This Month’s Epic Lightspeed Story Is One of the Best We’ve Read in Years
io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Does Harlen Lattner Dream of Infected Sheep? (Part 1)” by Sarah Langan; part two will post Thursday, April 10. Enjoy!
Does Harlen Lattner Dream of Infected Sheep? (Part 1) by Sarah LanganJanuary 16, 2034
From the Associated Press:
“Congo CEO Jeff Jassey is expected to testify in congress over his company’s software update, which literally broke the internet last month. For eighteen seconds, every warehouse, screen, and air traffic control system went dark. Initially invented to assist Congo warehouse workers retrieve stock, Congo software is now the global number one employee-employer interface, with a ninety-eight percent market share.”
• • •
The body opened too easily, like paper wrapping on room temperature butter.
“This isn’t right,” Lattner said, at first to himself, then louder, for the trauma nurse and anesthesiologist to hear.
The patient, a John Doe, had arrived at the ER reporting pain in his right side and copious bloody vomit. A CT showed a twisted large intestine and organ dysplasia. When Lattner got the alert, he’d been trying to read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but mostly worrying about the big reunion. He’d gained thirty pounds since college. Or maybe forty. Would Gerry recognize him? Was Gerry even going?
Also, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was a really sad book about two best friends or maybe lovers. They’re the only people who understand one another. Then one of them goes crazy and leaves the other bereft. It was a poor reading selection for a man going through a divorce, living in a divorced sad-man apartment with deep pile carpet and slivers of bar soap caked to the ceramic tile dish in the bathroom. He should have picked an upbeat novel. Something like: Heaven Is Real So Don’t Worry So Much! or Dumpy White Guy Success Stories!
He’d been relieved when the hospital had pinged his home console; glad for the excuse to leave the house in the middle of the night, where he’d been sitting in bed eating peanut butter dipped in granulated sugar with his index finger, nothing but a suicide novel and his own insomnia to keep him company. Now, looking at the patient’s innards, he was no longer glad. He was freaked out.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked the anesthesiologist, a twenty-something who’d checked his Congo App every step to make sure he was doing the job right. Instead of headsets, the younger generation liked to implant their Congo relays against either temporal bone. You could tell because the skin ahead of their ear canals blinked green whenever they were interfacing, which was most of the time. At first, Lattner had tried to talk him through the procedure, set him at ease, but like Lattner’s teen kids (who also thought he was stupid and irrelevant), the anesthesiologist had ignored him, trusting only the electronic, humanoid voice in his ear.
“Look.” Lattner spread the Balfour retractor, opened the incision wide—a six-inch slash in this John Doe’s abdomen. It should have been hemorrhaging. But it wasn’t. No bleeding at all. There were also no discernable organs. Instead, all the way to the spine and lateral ribs, Lattner found wide organic tubing the color of faded pink Pepto Bismol.
Green light blinking, the anesthesiologist didn’t know what he was looking at. Just nodded with fake bravado.
“You?” Lattner asked the nurse, Ocean Philips. She was old guard, from before even Lattner’s time. She’d outlasted all the docs she’d come up with, who’d gotten cancer or some other toxic exposure disease—you think of hospitals as clean, but a lot of chemicals keep them that way. Physician, heal thyself: So many docs had wanted to work past retirement, but none’d had the health.
Ocean was skinny and short with curly silver and black hair. She’d refused to wear the Congo headset interfaces required of most nurses. Her seniority, all those years of accumulated knowledge, had made her too valuable to fire. At least for now.
Lattner imagined that Ocean was just as competent in her private life as her professional one. Probably had four kids and ten grandkids. Babysat them all, kept a clean house, everybody had jobs. Beloved matriarch.
How does a person become such a thing? Are they taught it? Do they just know?
Lattner widened the Balfour retractor. Where there should have been a stomach and large intestine, all he saw was more coiled pink, wormlike tubing. He indicated for Ocean to reach her gloved hand into the man’s internal cavity, root around.
“See if you can find any organs,” he said.
“Nuh-uh. No way,” she said.
“So, hold the instrument for me,” he said. She took it. He rooted on his own, even as he felt a strange retraction all along his scalp, a coldness. Was this a parasite? A giant worm?
Lattner found no heart or intestines. No lungs or alimentary canal. The entirety of John Doe’s internal chest cavity was this simple coiled tubing held in webbed place by what appeared to be florid and colorful fungal hyphae, like the mushrooms you might find in a forest. What fluid existed was thin, watery pink, specked with black particles. The whole thing pulsed like breath, up and down, in and out.
“This is a prank,” Ocean said. “Someone’s messing with us.”
Back in med school, this guy Cameron VanLieden stole the arm off a cadaver and stuck it to the side of a toll booth. Another time, somebody put human eyes in a bowl on their anatomy professor’s desk. But people didn’t play those kinds of jokes anymore. It was a sensitive world, where everybody traveled with lap dogs and cried over microaggressions even as the roads collapsed and the bombs sailed overhead.
The wormlike tubing was warm and pulsing through Lattner’s gloves. He’d never have known this until right now, but a person innately intuits the presence of sentience. This thing was or had once been human. “It’s not a prank. This is living tissue,” he said. “Organic.”
