Doubting Thomas 小标题 Family ties.Footsteps ran up the stairs. I clutched at my bottle. Then someone banged on my bedroom door. I jumped.“Go away,” I said.“It’s me,” said Thomas, and he was like a brother to me. He was all right.I unlocked the door. He rushed in, all out of breath, locking the door behind him. I had Sludge playing, as usual. Thomas cranked it up before cupping his hand to my ear.“It’s true,” he said, and I knew right away what he meant.I was a clone. I took a slug from the bottle, already numbed to the idea. Letting it sink in: I was a clone. “Of who?”“Whom,” he said, always the smart ass. That gap-toothed grin. Seriously, then. “Sorry, man. Don’t know.”“OK, no problem.” I knew Thomas, and I knew how it was. He was brave, sure. Braver than me. But he wasn’t stupid. If he’d stuck around any longer, they’d have noticed him, and he’d never had made it back to me. He’d be disappeared, like Rob, or Janice, or that new girl. Mother had an answer for everything. Excuses, excuses.Still, I wondered who he was. WhoIwas. My genetic material, anyway. I wasn’t him, and he wasn’t me. Separated from birth. We had different experiences, so our brains would get wired up differently. Like the same glasses filled with different spirits.I had a hunch, though …You look just like your father.How many times had I heard that? And the way Mother looked at me, these days, when she said it … like she was a panther, and I wasn’t her cub. She’d paw at me, and I’d scurry away. As if I knew.She’d never be satisfied by anyone, really. It was only a matter of time before she found out I wasn’t Him. But she’d keep trying.Was I the first, or only the latest?“Billions and billions served.” Meat processed for her soul-consumption.I don’t know what else Thomas and I talked about, or when he left. If we played SBS, Dogfight, Afrika Corps … I can’t remember. I was busy drinking.I woke up on the floor, having thrown up on myself again. I rinsed the taste out of my mouth and washed up at the sink, but I didn’t go down for breakfast. I wasn’t hungry, and besides. I never wanted to see Mother again. That life-sized, plasticized …How can you be growing up so fast?Wasn’t everyone asking, these days, how she could possibly be my mother? When she looked so young? But she was ofthatgeneration, among the oligarchs, when they arrested everything and took control. They could do anything. We knew their Big Lie. Everything else was up for grabs — just like me.Whether I snuck out the back door or my bedroom window, I’d set off the alarm, the security lights, everything. Armed guards with dogs and drones patrolled the grounds. Mother had plenty of black-shirted cops on the payroll, too. I was their prisoner. So was she, in a way. And our neighbours. They pooled their wealth and power behind high walls, and the fear of losing it all kept them under lock and key.It looked hopeless. But … What if I didn’t sneak out, or go over the wall? What if I didn’t try to do the impossible? What if I kept up appearances, and I did nothing to draw attention to myself? What if …Once I started down that line, an idea took shape. So, I called him up.“Thomas?”“Yeah.”“Can you come over?”“What for?”“You still got that hoodie?”“Yeah,” he said.“It’s cold in my room, this morning, but I got this new game to play …”“What is it?”“Generation Ship.”“It’s not even out yet,” he said.“It is for me.”“Well, aren’t you special,” he said. “OK, I’ll be right there.”Thomas hung up. It wouldn’t take him long. He’d ride his bike over, as usual, and leave it against the side of my house. That wasn’t doneoutsidethe Pearly Gates. Here, though, property wasn’t theft; it was sacred.He came in still wearing the hoodie pulled up over his head, only peeling it off in the camera’s blind-spot. And I put it on, the same way he had it. We were the same height. The same build, too. We’d done this before. Now we traded places, and we played the game like that for as long as I could stand it. Then I got up to go, making some excuse. Thomas looked like he was still having fun. But his eyes were wet.“Thanks,” I said, and I called him by my name.He waved me off, for the camera. Not taking his eyes off the screen. We had to keep up appearances.So, I left the house with the hoodie pulled up over my head, sure I’d be mistaken for him. I knew how he walked, how he rode his bike, everything. I could do the same, and there was no doubting Thomas. He was the best. I wished the best for him. But I knew Mother. She’d never let him live this down.The story behind the storyPaul Renault reveals the inspiration behindDoubting Thomas.Where I live, the police wear black shirts. I don’t know whose idea that was, or if they knew about the Black Shirts and Mussolini’s corporate state. When billionaire Elon Musk gutted the United States, his Department of Government Efficiency was known as DOGE. A doge, or duce, led the Venetian oligarchy, and that cliché