CZM Book Club: "Intentionalities" by Aimee Ogden

and story. This week, Uncle Zone Media book Club, I'm going to read you a story called Intentionalities by Amy Ogden. And this story has it all. I really like this story.

Cool Zone Media Book Club. When Intentionalities came out, Hank Green tweeted at her that the story made him cry, which we'll have to count as Amy's fifteen minutes of Internet fame, even though she missed it at the time because she was cleaning the bathroom. You can find more about her work and her at Amyogdenwrights dot com. Amy is spelled AI m E and I'll just read the whole thing actually a I M E E og d E n w R I T E s dot com.

But without further ado, because there's been some ado. Do you ever think about those words that only exist in very specific contexts, like we only say much ado or further ado. We never talk about a do on its own, like, oh, there was some ado. We don't say that because it sounds like poop, and we're afraid to talk about that.

Intentionalities by Amy Ogden. This story was first published in January twenty twenty one in Clark's World magazine, which again is one of the best science fiction magazines and one of the only ones I never got into. I haven't been publishing short fiction in a little while. That's why I've never been in it. But you know, if you're writing short fiction, if Clark's Worlds currently open submission, you should always submit to them first, because they reject you

so fast. It's like, really impressive how fast they reject you. And since you can only submit a short story to one magazine at a time, it's cool to like get the rejections racked up per story if you're writing short fiction and you get rejected, like these magazines have like a less than one percent acceptance rate, and even professional authors are rejected about as often as they're accepted, even once they've already got like a bunch of credits and

things like that. So don't take it personally, just like I don't take it personally that Neil Clark has never published me in Clark's World. I don't take that personally at all. Intentionality is by Amy Ogden. Soorrel never intended to confer a child to the Braxos corporation. But Sorel had never intended a lot of things that managed to happen with or without her say so. She had scarcely

marched across the auditorium diploma in hand. When Congress passed the Protecting America's Children Act, education was handed over to the private sector, mostly to prison corporations whose personnel already had certifications in sub lethal youth management. Sorel didn't have an SYM license nor the heart to teach with a taser on her rip. Instead, she found work serving as a custodian at Mission Health's main hospital, Camp. Mission belonged to the parent corp that owned her student loan debt

and her father's end of life bills too. Having them deduct the payments straight from her paycheck cut her interest rate by a full half percent. The hospital had Braxos ads everywhere, of course, along with those for several other parent corp holdings. One Halavid played in the air over the middle of the cafeteria several times a day on a twenty minute loop. Braxos Our Future in Yours Hand in hand, a blurb about the future career training and

Advocacy Act. All the ads became white noise to Sorrel sooner or later, but she caught herself sometimes humming that little jingle or the one for the new hyperloop line. So Sorrel made plans, the kind of plans that can only be made because believing they could come true was the only thing that could get a body out of bed in the morning she was making ends meet. She would find a cheaper apartment and save money there. She would skip breakfast a couple times a week, another couple

of bucks to sock away. She would st stop going out to the matinee theater on her Tuesday mornings off, cancel her vidgas streaming service, skip the occasional beaters with friends who still lived nearby. The shell sparkled overhead, reflecting sunlight back into space, but Sorel's apartment sweltered in the

hotter than ever summer's with the air conditioning off. In her head, the numbers added up, slowly but steadily, building sturdy mountains out of nickel and diime mole hills, but the balance in her checking account never fell in line the way its imaginary counterpart did. After two months of overdraft, fees her bank account transferred her account to a high

risk financial management plan. When she sat down at the first required meeting with her assigned case manager, the man didn't even look at her as he typed her entire biography into a two hundred character field on his form. When he asked how she planned to develop her financial outlook to prevent reaching felony levels of debt, he called her Sarah. Her hands refused to warm to the temperature of the office. She clasped them on her lap so he wouldn't see them shake. Nothing she could say would

be right. No secret money stashed away, no education and career development plant, no chance of an inheritance. Her head was an empty box and the only thing bouncing inside of it was that stupid Braxos jingle. I'm going to confer a child to Braxos, she said, and he looked

up from his tablet. Sorrel meant to have a plan in place before the screening test arrived in the mail, another part time job under employment relief funds crowdfunding, but her biz pass resume only ever racked up a couple dozen hits and no leads, and her relief application bounds and or hit you up ended up in the red after she paid the fee to close it out. So when the screening test came, Sorel viciously swabbed the inside of her cheek and then dropped it back in the

postal box, postage paid. By the time the response arrived, she'd convinced herself not to read it in detail. She would check to see if there was a contract, and if so, she could and send it back. If not, no harm, she would simply be back where she'd started. Knowing what small genetic accidents kept her from being a viable candidate wouldn't change things. She opened the envelope. The cover letter fell out. Behind it peaked another document on

heavy paper. At the bottom, a hungry signature line waited. Her fingers brushed the letter, not hard enough to sweep it aside. Instead, they crawled word by word over the ink, collecting the scrabble tile names of celebrated genes. A novel mutation in the po LB gene was her crowning glory, promising a vastly increased rate of replication fidelity that would help her offspring to withstand the withering radiation of space.

