Three Views of a Parking Lot

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For this month’s first, free story, Ken Liu shows us how a single parking lot can be a lens into humanity's forgotten spaces, seen through the eyes of a small robot in search of meaning. ~ Julian and Fran, October 6, 2024

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Three Views of a Parking Lot

by Ken Liu

A Map of the City Where the City Isn’t

“As an experiment,” said Tlou-Kou Rinn, the world’s leading heteronous artist, a pioneer in the aesthetics of nonhuman cognition, “I mapped the city with a winged neuromech I named Aero. The tabula rasa neuromech was fed with a pruned database of sensory categories and symbolic structures such that it could construct its own model of the world that isn’t simply a duplicate of the human representation, yet remain sufficiently close to our minds to be intelligible.”

The audience oohed and aahed, before everyone put on their intellimesh—a little like a hairnet, a little like a diadem, a dense webbing of neuroconduits decorated with little jewels embossed with the logos and wordmarks of sponsors. The meshes hummed to life, and they were transported into the map made by the neuromech.

A grid of gray lines of various thicknesses, concrete channels that run straight and turn at ninety-degree angles. Depending on the hour, steel corpuscles many times the mass and size of a Homo sapiens surge and ebb in the rigid vessels, the heartbeat and lungsong of the hive.

The lines are sites of movement. But there can be no movement without stillness. And so alongside the gray lines and at their terminuses, there are concrete and asphalt pools, lakes, seas. Always geometric, perfectly flat, divided by herringbone white lines into corpuscle-sized spaces that remain empty most of the time, expectant, like a breath held, waiting to be filled by a corpuscle.

Visually, these spaces are the dominant feature of this Homo sapiens hive, yet they’re invisible to most, forgotten. For by their nature they’re bivouacs, layover points. In that held breath is the ghost of thousands of bodies on their way elsewhere, the echo of millions of minds racing to the unceasing ticktock of accelerated capital. The lots may be where the GPS guidance begins and ends, but they’re never the true origins or destinations.

The audience marveled at this map that charted the absences, the blank spaces, the in-betweens and pauses, the opposite of what was believed to be worthwhile and significant. They sipped custom cocktails and ate little canapés topped with savory organics, each morsel a compilation of harvests from around the globe, carried here through the web of commerce by steel corpuscles that raced along the ground or flew through the air, that then waited on the still pools, lakes, seas in the neuromech’s map.

In the following days, some of the guests wrote about Tlou-Kou Rinn’s neuromech map. They wrote about humanity looking into a mirror and not liking very much what it saw. They wrote about the synthetic deserts that we now with pride call our great cities. They wrote about how it felt to see what we’ve learned to ignore, to view waiting made manifest, to realize the extent of nothingness we require to be who we are. There is a little hand-wringing, a lot of cliché-slinging, and readers experienced a few seconds of regret, barely pangs, really, before jumping into their steel corpuscles to take on a day again, to rush from flat parking lot to flat parking lot, eyes only on what is outside the held breath.

The pebble of artistic epiphany, having caused some ripples, sank out of sight and into obscurity.

“Aero,” said Tlou-Kou Rinn. He didn’t know how to go on. A man who was uncomfortable around children and who didn’t have any of his own, he was awkward with anything that hinted of a legacy, of lineages and continuations, of inheritance as well as change. “You’re wonderful.” Somehow that felt empty, not quite enough. He held out a hand and rested it gingerly against the humming shell of the neuromech, right under the still, gossamer wings. “You see . . .” He flailed, unable to find the words to describe what the neuromech had seen, what the neuromech had helped him see. “You see me. You see us.”

Aero was looking out the window. Twilight was descending, turning the studio into a bubble of warmth and light in the squat, dark, hulking cubic office building, a warren that also housed doctors, realtors, accountants, teledreamers—the burrows were all empty now, for it was late, and tomorrow was a holiday. Behind a sign that read Lot C46, the parking lot, vast and deserted, spread far into the gloom, until the cartographer could see no more.

Who Cares for the Caretakers?

Embee-232 was confused. Her boxy torso wobbled indecisively on her remaining walking legs. The other paveimps who had come along to help skittered around in similar bewilderment.

