AN AUTHOR:
Madeline Ashby is a graduate student living in Toronto and working on a thesis regarding anime, fandom, and cyborg theory. She also writes for Frames Per Second Magazine and WorldChanging Canada. Between Japanese lessons and workshop meetings, she has foolishly embarked on a project called The Von Neumann Wives.
HER STORY:
The Motes let Xian go, and she tucked herself, twitching and sweating, into a loose ball until the crane plucked her like fruit from her sector of the performance space. The Motes really had a lot to say, this session, and her body had contorted in ways it hadn’t since her People’s Colonial Circus days: her toes near her eyes, her spine a half-circle. A nurse pulled Xian’s collar down and slapped on a pain patch. Xian’s body, so light in this space, took on a false heaviness as the drug worked at softening the impact of what the Motes’ molecular machines had done to it. Someone gave her a drink – potassium and sodium chloride and all the chemicals the Motes liked to mimic when their machines broadcast signals through a Dancer’s nervous system, bypassing the brain’s own signals. She needed to replenish. She needed to sleep. She needed to place her bets.
Tags: nerd with a capital N, sci-fi, wow, yes this is really how I amuse myself