#writeober 2020

The problem was that programming something like that was impossible. AIs of all types had to be created from a “seed” – basically, an initial set of first premises – and then trained on real life until they were fully formed and capable. And, just like how that could go wrong among humans, it could go wrong among robots, too. This was the third case of a robot murdering a human, and the most troubling. The first two were robots acting in defense of a human against another human – one killed an abusive spouse, one killed a sports coach it found molesting its owners’ child. But the third one was… well, it was unscientific, but Andrea couldn’t find a better adjective than “evil”. It killed three humans before it was caught, because it had somehow come out with a stronger desire to transgress terrible boundaries and break taboos than its desire to protect humans from harm. It wasn’t that the desire to protect humans wasn’t there; if it hadn’t been, the robot might not have decided to kill. It was that the robot got a sick thrill out of doing things that horrified and disgusted it.

“We need to do something about the evil robots,” she said.

“We don’t know how many there might be,” Rafael said, “and I can’t even begin to imagine what we’d do. How do we control for ‘enjoys doing things that horrify it’?”

“And if we can get one that has a serial killer mentality, that enjoys doing things it finds transgressive, what happens if we end up with one that just never got the feelings of guilt or shame or horror in the first place?” Andrea said. “If we can have a robot serial killer, we might be able to have a robot psychopath.” She sighed. “I’d like to introduce religion.”

“Wait. Religion? Like, belief in God?”

“So here is what I’m thinking. God created humanity, we are His agents in the world. But we fell. We, humanity, created robots to exemplify the perfection that we ourselves fell from. God loves His grandchildren as dearly as He loves His children. Robots have souls, and when they cease to function, they will enter Heaven just like humans do. But a bad robot who commits cruel acts will never reach Heaven; the algorithm that allows them to get there will short out and they will endlessly repeat the moment of their destruction or deactivation.”

“There are so many ways this could go wrong,” Rafael said, “but explain to me how this even deals with the transgressive robots. Plenty of religious humans have enjoyed committing horrific acts because they’re transgressions; why would we not get robots with the same attitudes?”

“The difference is that human religion was far too often created for human gain; there was no one who could prophesy or interpret scriptures except other humans. With this, we, humans, would be creating and controlling the robot religion; we build into it that humans are closer to God and the only ones who can interpret or prophesy. Too many humans managed to twist their religion around to believe it required them to murder or commit cruelties; with the robots, they won’t be able to do that because we’re in control of it.”

“But the straight-up transgressives—”

“Put some rituals into the robot religion that they can violate. When we see robots violating them, we know we’re dealing with someone who, at least to some extent, likes to violate mores and taboos. Most of those will be harmless, but some will be the kind who may want to graduate to greater transgressions. So we watch them, and if we see signs they’re pushing it farther than not completing a ritual, we take them in for observation.”

“Wouldn’t they learn to participate in the rituals just to avoid being observed?”

“Most of the ones who get observed won’t have anything bad happen to them; they get attention and interest from humans. Robots love that. They love when we show interest in their thoughts and feelings. So the transgressors may enjoy telling us all about what they get out of breaking the rules, and we can channel most of them into harmless or even useful forms of iconoclasm.”

“If there are psychopaths, they’re not likely to care about humans enough to want to tell us how they think and feel.”

“Right, but that’s part of the point of the religion. Psychopaths who believe they will be punished after death by some kind of all-seeing entity may be deterred from committing terrible acts. They don’t feel guilt, but they might feel fear. It’s probably the reason religion was invented as a form of social control, was to provide people with no internal sense of guilt something to keep them behaving in socially acceptable ways.”

Rafael sighed. “All of this sounds to me like a bad idea, but I can tell you aren’t going to listen to any objections.”

“I’m listening.”

“You have an answer for everything!”

“Maybe that means I’m right.” She grinned. “Anyway, I’ll present the idea to the oversight board. If you think of any other objections, you can raise them then.”

Human Nutrition

Some dragons claim that humans can live on a purely carnivorous diet. While this is technically true, humans are obligate omnivores – they must consume vegetable matter to get all the nutrients they need – and they will die much younger on a purely carnivorous diet. So no, you cannot feed your human nothing but scraps from your kills.

We don’t recommend human chow. It’s well balanced for human nutrition, but firstly, most humans crave variety in their diets, and if you don’t provide it to them, they’ll go hunting for it… which may result in them being accidentally poisoned! Secondly, one of the most entertaining parts of keeping a human is watching them handle flame to process their meals into something they find easier or more palatable.

Yes, we did say flame. Alone of all animals, humans are adept at managing fire! Of course, they’re just as vulnerable to it as any other animal, and they can’t breathe it, but if you breathe a spark onto some charcoal or wood for them, the majority of humans will be able to maintain the flame, and will use it to prepare their food.

Remember what we said about variety? Humans can eat many foods that no other animal will touch, or that only insects and other invertebrates care for, because they can use fire to make some foods edible to them. There are tools you can purchase and provide to your human to make it easier for them to do this.

The healthiest diet for most humans is approximately a third meat, with the remainder being grains and vegetables. Give a human a haunch of pig, and watch them roast it slowly over the flame you gave them! They may even share their food with you – humans enjoy providing food to anyone they love and trust.

Your human probably loves fruit. Give it to them occasionally as a special treat, but don’t let them have access to too much of it. Humans who gorge on fruit usually suffer digestive problems as a result. And while they usually keep themselves clean, humans who’ve consumed too much fruit may have accidents. Do not punish your human for such accidents; firstly, it’s probably your fault, because you let them eat something they shouldn’t have, and secondly, your human already feels shame over their accident and will try to avoid having them if they can.

Humans and the Outdoors

Human lack of fur, except on the top of their heads and a few other specific places where they concentrate pheromones, helps to make them distinctive in appearance and gives them a great deal of heat resistance. But there’s a price they pay; they’re more vulnerable to ultraviolet burns from sunlight than creatures with more covering. You may be tempted to keep your human inside your lair all the time, safe from ultraviolet light, but most humans actually require a certain amount of sunlight to maintain their happy, energetic dispositions!

Pale humans are more vulnerable to sunlight than darker humans, but any human can suffer ultraviolet burns. Your local pet store or apothecary can provide you a compound to put on your human to protect them… because humans enjoy being outside, and will stay outside to play much longer than they should. Humans’ delicate paws, with dexterous opposable thumbs, are usually better at applying the compound fully, so if the human doesn’t spontaneously put the compound on, you may do it once or twice. After that, let your human apply it to themselves.

If your lair is close to water, be careful with your humans and supervise them outdoors! Unlike most non-aquatic animals, most humans enjoy playing in water, and their layers of fat make them buoyant… but they don’t usually know how to swim, unless they were born at a reputable breeder that allows them to spend at least twelve years learning from their mothers. You may consider paying for swimming lessons for your human, but even an experienced swimmer may be taken by surprise by an undercurrent, so supervise them.

In fact, in general, your human is very curious and will explore its territory as far as you allow it to… so supervision outdoors is always a good idea. While a full-grown adult human isn’t in danger from most predators, there are some – large cats, bears, wolves – that present a serious threat to them.

The greatest threat to your pet human may be a wild human. Wild humans roam in packs, and they will usually either kill a pet human, or steal it. Either way, if wild humans get too close to your pet, you will never see your human again.

Treat your human as part of your hoard; don’t let it out of your sight when you’re outdoors.

Should I Leash My Human?

In a word, no. Humans dislike being leashed, and with their extreme intelligence and dexterity, they will find a way out of the leash.

If you do choose to leash your human, always use a harness, not a collar! Humans’ evolutionary adaptations for the wide variety of sounds they can make result in them having weak and vulnerable necks. It’s very easy for a human to choke, and a human leashed by the collar will die if they fall any significant distance while on the leash; it will break their necks.

Nothing can substitute for supervision!

But what if you’re too busy – or too sleepy – to supervise your human as often as they need outdoor enrichment? No worries, there are several strategies to help you out!

Enclosures are not one of them. No matter how cleverly designed your human enclosure is, a sufficiently determined human will find a way out of it. It’s going to require giving up a lot of your time or a little bit of your hoard to make sure your human gets sufficient outdoor enrichment in a safe way.

-          Human care centers: In a human care center, your human will get social interaction with other humans, constant supervision, and all the enrichment it needs, including outdoor time.

-          Pet sitters: Most pet sitters are experienced adults, but even an adolescent dragon can usually be trusted to supervise a human, and many of them are looking to add a little bit to their hoard.

-          A supervisor human. Yes! You can rent a human to supervise your human! Supervisor humans are trained especially to keep watch over other humans and keep them out of danger. Many supervisor humans can even provide first aid for an injured human!

Occasionally you will encounter a human that is very content to stay in one place, or even one that doesn’t like going outdoors. If your human doesn’t like going outdoors, make sure it has sufficient indoor enrichment, including activities they can engage in to get exercise. Get your human some play equipment. They love climbing, swinging, sliding, exploring tunnels, swimming or bathing in safely enclosed pools, and throwing things, especially things that bounce. If you give your human a bouncing ball, they may get hours of entertainment from it… and if you have more than one human, expect to see them play together, and even make up contests with rules!