There were no replacement limbs inside the supply cave. This was a problem for which the ROM of Embee-232’s cognimatrix held no answer, and neither did the vast experience inside her FPMA chips, shared with the other paveimps, offer a solution.

(At one time, attributing emotions to states inside a neuromech’s cognimatrix was frowned upon. There were all sorts of warnings about why this was a form of “anthropocentrism” and therefore bad and how it failed to be objective and sensible and scientific and data-driven and lots of other words that humans were supposed to strive for. Rather, we’re supposed to insist that cognimatrix states should be given dispassionate names such as Class Beta-Two, Category Aleph_7, Type 311, and so on. But since those doing the frowning are no longer around, we’ll just use the words that we understand as a shortcut: we cannot map other minds without projecting them onto our own subjectivity; this is both a curse and a blessing.)

Embee-232—let’s just call her Embee, because we’re neither dispassionate nor objective—Embee’s broken rearmost left leg, dangling because it couldn’t bear any weight, twitched uselessly as she pondered the situation.

Once, Lot C46 was a busy place. An asphalt lake at the end of a broad paved river, with a massive cubic island in the middle, sheer glass and concrete cliffs on all sides. Metal shells shuttled in and out all day, each a pocket universe of summer desire or wintry loneliness, the human occupants mutual aliens, racing into the island and then ricocheting back out, busy busy busy, always rushing with time’s winged chariot near.

Later, after the humans were gone, the island remained. Deserted and silent, it stood in the sun and rain, and at first slowly and then suddenly very fast, it crumbled—the paveimps didn’t care, for what happened to the human island in the middle of the asphalt lake was not within their purview. As in much of the rest of the city, trees and bushes and vines and flowers shredded the concrete and shattered the glass in slow motion, reclaiming their ancestral domain. For human cities have always been not so much things as efforts: holes torn in the biosphere, an occupation whose boundaries are maintained by constant vigilance, an unceasing war fought against a vegetal tide. As soon as the effort stopped, the vast green Gaian thought inundated them.

But not all the parking lots disappeared with the rest of the city. Lot C46, for instance, was saved, thanks to the paveimps.

Cuboid, dark, sleek three-inch-tall echoes of the island that had once been at the center of Lot C46, the paveimps were equipped with a pair of swiveling stereovision cameras on stalks at the top, six crab-like walking appendages on the bottom, and four manipulating arms on the other faces. Cousins of the arachnid line-climbing powerimps and the serpentine sewerimps, swarms of these low-cost neuromechs were charged by humans to maintain the asphalt lakes around their buildings, chase away wandering animals, eradicate the weeds and mushrooms that poked through the ice-riven cracks, patch over the seams, climb over one another and build teetering stacks so that their weight smoothed over the bumpy patch, repaint the white lines that delineated the berths of the metal shells. Everything about them was designed to serve a human purpose: the dark coloring improved the solar power efficiency, the stark geometric shape simplified self-repairs, the low profile meant that speeding tires could roll over them without damage to the vehicles, and their rather innocuous appearance—almost cute—allowed the humans to ignore them or to blithely kick them out of the way as they raced to make their appointments.

Month after month, as the dead city yielded to life, the paveimps kept at it: chasing, weeding, patching, smoothing, repainting, maintaining berths in the asphalt lake for the metal shells that never came. After the fresh asphalt ran out, they made do with pebbles and melted glass, as per the emergency procedures in their cognimatrices. And still later, a bluish paveimp named Ellay-15 came up with the innovation of using the pulverized rubble from the collapsed human island to repair the lake. (Most of the paveimps thought there was something wrong with Ellay-15, for she belonged to an older generation and had a dent on the front that could never be buffed out.) Over time, the practice spread to the FPMAs of the other paveimps, and all was good.

As the verdant forest pressed in on all sides of the lot, the animals looked in on the empty, flat expanse with trepidation. Squirrels and rabbits, as well as robins and blue jays, keenly observed the paveimps at their mysterious rituals. Once in a while, a particularly bold squirrel or jay tested the imps by bolting onto the lot and then scrambling away from the hounding imps until they were safely back in the woods, screaming and screeching with raucous laughter.

