Read the Conclusion of This Month’s Epic and Excellent Lightspeed Short Story

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 2)” by Sarah Langan. You can read Part 1 here. Enjoy!

Does Harlen Lattner Dream of Infected Sheep? (Part 2)
by Sarah Langan

February 4, 2034:

AI Compendium: Classified documents stolen from Congo last year were released this morning. These indicate morally, ethically, and legally dubious research on their own workforce as they seek more productive employees. The Attorney General of Virginia, which has jurisdiction, says it has no comment. Congo released a statement this afternoon: We at Congo believe in the essential value of every human being. We’ve devoted our lives to making the world safer and more efficient for their benefit. In other news, excess deaths increased eightfold this week and are all linked to heart attacks, seizures, and abdominal hernias among otherwise healthy individuals. All deceased are Congo interface users. Congo denies any connection.

• • •

That night Lattner had a panic attack. He’d never had one before but as a physician, understood that his heart, pulsing at just eighty-five beats per minute, was under no serious threat. Still, it felt like he was changing. It felt, for just a heated, sweaty moment, that his organs had slipped and realigned.

He called his kids and neither answered so he took a deep breath and called Lorna. “I’m at work,” she said, “but like I told you, Congo promised to keep them safe and healthy. I can see them through the camera. They’re fine.”

“Send me the password for the stream on them or I’m calling the cops.”

“And saying what?” she asked.

“Anything. Everything. Send it. I’m their father. I have a right.”

“Since when? Our whole lives together I don’t think you changed a single diaper. What are you talking about?”

She could be such a pain in the ass. He really hated her sometimes. And then he thought: Was he supposed to have changed diapers? Did she have a point? “I’m worried. I’m . . . Jesus, I’m sick with worry. I think I might even be worried about you. Help me out, here, Lorna.”

“You’re worried about me,” she said, not like a question, but like a statement she was controverting.

“I am,” he said.

“You jackass. I had a nervous breakdown. We never called it that; you couldn’t stand to hear it, but that’s what it was. Ten years ago. I was in a mental hospital for three months and you never visited me. Do you remember that? You weren’t so worried about me, then.”

“I visited,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Not once. I used to sit there on visitor’s day like a jerk. You never even brought the kids. I missed them so much.”

“That’s impossible,” Lattner said, his heart beating fast all over again. “No! Wait! I remember. We decided you needed the time to yourself.”

“You decided,” she said. “I never got a say in anything.”

Lattner’s heart thudded in his throat. He surveyed his small apartment, thinking it was dumb to have picked the one here, when across town there’d been a complex with a pool that the kids might have liked. Thinking he should have hung posters in their rooms or made their beds so they didn’t have to bring their own sheets and towels.

“I feel so sick,” he said. “I feel like I’m dying.”

“Lattner,” she said, her voice soft. “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you talk about anything important?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and now he was crying, his speech broken and shaking. “I don’t mean to be this person.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m sending the link. They’re okay and I’m okay,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, weeping now.

Soon after, he watched them in their rooms through ceiling mounted cameras. They were aware of these cameras but had mostly forgotten about them. Bea was tuned to a streamie in her bedroom. Lattner counter her respiration. Nine breaths per minute. This was low, even for a resting rate, but not alarmingly so. He zoomed in, tried to see her skin—was she pale? But the resolution wasn’t strong enough. Dylan was jerking off, his respiration slightly elevated.

Lattner felt a measure of compunction about this. Still, he zoomed to see what the kid was looking at. A man? A woman? This, too, was out of focus. He couldn’t tell.

But they were alive, at least. Not sick. A kind of trilling panic inside him suddenly eased. What was this emotion? Relief.

Jesus, he’d never felt this way about any of his family while he had them. Lorna’d asked a good question: why now?

A kind of compulsion took over after that. He wrote Bea a letter:

Honey,

It’s your dad, Harlen Lattner. I feel I should let you know that I love you and I’m sorry if I have not been a good father to you. I have wanted to do right by you but I believe I was afraid that anything I touched would only result in disaster. I wonder now whether I erred. I should also tell you that you are not alone in your sadness. I was on the very same medication you are now taking for depression. I have always felt very badly that you inherited this from me. Though in hindsight I wonder whether both our emotional troubles are caused, not by genes at all, but environment. I’ll not bore you with the details of my own upbringing, except to say that I never feel free or good or of any value at all. It could not have been easy, when your mother got so sick, that I doubled down on work and disappeared, too.