It would keep the baby's genes, hewing closely to the original versions that Sorrel would bestow upon it, in other words, a tie to bind them between worlds. Her hands seized and she crushed the cover letter. Her signature on the contracted more than usual, but still recognizable as her own. She put it into the envelope and dropped it into the mailbox downstairs before she changed her mind. It was only five years. Sorrel could make it through five years unscathed if it meant a light at the end of

the interminable tunnel of debt she'd fallen into. Sorel got sucked into an argument with the crowd outside the clinic. She was supposed to keep her head down and follow the company liaison from the taxi to the door, but then some asshole hit her in the head with a sign declaring the Youth Occupational Success Act as slavery. It wasn't slavery. It was just ten years of service after their training, and after that the kids would be set

up for any career they wanted. She tried to say that at least, but the protester shouted her down, calling her corporate broodmare and mother of the year and more. Succinctly bitch, and then the liaison was pulling her away through the bristling cardboard signs and grabbing hands and into the cool, clean lobby. While she waited for her appointment,

Sorel considered asking about the sperm donor. It was doubtful that Braxos could tell her much, but even if she couldn't know who he was, she would have liked to hear what he was like, where he lived, why they wanted to knit her DNA to his. But when the technician called her name, he didn't look up from his tablet, only rattled off her identifying information.

of the exam table. The technician excused himself, while Sorrel changed. Don't forget to take your underwear off off, he reminded her, before the door whispered shut. Sorols slipped into the gown and lay back on the table, Her skin prickled with cold where the sheet touched her legs. She wriggled, trying to find a comfortable position. Exactly how many people had lain here, expecting to get pregnant while still snugly encased in a pair of haines. A knock on the door

pulled her fingers taut on the sheet. Come in, she called, and another technician, a different sandy haired white man, entered with a small cart. Sorrel Macintosh, she said, reading from a vile label on the cart, and compared it to the readout on his tablet. Thumb print here. She pressed the tablet where he indicated, and it chimed its approval. She was, in fact, who, she said to was no allergies he should be aware of, she averred, no new

health condition since the mandatory complete physical last week. At his instruction, she fumbled her feet into the stirrups and stared up into the clean, white fluorescent light. Someone had hung a suncatcher from one inner section of the drop ceiling tiles. A cribmobile for adults suspended it twisted on its string from the draft from the HVAC vent, beaming faintly flower shaped patches onto the white wall while the cold speculum stretched Sorel open. This is the lydocane injection.

The technician pulled up beside her on a rolling stool to show her a syringe. You might feel a little pinch. That little pinch darkened the edges of Sorel's world. When she swam nauseously up from the depths of her dizziness. The technician had stripped off his latex gloves and tossed them into the used kit on his cart. You did great, he said, entering data on the tablet. Sorrel craned her neck, but couldn't see what he wrote, nor guess what he'd

need to. Please, remain in this position for ten minutes before you get up. There are tissues to clean yourself up if you need. Thank you for coming in today. Thank you, said Sorel foolishly. Awkwardly, he pushed the cart out with one foot and shut the door. Sorrel stared at the ceiling alone with the realization she'd forgotten to ask about the donor. Alone altogether. Now, five years wasn't forever. She could be alone for five years. But you won't

be left alone without advertisements. Advertisements are always there. Whenever you're lonely, turn to advertisements. This show brought to you by advertisements. How was my ad for ads?

directly into Sorel's arms. Her whole body trembled, Convinced she was ice cold in the wake of an epidural. I'll drop her, she cried, as the little mouth pushed and puckered against her neck. You can do this, mamma, the nurse tutted and draped a warm felt blanket over her head and around her shoulders, anchoring it under the baby's tiny weight. Sorel didn't have the energy to explain it

to her. If anything happened to the child, if she wasn't contractually perfect, then these nine months of worry and wellness checks had been for nothing. Then she was still in the same tunnel, digging ever downward. Two turned around to hope to surface again. No one's ever dropped a baby on my watch. But if you do, fumble her, the nurse went on, appending a wink, I'll catch her before she hits the ground. She clapsed the wave function of Sorel's violently oscillating knee by squeezing it.