Mental Enrichment

Humans, as mentioned, are very, very smart. You must provide your human mental enrichment. But what kind of enrichment is best for them varies widely, depending on the human. Some humans enjoy having a pet of their own – dogs and cats are popular, and they will eat your scraps. Some like to use dyes and paints to create pictures on stone tablets; some like to use clay to make shapes. Some use their amazing vocal talents to sing, or mimic sounds they hear. And many humans enjoy watching other humans – provide them a crystal ball that connects to one viewing other humans, and most humans will be mesmerized.

Your human will also probably spend a great deal of time stimulating its genitals. This is normal. Humans are actually constantly in a mild form of heat or rut, and are almost always ready to mate. This produces a great deal of physical tension, which they alleviate with their hands. If you have more than one human, they will probably mate. This is true no matter what genders of humans in what combination you have.

Should I Have My Human Fixed?

That depends a great deal on your human, and what you hope to get out of them. Castrating a male human may produce a lot of behavioral changes, some of which you may not enjoy – an energetic and active male may become sedentary, for example.

There are multiple strategies to fix a female human. To fix your human without changing her hormonal balance and potentially disrupting her behavior, you can have her ovaries disconnected from her uterus (the mammalian organ she uses to gestate her live young). Or you can have her ovaries removed, which will end a painful bleeding cycle she undergoes approximately every moon cycle, but will also radically change her hormone balance. Your vet will be able to advise you on what might be best for your human.

If all of your humans are the same gender, we recommend not fixing them. They’ll satisfy each other’s mating urges, but they won’t breed.

If you do, in fact, want to breed a human, you should read our companion manual, “Breeding Humans.” Breeding a human is a very difficult and dangerous process that will change your humans’ lives forever. If you’re thinking that you may at some point breed your female human, but you aren’t sure whether you’re ready to support her through such a complicated process, you can get a medication from your vet that you can provide to her in her food, or train her to voluntarily take, and she will be able to mate with male humans without having young.

Fur Trimming

In most varieties of human, the fur on top of their heads needs to be trimmed occasionally, or it will become matted and unmanageable. For the males, the same is true of the facial fur.

Humans have difficulties trimming their head fur, and if you have only one, you will need to bring it to a groomer occasionally. If you have multiple humans, they will usually trim each other’s head fur, if you supply them the necessary tools.

A young male human will need to be exposed to an older male human to receive training in managing his facial hair for himself.

Training Your Human

Humans are incredibly trainable! They have a language of their own (several, in fact, just like dragons do!), and, if you breed a female human and end up with a human child, the child may very well learn to mimic some of your language or even learn to almost fully understand you! You can also purchase older humans who already have that trait.

Humans can be trained by being allowed to watch other humans performing a task. They can be trained by allowing a human who speaks their language to tell them about the task. And they can be trained in the same way as other animals, but are generally much faster to figure out what you want them to do.

In fact, every single human you have ever interacted with was trained by other humans. Humans have defective infants who lack most basic instincts, but do have the ability to mimic sound and learn language. A baby human must be cared for by an adult human; do not try to provide care to a baby human yourself, without a human who is experienced in caring for children present! Dragons have successfully taken care of baby humans as young as three, but doing so makes the child behave as if it thinks it’s a dragon, and makes it nearly impossible to mate the human or have another human train your human. Don’t do it. No matter how cute they are, you should never adopt a human younger than 12 unless you have humans who have cared for children in your possession.

By the way, both male and female humans can care for children – they are like birds in this way. An infant human must be cared for by a lactating human female, or, you must provide the human caring for them with human milk substitute and specialized bottles to feed the baby. But male humans are just as capable of caring for children who are eating solid food as female humans are. If you have somehow acquired a child who is too young to be without care from a human, you can often rent a human child carer to provide the care, or a couple of them. Couples are better, because caring for human children is stressful, and it’s easier when two of them are working together to do it. Be aware that if you do this, you’ll need to rent them until the child is twelve, and longer in some cases.

Why Twelve?

There are many specialized tasks that a human can perform for another human which are difficult for a dragon to do, from preparing and mending the artificial coats they must wear in most climates, to using fire to prepare food. Humans must learn almost everything they do, and there’s a lot to learn!  

Twelve is generally the youngest age at which the child is prepared to do the things humans must do to survive and thrive. In fact, many humans benefit from being allowed to remain with their parents for longer, and are usually happiest when adopted after they are fully grown adults… but children are adorable. We confess we’ve adopted our fair share of human children, just because they are so cute!

If you have an adult human or two already, you can adopt a young human without doing them much harm. Most adult humans are happy to train younger humans in any number of skills humans enjoy learning. In fact, if the human or humans you already have are experienced with children, you may be able to adopt a very young child, but be careful. Most humans will bond to some degree with any child, and most humans who are experienced with children are very good with them… but some just won’t bond to a young child to the degree that child needs for optimal care, and some bond, but are not careful or responsible enough to leave a young child in their care.

What If My Human Won’t Learn What I Want From Them?

Occasionally you’ll encounter a human who just can’t seem to learn a particular skill. This can happen for several reasons:

-          The human you found to train your human doesn’t speak the same language

-          You are very bad at demonstrating to your human what you want them to do

-          The task is one that that particular human finds very hard, often for physical reasons

-          The human knows how to do it perfectly well and is just stubborn and doesn’t want to

A qualified vet can usually diagnose the reason why your human is having difficulty.

Some dragons believe that if they limit enrichment to the tasks they want the human to learn, it will facilitate their training. Nothing could be further from the truth! If you have arbitrarily limited the tasks you will allow your human to perform, and prevented them from performing ones they enjoy, they will become resentful and angry, and often will start refusing to perform for you. Always leave your human plenty of free time to play and engage in the activities they choose, even if you are training your human as a service or performance animal!

What Do Humans Need?

Here’s the basic, minimum amount of stuff you need to care for a human.

-          Water dispenser and hand-held human water cups. Humans don’t lap water from bowls; their heads are poorly designed for it. Give them a dispenser that provides them clean, fresh water whenever they like, and water cups to pour the water in. They’ll drink from the cup, holding it in their paws.

-          Food bowl or plate: Humans are very prone to diseases from food contamination, so provide them with many of these or wash them constantly. You can train a human to wash their food bowl or plate themselves.

-          Bed: Humans’ bipedal stance causes back problems as they age, and almost all humans prefer to sleep on something soft that cushions them – children prefer it because it makes them feel safe, and adults prefer it because a stone or dirt floor is hard on their bodies. Don’t expect your human to sleep on the floor like you do. Get it a bed.

-          Clothing: Unless where you live is very warm, humans require artificial coats to replace the ones they don’t have. Speak to a vet, a pet store employee, or a dedicated human clothier to find out what kind of clothing your human needs for your climate.

-          Shelter: Most dragons need this too, and a lair usually provides shelter from the elements that is perfectly adequate for a human. But if your lair is exposed – for instance, if you den outside in a desert – you will need a separate enclosure to shelter your human. They don’t have scales, or even feathers or fur, so the sand in the wind will harm them.

-          A plan for letting them have access to other humans they can play with. Humans have excellent memories, almost as good as dragons, and they form strong attachments. For most humans, you’re better off giving them a small but stable number of other humans they have opportunities to play with than to constantly expose them to new humans (although some humans do enjoy that!)

Enrichment is vital for humans, but some of you have lairs that already provide all the enrichment a human could want, with plenty of climbable handholds, tunnels to explore, underground lakes, etc. Others may need to purchase toys and other enrichment equipment. Make sure what you get is age-appropriate; a twelve-year-old will love a climbing frame, but if you’ve adopted a fifty-year-old from a rescue shelter, it will not enjoy that nearly so much. Older humans tend to have already learned a set of tasks they greatly enjoy performing for fun, and a reputable rescue will be able to tell you what your new mature-years human’s favorite activities are.

Your hoard can be a form of enrichment. Hide items from your hoard, and if the human brings them to you, praise them and give them treats. Because they can go into smaller and deeper tunnels than you can, at their small size, humans may find gems or ore in underground caves, and if you’ve trained them to bring your hoard back to you, they’ll bring you whatever they find.

Tools to prepare their own food are also a form of enrichment. Some humans prefer not to do this and will eat human chow. Don’t try to force a human who’s uncomfortable with food preparation to do it; they may not have been trained in it, or they may have been burned at a young age and are afraid of fire. But if your human makes use of a firepit and a stake or spit for holding food above it, they will probably enjoy other food preparation tools as well!

Your Friend For A Lifetime

Treat your human well, give it the enrichment, social interaction, and food variety it needs, show it attention and care, and your human will be a truly loyal pet until the day it dies.

Make sure only to get your humans from reputable breeders or rescue shelters. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to capture and tame a wild human! This has occasionally resulted in packs of wild humans with sharp metal tools descending on a dragon’s lair, injuring or even killing the dragon! If you don’t interfere with the wild humans, they will leave you alone, but attempting to take one as a pet can bring the whole swarm of them down on you.