I was additionally upset when you got your diagnosis because there is a correlation with what we have and suicide. This possibility was so deplorable to me that I could not speak it, or acknowledge any problem at all.

Fondly,

Dad (Harlen Lattner)

Dylan,

It’s your dad, Harlen Lattner. It occurs to me that we have never had a good relationship. I’ve always felt it’s because you hate me and believe I’m a bad husband to your mother. But I wonder if I only projected this, and felt so bad about it that I stayed away from you. I assumed I’d earned your hate and so accepted it without ever questioning it. It lately occurs to me that perhaps your feelings are your own and not entirely caused by my existence. So I suppose I should ask: why are you so angry? Can I help?

Additionally, I’d like to let you know that my own father was a malignant presence in my life. I absented myself from knowing you, I assumed that my absence could only be an improvement. But sons ought to have fathers. These fathers ought to approve of them. Perhaps you will allow me to get to know you better, so that I might be able to confer that judgment.

Yours sincerely,

Your father, Harlen Lattner

Lattner read these a few times, agonizing over them, and ultimately decided not to send them. They seemed self-indulgent and he couldn’t get the words right. What he did realize, through writing them, was that he loved his children. It was absurd that he’d ever convinced himself otherwise.

• • •

Feeling calmer, he searched the streamies that night for news, then scoured the social networks. At first he found nothing, but in the wee small hours of the morning, he found an encrypted site reachable only by anonymous browsers. On this were thousands of anecdotes reporting sickness and death but also and more often, that loved ones weren’t behaving as they should. They’d developed flat affects. They didn’t remember personal information. They seemed dazed. The posters were attributing this to the Congo update. The name the group gave it was The Great Amnesia.

When dawn arrived, he called Lorna. She didn’t answer the first ten times, which seemed fair. When she finally did answer, she was pissed off, which also seemed fair. “Are you hearing anything in your department about the Congo update?” he asked.

“Like?” She had this way of never being surprised. Aliens could jump out of their ship and present her with petunias and she’d say: That’s nice. I’m late, though. And then he remembered that she hadn’t always been like that. It was only after her breakdown that she’d disconnected from him and the rest of them. Before that, she’d been eager and interested.

“Uh, all these dead people? The personality disorders? They’re attributing it to the Congo update.”

“That’s just crazy people.”

“Maybe not. You should stay home. All of you. Let me come over. I can help.”

She lowered her voice as if someone might be listening. “Even if there is a connection, what do you think you can do about it? They’re safe. I’ve been assured.”

“What’s causing it?”

“Other than the update? No one knows. But they’re working on it. Everyone’s working on it. No one wanted this outcome.”

“How long have you known?”

“I don’t know now. Nothing’s explicit. I’m connecting dots.”

He leaned into the wall. It was strange, you can play-act a life with someone for decades, and then the play’s done. “The hospital is about to make consoles mandatory. Were you even going to warn me?”

“No,” she said. “I told you; they’re fixing it. The media has it all overblown. It’s a few isolated incidents. There’s no reason to warn anyone.”

“Can you take their consoles away until this is sorted?”

“I’m serious right now. I want a real answer. Why do you suddenly care about them? Is this all to punish me? Why can’t you just let me have them?” she asked.

“I always cared about them. I care about you. I just didn’t know it,” he said.

She sighed deep and long. Then, she hung up.

• • •

He was at work an hour later and what he did when he got there was ill advised. Dumb, even. He buzzed himself into the morgue. The bodies in the freezer were stacked in long drawers, none locked. A few medical examiners were hanging around but they stayed in their lanes and didn’t ask questions. He opened the chest-high drawer in the center.

Jane Doe. He unzipped the black bag and conducted an autopsy. Jane’s chest cavity was a wild growth of pink tissue. A tube ran from throat and then went spherical, its gills upright in a protean stew of fluid. The tubing was tangled, and where it knotted it had bulged into a bubble-gum-like rupture, just like with his initial patient.

The human body is very complex. It needs sleep to keep its brain fresh; it needs food every few hours, it needs water constantly. It needs an endless supply of oxygen. It has to eliminate the waste products of metabolic reactions at least five times a day. But this system wasn’t complex. Pink fluid pulsed, replacing the heart and its blood. Gills received this fluid and presumably extracted oxygen. This digestive, circulatory, and pulmonary tract was much simpler. Like a hydra.

