My Recipe for Making Amends

Starting an interstellar penal colony could be an extremely practical idea, right? It could even provide a sponsoring corporation a good return on investment—though of course the initial investment would be massive. Making Amends is my series of short stories about a corporate government trying to put this idea into action, and the idea’s lovely and unforeseen consequences.

The first installment of the Making Amends series to appear was “Deep End.” In 2003, Nalo Hopkinson asked me to send her an anti-colonial science fiction story for her 2004 anthology So Long Been Dreaming, and my mind kept turning to historical examples of how empires had spread themselves. Australia, a long-running success, began as an extension of Britain’s prisons—a dumping ground for debtors, revolutionaries, and other undesirables. I took that as my model. I decided to let the convicts face the unknown dangers of life on alien worlds: the hostile animals, poisonous plants, and whatever other weirdnesses a strange ecosystem threw their way. If they were injured or died, well, too bad. After all, these were criminals and not a great loss—though the benefits they won, such as mineral rights, would of course belong to the supervising political and financial entities.

But there’s an obvious problem with extrapolating the Australian set-up into space, and that’s the prohibitive expense of hauling the necessary mass across the distance between Earth and any other at least semi-habitable planet. I solved the issue of cost by stripping the transported prisoners of their flesh. Since downloading and uploading consciousness is a familiar science fictional concept, I used it, but in my story, I made that practice more appropriately cruel by describing it as a very painful process, and part of the punishment.

Conceiving of these convicts as strings of data stored on a rocket-borne computer made them a lighter load, which made the whole venture much more feasible, economically speaking. Plus, it meant I didn’t have to worry about calculating the stresses human freight would be subject to during acceleration and deceleration. No bodies, no stress. And it also solved the problem of how long they’d have to spend aboard their interstellar rocket ship: if the prisoners were reduced to mere software programs, they could be run slowly, or intermittently shut down. So at sub-light speeds, these expeditions to other stars would take decades, centuries even—but not according to the prisoners’ perceptions. For them, the time would be long and tedious, but not necessarily interminable, unless those in control preferred to make their prisoners’ fully experience this taxing journey by ramping up the software’s run time.

The final fillip of whatthefuckery I added to “Deep End’s” premise was to stipulate that the bodies into which the convicts’ consciousness would be downloaded were cloned from the genetic material of their supposed “victims.” Thus a doctor providing abortions could be reborn into a body copied from the DNA of an aborted fetus, or a strike organizer into one copied from a corporation’s CEO.

“Deep End” raised lots of questions, but despite a publisher’s invitation to expand it into a novel, I didn’t feel the immediate need to answer them. Eventually, though, I wrote five other stories that supposedly do that, and I plan to write two more. In the chronological order of the stories’ events (rather than in the order I wrote and published them), the series looks like this:

“Over a Long Time Ago”—An interstellar voyage intended to found a penal colony on the planet of Amends goes missing. Mission Control assumes this is due to failed equipment. (I’m writing that one this winter.)

“Living Proof”—A political system’s AI creates another AI to supervise a follow-up expedition to Amends and prevent a second failure. “Living Proof” appeared in September 2018 in the anthology Mother of Invention, edited by Rivqa Rafael and Tansy Rayner Roberts. Here’s an interview about the story.

“The Best Friend We Never Had”—A trend-setting secret agent volunteers for the second mission. This story appeared in the January 2018 issue of Apex Magazine.

“Deep End”—Shortly before being sent down to her assigned settlement on Amends, a prisoner discovers the body she’s been downloaded into is defective. This is the first story I wrote, though it’s the fourth in my fictional chronology. As stated above, it appeared in 2004 in the anthology So Long Been Dreaming, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan.

“Like the Deadly Hands”—A prisoner testing the edibility of native flora turns one plant into a weapon against the penal colony’s “trustees.” This was my first Analog sale. It appeared in the December 2016 issue.

