PodCastle

* Author : Lauren Ring
* Narrator : Rebecca Fraimow
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by Fantasy and Science Fiction


Content Warnings for racial discrimination, terminal illness, and the death of a parent


PG-13



(emet)
by Lauren Ring
i. detection
When protesters take out the power at her Silicon Valley office, Chaya is at home, watching a golem pull dandelions.
The morning air is clear and cold. Chaya can hear her computer pinging alerts at her from inside her farmhouse. As soon as the dandelion patch is gone, she wraps her knee-high figurine in satin, pressing the cloth against its soft clay midsection. She lays her golem gently down by the riverside. A single tap on her phone activates the preprogrammed subroutine that wipes the alef from its forehead, leaving only the letters mem and tav — every instance in its code of emet, truth, becomes met, death.
She slips the bundle into the water, watching the satin flutter away in the current as the golem returns to the wet sediment. All that is left of Chaya’s creation are smears of ochre on her fingers and lines of code on her hard drive.
Chaya wipes her hands on her jeans and heads back to her daily bug tickets, ready to find out the day’s fresh disaster. Working from home has its perks, but maintaining her plot of land would be impossible without the help of her golems.





After a few false starts, Chaya has the bestowal of life down to a science. Each morning at dawn, she molds assistants from clay, connects them to her wireless network just like any smart watch or Bluetooth dongle, and passes them the day’s variables: a list of chores, with each step painstakingly defined. The golem in charge of the dandelions finished early, but there are others of various sizes lumbering about the yard, carrying eggs from Chaya’s chicken coop and clearing loose stones from her long, winding driveway.
Chaya stumbles over a heap of dandelion roots on her front porch and swears. She has forgotten to specify that the golem must dispose of the roots on her compost heap, not just wherever they happen to land once plucked. Another tweak for her chore list. There is less and less time for quality assurance these days, and Chaya tries to pour as much of that time as possible into her code for Millbank Biometrics.
“Sorry I’m late.” She slides her headset on before she even sits down, logging in to the morning standup.
“No worries. Headquarters lost power just now, so I’ll be taking over until management can find a hotspot.” The sprint leader smiles as he speaks. Chaya will never understand how her coworkers can be so cheery, not with the bug tickets stacking up and the release date approaching. Millbank has contracts with social media platforms, telehealth doctors, and even law enforcement agencies, so management has been very clear that there’s no postponing this release. Still, Chaya doesn’t want to seem unmotivated. She smiles, too, and taps her mic back on.
“That’s the third time this month. Is everything all right over there?”
“It’s just the privacy protests again. Legal still thinks we’re only collateral, since the office complex also houses a few major surveillance vendors. There’s nothing to worry about — especially for you, Chaya.”