about Il Duce (making the trains…) refers to his supposed efficiency. It’s crazy-making stuff, and where I get ideas of reference. “If I point out the emperor’s clothes, they’ll come after me! I’ve got to get out of here!” And back into the bottle? Rule 62: don’t take yourself too seriously. I’m just a writer. I play with words. Thomas, for example, means ‘twin’. History doesn’t rhyme, but it replicates.Those who forget小标题Clarity of thought.There’s no way to know how or when it happened. When you can’t trust your own memory, how can you know?It seems like one day I was hearing about it, reading about it online, and the next it was affecting people on campus. My professors forgot their lesson plans, and then rambled on about alien abductions and lizard people. My friends forgot to do their assignments, and then how to get to class, and then who they were. They’d think they were disciples of Jesus, or soldiers in the Civil War, or colonists on the Moon. Anne, the engineering student in the room next to mine, became convinced she was a Lady in the court of Poseidon’s underwater palace. I’d got a bit forgetful myself, but felt I still had a pretty firm grip on reality. But, again … how would I know?Eventually, things got bad enough that we decided to leave our dorm. There were three of us that night: me, Gene and Arthur. I was a psychology major, Arthur was a med student, Gene was in theology. For some reason, we seemed to be the only ones there who hadn’t completely lost our minds. We huddled under the bare trees behind the building, old snow crunching under our feet.Gene took a long drag from his cigarette and let it steam out in the frigid air. “Robarts Library is our best bet. I’ve heard it’s a sanctuary. An island of sanity in …” He waved the cigarette. “All this.”“You can’t believe anything you hear,” Arthur said, voice muffled behind a surgical mask. “Not any more.”But it made sense. Robarts would have books and records from before — old, physical documents that we could hold in our hands. Those we could believe. And the library itself was built like a fortress.“Do you have a better idea?” I asked.Arthur sighed, then shook his head.“Let’s go, then,” I said, and started walking.“Uh …” Gene said.I stopped and turned around. They were looking at me strangely.“Library is that way.” Gene pointed with his cigarette, in the opposite direction. “You know that. We go there almost every day.”“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Just got turned around.” It was the snow, I told myself. It covered everything, made the landscape new and unfamiliar.We took an indirect path, cutting through Queen’s Park. Trudging through the snow, we came across a man, shivering and dead-eyed. He was wandering the park, handing out poorly xeroxed flyers that featured a picture of him under the words:WHO AM I?I shrugged at him, but politely took the paper, folded it up and put it in my pocket.Passing between the Conservatory of Music and the Faculty of Law, we found the Conservatory under siege by law students in black robes and white wigs — I wondered where they’d got the wigs. They’d set fire to the building, and thick plumes of smoke rolled up into the grey night. Discordant music came from inside, a booming anthem of tubas and drums. What quarrel the lawyers had with the musicians, I have no idea; maybe they didn’t like their performance.A few of the robed figures approached us, one of them holding, ominously, a torch.“Papers,” the man with the torch said.“Papers?” Arthur repeated.“You need transit papers to pass through here. It’s the law.”“Here you are, sir.” I handed him the flyer I’d been given earlier.The man passed his torch to one of the others, and then unfolded the paper, frowning and scratching his wig like he’d forgotten how to read.I cleared my throat. “Is everything in order?” I asked.He gave the paper back to me. “Move along. You can see we’re very busy here.” They turned and left.Arthur looked at me. I shrugged. We continued on our way.“I called my parents this morning,” Gene said. “They were going on about how the government was listening in on the line, and monitoring their brainwaves. How the hell did it get so bad, so fast?”“Information overload,” I suggested. “Viral videos, marketing scams, government propaganda, foreign psyops … it’s all confusing our ideas about what’s real. When there’s no shared consensus, everything breaks down.”“It’s biological.” Arthur tapped his mask. “A virus designed in a lab that got out. That’s the only logical explanation.”“It’s like something out of the Bible,” Gene said, lighting up another cigarette. “Like the Tower of Babylon. People started to think they were above God, and he punished them — knocked down their tower, mixed up their languages, and scattered them across the Earth.”Arthur stopped, and turned to face Gene. “You saying this is an act of God? Are you starting to lose it, too?”I put a hand on Arthur’s arm. “Whoa. Calm down.”