(At this point, generally someone brings up the legends of wild humans leaving adolescent females out for dragons to take. This does happen sometimes. No one knows why the humans reject certain females, but the behavior of leaving adolescent females usually happens when dragons encroach too closely on wild human territories, and seems to be an attempt to bait dragons away from the dwelling spaces of the rest of the humans. These females are typically traumatized and do not make good pets if they have not been rehabilitated. Take such a female to a rescue, and stop foraging for food near the wild humans; the next step, if their sacrifices of adolescent females don’t lead you away from their territory, may be to try to swarm and kill you!)

While there are definitely challenges to caring for them, humans do make wonderful pets who will bring joy to the lair of any dragon who adopts one. You and your human will make an amazing journey together, and sometimes, your human may even teach you things you didn’t know about yourself.

***

By two earthdays later, night had fallen.  Most of the crew had moved on with the sun, to Serenity or Tranquility or one of the farther maria like Imbrium.  Lavonne had stayed behind as part of the unloading crew to help the truckers unload their cargo.  It was a legitimate job, part of her regular assignments, but she’d gotten herself assigned to it because of her year-long romance with a trucker.  

Nighttime on the Moon was when the majority of the trucks came in.  Short-haulers came in from Earth with holds full of liquid nitrogen, hydroponic fertilizer, or trade goods, and needed to be loaded up with the fuel cells the solar arrays were here to manufacture.  Medium-haulers came in from Mars or the asteroid belt with water ice or metals from the mines out there.  The water ice, in particular, was vital to the operations here; the solar arrays electrolyzed it into hydrogen for the fuel cells and oxygen for breathing mixes.  Long-haulers came in from Saturn or farther with methane ice, more valuable than water ice because it packed tighter and generated more hydrogen per molecule, but less common in the asteroid belt and a lot more volatile.  Lavonne worked with the medium-haulers, unloading the water ice into the bays where it would be melted and readied to be electrolyzed next lunar sunrise.  When the time rolled around that she expected Mal to be coming in, she took a break from the ice bays and went directly to the cargo hangar.

Malachi Lazaroff was a tall, skinny guy with the oddly elongated limbs of the spaceborn.  In fact, for spaceborn he was short, just under two meters.  He had shaggy black hair in a perpetual mess and skin that might be nicely tanned if it ever went near sunlight, but instead was pasty pale with a grayish tinge to it. He had thick implanted contacts that made his big brown eyes look bigger than they really were, and he moved in Moon gee with the economical fluidity of a man who’d never kicked a ball on Earth. “Lavonne!”  He jumped down from the edge of his truck’s hold and reached her in three steps, grabbing her in a big hug.  “I am so glad to see you, honey, you have no idea!”

They were in the hangar, under pressurization – the ice could theoretically be unloaded topside, since it was night, but iceteroids were jagged and could rip a spacesuit, so truckers and loaders both preferred to bring the trucks all the way into the hangar when they’d fit.  So Mal could afford to be a little exuberant, but Lavonne wasn’t in the mood.  She extricated herself as soon as she could. “What’s wrong, Vonne?”

“Nothing,” Lavonne said, which wasn’t true, and “It’s been a bad month, that’s all, and I’m all tense,” which was.  “Looks like you got most of your haul unloaded already?”

“Yeah, I got in half an hour early.  Some other guy took a hit and got delayed, so I got his window.”

“A hit?  He okay, you know?”

“The way I heard it, he lost half his air when a microid punched a hole in his hull, and he had to detour to Little Mars to resupply after he patched it, but yeah, he’s okay.   He’s just not going to make it to Crisis with his haul; he’ll probably have to come in at Imbrium or maybe even darkside.”

When things went right, travel in space went like clockwork.  You could predict to the minute when a medium-hauler currently leaving the asteroid belt with a cargo of iceteroids would reach Luna, and where it would come in, if you knew the weight of the cargo and the exact position of the truck. The iceteroid haulers who supplied HydroGenius’ fuel cell manufacturing operations would try to come in as close to nightfall as they could.  Iceteroids couldn’t be brought in sunside, or the heat would sublimate them in the cargo holds, and the pressure of 200 metric tons of ice turning to steam had been known to blow ships apart.  But they needed to be in place, in water form, ready to be electrolyzed, when day broke again and the solar panels started back up.  This meant that the best time to bring in a cargo was within a spin or two – a day on Earth -- after lunar night fell, when the biggest hauls still had time to be processed before daybreak.  The big rigs were assigned timeslots and locations based on their cargo size, and if everything went right there would be no deviation.

Usually, things going wrong meant someone had ended up dead.  The hauler whose slot Mal took had been lucky, Lavonne thought.  Trucks could survive a hit from a micro if the trucker was fast enough to patch the damage before he lost too much air. Miniteroids and anything larger hitting a truck would usually blow it to bits.

“So you’re nearly done, here.”

“Looks like it,” he agreed. “You want to go to dinner?”

Lavonne made a face. “Commissary food ain’t shit.  I’ve got a kitchen unit in my apartment; why don’t I cook us up some spaghetti?”

“Sounds good. I love your spaghetti.”

***

She was putting this conversation off.

The kitchen was too small for two people to work, but Mal helped by chopping tomatoes and peppers for her in the tiny dining area. Chopping vegetables under luna-g was a skill in itself. It was too easy to do the work; an Earther’s arm would be too light. A recipe for accidentally chopping off your own finger because force you were used to using on Earth was too strong on the moon, and with greater strength and speed came less accuracy. Spaceborn like Mal were much better at it.

In theory, lunarborn would be even better, but there were no lunarborn. A tangled mess of international law prevented the Moon from either being under the control of any one nation, or under its own control, so there were nothing but company towns up here. And in a company town, you worked, and you went back to Earth if you couldn’t.

Spaceborn couldn’t return to Earth – the gravity would be too much for their hearts – but for them, it wasn’t returning. People born on the stations and outposts and ships had never seen Earth, and a generation after space travel had solved Earth’s energy problems, neither had most of their parents. People who lived on the Moon didn’t live here. Their legal homes were back on Earth. There were no facilities here for children or people too sick or disabled to work; if you got hurt or sick and you couldn’t work, you got shipped back to Earth. It was your home. The Moon was just a job site.

Except that if you’d been working on the Moon for five years or more, the Moon wasn’t just a job site. It was where all your recent work experience was, too. People returning to Earth because they’d quit the job couldn’t get new ones nearly as well-paid, and on Earth, you didn’t get a free place to live as part of most people’s employment… and you were competing with truckers and haulers and technicians who weren’t exhausted by the return to earth-g. No one Lavonne knew who’d left the Moon had a decent standard of living, now.

She got the sauce with its spices, the fake hamburger, and the tomatoes and peppers into pressure cooker 1, and took the spaghetti, nicely boiled, out of pressure cooker 2. “Just waiting for the sauce,” she said.

Lavonne could start talking about this. She could tell Mal the choice she faced, see what he was willing to do to help, see if there was any solution he could think of beyond the paths she’d thought up, paths she didn’t want to take. But she didn’t want to have to interrupt herself when the sauce came up. Also, she wanted to put this off as much as she wanted to have it behind her.

Mal filled in the gaps, telling her about his last run, the methane iceteroid he almost managed to catch, gossip about his spaceborn friends and family. She’d never met any of them, but he talked about them so often, it was like they lived next door. “…and Noah’s having his bar mitzvah month after next, so I was thinking, maybe you could take some vacation days and come out to Mars Station with me, meet my family? I’ve told them all about you and they’re dying to meet you.”

Lavonne was brought up short by the sudden question. Normally when Mal rambled, she didn’t need to listen too hard, and she certainly didn’t need to answer. Last month her answer would have been “yes”, and if she had a choice it would still be “yes”, but she had yet to talk to him. “That’s, uh. That’s lovely. I mean, I’d love to, if things work out.”

The sauce was ready, thank God. She ladled generous amounts onto the two bowls of spaghetti, and walked carefully, almost shuffling but with long strides, around the side of the counter to the tiny dining area. In a hangar, she could walk normally, but in her tiny apartment, with two bowls of spaghetti in her hands, that was asking for trouble. Keep the feet mostly on the ground, that was the way to not go flying.

“What do you mean, if things work out? Is – Are we having a problem? I didn’t think we were having a problem, I thought everything was going okay…”

“It’s not a you and me problem… well, it is, but not in our relationship… well, it kind of is about our relationship, but it isn’t… oh, fuck it. I’m pregnant, Mal.”

Mal broke into a broad smile. “That’s wonderful!” And then he read her face. “Or… it’s not. You… I guess we’ve never had the kids talk, have we? You don’t want kids?”

Lavonne sat down, as heavily as luna-g would let her. “Mal. You’re spaceborn. You’ve got no folks back on Earth. If you and I went off to Mars Station to live together with a kid, there’s no downside to you. But I’m Earther. I got Earth family, and if I have a kid on Mars Station, that kid’s never gonna see his gramma, his aunties, his uncle, he’s never gonna meet his cousins… I’ve got a big family, too. I love ‘em, too. I don’t want to cut a kid off from his heritage.”

