Summary:
There is one good story in this issue, Paean for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren, a time travel/combat SF tale about the rescue of a family from the Sobibor concentration camp during WWII. Apart from that, Alexy Dumenigo’s story has a neat idea (about a particular sort of personality/memory editing) and some absorbing scenes. A mixed bag overall, though.
[ISFDB] [Issue: FSFD, Amazon US/UK]

Other reviews:
Karen Burnham, Locus
C. D. Lewis, Tangent Online
Eamonn Murphy, SFCrowsNest
Various, Goodreads

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Editor, Alex Shvartsman¹

Fiction:
A Friend on the Inside • novelette by Will McIntosh ∗∗
Four-Letter Word • short story by Alexy Dumenigo, translated by Toshiya Kamei ∗∗+
Rat’s Tongue • novelette by Sing Fan, translated by Judith Huang ∗
Vagrants • by Lavie Tidhar ∗
The Sweetness of Berries and Wine • short story by Jo Miles ∗
Paean for a Branch Ghost • short story by Filip Wiltgren ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Oleksandr Kulichenko.
Foreword • by Alex Shvartsman

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A Friend on the Inside by Will McIntosh begins with Candace, a poor student, on the roof of her high school trying to hack into the school’s Axon network to get credit for lunch. Then, when she succeeds, she receives a message from an Izzy Mahfouz asking her if she is “outside”. Candace quickly disconnects and leaves. Later, after she is the victim of some routine bullying in the lunch hall (insert your own Heathers, Mean Girls, etc. scene here), Candace looks up Izzy’s name—only to find it belongs to a dead college basketball player.
When Candace next goes up on the roof and connects to the network Izzy comes online again and begs her not to leave. He tells her that his last memory was of a car crash, and that now he is in darkness and connected to three other “nodes” who are people like him. Then Izzy asks Candace to call his mother to let her know what has happened to him. When she pleads poverty, he provides her with a code for a “system” like the rich girls in school have, and which she later picks up from the shop:

[I] told her I was picking up a system. I gave her the code, and held my breath, half-expecting a platoon of Axon security people to come busting out of the back room, heaters raised.
A sparkly transparent ball rolled out of a slot. The ball, which felt like skin, broke open in my hands, like it was giving birth to the system rolled up inside. Triumphant music played.
I ran for the exit.
“Have an A day,” the associate called.
“Eat shit,” I called back as the door swung closed behind me.
Moving out of the flow of pedestrians, I unrolled the system. It was silver with green speckles, lighter than it looked, the material so thin it felt like it would dissolve in my hands. I pulled the sleeve up my forearm, looped my thumb through the smaller hole on the end. It extended just past my elbow.
Everything shifted. The air took on a golden tint. New Main Street was perfectly jet black, and each building was a different pastel color. Everyone who passed was smiling brightly. It was like I’d stepped into a new reality. I knew what the world looked like through a system—I’d seen it on TV a million times, but I’d had no idea it looked this real. I didn’t understand how something I put on my arm made my eyes see differently, and I didn’t care. I wanted to see like this for the rest of my life.  pp. 7-8

The benefits of the system don’t last long because the phone connection drops when Candace tries to call Izzy’s mother: Izzy realises that Axon are monitoring the calls, and disconnects her from the net so she can’t be traced.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Candace learn from Izzy that there are lots of nodes, and Izzy later says to Candace, “I’m just a brain, aren’t I?” They realise what Axon’s “revolutionary [network] technology” is and, when Candace learns that Izzy’s body was donated to Good Medical like her sister’s, she wonders if her sister is one of the nodes. Candace tells Izzy that if he wants any further help he needs to find her (and during this conversation she learns that the nodes suffer terrible headaches and pain when they are not doing the network tasks assigned to them).
The story turns into a chase when Axon put Candace’s picture on the net and she is recognised by a group of teenagers. As she evades capture by them and the others who start pursuing her, she repeats her demand to Izzy about finding her sister.
Eventually, and after a few more narrow escapes courtesy of Izzy’s magic hacker skills, the story comes to a conclusion when Candace contacts Izzy’s mother and Candace is then shot and wounded by an Axon guard. A driverless car then drives into him, while Candace is protected by a cyclone of drones and vehicles controlled by the brains/nodes. Video of the event goes viral, along with the nodes/brains’ demand for time off and pay for their families. Finally, Izzy tells Candace he has found her sister.
This is a well enough told story (McIntosh is a slick writer), but it is essentially a piece about stealing brains for God’s sake, something that might work in 1932 but terminally strains credulity ninety years later. And even if this is all a metaphor about the way corporations treat their employees, it is a silly one. (I’d also add that having “Pay for our families. Time off” as the brains’ first demand is ridiculous—what about the fact that Axon have essentially been kidnapping sentient beings, using them as slaves, and torturing them?)
∗∗ (Average). 8,250 words. Story link.