He stitched Jane up, went through five more bodies. One body looked normal. The other two had this same fungal-type disease. He took a tissue sample under the microscope. The cells were clearly defined and cholesterol rich. They weren’t fungal. They were human.

• • •

It would probably take a few days before anyone reported that he’d broken into the morgue. Someone would have to complain, and then a higher up would have to review the video, figure out it wasn’t typical and send it up the food chain. Up the food chain, someone would have to identify him, make a decision, send that decision down. The Congo algorithm was great when things were predictable. In randomness, it was molasses in winter.

At work, triage was a mess and so was surgical. The floor was wet with Pepto Bismol-colored blood. The patients weren’t making it to surgery in time; were dying in gurneys. Before his shift ended he found himself in surgery with the same procedure. This time he didn’t hesitate. He reached in with his hands and untangled the intestine. Jane Doe’s body stopped seizing.

He visited Tucker Rhodes’ office once his shift was done. “Hey! Any news on all this? Did anybody ever call you back?”

Tucker took a second to process what he’d said, and Congo answered. “The system cannot process the information.”

“Right,” Lattner said. “We know that. But did you hear anything from your dad?”

Tucker bent down, listening to his headset. “I’m sorry. I have filing. I’m not on break right now.”

• • •

• Classified Internal Memorandum, Congo Corp •

February 9, 2034

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,

It is with some surprise that we’ve received the results of the Congo 5.0 rollout. It appears that the application has had a physiological affect on the majority of users. Perhaps all users? Our working theory is this: when the Congo app activated transmogrification genes to make users more docile and efficient during their workdays (slower metabolisms, disconnected minds), we accidentally initiated the metamorphosis of the human species into a simpler life form.

In addition, .01% of users experience intestinal knotting during metamorphosis, which is fatal unless addressed surgically. Another .01% experience psychotic episodes resulting in suicide.

It’s imperative we keep this secret to prevent widespread panic. As I type, our brilliant researchers are working toward cures.

Guys, this was a total accident!

• • •

Lattner documented everything he’d learned and seen since opening up John Doe and sent it to the anonymous website. The kids were coming for their bimonthly weekend visit the next night. He was thinking about spying on them to make sure they weren’t sick, when Gerry showed up for their date.

Gerry arrived carrying a bag full of weird sex paraphernalia. Possibly some of it was ordinary sex paraphernalia. Lattner’d spent most of his life too afraid to investigate such things.

“My husband’s gone,” Gerry said.

“Dead? That’s awful. How?”

“No. They’re flushing us out. Congo raised our rent. It owns the building. He moved into the warehouse. Congo offered these sleep pods for everybody. It’s cheaper. He says he doesn’t care about material things anymore. Or Congo says it. Who knows, he never takes those headphones off.”

They had crazy sex that night. Sex Lattner had never imagined. Sex that answered questions. Sex that meant nothing. Sex that meant everything. “I should quit my job and move in with you,” Gerry said as they lay in bed. Lattner went rigid.

“Same old Harlen,” Gerry said.

Lattner felt that, and felt bad about that, but couldn’t bring himself to do anything about it.

Gerry said he wasn’t hungry. His stomach had been sour. He hadn’t been sleeping well, either. Lattner placed his hand on Gerry’s belly. It pulsed worryingly. “You might have that thing going around,” he said. He was panting suddenly, his forehead slick with sweat. “Why don’t you come with me to the hospital. I can run some tests.”

“You don’t have to take care of me,” Gerry said, wounded just like he used to be wounded. “I’m not your obligation.”

Lattner kissed him goodbye at the door, feeling strangely like, if he did not get down on his knees and beg Gerry to stay, that the attachment between them, tenuous invisible strings that had persisted over so many years, would finally tear.

Gerry left.

• • •

The hospital the next day was quieter. Fewer patients were exhibiting abdominal or cardiac symptoms. The employees seemed especially quiet, too. In the absence of the emergent or new they tuned out, let their headsets do the thinking. At last, the day had come and mandatory headsets were issued to all the docs on staff. Lattner tried his. The voice inside lulled literal sweet nothings (shoo be do la lume di lee). Staccato prompts in the music told him when to repeat what the voice was telling him, told him where to put his hands, what tests to run. He spent the day like this, in a kind of floating, even as his body moved.