He noodled some more as Ocean, an excellent nurse, anticipated the direction of his hands and adjusted the retractor accordingly. The flowery tubing, a kind of uniform alimentary canal, pulsed oddly in the section lower down, with backflow like a heart murmur. Then he found the problem: it was knotted near the groin. For this reason, the whole apparatus was in a spasm. “I see what’s wrong. It’s this swell right here,” he said. “Should I untangle it?”
The kid anesthesiologist was typing on the corner Congo console.
“What are you doing?” Lattner asked him.
“I’m asking the software what to do,” he said. The kid’s skin was pale, with a greenish-yellow hue. These young people didn’t get out much. “It’s routing me to surgical headquarters in India. I think there’s a real person there.”
“What’s it say so far? This guy’s in arrest.”
“I’m still at the prompts. It’s got all these questions. I’m not at the part yet where I explain the problem. There’s not a multiple choice for this.”
Lattner looked to Ocean. She shrugged a kind of don’t ask me—they’re paying you the big bucks. Which wasn’t true. He wasn’t paid big bucks. Sometimes it felt like he was paid with canned cream of corn and Pez.
Beads of sweat rolled all down Lattner’s forehead. The guy’s whole insides pulsed and swelled, fluid rushing into the knot and getting trapped there. Soon, he’d go into cyanotic failure. Lattner needed to do something. Still, if he failed to untangle this knot correctly, he might kill the guy. There’d be an inquiry. The higher-ups would review the recording and quibble over every decision he was about to make. They’d look at all his prior reviews. They’d ask him why, right now, he hadn’t sewn the guy up and awaited further instructions. It’s fine if the outcome is good—nobody cares how you got there. But when it’s bad, you’re neck deep.
Looking at the throbbing innards of this human-shaped being, he thought of his rich wife who’d left him. He thought of his kids, who didn’t like him. He thought of Gerry, whom he hadn’t seen in over twenty years. He was a free agent. What did he have to lose?
“You got an atraumatic clamp?” he asked.
Ocean handed it over. He clamped the knotted body to hold it still.
But—
—Shit!
The metal tore right through John Doe’s soft tissue, slicing it open. His whole body went into a spasmodic fit, shoulders slapping steel.
“Hold him!” Lattner cried.
Ocean gave Lattner a look that meant: I’d better not go down for this. Then she held the man. When that didn’t work, she climbed up on the table and shoved her knees up against his shoulders, pinning him. That slowed John Doe down enough that Lattner could carefully release the clamp without tearing any more tissue—that tender, pulsing canal.
Doe’s body went scarily still. Torn tissue bled strange and slow, its color cotton candy pink, vital signs going flat. Whatever this was—human or pod person—it was dying.
Panting, his mask wet with old breath, he reached inside the patient’s cavity and unknotted the canal like untwisting moss-slippery boat rope. Right away, the thrumming stopped. John Doe’s fluid whooshed, all in the same direction. Vitals rose slightly, with a pulse of twenty and oxygen levels at forty five percent. The patient stabilized.
• • •
- Classified Internal Memorandum, Congo Corp •
February 13, 2032
To:
Mica Peters, Congo CEO
Lorna Lattner, Department of Innovation, Legal
Frank Henry, Congo Trust Reserve, Applications
From:
Paul Mackenzie, R&D
Simon Iscariott, R&D
Lucas Johnson, R&D
To our senior officers,
Imagine a world without pain. Imagine drudgery without suffering. The new Congo Application offers exactly this. For years, we’ve heard the cries from employees. At last we’ve found our solution. It is with great pride that we proudly introduce Congo 5.0. The solution to modern life.
• • •
An hour later Lattner watched the playback of the surgery. In it, he appeared especially fat, bald, and middle-aged. This was not revelatory, but rather, a familiar disappointment. The recording evaluated his performance according to a rubric that took agility, decisiveness, cleanliness, and politeness into account. He’d gotten a two out of ten. Congo stopped the program on Lattner as he’d asked the nurse what was happening and announced: spreading negative emotions; halting activity; paralysis. Lattner entered a dispute ticket, upon which he wrote: The guy’s organs were dissolving on the table. He’s either an alien or a symbiote. Fear and paralysis were appropriate responses.
But the algorithm had no matches for dissolving organs or alien so the dispute was denied.
The film continued. Lattner watched his too flawed, too human body onscreen. He watched himself fish inside the patient with his hands. Hands aren’t allowed! Congo’s voice announced. Error! Error! But screw Congo, because he saw, with great satisfaction, that he’d completed the surgery with competence. He’d saved this thing, whatever it was. As Congo continued to deliver more advice (If patient sues for malpractice, please be aware the hospital will not pay for your lawyer. Use of hands is a violation!), he found himself smiling. He’d been down on himself lately. But he was a good surgeon.
He sent the footage to everyone on staff, plus his old colleagues, plus Congo, with its tentacles on every continent. “Yeah,” he muttered as he watched the footage again and again. “That’s not human. Is it human? That’s not human.”
A half-hour later, no one had gotten back to him. He stopped at triage. According to the nurse there, John Doe had shown up late the night before with a swollen abdomen and amnesia. She’d given him Congo E-File paperwork, told him to fill out what he could. Then he’d thrown up blood and fainted.
“How did he present to you?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Was he cognizant? Were his wits about him?”
The nurse shrugged. She was wearing her headset, listening to a voice in there instead of him. What was it telling her? Was it even talking, or was it playing slow, soporific music to soothe the monotony of her work? “I don’t remember.”
