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“Plastic, to collect rainwater.”

He tapped the final box, and I heard a somber chime.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You didn’t make the cut.”

“Why not?”

He glanced down at the screen. “No stability in your employment history. And honestly, you’re too old.”

I looked around his office, desperate for an idea. A poster showed a celebrity chef reaching down into a carton of plump apricots—though even a tri couldn’t have missed the bizarre retouching of the fruits’ appearance. “Can I show you something?” I offered. “In the produce aisles?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I could save the company thousands of dollars a month,” I boasted. “If something’s on the verge of going rotten, or infested with insects—”

My interviewer was smiling. He shook his head in disbelief, or perhaps a trace of admiration at my chutzpah.

He said, “Sorry, we already have that app.”

I looked up the app. It wouldn’t work on older phones, like my own, but the very latest models now carried reconfigurable quantum dot cameras as standard. It was not just art galleries and DIY-card-sharks who could access the whole spectrum; early adopters could do it already, and in five years it would be ubiquitous. Phones, notepads, glasses—every small, cheap camera would soon be seeing more of the world than its human owner.

After Lucy’s last day at the gallery, her colleagues took us out to dinner. I sat watching them, feigning bonhomie, laughing when everyone else laughed. One man took a photograph of his steak to assess its rareness and quantify the risk of food poisoning. A woman looked around furtively then snapped the dessert, in the hope of recreating it at home. These people would never learn to see the world for themselves—but they were already accustomed to asking their gadgets to advise them every few minutes.

Lucy glared at me as if I was someone’s mad uncle at a wake.

My mother had watched Zelda for us. When Lucy and I were alone, I said, “Remember the treasure hunts?”

She groaned. “Oh, please—not the good old days!”

I said, “Do you still have the recipes? For the inks you used?”

“Why?” Then she understood. “It would only be a fad,” she said. “A novelty. We’d be lucky if it lasted a year.”

“A fad can make a lot of money in a year. Software, posters, spray-cans, marker pens, clothing, tattoos. A whole secret world that’s hidden from ordinary eyes—but not some virtual reality overlay: solid objects you can touch with your bare hands.”

Lucy was skeptical. “And whose kidney are you going to sell to fund this empire?”

I said, “We’re going to need a backer. Someone who’ll understand the idea. So let’s hope my cousin hasn’t blown all his prize money.”

3

Zelda stretched her arms above her head and waved her hands at me impatiently. “Lift me, Daddy!” She wouldn’t let me carry her comfortably on my hip, or even riding on my shoulders: she had to be gripped under the arms and held up at chest height, half a meter ahead of me, like a kind of advanced scout, seeing everything moments before I did.

“You’re getting too old for this,” I told her, as I staggered through the gallery’s automatic doors.

“No, you are!”

“That’s true as well.”

I put her down and she ran toward Lucy, stopping shyly at the sight of the two strangers talking with her mother. Lucy smiled at her, and so did the customers, but then they all turned back to the painting.

“You’ve captured the river perfectly!” the woman marveled, making a sliding gesture beside her glasses to shift between false-color renderings. “Whatever wavelengths I map . . . the natural detail’s there.”

“That’s what I was aiming for,” Lucy replied.

“How long did it take you?” the woman’s partner asked.

“About a year.” Lucy glanced at me, but I kept a poker face.

“I can believe that.”

I stood back and waited for her to clinch the sale.

Tris can never really join us in the wider world, but having learned to peek out through the keyhole of their prison and take in the view incrementally, they’re no longer willing to spend their whole lives staring at the blank stone walls. The individual gimmicks come and go: the TV shows with points of view mimicking multispectral glasses, the plays where the actors have trained to emote with their capillaries for suitably equipped audiences, the advertising signs with secret messages that seem more profound and persuasive after the five-second hunt across the rainbow that it takes to reveal them. And the need—among the sufficiently wealthy—to hang a picture on the wall that actually resembles the thing it portrays.

When the customers had left with their painting, Lucy took off her shoes and sat down wearily on the gallery’s fashionably white bench. It was covered with her buttock-prints—and mine—but we varied the location to form a tasteful pattern.

“I want to do some drawings,” Zelda demanded.

Lucy sighed, feigning reluctance, but then she fetched a stack of paper and the bucket of pencils she kept out in the back. Zelda sat on the floor, carefully choosing among the six hundred hues on offer. She drew a garden of striped flowers, three stick figures with wildly mottled faces, and then above it all began meticulously shading in the bands of an eleven o’clock sky.

About the Authors

Madeline Ashby
is a science fiction writer, speaker, and strategic foresight consultant living in Toronto. Currently, she works developing user stories for provisional patents related to brainwave-sensing wearable technology. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty series of novels from Angry Robot Books. “Come From Away” is a chapter in her new novel
Company Town,
available in the autumn of 2014. Her short fiction has appeared at
Escape Pod, FLURB, The Tomorrow Project,
and multiple anthologies. Her essays have appeared at
BoingBoing, io9.com,
and
Tor.com.
You can find her at madelineashby.com, or on Twitter @MadelineAshby.

