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  “As he said this, he unbuttoned the cuff of his right sleeve with his free hand. His right hand held the pistol, and his finger never left the trigger. He pulled up his sleeve, revealing a scatter-plot row of weeping boils that had sprouted up his forearm. Nestled in each boil was a small, wide eye. There were five of these eyes, bright as a baby’s. Each looked like his eyes, like mine, but each tracked independently, like five separate eyes in five separate darling baby faces. As I watched, they blinked in series, like a shiver of gooseflesh.”

  The children do not react to this, and that’s good; their Resilience is all they’ll have, soon enough.

  “My father said: ‘I’m scared about what happens next.’ He was crying then with his own eyes, his forearm eyes still looking around like fascinated toddlers. ‘I used to get anxious,’ he told me. ‘It was this constant feeling, like something awful was always just about to happen. Now the feeling has changed. I feel like something awful has already happened. And it’s me. I don’t want to do this, but the song . . . I thought it was Mick Jones singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” but now I realize it’s Sid Vicious covering Sinatra’s “My Way.” I can take a hint.’

  “And then he put the gun in his mouth. And then he pulled it out with a grimace, and instead placed the barrel beneath the shelf of his chin. And he pulled the trigger twice. That impressed me. It still does: he’d done the job fine with the first bullet—the proof got all over his grandfather’s axe—but he so badly wanted to make sure the job was done right and final that he had the presence of will to keep pulling, even though he was already dead. That’s something. That was my dad, in a nutshell: he really did the job right and full.”

  You take a breath, and you finish:

  “My father committed suicide because he’d listened to the Bad Song on the radio—back before anyone even knew anything like the Event could happen—and the song had started to change him. He was insufficiently resilient and adaptive. This is a problem for adults: he could not cope with What Has Happened. To his mind, when your Pattern is gone, you’re gone: the head and handle aren’t just not the old head and handle; they aren’t heads or handles at all. He could not accept this, and so he was Rejected.”

  You pause, and then say:

  “I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place.”

  “You can’t,” Vanessa Z. gasps. Denial.

  You ask if there’s a rule that you can’t. The children clearly don’t know. But you do, and there is not. No one ever conceived of the possibility that an adult might try to leave the “safety” of a federal continuity-of-operations shelter. No one older than fifteen is known to have survived outside any shelter, and everyone knows it.

  “Bitch,” Bennie mutters under his breath, his eyes accusatory coals. Anger.

  The other shelters ceased communicating weeks ago—their computer networks don’t even “reply to pings,” whatever that means. You don’t imagine this is because they’ve somehow found a way to eliminate Rejection.

  “Who will help us work through our issues, Dr. Mikkelson?” Vanessa L. asks, slyly.

  Bargaining.

  You tell them that Dr. Bowersox is an excellent clinician, because she is. They will all be ready to leave sooner or later, you explain. They all have the capacity to be Resilient, Functional, and Adaptive. They are young, and it is still their world. They just need to trust in the therapeutic protocol and in themselves.

  You do not say that we—the adults “protecting” you—won’t survive here. Small children are never Rejected; they can accept What Has Happened. These older children can process their grief and likely avoid Rejection, too. But what are the rest of us, the “responsible adults,” doing? Living like moles, breeding more children in order to steadily traumatize them in the sunless continuity of operations bunkers, only to someday send them out the Waiting Room Door, where they’ll sink or swim on their own—and all the while cutting our own rations further and further. What’s the point of that? What the hell are we clinging to?

  You realize you are Bargaining with yourself, and you smile.

  “I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

  5. ACCEPTANCE

  The final rule is that when you leave the Children’s Sharing Place, you must leave through the Waiting Room.

  As soon as the session begins, you stand. “I am ready to leave the Children’s Sharing Place,” you repeat.

  The group is silent. They do not Bargain because they are now in Depression.

  But you’re past all that, and so you leave.

  The Waiting Room Door snicks shut behind you, and you are finally in the Waiting Room, where the potted plant nods in the corner like the quiet old woman whispering, “Hush.”

  The Waiting Room is small but not stuffy.

  You wait. Nothing happens. And so you leave through the EXIT.

  There is a shock of clear light and a distant dinging. The heavy EXIT door thunks shut behind you. Your eyes clear, and you discover that the door exits directly into a large parking lot: cracked, oil-stained asphalt full of weeds, a few cars parked indiscriminately around the blacktop. One car has its driver’s side door hanging open. That’s the source of the ding: the keys have been forgotten in the ignition.

  Something bothers you about that dinging, but you can’t focus on what that might be.

