrical impulse in our brains can shed only so much light on whether we truly are the architects of our own fates. And maybe the confusing data from neurons is actually the point. “I don’t think it is a yes-or-no question,” Maoz says. Maybe our less meaningful choices aren’t mindfully made but big ones are; maybe we have the conscious power to change an intended action, but only if our brains are in a particular state. 

Neuroscientists likely can’t figure out, on their own, if free will exists. But they can, Maoz says, parse how semantically distinct decision-making forces—desires, urges, intentions, wishes, beliefs—manifest in our brains and become actions. “That is something that we are making progress on,” he says, “and I think that that’s going to help us understand what we do control.” And perhaps also help us make peace with what we do not. 

Sarah Scoles is a freelance science journalist and author based in southern Colorado.

Constellations

I.

We had crash-landed on the planet. We were far from home. The spaceship could not be repaired, and the rescue beacon had failed. Besides me, only the astrogator, part of the captain, and the ship’s AI mind were left. 

Outside, the atmosphere registered as hostile to most organisms. We huddled in the lifeboat, which was inoperable but still held air. Vast storms buffeted our cockleshell shelter, although we knew from prior readings that other areas remained calm. All that remained to us was to explore, if we wanted to live. The captain gave me the sole weapon. She tasked the astrogator with carrying some tools that would not unduly weigh him down.

Little existed on the planet except deserts of snow. But alien artifacts lay in an area near us. We were an exploration team, so this discovery had oddly comforted us, even though we had been on our way elsewhere. The massive systems failure had no discernible source, and the planet had been our only choice for landfall.

The artifacts took the form of 13 domes, spread out over that hostile terrain. The domes had been linked by cables just below shoulder level, threaded through the tops of metal posts at irregular intervals. Whether intended or not, these cables and rods formed a series of paths between the domes. 

Before our instruments failed, the AI had reported that the domes appeared to have a heat signature. The cables pulsed under our grip in a way that teased promised warmth far ahead. It took some time to get used to the feeling.

The shortest path between domes was a thousand miles long. The longest path was 10 thousand miles long. Our suit technology was good: A suit could recycle water, generate food, create oxygen. It could push us into various states of near hibernation while motors in the legs drove us forward. For the captain, the suit would compensate for having lost her legs and ease her pain. We estimated we could reach the nearest path and follow it to the nearest dome … and that was it. If the dome had life support capabilities, or even just a way to replenish our suits, we would live. Otherwise, we would probably die.

We revised the estimate of our survival downward when we reached the path and soon encountered the skeletons of dead astronauts littering the way. In all shapes and sizes, cocooned within their suits. Their huddled forms under the snow displayed a serenity at odds with their fate. But when I wiped the frost from face plates, we saw the extremity of their suffering.

It is difficult to explain how we felt walking among so many fatalities. So many dead first contacts. 

We no longer had to puzzle over the systems failure. Spaceships came here to crash, and intelligent entities came here to die, for whatever reason. We could not presume our fate would be any different, and adjusted our expectations accordingly. The AI’s platitudes about courage did not raise morale. There were too many lost there in the frozen wastes. 

Here were the ghastly emissaries of hundreds of spacefaring species we had never before encountered.

The number of the bodies and their haphazard positioning hampered our ability to make progress to the dome. The AI estimated our chances of survival at below 50% for the first time. We would starve in our suits as the motors propelled us forward. We would become desiccated and exist in an elongation of our thoughts that made us weak and stupid until the light winked out. But still, we had no choice. So even in places where the dead in their suits were piled high, we would simply plunge forward, over and through them, headed for the dome. 

What we would find there, as I have said, we did not know. But we were in an area of the galaxy where ancient civilizations had died out millions of years ago. We had been on our way to a major site, an ancient city on a moon with no atmosphere in a wilderness of stars. 

