Brave New Worlds

up.
    She sang; it was beautiful, even if it was broken. The pattern in the sound reminded me of the colors on her screen. The sound grew louder as she continued, and then I saw that little flying animals had come from the sky and joined her, together adding their voices and fixing where hers was broken. It must have been the best sound in the world, because then finally, Niles woke up, and he smiled.
    "Hey-a, Boo, "he said. "You can sing." As if he had always known, and it wasn't a surprise to him. And maybe he did. Niles was smart, especially for an arty. Then he turned and smiled at me.
    "Hey-a, Mona. You rescued me. "
    "We did," I said. "And the brainiacs hardly helped at all. "
    He laughed. "that's good. But Ibeen thinking about what you said. You right. We should ask the brainiacs for help more often. Arties can't do everything. "
    I cried, and hugged, and cried some more.
    Niles is getting better. He told me the secret of how the animals work, and at first, it made me sad. But we can eat the plants, and the animals too, so we don't have to go back to the Elderfolk for chits. We're staying here in our hiding places, and we're sharing what we know with the brainiacs. They're slipping away from their Elderfolk too. We need the thicknecks' help too, and the brainiacs are talking to them for us. Thicknecks listen to them, at least sometimes.
    There are plants and animals everywhere now, and they grow too fast for the tin men to stop them. And the little flying ones, they all sing such sweet songs. Boo, and Niles, and I sit and listen to them for hours. Boo says that she only made some of them, and doesn't know where the rest of them come from. The brainiacs have theories, but we don't understand them.
    And we still Make, more plants and more animals each day with more stolen factories. The ache is still there, but it's not the same. It's the ache you feel when things are good, not when things are bad. And that's the kind of ache that makes you feel good. Niles says he understands it, but I don't believe him. Nobody understands that, not even the smartest brainiac of them all.

Jordan's Waterhammer
    by Joe Mastroianni

    Joe Mastroianni's short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy and Tomorrow Speculative Fiction . He's currently working on a novel that he describes as a psychic Antarctic love story. He's done five deployments to Antarctica, and two to the south pole where he worked on instrumentation for climatic research. He's been a Silicon Valley executive for twenty-five years and says he's currently writing and building Tesla Coils.

    Most of the worst atrocities in human history spring out of the dehumanization of particular groups. Germany's war crimes during World War II are some of the most horrifying examples, with over 11 million people put to death not as individual humans, but as faceless Jews and Gypsies and anti-establishment "criminals. "

    But genocide isn't the only crime people commit when they strip the humanity from each other. Apartheid came from the same ugly source. Slavery, child labor, and even indentured servitude also depend upon devaluing a human being. It's sickening to imagine a society that encourages people to see a man merely as a tool, not even worthy of a name.

    Our next story gives us just such a society. The workers in this world fight to teach each other a man could be worth as much as the ore they work to mine, not because a man can be bought and sold for a particular price, but because a human being is valuable in and of himself.

    Here is a world without the right to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or even life itself. After all, how can a tool be free?

    T he gaffer tripped. He fell into Jordan's blade and was cut in half with the ore pile. Perhaps it was confusion. The boy may have had his hearing. Confusion in the mine was common among the young men who could hear the crash of shovels against rock, the impact of turbo-pressured water against
    stone, and the roar of the loader engines. Jordan felt the slight hesitation as his machine sliced through the soft human body on its way to the heavy pile of ore. A less experienced man may never have noticed the barely perceptible difference between the hydraulic shovel's passage through air and its passage through human flesh and bone.
    Jordan typed a command on his console. He marked the ore load "dirty. " the ore would have to be washed clean of blood and bone before it reached the refinery. He ordered another