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Preliminary Report of the Late-Career Genre Author Human Rights Investigatory Commission

by Matt Carey

When I started Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine, it was really only as an unpublished science fiction writer who wanted to see how thrown-together internet genre fiction publications really worked, so I could understand why they kept rejecting all the awesome literature I was submitting to them at the time. What I didn’t understand was that by virtue of my new role as editor, people would begin to see me differently. I’d be taking on new responsibilities in my relationships with writers, and facing new dangers. Unfortunately, as I’ll explain here, that was a lesson I learned only too late.




“No, you may not read my unfinished MFA thesis,” my fiancée said. “I don’t need an editor. I just need to finish my novel my own way. Stay away from it.”

“Maureen, I don’t want to read it as an editor,” I said. “I’m writing a novel too. I just think if I read yours, we could both talk about it, and we could both get some ideas.”

“No. I know what you want to do with my novel. You want to pick, pick, pick at it. You are the dream-killer, Matt. You are the enemy. My novel is a baby bird and you want to touch it and leave your scent all over it so I won’t recognize it anymore and I’ll abandon it to the elements and let it die. I would sooner Reply-All to the English department mailing list with an email attachment of my unfinished novel, rather than show it to you. I would sooner have my unfinished novel read out loud as the opening act to a professional wrestling match, in fart-language. I’m gonna string up invisible gossamer tripwires all around the keyboard of my laptop, and if I ever find one of them broken and I even think you’ve read my novel, I will set you on fire as you sleep. Keep your stinking hands off my goddamned unfinished novel.”

At that moment there was a muffled crash far beneath our apartment and the distant sound of a man screaming, “HOW THE HELL AM I BACK HERE AGAIN?”

“Great!” Maureen said. “Sounds like another delivery for Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Don’t act like that’s my fault. I had all these smartass wannabe writers sending their manuscripts by courier service so they’d know the exact moment I had them in my hands, and all we were getting was eight million angry notes from UPS and Fedex complaining there was no place downstairs to leave the envelopes. I had to give them the back door delivery directions.”

“No, you really didn’t! I’m afraid some delivery guy’s gonna get lost down in the basement and starve to death. If two of them get stuck down there, they could resort to cannibalism. I don’t want us to go back to Texas for a week and come home to find some delirious Fedex guy with his arm gnawed off and his uniform torn into some kind of loincloth, scrabbling at our apartment door with a bloody stump and some dork’s creepy pornographic submission about naked minotaurs. I can’t handle that kind of drama in our home.”

“Fine. I’ll take the directions offline. I just gotta go rescue this guy first.”

“Hey! Kiss first!” I gave Maureen a kiss and she gave me a kiss, and I made my way down to the basement of our building. Our apartment was nice enough, but most of the lower floors were taken up with an unlit, defunct machinist’s factory dating back before the great quake and under the perpetual protection of the San Francisco Historic Preservation Committee. With all the old equipment pulled out, the place was a cross between a catacomb and a honeycomb. I followed the sounds of swearing to find a middle-aged man in a beret and a cheap windbreaker in a chamber illuminated by a tricky light coming through a hole up by the ceiling, giving the false impression there was a stairwell to the surface only a couple of rooms away. Lost souls could circle this light for hours, like doomed moths seeking the sun. The man in the beret wasn’t wandering aimlessly, though. He was smashing pieces of old cast-off wood furniture against the wall, using the splintered chunks to mark his path so he’d know where he’d been. Smart.

“Hey, you lost?” I said.

“I'm looking for Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine,” he said. “Do you know a Matt Carey?”

“That’s me,” I said. “Do I know you?”

The man sized me up briefly, and tossed away the remnants of a shattered end table. “No, you don’t. I thought it better for us to meet in person. My name’s Donald Pierce, and I’m here representing the Science Fiction Writers of America. It’s a matter of some delicacy.”

Donald Pierce. I didn’t recognize his face, but I knew his name. The rumor was that he’d once accepted commissions to write both a Dragonlance novel and a Warhammer 40,000 novel simultaneously, hard up against both deadlines after the original authors dropped out. He finished both novels in under two weeks by structuring them as generic MacGuffin quests, identical scene-for-scene and almost sentence-for-sentence. All he had to do was change the protagonist’s name from Tanis Half-Elven’ to ‘Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro’ and swap out a few other superficial details as he switched back and forth between word processor windows. Both books were equally successful, and Pierce developed a reputation among science fiction writers as a loyal soldier and a man who got things done.

“I’m so sorry you got stuck down here,” I said, a little flustered to be in the presence of a serious, working writer. “I’m an idiot, my directions are terrible. Do you want to come upstairs? Or, we could go across the street and get some tea or coffee?”