• • •

His kids arrived late that weekend. Lorna’d delayed them at her house so she could familiarize the new nanny with the routine while she was out of town. She’d be relocating to Congo headquarters the following Monday—a cluster of buildings that functioned like a small town for the very top executives—in order to address the update crisis. She’d been promised once again that the kids would be safe. This nanny in particular had been debriefed and would make sure they didn’t get infected. She’d also been told that the headsets represented zero threat. They could all continue wearing them indefinitely.

“We’re too old for a nanny,” Dylan said.

Lattner wondered if this changed the custody agreement. If the kids would now stay at his house. Though he wanted them around, he wasn’t sure he was ready to have them full time. Worried he’d mess it up. Also, where would he be able to meet-up with Gerry?

“The nanny’s weird,” Beatrice said. “Even when she’s on break her implants glow green. You clap your hands in front of her and she doesn’t blink.”

“She doesn’t laugh,” Dylan said.

“She doesn’t smile,” Beatrice said.

“Yeah she does, but it’s a creepy smile. Like the interface told her to.”

“You’re like that sometimes.”

“No, you, asshole.”

They’d hardly walked in the door, were still bantering. He noticed their pallor was green and they moved too slowly for healthy kids. It set off alarms. Had Congo done this? And how could they know for certain that the headsets weren’t a threat?

“I have good news and bad news,” Lattner told them. “My house is a no screenie or interface house. We can read books or talk or whatever we want.”

Beatrice and Dylan went simultaneously ballistic. It was like manifesting a tornado. There was literal screaming. There was stomping. He covered his ears at the horrible high-pitched-ness. He’d played this out in his mind. They’d rebel, grabbing interfaces and ignoring him. Bewildered, he’d throw up his hands and give up. Nothing would change but at least he’d be able to tell himself he’d tried.

What happened instead was almost worse. They ganged up. They argued relentlessly. Over the following hours, they broke down, weeping. They shouted. They made him feel like a total dipshit. But they never disobeyed him. He went to bed Saturday night close to tears. By Sunday, they were all tired. Listless, they sat together at the kitchen table and played gin rummy. He tried to coax them into eating something—they’d skipped dinner and breakfast, said their stomachs hurt—and at last managed to foist some crackers.

A funny thing happened. The first hour of rummy was excruciating. They weren’t the only ones who missed the fucking screenies. But the second hour went very quickly. And somehow, they played into a third hour. When it was time for them to go, they all stood at the door while the ride waited outside. Nobody knew what to do. Typically, the kids showed themselves out.

Lattner made the first move. He hugged Bea. Then he hugged Dylan. What surprised him: they hugged back. His eyes were unreasonably wet. He was sniffling, trying not to cry. He looked away from them. It was too hard. Still, he said the words. “I love you. Both of you. Very much. I’m sorry I haven’t said it more often.”

Neither Bea nor Dylan answered that. But Bea smiled. Then they were out. He followed them to the street, waved to the car. They looked out, watching him as it carried them away. Dylan offered the tiniest of nods.

The rest of the day felt strange and terrifying and wondrous. He imagined this was how real dads felt all the time. Had Lorna endured this weight, this terrible, responsible love all alone? Was that what had broken her, then changed her for the worse? The loneliness of carrying the emotion of an entire family all on her own?

• • •

Work the next day was quiet. The people were quiet, the routines were quiet. There weren’t any new patients with abdominal issues. The nurses moved with emotionless efficiency. So did the admins. Only Ocean seemed her usual self. Watching her enter the surgical lounge was like watching a daisy in a windy field of orchids. It bent differently; swaying with greater, wilder life.

She saw him right away and sidled up. “I’m going to ask you the same question I asked last time. What is happening?”

“You noticed it, too?”

“It’s like sleepwalkers. Only, it’s hard to remember. I keep thinking I should do something but everything’s so fuzzy.”

“Maybe we’re becoming pod people,” he said.

They both looked at each other, and yeah, maybe that was the exact truth.

You’d think, under those circumstances, that they’d both have run screaming from the hospital. They’d have tossed Molotov cocktails through windows, shouted from bullhorns. Probably, that’s exactly what some people did. But not them.

To break the tension, Ocean made a raspberry at him. Then the bell rang, signaling the end of their break.

His shift ended before Ocean’s and a funny thing happened. They must have threatened her job, because she was wearing her headset. He watched her wind through the halls just like everyone else, her steps preordained to maximize efficiency. Did he look like that? He didn’t remember his shifts anymore. They blurred, a set of instructions and music. He didn’t remember his patients’ faces, either. If the intention of 5.0 was to make life more pleasant, it had failed. When the day was done, he didn’t feel accomplished. He felt empty.