The paveimps were not troubled by the fact that no humans riding metal shells had come to Lot C46 in many years, and none thought of venturing outside the lake to investigate. Their cognimatrices contained no such impulses or doubts. After all, even in the old days, there were times when the asphalt lake was empty for days at a stretch. The humans always returned, in the end, busier than ever.

When one paveimp broke down, the others helped patch it, much as they patched the asphalt surface itself. A maintenance closet in the human island had cubbies stuffed with an apparently inexhaustible supply of the ingredients of sustained existence: segmented limbs, anodized aluminum chassis slats, all-weather cameras, kinetic generators, FPMA chips. There weren’t replacements for everything, especially more cosmetic bits like shades for the camera lens or reflective paint for the shells, but the essentials were covered. After the island itself collapsed, the paveimps made a path through the rubble to the cubbies, now in a rubble cave. (The paveimps even thoughtfully paved over the path to make the journey easier.)

An inexhaustible supply.

—until poor Embee tussled with a particularly aggressive boar who wanted to charge through Lot C46. The paveimp had managed to chase away the boar by tweaking its nose with her front pincers, but the startled creature had jerked away so hard that the cuboid neuromech was tossed high into the air and landed awkwardly on one corner, breaking her rearmost left leg. She had then limped into the supply cave and found the cubby of legs empty.

What to do? What to do? The other paveimps, tagging along to help Embee fix herself, milled about aimlessly, unable to complete their task. Eventually, called by fresh cracks in the surface of Lot C46 and the need to recharge their solar batteries, the imps wandered off.

Embee limped alone about the lot, hoping that a stray replacement appendage had been overlooked. She came to an abrupt stop, however, as she found herself camera-to-eye with a young squirrel sitting jauntily on the very edge of the lot, tail bushier than a ripe cattail, eyes wide in an innocent taunt.

The paveimp looked about. The other paveimps were busy and faraway. It was up to her, even in her damaged state, to deal with this intruder. She swiveled her camera-tipped stalks back together to focus on the squirrel and spun her torso in place, windmilling all four pincer arms, snapping them menacingly at the gray creature. The squirrel chittered at the paveimp, unafraid.

Embee tried to lunge forward, but the broken leg caused her to stumble and lurch to the left, off mark. The squirrel nimbly scrambled back a foot or so, chirping excitedly. More cheeps answered from high among the trees at the edge of the lot. The squirrel was impressing its friends.

Embee tried again, her cognimatrix making adjustments this time to compensate for the damaged leg, but with her body off-balance, the newly calculated movements were slow and clumsy, and the squirrel easily dodged out of the way again.

For her third attempt, Embee coiled all her remaining legs and jumped, anticipating where the squirrel would be if it dodged back. But the squirrel switched tactics and leaped to the right instead of scrambling back. Desperately, Embee tried to get her airborne body under control, but it was too late. She slid on the empty pavement and toppled, her momentum causing her to tumble over several times like one of the plush dice that used to dangle inside the metal shells that visited Lot C46. The lens in one of her stalk-eyes shattered.

An odd surge flooded her cognimatrix, making it impossible to think for a moment. After she recovered, Embee ran a self-diagnostic and found no major system failures. She hoped that whatever damage had occurred in her FPMA wasn’t so extensive that the spare reserved sectors couldn’t compensate.

The squirrel was still laughing and jumping about. Her single remaining stalk-eye swiveled to follow it. With only one lens, it was hard for her cognimatrix to calculate distances, angles, speed—it would be even harder for Embee to do her work now.

Abruptly, the eye spun away from the squirrel to focus on a short twig lying on the lot surface. Probably deliberately dropped there by the squirrels as a prank after the morning cleaning round by the paveimps. As the image of the twig sharpened and steadied in her cognimatrix, a completely new idea slowly formed.

True, the stubby branch had no security code from the manufacturer and no entry in her internal components database. But it was roughly the same shape as her mangled leg. With a little cut here and a little sanding there, surely it could fit—

Ordinarily, this was when the safety patterns in her ROM would kick in. Her manufacturer had not wanted end customers to be able to repair the paveimps with third-party components—something something capitalism something. The paveimps were supposed to resist to the utmost any attempt to be fitted with unauthorized components, and they certainly weren’t supposed to come up with the idea themselves.