Four-Letter Word by Alexy Dumenigo, translated by Toshiya Kamei, begins by introducing the idea of “calibration clinics”:

There were these government-run facilities where you could go and ask men in white coats to fix those aspects of yourself you didn’t like. Back then, fewer options were available, but it was at least possible to erase concepts from your mind, modify your character, and even take the first step toward personalizing your memories.
If you wanted to be more intelligent, more daring, or willing to tackle any project, you footed the bill and that was it. But those options, just like now, cost dearly and required special permits from the government.
Fortunately, other calibrations were inexpensive.  p. 29

The narrator then states that, forty years ago, she went to get not only a word, but a whole concept removed because of a domestic quarrel with her boyfriend over her dog Hamlet (who had an implant and could talk, part of the boyfriend’s problem). We later find out that that word/concept she had removed was “love”, and we learn (in among some back story about her life) about the result:

I felt the same as before. Of course, I wasn’t in the mood to immerse myself in my memories either, or I would have noticed the gaps. On the way home I listened to a song I liked and the audio seemed to skip at times. I tried to remember the lyrics, but only bits and pieces came to me.
I soon discovered that, except for that inconvenience, my new conditioning offered only advantages. Unlike other breakups, now I didn’t feel the urge to call Carlos or spy on his social media. I dedicated myself to living my life. Even my work became less tedious. In the evenings, I went out with friends. I talked to my parents on the phone more often.
I spent most of my free time at home. I took care of Hamlet and we talked about the old days. pp. 34-35

Hamlet later developed a neural problem which meant he needed to have his implant removed. At the clinic, and while they waited for the dog to wake up after surgery, the narrator and the vet talked and she discovered that the vet had had the same treatment as her. When Hamlet finally woke up he could no longer talk, but communicated non-verbally with the narrator by putting his head on her lap.
The story ends (spoiler) with her and the vet presumably communicating in a similar non-verbal manner and ending up together. They never need any further calibration.
This piece has a neat idea and a number of interesting passages, but the ending didn’t really work for me: partly this was because I wasn’t entirely sure about the point the story was making—is it that you don’t need love to have a successful relationship?—and I also thought the pair of them ending up together runs against the story’s set-up (you don’t expect a narrator who has had the concept of love removed from their psyche to happily couple up with someone else). A pity, as this was pretty good for the most part.
I’d be interested in seeing more work from this writer.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 2,450 words. Story link.

Rat’s Tongue by Sing Fan, translated by Judith Huang,³ opens with Ding Jie arriving at the planet Yan: he is there to get a delicacy for the Emperor, the tongue of the Silver Rat. Jie is surprised to discover that a close friend, Chen Guang, is in charge of this bleak outpost. Then, after they catch up (at length) with each other’s news, Guang tells Jie that the Silver Rat’s tongues are now black and poisonous. Guang has one edible tongue left, however, and he gives Jie a taste:

He opened his mouth and bit into the tip of the tongue.
Suddenly, the whole busy world before his eyes grew dim.
The taste skated across his consciousness and melted a little in his stomach.
He was overwhelmed with the feeling that nothing he could remember that came before this amounted to anything, and his very life appeared barren and meaningless, reduced to something absurd. He thought back to the magnificent fireworks bursting over the roof of the Royal Palace, the most splendid of skies he had ever seen, and they all those memories seemed strangely leached of color. Even the most complex, most spectacular and intricate architecture he had seen in the Afang palace, dating from the Qin dynasty, its exquisite beauty beyond anyone’s imagination, now seemed boring and monotonous in comparison.
Every single taste bud in his mouth exploded simultaneously, like a singularity bursting and expanding into infinity.
This extraordinary taste had flown beyond all description.
Could this thing still be considered food? Or was it rather, a vast epic rushing through the tongue and vaulting past the stomach walls, a mighty poem redolent of ancient song.  pp. 46-47