• • •

After work, he retrieved the photo he’d taken on his phone of that first patient’s Congo employee badge. The first numbers represented a warehouse number—a local one, and the same at which Gerry worked. Lattner ordered a car and took it there.

The warehouse was a mammoth building about three city blocks wide. There wasn’t security. He drove up and parked in the employee lot. He knocked on the locked main door but no one answered. But this was a new life for Lattner. He’d had sex with Gerry. He’d fought with his kids. He’d told a waitress he was gay. So when he saw the open window, he climbed through with great and pleasant grunting.

The building had a utilitarian appearance. No decoration; plaster walls. Signs pointed to the warehouses A, B C, and D, and dorms A, B, C, and D.

A reception area was center. There was only a sliding plastic barn door ahead of a low desk. He showed the man at the desk his John Doe’s number. “I’m looking for this employee.”

The woman blinked several times, and he had the feeling her eyes were cameras, relaying the employee number directly to Congo.

After a long pause, she said: “He’s in acquisitions, Warehouse C.”

He followed that direction. The building was labyrinthine. Got to a door marked acquisitions. Inside, a mammoth warehouse stocked with boxes upon boxes of goods. Employees in Congo uniforms bussed around, plucking items like bees in a hive.

He found the foreman, showed the number.

Blinking, blinking. “Wait,” the foreman said. “He’s being hailed.”

Lattner waited. Waited some more. “He’s coming?”

The guy didn’t answer. He was routing someone, relaying someone.

A half-hour later, John Doe appeared. He was green-faced but alive. Walking. This was the same man.

“Hi. I was your surgeon,” Lattner said. “You walked out of the hospital.”

Congo answered, monotone and dead. “Thank you for saving employee 24601.”

Lattner noticed that beneath his tight shirt, his stomach was rippling; a kind of cauldron of gas and metabolic processes in there. But his breath was markedly slow, about six respirations per minute. Did the air directly interface with the gills? “Can you turn your implant off? Do you know what happened to you?”

“Employee 24601 must return from break.” Then he began pulling boxes.

• • •

That night, the streamies reported what Lattner already knew. The sickness had dwindled, with excess deaths down to double. Still, the social networks were ablaze: loved ones didn’t recognize one another, friends seemed like strangers. It’s the Congo update, a thread with eight million comments insisted. It did something to us. It changed us.

“Parasite,” he said out loud.

• • •

He arranged a car to his wife’s house the next day. His old house. Like all of them, the driver looked glassy eyed and dead. The thing about glassy eyes, you assume it’s calm underneath. But it occurred to Lattner that something turbulent was hiding in there. Something sentient, trapped. You can feel sentience. You know, even when it doesn’t speak or hear or see.

Lattner counted the driver’s breaths: about six per minute. The woman at security scanned them both using retinal display. “Permitted,” she said in Congo’s voice. Her breath was slow, too.

The community was unchanged from when he’d left. Green grass, freshly recycled air. People still kept dogs for pets here—they had access to enough soy to feed them. But the dog he saw didn’t appear healthy. It languished against a see-saw in the children’s playground, ribs prominent.

The houses were all widely separated and two or three stories. He’d missed this place, but also felt, in the six months that he’d been gone from it, that he’d stopped belonging.

He used his handprint to open the door but Lorna had changed the locks. A camera eye opened, articulated along steel tubing and lowered itself, shining into his face with a retinal scanner. Then the camera became a screen, and Lorna was looking back at him. She wasn’t home, but at her office. She looked overwhelmed, her desk covered in paperwork. For the first time in a very long time, he felt pity and wondered: had he done this to her?

“What now?” she asked.

“Are the kids home? I want to see them.”

“It’s not your day.” Her voice wasn’t Congo’s. She wasn’t wearing a headset. She was too high up, making too many decisions still. This was Lorna.

“Please,” he said.

She looked at him with what he realized for the first time was hate.

“I should tell you that it wasn’t fair of me to marry you,” he said. “I was in love with a man when I met you. I love men.”

Her eyes watered but no tears fell. Her mouth gaped. “Fuck you. That’s not funny.”

He waited, knowing she’d come around in a second.

“You’re serious?”

“I wasn’t seeing you as a person. I wasn’t seeing the kids as people. There was something wrong with me. I was afraid. I’ve always been afraid. I’m working on it. You tried. You really did. I remember that. The failure is mine. Someone else would have made you very happy.”

