Brave New Worlds

, and in anthologies including Mojo: Conjure Stories , New Voices in Science Fiction , and I, Alien . Much of his short work has been collected in Tides from the New Worlds . He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, twin daughters, and his wife.

    In November 2008, American voters elected Barack Obama president of the United States. The race was not as close as it has been in recent elections, but the real excitement of the day was the high voter turn-out. With an estimated 61% of all registered voters choosing to cast votes, the 2008 election stands as the highest voter turnout in more than three decades.

    Of course, that means 30% or so of all registered voters didn't bother to turn up. And who knows how many U. S. citizens never got around to even registering in the first place?

    There are thousands of explanations for voter apathy, but in the world Buckell portrays in our next story, none of those excuses really matter; it's a techno-democracy failed by its own voters. But Buckell knows first-hand about systems that begin with high hopes only to crumble into disaster. He was born during a 1979 coup d'etat in Grenada, where the new government, according to Buck-ell, "fell into the spiral of quashing opposition to the point where it became draconian and people ended up lined up against walls and shot. "

    It would appear that a utopian government is only as strong as the voices of its resistance.

    F our days after the coup Stanuel was ordered to fake an airlock pass. The next day he waited inside a cramped equipment locker large enough to hold two people while an armed rover the size and shape of a helmet wafted around the room, twisting and counter-rotating pieces of itself as it scanned the room briefly. Stanuel held his breath and willed himself not to move or make a sound. He just floated in place, thankful for the lack of gravity that might have betrayed him had he needed to depend on locked, nervous muscles.
    The rover gave up and returned to the corridor, the airlock door closing behind it. Stanuel slipped back out. The rover had missed him because he'd been fully suited up for vacuum. No heat signature.
    Behind the rover's lenses had been the eyes of Pan. And since the coup, anyone knew better than to get noticed by Pan. Even the airlock pass cut it too close. He would disappear when Pan's distributed networks noticed what he'd done.
    By then, Pan would not be a problem.
    Stanuel checked his suit over again, then cycled the airlock out. The outer door split in two and pulled apart.
    But where was the man Stanuel was supposed to bring in?
    He realized there was an inky blackness in the space just outside the ring of the lock. A blotch that grew larger, and then tumbled in. The suit flickered, and turned a dull gray to match the general interior color of the airlock.
    The person stood up, and Stanuel repressurized the airlock.
    They waited as Stanuel snapped seals and took his own helmet off. He hung the suit up in the locker he'd just been hiding in. "We have to hurry, we only have about ten minutes before the next rover patrol. "
    Behind him, Stanuel heard crinkling and crunching. When he turned around the spacesuit had disappeared. He now faced a tall man with dark skin and long dreadlocks past his shoulders, and eyes as gray as the bench behind him. The spacesuit had turned into a long, black trench-coat. "Rovers?" the man asked.
    Stanuel held his hand up and glyphed a 3-D picture in the air above his palm. The man looked at the rover spin and twist and shoot. "Originally they were station maintenance bots. Semi-autonomous remote operated vehicles. Now they're armed. "
    "I see. " the man pulled a large backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.
    "So. . . what now?" Stanuel asked.
    The gray eyes flicked up from the pack. "You don't know?"
    "I'm part of a cell. But we run distributed tasks, only checking it with people who assign them. It keeps us insulated. I was only told to open this airlock and let you in. You would know what comes next. Is the attack tonight? Should I get armed? Are you helping the attack?"
    The man opened the pack all the way to reveal a small arsenal of guns, grenades, explosives, and—oddly—knives. Very large knives. He looked up at Stanuel. "I am The attack. I've been asked to shut Pan down. "
    "But you're not a programmer. . . "
    "I can do all things through explosives, who destroy for me. " the man began moving the contents of the pack inside the