  You turn to look at the building that you came out of, and see that it’s a low-slung strip of little cinderblock office units skirted with ragged hedges, situated on the outskirts of a giant parking lot, which surrounds a distant shopping mall. There are more cars at the mall, but the parking is no more orderly. You’d originally been brought (note the passive voice) to a different building elsewhere in this office park, a warehouse with a loading dock. This was back when we thought we could hide long enough for What Has Happened to blow over. Back then the big concern was keeping the kids “developmentally on track” while they lived in the shelter, “so they’d be ready to kickstart the global economy.” The soldiers who brought you had spoken of critical infrastructure protection and continuity of operations planning. “The children are our future,” one had told you earnestly as she helped you down out of the truck, “our most precious natural resource.”

  You had agreed, but you were still in Denial. Everyone was. Well, everyone older than fifteen.

  You are absolutely terrified, standing out in the open in the parking lot.

  But the day is beautiful—especially after so many months spent in tunnels and bunkers and shelters and conference rooms and gymnasia. It is sunny and clear, the breeze fresh and clean. It smells of hot tar and the tall sweetgrass left to grow undisturbed in the fields beyond the parking lot. There is no distant drone of traffic. There are no airplanes in the sky, nor the contrails that show their passing. Birds flit and swoop in enormous flocks.

  You look down and see a child’s fingernail—a perfect ellipse of robin’s egg blue—crusted into the center of one of the “oil stains” that is not an oil stain. A scream gathers in your throat and you look away.

  Tilly climbs out of the dinging car and stretches languidly, like a cat. She has a big, daffy grin.

  “Oh, hey, Dr. Mikkelson!” she says. “How are you? Long time, no see.”

  You tell her you’re scared. A coyote pads out of the tall grass at the edge of the parking lot. You startle and draw back, stepping toward the safety of the EXIT. Now you’re more than scared. You are terrified, bordering on petrified.

  Two more coyotes come, trotting silently into the parking lot. You scurry back to the building and find that there is no knob on the exterior of the EXIT.

  “It’s okay,” Tilly says, smile sparkling. She’s hardly herself at all. “It’s all good,” she says. “It’s all good from now on.” She isn’t herself at all.

  The coyotes are mellow as old collies, their tongues lolling like friendly pups. One lazily laps Tilly’s hand as it trots past. The lolling tongue is n
ot a tongue; it is a tentacle, the suckers cupping wide, curious eyes, some hazel, others blue.

  High in the sky there is something beyond the clouds. At first you think it’s the Moon. But it’s too big, too close, too pink. You note that there are several of these not-moons, pale red, with wavering edges. One rotates slowly, like a curious bird, revealing an enormous three-lobed eye that blinks like a baby’s nursing mouth, pursing and relaxing.

  Your heart pounds and pounds in your chest, sending shocked vibrations down your limbs, as if you are uselessly hammering a concrete floor with a hard steel axe.

  “Dr. Mikkelson,” Tilly says, “it’s all good; just Listen.”

  Tilly is quiet, beaming at you with her daffy smile. You listen to the car dinging, and it doesn’t sound quite right. It’s a little ragged and uneven—but more importantly: it’s been months since you were taken down into the bunker. That car’s battery must be entirely dead by now.

  You abruptly remember something Dad showed you once. You’d been washing up after dinner, and had asked him why your guitar amp picked up AM when you had it cranked up with the cable plugged in, but no guitar. He explained that it was because AM transmission was powerful and simple and could infiltrate the amp—and since the amp would amplify any analog signal, it amplified that just the same as your guitar. The place he’d lived in college was near an AM station, he explained, and his toaster would pick up the broadcast on some nights. The appliance’s whisker-thin heating elements vibrated with the power of the AM transmission, singing in tinny harmony. Even unpowered items—unplugged stereos, radiators, people’s dental fillings—have been known to pick up high-output AM.

  “AM’s powerful stuff,” he’d said, drying a plate. “If you’ve got the wattage, you can make just about anything sing your song.”

  You imagine that this is precisely what the things up in the sky are doing, bathing us in their electromagnetic transmissions, suffusing our highly wired, intricately interconnected world with their perplexing, invasive song. And what is a song, if not a Pattern of signal and silence? God knows that a song can get “stuck in your head”—tricking your brain into reproducing it, over and over, the same as a virus tricks a cell into reproducing it until the cell bursts with those li’l hijackers. Was it so beyond imagining that there might be a song that was so catchy, it didn’t just seduce your brain into reproducing its Pattern, but also into fundamentally changing yours?

  Tilly nods encouragingly, still smiling. There’s something odd about her eyes, her eyelids. They’re slitted—you assume because of the brightness of the day—but the corners of her slitted eyes curl up into smiles exactly matching her smile.

  Her smile widens, as does the smiling of her eyes.

  The car’s dinging isn’t dinging; it’s the Bad Song. It vibrates all through you, at first in harmony with the vibrant clangor of your heart, and then drowning it out. For a moment it is absolutely intolerable, a feeling like your guts being used to dangle you over an infinite and airless abyss, and you absolutely understand why your father put the gun in his mouth.