“You’re gay?” she asked. It wasn’t as simple as that. He could still have been good to her. He could still have considered her, and recognized that the life she’d tried to build with him had value. But if she liked that answer best it seemed like a fair one. He nodded.

“You knew that the whole time?”

“I don’t know what I knew. I don’t think I thought that deeply. I just wanted to be settled, to do everything I was supposed to do. And now it’s almost twenty years later. I wasn’t living. It kept you from living. I hurt you. You’re still not living. You tell yourself you’re working so you can provide for the kids’ futures, but the company you’re working for is going to destroy that future.”

She made a sour face at him. “Oh, fuck you,” she said. “Just for that, you can wait until Friday.”

He tried the bell a few more times. Stalked around the house, saw the nanny through the window. She was the new kind, her implants both auditory and retinal, so nervous parents could see through her eyes. The house appeared clean and tended, the windows opened for fresh fall air. The kids didn’t seem to be home, or if they were home, they were in their rooms. There wasn’t anything for her to do, but she was on the clock. Like a turned off machine, she was standing in the middle of the room.

An eerie sight. As he looked at her, calling “Hey! You!” through the open window, he knew she heard him. But she was receiving orders not to answer. And so her body quivered slightly, as if trying but unable to respond, a tear falling down her dead, placid cheek.

As he was leaving, the skinny dog followed. It was a mutt; some kind of mix between a greyhound and pit bull. He was allergic to dogs. They gave him a rash. He got to the car. The dog whined. “Okay,” he said, leaving it open for the dog to climb in.

• • •

He named the dog Buster. It seemed like a dog kind of name. He walked him when he could and when he couldn’t, left the door open for him to roam. His arms got blistery with rashes and his nose and lungs plugged up with allergies until he figured out how to divide the apartment between the two of them, keep the windows open, clean the air. It would be temporary. He’d find someone to take the dog or return it to the village. But over the following days he found no takers. Instead, what he saw were more and more strays, combing the streets in scraggly, hungry packs. Briefly, it occurred to him that he ought to let Buster join them, but Buster was a sweetie. He didn’t belong with that crowd.

Lattner went to work all that week. More and more, the people became the same. Like zombies. Excess hospitalizations went down to zero. Everything calmed down. His fellow docs stopped taking off their headsets in the breakroom. Sometimes he talked to them through the apparatus, and sometimes they answered in their own voices and not Congo’s, but not often.

He left messages for Lorna, who wrote him a 5,000 word letter about how he’d ruined her life. This letter didn’t make a lot of sense, so he put it aside, read it again the following day after receiving it, and the day after that, until the feelings of the thing bled past its cruelty. I always hated you. I only married you because I was insane. You’re weak. You’re nothing. The children hate you, too . . . You’re just jealous of my success. He picked out the lines he hadn’t noticed at first: Remember when we went to the state fair and you won that panda for me? Was that a lie, too?

It took him a while to remember the state fair and he had no memory of winning the panda. But he thought that it probably had not been a lie. Lattner was a lot of things, but a master manipulator was not one of them. So he wrote back to her, ignoring all the cruelty. It was probably the most adult act he’d ever committed in her direction: I want you to understand that it’s not your fault. The panda was earnest. I should have visited you at the hospital. I should not have driven you to a nervous breakdown.

He called Gerry, too. But Gerry wasn’t getting back, either. So Lattner wrote to him, too: My whole life I’ve been hiding. I am a man unaccustomed to emotion, like a baby feeling joy and sorrow for the first time, and unequipped. I cannot say I love you. I do not know you. I can say that I want desperately to see you because you make me happy.

He didn’t hear back from Gerry, either.

Meanwhile, the social networks had quieted. Most, he assumed, had been scrubbed by Congo, which owned the servers. He found a few still insisting that people had changed, not only in their behavior, but in their very anatomy. He read through these, poring over each comment from some unhinged voice in the dark. The invasion had not come from outer space, but from within. The assertion was crazy. But, looking out on the street of his apartment building, where people no longer walked after dark to head to restaurants, but instead shut down for the night, he also knew they were right.

• • •

He showed up for his shift at work. No one ate much in the surgical lounge anymore, he noticed. It was all protein bars, no hot food. No coffee, even. The microwave was clean for the first time in two decades.

Right before it was time to report to surgical, Ocean walked in, wearing her headset. Her eyes were wet from crying but she wasn’t moving, just sitting very still while her body respired six breaths per minute, and she took her appointed break. She sat on the couch beside two other nurses, all squeezing close, none talking. Their breaths and squishing pulses soon synchronized.