“That’s okay. This is a good place. We won’t be overheard down here.” He took a folder labeled ‘LCGAHRIC’ out of his jacket and tossed it on top of an old piano with a giant throw rug wrapped around it. The impact sent up a cloud of dust mites. “There’s been an uprising in the science fiction community in the weeks since Michael Crichton’s unexpected death. The long-standing position of the SFWA has been that a science fiction author has complete freedom to write about any imaginary world, the real world, or any alternate reality he chooses. But there’s now a faction within the SFWA that believes Crichton took this freedom too far. Obviously, Michael Crichton was a major figure in President Bush’s circle of climate advisors. As a medical doctor, he was closer to being a climate science specialist than anyone else willing to support the White House policy on carbon dioxide emissions. Many other authors felt that Crichton was letting the tail wag the dog, using his real-life press conferences as promotional tie-ins for a novel about an alternate reality where his opinions about global warming were actually true. But nobody dared call him out on it while he was alive. The one newspaper columnist who denounced him turned up as a character in his next novel—as a child molester with a tiny penis. That was hard enough on him, as a journalist, but no science fiction writer’s career could survive a small-penis attack by Michael Crichton. Michael Moorcock obviously could do nothing. Elizabeth Bear wanted to speak out, but she thought Crichton would say something about her weight. It’s not that she has any reason to be ashamed of her body, you understand, but these attacks destroy lives…”

“I have to stop you there,” I said, “I don’t think I want to be a part of this. Jurassic Park was a science fiction masterpiece. Michael Crichton took a bunch of realistic characters to a dinosaur theme park with no handwaving. He explained where the DNA came from, he explained how the dinosaurs could reproduce even though the scientists only cloned females, and it was amazing. I don’t know if you remember what that meant to the world back in 1991, but I do. And Crichton may have done some horrible things later in life, but he’s gone now, and Bush is about to be out of the White House anyway, so maybe we should just move on and honor his memory.”

“Of course. But it’s not just Michael Crichton, is it, Mr. Carey? We’ve all heard the rumors about Orson Scott Card’s support for barbaric reeducation camps, in his quest to find a cure for homosexuality. There are people saying that successful science fiction writers have a tendency to commit human rights abuses. They say that after a career of writing about the value of scientific expertise, science fiction authors start wanting to be treated like they have expertise. So they use their ability to invent plausible-sounding nonsense, and they start passing it off as the truth. They start giving orders and, sometimes, they find people willing to listen to them. There are even SFWA members threatening to speak out about L. Ron Hubbard! It would tear the science fiction community apart.”

When Pierce said Hubbard’s name, his voice lowered slightly. I was startled even to hear the name spoken out loud in such a blasphemous context. It was at that moment when I realized a conspiracy of silence among genre authors was really possible. I, too, might be complicit.

“Okay, say it’s true. What do you need me for?”

“The dissidents within the SFWA are demanding some kind of investigation. And we decided right off that it would only lead to witch hunts to call upon writers to investigate other writers. We need people who are critical, but who have the appearance of credibility. That’s why each author accused of human rights violations is going to be investigated by the editor of a different genre publication. We’ve already got the editor of Arkham Tales in Providence investigating Lovecraft and the Ku Klux Klan, and the editor of Dante’s Heart is deep undercover in a magic cult near Northampton waiting to see if Alan Moore will show up. It’s called the Late-Career Genre Author Human Rights Investigatory Commission. We want you to conduct one of these investigations and submit your findings for the Commission’s report.”

“Who am I investigating?” I asked, bristling a little at the suggestion that they came to me because they didn’t want a writer.

“Jorge Luis Borges. Who else? The dissidents are insisting we dig up the same scandal that cost him his shot at the Nobel Prize: the way he was such a vocal opponent of Juan Perón, but then he supposedly fell silent during the period of violence after the Peróns fell out of power and Jorge Rafael Videla came in. We just need you to travel to Argentina and research Borges’s attitude toward the Dirty War, the concentration camps, the disappearances. Find out if he did anything to support the regime in power at the time. I’m sure I can trust you to be fair-minded and not alarmist in interpreting whatever you find.”

“Fair-minded?” I said. “Naturally. The man happens to be an idol of mine. So when I ask for access to Borges’s papers, I’ll be speaking on behalf of the SFWA?”

“Not exactly. The SFWA can’t acknowledge any involvement in the investigation at this time. Just say you’re researching an article for your website.”

With that little admission, it was as if Pierce’s whole body began to give off the sour odor of ‘doomed collaboration’. It was a smell I’d learned to recognize very well in my literary adventures, but not one I’d learned to steer clear of. Against my better judgment, I was still willing to be convinced.

“The SFWA board hasn’t even approved this ‘Investigatory Commission,’ have they? Who’s behind it?”

“The board is keeping its distance, but it knows of the investigation,” Pierce assured me. “My orders come straight from Andrew Burt.”

“Really? Burt? Didn’t Burt just lose the last SFWA election by a landslide? I heard he wanted to clamp down on the copyright of every science fiction story ever written. He wanted to sue Google. I thought he went off to develop some program that blocks you from accessing your desktop when you’re reading e-books, to keep people from copy-pasting to the internet.”

“Andrew Burt still has plenty of friends in the SFWA, I assure you. And some people may not like his methods, but he’s looking out for the value of our intellectual property. These are hard times. If this investigation doesn’t clear the air of the allegations against genre fiction, the value of science fiction could crash just like the hedge funds. Mr. Carey, you have to decide. Are you ready to do what needs to be done? Or do I need to find someone else?”

“Let’s see that folder,” I said.




Six weeks after my meeting with Pierce I was sitting on a concrete bench in the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, flipping through the same folder, which I had fattened with dozens of pages of background internet research. I was elated to be out of San Francisco; I felt like I’d escaped. To me, San Francisco was a series of enclosed spaces bounded by tall buildings, low skies, fog banks, hills. Not like Texas, where you could see for miles and it always felt self-evident that if you walked far enough you could go anywhere in the world. But Argentina was like Texas. Buenos Aires was flat and dry, clear and bright, and eighty degrees in the middle of the southern-hemisphere summer. It was hard to believe it was the sort of place where a secretive right-wing dictatorship could make thirty thousand of its people disappear, and torture thousands more. It seemed like the sort of thing that could only happen someplace damp and freezing, like Russia or Orwell’s England.