Although our emotions fluctuated, a professional awe and curiosity about the dead eventually came over us. This created much debate over the comms. We had made a discovery for the ages, but our satisfaction was bittersweet. Even if we lived longer than expected, we would never return home, never see our friends or family again. The AI might continue on after we were dead, but I doubt it envied being the one to report on our discovery centuries hence. And to who?

Here were the ghastly emissaries of hundreds of spacefaring species we had never before encountered. Their suits displayed an extraordinary range, although our examination was cursory. Some even appeared to be made out of scales and other biological substances from their home worlds, giving us further clues as to their origins. 

The burial of the suits by snow and the lack of access to anything other than a screaming face or faces, often distorted by time and ice, worked against recording much usable data. This issue was compounded in those cases where the suit was part of the organism and they had not needed any “artificial skin,” as the AI put it, to survive harsh conditions. That many had died despite appearing well-­prepared for the planet’s environment sobered us up even before our own suits dispensed drugs to help our mental states. 

After a time, each face seemed to express some aspect of our own stress and terror at the seriousness of our situation. After a time, the sheer welter of detail defeated us and caused us extreme distress. The captain made the observation that even one instance of alien contact might cause physiological and mental conditions, including anxiety, stress, fatigue. Here, we were constantly encountering the alien dead of what seemed at times an infinite number of civilizations. 

We stopped recording. We recommitted ourselves to the slog toward the nearest dome. 

The captain’s drugs unit had failed, but the AI found a way to help her by turning off the heating element in select panels of her suit. Some parts of her would soon be lost to the cold, but the system would allow her to live on with some measure of comfort.

I must admit, we were just glad the screaming had stopped and welcomed her counsel.

---

II.

For a long time, as we labored in our spacesuits on that planet—following the path, beleaguered by snowstorms—we could not understand why we found so many dead astronauts, of so many unknown alien types, and yet no spaceships. During good visibility, our line of sight reached, unbroken, for 500 miles. Where were the crash sites? 

But one day we chanced upon an antenna sticking up out of the ground. Clumsy attempts at excavation soon revealed that below this antenna lay a vast dead spaceship of a kind we had never seen before. The gash that had opened it to the elements had laid bare its unique architecture, but also gave the illusion that the snow had spilled out of it to create the world around us rather than having infiltrated and accumulated inside over time.

Aspects of the spaceship’s texture gave the startling suggestion that it had been made of some ultra-hard wood or wood equivalent. Clambering partway up to stare at the inner compartments, we all felt the strangeness of the dimensions and proportions of the living quarters. There was no sign of the occupants. Perhaps, I suggested, they had headed for the domes. Perhaps they had even made it to the domes. I tried and failed to keep hope from my voice.

But the captain had ordered the AI to perform a materials analysis. The “snow” in this region had been contaminated by ash and tiny particles of bone. The AI estimated that more than 70% of the white surrounding us was made of the remains of vertebrate sentient life and the remnants of suits. Of invertebrates there was no telling. A thaw might bring not just the drip, drip of water but a shushing sound indicative of bone particulate in the mixture. I imagined there might even be the clink of small objects not rendered down by whatever intense heat had created the ash.

The astrogator had insisted on digging deeper into the ship, with the idea that some recognizable commonality between technologies might yield a part or parts with which he could fix our ship. The rest of us allowed this delusion for the obvious reasons. But upon his return, he held in his hands ovals of snow not much larger than the space formed by the circle between a thumb and finger. Many of them had soft indentations, as one might find in the afterbirth of reptiles from eggs. A kind of ghostly cilia-like tread appeared along the bottoms of these objects.

The astrogator did not find any technology of use to us. Instead, he discovered that the species piloting the spaceship had been so different from us as to be safely encapsuled in suits the size of eggs. Much of what had spilled into or spilled out of the gash constituted the bodies of the crew, in their hundreds of thousands. Their suits had been inadequate to the conditions. They had died en masse attempting to escape their own ship.