was a new message from her bank. The initial Braxos payment had been received. Every zero in the number looped her around and round inside it, dizzying her with relief. She shut the phone off and tossed it by her feet before the nausea overwhelmed her. Here we are now. The nurse appeared in the doorway with a swaddled infant in her arms. When Sorel didn't hold her arms out,

she nestled the baby in the bed alongside her. She's been fed, according to your wishes, you two shuldt a court and get some rest, not necessarily in that order. Her smile had ossified since earlier. Maybe she was at the end of a long shift. Maybe she'd remembered that Sorel was a Braxos parent. If you're going to name her yourself, you can start thinking on that. Otherwise, we'll

use the random generator tomorrow for the official certificate. In the meantime, you just buzz the nursing station if you need anything, all right, dear, okay. The nurse dimmed the lights. Sorel frowned down at the infant beside her, scrying for her own reflection in the opaque, blue black eyes and petulant face. In the morning, she had the nurse enter the name Abigail onto the birth certificate. Abigail had been

Sorel's mother's name. You can use the generator for a middle name, she said, aiming the little plastic bottle at Abigail's incompetently pursed mouth. The nurse's reading lenses jumped as she wrinkled her nose at the tablet. Abigail April doesn't make much sense for a little girl born in July. It's fine. Sorrel nudged Abigail's lips with the bottle nipple

the way the nutritional consultant had showed her. This time, she latched on tiny bubbles rolled up to the top of the chalky liquid with each of her sluggish pulls. Just put in Abigail April. The nurse turned her back to tap on the tablet. Abigail's feeble gulps competed with the room silence they were absorbed into it. Sorrel re arranged to hold the baby in the bottle with the same arm and fumbled her phone out to watch the day's news. The top story detailed the construction project that

would house the news Braxos Crush. She scrolled past it to a bit about a hyperlooped derailment outside Rio, then glazed over the coverage of the water ryots. Nothing new to see there. A loud slurping noise roused her from behind drooping eyelids. The baby had made it to the end of the bottle and failed to distinguish dry air from milk. Soorrel flicked the bottle onto the bedside table and hefted the baby toward her shoulder. The baby burped before she ever made it there, dribbling a mouthful of

sour milk slabber down the front of Abigail's gown. God, damn it, Abigail April, she said, and the words rolled out too naturally out of her mouth. She snatched a tissue to wipe off her shirt, and the baby's pointed chin. Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it. She knew from the outset the name was a mistake. Pretending it was the first such she'd made. That was only a concession to what was left of her pride. Sorel didn't mean for Abigail's second birthday party to be her first

and only one. She made a cake yellow with chocolate frosting, invited the other three children around Abigail's age from the mission housing complex where they lived now. One of the kid's older siblings who tagged along, sang Happy Birthday with the adults, but the other little kids only shrieked and confused anticipation. When Sorrel stopped Abigail from grabbing for the cake with its still lit candles, no no hot, Abigail

burst into frustrated tears. Sorel cried too, but only later when they were alone, while Abigail played with the presents that Braxos had paid for. They sent money every month for toys and games, as well as for child care and food and clothes and educational programming. They wanted well rounded humans, not neurotic labrats. Abigail was currently banging a plastic spaceship against various things in the apartment, examining the different sounds it made when bounced off the couch versus

tapped on the wall. The week before, Sorel had started to fill out a dating profile on amoor dot com and till she got to the question about whether or not she had children, and froze, as she always did. This time she'd been saved by the paying of July's check arriving in her bank account. She closed the amor tab and studied the solid black numbers. Walls of zeros holding off all the awful things lying just out of sight,

never out of memory, hunger and sickness and exhaustion. Walls full of holes, gaping wounds through which Sorel couldn't help but jopoggle all the painful possibilities to test how loose they'd grown. We could go on vacation, she said to Abigail, who was banging the spaceship against the toy bin. Now, she wiped her nose on her sleeve, a habit she'd been trying to break, Abigail of neither of us have ever had a vacation. Abigail put the nose cone of

the ship in her mouth. Snack pease, she said, round her mouthful of Braxos fuselage. Sorrel picked her up and carried her into the kitchen to make peanut butter banana, which was too messy to eat on the carpet. She cut the banana into little discs, dabbed peanut butter on top, and placed a single cheerio halo in the middle of each. Abigail ate three slices and pulped the rest in her fists to paint an abstract master work on her high chair tray. Sorel hated it when dark phantasies flitted through