He went to surgical processing on the second floor. “Can I see his clothes?” he asked the two admins. They exchanged glances. This was unheard of. Doctors never picked through patient clothing. “It’s not allowed,” they finally agreed.
“You could hold it up in the Ziplock; just let me see. I won’t touch anything. I have reason to believe he carried an infectious disease.”
“You’ll need permission. I can’t take something out unless I log it and I can’t log it unless I have permission,” the admins said in flat stereo, each clearly repeating the instructions that had come through their headsets.
Lattner looked at one, then the other. “When I went into medicine, I thought people would respect me.”
They looked back at him like being a middle aged white man was a sin, and he deserved to die. Maybe, in the name of all privileged people everywhere, he deserved exactly this. But as a man whose life had turned out pretty shitty, who’d come from nothing and had the terrible suspicion he was headed for nothing again, it felt unfair.
In search of permission, he went to the dean of surgical excellence, a nice smart guy with hands as precise as baked potatoes. Management had promoted him past his ability just to get him away from patients. Through a smart Congo investment, his dad owned the hospital.
“I got your message. Fascinating case. Looks like infection by invasive species to me. But I can’t grant you access,” Dr. Tucker Rhodes said. “Actually, Congo can’t grant it. There’s no specific form and they don’t let me create new ones. They have to be preexisting. There’s a real person in Madison, Wisconsin apparently, but the hold time is two days. They’re gonna call me back.”
A man who’d made only safe decisions his whole life, and had consequently grown tired of his life, Lattner didn’t give a shit. “This won’t wait two days. What about next of kin? If there’s no next of kin, which there isn’t, I can claim that.”
Tucker typed into the Congo console. These were mounted touchscreens. The attendant wireless headsets most people were required to wear were ergonomic, expanding or shrinking to fit inside ear canals and so porous human immune systems rarely rejected them. You could, and people did, wear them indefinitely. They’d been known to weave inside skin, attaching there, just like the implants attached to bone.
Less than a week ago, the new Congo 5.0 app broke the internet. For nearly a minute, everything went dark. Lattner’d been reading Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in his apartment. For him, the world already felt like it was ending, so the blackout hadn’t alarmed him so much as validated him.
The body count was high: People fell off balconies, stumbled into traffic, were crushed by the boxes they were receiving, crashed on highways, expired on blacked-out ventilators that no one thought to reset once power returned, fell out of the sky on lost planes. You’d think, after something like that, that people would be pissed off at Congo. And they were. But more than that, they doubled down. They got more implants, they installed more consoles.
People are strange.
“Uggh,” Tucker said as he pressed both hands to his ribcage and pain-grunted.
“You okay?” Lattner asked.
“Yeah. Just . . . ate something bad a week ago and it hasn’t gotten better. Listen, if I put you down as next of kin, I’m not taking the fall if something happens. I’ll say you lied and told me he was your cousin.”
“You think I’ll get in trouble?”
Tucker looked around his crumbling office, where papers filed in triplicate lined the walls, and three consoles were running at once. Though he was still youngish, in his late forties, his skin looked sick. Why was everyone so green lately?
“Who knows?” Tucker asked. “There’s so much noise lately it’s hard to think.”
Lattner got his way. Tucker filed next of kin. He went to the on call surgical manager who told him that the permission needed to be printed and signed and filed on a special Congo app. He mustered all this, returned to surgical processing.
“I have it!” he said. But the people at the desk were new and didn’t care that he’d been through an ordeal. They just gave him the Ziplock. This contained some ordinary stretch fabric jeans, a jacket, and a t-shirt with a bib of bloody vomit that was red, not pink. The shoes were decent work boots with worn treads. No jewelry. Wrapped within all this, he found a Congo Employee Badge from the warehouse outside town. Instead of a name, it had a barcode.
“Did you guys see this? Did you call anyone at Congo?”
They looked at him like: Who’s this asshole trying to assign us extra work?
Just then, the head ER doc on duty pinged him with a response to the video he’d sent. “Is this a joke?”
“No,” he answered.
“Whoa. Did you get a tox report?”
“Pending. I sent samples to all three labs.”
Typing dots arrived. They stayed there for a while. Then went away. Head ER doc was a political position. He probably didn’t want the stain of this on his record. Also, it didn’t fit into a neat box; would be a lot of extra work.
Dawn was just breaking. Lattner was headed for his locker when the e-file announced that his John Doe had been moved from observation to recovery. He headed there, thinking again about the pulsing tubing, the missing organs, the strange floral growths. Was it a fungal infection? A parasite? A symbiote that was eating him while keeping him alive?
. . . Was it contagious?
He arrived at the hospital bed. The patient, who should have been unconscious, was gone.
• • •
January 23, 2034:
From the AP News in a minute: The measure to provide all public school children with free Congo 5.0 implants and consoles passed last Friday, amidst vocal protesters outside city hall shouting “Down with AI Slavery!” Frustrations with Congo have reached a frenzied peak in the aftermath of the Internet blackout two weeks ago. In other news, SS Prometheus, a mining ship on route home from Mercury, was blown up by terrorists last week. . .
• • •
A week after the surgery, Lattner was headed for his college reunion in Scranton. He rented a Congo self-driving car. For legal reasons these cars were equipped with emergency human drivers. The guy sat unobtrusive up front, his implant flashing green, reminding Lattner of a mannequin. This wasn’t new—most jobs over the years had switched from autonomous to drudge work. The people who performed them tended to recede inside their own skin. But this dude was especially stiff, his breath especially slow. He could have been sleeping with his eyes open.