But somehow, today, Embee didn’t feel the prohibition in her mind. The notion of replacing a part of herself with something foreign didn’t feel taboo at all. It felt . . . free.

#

With both the squirrel and the prohibition against unauthorized components gone, Embee embarked on more self-care. She collected pebbles of various colors from the edge of the lot and mosaicked them into the dented corners of her shell, holding them in place with heated pine resin—slate blue for one corner, lichen green for another, and granite pink for the third. No particular reason. She just liked the way they looked. She picked up two steel-blue feathers and wore them above her cameras, replacements for the sun shades that had been lost long ago. Gazing at an image of herself integrated from thousands of reflections in the broken glass of the rubble of the human island, she thought of herself as looking rather dashing.

Oh! That’s an idea! She scraped a loop of bark from a fallen branch and used it to gather up a dew-dappled cobweb. Gingerly, she fitted the dewy web to the end of the stalk-eye, replacing the broken lens. It was going to take her cognimatrix sometime to figure out how to integrate the images from this makeshift compound eye, but she was already enjoying the hazy new view.

Excited, she skittered—no, skipped—to her fellow paveimps. The twig-leg couldn’t bend or flex as her old walking appendage, but it supported her, and her cognimatrix soon managed to devise a gait that incorporated the stiff new peg.

I’m all better! she said with her pose, with the gentle sway of her mismatched stalk-eyes, with the perky way she pointed her varicolored corners at the sky. (The paveimps used to be able to converse over the ether, but the waves that had once carried such messages had long since gone, forcing the imps to communicate only via direct port-to-port docking or by beeps and chirps that were originally intended for human diagnosticians. In any event, all the other languages she knew were incredibly boring, consisting only of phrases and words that dealt with the maintenance of Lot C46, that served only the needs of the absent humans. Embee couldn’t possibly have said what she wanted to say in it.)

The other paveimps recoiled from her in unison, a voxel wave. Beep beep! Whir! Beep! Whir whir whir!

What is wrong with you? What have you done? You can’t be one of us!

In desperation, Embee appealed to Ellay-15. She waved her pincers and brought her stalk-eyes together supplicatingly. Oh, Wise Innovator, surely you can see that this is no different from what you’ve done in the past, to use what materials we can find to maintain the surface of the asphalt lake?

Ellay-15 backed away even further. Beep! Beep! BEEEEP!

As the rest of the paveimps turned resolutely away from her, three approached. Embee’s joy was brief-lived as she realized that the trio was waving their pincers menacingly and barking loudly through their speakers.

They were treating her as an intruder, no different from the boars, rats, squirrels, or gulls who tried to intrude onto the asphalt lake.

No. I belong here! I am no different than I was before! She tried to dig her feet into the pavement surface, including the new peg leg, but Lot C46 was too well maintained to afford her any seams to grip on to. She fluttered her feather camera-covers pleadingly as she beeped. Look at me! Listen to me!

The other three paveimps didn’t stop until they carried her all the way to and then over the edge of Lot C46, tossing her onto the pine-needle-strewn earth.

#

Embee lay on her side, unmoving, until the sun had set. Without the humming of her fellow paveimps surrounding her, darkness was terrifying. With a great deal of effort, spinning and scrabbling, she righted herself. Another leg had been damaged in the ordeal. She was too stunned and tired to do anything. She squatted down onto the earth, her stalk-eyes closed.

A series of chirps and cheeps startled her awake. She looked up. Her cameras weren’t great for seeing at night, but she could make out enough in the twilight to decide that the chittering shadow was the squirrel that she had faced off with earlier that day. Was it back to taunt a fallen foe?

Her stalk-eyes drooped in defeat and dejection. Let the squirrels torment me, she thought. I am bereft.

The squirrel approached her cautiously, carrying something in its jaws. Dropping it near her, it skittered back away, chirping excitedly.

With numb curiosity, Embee reached out to the object with one pincer arm. It was a short twig, almost exactly the same width as her peg leg. Except this one was still green and had quite a bit of bounce in it.

