Posters gummed to the sidewalk at her feet flickered with information about classes, lectures, and all the wildlife she couldn’t see among the wind-maimed weeds.

  ***

  On the glowing access pad next to the door, beneath KidLab and Flora Bioworks, was the name Justine Jacobsen-Coal. Sublevel 5. So she had been right. Tom pressed her thumb into the scientist’s name, and the door clicked open without requesting any identification. This was almost too easy.

  When Tom stepped out of the elevator into Sublevel 5, the first thing she noticed was the redirected sunlight, and the smell of fresh sea air. The lab was designed to look like a large, sunny atrium, perfectly circular, with environment portals in the high ceiling bringing in the light and air. Plants erupted from enormous pots, and vines scaled the walls, clinging to the ceiling with corrosive fingers. To her left was a wall of tanks—some filled with water, others with sand and heat lamps. All were squirming with creatures.

  To her right, facing the tanks, was a woman sitting at a cluttered desktop, gesturing two long strings of capital letters into a new alignment. Gray hair flowed over a pronounced hump in her back.

  She ignored Tom completely.

  “Excuse me,” the detective said. “I’m looking for Dr. Jacobsen-Coal.”

  “You found her,” the woman replied, moving another string of letters into place.

  “Are you J.J. Coal, the author?” Tom casually passed a hand through her hair, and a tiny red circle appeared in the corner of her vision. Her specs were recording everything she saw. If she wanted that second million, she’d need video proof that Coal existed.

  The woman wiped her work out of the air and looked at Tom for the first time. “Well that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.”

  “You’re the author of the Scorpion Diaries series?”

  Coal nodded with mock grandeur. “For what it’s worth, yes I am. And please stop filming or I’ll brick your mobile.” The old slang sounded sharp on this woman’s tongue.

  Tom turned video off and glanced around the lab with new appreciation. Security was better than she thought.

  “I’m Leslie Tom, a private detective. I was hired to find you by the Book Rights Registry.”

  Coal straightened up in her chair, then sank down into an even more crooked position, back mounded up behind her head. She looked puzzled. “What’s the Book Rights Registry?”

  “They’re an industry group. They want you to claim your books so they can pay you what you’re owed for Scorpion Diaries. You know, from the money they got for licensing your books to Pixar-Disney.”

  An odd, bubbling sound came from the tanks then ceased. Coal frowned. “Claim my books? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Your books. They’ve been turned into a franchise—immersives, games, a movie series. They’ve made billions.” The scientist’s back was definitely moving strangely now. Almost undulating. Tom covered her confusion with an uncharacteristic string of babble. “You must have—may have noticed. There are huge ads for The Sting of Time over the freeway. . .”

  “They turned my books into movies? Without telling me?”

  “I think they may have tried to tell you, but they didn’t know where you were.”

  Tom was more uneasy than ever. She didn’t want to apologize for whatever weird intellectual property lawyer bullshit the Registry guys had pulled, and it was becoming pretty obvious that she wasn’t the bearer of good news here. Coal was pissed. And Tom didn’t like the look of whatever was in those tanks.

  Coal gestured frantically over her desktop, poking searches through to the public web. She was pulling up information on the Scorpion Diaries franchise. Images erupted into of the air, then disappeared: A muscular, shirtless man astride a giant scorpion whose segmented carapace gleamed silver in sunlight, a woman drawing a gun from the lacy frill of her bustier, an explosion-laced battle between a frothing sea of red octopuses and humanoid robots with glowing eyes.

  “How the hell did this happen? My books have been out of print for decades.”

  “All I know is that somebody scanned them back in 2007. You never claimed them, so the Registry took charge of licensing.”

  The floor moaned as if a weight had settled on it, and Tom realized they were standing on top of a transparent water tank, so lightless that she’d taken it for dark concrete. A fat, red tentacle pressed suckers to the floor beneath her feet then writhed into invisibility.

  “Claimed them? You keep talking about claiming.” Coal’s voice was rising now. “What does that even mean?”