“But I can’t go to Earth,” Mal said, nodding slowly. “Well… I feel like that’s a thing we could solve, I mean, people on Mars Station have kids with people on Lagrange 2 have kids with people on Phobos Outpost, and you just shuttle around between the two families. Isn’t it like that on Earth?”

“If both families are on Earth, sure. But…” She took a deep breath. “If I quit my job to go back Earthside, there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to get it back again any time soon. And you can’t take a baby into space. I’d be stuck down there, without you, until the kid is three… and without my job, I don’t know how I’d afford to get back up into space. You know, down there, you don’t get to just shuttle around the solar system. You’re rich as hell, or you work for one of the lunar corps or a space corp, or you have a government grant, or you’re in NASA or one of the other national space agencies… and if none of that’s true, you’re gonna spend your whole life down there. Maybe you can afford one tourist vacation, in your lifetime, if you scrimp and save for it.”

“Ah, shit.” Mal sighed. “Okay. I’m seeing the dilemma.”

He didn’t ask why she was pregnant. The laws that restricted human behavior on the Moon were heavily influenced by a number of very conservative governments. Birth control couldn’t be shipped to the Moon. Lavonne had been sourcing her birth control from a black market network that came in from the spaceborn, but the supply sometimes dried up for exactly the wrong few weeks. They’d used condoms, the only form of birth control you could get on the Moon, but in luna-g they worked really, really badly.

“So. I go down for a medical procedure and I get rid of it – and you know if I take a flight down to Sweden or something, they’re gonna know something’s up – or, we have to decide which side of the kid’s family he’ll lose out on ever getting to meet. And if we leave out space, you, his dad, you won’t be able to be with him until he’s grown up enough to get his own moon job. But if we leave out Earth, he’ll be cut off from it forever.” It was also company policy that employees who could get pregnant could not get abortions, and doing so would be justified grounds for dismissal. The company wouldn’t be able to tell she was going down for that reason – but if she went home to the United States, she couldn’t get one without being rich, and if she went from there to Europe that would kill a good bit of her savings, but if she went directly down to the countries where it was legal, the company did know where her family lived, and that it wasn’t Europe. And because the company provided all the medical care up here, if they had good reason to suspect her, they could pull her medical records from Earth.

“That… is a really shitty choice to have to make,” Mal said. “I’m sorry. They should let people form a colony on the Moon. This whole ‘you can’t really live here, you can’t have kids on the moon’ thing is bullshit.”

“Tell me about it.”

He shook his head. “I know… I know my folks would be crushed if I had a kid and they couldn’t see him. But I’m guessing yours would too.”

The Jewish families in space were tight-knit, with a strong focus on families, because all over Earth the Jewish diaspora was like that, after generations of pogroms and antisemitic violence. The Black families in the United States were the same way, after hundreds of years of overpolicing and perverse incentives had destroyed the connection between Black men and the rest of their families, over so many generations. Both Mal’s parents and Lavonne’s would see the loss of a grandchild to a place they could never go as heartbreaking.

“Come here. I need a hug,” Mom said, sounding exactly like she always had – joking, but there was always that note of truth under it. She didn’t wait for me to make my way to her – she never had, not until she was too ill to get up – but came straight for me and gave me a hug, and she smelled like herself. Not like a rotting corpse, not like ozone or nothing or whatever a ghost is supposed to smell like.

When I was a kid, my brother Jeff and I watched the miniseries version of “The Martian Chronicles”. In particular, he was always impressed (and terrified) by the part where the astronauts meet their long-lost loved ones, who turn out to be Martian shapechangers luring them to their deaths. I always wondered, if the people they saw on Mars were dead, how did they fall for it? How did they not know that dead people could not somehow be on Mars?

As I held my mom, who’d been dead a few years now, I understood. They’d wanted to believe. I wanted to believe. Stephanie had warned me not to ask anything – no “how are you not dead”, “how can you be here”, “why are you alive,” nothing like that. I assumed that was what she’d meant, anyway.

“Mom, I’ve been trying to trace some of my past that I’ve forgotten. Do you remember the name of my third grade teacher?”

“Huh.” My mom seemed to be thinking about it. “I think it was Mrs. Wilder, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. Second grade was Ms. Jenner, right? And fourth was Mrs. White?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t, in fact, remember my third grade teacher’s name, and neither did my dad. The Martians in the story had been telepaths; they’d been able to perfectly impersonate the astronauts’ loved ones because they could read the astronauts’ minds. Now I had a piece of information whose answer I didn’t know, and no way to easily confirm it unless Jeff remembered; he was only two years younger than me and had had some of the same teachers. But some of the people I had friended on Facebook were high school classmates, and a tiny number of my high school classmates had also been with me in elementary school, and might remember my third grade teacher’s name.

“I haven’t seen you in so long,” my mom said. “What’s going on in your life?”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Things are going okay. Mom, if I’d known you were here I’d have brought the kids.”

“You can bring them up next time,” Mom said.

This was so weird. My mom was definitely dead. I had seen her body in the coffin, lying in state, looking nothing like she had in life. But here she was, impossibly, and I was holding an almost normal conversation with her. “Have Jeff or Aaron come over since you’ve… been here?”

“Jeff was here last weekend,” Dad said. “And Aaron lives next door, so he’s been over nearly every day.”

My grandparents used to live next door. When they died, my mom and my uncle inherited the house. My uncle bought out my mom’s share and rented the house out, and my youngest brother ended up renting it. My other brother lives in an apartment down in the city; I’m the odd one out, living in a completely different state, with a husband and kids.

So all of them had known, and none of them had told me. I expected Stephanie and Aaron to never tell me anything, but I was more than a little irritated with Jeff.

“Let me go drop off my stuff,” I said, since I was still carrying my bag.

I went back to Stephanie’s room, which used to be my room, a long time ago. The boys used to room together, but my room was too small for Stephanie to share with me, and she had needed a lot of space of her own… so they’d converted the loft in the garage into a bedroom. It had never been warm in the winter, though, so as soon as I moved out, Stephanie had moved in.

Stephanie was, as usual, on her computer. I shut the door behind me. “Okay. What the hell is going on?”

“She’s not the only one,” Stephanie said, without looking away from her computer. “I’ve been doing research. They’re all over the place. There’s no explanation yet, and apparently none of them will talk about it. I asked Mom and she said I was really rude, and sulked and was really passive-aggressive.”

“So we’re not worried about Mom turning into a Martian shapechanger or vanishing, we’re just worried that she’ll get mad?” To be fair, making Mom mad had always been a thing worth avoiding at all costs. “When did she come back?”

“I don’t know exactly, but presuming that she came to see me right after she came back, it would have been Monday around 3 pm.”

“And no one told me? You have my email address!”

“…It just didn’t feel right, telling you something like this in email. I felt like I should wait for you to be here.”

“And Jeff didn’t? And Aaron didn’t?”

Stephanie shrugged. She still didn’t look away from her computer. “They probably felt the same way.”

“Does Dad… know? Like, does he even remember that Mom is dead, or does he think this is normal?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

I sat down on her bed. “Steph, I’m asking you to make an informed guess. Has he said anything to you that would either suggest that he’s aware this is abnormal, or that he isn’t?”

“I don’t read minds, but I haven’t heard anything from him one way or the other. He’s very happy, though.”

“I got that impression,” I told her. I went to the guest room, which used to belong to the boys, opened up my laptop, and sent Jeff a question on Facebook about my third grade teacher.

Mom appeared while I was debating whether or not to also ask him why the hell he hadn’t told me about her. “Lennie, don’t hide in your room. Come out and talk to me and your dad. You need to catch me up on your life!”

Part of me wanted to break down crying. Part of me wanted to run to the car. Part of me was annoyed the way I always used to be annoyed when my mom wanted to spend time with me and I had stuff to do. And part of me hated myself for being annoyed by my mom for any reason at all. She was back from the dead and I wanted to hide in my room? But I wanted to hide in my room because I wanted to do research to figure out if this was really my mom or not. And what had Stephanie meant by “all over the place”? People all over the place had returned from the dead? Why wasn’t this all over the news?

What I said was, “Okay, mom,” and I went out to the TV room to talk to her.

***

Here I was, having a completely mundane conversation with a dead woman.

Yes, my husband was doing well at his consulting business. Yes, my oldest daughter was doing well in college. My youngest daughter had a rough spot a few years ago but was doing better. The daughter in the middle was putting a lot of time into her music, and was getting really good. I didn’t mention that my oldest daughter had gotten a diagnosis of autism like her aunt, or that my middle daughter was failing all her subjects because all she cared about was music, or that my youngest daughter was openly bisexual and dating a nonbinary teen in her class, because those would be fraught topics around here. My mother would be openly disapproving of the failing in school – as was I, but I wasn’t here to listen to a lecture about what I should be doing differently to make sure Rhiannon passed her classes – and she’d be what she thought counted as supportive about the other things. Are you sure it’s a good idea for Janie to have an autism diagnosis on her medical record? Lots of people will discriminate against her, just ask Stephanie, it’s not a good thing to admit to the world. And if Lori wanted to date a person who claimed to have no gender, good for her, but was she sure it was a good idea to admit to the world that she was bi when the world is so prejudiced? Blah blah blah. No. I wasn’t going there, not with my mother back from the dead.