The AI speculated that it had been a generation ship, perhaps fleeing a planet with a dying star. If we wondered how the AI had reached this conclusion, it was because we did not want it to be true.

The captain became silent upon receiving this further news and did not speak to us for more than 100 miles of further progress. 

As we left that site, unsure exactly what we stepped upon, we also knew that since the spaceship was entirely covered by snow, it had been falling into the sediment for days or months or years. We knew then that our ship might not be visible against the horizon should we retrace our steps. The already bleak probability of rescue through visual identification of a crash site from above would be lost to us in time, even as the line of cables remained perpetually visible to the horizon. We now thought of the planet as a trap. But of what sort? 

---

III.

We could not be sure, but in the absence of the captain’s voice, it may have been the AI that put forward the idea of the planet’s being “duplicitous.” The phrasing concerned us, for there was a duplicity in using the planet as the subject of the spoken sentence. A sphere rotating around a sun in deep space could not exhibit forethought or premeditation or other qualities of sentience. 

The AI meant whoever or whatever had created the conditions on the planet that allowed spacecraft to be trapped and then the occupants placed in a perilous situation with no recourse. But I distinctly recall the AI using the words “the planet.” In addition to being inaccurate, this also let us know that the AI did not have any analysis available that might help us understand the agency and motivations acting upon us. 

But in a sense, the AI only voiced something I had felt for several miles: that there existed an overlay to the planet’s surface, an area or space or different landscape unavailable to us. This overlay had also not been available to any of the prior astronauts who had died here. In this area or space or different landscape existed a wealth of the usual hoped-for things: a breathable atmosphere and abundant food and water. 

While we struggled with the line through the snow and through the storms that welled up, others could see us but chose to ignore us for reasons or perhaps just for their own well-being. For hundreds, possibly thousands of years, as explorers had died here in merciless and terrible ways, there raged a sumptuous feast for the senses, as excessive as it was ancient and unending.

I cannot tell you how powerfully the AI’s words struck us, so that our mouths watered at the thought of real food and of clean, unrecycled water, of a freedom unencumbered by suits and breathing apparatus. Even at our intended destination, we would have spent most of our days aboard a small space station. This tedium would have been broken only by the arduous process of reaching the unbreathable surface and its ancient ruins of jagged black stone. 

This vision that overtook us functioned not just as tantalizing delusion. It scared us so much that we could not compartmentalize it in our thoughts. It continued to overwhelm us like a wave.

We fought for the first time, with the astrogator expressing the wish to return to the ruined spacecraft and explore nearby areas for parts, while the captain broke silence to order us to continue to make progress toward the nearest dome. The AI, which had brought us to this point, stole the captain’s silence and said no more.

For each of us, those endless white plains with no real elevation, just the metal rope and the metal posts, had become a kind of repetition that hurt the brain, and the mind with it.

---

IV.

About halfway to the nearest dome, amid a storm that reduced our progress incrementally and our line of sight to nothing, we came upon a peculiar tableau. 

Six astronaut suits had fallen across and around the metal rope. With the flurries of snow, it took us, even with our powerful headlamps, some minutes to determine the nature of the obstruction. The six suits had been created for a humanoid species that must have had torsos like nine-foot-long slabs, attached to six limbs, three for walking. Their heads had flared out like thick fans. All the helmets were cracked open, and curled inside were the skeletons of some other intelligent species no larger than 40 or 50 pounds, possibly warm-blooded. With no sign of the original occupants. 

After a brief analysis cut short by the conditions, we postulated that the warm-blooded species had worn breathable skin suits that, as they failed, required these intruders to seek shelter. All they could find were these six dead astronauts. Because we could discover no trace of the original occupants, the AI put forward the theory that this smaller species had eaten every scrap of the remains within the suits. 

Then they too had perished, and in time, the AI suggested, something smaller would take up residence inside those bodies, then smaller still within those, and smaller still—

At this point, the captain attempted a soft reboot of the AI using a coded question. We could hear the concern in her voice.

