The Grimm Future

Introduction copyright 2016 by Erin Underwood

Pair of Ugly Stepsisters, Three of a Kind copyright 2016 by Garth Nix

The Iron Man copyright 2016 by Max Gladstone

Zel and Grets copyright 2016 by Maura McHugh

For Want of a NAIL copyright 2016 by Sandra McDonald & Stephen D. Covey

The Shroud copyright 2016 by Dan Wells

Long-Term Employment copyright 2016 by Mike Resnick

Swan Dive copyright 2016 by Nancy Holder

The White Rat copyright 2016 by Dana Cameron

Origins copyright 2016 by Carlos Hernandez

Angie Taylor in: Peril Beneath the Earth's Crust copyright 2016 by John Langan

The Three Snake-Leaves copyright 2016 by Jeffrey Ford

The Madman's Ungrateful Child copyright 2016 by Peadar Ó Guilín

Stories of the Trees, Stories of the Birds, Stories of the Bones copyright 2016 by Kat Howard

Be Still, and Listen copyright 2016 by Seanan McGuire

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Erin Underwood

Pair of Ugly Stepsisters, Three of a Kind by Garth Nix

Little Brother and Little Sister by the Brothers Grimm

Rapunzel by the Brothers Grimm

Little Red-Cap by the Brothers Grimm

Cinderella by the Brothers Grimm

The Iron Man by Max Gladstone

Iron John by the Brothers Grimm

Zel and Grets by Maura McHugh

Hansel & Gretel by the Brothers Grimm

For Want of a NAIL by Sandra McDonald & Stephen D. Covey

The Nail by the Brothers Grimm

The Shroud by Dan Wells

The Shroud by the Brothers Grimm

Long-Term Employment by Mike Resnick

Death's Messengers by the Brothers Grimm

Swan Dive by Nancy Holder

The Six Swans by the Brothers Grimm

The White Rat by Dana Cameron

The White Snake by the Brothers Grimm

Origins by Carlos Hernandez

The Star-Talers by the Brothers Grimm

Angie Taylor in: Peril Beneath the Earth's Crust by John Langan

The Brave Little Tailor by the Brothers Grimm

The Three Snake-Leaves by Jeffrey Ford

The Three Snake-Leaves by the Brothers Grimm

The Madman's Ungrateful Child by Peadar Ó Guilín

The Bremen Town-Musicians by the Brothers Grimm

Stories of the Trees, Stories of the Birds, Stories of the Bones by Kat Howard

The Juniper-Tree by the Brothers Grimm

Be Still, and Listen by Seanan McGuire

Little Briar-Rose by the Brothers Grimm

Acknowledgments

Copyrights

Technical Notes

From NESFA Press

The Grimms' Fairy Tales following each story are based on the 1884 translation by Margaret Hunt. The numbers under the titles are the index number within the Hunt translation.

INTRODUCTION

by Erin Underwood

In 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first edition of Children's and Household Tales (Kinder und Hausmärchen), propelling their unique collection of fairy tales into literary history. Even before they published their collection, the stories themselves had already captured the imaginations of children and adults alike; they were tales that had been passed down person-to-person and generation-to-generation before finally being published by the Brothers Grimm. The last two hundred years have since smoothed away many of their sharp edges of sex and violence. How might these fairy tales continue to change over the next two hundred or two thousand years? How might they be retold? Would they even be recognizable as the old classics that shaped us as children?

Sweet Cinderella may be what many people think of as a classic Grimm fairy tale, but they won't find that fairy tale version of Disney's perfect princess within these pages. Rather than taking the well-worn path of choosing only the best-known and most well-loved classics, The Grimm Future authors choose to retell the fairy tales that best invoked visions of the future they wanted to tell. So, they did what authors do and mined the field of more than 200 Grimm fairy tales for the richest nuggets of inspiration. In so doing, they picked an exciting combination of old time favorites as well as many of the more obscure tales, running the gamut from a charming multi-tale mash-up by Garth Nix to retellings of Hansel and Gretel, Little Briar-Rose, and The Six Swans as well as the The Star-Talers, The Juniper-Tree, Iron John, and others.