It was an inauspicious outlook for a human rights investigator, and in retrospect, it was a stroke of luck that I dug up anything on Borges at all. If exoticism didn’t lull me into ignoring this country’s horrors, nostalgia could have. If there was any revelation I didn’t miss due to cultural and historical ignorance, I was likely to blind myself to it because of my Borges fanboyism. This was the “fair-minded” assessment Pierce wanted from me, and he was planning on passing it off as an expert opinion simply because my publication shared the same name as one of Borges’s obsessions. If I’d have turned the assignment down, Pierce probably would have gone straight to the editor of Zahir. Or Memorious. Or Tiger Beat.

However, there was one revelation I didn’t miss, because it was right in front of me, opposite the wall with the names of the disappeared. Called the “Monument to Escape,” it was a life size sculpture of six cramped jail cells in three cube-shaped grey buildings with translucent red roofs. Two of these buildings were propped up on their edges so they leaned against each other at 45-degree angles, and the third building rested crookedly atop the other two, so all the prison doors opened onto thin air.

“That’s what it was like. You could not always keep your feet on the ground,” an old man said. He stamped an Oxford shoe on the ground to illustrate. “They knew how to take your bearings away from you.”

“Roque Abrea?” I asked. I hoped he was my interview contact, a retired journalist who I knew only as a name from a webforum post I’d found by Googling “Borges dirty war”. His skin was tanned nearly orange and his cropped hair was bright white. He leaned hard on a cane planted in the ground straight in front of him and hunched down with his shoulders around his ears.

“Mmm,” he reached over and pulled the Atlanta Braves baseball cap off my head. He squinted at the letter ‘A’ logo, frowning. It crossed my mind that he might be glimpsing transcendent truth through the logo like in El Aleph. Then I thought he might be sniffing the sweatband. “I told you it’s a nice place where you’re buying me lunch.”

“I’m not dressed right?” I stuffed the Borges dossier in my backpack. In my polo shirt and jeans I thought I looked about as good as he did, with his rumpled black vest and slacks.

“You’re dressed right for a North American tourist. You look exactly like a North American tourist. I can’t say you’re dressed right for a civilized meal with a local. It’s my clothes I’m worried about, really, I’m worried they might not seat me with you. Are you going to be bringing with you the, uh, the ‘Jansport’? What age are you?”

I glared at him. “This backpack has a lifetime warranty. In order to get my money’s worth, I need to continue using it for the rest of my life.”

“Fair enough,” Abrea said. “Let’s go eat.”

“Wait a minute. What did you mean when you said they didn’t let you keep your feet on the ground? What does that have to do with this monument?”

“Oh, no. I have no particular interest in repeating the secrets of my country’s great shame to some website. To me, this lunch is nothing but another conquest. I love to dine for free on the strength of my stories. Especially at an overpriced restaurant like this one. You’ll hear the whole story of my imprisonment, and Borges, and my lost bearings and everything else. But feed me first.”

“Huh,” I said, getting up. “I don’t think I’d enjoy singing for my supper. I’d be afraid I wasn’t impressing anybody. Too much stress.”

“Ah, that’s because you’re not a writer like me,” Abrea said. “It’s part of the storytelling impulse. A primal need.”




We went across the street to a noisy grill restaurant where Abrea ordered a menu item I couldn’t translate, but that he strongly recommended. It turned out to be filet mignon. I had a chorizo sandwich that wasn’t bad, until I swallowed a chunk of gristle and suddenly needed to dry heave. Abrea probably knew something was up the second time I hit the bathroom, but he didn’t comment. Instead, as soon as I got back to the table, he launched into his story.

“To my regret, I allowed myself to be imprisoned for taking a stand on an issue of no real importance,” Abrea said. “I should have known better. The junta had the clever strategy of placing pointless absurdities before the public from time to time. Anyone with the courage to criticize any of these red herrings revealed himself as a threat to the military government. For me, the breaking point came when they required certain academic work at the University of Buenos Aires to be screened by government censors before it could be published. These censors had no academic background; probably they couldn’t even understand what they were reading. For the professors it was merely an inconvenience that didn’t stop them from doing their work. But to me, the notion that the junta appointed itself as the editor for all intellectual work produced in Buenos Aires was offensive, and I wrote an opinion piece about it in La Opinión. The Triple A didn’t bother coming to me that night, or the next night; they had bigger worries. But a month or so later it was a convenient time to take out several journalists at once, so they smashed down the door of my apartment, dragged me naked out of bed, and took me to their Ford Falcon idling out on the street. I remember thanking them, like a groggy fool, for letting me put on a pair of pants before they took me. Once I was in the back seat, they drugged me. I awoke tied to a chair in a dim room with black walls, with no idea where I was. In fact, I still can’t say for certain where I was. When they let me walk out into the sunlight again fourteen months later, it was through the doors of Caseros Prison here in Buenos Aires. A strong indication that the prison where I was kept might have been Caseros, but by no means certain.

