Brave New Worlds

hang up there at the top of the leap, free in the vacuum, free of gravity and everything else, for just that instant.
    After a while they sat down on the new crater's rim, covered with white dust and black dirt. Oliver sat on the very edge of the crater, legs over the edge, so that he could see back down into their sublunar world, at the same time that he looked up into the sky. Three eyes were not enough to judge such immensities. His heart pounded, he felt too intoxicated to move anymore. Tired, drunk. The intercom rasped with the sounds of their breathing, which slowly calmed, fell into a rhythm together. Hester buzzed one phrase of "Bucket" and they laughed softly. They lay back on the rubble, all but Oliver, and stared up into the dizzy reaches of the universe, the velvet black of infinity. Oliver sat with elbows on knees, watched the white hills glowing under the black sky. They were lit by earthlight—earthlight and starlight. The white mountains on the horizon were as sharp-edged as the shards of dome glass sticking out of the rock. And all the time the Earth looked down at him. It was all too fantastic to believe. He drank it in like oxygen, felt it filling him up, expanding in his chest.
    "What do you think they'll do with us when they get here?" Solly asked.
    "Kill us," Hester croaked.
    "Or put us back to work," Naomi added.
    Oliver laughed. Whatever happened, it was impossible in that moment to care. For above them a milky spill of stars lay thrown across the infinite black sky, lighting a million better worlds; while just over their heads the Earth glowed like a fine blue lamp; and under their feet rolled the white hills of the happy moon, holed like a great cheese.

Sacrament
    by Matt Williamson

    Matt Williamson's fiction has appeared in Barrelhouse Magazine , Gulf Coast , The Portland Review , Ruminator , and The Cimarron Review . He is a graduate of the University of Texas and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he's currently working on his first novel.

    Ever watch TV and think the ads are funnier than the sitcom they interrupted? Or see a beautiful photo in a magazine, only to wonderingly discover it's an advertisement? Moments like these blur the boundaries between art and advertising, a borderline that grows increasingly unclear in this era of corporate sponsorship of the arts.

    Matt Williamson spins a world where art and advertising have collided on such a large scale that a Nike art project can fill Times Square, and an Apple light show can be seen from outer space. The world is loaded with art-advertising objects so massive and inescapable that an international war has erupted over its imperialist presence. Or perhaps that's just the view of our protagonist, a character who maintains his own uncertain boundary between art and his life's work as an intelligence extractor.
    It's not an easy craft, pulling information out of the unwilling. It takes special tools, a unique skillset and a sense of intuition that can't be taught. It's a gift. A talent. It's easy to see why some people might call torture an artform.

    But it's only in a truly broken world that anyone would.

    B ones are not organs, under the Protocols. I've got that stuck up on the wall in the locker room, the briefing room, big signs, all caps: BONES ARE NOT ORGANS.
    That leaves a lot of running room. The kneecap? What you can do with the kneecap? That alone will get you farther than you need to go, in almost every case. The kneecap. The chin. The lowest knuckle on the forefinger. Those are
    my favorite bones.
    I always say, you can tell my guys in a crowd. From their hands.

    The trick is, can you keep him lucid. Can you keep Ali sharply focused on the Program all the way through. Part of it is physical control, part of it is drugs, and part of it, I say a little facetiously but not totally facetiously, is artistry: the artistry of the lead interrogator. Before the pinpoints, before Suspensions, we couldn't keep a guy from passing out. Wake him up with ammonia, it's not the same as having him alert. Now we've got pinpoint synthetics that allow sustained equilibrium. No fainting, no grogginess, no euphoria. It isn't quite the same as True Awake; Dr. Ghose calls it a simulacrum. It's better than True, in some ways. Ali's awake, sans certain defenses. With catheters and drips, we can preserve that balance—not for hours, but weeks, months. Last week, I left a Session, went home, played kickball with my