  The scientist braced her arms against the desk, pushing herself up with difficulty. Tom rushed forward to help, realizing how terrible this must be to the old woman. But instead of tottering, Coal flinched away from Tom’s proffered hand, raised herself up gracefully, and withdrew from beneath her desktop another set of arms. Then another. Her body elongated still more, growing at least three feet taller.

  Coal towered over Tom now. Her six human arms were connected to a chitinous, segmented abdomen. Before Tom could wonder what that abdomen was attached to, Coal brought all six of her fists down thunderously on the desktop. More gurgling and scrabbling issued from the tanks. “I own the copyright on those books! How could the Registry turn my work into such garbage without my permission?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Tom said, backing away. “They just hired me to find you. I’ll have them contact you right away. Like I said before, I know they want to pay you for everything.”

  Coal’s expression was pure rage. More images beneath two of her hands. They settled on a still of an evil scientist rubbing his hands over bubbling beakers. “I don’t need money. What I need is for people like you to not steal my work!”

  An advertisement for the third installment of the Metal Scorpion video game—now with more cyborg fighters!—roiled in the air.

  “FUCK!” Coal screamed. Trembled. And then her face became a fault line. Skin tore down the middle of her furrowed forehead, opened a crack through her nose, split her mouth open. A sticky paste the color of blood oozed out of the widening wound. Was she dying? Had those arm mods, combined with this bad news, finally become too much for her elderly body?

  This was getting dicey. Time to get the hell out of here. Tom slid a hand into her pocket and flicked on her emergency emitter, which sent the SFPD her coordinates bundled with a distress call.

  At least now she had an answer to Hu’s question about why Coal hadn’t noticed what was going on with her books. She’d been too busy turning the Scorpion Diaries into something more terrible than a transmedia franchise. A living, breathing biological reality. What was it with these book collectors and their obsession with converting words into flesh?

  WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO CLAIM SOMETHING THAT IS ALREADY MINE?

  The words slammed into Tom’s mind like an aneurism of thought. A voice inside her head. From the ruin of Coal’s face there emerged the domed head of a scorpion, its chitin reinforced with the kind of fiber composite she’d only seen on combat robots. The scientist’s features collapsed around its cephalothorax like a horrific scarf.

  Tom’s specs went black. Snatching the dead lenses from her face, she did another assessment of the lab, looking for exits. Was there a way out through the air shafts? She punched the elevator button without much hope.

  I WILL NOT CLAIM THEM!

  How was Coal screaming without a mouth? Tom’s head ached, as if the words had arrived directly in her brain, circumventing her eardrums.

  Two of the tanks exploded, their heat lamps gone nova. Scorched bodies of scorpions clattered to the floor. Tentacles and foam boiled beneath the biologist’s desk. It felt like an earthquake, or the moment before a flash flood. A hairline crack opened in the floor. Spread into a network of breaks beneath Coal’s desk. Then shattered completely.

  Tom began to slide across the buckling glass near the elevators, fingers searching for a handhold that would prevent her from falling into the dark water, bobbing with shards and drowning bugs. A tentacle gripped her waist, lifted her above the churning liquid. At last she saw what Coal had made of herself in the years since writing for Vam Books. The scientist’s head was a smooth half-moon edged with eyes, her body a composite-laced scorpion’s carapace with six human arms instead of legs. And from her lower half, where a scorpion would have its stinger, there emerged the fungible, polychromatic tentacles of a giant octopus. One of those tentacles was the only thing preventing Tom from falling into the water.

  Deep in her pocket, she felt the emergency emitter throbbing; help would be here in minutes. She didn’t think her gun would do much good against Coal’s armor, but it didn’t matter. Whatever blanked her specs had killed her gun too. She thrashed and tried to reach for a piece of glass to use as a weapon. But the hybrid creature tightened her tentacle, held Tom at face level with that nearly-featureless head, and made a sound like laughter.

  LET THE REGISTRY TRY TO LICENSE THIS TO PIXAR!

