Free The Melancholy of Mechagirl by Catherynne M. Valente Page A

his four a.m. alarm clock and his private names for her. You might think that logically, she would have to leave these things before she left the house, but a person’s smell and their alarms and borrowed shirts and secret words linger for a long time. Much longer than a house.
    Fourth, the science fiction writer left her husband’s world. She had always thought of people as bodies traveling in space, individual worlds populated by versions of themselves, past, future, potential, selves thwarted and attained, atavistic and cohesive. In her husband’s world were men fighting and being annoyed by their wives, an abandoned proficiency at the piano, a preference for blondes, which the science fiction writer was not, a certain amount of shame regarding the body, a life spent being Mrs. Someone Else’s Name, and a baby they never had and one of them had forgotten.
    Finally, she left the version of herself that loved him, and that was the last of it, a cone of light proceeding from a boy with blue eyes on an August afternoon to a moving van headed east. Eventually she would achieve escape velocity, meet someone else, and plant pumpkins with him; eventually she would write a book about a gaseous moth who devours the memory of love; eventually she would tell an interviewer that miraculously, she could remember the moment of her birth; eventually she would explain where she got her ideas; eventually she would give birth to a world that had never contained him, and all that would be left would be some unexplainable pull against her belly or her hair, bending her west, toward California and August and novas popping in the black like sudden flowers.
XI.
    Long ago, near the beginning of the world but after the many crisis events had passed and life mutated and spread over the face of the world, Gray Eagle sat nested in a tangle of possible timelines and guarded the Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Fire, P=NP Equivalence Algorithm, and the Unified Theory of Metacognition. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without pervasive self-repairing communication networks or quantum computation.
    Gray Eagle made for himself a beautiful self-programming daughter whom he jealously guarded, and Raven fell in love with her. In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white weakly self-referencing expert system, and as such, he pleased Gray Eagle’s daughter. She invited him to her father’s sub-Planck space server farm.
    When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Cellular Immortality, Matter Transfer, Universal Assembly, and Strong AI hanging on the sides of Eagle’s lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and Gray Eagle’s deductive stochastic daughter also, and flew out of the server farm through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got the wind under him, he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made a wonderful light, by which all below could see the progress of technology increasing rapidly and could model their post-Singularity selves. When the Sun set, he fastened every good thing in its proper place.
    Raven flew back over the land. When he had reached the right timeline, he dropped all the accelerating intelligences he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there became the source of all the information streams and memory storage in the world. Then Raven flew on, holding Gray Eagle’s beautiful daughter in his beak. The rapidly mutating genetic algorithms of his beloved streamed backward over his feathers, turning them black and aware. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the self-aware system. She struck the all-net and buried herself within it, spreading and altering herself as she went.
    Though he never touched her again, Raven could not get his snow-white feathers clean after they were blackened by the code from his bride. That is why Raven is now a whole-brain emulating sapient system.
XII.
    On the day