io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Teach Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” by B. Pladek. Enjoy!
Teach Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness
by B. Pladek
USER: this is a message for Milwaukee Elementary’s curator Jude Towers, I hope this is the right address. anyway thanks for the story you had RIGHTR generate for my 10th graders’ Empathy Week. it was really great! can you tell me more about it?
CURATOR: I am happy to have fulfilled the assignment.
USER: this isn’t a trap, I promise! you curators are so scared of getting sued for using real writers. I KNOW you’d never do that. but I’ve liked all the stuff you’ve curated so far. my kids loved “the ones who don’t stay.” I loved it too. what a concept, the perfect city upheld by a single child’s misery! we had a better discussion about it than anything we’ve read so far. how’d you get RIGHTR to do that?
CURATOR: I’m glad the story was useful. I enjoyed it too.
USER: come on don’t be that way. I swear I just want to talk. look my name’s Booker. here’s my Instructor ID: 5-778. why do you enjoy it?
CURATOR: Because it’s an indictment of our failure to imagine a world without suffering
Because it’s so much more than a swipe at utilitarianism
Because if I didn’t send something real I was going to throw myself in the lake
Did your students learn empathy?
USER: yeah! more than that though. we talked about how hard it is to believe in a world where everyone’s happy. and how it seems like the story gives you a choice: would you leave or let the child suffer? but then joke’s on us, because we already live in that world. people suffer, we let it happen. we made our choice.
CURATOR: . . .
USER: anyway I’m sorry for bothering you. I guess I just wanted to talk with someone. you’d think this job would have more of that, talking about stories. real talk I mean. 10th graders are great but they only get you so far. thank you (and the AI) so much. I won’t bug you again.
CURATOR: Wait
Do you have a messenger address?
****
Dear Val,
Glad to hear you and Sula are settling in well, and that Pacifica’s wildfires aren’t too bad. You can stop apologizing. You aren’t abandoning me. I’m a big boy of 43. Sometimes your chosen family moves away, just like your bio one. The way you talk it’s as if you airdropped me into a New Dixie lynch mob! Lakes United isn’t great, but it’s fine. I’ve lived in it my whole life, ever since it was little old Wisconsin. I’ll be fine.
And let’s be honest, I was lonely before. That’s not your fault! It’s me. Classic Aquarius, shy and judgy. Now maybe that you two have left I’ll kick my own ass to do something about it. There’s this queer book club that meets every Wednesday. No AI, just real books. Can you imagine?
Obviously, I’m bitter about the new job. It’s fine, I can do it, but I swear it’s making me stupider. I guess it still hurts that I’m babysitting the same fucking AI that stole my career. I would’ve been an acquiring editor in two years! And now I just curate endless milquetoast RIGHTR fables for high schoolers, making them stupider too.
In 10 years they’ll sue me for child abuse.
At least one of the teachers seems nice. He texted me to let me know he liked Omelas. Small victories. And don’t worry, I scrub the titles so no one can tell. It’s not like the school admin checks anyway. They don’t give a shit. Also, none of them have read a book in their life.
Sorry for the whining. Please send more pics of little Gabbi, she is a perfect being of light and the one good thing in this terrible world. Funny, you never realize you want kids until someone else has them. Haha. Now you and Su know you won’t die alone, which I also definitely WON’T DO!! fuck, I shouldn’t write emails when I’m drinking.
anyway, I’m stupid, don’t listen to me. love you both so much.
xoxo
Jude
****
To: Jude A. Towers, Curator, Milwaukee High, Lakes United District #4
From: Principal Walker
Dear Jude,
This week the kids are learning about SELF-LOVE: 35 English classes, 1 story each, for 5 days. Remember
each RIGHTR story needs to be 100% unique so they can’t use bots to write their essays for them. As mandated
by Lakes United Federal Law (c.2047), please heed the following guidelines:
- Religious, racial, gender, class, and ability variants must EXACTLY match those of the Lakes United population: 67% white, 58% female, etc. (I know you’re a Transgender but don’t let that tempt you to put in more than 1 every 100 stories. Recall you people are less than 1% of the population!)
- All slurs—e.g., queer, fascist, slaveowner—are strictly prohibited.