  And then that feeling, whatever it might be called, releases, like a cramp loosening, and you hear the Song for what it is.

  Tilly nods, and the coyotes nod, and the birds swirl, and the Eye of Heaven even seems to nod—although how could it be nodding at you? How could the Distant Traveler care at all about something so infinitesimal as you or Tilly or this parking lot or even this country or our species—except to care absolutely and without exception, as It cares about all things here, living on the newest addition to Its glorious collection of Worlds.

  Peace and plenty is in the Song. Clean longevity is in the Song. In the Song we’ll be free of strife and free of disease and our slightly battered world will mend and go on and on and on.

  The Song isn’t Bad; it’s actually pretty Good. It’s a Good Song, and you smile. You can feel that soon you’ll be smiling all over, in every pore. You’ll be something new, all seeing and all loving, omniscient and omnipresent. Coyotes lick your fingertips, and you taste their tongues on your skin as you taste your skin through their tongues, watching through the eyes that stipple the birds’ skin like morning dew.

  The Song tells you that the Song Rejects no one, but some fail to Accept the Good Song and the One True Resonating Harmony that comes with it, here in the Vast Collection.

  This is the true Sharing Place, you realize, and you share in it as it shares in you.

  A SERIES OF STEAKS

  VINA JIE-MIN PRASAD

  Vina Jie-Min Prasad is a Singaporean writer who began publishing short stories in 2016 with “Different Ways to Burn” in HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology , at which point she’d already been given a special commendation for the James White Award for the best unpublished work of science fiction. She broke out with two major stories the following year, “Fandom for Robots” and “A Series of Steaks.” The two stories were each nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon awards. Prasad was then nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She graduated from the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2017.

  “A Series of Steaks” is a deeply engrossing story of the potentially illicit world of bioprinting as well as a reminder that nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

  ALL KNOWN FORGERIES are tales of failure. The people who get into the newsfeeds for their brilliant attempts to cheat the system with their fraudulent Renaissance masterpieces or their stacks of fake checks, well, they might be successful artists, but they certainly haven’t been successful at forgery.

  The best forgeries are the ones that disappear from notice—a second-rate still-life moldering away in gallery storage, a battered old 50-yuan note at the bottom of a cashier drawer—or even a printed strip of Matsusaka beef, sliding between someone’s parted lips.

  Forging beef is similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind. A red that’s too dark looks putrid, a white that’s too pure looks artificial. All beef is supposed to come from a cow, so stipple the red with dots, flecks, lines of white to fake variance in muscle fiber regions. Cows are similar, but cows aren’t uniform—use fractals to randomize marbling after defining the basic look. Cut the sheets of beef manually to get an authentic ragged edge, don’t get lazy and depend on the bioprinter for that.

  Days of research and calibration and cursing the printer will all vanish into someone’s gullet in seconds, if the job’s done right.

  Helena Li Yuanhui of Splendid Beef Enterprises is an expert in doing the job right.

  The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.

  As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.

  “Hi, Mr. Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”

  “Nonsense!” Mr. Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us, they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent, and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”

  “Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few month
s. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”

  “You know, Helena, you do good work, but I’m very concerned about your self-esteem, I know if I printed something like that, I’d want everyone to appreciate it! Let me tell you about this article my daughter sent me, you know research says that people without friends are prone to . . .” Mr. Chan rambles on as Helena sticks the labels on the boxes—Grilliam Shakespeare, Gyuuzen Sukiyaki, Fatty Chan’s Restaurant—and thankfully hangs up before Helena sinks into further depression. She takes her iKontakt off before heading to the drone delivery office, giving herself some time to recover from Mr. Chan’s relentless cheerfulness.

  Helena has five missed calls by the time she gets back. A red phone icon blares at the corner of her vision before blinking out, replaced by the incoming-call notification. It’s secured and anonymized, which is quite a change from usual. She pops the earpiece in.

  “Yeah, Mr. Chan?”

  “This isn’t Mr. Chan,” someone says. “I have a job for Splendid Beef Enterprises.”

  “All right, sir. Could I get your name and what you need? If you could provide me with the deadline, that would help too.”

  “I prefer to remain anonymous,” the man says.

  “Yes, I understand, secrecy is rather important.” Helena restrains the urge to roll her eyes at how needlessly cryptic this guy is. “Could I know about the deadline and brief?”

  “I need two hundred T-bone steaks by the 8th of August. 38.1- to 40.2-millimeter thickness for each one.” A notification to download t-bone_info.KZIP pops up on her lenses. The most ambitious venture Helena’s undertaken in the past few months has been Gyuuzen’s strips of marbled sukiyaki, and even that felt a bit like pushing it. A whole steak? Hell no.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think my business can handle that. Perhaps you could try—”

  “I think you’ll be interested in this job, Helen Lee Jyun Wai.”