Yet the AI continued undeterred, suggesting that we might find this to be a common situation. It might be replicated across the planet, depending on a system’s ability to break down and process meat that had not evolved alongside the devourer for millions of years. In all likelihood, most who attempted to eat in this way died soon after, poisoned by alien flesh.

---

V.

The AI began to talk to us in strange alien voices at mile 700, as we labored through the snowstorm to hold onto the cables and thus the path. The AI warbled and chirped and howled and hummed and clucked. The AI spoke in voices like fossilized choruses of beasts, vast and harmonious. And in voices like dry grass spun to fire by the sun. And in voices like the dissolution of all things, darkness in the blinding white that scared me. 

At first we thought the AI was deranged. Then that the AI channeled voices from the dome 300 miles ahead. But finally, the AI managed to make known to us that these were the voices of the dead astronauts we had come across from time to time. Huddled frozen. The suits in so many shapes and sizes. That the voices of the dead were channeled through the AI, and nothing could stop them.

---

VI.

The snow began to betray us, as the storms created different forms of ice. Often, our arms became weary, our legs cramping, and we had to rest with greater frequency. We came to accept the solid crunch that could support our weight. We came to reject the feather-light freshness that felt effortless underfoot but could give way just as easily as if it were air. In some places, slick purple-hued ice welled up in sluggish layers as if something half-alive. In others, we discovered strange islands of elevation, with brutal curls and curves that suggested two continental shelves had clashed in that space.

As we adapted to these conditions, and as conditions worsened and still we adapted, we came to feel an illusion of competency, one that made even the astrogator temporarily cheerful. The sounds through the comms of our efforts, the deeper breathing, the occasional muffled curse, seduced us in this regard. We felt that we were becoming adroit at handling the snow. We began to believe if we could only make it to the dome, we would be saved.

Yet this uptick in morale ran parallel to, rather than intersected with, the idea of our ultimate survival.

---

VII.

We lost track of the distance left to us without the AI to tell us. Or the captain, in her pain, no longer thought to issue updates. But across the distance left to us came sights beyond reckoning: three giant astronauts spaced 50 miles apart. Larger than most starships, each body lay sprawled across an area larger than several fields and in very different conditions.

The first had been badly burned and was thus unrecoverable, even in terms of salvage. The astronaut had crawled or pulled itself along for some distance. It had left a long smudge of black and red across that expanse. The alien species was, as ever, unknown to us, but the five arms were sunk in the ground as if in agony. The skull had once held three eyes, and the face plate had been cracked by force so strong it resembled a meteor strike. The body was bloated, the fabric of the suit gray with a shimmer of green that came and went, linked to photosensitive skin cells. The way the flesh took up space, and how it exhibited aspects more plant than animal, made it impossible to study further.

The second was a sprawl of limbs, with the suggestion of a defensive posture. The debris of conflict flared out to the side in an incomprehensible display. The suit had an intactness that surprised us, but a similar crack in the face plate without any trace of body within. The rest of the suit had become inhabited by a wealth of other dead astronauts of varying sizes and shapes, who had sought shelter or sustenance and then become trapped or simply … given up. As the AI had predicted, we had once again encountered bodies providing other bodies with temporary sustenance and shelter.

I felt like a parasite who beheld a god. Or was the scale even more ludicrous?

But this condition was not at first evident to us, becoming apparent only after we had clambered for an hour to reach the cracked face plate and the entry hole extended like a broken archway before us.

Despite the number of remains within, and the difficulty in moving through them to explore, the captain ordered an exhaustive recon. Her pulse in the readings had a thready quality. Sometimes I felt, and the astrogator too when we took private comms, that the captain had begun to say things similar to the AI’s delusions. Yet we obeyed the order, on the chance that some internal calculation on the captain’s part meant she believed this was the only way we would survive. 