“In Colors Everywhere”—One of several settlements developing on Amends responds to Earth’s invasive plans to create more trustees via rape and implanted embryos. This story first appeared in the 2012 anthology The Other Half of the Sky, edited by Athena Andreadis and Kay T. Holt. 

“The Mighty Phin”—Convicts who haven’t been downloaded into physical bodies yet form an alliance with the Amends mission’s supervising AI. Tor.com “reprinted” this story in June 2016, and it was included in the anthology Cyberworld in November 2016.

“Making Amends”—The rebel convicts forming an Amends-wide network of settlements build relationships with the planet’s native sentients. (This one’s still unwritten; I’m researching the form of intelligence I want the natives to exhibit.)

Those are bare synopses of the Making Amends stories, both written and planned. But there’s a lot more going on in the series than these brief sentences can convey. The question of control kept coming up as I wrote them, for instance. The creation of an autonomous second AI meant that the original first AI, responsible for implementing the decisions of a fascist regime, had to give up control of its creation’s operations. The narrator of “Deep End,” Wayna, is subject to uncontrollable pain, and in “Deep End” and the later stories, prisoners are subjected to the control of the colony’s trustees and, through those trustees, the control of the state that exiled them.

Another common thread is the mutability of antagonism and the blurring of lines of enmity. The AI in charge of the Amends mission could well be taken to be the enemy of the prisoners, especially when they try to win their autonomy, but his position is more nuanced, and subject to change. For the first generation of Amends settlers, the connection between their consciousness and their flesh is potentially a hostile one. Trustees are put in positions of power that make them enemies of their fellow prisoners despite shared concerns. And always, the environments through which my stories’ characters move must be adapted to, placated, integrated into their lives. There are the stultifying class hierarchies embedded in the Earth-orbiting habitat where “Best Friend” takes place, the hard vacuum surrounding the mission’s spaceships in “Over a Long Time Ago” and “Deep End,” and of course, the alien landscape of Amends itself. All these tensions are explored, in all their ramifications.

By the time we see Jubilee, the Amends settlement at the center of these stories, the prisoners brought there have begun naming elements of their surroundings. Glow-in-the-dark Chrismas trees and Hannakka bushes soften the nights. Multicolored Rosetoos bloom and fruit, cured Redvines bind the walls of their homes and accessorize their clothing, and they fish the waters of Unrest Bay and scavenge the eggs that Prettybirds lay in the Rainshadow Mountains.

“Like the Deadly Hands,” summarized above, focuses on the activities of a “food tester.”  I’ve always been fascinated by the cultural wisdom encoded in food foraging and farming, and I’ve always wondered how we put it together. Did people talk to the spirits of plants they encountered? Did they watch what bears and monkeys and other animals ate and copy that? Did they try unfamiliar foods out on themselves and keep track of the effects?  Or perhaps they used combinations of all these techniques and more? My story’s protagonist, Wayna, relies mostly on the third strategy, putting herself in direct danger as part of her community’s struggle for independence.

One question I’ve faced from some editors and reviewers when talking about this series and a few other stories I’ve written is: What did my imprisoned characters do wrong? What justifies their treatment?

The short answer, the answer I give once I’ve quieted my fury enough to respond coherently is: “Nothing.” Nothing justifies the police persecution experienced by the hero of “Lazzrus” and “Sunshine of Your Love;” nothing excuses the confinement and exile of the involuntary inhabitants of Amends.

The longer, more specific answer I give tallies up behaviors recently re-problematized: seeking and providing abortions, presentation as an unassigned gender, non-heteronormative sexual interactions, and so on.

My home community is the African diaspora in the United States, specifically in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In my neighborhood there was never a need to discuss why someone was incarcerated. Incarceration was axiomatic, a basic condition of our lives. This past is the root of my resistance to the question. And the unfurling bud at the tip of the tree of my resistance is my dawning realization that I and many others—maybe you yourself—could easily be classified as criminals. Indeed, many of us are classified that way already.

In Making Amends I do my best to describe the steps and ingredients needed for us to break out of that oppressive categorization and into the deliciously wild unknown.

THE END