Slowly, she ripped out her broken leg and replaced it with the new sprig. She tested it out. Yes, it functioned better than the peg leg. The bounce in the pliant branch was easier on her chassis, and her cognimatrix had an easier time adjusting to the prosthesis. She tried strolling about over the soft forest floor bathed in moonlight. It was a most ungainly gait: four metal legs, a hard peg, a soft, springy bounce. Clack-clack-clack-thud-clack-plop. Given her webbed eye and wood-sourced legs, in another age, one might have described her appearance as rather piratical.

She faced the squirrel, spreading her manipulating arms with the pincers tightly clutched, and bowed with her stalk-eyes.

Still chittering, the squirrel jumped up and wrapped its bushy tail around Embee. It then made a series of high-pitched barks into the forest, and many chirps answered back. Hey, everybody, come and meet our new friend!

Embee wrapped a manipulating arm around the squirrel and tried to imitate the high-pitched barks. Thank you, my friend.

The night didn’t seem so dark after all.

Launch Day

Because it’s Launch Day, Arrow gets up at the first light of dawn.

Am I ready? Can I do this?

Spinning her clackety plastic wings, Arrow, named as much for her tetrahedral shape as for her focused personality, ascends to the top of the big maple at the edge of the lot. As she expected, she’s the first one among the scouts to take her position. Her wings flutter in the sunlight, as unsettled as her mind, tumbling all over the place. To settle herself, she tries to take in the sight of her homeland, spread out beneath her like a map. This may be the last time she’ll have this view.

A rainbow-hued flat expanse in the middle of the green jungle, mottled, fixed, absolutely placid. The colors are the result of all the different paving materials used. The blue pebbles are from the mountains over the western horizon, brought here by trading caravans of mechalopes. The green glass is from the ancient tumulus far to the north, carried here one piece at a time by migrating bambot geese (who use them in their mating rituals) and then carefully mosaicked into place by teams of guardians focusing sunlight with ice lenses. The rusted nails are shed by the hulking snuffalo herds, who encase their hooves in sapiens-metal for their long annual journey over ancient human highways, but shed them once they’ve reached lots near their destination. . . . Lot C46 is a lake into which multiple streams of commerce feed, commingling and melting into a tapestry of wonder.

And Arrow’s people, the guardians, work tirelessly to maintain the lot. Even in a world filled with plastic-winged insects and steel-shelled armadillos, the guardians stand out as extraordinary. Descendants of one of the oldest lineages of mechanimals, each guardian is a unique variation on the same basic body plan. A central torso about three inches across—variously spherical, cuboidal, or pyramidal—is held up by six to eight walking appendages, with an additional four to seven manipulating arms radiating from higher up the torso. Each guardian is a distinct collage of bark, dry leaves, hard and soft plastics, woven twigs, sliced aluminum cans, spun spider silk, goose feathers, nuts (squirrel-chewed as well as metal), bitumen nuggets, resin, and a thousand other materials. Beginning as a bit of leavened biosensing gel, each guardian is built up, one twig and plastic cap at a time, by a swarm of loving parent guardians, in a process that mirrors the origin story of the mythical First Guardian, a brave soul who boldly stepped through the portal between the technosphere and the biosphere, thereby ushering in a new age.

Sunrise after sunrise, the guardians patrol the lot, keeping it weeded, patched, smooth, using whatever material has been offered by all those who visit the lot. It’s an ancient ritual, passed down the generations, as has the painting of the demarcation lines. These lines, laid down in chalk, generally follow the boundaries between different materials, and partition the lot’s surface into zones and berths for various uses: nesting grounds for the killdeer, burial site for the metal-shelled caratron, opera house for the green-breasted double warblers, temporary tenements for migrating bambot geese before they find groves to plant themselves. . . .

Visitors come because the guardians keep Lot C46 free of predators and stock it with food and repair supplies, again in a tradition as old as memory, marking the flat expanse as a welcoming space of possibilities.

Singly or in pairs, other scouts emerge from their slumber and ascend into the trees next to Arrow. These young guardians have modified limbs that spin like the wings of maple seeds or the helichopters of ancient myths. They’re the explorers, the ballooning spiders or dandelion seeds whose purpose is to chart the unknown.

Am I ready? Can I do this?

