Page 36 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

[GdM] We now live inside huge information systems that no one person can fully understand. Algorithms shape what we see, institutions hold more data than anyone can review, and synthetic media makes evidence harder to trust. Does reality ever feel like an antimemetic problem to you?

[qntm] I don't know if "antimemetic" is the word I would use, but the fact that there is simply too much of the world to pay attention to all of it at once is a real problem. It's something we grapple with in reality and a problem characters in the book also grapple with. We are finite and mortal and we have to pick what even can pay attention to. This is where "attention economy" comes from as a term—because we now have attention scarcity.

[GdM] What do you think is the bigger danger now: information being deliberately hidden from us, or important truths being buried under so much noise that we can’t find them?

[qntm] To answer that I would need to know all about both of those things! Alas, definitionally, I cannot. The person who is hiding or burying this information is not me!

[GdM] Do you feel hopeful about where humanity is headed? What gives you hope, and what worries you most?

[qntm] I am cautiously optimistic about solar power and electrification, but even in the best scenario I think climate change is going to cause decades of pain. Modern LLMs I think are a multi-forked thing—I'm dubious of the way they are trained; the factual/practical work they can perform is impressive but still not at a point where I think it's reasonable to remove human checks from the loop; I am, subjectively, entirely uninterested in the visual media and written fiction they generate. I care about art made by humans.

[GdM] What would a genuinely good future look like to you? Not just one where humanity survives, but one where people can actually live well?

[qntm] At a very basic level people need to be able to do what they love doing without fear. To create and love and explore without fear of illness or insolvency or war or other people. But a weird thing in science fiction is that dystopias always feel more credible than utopias. Easier to envisage, easier to build. To me, utopias always seem to have an element of impossible fantasy to them. So I don't know how we get from here to there.

qntm is the internet handle of Sam Hughes, a writer and software developer living in the UK. He has been writing short-form and serial science fiction for most of this millennium; his preferred writing technique is to start from an interesting hypothetical and drive it to breaking point and far beyond.

Underbelly

By SenLinYu

She’d always judged marks by their looks, and he’d looked like an ordinary man, not like a monster at all.

It's a silly detail when there’s so much else to worry over: starvation, cold, the fear of discovery, whether Six is alright. Yet in the long, lonely hours in the dark, with only gnawing pain and endless hunger for company, she retreats to even her worst memories.

He’d had a heavy chin and an unremarkable face slightly lined with age. In a crowd, she wouldn’t have thought him much different from any other grown-up. Although he’d been very clean.

The cleanliness should have been a warning, but she’d been thinking with her belly, that someone so clean must have money in his pockets.

She’d been a natural thief because her hands were quick and small, and she looked young, closer to eight than thirteen.

There were no battle sounds or smoke in the air that day, and so the streets were full of people hurrying about for supplies before more fighting broke out—so distracted by haste that they were easy to steal from.

He’d been studying an ugly, heavy-headed mastiff tied outside a pawnshop when she brushed past, emptying his right pocket; yet it wasn’t a wallet that she came away with, but a leather case containing a mostly empty vial, hollow needles, and one empty space.

Stupid with hunger and not wanting to miss out on the riches of one so clean, she went back.

She bumped him as he was leaning forward to pet the dog, hard enough that he stumbled, distracting him as she slipped the case back. She made to catch him, dipping two fingers into his left pocket until she felt a handkerchief and the promising curve of a watch or large coin.

Before she could grasp it, a hard hand closed around her wrist.

She looked up and he was staring at her, his heavy chin jutting out. She braced herself to be angrily cuffed or kicked away, but he pulled her so close she could smell chemicals on him.

“I should beat you to death, as a warning to any friends watching,” he said. He had a western accent.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and she lunged, spitting in his face, trying to trip him, but he gave a quick jerk and she stumbled, knees crashing into the stone street as something stabbed into the side of her neck.

She reached up, startled, fingers finding a tiny puncture and her own blood.

His left hand still gripped her, and in his right gleamed a large needle attached to an empty tube.

She tried to pull away, but the street swam around her; everyone rushing past, no one noticing when she dropped to the ground.

“I was going to take the dog, but you’re prettier and even less likely to be missed.”

When she woke, she was clean, and so was everything around her: the metal tables and whitewashed walls; the knives, saws, and drills; even the bars of her cage.

***