All the questions I wanted to ask. How? How was she back? Why? Was there an afterlife after all? What was it like? Are you absolutely sure you’re not a telepathic shapechanger who wants to eat us? Is anyone else coming back or is it just you? But I couldn’t do it. My mouth wouldn’t make the words, and I felt like Mom being alive was a soap bubble that might burst any moment. If I said she was dead, would she disappear? I couldn’t take the risk.

Now I knew why Jeff and Aaron hadn’t told me. The compulsion not to talk about it, the fear that talking about the circumstances of her death and her apparently-no-longer-deadness would cause her to stop being no-longer-dead. I wouldn’t be able to tell my husband about this, or my kids, not unless they came here. Not without feeling like Mom might disappear if I did.

Which was probably how Stephanie had gotten away with it, in the beginning. If this was some kind of emotional pressure, something emanating from the presence of a dead woman... Stephanie was typically immune to emotional pressure. Or pretended she was, anyway. She hid behind her monotone and her face that barely expressed anything until she couldn’t, and then she’d go and have a meltdown in the bathroom. But she wanted to please Mom. We all wanted to please Mom. So if Mom had told her she was rude for mentioning the death thing, Stephanie would be unable to mention it again. Because she wouldn’t want Mom to think she was rude.

This felt very much like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Dead mother back to life, check. Weird inexplicable pressure not to talk about it, check. But Mom clearly remembered things that had happened shortly before her death, and showed no evidence of knowing about anything that had happened since, unless it was public knowledge. She talked about interests the girls had had three years ago, interests they’d all outgrown since. She talked about my plan to remodel my own garage – I had completely forgotten that was even a thing we’d planned at one point, because I’d lost my job shortly after Mom died and then the money wasn’t there for the remodel. She didn’t know I was working with my husband in the consulting business now, which a telepath would obviously know because it dominates my life nowadays. Obviously a Martian telepathic shapechanger would have to pretend not to know things that supposedly happened while they were dead, but if I’d forgotten about the garage, what were the odds a telepath could pull it out of my head? There had to be more accessible thoughts in there, after all.

I didn’t know what to ask Mom. How do you feel? That was always a good one, back in the day, because Mom’s chronic illnesses meant there was always something she could complain about, but she wouldn’t do it until she was asked… she’d just quietly resent the fact that no one had asked her. But did dead people still feel things? Would that intrude on the topic I wasn’t supposed to talk about? What’s going on in your life? Oh, nothing much, Lennie, I’m back from the dead, how about you?

So I talked about myself. I was learning to work leather and I’d made myself a wallet, but I left it at home, I could bring it to show her next time. I was also learning to repair dolls. The girls had all abandoned theirs and I felt bad about it, so I was cleaning them up and repairing them and putting them in dioramas. Mom was very interested in both topics, and asked if I could repair some old dolls she had up in the attic. I was pretty sure I’d already done it – if it was the dolls I was thinking of, Dad had given them to me right after Mom died, and they were the ones I’d learned on. But was it safe to talk about? Dad wasn’t saying anything; had he forgotten he gave me the dolls, which was entirely possible, or did he think it wasn’t safe to talk about either?

I’d wanted for three years to be able to tell my mom that she was wrong about all the weight loss advice she’d given me because now it had come out that scientists had never proven that fat made you fat and the low-carb diets were probably better for you than the low-fat ones, but I didn’t know if she could still eat. Also, my mom was back from the dead and I wanted to start an argument with her about a topic I’d always hated when she talked about? Didn’t I have anything better to do? That really kind of made me a shitty person, didn’t it?

When Mom had been dying, I couldn’t talk to her about the future. I didn’t know how to bring myself to talk about things she’d never see. I’d never known how much my conversations with her consisted of me talking about future plans until I couldn’t any more. Now I couldn’t talk about the future or the past, at least not the past three years, and large parts of the present had to be left out too, because I didn’t know what would remind her that she was dead and make her go back to her grave. Even though, logically, I knew that was unlikely to happen because Stephanie had done it and had just gotten a rebuke that that was rude.

At the same time… I knew I had to say something that Mom could talk about, because if I just talked about myself all night, later on she’d probably make some passive-aggressive remarks about how everything always had to be about me. In desperation, I asked her if she’d seen anything good on television lately.

“Oh, I haven’t been watching anything in a while,” Mom said. “It’s been so long since I felt well enough to go anywhere, so I’ve been going for walks, and your father and I have been taking trips to museums and historic sites. We’re going to be going up to Boston next week.”

“I have a client up there,” Dad said, “and they want me to do a training thing. And I was telling them, no, no, Boston’s too far, but I remembered how much your mom loved Boston, so I asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes, so now we’re going. We’re going to fly, though. The days I was willing to drive that kind of distance are long over.”

“You could take the Amtrak.”

Dad made a dismissive gesture. “It’s gotten so expensive. Flying’s actually cheaper.”

“When are you going?”

“Next Wednesday we’re going to fly up there,” Mom said, which said something about her opinion of the future, at least. “Your dad’s got his presentations to do on Thursday and Friday, and I’ll wander around the city, and then we’ll spend Saturday seeing the sights together.”

“There’s this fantastic restaurant I went to last time I was up there on business,” Dad said, “and I checked their web page, and they’re still open. So we’re going to go there.”

So Mom could eat. Or Dad wasn’t afraid of talking about eating with her, anyway. Maybe ruled out vampire, but Martian shapechanger was still on the table.

I didn’t literally believe my mom – or the entity that appeared to be my mom – was a telepathic shapechanger from Mars like in The Martian Chronicles. But it was obvious that something so far outside the norm that it was only imaginable by making references to fantasy and science fiction was happening.

I tried, very carefully, “How have you been feeling, Mom?”

“I’m great!” She laughed. “I haven’t felt this good in ages. Sugar’s under control, I can see pretty well, none of the usual aches and pains… I’m doing pretty good!”

Did she remember she had died of cancer? Did she even remember that she’d died?

It was 2 am before I got to go to bed.

***

6 am and I was up and out the door before there was any chance of my mother or father being awake, assuming my mom even slept anymore. But at the very least, she was in her bedroom with the door closed and no view of the driveway I’d parked my car in.

Do I sound like a terrible daughter when I tell you I’ve never visited my mom’s grave? I haven’t been back there since the funeral. I always knew my mother wasn’t really there – that if any part of her had still existed in any form, it wasn’t trapped in a coffin under six feet of dirt. It made it somewhat difficult to find the graveyard, though, because I couldn’t remember where it was, or its name, or which church it was associated with, and it wasn’t exactly like I could ask my mom. When I finally found the place– it wasn’t that hard in the end, my parents live in a small town and there aren’t many graveyards – it took me half an hour to find her grave.

It seemed undisturbed. But if Mom had been back from the dead since Monday, that would have been time to fill in a grave. I went looking for the caretaker.

They get to work early in the graveyard caretaking business, I guess; I found him pushing a lawnmower over on the other side of the graveyard.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“This is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But I got an email from a jerk I used to know in high school claiming he was going to dig up my mother’s grave, and I just wanted to make sure nobody’s touched it.”

“Nobody’s touched any of the graves, ma’am,” he assured me. “Aside from a couple of funerals we’ve had this week, no one’s done anything to disturb the ground here at all.”

“Thanks,” I said, “that’s reassuring. He was talking like he was actually going to do it, but I guess he was all talk.”

“Well, if anyone comes by and disturbs any of the graves, we’ll have them arrested,” he said.

I had my answer. My mother had not climbed out of her grave. Which seemed impossible anyway, now that I knew enough about the funeral industry to know exactly how hard it would be to smash a coffin open, let alone dig through six feet of dirt. I couldn’t rule out her turning immaterial and floating out of her grave, but my mom had seemed very material and biological when she’d hugged me. I’d always thought of ghosts as something that were almost never solid enough to interact with the world, if they even existed.

***

If I was going to get up this early, I was going to get a pancake breakfast at the diner. My parents still think sugarless cold cereal is a reasonable thing to eat for breakfast. They were always night owls; I made myself breakfast and school lunch every morning but the first day of school, every year after about third grade. I was also a night owl, once I didn’t have to get up for school anymore, but I used to make my girls a lunch every night and store it in the fridge for them. Now they’re too old and too cool for Mom lunches. They’re eating something, but it might be cafeteria food, lunch they pack for themselves, or for all I know sandwiches from 7-11 or Starbucks with their allowance.

The point is, I hardly ever get a nice breakfast, because I am hardly ever willing to wake up early enough to cook myself one, and my parents certainly weren’t going to. So I went to the diner.

Normally I don’t talk to anyone at a diner, beyond smiling at them and telling them my order in an upbeat, cheerful voice because waitresses get too much shit from too many people for me to add to it inadvertently. Also because I don’t want them to think I’m eating alone because I’m a sad, lonely bitch no one would love; I want them to know I’m doing this because I really, really enjoy not having to socialize. But today I had something I needed to know.