The trip from Harrisburg took two hours. Lattner passed semi-odorless gas the whole ride. He’d done something very vain and ordered three girdles from Congo. He’d tried on all, picked the tightest. It wasn’t comfortable.
When you’re on your way to your reunion and you’re going by yourself because you haven’t kept in touch with anyone, some thoughts enter your mind. For instance: was he a failure?
When his wife Lorna told him she’d fallen in love with someone else, he’d at first been surprised, then relieved. They’d been married almost twenty years, and every day of that marriage he’d woken up thinking: The idea that time is finite is a myth. It’s interminable.
After her confession, there hadn’t been much arguing. They’d simply gone about the business of splitting things apart, only to find that they’d never really merged: bank accounts were separate; clothing in separate closets. They’d even kept their cookware separate.
How was that possible? How hadn’t he noticed that for twenty years, the people he called family had been strangers? Then again, he’d never been the type to notice much.
Months later, she broke it off with the new guy. She told Lattner that she hadn’t actually loved him. Do you want to get back together? He’d asked. Though he hadn’t wanted this, he’d thought it might make life easier. Less kid schlepping, less grocery shopping, less emotional wreckage. No, she told him. I cheated because I wanted to do something so bad there wasn’t any coming back.
In a way, she was brave. He wished he’d done it first.
The casualties here were the kids. But it was hard to see them as casualties, given they didn’t like him. Beatrice was sad, slow-moving, and heavyset. She’d been prescribed the same anti-depressants that Lattner had taken during adolescence. If Lattner thought about it, he’d feel very badly that his tendency toward the melancholy had stained the next generation. So he didn’t think about it. He ignored it.
Dylan was angry like his mother and resentful like her, too. His moods blasted through rooms like earthquakes. Ever since the kid could walk, he’d charged. But over the years, some piece of his courage had left him, and what remained was surliness. He no longer charged, he sat still, eyes watching with furious judgment.
Lattner felt awful that they’d turned out so badly. He blamed Lorna, who’d chosen her career over motherhood. It was an unnatural choice. Deviant, even.
She hadn’t always been so selfish. Early on, she’d been devoted. The type who cooked and cleaned and loved and supported. But she got bitter. Or maybe she just got too much success in her work at Congo. She started picking fights. He’d been forced to play the role of reason, to talk her down, underplay the thing, convince her she was overreacting. Eventually, they avoided one another. And then, somehow, they avoided the children, too.
What surprised him was that after he moved, in the silence, he missed Bea and Dylan. Well, maybe not them. They were pills. But he missed the idea of them.
Lately, he’d come to wonder: Should he have married Lorna at all? He could have stayed with Gerry, a man he’d genuinely loved. Would his kids, born someplace else, to a better nurturer than Lorna, have been happier? With his career falling apart and his options contracting, he wondered, too, whether his stamp on the world was a stamp at all, or a castle of sand.
It’s true that crises precipitate change. In the lonely silence of his new, downsized life, he found his college syllabus. Something about the paper, browned and old from a time when his life held promise, had drawn him near. And so, Carson McCullers. He’d been reflecting, lately. But not a lot. It was unpleasant.
When his John Doe went missing, Lattner initiated all the protocols, filed all the correct reports. “Are you saying he got up and walked out?” Tucker Rhodes asked. He looked sicker than the day before, his skin sickly green like he needed to vomit.
“I don’t see how he could have. I’m saying he died and got misplaced, probably,” Lattner answered. “But sure, there’s a non-zero chance of nanoparticles eating humanity, so maybe he walked out.”
“We’re saying he walked out. I rescinded your other reports indicating otherwise.”
Lattner thought about that. Knew there was nothing he could do, short of searching the morgue for the body, which he’d already done. “Okay,” he said. Probably, he should have been up that night, worrying about an infectious fungus about to take over humanity. But he slept.
What would Gerry think of all this? He wondered as he inched his finger inside the truss to soothe the skin it was pinching. If Gerry were watching Lattner right now, seeing through Lattner’s eyes, would he approve?
Gerry’d been his secret college boyfriend. They’d both had jobs at the cafeteria, both smelled like fried lard. The bravest act of his life, he’d kissed Gerry while walking from work to their separate dorm rooms.
He still remembered the feel of Gerry’s hands, his sparse chest hairs and gangly kid-body that had flung frisbees with grace. They’d liked to read to one another at night. Well, Gerry had done the reading. Lattner had listened.
When you meet the love of your life at nineteen, it’s practically unfair. It’s too soon. Too momentous. Impossible. He broke up with Gerry for a woman who checked all the boxes: pretty, smart, and just a little brittle.
He forgot about Gerry, the way you forget about all your most important things when you’re young. And then during the long slog of his marriage, when the friction between their personalities had been like barbed wire, he’d remembered.
He searched online, found a wedding photo. Older, shaggier, Gerry’d stood beside his buff, beautiful husband. Gerry was happy, clearly. He’d moved on. It hit Lattner like an invisible hammer big as Thor’s, straight to the bowels.
They say love lives in the heart, but they’re wrong. It lives in a tangled place below the belly.
Further research told the story of their romance. They’d met at the library where they worked. After a few years together, their jobs got automated and they became Congo warehouse employees. They publicly posted about these career blows. People, presumably friends, responded with great compassion.