- No politics: all stories must be strictly non-partisan. (Remember especially not to insult our neighbors to
the south. New Dixie has their system and we have ours. We must not teach our children to hate. For the
list of prohibited political concepts, e.g., “lynching,” please see the Appendix).
And remember RIGHTR’s Three Rs:
1. Relatability: EVERY child should be able to see himself in EVERY story!
2. Readability: Nothing that will harm students’ self-esteem by being too difficult!
3. Rectitude: Only stories that promote GOOD morals to create GOOD people!
A final note—I know you’re new to this job, so I just wanted to flag that in one of your RIGHTR stories for English 501, it wasn’t super clear who the bad guy was. You’ll want to tweak the algorithm a bit for next time. 🙂
Thanks,
Principal Walker
****
Booker: so why did you become a curator?
Jude: Because I LOVE AI that makes a joke of authorship
Because I hate myself
. . .
Booker: was it because you love stories so much?
Jude: . . .
Yes.
Booker: me too! that’s why I became a teacher. I remember when I was 11 and the first chatbots came out. I spent hours on them, telling myself stories. I really liked dragons. I generated endless fantasies about me flying away with them. it was such a comfort.
Jude: Comfort?
Booker: right, you wouldn’t know. my family were New Dixie refugees. we got out just in time. well, most of us. I liked to pretend sometimes that the ones who didn’t, they escaped on dragons. It helped a little.
Jude: . . .
Oh my god
Booker: haha whoops that got dark, sorry!
big emotions to be dumping in the chat, my bad.
Jude: No, it’s ok. I don’t mind.
How did you escape?
Are you ok now?
Can I help?
You said it’s why you became a teacher?
Booker: yeah. I won’t get into it, but when we first got here I was pretty messed up, you know? I’d internalized it all. you tell a 5-year-old they’re subhuman, what they gonna do, fight back?
so my mom scraped a chatbot off the net, put me in front of it and told it to tell me a story about me, what a good kid I was. how I wasn’t a coward for leaving my friends behind when we ran north.
Jude: You thought you were a coward?
Booker: well, not everyone we knew got out.
Jude: . . .
how did
Booker: but that’s why that story you sent hit me, you know? sometimes you do just have to leave.
Jude: But in that interpretation, your family is the child, not the city dwellers. You were the ones suffering.
Booker: sure. but there’s not just one kid, in real life. and if you’re them, sometimes you’re the one who has to walk away.
Jude: . . .
I guess I never thought about it that way.
Booker: what prompt did you put into RIGHTR to get it? I’d love to string it in myself to make more. I don’t have the full version, can’t afford it, but I still have the free RIGHTR-mini my mom scraped. I still do dragon stories sometimes, haha.
Jude: it’s REAL, the writer’s name is
I forget. But I can pull up something else for your class if you like?
Booker: thank you. and maybe . . . we can talk about it?
Jude: I’d like that.
Booker: me too.
hey, would you want to meet in person?
****
English 501: possible re-titles list
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (Le Guin) —> The Ones Who Don’t Stay (Empathy Week)
Girl (Kincaid)—Like A Lady (Self-Love Week)
The Lottery (Jackson)—Come the Good Harvest (Patriot Week)
The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman)—John Tells Me (Family Values Week)
Sonny’s Blues (Baldwin)—The Brothers?? (Colorblind Week)—or Going to Meet the Man? too violent?
(violates no-lynching protocol? though they’d never know, the word “lynching” never appears)
—Walker??
(note: when do I tell Booker? he’ll have to guess eventually. or maybe he just thinks RIGHTR can pull off a Shirley Jackson? according to him he’s never read a REAL book. fuck, and it doesn’t even bug him. don’t be an asshole, Jude, he never learned—how could he in New Dixie? and he’s only 22. you can teach him)
(note 2: give some context notes for the older stories, Booker said his kids barely know anything about the US before it split. I think he means he doesn’t)
(note 3: remember, you are too fucked up to be a father figure. DO NOT TRY.)
****
Dear organizers,
I’m writing because I’d like to be sent the geolocale of the next queer book club
Dear Queer Book Clubbers,
My name is Jude and I’d love to join! I used to work for Harper Collins and I really miss talking with other readers
Hi fellow queers,
I’m awkward and lonely too! can we talk books?