  With the words came a pounding migraine of image-ideas. A crèche of silvery eggs, spawning more cyborg chimeras, planted somewhere in the mud of the Bay. An incomprehensible, nauseating perception of a future where there were no opposites, no binaries. Self slimed into other. Biology was machine. Mammal dissolved into arachnid, cephalopod, bacteria. Tom vomited convulsively, wanted to black out. But still the unknowable invaded her. No outside. No inside. No civilization. No nature. Everything was hybridized and multiple and ateleological and over.

  Over. She floated in quiet water, in dimness, smelling her own effluvia. Coal was gone. And the water levels were falling fast, sluggishly circling as if around a drain.

  ***

  Tom came to when the paramedics loaded her onto a stretcher. She was at the bottom of a drained, egg-shaped pool, full of sun and wet piles of debris: glass, hard drives, drowned lizards, and pulpy smears of organic material she realized were the waterlogged remains of paper books. A few feet away was the slime-covered entrance to a massive storm drain.

  “Lucky you didn’t get sucked into that thing,” one of the paramedics remarked when he saw she was awake. “Just hold still and we’ll get you out of here. Probably nothing worse than a concussion, but we still need to take you to the hospital, OK?”

  She nodded, trying to remember what had happened after her specs went black. An armored guy from SFPD approached, specs glinting with data. “Where’s the suspect?”

  “Not . . . a suspect . . .” Her head was throbbing so hard she could barely form words. Talking would have to wait for later. Tom eyed the drain again: It was the perfect escape route, especially if you had a nest full of eggs where the drain met the Bay. Where did that idea come from? Had Coal implanted it in her mind?

  The paramedics tugged her behind them, the stretcher wheels leaving two trails of water through the Randall Labs lobby, and across the front patio with its view of the Bay. A small swarm of reporters waited for them, specs trained on her. It was hard to keep an emergency signal secret, especially one that led straight to the door of the mysterious author of a science fiction blockbuster.

  “Is J.J. Coal alive? Did you talk to the author?”

  “Did Coal know that members of the Registry board were illegally spending the money they got from licensing the Scorpion Diaries?”

  “Readers of Scorpionistas want to know what J.J. Coal thinks about the latest Scorpion Diaries movie!”

  They were all yapping at once, and even if she’d wanted to answer, she wouldn’t have been able to manage it. Thankfully the cops were pushing reporters aside, preventing them from grabbing video of Tom’s soaked, battered body.

  More paramedics lifted her into the ambulance helicopter, wrapped her in a heated blanket, administered drug patches. Painkillers fuzzed through her body. Vaguely, she felt them lifting off. Corona Heights diminished in the bubble window, the hill’s bony, ragged hide apparently capable of sheltering the Randall Museum diminished in the bubble window from everything in the outside world, even advertising campaigns.

  Tom slid toward unconsciousness, the reporters’ questions forming a psychic muck beneath Coal’s last words in her mind. She imagined the bizarre stories that were probably already rising up through the news aggregators right now, their relevance increasing every time somebody linked to them or mailed them or messaged “OMG watch this!” to a friend. It didn’t matter whether Coal ever claimed her work, because other people would always be claiming it more loudly and persistently than the author ever could. A gray wave of sleep overtook Tom, bringing with it a vision she knew wasn’t hers, of eggs hatching in the Bay, bringing at last to the world something that could not be owned like a story.

  * * *

  Annalee Newitz is the tech culture editor at Ars Technica, the founder of io9, and the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. Her first novel is about robots and pirates, and it’s coming soon!

  “Unclaimed” was previously published in Shimmer, Issue 18 (2014).

  His Master’s Voice

  by Hannu Rajaniemi

  Before the concert, we steal the master’s head.

  The necropolis is a dark forest of concrete mushrooms in the blue Antarctic night. We huddle inside the utility fog bubble attached to the steep southern wall of the nunatak, the ice valley.

  The cat washes itself with a pink tongue. It reeks of infinite confidence.

  “Get ready,” I tell it. “We don’t have all night.”

  It gives me a mildly offended look and dons its armor. The quantum dot fabric envelopes its striped body like living oil. It purrs faintly and tests the diamond-bladed claws against an icy outcropping of rock. The sound grates my teeth and the razor-winged butterflies in my belly wake up. I look at the bright, impenetrable firewall of the city of the dead. It shimmers like chained northern lights in my AR vision.