Whether well-known or not, reading fairy tales is intrinsically appealing no matter your age or from which culture you come. This fascination paired with science fiction's age-old quest to explore the great What if? provides an exciting opportunity to examine what our future may hold. What will we find when gazing at the future through a Grimm fairy tale lens? Does humanity change over time? Does human nature? Will the human experience even be relevant in the future or will sentient life evolve beyond the physical plane? And—will Grimm fairy tales even have a place in that future?

It is my hope that The Grimm Future captures the appeal of the original Grimm fairy tales while also providing a glimpse into the near and the far-flung future through these 14 speculative retellings. I hope you enjoy the journey.

The Beginning

Table of Contents

PAIR OF UGLY STEPSISTERS, THREE OF A KIND

by Garth Nix

based upon multiple Grimm fairy tales, including

Little Brother and Little Sister, Rapunzel, Little Red-Cap, and Cinderella

Little Sister woke me up when the work ticket came in, which told me straight away it wasn't something routine. She'd have left it for my shift if it was the usual. We spent most of our time on pure maintenance work, going from worldlet to worldlet, invisible to the super-rich inhabitants within. This had to be something different.

Little Sister and me, we were just flotsam who'd managed to find a niche working for the Company, a niche that only existed because of the system-wide ban on AIs and on potential bodies for them, whether it be humanoid androids or super-capable robot chassis. Everyone feared those combos, ever since the AI that called itself Diablo took over the Jovian mining robots and their android overseers almost ten years ago and decided to rationalize humanity out of its future plans.

So. We worked for the Company, and the Company looked after the nine thousand or so worldlets between Mars and Jupiter, made a long time ago for the phenomenally rich of Earth, just how they wanted them. They were all pretty much the same on the outside, these worldlets. Just big flattened ovoids of asteroidal rock, the standard size sixty kilometers long, twenty wide at the midpoint, twelve high. Some were bigger, a few smaller.

Inside, they were all different, cosmetically at least. They were dream worlds, made to be whatever their original purchasers desired. Many replicated historical periods from Earth. Others extrapolated terraformed versions of system planets, centuries ahead of the actual terraforming that was going on.

More than two thousand worldlets were based on works of fiction. Little Sister and I had worked on at least a hundred Middle Earths, twenty or more Tattooines, dozens of wizarding worldlets with the inhabitants permanently at magic boarding school. They'd all probably seemed like brilliant places to be when the uber-rich had first set them up, aiming to use them for a few months, a year perhaps. Vacation places to indulge one's fantasies.

But not so good when you were stuck there for almost a decade, so far.

See, the worldlets turned out to have a basic flaw, at least in light of later events. To make them work properly, they each needed a central AI and lots of anthropomorphic and other bodies to fill out the necessary casts, whether it be invented Martian beasts, steppe fauna of 15th century Earth, townsfolk of Victorian London, elves and orcs or whatever.

Which is why, post Diablo and the Jovian Miner War, every single worldlet was quarantined and any human who happened to be there when the word came down was stuck there, being Elrond or Genghis Khan or the Empress of Mars.

Forever.

This had better be worth waking me up, I grumbled to Little Sister. She shrugged and handed me the red-bordered message flimsy. I read it, wiped my nose on it, scrunched it into a ball and shoved it in the recycler.

Seven Six Three, called Grimm World, I said, sniffing. Got the blah on it?

I knew roughly what it would be. I'd read Grimms' Fairy Tales, growing up on Luna. Unlike a lot of younger folk, I'd actually had something that could pass for a childhood. So I knew this worldlet would be some plutocrat's dumb idea of being Cinderella or something like that. Fly in from Earth, suffer (a little bit) as a servant for a few days, then have the whole ball/fairy godmother/hazel-twig kindly spirit/prince thing and spend the rest of their holiday with their perfectly designed android prince or princess adoring slave.