What did we expect to find in the dead body of a once-­intelligent giant? Food? Oxygen? Some cause of death? To put off the thought of our own death by seeking shelter with a death so large we could not comprehend it?

I felt like a parasite who beheld a god. Or was the scale even more ludicrous? I had trouble envisioning the way the body must have twisted as it pitched forward into that icy ground. I had trouble holding onto my own thoughts.

More and more pressure moved through my skull as I contemplated that scene. We were in the midst of something none of my kind had ever known. We might be the only ones, ever. I better understood the unraveling of the AI and of the captain. My sharpness had dulled, taking my calm with it.

It was impossible to tell how long the astronaut had taken to die. Unless somewhere within that fallen figure some hint of life hid that we would never find.

The storms fell away, rose, then fell away again. 

---

VIII.

The third huge astronaut was full of light and life and shone out across the wasteland of snow like a beacon. For a moment, I thought we had pierced the invisible layer and could see what lay beyond the veil. We would have comforts beyond anything found on our ruined spaceship even when it had been fit to cross galactic space. There would not be recycled urine for our water. There would not be the faint stink of sweat creeping into our suits as the ventilation system began to fail. Our liquid food would not taste stale and moldy. 

As we approached, the suit extended almost to the horizon in that foreshortened perspective created by the left foot. We noted through our remaining instrumentation that the suit remained intact. The pressure told us a kind of air circulated within its sealed surfaces. 

We climbed with a renewed energy, the promise of sanctuary so close making us giddy. We each exhorted the others on with such exuberance that it made me a little afraid. What lay on the other side of this state of mind but a fall?

When we reached the helmet plate, we could see inside not a face or a skull, but instead such a richness of healthy growth that we fell silent before it. None of us could, I believe, understand exactly what we saw, except that it equaled ecosystem—resplendent with vibrant greens and blues, stippled with other colors. There might be some parallel to a terrarium full of moss and exotic plants. There might be some sense of life moving amongst those plants, as of jewel-like amphibians or even tiny shy sapphire birds. We could not smell or taste or hear what lay behind the face plate. We could not experience it in that way, but somehow we each imagined enough to be calmed and comforted by it. 

The astrogator said he might be able to create a hole in the plate or elsewhere on the body to let us in, and then patch the surface such that not too much air or vitality would spill out. This workaround might take an hour or two, due to the delicate nature of what we saw within. But it was possible.

The captain considered the astrogator’s proposal and then agreed. The weather had begun to turn dangerous again. That we should begin immediately did not need to be said. With the proper pressure brought to bear, we would have some measure of sanctuary from which to recover for a final push to the dome. It could be the difference between life and death, the astrogator said. If the atmosphere was breathable, we might even be able to give the captain some better solution to her pain.

I unclipped the astrogator’s equipment from his waist and threw it off the mountain that was the astronaut and watched it sail through the air and into the snow. Then I used my weapon to fry it where it lay. Then I threw my weapon into the snow, too, in a place where the featheriness would cover it and hide it forever. 

We were a team and I had helped my team while showing them I posed no threat—although I knew the astrogator and the captain would not see it that way. I stood there on the face plate that we could no longer open with the diminished tools at our disposal as they both yelled at me through the comms. It’s unimportant what they said to me. They were admonishing me for something that had already happened and that they had no power to stop. I did not bother to explain, but began to make the descent to the ground so we could once again take up the metal rope and make for the dome.

---

That in that frozen hellscape, the persistence of life in that manner, an oasis in the midst of nothing, could be categorized as a miracle.

This reply incensed him and he castigated me in words not used among members of a team that respect each other. Once more, I ignored him, but told him if our oxygen got low, he could have mine if we calculated he could make it to the base. I meant this, as I knew the odds were low anyway. I had hurt my knee taking the equipment from the astrogator and then making my way so rapidly down from the dead astronaut.

The astrogator did not reply, by which I knew he did not accept my answer.