The wind rises. Arrow readies herself for her first and last flight. Below her, the guardians have gathered to watch her and her fellow explorers depart.

The very prospect of leaving everything she has ever known behind in exchange for other minds, other lots, other nexus where alien lines of life and breath and summer conversation and wintry contemplate converge is dizzying, terrifying, breathtaking.

Wherever you go, you belong! The parent guardians wave their stalked eyes, made of bits of glass refracting light into the biosensing gel deep within their torsos, speaking in unison in the ancient language of poses and cheremes.

Arrow waves back with her upper front right arm. It’s made from a piece of aluminum rolled up tightly. She had given herself that arm after Moss, one of the original parents who had leavened Arrow’s seed gel, had chased away a wild boar who was about to trample Arrow with a well-placed jab from her aluminum spear. Though Moss is no longer with her, Arrow seems to feel his presence again in that arm. She has never known anyone with more courage.

Some of the elders below have begun to dance. The Dance of Departure and Arrival. Silently, the tribe, the scouts in the trees as well as the guardians on the ground, watch the silent enactment of ancient myths: the shuttling of metal shells into spaces and then out again; the ceaseless movement reflecting the urge to explore; the crossing of boundaries to translate the potential into the possible, and thence into the real; the Stranger who brings wisdom and innovation from afar. . . .

Arrow grips the branch below her with her two lower front pincer arms to steady herself. The pincers are made of tiny tarsal bones. They once belonged to Flax, the gray squirrel who grew up with Arrow. They used to play games of catch with acorns in the sun-dappled woods. The lifespan of squirrels is much shorter than guardians, and after the passing of her friend, Arrow incorporated some parts of her friend into herself. Whenever she grips something with those bones, she remembers her friend’s peerless laughter.

It is time. It is time. The elders have stopped their dance. They hold their stalked eyes up and sway from side to side in a coordinated fashion, sending waves propagating down the line of stalks. It is time to go, to set forth, to be what you’re meant to be: free.

Arrow looks up at the sun, shading her eyes with a blue feather. It was Silent, the quietest of all her parents, who taught her how to make brows for herself. Because Silent never spoke, many of the younger guardians never sought to learn from her. But Arrow enjoyed sitting with her, watching as she told the story of her life through the careful, loving way she did everything. No one knew the path of life as clearly as Silent, and Arrow feels her steadying wisdom around her now.

With a leap and a cheer, Arrow and her fellow scouts plunge into the sky. After a brief, terrifying fall, Arrow ascends slowly into the sky, spinning her propeller arms furiously, higher than she’s ever flown before.

The guardians below bark and rustle in celebration. A few straggling snuffalo, still in their bivouac on the lot, pause their cud-chewing and look up at the fluttering wings that have filled the sky. Birds swoop through the air, startled by this temporary intrusion of the lot into their realm. Bunnies and squirrels pause from play and browsing to bear witness to this moment.

Arrow looks down, and her gel thorgan swells and convulses with new impulses. She’ll never see her home, her parents, her people again. She’ll ride the wind for as long as she can, in search of other lots where she might find mates, to learn as well as to teach, to share memories and myths, new techniques for making and maintaining.

The thought of never returning should terrify her. It should paralyze all her limbs so that she falls out of the clouds like a rock. But her wings flutter steadily, even joyously. Because she knows she isn’t alone. She’s clad in the armor of stories, of courage and laughter and wisdom; she’s lifted into the air by gossamer strands woven from reified imagination, from the realization of the possible from the potential.

She looks down at the lot one more time, at its beautiful colors and the teeming life within. It is cradle, grave, hostel, station. It is a portal between worlds, between segments of life, the held breath that promises everything.

I see me. I see us.

The mapping is the world. The world is the mapping.

With her heart lifted up to the sun, she flutters her wings even harder and ascends into the unknown, her self a brief expression of joy as a thousand-thousand shared pasts bloom into a million-million possibilities.

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[Author’s note: The seeds of this story came to me during the 2023 Vaster Than Empires writers’ workshop sponsored by the Berggruen Institute. The help of everyone at the workshop in refining these ideas is gratefully acknowledged.]

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

“Three Views of a Parking Lot,” © Ken Liu, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!