“They tortured me with electricity, with cattle prods. It’s a terrible feeling, your whole body tensing up. You can feel your heart becoming exhausted, you can feel how close you come to death. I had two torturers who liked to come see me, a tall one and a short one. The short one was insane, brutal. He loved to apply electric shocks with car batteries or splash water on me and threaten to electrocute me, but he was ashamed to do too much when the tall one was there. They liked to make me beg the tall one not to leave me alone with him. Maybe it was all an act. I denounced a great many friends, but I don’t remember them writing any of it down. I didn’t know anything. Maybe I wasn’t important enough to kill. I was a respectable journalist, I even wrote for La Nación from time to time, but I suspect there was nothing particular about me that made them keep questioning me month after month. Bureaucratic force of habit, most likely. Well, it doesn’t matter. You want to hear about Borges.

“Once they finished torturing me the first time they dragged me by the arms—they liked to drag, it was a point of pride with them that their victims would be weakened so badly that they could drag them along, they liked to scrape the knees on the concrete floor and leave trails of blood—they dragged me down a hall that terminated with the torture room to the right of cell seven and the guard station to the left of cell one, seven cells in a row, they counted them for me, seven six five four three two one. Each cell faced back toward the guard station, on a diagonal; none of us prisoners could see into each other’s cells. Bright lights on all the time, but we never saw the sun. They said ‘you are in cell five’ and they threw me in there. A toilet, two bunks, a table. Two prisoners per cell.”

“Fourteen prisoners,” I said.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Abrea said. “I was sitting right in that cell when I saw Borges walk by. The old blind aristocrat. He had a fine wool coat, a cane—I didn’t have much use for canes back then, though I did by the time I walked out the prison door. Borges didn’t glance into a single cell, of course he was blind but he didn’t cock his ear at us either. None of us called out, we didn’t dare, but a few of the others groaned. The guards became like waiters, they let Borges do whatever he wanted. So he walked down to cell three and sat in a chair the guards gave him and had a conversation with a man in the cell I couldn’t see—some friend of his who had just been taken off the street. They didn’t discuss politics. Borges spoke of a collection being taken for the man’s wife, and he promised to send food. A vain hope, sending food in the care of the torturers.”

“He pulled strings to meet with a prisoner?” I asked. “What does that prove?”

“It proves his influence. For more than a year that hallway was my world. It was just us and the guards. There was no outside. But they let Borges in.”

“So you think he earned special privileges with the regime, beyond just being a famous author?”

“Maybe. But there’s more. We prisoners rarely left our cells. Maybe to go to the torture room or the infirmary. But we passed notes. We had to wait until the guard got out of his booth and went to see something down some other hallway. That was the only time we knew we were alone. Then one of us could jam the note through the steel mesh along the side of the cell so it would stick out enough for the man next door to take hold of it with a couple of splinters of wood or whatever he had, and pull it through the grate into his own cell. ‘Caramelos’ we called them, because when the guards were looking we hid them on the dry roofs of our mouths. It was a distinctive taste, the sour saliva of the author soaked into the paper. You might have to keep it resting there on your palate for an hour before you could pass it on to the next cell. We had no way to know if a caramelo was coming, so every time the guard walked away our eyes would go to the two sides of the cell, like watching for the mailman. Even today if you gave me a caramelo I could put it on the roof of my mouth and taste it and tell you right away if it came from cell four or cell six. Passing caramelos was a good pastime for prisoners: a game to consume weeks and months. We had no stationery, I promise you, writing a caramelo took time. And sending a caramelo was hell. It was a great triumph when we finally sent a caramelo all the way up and down the line saying “Who is here?” with numbers one through seven, and every man signed his name. Yes, fourteen names, as I see you are about to point out, very good. But it wasn’t as easy as that, prisoners would come and go, they would be taken away for torture and questioning.”

“Under such conditions one naturally develops suspicions. I began to suspect the prisoners in cell four might be talking to the interrogators. What they would tell them of any consequence, I have no idea. There was a communist in cell three, and I wished to discuss some matters with this communist in confidence. So after great effort I invented a method for folding a caramelo that, in my opinion, would not allow it to be unfolded without showing signs that it had been disturbed. A sealed caramelo, if you will. I sent this sealed caramelo to cell three in care of cell four. I got no response. This was very suspicious, and I’m afraid I sent a caramelo to cell four containing some rather indiscreet accusations. Cell four denied intercepting the caramelo and promised he’d delivered it faithfully. So I sent another sealed caramelo to cell three, explained the situation, and begged him to respond with a sealed caramelo that could not be tampered with. The response I received was astonishing. It wasn’t from the communist at all. It was from a former water department bureaucrat from Villa Soldati and his cellmate, a former union official. The bureaucrat assured me he had no interest whatsoever in European models of economic reform, he expostulated at length about his loyalty to the National Reorganization, and he complained that I had ignored his last caramelo in which he said exactly the same thing. I promptly sent the water bureaucrat an unsealed letter of apology, welcoming him to the neighborhood. I remember very specifically that this message was addressed to cell three. I received no response, but much later when my relationship with cell four thawed, they explained to me that the communist had received the message intended for the bureaucrat, had interpreted it as a coded warning that our communications were being monitored, and had responded with a barrage of accusations against cell four and sealed caramelos addressed to me. Naturally I received none of these sealed caramelos from the communist, though the prisoners in cell four swore they’d passed them all on.”

“Okay, let me try to understand. You would send a message addressed to a certain jail cell, but then depending on whether the message was sealed or not, that cell could turn out to have different people locked up in it?”

