Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 Read Online Free PDF

hair!
    The boys come and join everyone to watch.
    I think I am going to faint.
    When she finally releases my hair, my hands reach up, afraid to discover how terrible the injury is.
    My hair is so creased and crooked and matted and frizzed that it feels like I am wearing a giant bird's nest on my head.
    I think I am going to vomit.
    Then the boys laugh and applaud.
    Why me, why me, why always, always me! I want to die!
    I receive my Certificate of Successful Penitence from Pearl Colony. The victory against the boys finished us in first place. But I feel no victory.
    For that Doi Liang and I are not done.
    We are not equal.
    We are not even.
    We are tied
    So now, you ask us all to write this stupid essay to our parents about what we have learned during our sentence here at Pearl Colony.
    Well, I will tell you what I learned here.
    Nothing
    Not one stupid, stinking thing.
    You tell me that I am a wicked girl, but you just hate me because I am more determined to be myself than you were ever strong enough to be.
    You cannot shame me. You cannot deny me. For I am Her Grace, Radiant Goddess Princess Suki. I will take the entrance examination for Pearl Opera Academy and I will prevail.
    Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will have skated out of here and forgotten you, and you will still be nuns, ugly, talentless nuns.
    Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will battle this evil girl again and I will prevail.
    Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will win the lead role in the Drift Season Pageant and in Beautymarch, and I will be crowned Super Princess of Wu-Liu.
    Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will make my stupid parents so sorry that they ever sent me away that they will beg me to forgive them, but I will not care because I will have already forgotten who they are, as everyone under Heaven will have forgotten them, as the nobodies that they are, while my name will live forever in glory.
    Next year at Pearl Opera Academy, I will be a Legend.
----

VOX EX MACHINA
    William Preston | 11545 words

    Credit for this tale's first breath goes to the author's eldest daughter, who informed him of the news that started his storytelling engine. As he says to students in his high school literature and film classes, though, "Inspired by a true story" means "We made up 99 percent of this." Bill is also currently making up the final two stories in his Old Man sequence.

    The head in the zippered bag wasn't an actual human head. Having climbed onto the seat arm so she could reach into the first overhead compartment, Karen tilted the sack toward her. Why, she wondered, shape a face yet not make it more attractive? Lips and puffy cheeks too red, as if the man had come back chapped from an Arctic expedition; blue eyes too large, even under half-lowered lids, like the cows' eyes she had dissected in biology class; the nose and chin both outthrust unreasonably far; and sparse, erratic hair: combined, these features produced in her a surge of pity for a face that had never drawn breath.
    In the rear of the plane, Brenda, the crew chief, bent to retrieve trash, her hips touching the seats on either side.
    Karen zipped the sack shut, then slid the sack into the tote bag slung over her arm. Maneuvered beneath a sweater, it joined her purse and the current airline magazine. She climbed down from the seat arm. Some airlines still had height requirements, but being short hadn't kept her from landing this job two years back.
    Brenda waved. Three weeks ago, when Karen's husband, Chris, had run off, probably with a woman he met through an online game, Karen had confided her woes to the older woman. Chris's handwritten note had said only that he would send divorce paperwork eventually.
    Brenda had a live-in boyfriend and a child from a prior relationship. "I'd kill the man who did that to me," she had said, convincing Karen with a steady glare. "And I'd make it slow. One body part at a time. And you
know
where I'd start."
    Though the women had shared this flight