He imagined an orchid swallowing a daisy.

He went to put on his headset. Heard the soft, lulling voice. Couldn’t do it. “I’m sick. I’m going home,” he said to Tucker, who was also on the couch, also wet-eyed and unresponsive. Was it the soul inside him, crying out?

Maybe Tucker heard him, maybe he didn’t.

• • •

He spent days home at his apartment with Buster, alternating doomscrolling and reading. The threads about body-snatched loved ones had dwindled and the old ones were locked and deleted. He dove deep. Found autopsy reports, scholarly research published too quickly for peer review: bodies all over the country had changed. What they’d gained in efficiency, they’d lost in quality. For instance, workers could now stand on assembly lines for sixteen-hour shifts. They rarely ate or needed bathroom breaks. However, they couldn’t run. They couldn’t laugh hard or cry loud, either. Their hearts couldn’t beat or pump enough oxygen-rich material throughout their distal cells to allow that kind of energy expenditure. Similarly, they were much better at taking orders, but they could no longer logic. Logic, and serious thought in general, demanded too much energy.

• • •

Friday rolled around. Gerry wasn’t answering any of Lattner’s messages, but at least he’d see his kids. When they didn’t show up and neither Lorna nor Beatrice or Dylan answered any of his messages, he grabbed a ride service and headed for the gated community.

The guy sitting behind the wheel was staring without blinking for so long that his eyes welled.

“You okay, buddy?” Lattner asked.

The guy didn’t hear him, so Lattner did something crazy, reached over, and pulled off his headset. The guy didn’t suddenly become alert, like a spell had been broken. He face-planted into the wheel. The car kept driving, like this was irrelevant.

Lattner drew the headset near, heard a voice whispering softly. You’re sleeping. Everyone is sleeping. The world is asleep . . . A voice lulled. Remember being born. Remember being unborn . . .

“Fuck that,” Lattner said, dropping the headset.

The community was quiet. No kids playing ball. No cars arriving from work. No lights, he realized with surprise. All the houses were dark.

The nanny answered the door, looked at him dumbly.

“I’m the dad. Are the kids here? They’re supposed to be at my house.”

She cocked her head, let the words go to Congo. “Yes,” she said as she stepped back. “Come in.”

As soon as he entered, he could see that the house was wrong. But he didn’t want to admit that to himself; didn’t want to notice the spoiled, sour skin smell.

He opened the first bedroom door. Dylan was on the floor, interfacing with his console. “Didn’t you hear me?” Lattner asked. Always before, when he’d asked this question, he’d known the answer was yes—Dylan had been ignoring him. This time was different. Dylan was greenish, his breath slow.

Lattner snapped his fingers in front of Dylan’s eyes—no response. He felt his abdomen. The tell-tale squish-squish. “Do you know me?” Lattner asked.

Lattner pulled the headset away. Dylan made a kind of keening, animal sound. Slow, docile, he reached for the headset. “Do you know your name? What’s your name?”

Dylan looked at him blankly, the question seeming unrelated, somehow, to the present circumstances.

He was afraid to knock on Beatrice’s door but did it anyway. She was hanging from a noose.

• • •

Lattner wasn’t sure what happened after that. There was an ambulance, a visit to the hospital. He checked Dylan, whose vitals were slow, his metabolic process about 10% normal. A CT of his abdomen, which would have shown a new anatomy, was denied. There were dead eyes, so many dead eyes. There was a walk, somehow, through the city. Nineteen miles. He found himself back home, finishing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Buster licking him. It was a comfort but also an irritant, as his skin blistered.

Lorna didn’t come home. Congo’s retreat turned into a five-alarm emergency. They pulled all their top executives behind a tall wall and were flying them out to a hidden shelter.

“Jesus, Lattner. You’re a real cocksucker, saying something like that. The nanny would have called me. Those kids are fine. Listen, I gotta go,” she said when he finally tracked her down.

He considered sending her a picture, something that would force her to believe, but this seemed cruel.

• • •

Days passed and he didn’t come out of his apartment. He read his books. He raided neighbors’ strangely unlocked apartment kitchens for himself and Buster when hungry. He stared. There ought to be a law against what had happened to his children. There ought to be something supernatural that reaches through reality and prevents such things.