Only after nine years or so even that would probably have got somewhat old. Particularly without being able to communicate with the rest of the system. The trillionaires trapped in their own little space kingdoms were completely cut off to all forms of communication, both in and out. Every worldlet was surrounded with its own little orbital system of electronic jammers, interferers, blockers, detectors and even interceptors in case someone tried the age-old message rocket shtick.

Little Sister handed me the printout with the worldlet's basic data. No screens in our ship, just in case an AI got aboard somehow and messed with our minds via photic programming and the like.

Made for Everanza Luke-Hazely III, I read, with a suitable grimace. I knew that family, if not this particular scion. The rest of them were still making a ton of money mining noble metals on Mercury, hampered not at all by the ban on AIs and heavy-duty robots. They just used indentured workers from the slums of Earth instead, which is a fancy way of saying slaves. It probably worked out even better for them.

Designed to emulate a bucolic, idealized version of mid-19th century rural Germany with incidences of narrative action inspired by the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.

That could cover a lot of ground. Incidences of narrative action meant everything would go along without much occurring, and then all of a sudden something would, a story would begin and make life interesting. Though not too interesting, provided the AI continued to act within its pre-set limitations. Which, apart from Diablo, seemed to be what they did do. But you know what they say. One bad AI can spoil the whole solar system.

Unusual transmission attempts detected and variant energy signatures noted, I continued to read. AI to be terminated. Express. This was weird. If the powers that be really thought an AI was up

to something, then the big laser on Phobos or the missile tubes on Ganymede would get a very brief and wholly unchallenging workout. No more worldlet. No more AI.

Every now and then one would disappear in a bright flash, and no one ever told us why. It might be bored soldiers having a yippee shoot for all we knew.

The point was, it was easy to destroy an aberrant AI out here. There was no need to send two maintenance women to physically enter a worldlet and smack the brain inside with a hammer.

This has the strong whiff of politics, I said, wrinkling my nose. What's really going on?

Little Sister shrugged, but in a certain way that—to me at least—indicated she had some ideas. Come on, 'fess up.

She handed me another flimsy. I held it upside down for a second, since it was mostly a photo with a very small caption and I was expecting text, so it took me a moment to recalibrate my eyes. Once upon a time I thought I might be allowed somewhere where I could get new eyes regrown, but I'd given up on that, and the prosthetics were pretty good on the whole.

The photo was of a bunch of very good-looking (because they'd had lots of work), surprisingly youthful (because ditto) women, men and inbetweeners gathered for an official group portrait. There was a very strong family likeness going on with all of them, and the caption read Board of LH&M.

Oh, I get it, I said. If they get their government toadies to just blow the worldlet everyone will know Everanza Luke-Hazely was deliberately done away with. Whereas if we slip in and fillet the AI, everything will continue to look the same from Earth or Mars, but she'll be dead soon enough anyway. Then the siblings inherit her stock or her board seat or whatever.

Little Sister half-nodded. As in, my theory might be right but there was probably more to it.

LHM must own a fair piece of the Company to have enough pull to organize this.

Little Sister nodded and held up three fingers and then the full spread of both hands.

Thirty percent.

I whistled. The Company, to give its full name, was A World of Your Own For No One Else to Share, Inc. But that was way too long. They had tried a kind of bastardized acronym for a while: AWOYO FRONOES. But even the marketing geniuses who thought that up couldn't use it regularly. After a while, anyone who had anything to do with it just called it the Company. After all, there wasn't another one. Not out here.

Given that it was now a non-revenue generating concern whose dubious assets were also the biggest liabilities anywhere in human space, it was surprising that any of the big combines would bother to buy into the Company, particularly so large a chunk of it. But I had heard rumors about mining restarting out this way, which could explain the interest from LHM.

So, we going to do it? I asked. Or do we develop troubles of our own which regrettably mean sitting here incommunicado for a week or two?

