Clarkesworld Issue 195

An average issue, with interesting stories by Ben Berman Ghan, S.L. Huang, Lu Ban and Vandana Singh.

• "Law of Tongue" by Naim Kabir: negotiations between the matriarch of an Orca pod and humans may not go well for humans when the price to be paid for the negotiations to conclude is revealed.

• "Keiki's Pitcher Plant" by Bri Castagnozzi: an AI run biological lab that has been helping with ecological restoration makes an unusual call for assistance. The person answering the call would discover a startling outcome to a secret project involving another kind of restoration.

• "The Resting Place of Trees" by Ben Berman Ghan: a robot makes its case for a future Earth, nearly devoid of life, to be preserved so that it may continue to extract and try to make sense of the remains of various messages people try to pass to each other as the world slowly comes to an end.

• "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" by S.L. Huang: a story that initially starts as an investigation into who was sending lots of abusive and trolling messages to a victim that changes into an essay on the goodness and madness that can come from the use and abuse of AIs trained to communicate with people.

• "Upstart" by Lu Ban, translated by Blake Stone-Banks: a fascinating story of a world where the lifespan of people can be predicted. People are offered money by an organization, in return for dying at the predicted date. Known as upstarts, the story follows one upstart who is about to die. But before he does, he gets pulled into a possible conspiracy involving the organization, which ends in a plot twist.

• "Left to Die" by Vandana Singh: on an alien world, one explorer is left to die by her companions. She later figures out that the truth, but in order to be rescued, she will need to communicate with the plant-like life forms on the world to send her message.

• "To Exorcise Mechanical Ghosts" by Laney Gaughan: after a mining accident, a miner is given a cybernetic arm that belonged to another miner who had died in an earlier accident. The miner begins to get audio feedback that may be messages that the arm still retains from its previous user; messages that make the miner rethink about whether the previous miner did die in an actual accident and what he will do with the messages.

• "The Lightness" by Alex Sobel: on an alien world where items from Earth are considered collectables, a woman considers returning home while being a surrogate mother for the aliens, who hope their child can then become an Earth resident.