Illustration: Grandeduc (Adobe Stock)
io9 is proud to present the fiction of LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we present a story of the current issue of LIGHTSPEED. This month’s selection is “Critical Mass” by Peter Watts. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on the Lightspeed website. Enjoy!
Too critical
Leo Gregory is losing his height.
He tends to walk on a legacy that fades behind him: a documentary here, a retrospective there, a collection of great hits around the corner for amateurs. Oh, the work has not lost any of its grandeur: its buildings remain timeless, its art objects still offer facets on layers from every new angle. Critics continue to marvel at how Leo Gregory can create an entire hypnotic universe from a drop of glass and wire. But the signature pieces are the best part of a decade, now. Publications may be recent, but the works they explore have been around for years. In terms of inventory, Leo’s productivity is as high as ever, but somehow the new pieces don’t appear in monographs or ecstatic retrospectives.
No one seems to have noticed yet, but they know it’s only a matter of time. People are forced to hold on. The objects in the rearview mirror are further away than they appear.
Often now, function pumpkins are formed. Structures previously designed to hold the material now exist only to withstand the next hurricane. Leo’s creations once aspired to inspire; now they do nothing but adapt to the next outbreak. He is so tired of letting time and microbes push him. He wants to stop building things and re-sculpt them: walls that run perfectly through ceilings, lights that climb like bioluminescent squid down hallways, and conference rooms. He wants to subvert the boring straight geometries with naturalistic evocations of wood and coral.
He could, if they let him. His classic creations are as resilient as they are beautiful; seven Richters would barely break the windows. But people are very scared, these days. Every year the floods increase, the fires burn more, the winds blow stronger. People don’t want the disguised force, they want it in their face. They want peace of mind. They want something that looks strong.
There was a time when he could have even given them this, when he knew how to make beautiful even brutalism. Maybe he still can; so long ago he was given the opportunity. He can’t pinpoint when that straitjacket stopped rubbing.
Maybe when he started running out of ideas.
Looks like Leo can’t sleep well. He turns and turns, bewitched by dreams of plagues and prostitution. He often sleeps in the crib of Emma’s room, to save Michelle from her semi-conscious. (I just wish I could wake Emma up so easily.) I work late and sleep later. False starts and abortions pile up in his study at home, weigh him down like a ballast, compress him. It feels like they are slowly extinguishing it towards Juan de Fuca’s grave.
When he discovers the entrance on the morning of the 23rd, it is almost a relief.
Officer Thalberg interviews Leo in the vandalized studio. More precisely, he interviews Leo-in-the-vandalized-studio, through a drone floating at eye level two meters away; Thalberg herself remains antiseptically installed on her sidewalk cruise. His companion, a Boston Dynamics hound that moves like a hungry xenomorph on four spring-loaded legs, has already introduced himself and gone looking for clues.
Thalberg watches from a small screen nailed among the quad’s front fans. “Something stolen?”
“I do not think so. Whoever it was, he launched the site. In the trash two-thirty.
“Half past two.”
“A piece of sculpture I was working on,” Leo explains, and wonders why it sounds like a confession. “The number.”
“Are you an artist?” Thalberg sounds surprised; you don’t end up on the quick response list unless you’re respectable.
“Among other things,” Leo says. “I do a lot of building design.” This part of his person seems to be getting better in certain areas.
“Oh. An architect. “Thalberg looks pleased; Leo doesn’t correct her.
Something sounds around the corner. It follows the sound — Thalberg’s drone floating on his shoulder — through resin and concrete arches formed with fabric. Indirect natural light filters brightly through cracks in the walls. The whole studio is more of a grotto than an office: a bright cave with high ceilings, as natural as artifice.
The Bloodhound has found Leo’s garbage dump in an alcove in the main workspace: ceramic-coated GPUs from old motherboards. Cuisinarts engines discarded. Batteries, gears and gyroscopes connected together in crazy configurations, random garbage galvanized in glorious metal puzzles. Built, played with, discarded on a pile too large to contain everything; bits and pieces have been shed from their slopes, they are scattered on the ground like small fragile caltrops. The robot smells and scans and looks at everything, systematically transforming garbage into evidence.