The rest of the story sees the implantation of a mind-reading device into one of the rats, which later reveals that, when the rats meet each other in the wild, their tongues entwine—this is the way they communicate.
After this discovery Jie suspects the Silver Rats are sentient and he decides to decipher their language, a process that leads to the Silver Rat he has implanted eventually meeting the Grand Rat. When the Grand Rat then offers the implanted rat some dried tongue, the latter appears to gain access to all the Grand Rat’s memories.
Eventually Jie discovers that (spoiler) the rat’s memories and souls are contained in tongues, and the hatred they feel for humans—who have been hunting them—has made them poisonous. Guang subsequently hatches a plan to kill the Emperor by supplying him with a poisoned tongue, but what actually happens is that the Emperor falls ill (the rats have learned human language and made a taste that makes him feel nauseous every time he feels anger).
This story didn’t work for me, probably due to the strange (and barely) science fictional ideas which have been dropped into what feels like an oddly plotted fantasy. I think this would have worked slightly better if it had junked the SF furniture and been a fantasy.
∗ (Mediocre). 7,450 words. Story link.

Vagrants by Lavie Tidhar sees a man return to a space station he passed through twenty years ago, when he was on his way up from Earth and out into the solar system and what became his life (fighting in a war, etc.). He has various encounters with a robotnik beggar, a bar singer, and a robot hotel receptionist, during which various life observations are delivered:

“There’s a world right here”, Red said. She took a sip and studied him over the bottle. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said.
“Get what?”
“You think going out there fixes what’s inside here,” she said. She tapped him on the chest. It pushed him up so for a moment he was floating, just an inch or so above the seat. “Yeah,” Red said. She finished her beer and tossed it back to the bar. It floated to the old bartender. “I see guys like you every day of the week,” Red said. “Young and ignorant when you come up the gravity well. Old and ignorant when you come back. You think, if only you went out there you’d find whatever it is you’re searching for. But you never did find it, did you?”
“I don’t know,” Nugget said. “I lived a life.”
“No,” she told him. “You only ran away from one.”  p. 69

This is an okay read, I suppose, but it’s a fragment not a story.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,200 words. Story link.

The Sweetness of Berries and Wine by Jo Miles opens with Shoshana on Kepler Station, where the quartermaster tells her he can’t supply the strawberries she wants for a Passover dish called charoset (he tells her, “The war in the Celosian System has messed up our supply lines”). Later on, Shoshana discusses the problem with her partner Kindra, who asks why it is important as she is not religious. When Shoshana replies that it is her daughter’s first Passover, and that she wants it to be perfect, Kindra suggests Shoshana call her grandmother on New Jerusalem.
The second part of the story sees grandmother set Shoshanna straight after some teasing (“A disaster! You’d better give up now”), when she reveals that charoset was originally made with apples but they changed the recipe on New Jerusalem when they couldn’t get any. Shoshana learns about resilience and adaptation.
This parable was too cutesy, too saccharine for me.
∗ (Mediocre). 1,150 words. Story link.

Paen for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren begins with a time-retrieval team (consisting of the narrator and his two colleagues) learning that their special assignment will involve taking a Professor Rothman back in time to the “Age of Desolation” to retrieve her brother and three sisters. It materialises that Rothman is a time-probabilist who herself was extracted from the past, and whose exceptional contributions to the work of the Conglomerate have provided her the credit to pay for the journey back in time.
Almost immediately after they arrive at their extraction point it becomes obvious that the plan they have been briefed about is a cover story provided by Rothman, and that she has other ideas. This begins with them having to walk to a nearby railway station at a military camp:

A line of soldiers stood between us and the train, clumps of men in gray uniforms with long, iron-and-wood rifles. No electronic or magnetic signatures. Plain analog chemical reaction weaponry. Their uniforms looked enough like ours for us to blend in, although the soldiers had a black trim on their grey caps, which were adorned by two marks. I upped the magnification on my view, zooming in on the cap of the closest soldier.
The marks were the same bird of prey we had, and a skull below it. I sent the image to Ross, our historian, but he shrugged.
“Not my specialty,” he said.
Only Rothman seemed to know what was going on. She stared past the train, to the milling throng of humanity beyond. These had different clothes, mostly pants, skirts and coats in blacks, grays, browns, and dark blues. They carried bags and children. Unlike the soldiers, most of them were strikingly gaunt.
“Where are we?” I said, to no one in particular.
“Sobibor,” Rothman said. “One of the camps.”  p. 85

They later find out that they have arrived at this Nazi concentration camp at the beginning of a prisoner revolt and, during the turmoil, they join the fight with their advanced weapons: the team targets the guards and Rothman searches for a sadistic officer called Frenzel, who she kills (a “ghost killing”). During the action the team becomes concerned that this branch timeline they are creating (their own will be “canonical”) may not last long enough for them to complete the mission and they worry that they will become “ghosts”. Rothman reassures them that vortex that took them there will last for “days, months, maybe longer”.
Eventually (spoiler) they find Rothman’s family, and it materialises that she intends to rescue a different group of people:

The rest of the family slowly got to their feet. All except the young woman with the two children, the one Rothman had called Eliza.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“We—” I began. Rothman cut me off.
“I am you,” she said. “Years from now, you will be me.”
I cursed, and flicked off the voice-over before it could translate. Never explain, never introduce a point of confusion.
The young Eliza looked at the old Rothman. The father, the mother, the siblings, everyone looked. I could see the Eliza in Rothman’s face, the lines sharper, more defined, the eyes harder, the lips thinner. They were the same person, ages apart. The family would recognize it, and panic.
Instead, they smiled.
“You are the Lord’s seraphim, coming in our hour of need,” the father said, bowing his head, thin, white hair flopping in front of his face.
“Yes, father,” Rothman agreed. “We need to go.”
The family all tried to touch her hands, and she let them, guiding them to stand as gently as a wind lifting dry leaves.  p. 97

As they return to the extraction point the narrator tells Rothman that, if she returns to the future with her younger self, the Conglomerate will kill her and the child for breaching its rules. Rothman says she knows, and that she intends staying behind in this ghost timeline (“Now my children will live with their mother, and their family.”). Their problems aren’t over, however, and they then find that even without Rothman they are a hundred kilograms overweight for the return journey. After they all strip off all their clothes and dump their equipment they still have forty kilograms to shed, and the story finishes with the narrator volunteering to stay with Rothman.
The time travel hand-wavium, combat scenes, and Holocaust elements are blended together well, and produce a pretty good story.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Story link.

•••

The Cover for this issue is by Ukrainian artist Oleksandr Kulichenko. It’s rather amateurish to be honest, but you’d only notice if you take the time to look at it (the title and cover design catches the eye more than the artwork as there is no obvious feature in the latter to draw your eye in). I note that the cover is, for some reason, missing from the PDF version of the issue although it’s included in the epub and mobi files.²
There is only one piece of non-fiction in the issue, the Foreword by Alex Shvartsman. In this he talks about current events:

It’s been difficult to focus on finalizing this issue.
As I type these words, my home town of Odessa, Ukraine is bracing for an invasion by Russian forces. The familiar streets and landmarks where I spent my childhood are filled with sandbags and Czech hedgehog anti-tank obstacles. It’s a sobering and surreal thing to see for the first time, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.  p. v

A gloomy start to the issue.
I note in passing that the PDF version doesn’t have any publishing indicia (copyright notice, date, publisher, etc.).

•••

In conclusion, I found this issue a mixed bag—something that I often say in my reviews. To discriminate further I usually consider two or three other factors to refine how I feel about an issue. First, are there any really good stories? There is nothing outstanding here, but I thought the Filip Wiltgren story was pretty good and that Alexy Dumenigo’s tale has a neat idea. Second, are there any dire stories? No, although there were three that I thought decidedly lacklustre. That said, at least all of the stories here have some arc or plot or structure, with the exception, perhaps, of the Tidhar story (an editor who eschews fragmentary material is a rarity nowadays). Third, is there any other noteworthy material in the magazine (such as artwork or essays, etc.)? No.
So, overall, this is probably in the middle of mixed bag territory, maybe tending below that. Would I look at another issue of this? Maybe, if—as in this issue—I recognised a couple of names and wanted to check them out (in this case it was the McIntosh and Tidhar stories made me pick up this issue).  ●

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1. The masthead on the website also lists these staff members:
Editor-in-Chief: Alex Shvartsman
Fiction copyeditor: Tarryn Thomas
Podcast director: Wulf Moon
Media Reviewer: Paul Levinson
Editorial staff:
Rachel Cordasco
Robert Finegold
Natalka Roshak
Max Hrabrov
Frank Dutkiewicz

2. I got my copy here. $3.99 (£3.29 at the conversion rate on the day) for PDF, epub and mobi files.

3. There are unnecessary translation notes at the start of Rat’s Tongue by Sing Fan, mostly about the references to Chinese history: these could have easily been put at the back of the story, and then I wouldn’t have had to plough through them in case they were required to understand the story (they aren’t). Also, there are, for a story that is told in otherwise neutral fantasy language, a few odd colloquialisms: “nothing would have induced him to leg it” on p. 40; “it became super popular to eat Silver Rat meat”; “When their tongues met and entangled, the Silver Rats were, in fact, talking, not making out” on p. 51, etc. Jarring.●