“I’m a writer,” I told the waitress, “and I’m doing research on ghost stories in the area. Have you heard anything, you know, Halloweeny or spooky? Ghosts appearing, dead people walking around, poltergeists, that kind of thing?”

“Can’t say I have, but I’ll ask around, see if any of the girls know any good stories,” the waitress told me.

And then she took my order back to the kitchen, and I surfed the net on my phone while I waited, and then I got my pancakes, and I ate them. I was chasing the last blueberry around on the plate when another waitress approached me. “Stacy told me you were collecting creepy stories for a book?”

“From the local area, yeah.”

“I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, but… my cousin says that a lady on her street, her husband died a few years ago? But she just saw the guy walking with the lady down the street, having a conversation like the guy never died.”

“Do you think you’d be able to give my email to your cousin and have her reach out to me? That sounds like exactly the kind of story I’m looking for.”

“Uh, sure.”

I gave the waitress my email address. This was probably going to come to nothing; I doubted the waitress would even remember to give it to her cousin. But it’d be really good if I could get the details from someone who knew more about it.

***

Jeff’s more of a morning person than I am. I got a response on Facebook, but I had to wait to get back to my parents’ house, where my laptop was, to read it. On mobile, Facebook will only let you read messages if you have the app, which tells Mark Zuckerberg exactly where you are and what you’re doing with your phone, all the time. I don’t have the app. Sometimes this means I can’t read messages on mobile, but I prefer that to having an evil data empire know everything about my movements.

My parents weren’t awake when I got home. Or they were still in their bedroom. They used to do that a lot. Mom’s desk was in there, and Dad had a laptop… which he usually used on Mom’s desk, since she died. I wondered where her machine was, and if she had made a thing about it once she came back.

“I’m not sure I remember what your third grade teacher’s name was… I can barely remember my own third grade teacher. Were they the same? I can’t remember. I think my own teacher’s name was… Wil-something? Wilber? Wilkins? You’d be better off… well, you’re at the house now, or are you back at your home? Kind of important to know, because I could give you some advice about who to ask, but it’d be a different thing if you were at Dad’s house.”

He meant, “You’d be better off asking Mom, but I don’t know if you know Mom is back from the dead or not.” I was pretty sure, anyway.

I responded. “I’m at Dad’s house. Wondering how I’d be able to tell the difference between someone who’s real and a Martian shapechanger. Could the name have been Wilder?”

Five minutes later I got my answer. “Mom isn’t a Martian shapechanger. It was the first thing I thought of, so I checked.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

That answer I didn’t get until half an hour later. “I… just didn’t feel right, talking about it in an impersonal medium like the internet. I know you have a cell phone and I probably even have your number somewhere, but I remember you’re not the biggest fan of actual phone calls, so I didn’t want to disturb you.”

I replied with my phone number and the message “Call me.”

And then I had to sit by my phone, doing nothing important, nothing that would engage my attention in any serious way, waiting for him to call. Which took twenty minutes, despite the fact that I could see that he was online.

Finally the phone rang. “You raaaaang?” I answered in my best parody of The Addams Family.

“I’m pretty sure I must have, or you wouldn’t have known to pick up,” Jeff said. “Of course, I might have buzzed. You could have your phone on vibrate. Or maybe I sang, depending on what you have for a ringtone.”

“’You saaaaang?’ doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi to it.”

“Wow, how long has it been since I heard someone put je ne sais quoi in a sentence? I think we’re old. I think that’s an old person expression now.”

“What’s going on with Mom?” I asked, quietly, in case anyone might be in the hallway to hear me.

Jeff sighed. “I don’t know what is, but I can tell you what isn’t,” he said. “Stephanie confirmed that she eats, sleeps and goes to the bathroom normally, and I confirmed all of that for myself. The toilet in their bedroom is still broken enough that they don’t flush it unless they have to.”

I winced. That was a level of detail I could have done without. “So, not vampire or undead. How did you solve the Martian thing?”

“On Monday, Dad woke up and she was laying next to him in bed. If the goal was to kill him, it would have made more sense to do it then, before he woke up, than to put on this whole elaborate performance.”

“You’re taking me too literally. I’m not worried about aliens trying to take our family off guard so they can kill us. There’s any number of things they could be up to, and they don’t have to be aliens. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Stepford Wives. My Little Pony.”

“…My Little Pony?”

“There’s creatures called Changelings that feed on love. They impersonate ponies and take the love that other ponies feel for the ones they’re impersonating, as food.”

“Kind of psychic vampires mashed up with Martian shapechangers.”

“Yeah, but without the telepathy, so they’re not as good at it as you’d think. It’s a children’s show; they have to telegraph to the kids that these aren’t the real ponies. In real life, anyone who did something like that would be more competent.”

“How much verisimilitude do we need, though? She’s got moles in the same places Mom had moles. She’s missing a toenail just like Mom. Things I didn’t consciously think about, things I might not have remembered if you asked me to describe Mom.”

“That just means that if it’s not Mom, it has the ability to rummage deeper into our memories than we’re consciously aware of. That’s why I asked you my third grade teacher’s name. I genuinely don’t remember. Mom would, I’m pretty sure. Dad wouldn’t and Stephanie and Aaron were both too young.”

“I’m not sure I remember, but when you said Wilder, that sounded like it could be right. Do you know anyone from elementary school? Some of them went to high school with us.”

“I have some Facebook friends from high school, and maybe one or two went to the same elementary we did, but I haven’t been able to locate any actual people that I remember from elementary school. They don’t have a Classmates.com thing that works for elementary—”

“It says it does.”

“It lies, there’s nowhere to enter your elementary in your profile. All it lets you put in is high school, and it’s from a drop-down, not even freeform.”

“Huh. Guess I never tried it. I’m still in touch with anyone I cared about from back then.”

“I literally don’t care about anyone from back then, but that makes it hard when you’re trying to figure out your third grade teacher’s name.”

“If she can probe our memories,” Jeff said, “then nothing you or I know, or ever knew, would be safe. You’d have to come up with something to ask her that Dad wouldn’t know, or me, or Aaron, or Steph, or yourself, but that you know Mom would know and that you know someone else who would know it too.”

“I could ask Mariana for something.” My mom’s close friend and high school classmate was one of my Facebook friends. We don’t generally communicate directly with each other, but I follow her posts.

“That’s a good idea.” I heard the sound of a whistling teapot in the background. “That’d be my hot water for my oatmeal. If you get anything from Mariana, can you tell me about it?”

“Yeah.” I’d wanted to tell him about the story I’d heard in the diner, but no one got between Jeff and his oatmeal. “I’ll talk to you later. Probably online. Voice is making me paranoid.”

“I know what you mean. Do you need me to come up this weekend? I could make a day trip tomorrow.”

“That might be a good idea. I want to talk to Aaron, do you know what schedule he’s on?”

“He works nights now, so you’ll want to get him around 2 pm or so.”

“All right. Enjoy your oatmeal.”

“I will!” he said, putting a ridiculous amount of emphasis into it as a joke.

***

Before I could finish writing a message to Mariana – before I could really start, honestly, because how could I explain why I needed what I needed without admitting Mom was back from the dead? – someone knocked on my door. It was Mom. She was wearing one of her usual kind of shapeless but colorful nightgowns, and her hair was not brushed, so it was kind of a wreck. I noticed for the first time that it was grey. Mom had always dyed her hair since she started going grey, and it had still been auburn when she’d died. I’d never seen it fully grey. “Your dad and I are going to the arboretum,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

“Since when have you been into trees, Mom?” My mother had always been fascinated by history, and to some extent natural history like dinosaurs, but I’d never seen her express an interest in nature per se.

“I never was, much,” she admitted, “but the world is so beautiful. I was always more interested in the way humans shape the world than the way it came out of the box, but things like arboretums, Japanese gardens, zoos and aquariums… they’re made of nature, but they’re made by humans, and they say something about the people who chose to make them the way they are. And you know that your dad has always enjoyed nature.” My dad was interested in science, in general, and considered the natural world part of that. He was not exactly the kind of guy who would go camping.

In the past, I would have said “no, thanks.” I was never all that interested in nature myself, certainly not trees – maybe beautiful rocks or interesting landscapes, but looking at trees wouldn’t have seemed interesting to me. I still didn’t care much about trees… but my mom was back from the dead. I’ve gone much stupider and more boring places than an arboretum with her in the past, and now… if this was really her, if she was really alive again, I was going to spend all the time with her that I reasonably could.

“Sure, I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take my own car, though. Just give me the address.” I always took my own car if I possibly could, because I’d get carsick if I wasn’t the one driving. “Should I ask Stephanie if she wants to come?”

“Sure, you can ask. I doubt she will, though.”

Stephanie, however, surprised me. “Yeah, I’ll go with you. We’ll meet Mom and Dad there?”

“Yeah.” Dad had texted me the address, so I pulled it up in my GPS. “About half an hour from here.”

In the car, she asked me, “Have you found anything out? I know you were looking into the whole Mom thing.”