  I decide that it’s time to ask the Big Dog to bark. My helmet laser casts a one-nanosecond prayer of light at the indigo sky: just enough to deliver one quantum bit up there into the Wild. Then we wait. My tail wags and a low growl builds up in my belly.

  Right on schedule, it starts to rain red fractal code. My augmented reality vision goes down, unable to process the dense torrent of information falling upon the necropolis firewall like monsoon rain. The chained aurora borealis flicker and vanish.

  “Go!” I shout at the cat, wild joy exploding in me, the joy of running after the Small Animal of my dreams. “Go now!”

  The cat leaps into the void. The wings of the armor open and grab the icy wind, and the cat rides the draft down like a grinning Chinese kite.

  ***

  It’s difficult to remember the beginning now. There were no words then, just sounds and smells: metal and brine, the steady drumming of waves against pontoons. And there were three perfect things in the world: my bowl, the Ball, and the Master’s firm hand on my neck.

  I know now that the Place was an old oil rig that the Master had bought. It smelled bad when we arrived, stinging oil and chemicals. But there were hiding places, secret nooks and crannies. There was a helicopter landing pad where the Master threw the ball for me. It fell into the sea many times, but the Master’s bots—small metal dragonflies—always fetched it when I couldn’t.

  The Master was a god. When he was angry, his voice was an invisible whip. His smell was a god-smell that filled the world.

  While he worked, I barked at the seagulls or stalked the cat. We fought a few times, and I still have a pale scar on my nose. But we developed an understanding. The dark places of the rig belonged to the cat, and I reigned over the deck and the sky: we were the Hades and Apollo of the Master’s realm.

  But at night, when the Master watched old movies or listened to records on his old rattling gramophone we lay at his feet together. Sometimes the Master smelled lonely and let me sleep next to him in his small cabin, curled up in the god-smell and warmth.

  It was a small world, but it was all we knew.

  The Master spent a lot of time working, fingers dancing on the keyboard projected on his mahogany desk. And every night he went to the Room: the only place on the rig where I wasn’t allowed.

  It was then that I started to dream about the Small Animal. I remember its smell even now, alluring and inexplicable: buried bones and fleeing rabbits, irresistible.

  In my dreams, I chased it along a sandy beach, a tasty trail of tiny footprints that I followed along bendy pathways and into tall grass. I never lost sight of it for more than a second: it was always a flash of white fur just at the edge of my vision.

  One day it spoke to me.

  “Come,” it said. “Come and learn.”

  The Small Animal’s island was full of lost places. Labyrinthine caves, lines drawn in sand that became words when I looked at them, smells that sang songs from the Master’s gramophone. It taught me, and I learned: I was more awake every time I woke up. And when I saw the cat looking at the spiderbots with a new awareness, I knew that it, too, went to a place at night.

  I came to understand what the Master said when he spoke. The sounds that had only meant angry or happy before became the word of my god. He noticed, smiled, and ruffled my fur. After that he started speaking to us more, me and the cat, during the long evenings when the sea beyond the windows was black as oil and the waves made the whole rig ring like a bell. His voice was dark as a well, deep and gentle. He spoke of an island, his home, an island in the middle of a great sea. I smelled bitterness, and for the first time I understood that there were always words behind words, never spoken.

  ***

  The cat catches the updraft perfectly: it floats still for a split second, and then clings to the side of the tower. Its claws put the smart concrete to sleep: code that makes the building think that the cat is a bird or a shard of ice carried by the wind.

  The cat hisses and spits. The disassembler nanites from its stomach cling to the wall and start eating a round hole in it. The wait is excruciating. The cat locks the exomuscles of its armor and hangs there patiently. Finally, there is a mouth with jagged edges in the wall, and it slips in. My heart pounds as I switch from the AR view to the cat’s iris cameras. It moves through the ventilation shaft like lightning, like an acrobat, jerky, hyperaccelerated movements, metabolism on overdrive. My tail twitches again. We are coming, Master, I think. We are coming.