“I don’t think we’re dealing with an act of man or God,” Laura said. “This is something completely outside our experience, something … alien. Something that’s preying on our minds. Consuming memories, digesting them, depositing bizarre new ideas like a waste product.”Somewhere, not too far away, a woman screamed. Laura smiled.“Speaking of bizarre ideas,” I said, finally. But somehow what she’d said wasn’t so crazy.Arthur relaxed, and I let him go. “Come on,” he said, and started walking again.Laura looked back at the Conservatory, the fire reflected in her dark eyes. Then she looked at me, and took my arm. “Off to see the Wizard!” she said.The library loomed ahead, a concrete castle of 1970s brutalist architecture. We’d made it, the four of us: me, Gene, Arthur and Laura. We would be safe now.The story behind the storyMichael Adam Robson reveals the inspiration behindThose who forget.Anyone following my writing career (Hi, Mom!) will have noticed a long gap in my publication history.Those who forget is the first story I’ve had published since 2021. There are a couple of reasons for this.The first is personal. I was an early adopter of an exciting new virus, COVID-19. Among other things, I was left with some lingering cognitive deficits, and for a long time had trouble even reading, let alone writing. COVID isn’t grabbing headlines like it used to, it’s certainly evolved to be less deadly than it was in those early days, but studies have shown that even a mild case today will age a person’s brain and lower their IQ (and this might help explain some of the headlines we are seeing these days!).The second reason is the state of the industry. Many sci-fi magazines have closed down in recent years, and even the biggest are struggling to stay afloat. In fact, several publications I was in, or supposed to be in, ended up shutting down, to the point where I started to wonder if maybe I was the problem! At the same time, submissions to these magazines are way up — although editors have reported that a lot of these new submissions are AI-generated. (I’m afraid to use an em dash here, a hallmark of AI writing, but hey, I was using them first!) I’m not really sure what motivates these ‘writers’. I can’t imagine it’s very satisfying to have something write your stories for you, and publishing stories isn’t (at least in my experience) an especially lucrative endeavour.AI is transforming media in general. Pictures and videos are faked, news articles are generated, scientific journals are being flooded with generated, inaccurate research. AI is also changing the way we think, fundamentally rewiring our brains for easy (often inaccurate) answers and reduced critical thinking.Beyond this technological revolution and the misinformation that’s come with it, we’re also living through an ideological revolution, a ‘post-truth’ era of not just inaccuracy, but constant, deliberate disinformation. It’s reached the point where I read a news article and genuinely have no idea what’s real and what’s not — and, of course, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? To leave us confused, misinformed and at each other’s throats.What do we get when we put all of the above together? Well, maybe we get a world like the one in my story. What can we do about it? For one thing, we can think critically: question our sources of information, their accuracy and the motivations behind them. That’s one good thing to come out of our late-stage information age, the realization that we can’t just take something for granted, we have to dig a little deeper. I made several claims in this article, without any citations — don’t take my word for it!RS-232 and other forms of grief小标题A connection to another life.The alien’s name was something unpronounceable in any language spoken on this planet, which suited him fine because he was, to be perfectly honest, having a terrible Tuesday.He had come for food. Simple enough. The loft on Avenida Corrientes smelled of instant noodles and soldering irons and the specific despair of a man who owns 17 external hard drives and trusts none of them. The nerd was out. The alien was in. So far, so straightforward.Then he opened the drawer.Listen to me, because this matters: there are places in the Universe — dead stars, collapsing singularities, the men’s bathroom at a Ramones tribute concert — that contain within them a density of wrongness so profound that the mind simplyrefuses. This drawer was one of those places.It had a life. It hadgeology. Cables lay in strata the way civilizations do, each layer representing a different era of human optimism and subsequent abandonment. The alien reached in — four fingers, bluish, slightly luminescent, the kind of fingers you’d trust with delicate surgery — and pulled out a coil of something thick and grey with a connector on each end that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated the concept of insertion.RS-232. Serial. The label on a yellowed sticker said “FUNCIONA!! NO TIRAR.” It works!! Don’t throw it away.He turned it in his hands for a long time.Back in his home world — a place of crystalline efficiency, of data transmission at the speed of embarrassment, of connectors so elegant they made mathematicians weep — this object would be displayed in a museum of catastrophic thinking. Here it was in a drawer under aCaloicomic strip calendar from 2003.He dove deeper.FireWire. He found FireWire. Six-pin. Four-pin. A cable that connected neither to the laptop on the desk nor to anything else visible in the loft and yet had been kept, preserved,cherishedin a plastic bag with a twist tie, as though it were a relic, as though someday there would come a moment — some crucial 3 a.m. moment of absolute necessity — when a FireWire connection would be the only thing standing between this man and oblivion.The alien sat down on the floor. This was not in the mission parameters.From the drawer he extracted, in order: a MiniDisc optical cable (the thin one, the one that goes nowhere now, the one that went somewhere once and the memory of that somewhere is apparently worth preserving forever), a SCART adapter that connected European televisions to the collective grief of an entire continent, something that might have been a connector for a Palm Pilot or might have been a small weapon, three USB-A to USB-A cables (impossible, ethically), a coil of coaxial cable like a sleeping snake with delusions of relevance, and — at the very bottom, alone, without any device it could possibly belong to — a single DE-9 connector, male, with two of its nine pins bent at angles that suggested violence.He held this last one up to the light coming through the window, through which Buenos Aires roared and honked and smelled of facturas and exhaust and the river you can’t quite see but always sense.Why, he thought — and he was a being capable of holding seven simultaneous thoughts the way you hold seven simultaneous conversations, a being who had mapped three nebulae and read the philosophical traditions of four civilizations —why would any creature keep this?And then, because he was also a creature who had crossed 11 light-years to break into an apartment and steal leftover milanesas, he understood.You keep it because yourememberwhat it was for. You keep it because somewhere in the nervous system — biological, silicon, crystalline, whatever substrate carries the ghost of past purpose — there is a refusal. A refusal to admit that the moment when this thing mattered isgone. That the device it connected is gone. That the version of yourself who needed it, whocelebratedfinding it in a computer shop on Rivadavia at nine on a Friday night, flushed with the specific joy of the correct connector — that person is gone.The drawer is atomb, the alien realized. Lovingly maintained. Occasionally visited. Never disturbed.He put everything back. Carefully. In approximately the right order.He found the milanesas in the fridge. He ate one standing up, cold, with mustard from a tube, the way god intended. He left the other for the nerd, because even aliens from efficient crystalline worlds understand that a man who keeps a bent DE-9 connector in a drawer for 20 years is a man who has suffered enough.He went back out of the window.The drawer stayed closed.It works. Don’t throw it away.*****In orbit, three hours later, composing his report, the alien paused for a long time before the section marked THREAT ASSESSMENT and wrote, carefully:“Recommend indefinite non-contact protocol. These beings have not yet finished grieving their cables. This is not a civilization you interrupt.”The story behind the storyC. A. Russell reveals the inspiration behindRS-232 and other forms of grief.I’m a bit of a legacy-system hoarder. In my home office in Buenos Aires, my drawer acts as a geological record of my own technological optimism.As a cybersecurity and IT specialist, I spend my days dealing with the ‘handshake’ — that uncompromising, binary moment when two systems decide whether they can speak to one another. But as a writer, I’m fascinated by the ‘refusal’ that happens when the hardware is long gone. The RS-232 serial cable is the ultimate symbol of this: a chunky, physical, multi-pin connector that feels like it was designed by someone who wanted to ensure that once a connection was made, it stayed made. In IT we talk about ‘deprecating’ code and ‘End of Life’ for hardware, but we lack a similar protocol for our own memories.RS-232 and other forms of griefwas born from the realization that we keep the cables because we can’t delete the version of ourselves that once needed them. Even when the device is gone, the fact that the cable still works proves it isn’t quite ready to be thrown away. We aren’t just hoarding copper; we’re archiving the handshake.