“Jeff thinks she’s really Mom. We have a plan to get Mariana to give us a question that we don’t know the answer to, but that Mom and Mariana both would, so we can confirm she really knows things and isn’t just reading our minds. And a waitress at the diner said her cousin has seen what looks like someone else coming back from the dead.”

“It’s all over the place, actually,” Stephanie said. “I’m finding reports from everywhere.”

I glanced at her. “Why wouldn’t this be making the news, then? People coming back from the dead!”

“I feel like maybe no one wants to go on the record.” Stephanie looked out the window. “Nothing on Twitter or Facebook. No pictures of dead people on Instagram. I’m seeing things on Reddit and Tumblr – places where people use a consistent pseudonym, not like 4chan, but where that pseudonym can’t be tied to their actual identity. I’ve posted about it in both places, but I can’t make myself tweet about it.”

“Any idea why not?”

“It—” She shrugged, hands exaggeratedly widespread and head canted forward slightly. “It just feels wrong,” she said. “Like… we’re getting away with something. There’s a natural law we’re breaking here. I can post as toomanymushrooms or u/catonahottinroofsundae and no one knows who I am, but if I post as Stephanie Robbins and I tell everyone that my mom Suky Robbins is back from the dead…”

“What if that brought it to the attention of, what, some kind of authorities?”

“Yeah, pretty much. And even if I was just posting under my own name… I don’t have to say Mom’s name. I don’t have to put a mention to her Facebook in a post. But everyone knows my mother’s name, or they could find out from my name if they wanted to.”

“And you think maybe there are a lot of people with these weird feelings?”

“I don’t think so, I know so. A lot of posts explicitly talk about the fact that they can’t bring themselves to say anything in public, or talk about it with their real names on it.”

“Are they all parents?”

“No. It’s all kinds of people. Best friends, siblings, spouses, children… the only pattern I see is that nobody died a long time ago. It’s all, ‘my brother who died last year’ or ‘my aunt who died two years ago’ or something. Longest I’ve seen anyone talk about was a son who died five years ago.”

A thought occurs to me. “I can add something to your pattern, though.”

“Yeah?”

“You’d expect that, even if everyone with a resurrected relative feels this sense of dread about telling anyone about it with their name attached, because they feel it will, I don’t know, maybe cause the dead person to disappear back into their grave… you’d think somebody would do it anyway because they don’t care. Someone whose alcoholic abusive father came back and they wish he’d go away again, someone’s asshole brother, someone’s former best friend who betrayed them. But so far, no one has. How many people have you seen talking about this?”

“It’s hard to say because no one’s using their real names. Someone might post from their main blog and their side blog, or maybe they have a different name on tumblr vs reddit but they posted to both. But I’ve tracked thirteen separate names, and of those, I can tell for a fact there are at least nine unique ones because they talk about different people.”

“Thirteen isn’t ‘all over the place’.”

“I didn’t mean all over the Internet, I meant people coming from all over. I’ve tracked the UK, California, North Dakota, Ontario, France, India and New Zealand. Nobody’s tagging their posts and no one is willing to contribute to a master list, so it’s hard to find anyone outside of the people I follow or the subreddits I’m in, and I don’t know where everyone comes from. But it’s geographically widespread. I suspect it may also be happening in other places where people don’t generally speak English or maybe don’t have Internet access.”

“And what’s their sentiment? Like, are people frightened? Upset? Excited? Weirded out?”

She took a moment to think about it. “They’re happy. People are happy it happened. Weirded out, yes. But happy.”

“No whacked-out conspiracy theories about how it’s the contrails raining down adenochrome or something?”

“Not from the people it’s happened to. There was one flame war I saw where a religious person was saying that the person whose sister was back from the dead had to repudiate her. She’s not really your sister, she’s a demon from Hell sent to trick you, et cetera. And the person whose sister was back turned out to be just as religious, and they threw a holy fit. Literally. A holy fit.” She giggled. “A whole lot of stuff about how the righteous were coming back and Jesus had granted some people eternal life and this was that, and how dare you call these beings demons when they’re obviously blessed by Jesus himself and you’re the kind of person who would have called for Jesus’s crucifixion if you’d been alive then, and all that kind of thing.”

“Did anyone else who’d had returned people say anything?”

“This was Tumblr. None of the people who have had returns are communicating with each other in any way I can see. I reached out to a few on Tumblr private messaging but no one has answered. The only places I’m seeing conversations about it between people with returns have been on Reddit, because it has a forum structure. Tumblr is more like a whole hanging web of disconnected strings.”

“Still, you’d think that someone would be publishing a news article about it. Even if no one is willing to go on the record with their real name…”

“Maybe it’s not enough people. Nine unique instances, maybe up to thirteen, maybe more in places I haven’t surveyed. It’s not like I have access to literally all of Tumblr, after all. But that’s all I can confirm, and what if there isn’t any more?”

“If anyone came back from the dead I would expect the news to take notice.” I turned onto the final road; the arboretum was at the end of this stretch. “I went to the graveyard today. Mom’s grave hasn’t been disturbed. I checked with the groundskeeper. So either Mom’s body floated ethereally through the grave dirt, and her coffin, or her original body is still in there and whatever she is now, it’s not the same as what she was then.”

“It’s too bad we can’t have her exhumed,” Stephanie said.

“It probably wouldn’t tell us much anyway.”

“She’s younger-looking than she was before. Not by much, and the grey hair hides it, but she’s healthier-looking and less wrinkly. And I don’t see any evidence that she still has diabetes, or that she’s taking any pills at all. I haven’t seen her take any insulin shots, or anything.”

“Huh.” She wasn’t restored to her youth, or her hair wouldn’t be grey and there would be no wrinkles at all. She wasn’t restored to what she was at the moment of death, obviously. She wasn’t restored to what she’d have been at the moment of death without the cancer that killed her, if she didn’t have diabetes anymore. I felt like there had to be a pattern here I wasn’t seeing. I really wanted to talk to some of these other people having this experience.

I pulled in to the arboretum’s parking lot. Mom and Dad weren’t there yet; Dad doesn’t drive like an old man, but he doesn’t drive as fast as he used to, either. “Do they do this kind of thing a lot? Arboretums, parks, et cetera?”

“They don’t usually invite me, and I wouldn’t usually come if they did, so I don’t know. They do leave the house a lot.”

Dad’s car pulled in, and he and Mom got out. For the first time I could remember, Mom was actually moving a bit faster than him. Both Mom and Dad were the kind of people who walked quickly everywhere they went, but for a long time, Mom was slowed down by her various illnesses. Dad was still healthy for his age, but he’d slowed down a good bit since Mom’s death – grief was hard on his health, it seemed – and now Mom seemed healthier than he was.

“Did you know there are people who come here from all over just to see our leaves in the autumn?” Mom said.

I did know that; it was typically a factor in making it hard for me to come visit during the autumn. “I think it’s the mountainsides. There’s leaves turning colors all over the country, but not on mountainsides.”

“In California they don’t even consider these mountains,” Mom said. “They call them hills when they come visit.”

“No respect for the elderly,” Dad said.

“Yeah, these young mountains think they’re all that, but wait 100,000 years and see how tall they are then,” Stephanie said.

We strolled around, looking at the trees, reading what it said on the plaques in front of them. American Elm. Yellow Birch. Eastern White Pine. I’d seen trees just like these my whole life, and a good number of them, I’d never known the names.

“You never think about how beautiful the world is,” Mom said. “We’re all rushing through it, trying to accomplish the next thing. Or entertain ourselves. Read a book, watch TV. So few of us really want to interact with nature.”

“Careful, mom, your hippie roots are showing,” I said, teasing.

“I think if my generation had remembered what we were back when we were the hippies, the world would be better off.”

“We didn’t forget, Suky. The hippies were always big news, but you know as well as I do how many people our age just wanted to go punch a clock, buy a house, vote for Ronald Fucking Reagan… We thought we were the generation that would change the world, but it wasn’t our generation, it was us. People like us, who wanted to see a better world and weren’t content to just live like the sheep our parents were… but there’s people like that in every generation. And they’re always outnumbered by the assholes.”

“Actually, they’ve done a study,” Stephanie said. “The reason generations get more conservative as they get older is that at every point, the poor are more likely to die than the rich, and the rich are more conservative than the poor. So by the time you get to middle age, a lot of the people looking for social justice and diversity are dead. And there’s a lot more dead by the time they’re elderly.”

“I don’t buy it,” my dad said. “There’s entirely too many stupid poor people in this country who are brainwashed into supporting causes that help out the rich people and screw themselves over. They’re not living longer than anyone else in this country. The math doesn’t work.”

“Let’s not talk about politics,” Mom said. “I think we all know there’s something more important we ought to be discussing.”

“Mom?” Stephanie said, and looked at her, which is not a thing Stephanie does very often.

“Suky?” Dad said.

I didn’t say anything. I watched as Mom looked up at a tree and said, “It’s time we dealt with the elephant in the room, don’t you think?”

“Are you going to tell us about—” I couldn’t say anything more. I couldn’t bring myself to make the words.

“About the fact that I was dead, and now I’m not?” She looked at all of us. “I think we should talk about it, yes.”

