Liza Olson
1. THE DISPATCHMay You / Live In / Interesting Times
May You
Will sits and sketches a robot onto loose-leaf on his bottom bunk before dinner. Dinner is PB&J if there’s still some left from lunch. PB & syrup if not. Half a sleeve of saltines with that, and maybe a cup of watered-down cherry Flavor Aid. They’re waiting on their 30 days to pass at the food banks within walking distance. Collecting gas money change for the ones farther out. When he’s done putting together his story for the night, little Will is adjusting rabbit ears and trying to get a clear signal for the New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone marathon. The sky is the color of Pepto-Bismol, the ground a Midwestern permafrost. The heat hasn’t gone out yet, and they say they won’t cut it in winter months, but they did last year anyway, so Will has his snow jumper ready, winter coat, scarf, gloves. He folds them up nice, the way Mom showed him, puts them at the foot of his bed, and hopes he doesn’t have to use them. So then, when Henry Bemis cries out that it’s not fair, that there was time now, and the power cuts shortly after, throwing Will’s room into darkness, just the pink glow of sunset coming through his window, Will’s got the jumper on, then the coat, the rest. He’s got a double-A flashlight ready, comforter as fort as he finishes his robot sketch and moves onto the next page.
Live In
To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of May You Live In Interesting Times, the organizers of TimesCon have prepared a very special, very unexpected surprise for the year’s attendees. The book’s famously reclusive author, Will Foster, will be making an appearance. A simple interview, brief audience Q & A, and ten minutes of signing, that’s it. Will needs to be back in his hotel room by 3 o’clock. Ostensibly because he’s elderly and infirm, which is true, but also so he won’t miss too much of the New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone marathon before it’s time for bed. On stage, the audience’s rapture is almost too much for Will to bear. The speaker’s preamble goes on long, and in his eighty-three years on this planet, Will still hasn’t managed to become comfortable with attention or praise. They bring in a few guests, including the inventor of the consciousness stasis and uploading process, the inventor of the jackport, and the inventor of the first robotic body suitable for consciousness transplantation. Will can’t remember their names even after the presenter announces them to cheers and applause, but he nods his gratitude as each of them share their own introductions to Will’s work, all the ways that his fiction of the possible became their life’s work. As he listens, Will wants to interject, to ask if they’d noticed even a single bit of his cautionary subtext, or had they been too enamored by his robots, spaceships, and speculative worlds to care? The question depresses him, but he keeps nodding, keeps smiling. He answers all their questions and signs all their books. Later that night, in Will’s hotel room, Henry Bemis collects his broken glasses and cries, again, about it not being fair, about there being time now. The sky outside is a dark and dusky purple.
Interesting Times
To the metal refugees, the danger doesn’t lie in the glow that consumes skin but not steel. The danger lies in the people who at best want them decommissioned, at worst want to steal their bodies for their own before the glow snuffs them out like it’s done to so many others before them, going back dozens of generations, into a past that is apocryphal and filled with too many legends, not enough surviving facts. The refugees wear long robes that go down to their feet whenever possible, cover as much of their body as they can and move a little slower so they might better replicate the movement of muscle and bone and not servo and actuator. One of them, Willow, is being given guard and passage at high glow, when flesh and blood is least likely to be out. She doesn’t remember much from before, having been transferred at a young age, can’t put an image in her simulator of what it was like to feel the pangs of hunger in a stomach that processed food. The ones old enough to remember compare it to the feeling she gets when she’s scavenging for another page, a surviving slip cover. Or what the feeling was like, before she completed the project. Before the book was re-assembled. And so they lead Willow to safety, to the shantytown run by and for metal refugees. She doesn’t need to pay for her safety there, none of them do, but she reaches into her pack anyway, produces the sacred book and holds it up for them to see, to admire the cover and read the title: May You Live In Interesting Times. The sky is a brilliant, glow-infused gold.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYWater bottle (Sometimes swapped for a coffee mug.)
Headphones (I make a separate playlist for every project. Afterglow had a lot of ambient work from Cryo Chamber's channel, plenty of Japanese Breakfast, Hawaii: Part II, some Beach Boys, a lot of Rebecca Sugar, and Jonathan Larson's work on repeat.)
Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch (Not pictured, in the desk.)
Bookshelf (Lately it's been a re-read of my favorite novel, Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, but I like to have a few books on rotation.)
3. BIOGRAPHYLiza Olson (she/her) is the author of the novels Here’s Waldo and The Brother We Share and is the Editor-in-Chief of (mac)ro(mic). Her third novel, Afterglow, releases June 2022. A Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and 2021 Wigleaf longlister in and from Chicagoland, she’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, and other fine places. Find her online at nickolsonbooks.com or on Twitter @nickolsonbooks.