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One of the ways I have been able to mitigate the brutal summer heat is with my bedding. Our bed has these amazing sheets that we got from Quince. They are soft bamboo sheets that are so comfortable you slide into them and they have gotten softer and more comfortable the more that we wash them. I absolutely love them. You can make your summer bedding feel better when you go to quince.com storytime for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. And we are now available in Canada too. What's up Canada? Elbows up. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com storyt for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com storytime. Hi friends, I'm Will and it's story time real quick. Before we get started, I wanted to remind you that if you would like to hear me read you stories with absolutely no ads at all, check us out@patreon.com storytime for an ad free Experience in a bleak dystopian future that feels too close for comfort. Zhenya is dying from a terminal illness in a dehumanizing society that offers little, if any comfort to its citizens. But when a package arrives from the government health provider, it may just contain something that will give her not just comfort, but something more. Something which can only originate with a gray magic. A Gray Magic by Ray Naylor, Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, the September October issue of 2024. Well, at least we'll finally be able to get some hours. Ruthless. I'm serious. Maybe they'll finally be forced to make one of us full time. It'll never happen. They'll just hire another part timer. The two workers were in the break room. In the pause that followed their RIP stop, paper jumpsuits rustled. There were no windows. Everyone always watched the enormous countdown clock as they ate each number segment as long as a human army. The glass reflected their faces back to them. The vertical number segment stabbed down through the reflected room and the people in it. Don't pretend you liked her, though, the first worker said. I mean, don't be one of those people who pretends they were someone's best friend when they hear. I'm not pretending that. All I said was, it's sad. She was nice and everyone liked her. Nobody disliked her. Nobody really knew her. She never came out with us. Are you going to the funeral? No, I have to work that day. Me too. In fact, I'm picking up her shift, which seems really unlucky I didn't know. When they put it on my schedule. I thought she was just sick. There might have been more to say. But now there were 30 seconds left on the countdown clock. Both of them were thinking the same things. The kinds of things everyone thinks hearing someone they know has died. Here I am, still alive. It happened to them and not to me. For a moment everything looked a bit brighter. Everything seemed more fragile and more real. 15 seconds. They shoveled instant noodles into their mouths and tilted their heads back, draining the broth. They tossed their trash into the bin and went back out onto the work floor. A message popped up in Zhenya's inbox a moment before she walked in her door. She sat down at her small breakfast nook table and rubbed the inside of her elbow. There would be a bruise, she was sure. She opened the message. Hey, I noticed your sneakers are getting pretty worn out. I can even see one of your socks through a hole in the side. Looking to replace those worn out shoes. Because if you are, you should know we are running a 2 for 1 today only the ad feeder cameras on the square. Of course she couldn't get past them without one of them IDing her and finding something she needed to buy. Underneath the ad message were two soft keys. The top colorful one said Accept offer, Decline Offer was a smaller gray key underneath. When she touched that one, a dropdown menu of reasons for declining appeared. After reading through them, she selected other A text box appeared. Please let us know why this offer isn't for you. Required. Zhenya rubbed the inside of her elbow again, then typed in because I will be dead in less than a month. Again she wanted to call her mother. That wasn't it. Exactly. It wasn't her mother she wanted to call. It was a made up mother who actually cared about what was going to happen to her. A person who would be as hurt by what was going to happen to her as she was. Not her mother who would do nothing but go and tell everyone the story of it forever. Who would tell it as if it was something that had happened to her, not her daughter. One of the worst parts of the whole thing was knowing that after she had died, her mother would look across a table and say to someone, my daughter died. And of course it was absolutely devastating. I never thought I would survive it. And in that moment her mother would really believe she had been devastated. When her mother told the story. She always felt what she was saying really convinced herself that it was true. As far as Jenny could tell, that was the only time her Mother felt anything while she was performing. Having feelings for the benefit of someone else. For a long time Jenya had worried that she was the same kind of person as her mother, that her feelings were not genuine either, that she was only pretending to have them for the benefit of others, maybe for the benefit of herself, so she could go on imagining she was normal. This was ridiculous. It was ridiculous to feel devastated by having seen something awful and then doubt the feeling was real. She had seen a cat hit by a car, for example, a few years ago. She had been walking. It had happened right next to her. She had stopped and tried to help, but there was nothing that could be done. She had stayed with the cat until it died moments later. Later that evening she had gone home and lay in the dark and wondered whether she really felt anything at all. She had wondered if she felt anything while she was crying. Crying in the dark, alone. Crying for herself, for the cat, for its owners, for whose benefit. What poison had been put into her, making