“Precisely. We conducted experiments to try to understand what was happening, but we couldn’t do as much as we wished. We were being watched almost constantly, and even among us there must have been informers. But we performed other types of experiment as well. The bureaucrat in cell three liked to pour out fluids on the floor. He said it flowed very quickly to the left wall, and accumulated in the corner. He explained that this must mean we were in a rather small building on a steep slope, because if a larger building was built so unevenly it would collapse. I attempted to reproduce the experiment in my own cell, but the incline never seemed as dramatic as what the bureaucrat described. I sent an unsealed caramelo asking the communist in cell three to try the same experiment. He responded that the water did indeed flow very quickly downhill, but to the right wall, not the left.”

“The prison guards were trying to distort your sense of reality. You never even saw who was handing you these messages. It would be simple for them to intercept the notes and give you whatever misinformation they wanted.”

“It’s possible. But I believe the guards feared what we would learn from these little fragments of conversation with one another. They were entirely in earnest when they beat us and threatened to kill us for communicating among ourselves. For many months my cellmate was a very young man named Pascual de Paz. They took him straight out of the university. They photographed him at some demonstration and then, pfft, they snatched him up. One day I received a caramelo from cell one asking me if I knew why they transferred Pascual next door to cell six. I looked over at the bunk and there was Pascual, picking at his scalp with his fingernails to get rid of the imaginary lice, the same as every morning. So I sent the word back to cell one and told them they were misinformed, and nothing had changed. Days passed, and by this time there were sealed caramelos passing back and forth through our cell all the time. Whenever we opened them we found that they were sent between prisoners we’d never heard of, names not on the list of fourteen. But mostly we sent them on their way unopened, to keep from diverting them from their destination. Finally cell one’s response arrived. They said they sent a sealed caramelo to cell seven, and cell seven assured them that they were corresponding back and forth with Pascual de Paz in cell six, not in cell five. This was too much to let go. Pascual wrote a message addressed to himself in cell six, warning himself to keep to his exercise routine because he didn’t want an unfit doppelganger running around. We wrapped it inside a sealed caramelo to cell seven, which was itself wrapped inside a sealed caramelo to cell one, and we sent it on its way. Naturally, we requested a response by the same method. An hour after we dispatched Pascual’s message, the guards came into the cell, knocked Pascual senseless with their batons and carried him away. We heard two gunshots.”

“Shit,” I said. “They killed him?”

Abrea looked almost as if he pitied me for failing to keep up. “Yes, they killed him. Pascual de Paz was never again heard from.”

I thought for a long time. “But Borges can’t be blamed for all this. He came in to visit a prisoner. That’s all.”

“Borges came in. And Borges left. You aren’t much of an investigating journalist, Mr. Carey. I told you Borges came to see the prisoner in the third cell. I also told you he walked in front of my cell, cell five. You should have accused me of lying. But I’ll explain it to you anyway. When Borges finished his visit and turned back toward the guard station, he looked very unhappy and put his hands on his lower back. In his condition, he couldn’t walk that way. Instead, he walked past my cell and stopped in front of cell six. Then he turned around and walked all the way out. You remember the incline of our cells? It was steeply uphill from cell three to the guard station. But it was a perfectly comfortable slope downhill from cell six. Borges flowed downhill in both directions, just like the water we poured out in our experiments. And he showed not a moment’s surprise that such a thing was possible.”




Abrea was the only helpful person I’d managed to locate on my own before leaving for Argentina, so after my discussion with him was done I had nothing left to do but to go see the Borges collection at the San Telmo Foundation, in the south part of town. My cab dropped me on a rather cramped and busy street in a neighborhood full of fashion shops and art galleries in old buildings with varicolored awnings and plant-draped balconies. I found a gated door with  "Fundación San Telmo" among several unfamiliar business names on the intercom. I identified myself, heard a burst of static vaguely reminiscent of human voice, and was buzzed in to a darkened photography gallery with a few postcard-sized black and white images displayed on the wall. I continued through to a pastel-pink courtyard and wandered around until I found the Foundation’s nameplate by a door on the upper landing. I’d been warned that a very respectable magic realist writer with secret genre sympathies had called in a favor to get me this appointment, and that I’d better appear to know what I was doing.

Inside, a woman sat at a desk reading a French copy of The Charterhouse of Parma that she held up in front of her face so the title was visible from the door. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, with a tight black dress and very short dyed red hair. According to the placard on her desk, her name was Estella Palaguerra.

“Hi, can I go in?” I asked. “I have an appointment…”

“Yes, what university are you with?”

“I don’t have a university. I mean, I graduated from a university, but I’m here to research a magazine article.”

She put the book down. “You don’t have a university? The Foundation’s collection is for serious academic research only. It’s not for enthusiasts.”

“Sure, that’s okay. I’m researching Borges’s philosophical viewpoints late in life…”

“Absolutely not! The Borges archive cannot be opened to every tourist with a passing interest in philosophy or tracking down some reference in his stories. I’m sorry, you have to leave.”

“Wait! Wait!” I said as she herded me toward the door. “I’m doing biographical criticism! Look! Serious criticism!”

I tore open my backpack and dumped out the Borges folder on her desk. “Look at these. Lists of Borges’s known associates. Reconstructions of his movements and activities over a period of years. I’m hardly going to be referring to the text of his stories at all.”

“You’re certain you’re here to research Borges’s life? Not just to read his stories?”

“I promise.”

“Okay. You can use the archives. But you’ll have to leave if a university scholar comes in. Particularly if it’s a postcolonial scholar.”