The reason I took the tools and destroyed them is because the wind had told me something it had not whispered to the captain or the astrogator. The wind had not spoken to me before, so I believed what it told me. That the astronaut within the suit lived on, if unable to move. That what we saw on the outside and registered as ecosystem, as separate “plants” and “animals,” instead formed a composite life-form and that to crack open the suit or cut through the suit at a leg would have been a violation.

That in that frozen hellscape, the persistence of life in that manner, an oasis in the midst of nothing, could be categorized as a miracle. 

I would not snuff that out. I could not allow that to be snuffed out. But I remembered too how I felt looking at that vast and alien country behind the face plate. So calm, so comforted, overcome by the depths of an emotion I could not place. Would I replace that feeling with the feeling of seeing all those explorers dead within the other vast suit? Even as I become one of them? 

Because the planet had already told us the rules, the consequences, and the ultimate outcome. There are no odds so terrible that they could not be experienced, and in dozens of ways, in this place. 

So I trudged on and the astrogator cursed me and cursed me and called out my childhood and how badly I must have been brought up and how I must have cheated to pass the psych exams, and yet I had thought the same of him at various points during our journey.

See how beautiful the snow is, falling now, I said to him over the comms. See how precise and geometric this line we follow across this expanse. 

He did not reply, but a little later he told me he no longer believed in the line at all, and by his calculations he would get to the dome faster if he abandoned it and struck out on his own.

I could not stop the astrogator and did not want to, so I watched him become a smaller and smaller figure against the white until the white ate him up and I was alone.

---

X.

I have been walking a long time, visiting with the dead. Here, against an arch of heaven that appears no different than what I see directly in front of me. 

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling Southern Reach series, translated into 38 languages. His short fiction has appeared in Vulture, Slate, New York Magazine, Black Clock, Interzone, American Fantastic Tales (Library of America), and many others.

Listen to Earth’s rumbling, secret soundtrack

The boom of a calving glacier. The crackling rumble of a wildfire. The roar of a surging storm front. They’re the noises of the living Earth, music of this one particular sphere and clues to the true nature of these dramatic events. But as loud as all these things are, they emit even more acoustic energy below the threshold of human hearing, at frequencies of 20 hertz or lower. These “infrasounds” have such long wavelengths that they can travel around the globe as churning emanations of distant events. But humans have never been able to hear them.

Until now, that is. Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World, a new album by the musician and artist Brian House, condenses 24 hours of these rumbles into 24 minutes of the most basic of bass lines, putting a new spin on the idea of ambient music. Sound, even infrasound, is really just variations in air pressure. So House built a set of three “macrophones,” tubes that funnel air into a barometer capable of taking readings 100 times a second. From the quiet woods of western Massachusetts, House can pick up what the planet is laying down. Then he speeds the recording up by a factor of 60 so that it’s audible to the wee ears of humans. “I am really interested in the layers of perception that we can’t access,” he says. “It’s not only low sound, but it’s also distant sound. That kind of blew my mind.”

House’s album is art, but scientists made it possible. Barometers picked up the 1883 eruption of the South Pacific volcano Krakatoa as far away as London. And today, a global network of infrasound sensors helps enforce the nuclear test ban treaty. A few infrasound experts—like Leif Karlstrom, a volcanologist at the University of Oregon who uses infrasound to study Mount Kilauea in Hawaii—helped House set up his music-gathering array and better understand what he was hearing. “He’s highlighting interesting phenomena,” Karlstrom says, even though it’s impossible to tell exactly what is making each specific sound. 

So how’s the actual music? It’s 24 minutes of an otherworldly chorus, alternating between low grumbling vibrations and soft ghostlike whispers. A high-pitched whistle? Could be a train, House says. An intense low-octave rattle? Maybe a distant thunderstorm or a shifting ocean current. “For me, it’s about the mystery of it,” he says. “I hope that’s a little bit unsettling.” But it also might connect someone listening to a wider—and deeper—world. 

Monique Brouillette is a freelance writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.