Dear
****
readdit.com/r_trans_lit_club
Iscariot_J:
subject: old essays on Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”
I don’t know if this belongs here, so mods please delete if it doesn’t.
I’m a RIGHTR curator for a high school in eastern Lakes United. Used to edit for Harper Collins before they moved to bots. The other day I got curious about what teaching high school English used to be like. So I looked up one of those old sites where students posted essays to plagiarize. I read a bunch on Jamaica Kincaid’s story “Girl,” which was first published in the 1970s in The New Yorker (link here). If you haven’t read it, it’s 700 words, a single sentence of a mom telling her daughter this long, gendered list of duties, also berating her and calling her a slut. You only hear the poor kid’s voice twice.
So the essays. I thought they’d all be stupid analyses of point-of-view or whatever. But so many of them were about how the students related to the story: how they saw themselves in it, even if they weren’t little girls in twentieth-century Antigua. I mean, they weren’t good essays. But so many of them said, “this story is what it’s like to be in my head all the time. Other people telling me how I’ve failed.”
I went and re-read the story. And I suddenly realized that I related to it, too. That it’s been my inner commentary, my whole life. I don’t mean in a gendered sense (though clearly that’s part of it). Or in a race sense, I’m white. But all the voices in my head, and all the ones outside it too—no matter what they’re actually saying, I can only ever hear the ways I’ve failed. My list would be different than the girl’s obviously (like: I didn’t freeze my eggs before hysto! after the war I chickenshitted out of adopting! I never learned to make bathtub hrt so no one wants me as their tranpa!). But the story ends with the mom asking, “you really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” And I swear to god, when I read that line I heard my brain telling me every day: “you really going to be the kind of man who no one wants to be near?” And I thought, wow, those kids with their shitty plagiarized essays, they might have really been onto something.
Can anyone relate?
Replies: 0
****
Jude: So how did “Self-Love” week go?
Booker: phew! almost bad, but then really good! your RIGHTR’s really amazing. didn’t know it could work backwards like that.
Jude: Backwards?
Booker: the girl in “Like a Lady!” she wasn’t being taught to love herself, she was being taught the opposite.
I thought you were fucking with me for a second, this story about a girl being given all these orders and called a slut, then I realized that was the point. you can’t love yourself if other people don’t love you.
Jude: Yes, exactly! Did the students get it?
Booker: I had to help them, but yeah. it was so sophisticated! makes me grateful we’re using AI for teaching now, it was like this story was put together to make that point. haha, think about those poor suckers in the past who had to teach stuff humans wrote, trying to suck the moral out of some random text. like wading into a giant swamp full of snakes.
Jude: . . .
Booker: or worse, think of reading that stuff! why would you ever read something that wasn’t fit exactly to you? like wearing someone else’s clothes. I just think about how I would’ve been without my dragons.
Jude: You don’t think a real writer could have helped you more than a chatbot?
Booker: of course not! I’m me, not some random writer. haha!
Jude: . . .
****
Hi Jude,
I want to preface this by saying we love you, and we know how hard it’s been for you lately. I hope you’re talking to someone besides us, someone actually IN Milwaukee? I know you can’t afford therapy, but there are the sharing-circles. Low-pay or no pay. Sula used to go to one, it kept up even during the war. There are even some specifically for older queers who don’t have anyone else. I’m not saying YOU don’t have anyone else! But you write as if you’re not talking to people, and we’re worried.
Anyway, I’m saying this because I’m not sure you’re approaching this new friendship in the right spirit. I think it’s cool you want to look out for Booker. And I think it’s noble to want to give him some of the education he missed, antebellum US history, literature, all that. Never a bad thing directing people to James Baldwin! Your heart’s in the right place.
But the reports you’ve been giving me of your conversations . . . you just come across as a little elitist. I know you don’t mean to be. I get it. I even used to think the way you do. But do you know that Gabbi LOVES the chatbots? They’ve gotten her reading, when she only watched vids before. They’re the only thing she reads—and trust me we’ve TRIED. So maybe don’t shit on them so hard? They’re not the end of the world. Reading tastes change.