There was no computer in the office at all, except an old-looking Hewlett-Packard sitting neatly unplugged on a table in the corner of the research room, as if it was only being kept for the use of researchers with some strange and undesirable disability. It was covered with squares of rubbery gunk where some kind of stickers had been pulled off of it, and there was a thin slip of paper Scotch-taped to the front of the tower bearing only the word “CD-ROM”. I booted it up and found it only contained a fragmentary partial copy of the paper archive without any useable search feature. So I had to resort to sifting through the crates of paper materials. The first question was what year I wanted to start with. The Dirty War began in 1976 at the latest, when General Videla captured the presidency in a coup. Roque Abrea was abducted and imprisoned in 1980, if his account was to be believed. Caseros Prison opened only in 1979, but it was planned as far back as the 1950s. Whatever I wanted to cover, I only had a week before my scheduled flight home, and I wasn’t exactly a speedreader in Spanish.

After some hesitation, I decided to cover all my bases by going through the 1980 crates first and working my way backward. I was looking for any nonfiction works such as newspaper articles or obscure essays that might shed light on Borges’s connections in the worlds of politics, the military or the bureaucracy. Also, anything at all to do with prisons, especially anything with details indicating Borges had visited one. I didn’t have time to do much more than skim the letters, but I’d read over a historian’s organizational chart of junta officials known to be working in Buenos Aires at the time, and I hoped that if I came across any of their names I’d recognize it.

Lots of the papers were worthless to me: memorabilia from Borges’s public appearances, foreign-language editions of his printed work, cover art. There were lots of notebooks in Borges’s difficult handwriting, carbon-copies of typed correspondence, and galleys of his published work with corrections scrawled in the margins in an unfamiliar hand, probably his secretary’s. I actually became so fascinated by the revision process that I was tempted to read these notations whether they were relevant to my investigation or not. Soon I came to a few typed copies of a partial version of a story I wasn’t familiar with, obviously typed with a different, darker ink ribbon than any of the others, and probably a different typewriter. The scene under revision involved a military commander of the defeated Maratha Empire being thrown into a prison under the control of the British East India Company, in the early nineteenth century near Bombay. In the first draft, the commander was locked in a prison where the cells were organized into five semicircular tiers layered one atop the other, monitored from a central guard tower. Because the commander was the most dangerous and feared prisoner in the prison, the jailers dragged him to the top row and locked him in the very last cell. The second draft was the same except for the description of the architecture of the prison. This time, instead of the almost modern industrial design described in the first draft, the prison was more of a damp, stony dungeon. There was still a central guard tower, but the rows of cells were in five hallways radiating outward from the central hub. As the captive was marched down one of these hallways, he lost sight of the guard towers, but he knew he could still be seen through observation slits in the walls. Although his new home in the seventh cell was much farther down the hallway than the first cell, the light from each observation slit seemed equally near and bright.

The third and last draft differed from the others even less. In this one the prison was the same as the one in the second draft, but the jailers simply marched the captive down a different hall of cells, the one on the guard station’s far left rather than its far right. This hallway inclined steeply downward, and the British jailers cruelly pushed over the shackled chieftain to watch him roll down the hard slope. When he finally came to a stop at the end of the hall, he was once again in front of the same cell, the seventh cell in the row and the final cell in the prison, number 210. It seemed like the story would continue from there, but I couldn’t find any sign of an ending in the same crate, which was marked 1978. Unless these papers were misfiled, that meant that Borges had originally written the Indian commander’s story sometime earlier, and these notes were only revisions, perhaps for a new edition. I took out the international phone card I’d picked up at a grocery store and gave Donald Pierce a call. I reached his voicemail.

“The SFWA ought to get ready for some more scandal,” I said. “Borges was involved in something.”




I spent most of the next week at the San Telmo Foundation trying to reconstruct the story, digging through decades’ worth of papers for any reference to the Maratha Empire and making frantic calls to a half-dozen scholars every time I found the slightest lead. Estella the curator began to recognize me as a serious if hapless researcher. She even occasionally looked up from her books long enough to name a few contacts who might have come across fragments of the lost Borges story at one time or another. I never did reconstruct a complete draft of the story, but putting together the pieces, it seemed to have been written under the working title The Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham, which meant it was based on the period in the great English philosopher’s career when he proposed that prisons and other industrial buildings should be built to allow supervisors to see into every cell from a central location. Estella theorized that Borges might have actually suppressed the publication of the story in order to avoid comparisons with Michel Foucault’s book about the panopticon, Surveiller et punir, which came out in 1975.

Like several Borges stories, The Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham was narrated through a framing device in which an obviously fictional version of the author had an opportunity to review a mysterious, previously-lost manuscript: in this case, a journal kept by Bentham’s architect brother Samuel as he journeyed to India and supervised the construction of a British-funded panopticon prison. The scene where the commander was led to his cell had obviously been revised many, many times. I dug up a half-dozen more variant drafts, and there were receipts in the archives hinting that even more materials related to the story had been lent out long ago, to researchers from various universities in Latin America and the United States. But there was no difference in quality between the revision where the prisoner walked down the rightmost hallway to reach cell 210 and the revision where he walked down the leftmost one. There was no difference between the revisions where the same hallway sloped downhill, or curved to the left, or zigzagged. If Borges was just worried about telling the Indian commander’s story, he could have used any one of these versions of the scene. But I didn’t believe Borges was trying to choose between the different drafts. I believed the drafts were meant to be read together as one story. Or as one blueprint.