Lattner had never posted about personal things. He wondered whether he should have. No, he decided. Revealing yourself is lame.
At night, when he wasn’t trying to read sad books from his old syllabus, he scrolled the online pictures of Gerry and thought: I still love you, Gerry. Do you love me?
He imagined that this thought traveled through the screen, reaching its object on the other side. He imagined Gerry thinking of him right then, wanting him back. These feelings had to be reciprocated, he decided in the magic of dark. Somewhere right now, Gerry was thinking of him, too.
Then he rubbed one out.
And so, traveling at exactly the speed limit, the human driver in a twilight sleep wrought from boredom, Lattner pondered Gerry, who’d possibly been the love of his life, and was just as possibly the grasping fantasy of a sad, failed man.
If he saw Gerry alone at the reunion, he wanted to say this: I’ve come lately to realize that life is short. You and me and everyone we know will die. Maybe it’s a party after that, but maybe it’s not. Maybe there’s nothing. No thoughts. No love. No memory. No identity. Maybe we are erased. It seems to me that this human condition seeks to hide the big black from its own consciousness. It is so hysterically afraid that it builds trappings and walls and somethings from nothings. We eagerly occupy ourselves with such distractions because we cannot tolerate death. We scroll and we watch fantasies and we happily surrender our autonomy to anything that thinks for us, anything that promises you’ll be okay. But in doing so, we sleep little deaths. We are zombies.
When my wife left me, I woke up. I know now that it’s better to live with fear. It’s better to see it clearly, and be brave. I’ve come to understand that everything we do in this world matters. I’ve come to understand that I loved you back then. I want to love again. I’m sorry I spent my life pleasing people who won’t remember or care about me after I’m dead, because it was wasted time. I could have been with you. I could have been alive.
It didn’t matter what Gerry said after that. It only mattered that he found the courage in himself to say the words.
• • •
- Classified Internal Memorandum, Congo Corp •
October 9, 2033
To:
Mica Peters, Congo CEO
Lorna Lattner, Department of Innovation, Legal
Frank Henry, Congo Trust Reserve, Applications
From:
Paul Mackenzie, R&D
Simon Iscariott, R&D
Lucas Johnson, R&D
To our senior officers,
While it’s true the beta rollout of Congo 5.0 interface had a fatality, we believe the individual’s burst appendix was unrelated to Congo. Autopsy showed an invasive fungal-like infection. The other sixty-four test subjects responded positively. We recommend rollout continue.
• • •
The reception took place at the student union where he’d once watched comedians tell bad jokes before heading back to the library to memorize the citric acid cycle. It was a gorgeous day. Bright, cherry blossom-colored sun bled through the windows and spilled across tables. No one recognized him. He introduced himself as Lattner: “Everybody called me by my last name! I’m a doctor now!”
Everybody who had a clique sat together at their own tables. He sat with three other guys and a sad looking lady with tears in her eyes. They had to scan the menus and give their order to a screen. Then a waiter wearing a headset came out and brought drinks.
At his failure table, they made polite conversation about the cherry blossoms and whether Pakistan was really sinking. This guy across said that the college probably shouldn’t have spent eighty million dollars on an Olympic gymnasium, given the dorms were garbage and the library books had all rotted. And then someone said, “But people don’t need paper books. It’s all online.”
The truss and Gerry’s absence (Where was he? He’d been so stupid to assume!) had made Lattner cranky and a little mean. “Doesn’t look like they’re using this fancy gym. Look around, these kids are made of dough. Look at us. When’s the last time anybody at this table did a push up?”
Everybody got quiet after that, because you’re not supposed to body shame college kids or your table mates. It makes them feel bad. The sad lady got up with her drink, which he thought he’d heard her order as a Sexy Frida Kahlo, and joined another table. She was thick in the middle just like the rest of them, and he wanted to tell her: This isn’t an assessment of your human value. I’ve never cared what other people look like on the outside. I’ve only ever been interested in their insides. Literally, as a surgeon, but figuratively, too. Except it sucks having to get to know someone. It sucks making all that effort, just to find out what’s under the skin, especially when you might be wasting your time. They might be awful or they might be hurtful or they might be too too imperfectly human . . . I think I say these awful things because I don’t like my own outside very much. I don’t like my inside, either.
It was a useful epiphany that gave him an oddly joyous jolt: Lady, it turns out this is about me, not you! But he couldn’t tell her any of this. He’d only hurt her worse.
He looked around the table. Four guys with empty seats all between. They’d started cross-talking about Congo 5.0’s power outage. “I think something happened. It did something to us,” a guy said. He was skinny with bucked teeth, his cheeks sunken.
“What did it do?” a guy across asked. He was only half listening because he was wearing a headset. These people who wore during non-work hours: what was wrong with them?
“Something,” the guy said. “My wife and kids don’t eat anymore. They don’t sleep.”
The part of this that Lattner heard wriggled inside him like a worm of worry—was this connected to his patient? . . . Something was very wrong in the world and it wasn’t just his divorce. Something was happening, a kind of tipping point had been passed, and it felt like falling. It felt like the end of the world, if he let himself feel it—but mostly he didn’t hear it. There’s so much noise all around. It’s hard to pay attention, especially when your mind is on your own broken heart.