Like I said, I think your heart’s in the right place, and it’s great that you have a new friend. But I don’t think you need to try to culture Booker so hard. It’s kind of patronizing of you. Also, and Sula agrees with me on this, kind of white. Booker’s from New Dixie, he knows more about racism than you ever will. You giving him Sonny’s Blues isn’t going to change that.
We mean this with love! I know you are trying your best. Why don’t we have a call soon? Gabbi misses her favorite uncle.
Xoxo,
Val
Jude: but he likes it! hes becoming a better reader because of me!
Val: holy shit I just pressed send! maybe you should step back, Jude?
Jude: it’s not patronizing, its WORKING
Val: do you want to have a call now? Are you free?
Jude: no Im busy
Val: clearly not. look you’re talking like you’re not his friend but his teacher
Jude: no Im not !!
Val: or his dad
Jude: . . .
Val: Jude?
Jude: . . .
fuck you val
Val: Jude, are you drunk?
****
(note 3: DO NOT TRY)
****
Booker: good walk today, thanks! cool how well you know the crater. guess you’ve been walking it for awhile, huh?
Jude: Since it used to be a lakefront, yeah!
Booker: shut up, the lake came all the way up here?
Jude: you mean you didn’t
Yeah, Milwaukee was lakefront. It sold a bunch of its water rights to Pacifica back in 2043. One of the first things “Lakes United” did as a country. Ironic, huh?
Booker: haha, yeah! you should tell me about what it was like to grow up here, some time. when it was still the central west. did it suck?
Jude: Midwest. And it was fine. Being trans was tough, but not nearly as bad as you grew up with.
Booker: yeah, no one actively trying to kill you I guess.
Jude: . . .
Booker: ??? wait did someone try?
Jude: never actively
Nah, it was just hard. Felt like a scapegoat during a lot of the war. “Protect our children, eradicate the gender menace.”
Booker: scapegoat! that’s the word you gave me for the Patriot Week story, about the village that stones a person every year. I taught it to my kids. they use it now: “sometimes communities hold themselves together by targeting scapegoats.”
Jude: It’s a useful word.
Booker: but you were one? during the war? why do you never tell me these things when we’re actually talking, haha??
Jude: It’s a lot to remember. I don’t like to think about it much. Same as your family, they were scapegoats too.
Booker: yeah. hey can I ask you something serious?
Jude: . . .
how serious?
Booker: do you remember anything about what New Dixie was like, before? Like how bad it was, before ND seceded. way back in the 20th century. I’ve always wanted to know . . . how people could hate like that.
Jude: . . .
Booker: my mom won’t tell me, says it hurts too much. I always figured if I still had a dad, he would’ve told me.
Jude: . . .
. . .
Booker: haha ok, I get it. maybe it’s better I don’t know, I guess.
Jude: . . .
wait
Booker: hey, maybe you could ask RIGHTR for a story about it? maybe for next week’s theme? (uuugh).
it’d be on topic (uuuuuugggh).
Jude: . . .
Booker: hey, you ok?
****
To: Jude A. Towers, Curator, Milwaukee High, Lakes United District #4
From: Principal Walker
Dear Jude,
This week the kids are learning to be COLOR-BLIND: 35 English classes, 1 story each, for 5 days. To answer your question, no, the statistical percentages don’t change just because “this week is about race.” The whole point is to show kids race doesn’t matter! Remember the first RIGHTR R is Relatability—every student should be able to see himself in every story.
Also, and I hate having to remind you of this, but one of our 8th-grade instructors complained about your stories for Family Values Week. One teacher was confused about why the mother crawled into the wallpaper instead of nursing her child. Another one wondered why the mother argued with her husband, who only wanted the best for her. That teacher mentioned wallpaper too.
Remember the stories need to be UNIQUE, with CLEAR GOOD GUYS and BAD GUYS! Please take more care next time. I don’t want to have to tell you again.
Regards,
Principal Walker
****
Val: Jude? I’m sorry I got mad. you want to call?
Val: I really am worried about you
Val: please answer
****
Outside, in the world, he walks.