“Half past two, I guess,” Thalberg says.
Leo shakes his head. “These are just … I don’t know, prototypes. Failed experiments.” Fun for Emma, in fact. That’s how they started. He then continued to build them out of pure habit, half-heartedly and without joy. But at some point, when he wasn’t looking, they took on a new life, transformed from a sad distraction into something almost satisfying, perhaps. Warm-up exercises. An exploration of interesting dead ends.
Maybe it’s all shit, maybe that’s just his way of clinging to the past. So what if he gets more pleasure from these orphans without commission than from any of the recent works he dignifies with a real number. This does not change the fact that, by any objective measure, it is basically just making a paw.
He calls them masturpieces. It’s not that he’s about to admit so much to Officer Thalberg.
“Here are two-thirty.” Leo backs away and hangs to the left; the drone rotates and weaves in its path. The Bloodhound worries about the pile behind them.
230 his, rather seated, at a central table in the main study. In life it was a small frozen tsunami, glass folded with layers of shades of blue and emerald. You could look into its depths and see a whole dark ocean looking back. A filigree mesh of copper wire passed through his skin; the idea was to generate a magnetic field in which small drops of crystal, imbued in the same way, floated in the air around the central artifact. The wave and its spray cloud, bound by an invisible force.
Ten years ago, he would have been a pioneer.
Thalberg’s quad rotates slowly on its axis, contemplating the picture. The north wall of the studio overlooks the harbor to the mountains on the north coast.
“A nice place,” Thalberg says.
If you walk through that sliding glass door to the balcony and look down, you will find yourself face to face with the dirty gray asphalt of Commissioner Street at the foot of the hill, the creosote sutures of the train tracks on either side. However, none of this ugliness falls from here on out.
The quad floats to the glass doors. “Was that open last night?”
“Well, yes. But it’s an eight-foot drop.” The study extends from the crest of the hill as if the back house were sticking out its tongue. It protrudes from a wild canopy of cherry and maple, a dense green vein that meanders along a steep enough slope to keep developers at bay. In addition, Leo realizes late, a hidden approach for anyone who wants to do a little B&E.
“Uh huh. Also the private entrance,” Thalberg adds. It’s not uncommon, these days, when guests and colleagues come to use the facilities, you don’t want them to tread pathogens around your living room, but still.
“He’s alarmed,” Leo says, a little defensively.
“And the alarm was last night?”
“Yeah, I …” When I think about it, I don’t remember it explicitly. But you never remember the things you do automatically, do you?
“It always is,” he concludes, but the quad is already sniffing one of the cracks in the western wall – a source of light and cross ventilation that masquerades as geological imperfection. The drone makes the ultraviolet glow in front of a small wear mark there, turns back to look at it.
“Does this gap extend to the end?”
“There’s a screen on the other side to avoid mistakes. But yes.” He feels compelled to add, “But you’d have to be some kind of childish contortionist to get through it. Unless someone first cuts you to pieces.”
“Mr. Gregory, with all due respect to your architectural skills, I have seen the tree houses most safely.
Leo shrugs. “Yeah, I … I was more careful when I didn’t spend so much time at home. You don’t expect anyone to come in when you’re in the hallway, you know?
“At the very least, you should keep the balcony entrance closed and install some cameras. Who else has access?”
“Just me and Michelle.”
“And Emma?”
Of course: they went down the hallway, just in front of the closed door with their Dayglo nudibranch name plate and the muffled clicks and whistles that filtered through the other side.
“She hasn’t woken up in four years,” Leo says quietly.
Even without looking, he can see Thalberg counting back in his head. “My condolences,” he says after a moment. “Golem was … I still can’t imagine what kind of monster would deliberately create something like …”
I read the carving: “It’s induced.”
“Excuse me?”
“The coma. We induced it. H2S therapy. “It seems important that Thalberg knows that, somehow.” Until there is a cure. “
“Sure. They’re moving forward all the time.” The drone falls sadly into a sudden breeze from the balcony. “You have to have home care, then.”
“At most once every two weeks. The bed is mostly automated.” With delay he …