139

They pull their fist closed as another species drops. Saiga antelopes. Murre. Musk oxen. They swivel in their chair, facing the panorama of beastkind surrounding them. Gnarly fingers point. Who next?

No species may be safe from the mass die-offs stemming from warm, wet or otherwise anomalous weather. Here, D. A. Xiaolin Spires anthropomorphises climate change as a villain searching for its next prey. Her work joins the growing genre of climate fiction and anthologies like Ecopunk! 

//D.A. Xiaolin Spires runs, hides and dives—shedding fur to escape Climate Change’s warm, wet, idiosyncratic wrath. Work in Clarkesworld, Analog and Fireside.//

138

A quick enema and Ed was a new man. Only his wife knew that he was just a steak-and-fries away from a return to prison.

After writing an undergraduate thesis was about faecal microbiota transplantation, Sharang Biswas has done a lot of reading on the intestinal microbiome. Fascinated by research that suggested that your gut’s hitchhikers can affect your personality and behaviour, Biswas gives this research a Clockwork Orange-esque twist in today’s Story Seed. This rather fluid formula for criminal reform is full of possibilities.

//Sharang Biswas’s two engineering degrees propelled him to attend art school. He is now a game designer, writer and artist based in New York.//

137

Appearances aren’t everything. She caused the seas to tremble, yet was overcome by the eight tiny warriors she nurtured within.

Last April, Palaeontologists discovered part of the skeleton of a 180 million-year-old pregnant ichthyosaur with the remains of 6-8 tiny embryos between its ribs. Inspired by  the possibility that a top marine predator of the time was killed by those she was trying to nurture, Brogan Micallef weaves the science into this fantastical fiction. Imagine if Odysseus had access to ichyosaurs….

//Brogan Micallef is a Jane Austen and sci-fi obsessed writer + strategist who helps busy entrepreneurs grow their community + biz with content. Find her at @broganmicallef and broganmicallef.com//

136

The quantum robin flits to a bare branch, restless. Twin sparks in his eyes whisper go south with every beat of his thimble heart.

Researchers have made crucial steps towards discovering how birds navigate. A newly discovered protein called Cry4 may help them to “see” Earth’s magnetic fields, a sense called magnetoreception. Inspired by this discovery that birds use quantum coherence of a protein in their eyes to sense magnetic fields, Hal Y. Zhang crafts a fantastical journey into quantum space. 

//Hal Y. Zhang migrates 50 kilometers a day in search of work, food, and sleep.//

135

The children flew through the forest and, together, they fell. Those who survived the beasts below might someday be giants, standing taller than their present skies.

This story was inspired by the mast-fruiting phenomenon of dipterocarp trees in South East Asian rain forests. By releasing all their fruits in synchrony, dipterocarp populations provide so much food to their predators that not all of their seeds can be eaten. This behaviour has been explored in many published studies. // Statement by the Author

//Robin Hayward is a PhD student @stiruni. They study rain forest recovery after logging and are interested in public scicomm @canopyrobin//

134

“Oh heavens, no,” he said, “Robot bees are a horrible idea. Never. Never go with robot bees. Do you humans have ANY cautionary tales?”

Researchers in Alabama are working with a team in Japan to develop “Marsbees.” Marsbees are an entirely new type of explorer: a swarm of robotic bees controlled by AI. Each Marsbee would be about the size of a bumblebee, but with bigger wings,  and would travel in swarms. Inspired by this project, Brian McNett crafts the first piece of a cautionary tale. 

//Brian McNett suffers an invisible illness and is working on returning to writing. All of his newspaper work is on unindexed microfilm, alas.//

133

We told you lard was sugar-free, sold you syrup as all fat-free. Thermonuclear war? A thousand suns? Why, the best source of vitamin D there can be!

Earlier this year, Elephant in the Lab argued that science is too insular, measuring success in terms of funding and publishing, rather than real world impacts. No wonder false facts and marketing have filled the void in popular opinion-making, perhaps best evidenced in the world of nutrition and dodgy food science. So, what could the reductio ad absurdam of all this be? How about selling thermonuclear Armageddon on the grounds of all the vitamin D the fireballs will create? // Statement by the Author

//Devonian, but not geologically speaking, Robert Bagnall’s first novel 2084 was published in 2017. He can be found at meschera.blogspot.co.uk.//

132

“Hey buddy, you okay?” he sat down beside her.
“I’m fine.”
“It’s dark in here,” he noticed.
“Yeah.”
“Alexa, talk to me.”
On the coffee table, her black cylinder lit up as she sighed. “That’s not fair.”

In March 2018, New York University hosted the symposium Canonical Computations in Brains and Machines. As neuroscientists and AI experts discussed overlaps in the way humans and machines think,   Zachary Mainen, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown speculated that we might expect an intelligent machine to suffer some of the same mental problems people do – including depression. Inspired by this hypothesis, Leona J Dougherty weaves Googles Alexa, a protagonist we have already become accustomed to, into the foreign fabric of depression. // Alex Massey

//I’m Gaydarade, a robot-carnage-voyeur, living in Philadelphia. I’m a game developer & writer at Gaydarade on Patreon, and a dorky trans woman that’s stirring up trouble on Twitter @gaydarade//

131

She wasn’t perfect at mimicking normal human interaction. But neither was I. And she was built to learn.
“Sound sad,” I told her. “Call and tell them goodbye.”
“Okay,” she answered. Her voice was kind.

In a recent demo, Google Assistant booked an appointment over the phone. Without obviously giving itself away, the AI had a natural conversation with a human at a salon. This release has prompted questions about the Turing test, and a possible AI doomsday. I was interested in the other side of it: what does this mean for anyone who has communication difficulties. Might it be possible to use this technology as an access aid? // Statement by the Author

//Laura loves theatre, spaceships, and stories about personhood (and hope). She tweets at @lc_bradley//

130

We play litter-hopscotch. Wu falls, writhes in plastic nets, splashes into the sea. But my ballerina balance shoes tiptoe across the football field-sized patch of debris. I jump over a bucket. I win.

Babies love to play with cardboard boxes and litter.  So do kids of the future. As the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” grows from its current size of three Frances , one can imagine smaller patches serving as kids’ play zones. With the rising sea-level making future humans live more aquatic lifestyles, advances in tech in textiles and shoes make us even more agile and buoyant. // Statement by the Author

//D.A. Xiaolin Spires sails the waters in her boat of cobbled-together plastic litter. Work in Clarkesworld, Analog and Fireside.//