Little Sister emitted the kind of whistling-choking noise you hear when there's a hull breach and all the air gets sucked out. Hard to imitate that sound, but she could do it. It was particularly impressive when you considered she didn't actually have a mouth as such any more. Again, if we could get somewhere with an advanced medical facility, that could be fixed. But like my eyes, it wasn't going to happen. Fair point, I conceded. We couldn't sit out here for a few weeks, because we'd been out three months and needed to resupply everything. Including our air. Our old tub had a lot of very, very small leaks, and recycling only went so far.

We could declare an emergency, head over to Io, I continued. I really don't like the smell of this.

Little Sister pinched her nose, telling me I had to put up with it. You want to go there? I asked. Spike an AI that almost certainly hasn't done a thing wrong?

She nodded and shook her head. Yes to the first, no to the second. Curiosity killed the cosmonaut, I grumbled. And all her friends.

But I got up, and flew along the cylinder to what we laughingly referred to as our control center. I took a dozen star sights, and then with Little Sister pedaling to provide extra power, I woke up our dumb old computer, got it to work out how to get us to Grimm World and having got the results, punched in the thruster commands on the Selectorocket. That was a good find. Before we had it, Little Sister and I had to do every firing command in order and absolutely on time, using the big chronometer and the lever rack that still took up way too much space. I think the levers were designed as an homage to 19th century railway switch boxes. They were big enough.

I really missed the days when you told an AI or a very smart computer where you wanted to go and they just took you there.

We were sixty-five hours in transit. I spent an appreciable part of that time trying to second-guess what was really going on, before coming to the conclusion that I shouldn't worry about it and deal with whatever happened when it happened.

We did a slow, twenty-kilometer orbit of the worldlet first, taking a look at its collection of satellites, making sure they were behaving according to their hardwired programs and there was no visible evidence they'd been tampered with. They were totally dumb, so the only way you could change their behavior was to get into their innards. And the only way to do that would be to turn each one off first, by shooting over a low-velocity key torpedo of the right kind, which would physically match the activation lock.

That's what we had to do in order to get past them. Fortunately, this was part of our maintenance duty, so we had the means to do so.

Little Sister had made up the keys en route, laboriously cutting and filing the one point five-meter-long blanks to match the details we had in our top-secret codebook. The codebook was the first thing off the ship when we docked. It got escorted by numerous armed guards and in general was treated with tons more respect than we ever received.

Firing the key torpedoes was as much a pain as ever. After inspecting the satellites, which as far as we could tell were tamper-free, we worked out the three we needed to turn off for us to get at the worldlet, and even more importantly back again. Then we had to suit up and take the key torps one by one out to the launcher, which was fixed to the hull five meters around from the anterior lock.

Little Sister aimed the target painter, a laser of the correct frequency that wouldn't activate the satellite's defenses, while I loaded the torp in place and turned on its moronic guidance system to follow that laser. Finally, I very carefully flipped the valves for its compressed air guidance system, stood well back and pressed the stud.

The first two torps hit their targets as planned, hitting the wide bells of the venturi targets that captured them and guided the keys on into the locks.

The third shot went awry, spewing air out of a malfunctioning guidance exhaust as it spun out of control.

Typical, I grunted, and thought bad thoughts about the probably eternally teenaged boy who'd designed this ridiculously phallic security system.

Little Sister had cut two keys for each sat, just in case, so I got the second torp ready and hoped it would work. The sats would only be stood down for eight hours, so any delay was critical.

Fortunately, this second attempt went okay. We watched the external status flags on the sats for a while, me with my eyes on telescopic and Sis using flip-down binoculars, to make sure they were properly offline.

Guess we'd better go, I said. "Sled all packed? You got your

Magic Bag?"

Little Sister gestured to the bulging thigh pocket of her suit. That told me a lot. The mere fact she was bringing it indicated she thought this job was going to go in a particular direction. Or at least, there was a good chance it would.

We rode the sled over, me piloting by artificial eyeball, taking it slow and careful. We didn't head for the main airlock. That would have been welded shut when the sats were first put in place, along with most of the other entry/egress ports.