He typed on his interface. There weren’t names of the drinks, just pictures. This seemed off-brand, given they were at a college. He decided to have a Sexy Frida Kahlo out of secret solidarity with the sad lady.
Fifteen minutes later, a kid with a headset delivered the drink. “How do you like this job?” Lattner asked. “I used to work in this same cafeteria.” Maybe the kid would talk to him. He and the kid would bond. They’d become like brothers and over the years, Lattner would give him advice, help him thrive. He’d prove he could be a good dad. A good person. This kid would become president and in his inaugural speech, he’d thank Lattner. Gerry would hear all that and drive to his sad guy apartment. I saw how you raised that kid to be president. I’d die for you, Gerry would say, eyes wet with pain and love. Don’t excite yourself. Save that for later, Lattner would answer, rye and suave as James Bond.
. . . Where the hell was Gerry?
The young waiter’s eyes glazed like they belonged on a doll. He didn’t hear Lattner through his headset. He was carrying a full tray, moving on to the next table, when Lattner raised his voice. “Hey!” he shouted.
Everybody at his table stopped. Everybody at tables around stopped. I’m a mess, he thought. It’s the divorce, but it’s not the divorce. It’s like I’ve been boiling my whole life and suddenly the lid’s come off. Everything messy and terrible and wonderful and shameful has spewed out.
The waiter stopped, too, of course. But his eyes stayed glazed. “Sorry,” Lattner said, low. The kid didn’t hear him. He was tall with a full head of hair and had his life ahead of him. Maybe he was in love. Lattner hoped he was in love.
The kid wanted to set down his tray so he could pull his headset down but there was no place to put it. Lattner considered taking it, knew he’d never balance it right and the drinks would fall. He didn’t take it.
“Do you like this job?” he asked, voice raised.
The kid was confused by the question. His nametag wasn’t a name, but a number with a scannable bar code. “I have to do this job. It’s telling me table three now. Table three.”
“Do you like those headsets? My job wants me to wear them as a prophylactic against lawsuits.”
The kid had gone to table three. Lattner watched him make the rounds, the headset telling him whom to serve and in what order and exactly how to proceed step by step from one guest to the next. Your brain shuts off when you’ve got another brain murmuring orders in your ears. The disuse is sandpaper, smoothing all your most interesting edges.
By then, everybody at his table was ignoring Lattner, so he downed his drink and had two more, sweet as diabetes in a glass. It was then, drunk and disheartened, that he finally found his love.
He was at the appetizer buffet, even though waiters were now serving main courses. Drunk, Lattner went for it. As he crossed the room, his heart pounded. This was Gerry. No doubt. Older. Shorter, maybe? But it was him.
“Gerry?”
The man turned. At first, no recognition. Even a little fear—a drunk was calling his name. But then, that smile Lattner remembered, generous and open.
“Harlen Lattner!”
Lattner stood there, his nerves too alive. Can you die from the anticipation of future joy?
Gerry put his plate down right on top of the cut melons, opened his arms, and hugged him. Lattner hugged back, too long, too tight. Gerry squirmed. The hug felt so good.
“How are you? I think about you all the time!” Gerry said.
Just then, the buff husband appeared. Lattner hated him. They shook hands. Lattner pretended not to be heartbroken.
“Have you been here this whole time? I didn’t see you!” Gerry said.
Lattner nodded, temporarily losing his ability to speak.
Gerry slapped his thigh in a show of frustration. “What a shame! I have to be going—I’ve got a night shift. But let’s get together!”
“Yes!” Lattner said. Three drinks in, the truth came out: “You’re the only person I came here to see!”
The hot, amiable husband narrowed his eyes, sniffing intentions. Be afraid, Lattner thought, be very afraid.
They didn’t get the chance to make plans because a bad thing happened. That kid, the waiter, collapsed on the floor and went into a seizure. You’d think, with nearly eighty members of a graduating class at a reasonably good college, you’d have more than one medical professional on site. But the smart ones had gone into tech. The rest had gone into humanities, which no longer existed. Lattner was on deck.
He rushed to the doll-eyed kid, held him down by pinning knees against shoulders. “I need help! Call someone!” he cried, and maybe that happened. Gerry’s husband turned out also to be capable and strong. He took over holding the kid down as Lattner checked his pulse, heart, and pupils.
Just like the John Doe he’d operated on, this guy had no heartbeat. His whole chest cavity was pulsing. Lattner got the defibs and shocked him twice. The pulsing kept going. It reminded him of a squid or octopus—this wet squishing just beneath his skin—but his heart didn’t come back.
Fast, the local rescue service from the college took over. Lattner tried to tell them what had happened, but they were listening to their headsets and not him. The kid’s body stopped pulsing. It stopped everything. They put him in a gurney and carried him out.
Somehow, between finding Gerry and the kid getting carried out, hours had passed. The center had emptied out, reunion over. Gerry and the husband were gone. Lattner felt a great sadness inside him, not just for his own small, disappointments.
The kid was young. Maybe he was in love. That was all over now.
He went home that night and scoured the internet for posts about infectious disease and spontaneous seizures in the young. Found nothing.
The next morning, Gerry poked him on their friend web. Lattner accepted the poke, got a message: Hey! That was awful. We wanted to stay with you but we had work. I’m so sorry! Let’s get together soon.
