She was the jewel of women found because none else were born

Just in time for the slightly more than centenary of the first birth control clinic in the United States of America, Aqueduct Press has released Adventures in Bodily Autonomy: Exploring Reproductive Rights in Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror, edited by Raven Belasco. Its furious, thoughtful, hopeful, haunting contents include stories by Nisi Shawl, Kathleen Alcalá, K Ibura, Cecilia Tan, Cynthia Gralla, Anya Johanna DeNiro, Jaymee Goh and more. I am honored to have my novelette "As the Tide Came Flowing In," originally published in last year's chapbook of the same name, included among them. All proceeds are donated to Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America. Everything right now feels like destruction. It is all the more important to make art that is a defense, a defiance, and a damn good anthology.

Bertie Owen, 6 September 2009 – 16 October 2023

I have never before mourned a computer, but I never named one before, either, and the process is novel to me.

Bertie Owen entered my life at the end of a period of technological stupidity during which I lost three laptops in two years. The first melted down after three years of reliable service, the third froze up after a much less satisfactory eight months, and the second so far as anyone can tell was accidentally kicked or tripped over at a friend's house while in my backpack and its case stove in, culprit unknown to this day. The latest machine arrived new, which had not been the case with all of my computers, and was installed to life at the dining room table of a family friend. I remember that I minded very much the loss of my desktop wallpaper which had been a screencap of a White Star from Babylon 5, but I never got around to finding a suitable replacement and over time acclimated to the sort of purple galactic swirl of the Apple default. The more major deal was that I was able to transfer over my preferred version of Word with several of my rarer fonts from college and grad school, such as Greek with all the diacritics and cuneiform.

The new machine went unnamed, and indeed without much of a discernible personality, until 16 June 2012 when I had to take it in to the Apple store under the impression that one of its fans had died and to the surprise of all concerned it was discovered instead to have never had more than the one fan to begin with. According to the specs produced by the very confused dude in the utilikilt, its model was supposed to have two. It occurred to me then to name it for the first two one-lunged people I could think of, the historical George VI and Le Guin's Owen Pugh. It immediately died in the back room of the Genius Bar and was recalled to life without loss of data and I began to think of it as a fisher king. I was unsurprised to learn a year later that he was the only model of his weight class to use a particular, slightly inconvenient wattage of charger. I am not actually sure at which point he acquired animate pronouns.

In increasing divergence from Apple's priorities, he was exactly optimized to my idea of a computer, i.e. a word processor I could check my e-mail on and sling over my shoulder to catch a train. He played music through a set of speakers even more ancient than himself and allowed me access to my minimal text-based social media and supported a number of necessary applications and connections with which newer machines were not reverse-compatible. He survived three keyboard transplants, the permanent death of his CD drive, two changes of hard drive, at least one replaced battery, and more chargers than I can recall. He traveled out of state every time I did and out of the country the last time it was possible for me to do so. He remained throughout technically a 15" 2009 MacBook Pro, but I understood he was also the ship of Theseus. He weathered misfortunes which had reduced younger machines to e-waste. He was incredibly stubborn. I had to blow cat fur out of his one fan on a regular basis.

Especially in light of the hurtling trend toward planned obsolescence and against the right to repair, I cannot believe he was expected to last fourteen years, replacement parts or no. I doubt he would have lasted this long without the technical doctoring of my father, who was repairing televisions in New York City in the '50's and built all of the computers of my childhood until the toaster Mac. Nonetheless, Bertie chugged along so sturdily, without any signs of building trouble, that I did not expect him to come up against the mortality of his LCD cable with a sudden static pop and zap to black mid-sentence on Sunday night. Then again, one of his eponyms famously pegged out with no sense of timing and at least the computer's successor only has to make the journey from Micro Center. I am still not reconciled to the loss. Even now, inaccessible except as an external hard drive, he remains an archive of more than twenty years of my life.

I can't take him with me, but I trust him for the nekyia.