But there was still a way in. We just had to get on to the hull, walk around for a bit, then bore through at the right point to connect up a remote and fire off one of the lifeboats (which the sats would usually destroy) and then we could go in via the empty boat bay and the emergency lock there.

This was also supposed to be one-way, but we knew how to rejig it. It worked about eighty per cent of the time. If it didn't we'd be ejected back into space in a cloud of self-sealing foam. Which would be a real pain, so I was hoping probability would be our friend for once.

It was, and we made it through. We clambered on out and stood looking over the pleasant green pastures and charming woods of Grimm World. The sun (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) hung high in the sky. Smoke curled up from the chimneys of some cottages nearby. Cows grazed in the fields, bells at their necks tinkling. In the distance, there were the towers of a Mad Bavarian prince's white castle, huge cloth-of-gold banners flying from the turrets, lofted by a breeze I wasn't going to open my visor to feel.

I hate it already, I grumbled.

A cowherd looked at us incuriously as we wandered across the meadow towards a rough road that led to the castle. He was a fine-whiskered old fellow in yellow lederhosen and a jaunty Tyrolean hat with a long feather. He was, of course, merely an extension of the central AI, so I watched him carefully, my hand on the flame gun holstered on my chestplate.

Getting any indications? I asked Little Sister. Her eyes were flicking up and down, watching the dials and read-outs inside her helmet. She had a lot more sophisticated outfit than me. Made it herself.

She shook her head. So the AI wasn't misbehaving, or at least not in any obvious fashion.

The brain should be in the tallest tower, I said. If it's on the standard pattern.

While the AI consciousness extended throughout the worldlet, and in every artificia person, cow, pixie, sprite, Rumpelstiltskin, or whatever, all of that was nothing without the core-processing unit. And what made this work was a coconut-sized lump of many-times folded organic brain equivalent. So we really could hit it with a hammer. Presuming we could get past the various security arrangements put there to prevent any such occurrence.

We trudged along the road for a kilometer or so, and entered the woods. I actually drew my flame gun at that point, because if the AI was up to something Grimm-flavored, then there definitely would be trouble in the deep shade under the trees.

And indeed, trouble came when we were halfway through the forest. A little girl came screaming out of the tree line, her once-charming hooded robe torn and her neat blond hair in disarray.

A wolf! A wolf! she cried, pointing back into the trees. Come, woodcutter! Save my grandmother!

I guess Little Sister's diamond-edged boarding axe did make her look a bit like a woodcutter.

She swung it easily, despite its size, and neatly lopped off Little Red's head in a single stroke.

A wolf! A wooooolf… droned the head for a few seconds before it caught on that it wasn't connected to a body anymore. Said body stumbled on for a few paces, arms reaching, till I tripped it over and it went down to flail about in the leaves.

Little Sister knelt down, her knee pressing the head into the dirt. She worked quickly, reaching into her magic bag to pull out the probes, which she thrust deep into the eyes, straight through into the android's artificial brain behind.

I kept watch. I wasn't really worried about the wolf, my flame gun would take out even a combat-hardened wolf form. I was more concerned with what I didn't know about.

So, what have we got? I asked after a few minutes. AI really gone rogue?

Little Sister held up her hand for patience. She had all the probes connected and was interrogating the AI. This usually only took a few seconds so I was starting to wonder if there was something up when she unplugged and quickly gestured, signing to me the AI was behaving perfectly normally, and was a sober, responsible citizen.

If there actually were unusual transmissions detected and variant energy signatures noted, it wasn't the work of the AI.

Which once again begged the question of what we were doing there, why we were doing it, and who for.

On to the castle? I suggested. Little Sister nodded in agreement. We walked on in companionable silence, our usual state. Some ravens followed us for a while, their glistening eyes watching our every move, but Little Sister wasn't concerned so I figured this was just the AI walking along with us, as it were, also in companionable silence.