• • •
AI DAILY COMPENDIUM: From Harpers: We always thought the human brain was impossible to replace, but in fact it’s the other way around. The human brain is easily replaced. Look at Congo Warehouses, where employees stand in strategic formation throughout aisles of stock, their headsets directing them on the exact paths to retrieve merchandise. Scientists can’t replicate bipedal locomotion, a combination of conscious and unconscious decisions based on trillions of data points, but they have generated algorithms that complete human tasks as mundane as mail delivery and as complex as heart surgery. All this time, we imagined we’d lose our jobs to robots. But the robots don’t want our crappy jobs. They want to run the show.
• • •
At work the following Monday three John and Jane Does died in the waiting room, coughing blood. “Did we get autopsies?” Lattner asked.
Tucker was holding his belly. He’d gone from pale green to pea green, like his gallbladder had popped. “Congo Interface won’t allow it,” he said. “No autopsies until further notice. Money saving thing.”
“Okay. What if this new crop has the same disease as my John Doe with the mushrooms for intestines?”
Tucker shrugged. Was he hungover?
Having come to his personal awakening very late in life, Lattner took this cowardice personally. “It’s a public health concern. Fuck Congo. Talk to your dad.”
“I pinged him,” Tucker said. “His secretary told me he’s indisposed.”
“Is there a point person at the CDC?” Lattner asked.
“I pinged them, too. Their mailbox is full. It’s a three-day wait. The robot’s supposed to call me back.”
Lattner sat heavy in Tucker’s spare chair. “This is fucked,” he said.
Tucker opened his desk drawer. Pulled out a headset. “The Doc headsets came in.” He handed it to Lattner. “Try it on. They want feedback. Rollout’s Friday.”
It was smooth in his hands, like tooth enamel, and it covered both ears but didn’t add weight. Hello, a dulcet woman’s voice whispered. The earpieces curled inside his canals, warm and pleasant. Please state your employee number.
“I hate it,” Lattner said.
The timer went off on Tucker’s headset. “My break’s done,” he said as his eyes glazed over.
• • •
It took longer than usual to get a car service to take him back home to his apartment. The driver looked just as green and sick as Tucker’d been. At home, Lattner got tired of Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It made him too sad. People have oceans of emotions inside them. He’d known this intellectually, but lately he was beginning to feel the knowledge in his gut: even the dullards of the world have hearts and conflicts and private wars no one will ever know.
Humanity is everywhere.
He flipped on the streamies, and learned that excess deaths today, according to the AP, had quadrupled. Hospitals were filling up and so were morgues. This wasn’t the big news, though. Congo announced that now was a great time for the unemployed and underemployed to visit Congo Work Centers. For the sake of the economy, it was the civic duty of all to keep the supply line flowing. They were willing to pay minimum wage and a half.
Feeling weird, he called Lorna. “You guys okay over there?” he asked.
“Why?” Her voice sounded dead.
“Because I’m curious?” he asked, like a question. He was new at asking Lorna personal questions. When they were married, he’d have considered it rude—an invasion of privacy. They already lived on top of one another; why compound the problem?
“I don’t know how I feel because nobody ever asks me.”
“I just asked you. Literally, I just asked you how you’re doing,” he said.
“You don’t count. You’re lonely and no one likes you.”
“You’re in one of your bitchy moods,” he said, then regretted it, because it wasn’t such a helpful observation. Then they were both quiet until he tried again.
“Some guy showed up at the hospital last week with his insides all mutated. I don’t mean to alarm you. But it seems like it’s something that might be going around. I called to check on you and the kids.”
There was another long pause.
“You’ve heard about the excess hospitalizations? Excess deaths? The news is saying it’s nothing, but a kid at my college reunion collapsed right in front of me, Lorna. It’s not nothing.”
“I’ve been hearing about it, too. But we’re okay, Harlen,” she said, a surprising softness entering her voice. “Congo put the whole neighborhood on lockdown until this is resolved. We’re behind tall gates.”
“Yeah,” he said, not feeling any more reassured. “Okay.”
• • •
January 30, 2034
From the Associated Press:
Congo CEO Jeff Jassey testified in congress yesterday over his controversial software update. In his speech, directed at the House Speaker Cora Leigh Sherwood, he said, “‘Ma’am, I’m very sorry to hear some users think it made them sick or changed their personalities, or whatever. But we’ve done every bit of diligence on this product. Sometimes we think a thing is causal and it’s not. Listen, we updated almost two weeks ago and excess morbidity and mortality are happening only now. Don’t you think it could be radiation or infection? Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense?”
• • •
Lattner came early to the gaming restaurant so he wouldn’t have to make an entrance. The place was called Play it Again, Sam and all the walls showed retro screenies from the 2020s.
He asked for a table someplace quiet and dark. “We have an erotic experience room if you want that. Twenty percent starter special?”
“What’s that like?”
She paused before answering: the headset was supplying preselected words. “It’s wonderful, Mr. Lattner. It’ll clean your pipes, get your heart racing.” Though her cadence was seductive, her affect was flat.
“I like men, too,” he said, and this was the first time he’d ever admitted this. “I like men more.”
The waitress paused again, as the system ran his words through an algorithm. The booth was red vinyl. It was a seedy restaurant, a seedy part of town. On his doctor’s salary plus Lorna’s Congo money, he’d spent the last two decades in a gated community.
“We have role play for every scenario, Dr. Lattner,” the waitress said. “All kinds of men. The best kinds.”