her head. One day, while waiting to cross the street to do their grocery shopping, she caught herself dreaming about a car blowing through the intersection beneath a bloody red light. She imagined Abigail sailing through the air, imagined her legs shattering into the kind of shrapnel that would never again tolerate space travel. She could hear the sound of Abigail hitting the pavement, the screaming Abigail's her own intrusive thoughts, horrible thoughts that she held on the back of her

tongue to save her and never quite swallow. Mommy owl. Abigail protested, wringing her hand halfway free of surels. But she didn't pull all the way clear, and she didn't fumble into traffic, and her perfect legs carried them all the way down the street to the Amazon market, where the animated Cereal mascot sang Doggerel verses to Abigail, begging her to convince her mother to choose their variety of

technicolor breakfast starch. And if you want to live in a cyberpunk dystopia in which advertising shows up in the oddest of places, you can listen to this podcast or really a lot of things, because you do live in a cyberpunk dystopia. Congratulations, here's the advertisers. Sorrel meant for Abigail to get plenty of sleep, to be well adjusted and happy when she started her technical track pre kindergarten classes.

Yet she woke her up three nights out of four, slipping into her big girl bed beneath the purple and green comforter, shuddering silently with tears that Abigail could not be allowed to hear, but which she certainly must have been able to feel. Go back to sleep, Baby, Sorrel begged every night, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The nights that she didn't wake Abigail up were the ones that came at the end of the days when she met her developmental unit lead singly or in groups with her future cohort.

It was important that she spend time with the unit lead, a smiling tie woman with a kindergartener teacher's affect and an outminer's rangy stature. Adjusting to other adults and to her peer group would ensure an orderly, non traumatic transition, the Braxos Parent Handbook informed Sorel. Together, the ohort played what looked to them like games, activities that taught them how to work in teams, how to trust their intuition and each other. The unit lead was generous with praise

and rewards alike. Abigail would come home from these meetings with her sweater covered in colorful stickers and explain each

one's providence to Sorel over dinner. On those nights, Sorel's body was too heavy to lift from her bed the rest of the time, though, when she fumbled her way, half awake, into Abigail's room and roused her from her well earned sleep, she wrapped herself around a single, hard edged solace, the knowledge that a good mother wouldn't put her own emotional needs above those of her small child, that she wouldn't wake a little girl and leave her

sleepless and frightened. So a good mother was something Abigail could never have snatched away from her. Sorel knew she could never let the Braxis rep take Abigail away. She made spreadsheet after spreadsheet, trying to find a way to pay back what she'd been given. Not so much crunchy numbers as being crushed by them. She poured over the contract, asking on law advice forums, but she found no gap in the net of legalisms wide enough for even a bony five year old to slip through. She could never

let it happen. She can never. She could not be standing on the apartment complex stairs on Abigail's cakeless unsung fifth birthday, watching the unit lead, the medical technician, and the legal representative load Abigail's things, load Abigail into the company driveless car. The unit lead came back last to shake Sorel's limp hand. Don't worry, she told Sorel, her voice as firm as her grip. She will be loved. She turned to look at Abigail, whose perplexed, nervous, excited

face was just visible through the tinted window. We have a very dedicated training staff. Sorel didn't cry when the car drove off, and Abigail didn't look back. Soorrel wouldn't have driven all the way out to the Braxfast development complex outside Baltimore if she'd known the abbey M listed on the dark web registry she'd found was the wrong one. Or maybe she would have. After all, she had no other leads, no more ideas, nowhere else to go. Someone's

abby M was better than no abby M whatsoever. Either way, When Sorel shook the facility fence outside Newark and screamed her name, no one answered except the company's private police. After letting her cool off overnight, they sent her home with a bill for an overnight security stay. Along with the bill, there were some QR codes key to suggestions on how she might cover the costs. One of those codes pulled up Braxos's star studded logo Braxos. The site said,

its colors hideously familiar. Our future in yours hand in hand. She had enough of Braxos's money already. She never wanted to see another nickel. She paid the fine with what was left of her last payout and closed the associated account. Sorel went to the interview with a tidy CV printed expensively on real paper, armed with preloaded answers to questions, and an air of projected confidence for a field she'd

never worked in before. Instead, she found herself spilling her every secret to the interviewer, a woman a little younger than herself, with an otherwise nice suit with an old coffee stain on one's sleeve. She knew she couldn't change what had happened, couldn't undo her signature on the contract, couldn't reclaim what had been surrendered. It had been legal, but it hadn't been right. The interview put a box of tissues on the desk between them. There are a

lot of us with similar stories, she said. Sorel blew her nose, did you a nephew, said the interviewer. They sat together, kneeding the silence, making it elastic, making it strong,

