Asimov's SF, February 2010 by Dell Magazine Authors Read Free Book Online

scratchcards once did.
    Those few that were happy with their lives
    —
    are soon helpless as children—
    no one to run the factories,
    or write pop songs, or bury the dead.
    They too take the only way out—it's a game
    —
    you're bound to win again and again.
    Eventually the few humans left on earth,
    diehards they call themselves, settle
    for death, leaving, in the end,
    —
    one child, a forgotten infant girl
    who's torn apart for a hyena's meal. Then
    it's only plants and animals, too dumb
    to know to kill themselves.
    —Peter Swanson
    Copyright © 2010 Peter Swanson
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Short Story: DEAD AIR by Damien Broderick
Damien Broderick's latest critical book is Unleashing the Strange: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Literature, from Borgo Press. His next one, Chained to the Alien, will be an anthology of essays from Australian Science Fiction Review (Second Series). Other recent publications include two collaborative SF novels: The Book of Revelation, written with Rory Barnes, and Post Mortal Syndrome, written with his wife Barbara Lamar. The author's recent tales for Asimov's have taken some inspiration from classic SF writers like A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, and Roger Zelazny. Damien now appears in our pages with a decidedly Dickian meditation on...
    Jive Bolen exited his cramped office inside the two hundred story zeugma complex in the heart of nouveau Manhattan. Summer's noon sun was a blurry disk high overhead, easily visible even through the crowding skyscrapers. The size of a ten dollar coin at arm's length. Or so he'd read in the pape during morning coffee break, hoping to ferret out some lively snippet to throw into his next abortive conversation with Jolene, the building's peripatetic Vogelsangerin, with whom he had been desperately smitten for at least the last four thwarted months. Jive fished a coin from his pouch pocket and held it up. Not quite; the frayed edges of the immense nanotech-spun soletta, stationed out at Earth-Sun L1, extended like a reddish ghost corona beyond the rim of the plastic currency unit. The literal meaning of his ghost analogy stung Jive somewhere in his cerebellum a moment too late to repress it. Shuddering, he folded the coin back into his pouch.
    Something rushed directly above him. The sort of uncanny buffeting rush of air, it seemed to him in a vivid recollection from childhood, that a falling ten-ton safe creates in a toon as it tumbles from a high window to flatten a furious two-dimensional and villainous puddycat. In disbelief, Jive glanced up past the rim of his Brooks Brothers tropical pith helmet. By the living lord Harry, it was a safe plunging toward him, or a plausible simulation. No, light winked from the front of the thing. Leaping back, terrified, Jive tripped on the curb, fell full length. With a splintering detonation, the thing flew apart into shards of broken glass, trailing wires, microcircuitry from the previous century, plywood, and tasteless veneer. Another damned TV set, hurled from an upper window by a cit driven to despair.
    Jive scrambled to his feet, retreated, lifted his eyes again. A moment later something long and large with flapping limbs flailed down to slam atop the fractured television receiver. The soggy crump of flesh striking concrete, the spatter of blood, twisted Jive Bolen's mouth in disgust. He felt a sort of remote sympathy. Another day, another ‘ratische Augen, as the Kraut socialists dubbed them. Square eyes. Mort victims of the visible dead, supposedly. Kind of ironic.
    A siren was already sounding as a mortuary truckee, alerted by gossipgrrl watch, raced to claim the corpse. Jive shrugged, settled his hat about his ears. Mortuarian was a job, distasteful or not. It was a living—and there was another soupcon of irony. A more socially useful job, he reproved himself, than his own dead-end post with Industrie Globalisierung, AG. Day after oppressive day, representing the shareholders on the board of