By the day before my flight home, I was devoting most of my time to trying to track down missing drafts of the Bombay prison scene. It was mostly a game of fruitless phone tag. It seemed like every researcher who was on record as borrowing drafts of the scene was dead, or senile, or dropped off the face of the earth. Once I called what was supposed to be the home number of a former professor from the Catholic University of Chile, and when I asked after him all I heard was a series of clicks and a dial tone. When I tried to call again, I got a generic voicemail. When Estella came into the research room to check on the archive materials, I was staring dumbfoundedly at my lists of exhausted leads, amazed at my bad luck.

“You don’t look busy,” she said. “Come have a coffee with me.”

I gladly accepted, and we walked together to a café down on the corner. I ordered a cafe con leche because it was what the kid in The Savage Detectives was always drinking. We sat down at a table on the sidewalk and I realized I had no idea what we should talk about, so I blurted out that I’d been sent by the Science Fiction Writers of America to investigate Borges for human rights violations. Estella simply nodded knowingly. Obviously she’d done some checking up on me.

“I envy you a little, for being almost finished with your research,” Estella said. “You’ve been here for a week now. I’ve decided that a week is a very long time to spend on Borges. When I took this job, as a literature graduate student, I thought I could love Borges. I thought Borges and I would have adventures together. You have to be careful when you’re young and your heart is open, because it means you can fall for anyone. Sorry. I shouldn’t lecture to you; you’re almost my age.”

I smiled. “I probably need to hear that. I still read Borges for adventure. Really, there’s no way I can let this mystery go until I know how it all ends. I might have to delay my flight home.”

“Don’t. You said yourself the ending The Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham was probably never written. Make up your own ending if you must have one, and go home.”

“I actually think I can guess the ending. Whenever Borges describes the path the prisoner takes down the corridor, he’s always careful to point out that he sees the prisoners in the other cells, and they see him. And the prisoners are different in different versions of the scene. I think Borges was alluding to some of the academic papers that came out in the seventies about quantum computing and quantum mechanics, where the act of perceiving things in a quantum system can cause them to revert to one possible state or the other. Physicists used to write about a theoretical structure called a quantum corridor, which would be divided into a series of chambers separated by invisible dividers called logic gates that controlled the flow of information from one chamber to the other. In this case, in order to reach a certain cell at the end of the hallway, you might have to see a certain prisoner in the second-to-last cell in the hallway, because the path to the version of the cell you’re trying to reach only exists from that prisoner’s point of view. I think the story was about Jeremy Bentham anticipating the development of quantum computing by separating the different prison cells with logic gates, so when you were stuck in one cell, it was indeterminate which prisoners were in all the other cells. The twist at the end could have been that the whole prison only existed from a certain person’s point of view, probably Jeremy Bentham’s. In the real world, the panopticon in the story never actually existed, but when Jeremy Bentham died he had his body embalmed, or something, and put on display. So Borges probably would have ended the story by revealing that even though this prison in India appears not to exist, it actually does still exist in a quantum state which is only true from the point of view of Jeremy Bentham’s dead brain which is on display in a jar at University College London.”

Estella shook her head. “I’m sure you’re right. That’s exactly what he would have written. Borges never became a mature artist, like other authors do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Borges would never find the moral side. The Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham is full of imperialism, and violence, and oppression, but all Borges ever does is reveal the key to the riddle, and the story ends. No different from The Garden of Forking Paths, where the hero knows better than to spy for the Nazis, but he does it anyway to prove how clever he is. Borges liked fascist heroes because they took morality out of the equation. They left nothing but the puzzle for the reader to think about.”

“Do you think Borges would have been capable of collaborating with the National Reorganization Process? We're taliking about giving President Videla a tool he could use to imprison more people in the same space, to make them appear and disappear at will, to dispose of bodies where they'd never be found...”

Estella took a long sip from her espresso, and made a dismissive gesture.

“That goes too far. When Borges was in his political phase, he didn’t mind that Perón was a leftist. He hated Perón because Perón was a fascist. Videla was an even worse fascist; Borges had no sympathy for him. But Borges was a pure theorist. If he invented the idea for some new labyrinth prison, he would have written it down and handed it to his mother to type, and he hardly would have given a thought to what the world might do with it. You probably don’t blame Oppenheimer for the atom bomb, so don’t blame Borges for the quantum prison.”

A man in a leather jacket glanced over at us from the next table. Afraid of being overheard, I lowered my voice. “Okay. So if Borges didn’t try to have his prison built, how did Roque Abrea get trapped in an indeterminate quantum state in Caseros Prison as early as 1980? The real question is, who are these people who checked materials out of the Borges archive and never returned them?”

I took out a notebook where I’d been jotting notes about the lost archive materials. “This entry, for instance. I opened up a huge oversized manila folder in one of the 1973 crates, and all that was inside was this index card saying the contents had been lent out in 1975 to Federico Rodríguez at the Institute for Argentine Cultural Studies. What was inside that folder? Did it contain drawings? Engineering specifications? Google was no help tracking it down. Federico Rodríguez is about the third most common name on the planet, and I can’t find any sign this cultural studies institute ever existed.”

“1975. I haven’t been curating Borges’s papers that long. I have no idea what was in the folder.”

“Look at the mailing address. It’s down in La Boca. Isn’t that a more industrial neighborhood? What cultural institute would they even have down there? Maybe somebody had the plans for the logic gates shipped to some factory in La Boca so they could be built. I’m gonna find out what’s at that address.” I jumped up and started dialing Maureen.