making something that would rise. Sorrel went after the future career, training an advocacy act with both hands, tearing at it with every weapon she could find, every fundraised dollar or agami bent in ao blades, every legal precedent, an obscure statute, fired like bullets into the belly of the behemoth in her her entire life, there had been so few things she'd really wanted, really striving for. It had never seemed worth reaching for things when they had all been set

so far above her. A lifetime's worth of unspent aspiration and ardor now poured out of her and into her work. She wasn't fighting alone either. The organization she worked for had siblings all over the country, more people like her, or people who understood her, A chorus of voices shouting down the clarion call of this idea, thousands of people, millions of dollars a year of work, five a decade. It still wasn't enough. It still only scratched the surface.

But a scratch can be big enough for the cold

to get into and break the whole thing open. When the miners' union spokespeople made landfall on Earth to negotiate their terms for the release of Braxo's company property and their own emancipation, Sorrel was supposed to be on the other side of the planet filling out documentation for the class action lawsuit, But without her asking, her supervisor quietly swapped a few assignments, and so Sorel found herself as one of the nonprofits representatives at the introductory's summit, The

miners stood out in the sea of black suits and skirts. They wore company work suits emerald green or sapphire blue, depending on which project they had been tagged to. The name Braxos defiantly blazoned down each sleeve between the clasps of their exoskeletons. Sorel avoided them for the most part, afraid to look too long into their hunger and hurt. Not all of them responded in kind. One young woman took up a low orbit around Sorrel, falling closer with

each passing cycle. Sorel looked her over from the corners of her eyes, past the sides of her pocket as she nudged keynotes in legal references to the nonprofit's lead representative, seventeen or eighteen, the right age, black hair, shorn short, the right color, eyes like brown, bruises in her face, right and wrong, all at once. During a break, her orbital integrity collapsed entirely. She stopped in front of Sorel's seat on her way back from the coffee machine, a

paper cup in either hand, was I yours? She asked a challenge a rebuke a wish. Maybe it was wishful thinking to recognize any of Abigail and the curl of close cropped hair behind one ear. Maybe it was self punishment to look into this stern, stubborn face and see a round cheeked little girl's smile. No, she said, and it was the truth either way. Maybe I gave birth to you. I don't know, but I don't have the right to call you mine either way. The young woman's

bruised eyes did not soften. She did not reach for Sorel's hand. Her exoskeleton whined faintly as she set one of the coffee cups in front of Sorrel. She did not walk away. Steam rose from the surface and led away to nothing in the cool, dry meeting room air. Sorel took a deep breath and spoke slowly, stuttering but doling out every word carefully, to say exactly what she meant to say it all and leave nothing behind or

forgotten or overlooked. And that's the story. Hey, I hope you liked it anywhere near as much as I do, because then you would have liked it a lot. I had to like a little bit pause near the end because I get choked up. I mean Abigail meets Sorrel or the maybe Abigail meets Sorel. You know I'm a sucker for it. What do you want? I asked Amy, the author about the story, and Amy told me to

tell you at the outline stage. I intended for this to be a flash piece, but I figured out very quickly I couldn't unpack my feelings about motherhood, choices, and

complicity into less than a thousand words. As a parent, and as someone who has and or had a strange relationships with both my own own parents, I think constantly about how every day that passes means a million decisions, most of them subconscious, most of which don't feel like decisions at all, because of the societal stew that we all marinate in daily that tries to leave us all more or less isotonic to what we're swimming in. This story grew out of that and the nagging fear that

I'll embark on one of those egregiously wrong paths. It feels so obvious and safe and comfortable when I take my kids by the hand and lead them out into it.

you know, and it's just like so completely untrue. And I love that this is a story about space and near future and it is about science and it is also about emotion and family and those aren't contradictory, right, Like you can talk about both because we're human and we can do that. We contain multitudes. That was my addendum. I think you'll figure that out. And I asked Amy

what to plug. She said that her novella Emergent Properties came out last year, and although it's more upbeat, it does feature complicated parent child relationships, a sentiment of fuck capitalism, and in this case, body hopping robots. So check out Emergent Properties or anything else that Amy Ogden has written on a bunch of different magazines. And if you listen to this on it could happen here. You could check out my history podcast Go Cool People Did Cool Stuff.

If you are checking us out on Cool People Did Cool stuff you could check out It could Happen here Because this is on both feeds, it's a podcast without its own feed. It sits upon other feeds as a symbiote, like Dax from Star Trek. Different gender. I don't know how the different genders of the podcast are. It gets to the metaphor fall apart. I'll talk to you next week. Bye everyone.