September in Milwaukee breathes a high damp heat, its smell bodily, like the oilstain on an old pillow. Far off over the dry lakebed, quicksilver slicks the horizon. If he were to walk toward it, he’d die of thirst. The difference between real and mirage can kill. It’s something he would have taught a child, if he’d ever had one, if he’d ever been brave or lucky or good enough. But maybe it’s better this way. Here he is, old fart, seething about the Kids These Days who only read RIGHTR fables. He thinks the stories aren’t real, but who is he to say? The kids can’t tell the difference. Maybe Val’s right and he’s just being elitist. If mirages bring comfort, their champions aren’t worse or stupider readers than the people he grew up with, who loved literary complexity and killed the world anyway.
But.
High above, cloud shadows slither along skyscrapers’ windows like mailed wings. What can he possibly give Booker? How can he know the younger man hasn’t felt it, that breaching moment when a word written by a person you’ve never met turns your heart like a lock and opens you—in pain, in delight, in joy that is both of these and beyond them? Surely that’s just what the kids mean when they say, relatable. Surely that’s how Booker feels about his dragons.
But.And besides, it’s not his place to give Booker, say, some story by Walker or Baldwin or Morrison about the old south. He’s not his son.
Even though he asked you, he’s not your son. When people find their found families, they never find you.
But, but, but.
****
readdit.com/r_trans_lit_club
Iscariot_J:
Subject: Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man”
This story is a brilliant, damning portrait of the mid-20 th century south, written from the POV of a racist sheriff who literally gets off on violence, in a Freudian way. There’s a lynching, though no one calls it that. Harrowing, but really captures something about hatred. Has anyone read it?
Replies: 0
****
Val: Jude?
****
To: Jude A. Towers, Curator, Milwaukee High, Lakes United District #4
From: Principal Walker
Dear Jude,
Call my office, now.
Walker
****
Booker: jude what the FUCK
Jude: . . .
I’m
. . .
Booker: no answer me, what the FUCK was that
Jude: . . .
It’s what you asked for, a story about how it was.
Booker: a fucking racist sheriff getting off on rape and murder, n-word all OVER the place, and a LYNCHING???
Jude: . . .
I’m sorry, I thought
Booker: my kids were CRYING. I had to send some of them home!! “most racist story they’ve ever read”
I’m getting calls from their PARENTS and the PRINCIPAL
I might LOSE MY JOB
what the HELL were you thinking
Jude: I thought you wanted to know why people were like that. To know the history
Booker: history?? my kids didn’t learn any fucking history today. they just HURT
Jude: . . .
Jude: But the whole point of the story is to show how systemic racism distorts the psyche!! He wrote it in the 1960s during the civil rights push!!
He was making a point!!
Booker: he?
Jude: yes, James Baldwin!
Booker: . . .
so it was real
fuck of course it was. RIGHTR would never have traumatized my 10th-graders
Jude: ALL of them have been real!! all of them! The ones you loved too!
Booker: . . . so you lied to me
you’ve BEEN lying to me
Jude: . . .
I did it for you
I did it for you
I did it for you
Booker: oh my god
Jude: I didn’t think it would go like this
Booker: yeah no shit
god my friends were right about you
delete my number, I never want to hear from you again.
Jude: I’m sorry
look I’ll call the school, I’ll explain, it was my fault not yours
Booker: you’ll do that anyway if you’re not a complete zero of a person
Jude: Don’t go, please, I really enjoyed talking to you
Booker: yeah as some real author said, apparently, sometimes you have to walk away
bye
Jude: WAIT
Booker?
Booker?
****
readdit.com/r_trans_lit_club
Iscariot_J: old essays on Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”
Replies: 1
lakecrawlr: I just read this story and it’s crazy, I feel the exact same way!! Like my inner monologue, all the
ways I’ve fucked up.
Though for me the really interesting thing is imagining what the girl will be like when she grows up. Will she turn into her mom? Did her mom used to be just like her? And now she’s just passing the hurt down, even though she knows better, even though she hates herself for it, because she doesn’t know anything else?
About the Author
B. Pladek is a writer and literature scholar based in Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Slate Future Tense Fiction, PodCastle, and elsewhere. His debut novel Dry Land appeared in fall 2023 and was shortlisted for the Crawford Award. You can find him at bpladek.net or on all socials @bpladek.
Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the December 2024 issue, which also features short fiction by Melissa A Watkins, Lincon Michel, Pat Murphy, Cressida Blake Roe, Adam-Troy Castro, David Anaxagoras, Gene Doucette, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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