“Great. I’ll think about it,” Lattner said, and as she swiveled stiffly, heading for the next client, he realized that maybe he would.
Twenty minutes later, fashionably late, Gerry appeared. He wore a tan Congo uniform, a badge with a barcode. Lattner jumped up, hugged him. He didn’t smell like lard anymore. He smelled beer sugary and middle aged. It made Lattner laugh.
Gerry reached out, grabbed Lattner’s face in his hands. “What? Am I that bad?”
Lattner’d forgotten this, the way Gerry’d needed reassurance, the way he’d never been able to supply it. Or maybe hadn’t wanted to. It would have been too committal. “No! I love you! I mean—I love it. I love this! It’s just, we’re not the same.”
Gerry traced his hands down Lattner’s face, to his shoulders, then his waist. He tried not to be hopeful. Maybe Gerry was in one of these free spirit relationships he’d read about. “You’re definitely the same.”
“I am? I don’t think so,” Lattner said.
Gerry sat down across. “You’re still blunt.”
“Is that a euphemism for shitty?”
“No. Just blunt. I always appreciated it. Until you told me you’d screwed Candace Lyons. But it worked out. You did me a favor.”
Lattner gulped. He’d brushed his teeth twice before coming here, soaped behind his ears and given his balls a somewhat painful loofah. He’d steamed a real cotton shirt, which was buttoned to the top. “I’m sorry for that.”
“I was crazy. What you did was a kindness. Wow, did I get strung along after you. You wouldn’t believe the crap I cut and ate like a finely aged steak.”
Lattner remembered then, the drama of Gerry. The ease with which he’d cried, his saint-like devotion to mind-altering drugs. There’d been problems. He’d forgotten that.
. . . Did he even like Gerry?
“I’m sorry. It’s been rough?”
Gerry told him all about it. The boyfriends who turned into psychopaths, the normal boyfriends he’d tormented because he’d been afraid of love, the quest for purpose, the heartbreaking failure at the library when it closed. He told him about his husband, and the fact that they were getting a divorce. “I was so happy to have found someone. All my life, I’d been looking . . . But then one day you realize you never really saw the person. You just wanted the warm body.” Apparently, the husband spent all his time watching streamies. He didn’t talk. He didn’t want sex. He didn’t show interest in anything except lifting weights. “He used to be into me. Now he’s like a zombie. It’s worse than being alone . . . Honey, I need the touch.”
Lattner told him about his time with Lorna. They’d had a nice life. It had been a lie. He told him that he’d been following Gerry for a while now, missing him, though he didn’t know if the feeling was real. He thought about his big speech. Distilled it to this: “I’m trying to be more human but I have no idea how that works or what it means.”
They’d both finished their fake meat sandwiches by then. Gerry got up, moved beside Lattner. The lights were dim. Most of the other customers were on their headsets, watching screenies. No one would care. He reached over, tucked his hand against Gerry’s already erect dick. He opened Gerry’s trousers. Gerry did the same.
Probably, it happened fast. But to him, it was all of time. The expanse of the universe. Lattner’s pants were slick wet. He pulled his shirt to conceal it, his white crisp shirt. It felt decadent and insane. He was so happy he was laughing.
They both wiped at each other with napkins, and it was such a generous, intimate thing. Then Gerry looked at his watch. “Gotta go. They dock pay if I’m a minute late.” He was up, leaving Lattner breathless.
“You do this all the time, don’t you?” Lattner asked, and he couldn’t tell if he felt possessive or jealous or just insignificant. Or none of those things. Alive. In any case. he felt alive.
Gerry winked. “I’ve been in a sexless marriage for three years, Harlen. I’d do a gorilla.”
“Will I see you again?”
“If I know you, Harlen, you don’t want me to say yes. You want me to play hard to get.” Then, he was gone.
Lattner realized he’d been stuck with the bill, then remembered that Gerry’d never paid for anything. Which was fine. He thought of all the quibbles he’d had against his lover, stacking them like a laundry list, ranking them and naming them and memorizing them and repeating them, and it now seemed like such wasted time.
He’d wasted so much of his life.
On his way out, a patron in a Congo Warehouse uniform fell out of her chair. Lattner rushed to help her and as he lifted her, she coughed blood. It trickled down her lips and it wasn’t red, but dull pink. An ambulance appeared ten minutes later, maybe less.
He watched the woman get wheeled away. Her heart wasn’t beating, but her internal organs throbbed with a slow, methodic, swish-swish.
[End of Part 1 — check back Thu/10 for Part 2 here on io9.]
About the AuthorSarah Langan’s a three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning novelist and screenwriter, whose novels (A Better World, Good Neighbors, The Missing, etc.) have made best of the year lists at NPR, Newsweek, The Irish Times, AARP, and PW. Her short stories have appeared in Nightmare, F&SF, WIRED, Year’s Best Horror, Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, etc. She has an MFA from Columbia University, an MS in Environmental Health Science/Toxicology from NYU, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer/director JT Petty, their two daughters, and two maniac rabbits. Her novella Pam Kowolski Is A Monster (Raw Dog Screaming Press) and her story “Squid Teeth” (Reactor) are both forthcoming May, and in 2026, TOR UK is releasing her sixth novel Trad Wife.
Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the April 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Rich Larson, Nigel Faustino, Oyedotun Damilola Muees, Deborah L. Davitt, Jon Lasser, Dominica Phetteplace, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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