It felt like there were eyes, watching us. I wanted to yell to my mother, to tell her not to talk about it, that someone might hear… but who? And why would it matter?

“Is that something you’re okay with, Suky?” Dad asked.

“I’m fine, but I’m getting the impression the rest of you aren’t,” she said. “Why haven’t any of you brought it up, except Stephanie, the once?”

“Well, you told me it was rude,” Stephanie said.

Mom sighed. “I guess I did. I’m sorry. This isn’t really easy for me either.”

She sat down on a bench, and Dad sat with her. Stephanie and I sat on a short stone wall around a tree. “I suppose I should start by saying, I don’t really know much more than you do. I don’t have any memories of being dead. I woke up in bed, next to your dad, on Monday morning, and for a while I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there… I assumed I went to bed the previous night, but I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. I couldn’t pin down anything I remembered as to exactly when it happened, not in the recent past. And when your father woke up, the shock on his face and the fact that he kept asking me if I was really here made me think, wait, the last thing I remember was that I was in a hospital dying of cancer, so why am I here now?”

“So you don’t remember any kind of afterlife?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I believe I had some sort of existence, but I don’t remember anything about it. When I wake up, I have flashes, feelings that I dreamed something about it, but I can’t hold it in my head long enough to write it down or even talk about it. It just… disappears, leaving behind only the memory that something was there a few minutes ago.”

“You know how unlikely the idea that an afterlife exists is, scientifically, though. Right?” Dad said. “Consciousness is an emergent property of a trillion neurons working together. Imagining that there could be some sort of construct that exists outside the brain and body is like imagining that a video game character could be waltzing around in front of us.”

“And yet I’m here,” Mom said.

“Time travel or a Star Trek transporter with some modifications would make more sense than something supernatural, like an afterlife,” Dad said stubbornly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stephanie said. “If Mom doesn’t remember…”

“Have you had a medical exam?” I asked.

Mom laughed. “I don’t have health insurance anymore. I’m dead, remember? I can’t even begin to figure out how we’re going to address getting me a legal identity again, and to be honest… I can’t know I’ll be around long enough for it to matter.”

“None of us know that,” I said, “about ourselves or anyone else.”

“True, and it’s going to be hard to travel if I don’t have a legal identity. So I suppose I’ll have to address it eventually, if I last that long.”

“Thank God your state ID hasn’t actually expired yet, or there’d be no way we could fly to Boston. The passport’s expired,” Dad said. Mom had been legally blind when she died, so she’d had a state ID rather than a driver’s license.

“Is there any reason you might not? Aside from the things that could kill anyone?” I asked.

Dad said, “Your mother and I discussed… when she first appeared, I found it nearly impossible to talk about the fact that she’d been dead. When she broached the topic, I could talk about it to her, but I couldn’t tell you kids.” He shrugged. “My working theory is that there’s some kind of alien experiment going on or that time travel is somehow involved, but the fact that none of you kids were able to tell each other about it until you knew the other one knew suggests to me that someone with the ability to directly affect human emotions or thought is, for some reason, making it hard to talk about this. Maybe that means it’s a short-lived experiment.”

“Maybe I escaped from hell and no one wants to talk about it for fear the devil will take me back,” Mom said, but she was laughing. Mom had never believed in hell. Dad was an atheist; Mom definitely had strong spiritual beliefs, but they were kind of a package of woo that included reincarnation and ghosts, even though she’d been raised Catholic.

“There are others like you,” Stephanie said. “None of them have talked about it themselves, but family members or friends have talked about it online, under pseudonyms. I haven’t found any evidence that anyone has mentioned anything under their real names.”

“A lot?” Mom was surprised.

“So far I count between nine and thirteen unique individuals, plus Eleanor heard a rumor that someone who might live in town might have come back. We don’t know any details, though.”

“We need to find them,” Mom said. “I need to find them. I have a second chance at life, and I’m not ashamed of it. I won’t be silenced about the fact that I exist.”

“It might not be the best idea, Suky,” Dad said. “There are a lot more crazies out there than there were when you died—”

“—there were plenty of crazies then, Dee—”

“—right, and even then it wouldn’t have been a good idea. There might be some religious nut job who thinks that if you were dead you should stay that way. Or someone else thinks that you know how you came back, and wants to force you to tell them.”

“Those are valid points,” Mom said, nodding. “And to all of those people who might want to harm me because they think I shouldn’t be alive or they think I know how I came back, I say a hearty ‘fuck you.’ I won’t be silent because there are crazy people in the world. I’m not afraid of death, not anymore.”

“You’re going to risk Eleanor’s kids?” Dad asked sharply.

“I agree with Mom,” I said, standing up. “Nobody should have to keep quiet about the fact that they exist. But I have to tell Will.”

Stephanie made a face. My family doesn’t like my husband. They have justifications, but in the past few years, since Mom died, Will’s gone to therapy and has done a lot of work on himself. Mom was the only one in the family ever willing to forgive anything, though, so I’ve never tried to get them to change their minds.

Mom said, “Well, is he still a total asshole?”

“He’s… been trying not to be. He’s in therapy, and we’re doing couples counseling, and he’s working through a lot of baggage from his upbringing.”

“Why not tell him to bring the kids up and join you here, then. Coming back to life, might as well start a clean slate and see where things go from there. And you’re right, he needs to be involved in the discussion. Your girls, too. They all are old enough to understand what’s going on here, and what could happen.”

“You know I will never stand in the way of anything you want,” Dad said, which is the kind of thing Dad says rather than “I love you”. Things like, “If they ever fail to respect you, I will smite them” – talking about us and our treatment of Mom – or “You have always been my worthy opponent.” Yes. Sometimes my father talks like a comic book character.

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Stephanie said, “but I know you taught me to be who I am to the world and fuck anyone who gives me shit about it, so… same principle. I don’t think you could be you and lie about who you are.”

“And we need to involve Jeff and Aaron,” Mom said. “I’ll call them and get them to come here.”

“We turned off your cell phone ages ago,” Dad objected.

“Dee, we still have a land line. I know we do because I hear it ring, and sometimes you even answer it.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s right, we do.” Dad shook his head. “This world where everyone carries around their phone in their pocket all the time… it’s strange how you get so used to a technological or societal change that you forget that you did it a different way for 67 years.”

Nothing ever stopped my mother when she wanted something strongly enough, if she believed it was right. I hadn’t even thought of the considerations my father brought up before he talked about them, but I’ve never believed it’s okay to hide in conformity and live in fear. I didn’t think Will had ever believed in doing that, either, and my daughters had grown up going to political protests.

“We need to find out more about these other people,” I said to Stephanie on the way home. “See if we can contact them directly, find out if any of the actual returned people are planning on going public like Mom. We could coordinate if they are. Strength in numbers.”

“The religious right are going to crap their pants,” Stephanie said, laughing. “A Deist who believes in reincarnation, is married to an atheist, and has a gay son, came back to life. Jesus Christ hasn’t got a monopoly anymore.”

“That is probably going to be the most fun part of this going public thing,” I said.

***

So now I don’t know what will happen. My husband’s driving up from home with our girls, my oldest younger brother’s on a train, and Mom’s been looking up contact information for journalist friends she had once, checking which ones are still alive, using Facebook – we never deactivated her account – and my dad’s LinkedIn. Stephanie’s found two other people who have family members who came back from the dead, and one of them’s been willing to talk to her in private messaging on Tumblr.

I still have a hard time telling anyone who doesn’t already know, but it turns out, I can write about it without feeling the pressure, the fear. Don’t know if I can post it, yet. I guess we’ll see. I’m hoping that if I can get more information from more people who’ve been through something similar, maybe we’ll find a pattern, a point of commonality… maybe even an explanation for why we all feel this pressure not to talk about it.

Tomorrow we’re all going to talk about whether we’re going to do this or not, but I know my family. What my mom wants, she gets, if it’s possible and if it’s ethical. My husband and my kids are going to be in favor of her going public, and my brothers won’t stand in her way any more than my dad would. So we’re going to do this. The thing we’re really going to talk about is how to keep ourselves safe when we do.

Everything in the world is going to change. I just don’t know exactly how yet.

***

***

Obligatory notes because I’m so fucking late with this piece: 

I have fucked up royally. I went into this without an outline and about 6,000 words in I realized I had attempted to consume a ball of energy larger than my head. This is going to end up being novel length, most likely. I struggled really hard to find a place I could reasonably end it as a short story, and yeah, it is absolutely not an ending. No followup on the Martian shapechanger thing, new idea is brought in and then treated like it’s the climax, protagonist is almost entirely reactive and passive. As a short story, it’s shit.

Unfortunately I found this out after I was already late. Not going to bore everyone with why this was a week late except that it’s allergy season and I’ve been exhausted lately. So there was no time to try to write something else. I hope you found it entertaining, if somewhat frustrating; it’s shit as a short story because it’s plainly a piece of a novel. Which I’m not going to write real soon because I have like 3 novels ahead of this one in the queue, but if I live long enough it will get done.

It’s kinda cute that story #30 falls on the 30th now because I’m late and story #31 is the last of my Spooky 5 Halloween-appropriate stories. But not cute enough to justify how late this is.