“Wait, Matt, there’s something I need to tell you,” Estella said.

“Just a second,” I said, pacing. Maureen came on the line. “Hey, dear? Can you look up something for me?”

“What?” she said. “I’m in the office. I’ve got about a hundred students waiting to talk to me. Is it important?”

“It’s amazingly important. I just need to know what’s at a certain address in Argentina. Just Google it and tell me what comes up.”

“Okay. Go. I have literally three seconds.” I had to give her the address three times, as we kept losing the signal.

“It’s a car factory.”

“What factory? Ford?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my God! Maureen! I think Borges designed a prison block that could cause the people inside to both exist and not exist, and the plans were shipped to that factory! And that’s the same Ford factory where a few years later workers who were suspected of being labor organizers were supposed to have been tortured and disappeared from inside the factory during the Dirty War! They built a quantum mechanical prison facility and they put it into operation and used it on their own workers! And I can totally nail them on it! This is so awesome!”

“What? I said, I can’t hear a word you’re saying. I’m hanging up now.”

At this point I was pacing up and down the sidewalk raving into the phone and gesticulating, and all the others patrons including Estella were staring at me. “And that’s not all! The blueprints would have been sent in 1975! That was a year before Videla even came to power! Borges wasn’t responsible; he couldn’t have given the blueprints to the junta because by that time they’d already leaked! And listen to this: files related to the quantum prison were sent even earlier to the Catholic University of Chile, where the Ford Foundation was sponsoring the pro-American economics program that advocated overthrowing the left-wing government! And in those days the Ford Foundation was fronting for the CIA in Operation Condor! Henry Kissinger must have been involved! Quantum prisons must have been built in Chile, probably Brazil…by now they’ve probably spread everywhere the United States has sponsored an unpopular regime. Jesus, that’s why Obama’s dragging his heels in transferring the prisoners out of Guantanamo…he can’t! They’re all entangled in ambiguous quantum states dependent on each others’ perception! If he lets the wrong one go, then a dozen more will disappear forever. And the generals probably won’t let him release any…they’ve got a quantum computer made out of human brains! Think of the cryptographic applications…”

“Matt!” Estella said. “You can’t pursue this anymore. I’ve been trying to tell you, the SFWA is stopping the investigation. All the dissident authors have agreed to keep quiet about human rights abuses. The fax just came in from Donald Pierce an hour ago. Look what he sent with it.”

She handed me a press release. It was titled “SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA TO BENEFIT FROM VAST NEW REVENUE SOURCE; ALL MEMBER AUTHORS GUARANTEED HEALTH INSURANCE FOR THE LENGTH OF THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN.” It went on to explain that J. K. Rowling had announced her plans for the late period of her career. She was going to devote all her time to prosecuting lawsuits to stop amateur authors from infringing on her intellectual property. She was going to be the sole client of an online service, developed in secret by former SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt, which would scan all published materials on the internet for key words and phrases that would trigger automated Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices and cease and desist letters. SFWA members would then serve as expert witnesses in all subsequent lawsuits in the US, and Rowling would pay them each a generous annual retainer. The press release even included an absurdly overinclusive list of Harry Potter-related search terms and common misspellings that would trigger takedown notices, such as “muggle,” “hagrid,” “haggard,” “harry,” and “hairy.”

I read over the press release three times, staggered.

“You were only Andrew Burt’s backup plan,” Estella said. “In case the Rowling contract didn’t go through.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “The quantum prisons are too important. I’ll finish the investigation myself. I’ll publish the results in Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine.”

“No, Matt, it’s too late. Nobody’s going to listen to you now. The SFWA already discredited you. Look at the rest of the fax.”

I flipped through the remaining pages. It appeared to be a preview chapter of Orson Scott Card’s forthcoming novel Shadows in Flight. I hadn’t read the Ender series since the first book, but the scene seemed to be about Ender Wiggins as an old man attending some kind of interplanetary diplomatic peace conference. It began:


“This is disgusting! What the hell is this?” I asked, flipping through the rest of the description with mounting horror. It went on for four full manuscript pages, and it was clearly going to elicit at least six DMCA notices from J.K. Rowling.

“It’s a small-penis attack. The SFWA must have arranged for Orson Scott Card to carry it out as part of their deal with Rowling. This is checkmate. You can’t acknowledge it, because that would mean you recognized it as a description of yourself, and it would only confirm what Card says about you. It’s totally irrefutable. All you can do now is go underground, stay away from the science fiction industry and hope they forget. You’re nobody in the science fiction world now, for ten years at least. Maybe forever.”

“No! The SFWA doesn’t know how far along I am. I’m going back to the archive to get the news out before they have time to react.”

“Stop it!” Estella demanded, grabbing my wrist hard, digging into it with her nails. “I won’t sit here and watch you destroy yourself! You don’t understand. It’s over. Card already released this preview chapter on Amazon.”

I stopped struggling to get back to my research, and looked for a moment into Estella’s eyes. I began to realize she was right.

“You have a Wikipedia page now, Matt,” Estella said. “Orson Scott Card’s description of your penis is the only thing on it.”




I'm sure the above account begins to explain why this issue was nearly two months late. But on the bright side, if successful genre authors are truly as dangerous as this preliminary report suggests, then the next generation of tyrants and sociopaths can be found right here at Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine. This quarter, the talented featured authors are Chris Hayes-Kossmann, with Occupied, Robert E. Keller, with Blue Electron Moon, and Heather Parker, with The Experiment.