He forgot all about the date he’d scheduled with Gerry. It came and went. But a week later, his grief lifted long enough for him to remember. He went to Play it Again, Sam, ordered a sandwich, asked the waitress about the VR room upstairs but she told him it was closed. The demand had dropped out of the market.

The streets were empty of people as he walked to the Congo warehouse and asked for Gerry. Then waited until Gerry was on a break. He knew even from the walk, that this wasn’t Gerry. Gerry was gone.

“Are you here?” he asked.

Gerry blinked, let Congo answer. “I appear to be!”

“Do you know me?”

“You’re employee 5757393 from the hospital!”

Lattner put his hand on Gerry’s shoulder. “You were the love of my life, and I didn’t know it. But I’ve never known myself very well.”

Gerry cocked his head. Waited for Congo to translate. “How nice!” he said.

• • •

• Classified Internal Memorandum, Congo Corp •

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,

It appears the condition is irreversible. Nonusers account for about .5% of the population. But we can make lemons out of lemonade. We’ve solved food scarcity. We’ve solved suffering. Affected citizens are still capable of reproduction. We will continue to have a thriving workforce for generations to come.

• • •

There wasn’t a funeral for Beatrice. Without his consent, the nanny signed the orders to have her cremated. The ashes were divided. One half remained at the house for Lorna’s eventual return, the other half to Lattner.

As he held his daughter’s ashes, it had occurred to him that it’s awful to know that you’re a speck in the grand scheme, that you did not exist for the majority of history, and have no memory of this silence. That this brief stint on earth is a lease.

He thought about how children are supposed to be your legacy. His son was there, but not there. His son was gone. His whole life, he’d arrived too late, if at all, for his most important things. He tried to console himself that at least he’d shown up.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Lorna when he finally got in touch with her. By now, she believed him.

The news had broken her. Her voice was cold. “It’s inevitable. Psychological rejection of the Congo update happens .01% of the time,” she answered. “She was always like you. Secretive and sensitive. You’ll probably do it, too.”

Onscreen, Lorna appeared healthy. Not affected.

“You knew this would happen? I can’t believe that. You’re telling me, but I’m still finding it hard to believe,” he said.

“I didn’t know. They didn’t know. Not for sure. There was a possibility of physiological change. Someone wrote a hypothesis. But it had as much likelihood as nanobots taking over the earth. The hypothesis called it dissonance. The body and mind out of harmony caused a physiological response. But it makes better workers, happier people. It ends crime.” She looked at him pointedly, “It ends attachments and pain.”

“You don’t feel bad? You don’t want to try to stop it?”

She looked confused, as if this question bore zero significance. “How could I stop it?”

“Lorna,” he said. “I love you. I always have. Not in the way I should have, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”

Her eyes watered. For a moment, she appeared to be drowning. The gravity of it all hit her, overwhelmed her. “Don’t say that,” she whispered. Then she disconnected.

Lattner spread Beatrice’s ashes over the river. He wanted to cry, but the desire was like an avocado pit trapped inside his chest. It would have hurt too much to try.

• • •

In the month since the update, everyone he saw had turned a shade of green. The streets were quiet. The roads were quiet. Everything was still and dead, like a digital recording of a movie where everything bright is softened, everything sharp is dulled.

In the absence of anything else to do, he went back to work. As soon as he got to the doc’s lounge, he heard humming. He thought it was a person, humming, and his eyes brimmed with emotion. Who’d have guessed that such a mundane thing could be so lovely.

But then he saw that it was a console’s hold music.

His shift started. He thought about The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. He thought about all humanity’s cruelties, which had been outsourced now to a program. He thought about free will. We don’t choose to be born. Most often, we don’t choose to die. He thought about the pain in his abdomen he’d been having. He thought about his dog, who needed him.

There was irony, here, that at the exact moment humanity had chosen to delete itself, like an unwanted message, he’d chosen to come fully to life. If this were Lonely Hunter, he knew how it would end. He’d notice the pain in his side. He’d notice the terrible loneliness, that would be soothed or perhaps stolen by the headset he was supposed to wear right now. He would join the myriad masses, and in that way, reform himself. Atone. More apt, he’d fill a syringe and join his daughter.

He considered all this. And then he walked down the hall, his step out of synchronicity, seeing the world and the color and the sorrow of it. Thinking about all the chances he’d had in his life, that had happened so often they’d felt like deja vu. Thinking there had to be others, like him, who’d reformed too late.

About the Author

Sarah 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, D, 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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