Issue #17

"Heart of the Gyre" by Matthew Bey

For a few months the world panicked. There was talk of catastrophic power outages, the destruction of life-saving medical equipment, and food packaging rotting on grocery shelves. But the bacteria never left the confines of the gyre, and the futility of quarantining thirty-million square kilometers made it hard to maintain a high level of anxiety. Experts paraded through the respectable media outlets, reassuring everyone that plastic decay could only occur within certain parameters of pH, salinity, and temperature. The Vibrio wasn’t going to eat your tupperware any more than E. coli was going to eat your twinkies.

So the world population put the scuzz out of their minds and found new ways to frighten themselves.

"In A Stranger's Memory" by Eric Del Carlo

Anastas, remaining free and moving unseen at will, observed the gaunt survivors as they labored, some in shackles now, at taxing tasks that seemed to have no real object. Bodies crumpled by implosion were hung on posts.

Two days after the delegation came back over the hills, the collecting of fingers commenced.

"Seedling" by Ben Godby

This battle has been fought in every other country in the world. They had it in the States, and in China, in Russia, and Brazil; then in Nigeria, and in France, and in Turkey and Indonesia. And then everywhere else. Every member of every other Druid chapter's been arrested and imprisoned or executed. Every other Grove has been cut. Here, on the shore of Lake Athabasca, are the last two hundred and six trees on the planet, and the Canadian government has a plan to pulp them and make sheets of paper out of them. The papers will be big like diplomas and certify themselves as real paper, as real pieces of the last trees on Earth.