In Issue 2, we have two pieces for you.

Jonathon brings us A Joy Reclaimed, a story about cybernetic existence that brings humanity to those facing a dearth of it. There is a reclaimed humanity in the cherished traits of the characters that such existence completes, but by insisting on the human desire to persist after we are gone, the machine also becomes a memory, a history. The machine becomes fiction itself, containing traces of a cumulative humanity within itself, an idea which gives me pause and makes me wonder.

Chris’ piece, The Stranger, is about many things, but I love that it is about unidentified flying objects—those pesky things which everybody claims to have seen, no one pins down exactly and about which all accounts differ. The stranger too, turns out to be an unidentified flying object on all these counts, difficult to explain and relate with. Through this parallel, the story opens some windows to what happens when that which we consider peripheral is starkly introduced in our world, and the brush with paranoia that ensues.