That silence was broken as we neared the castle. I picked up the vibrations first, then the sound came via my helmet pickup. A rhythmic noise that I took a moment to recognize as the sound of horse's hooves. A single horse, galloping.

It came across the drawbridge of the castle, a wonderful white stallion with saddle and all the trappings in the same cloth-of-gold as the banners.

Naturally, there was a prince riding it. Pretty much a real prince, in human terms, since it wasn't one of the AI's bit players. The rider was Everanza Luke-Hazely III herself. Or himself, since Everanza was a modified inbetweener who could be whatever gender seemed good at the time, given a little notice. She looked just like all the other Luke-Hazelys in the LHM board pic.

Very striking, very proud, and very much superior to everyone else. She rode straight at us, with that classic aristocratic contempt for lesser beings, only reigning in at the last minute when we didn't step aside and tug our forelocks, or whatever the equivalent is when you're wearing a suit.

You're so slow! she complained. I got tired of waiting.

She looked me up and down, taking in my admittedly rather clumsily-stitched in artificial eyes and the section of radiation-burned scalp not covered by my skullcap, and then across at Little Sister, who has no lower jaw at all, just a burnished plate of silver. I think it quite stylish, I copied the hammered effect from a 10th century cup, but Everanza grimaced.

Ugly sisters straight out of Grimm! she exclaimed. Where's my suit?

I raised my hand, very politely. What? she asked. Hurry up!

We're here to spike the AI, I said. That's all. She scowled at me.

I know you've had your instructions. You're here to retrieve me. This was extremely unwelcome news. If Everanza was in touch with the outside world, it could only be with the connivance of the Company itself.

I looked meaningfully at Little Sister. She opened an arm pocket and pulled out a purple-bordered flimsy. That meant ultra-high priority, destroy upon reading, all that kind of thing. I held it up near my faceplate and read it aloud.

Spike AI second priority following First priority, safe retrieval of prime inhabitant Everanza LH III, rendezvous Amalthea soonest.

I handed the flimsy back to Little Sister, who pulled the diagonal edges, activating the security feature that crumbled it into dust. I guess she hadn't shown me before because I would have refused to go rescue a plutocrat.

Amalthea, huh? So that's where the Company's got the secret base for the new mining setup? Hence your lot buying in I guess, being specialists in slave labor and all.

Do not speculate on matters beyond your immediate concern, said Everanza. You are employees and would do well to remember your place. Where is my suit?

Little Sister pointed at one of her thigh pockets and made the sign for an emergency transfer bag. Then she turned her head and winked at me. That wink told me she was up to something, and I had an inkling I knew what it was. But I'd been wrong before. Spectacularly wrong, as it happened. I told myself not to speculate, but just go along. For now.

We've got a baggie for you, I said. But first we have to spike the AI. Kill the worldlet. But how are you going to explain popping up on Amalthea? I mean, lots of people will know you've been stuck on a world—

"I will be in charge on Amalthea from the moment we land there, so you had best learn to serve me well from this moment, and not bother with peripheral questions, snapped Everanza. And I am not going in a transfer bag. I'll take your suit, you look roughly the right size. You go in the bag."

Sure, sure, whatever you want, Boss, I said easily. Let's go take care of the AI. It's up the top of the tallest tower, I guess? Over there?

I presume so, said Everanza. I do not concern myself with technical matters unless it becomes necessary. You go and deal with it, I will await you here.

Little Sister made a sign.

Well, I think we'll need you, ma'am-sir, I said. To get past the basic access security. It'll be coded to your biometrics. Can you check? Everanza shut her eyes for a moment, accessing the auxiliary memory cores that most plutocratic executives had installed to assist their natural brainpower. I wanted to know if she had them. We didn't really need Everanza's help to access the tower, though it would make it a bit faster.

Yes, yes, she muttered, opening her eyes and scowling. A ridiculous voiceprint challenge to begin with. I never wanted a Grimm worldlet, I should have let Tamarith keep it…

Please, lead on, ma'am.

I gestured for her to go ahead. She wheeled her horse around and