Sale announcement: my science fiction short story “For Every Bee, a Hive” will appear in Analog Science Fiction & Fact!
This is the story I read an excerpt of at the Space Opera Themed Reading at Worldcon 2022 (Chicon 8): The story of Tamar, cyborg salvager, scraping out a life on the edge of an AI-dominated solar system. When her ship is crippled by a mysterious new weapon, her only source of aid is a lonely little piece of her people’s most dangerous enemies: an element of an AI swarm.
Didn’t matter why the AI wanted to connect. Didn’t matter whether the AI wanted at all. Only mattered what she wanted.
The free humans had survived all these centuries by adapting. By taking new technologies into themselves and becoming what they needed to be. And now she needed to be a survivor.
“For Every Bee, a Hive” is also my examination of what it might mean for humankind to enhance itself with cybernetics: the opportunities we have for technology to improve the way we function by supporting, not replacing, the brains that we have. And my exploration of the Found Family trope in space opera – and how that yearning for family parallels an AI swarm’s dream of growth.
Watch for “For Every Bee, a Hive” in Analog Magazine, likely in 2024!