Elizabeth Bear
was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of twenty-five novels and over a hundred short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

Born in the Caribbean,
Tobias S. Buckell
is a
New York Times
bestselling author. His novels and over fifty stories have been translated into seventeen languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com

Helena Bell
lives in Raleigh, North Carolina where she is an MFA candidate in Fiction at NC State University. She has a BA, another MFA, a JD, and an LLM in Taxation which fulfills her lifelong ambition of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and her stories have appeared in
Clarkesworld, The Dark,
and
Shimmer.

Erin Cashier
is a registered nurse and has had short stories published in
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer,
and
Writers of the Future.
As Cassie Alexander she’s the author of the Edie Spence urban fantasy series. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband.

Jason K. Chapman
lives in New York City where, as the Director of IT and Web Development for
Poets & Writers,
he gets to indulge his two main interests, computers and literature. His fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including
Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Bull Spec,
and
Cosmos.

Seth Dickinson
’s fiction has appeared in
Clarkesworld, Analog, Strange Horizons,
and more. He is a writer at Bungie Studios, an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, and a lapsed student of social neuroscience. His first novel will be published by Tor Books in fall 2015.

Greg Egan
was born in 1961. Since the early ’80s he has published twelve novels and more than fifty short stories, winning the Hugo Award for his novella “Oceanic” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel
Permutation City.
His latest book is
The Arrows of Time,
the concluding volume of the Orthogonal trilogy.

Amanda Forrest
is a programmer, mother, writer and adventurer. She is currently learning the art of stone masonry in hopes of building a backyard castle. Though she is not, unfortunately, a cyborg, she once had a cat with titanium skeletal augmentations.

Amanda’s fiction has recently appeared in or is forthcoming in
Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex,
and the Writers of the Future anthology.

Author and video game designer
Erin Hoffman
was born in San Diego and now lives in northern California, where she works as Game Design Lead at the GlassLab, a nonprofit video game studio building big-data-powered educational games that digitally adapt to the learner. She is the author of the Chaos Knight series from Pyr books, beginning with
Sword of Fire and Sea,
followed by
Lance of Earth and Sky
and concluding with
Shield of Sea and Space.
Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction, Electric Velocipede, Tor.com,
and more. For more information, visit www.erinhoffman.com and Twitter @gryphoness.

Rich Larson
was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island, and at twenty-two now lives in Edmonton, Alberta. He won the 2014 Dell Award and the 2012 Rannu Prize for Writers of Speculative Fiction. In 2011 his cyberpunk novel
Devolution
was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His short work appears or is forthcoming with
Asimov’s, Lightspeed, DSF, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE
and many others, including anthologies
Futuredaze
and
War Stories.
His self-published spec-fic can be found at Amazon.com/author/richlarson.

Yoon Ha Lee’s
fiction has appeared in
Clarkesworld, Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed,
and other venues. Her collection
Conservation of Shadows
came out from Prime Books in 2013. She lives in Louisiana with her family and has not yet been eaten by gators, cyborg or otherwise.

Ken Liu
(kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed,
and
Strange Horizons,
among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Ken’s debut novel,
The Grace of Kings,
the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.

Alex Dally MacFarlane
is a writer, editor and historian. When not researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, she writes stories, found in
Clarkesworld Magazine, Interfictions Online, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies
and the anthologies
Solaris Rising 3, Gigantic Worlds, Phantasm Japan, Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction
and
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014.
Poetry can be found in
Stone Telling, The Moment of Change and Here, We Cross.
She is the editor of
Aliens: Recent Encounters
(2013) and
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women
(2014).

Greg Mellor
is an Australian author with fifty published short stories. His work has appeared in
Clarkesworld Magazine, Cosmos Magazine
and
Aurealis
as well as several anthologies in Australia and the United States. His debut collection of short SF stories
Wild Chrome
was published in 2012 and his first SF novella
Steel Angels
will be out in 2014.

Greg holds degrees in astrophysics and technology management. He is a member of SFWA. Visit www.gregmellor.com.

Mari Ness
hasn’t quite managed to wire herself directly to her computer, but that’s not for lack of trying. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including
Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction,
and
Strange Horizons.
For a longer list, check out her official blog at marikness.wordpress.com. She lives in central Florida, occasionally twittering about what she’s up to at mari_ness.

Chen Qiufan
(a.k.a. Stanley Chan) was born in Shantou, Guangdong Province. Chan is a science fiction writer, columnist, and online advertising strategist. Since 2004, he has published over thirty stories in venues such as
Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah!,
many of which are collected in
Thin Code
(2012). His debut novel,
The Waste Tide,
was published in January 2013 and was praised by Liu Cixin as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing.” The novel is currently being translated into English by Ken Liu.

Chan is the most widely translated young writer of science fiction in China, with his short works translated into English, Italian, Swedish, and Polish and published in
Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Interzone,
and
F&SF,
among other places. He has won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award, China’s Galaxy and Nebula Awards, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award along with Ken Liu. He lives in Beijing and works for Baidu.