her doubt her own feelings when they were right there? What poison could make her feel so deeply, yet doubt she was feeling anything at all? And if she didn't call her mother, she never even called me. I had to find out after it was too late to even say goodbye to her. Of course I gave her a wonderful funeral. But she blamed me for everything that ever went wrong in her life. That's the way it always is, isn't it? That's the way they treat us. There's no end to how much blame we mothers have to bear. Fathers always get forgiven, but not us. Better to call, her mother answered after several rings. But the conversation they had was all about her mother. Of course, Zhenya could never find a place to turn it, could never find that moment to interject. Her mother was so tired and there had been a problem with the car. And could Zhenya believe this and kozenya believe that 45 minutes an hour, never once a place to break in? So Zhenya said nothing. After the call. She went for a walk down on the river. The ice was breaking up into the ships of childhood, crewed by paratic seagulls and a mitten someone had dropped upstream. Jen. You could see her breath in the air the entire time she was walking. She felt fine, yes, a little tired, blurry around the edges, but not so bad. Like someone who needed a cup of coffee. Not like someone who would never see the leaves return to the trees. Not like someone who might not even see the hard buds on the trees open. I do blame My father, she wanted to say to her mother, to that mother who would be telling the story of her daughter's ingratitude again and again, to everyone who would listen, and to many people who had long ago stopped listening, retreating inside themselves while they plotted their escape. I do blame him. I blame him for dying before I could know him. I blame him for dying and leaving me with you. I blame him for this. He could have died without giving me his death. I blame him for this, even though I know it isn't fair. There was a place near the bridge. Exhaling breakfast smells, potatoes, frying, coffee. Those kinds of smells made her a bit nauseous now, but she went in anyway. She'd been here before, several times before. The waitress who worked here recognized some of her customers, greeted some of them by name, but never Zhenya, who came in once a month or so. Zhenya always got the neutral hi, honey, what are you having? Any stranger got There were other people who came in and were joked with or asked about their children. There was an older man who the waitress helped with his coat. The man sat at the counter doing crosswords on his tablet and drinking his cup of coffee as if it would all last forever, all of it. This place is returning here. Her greeting of him, her helping him with his coat because he was too stiff to do it easily himself. But it wouldn't. Yes, she would go first, but the rest would too. The blade of a bulldozer would splinter the abandoned walls of this place already dust gray and emptied of life. Not only would this place be gone, it would be erased, like nothing had ever been here at all. Whatever was new, whatever rose here once they scraped all this away, would not carry any record of any of the warmth exchanged here between people. And it would know none of the customers names and certainly none of the names of their children. While she was walking home, there was a delivery message. Zhenya tried to walk faster. Sometimes the delivery man would leave a package outside of the bin it was supposed to go in. It wasn't long when they did that, before the package got stolen. But when she walked faster, she started losing her breath. Worse, she started to feel it, an ache in the side. Death had a place inside her. She slowed down, tried to calm down. She hadn't ordered anything anyway. She didn't even know what would be in the package when she got home. It was in the bin, a box wrapped in translucent green bioplastic with the government health provider's seal printed all over it at intervals. That's right, the Doctor had said she would send Zhenya something inside her apartment. She opened it carefully. She did not open the envelope that came with it. She took the oculus from its molded paper clamshell and put it on the table. She pressed the power button, the oculus word. Its lens dilated, and then a woman was projected into the room. She was sitting at a table, a table much like this one, but scattered with devices, terminals of various sizes, and also a thick, oversized ceramic mug as big as a bowl, the kind of mug you could drink half a pot of tea out of. Or soup. The woman was writing something on one of the terminals with a stylus. She stopped and turned. Oh, she said. Hi. I think I had my terminal on vibrate, so I didn't get the notification. I hope I wasn't picking my nose or anything. Was I picking my nose? The woman pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, folded her hands awkwardly in her lap. There should be a moment of awkwardness, Zhenya thought, because I know. And she. She went for another word, but she seemed best. She had to know, too. Of course, the woman said. My name is Agata, pronounced Agata, which nobody really gets right. And you are Zhenya. She pronounced it perfectly, which I bet people mess up a lot, too. Yeah, someday they'll make a widget for that, whisper our names in people's ears and save everyone having to repeat themselves half a dozen times. That's a good idea. Agata shrugged. I'm full of good ideas. What are you doing? Have you had breakfast? I did. I went to a cafe down by the river. What's it called? I don't even know. Did the place have a name? It must, but she couldn't remember the sign that most certainly had always been there. And then for some reason she found herself saying, I went to the hospital early in the morning and they took blood, vial after vial of it, and the nurse was clumsy with the needle. And I kept thinking, why, they know and I know, but they just won't leave it alone. If I only have a little while, I don't want to spend it this way. She paused a moment, thinking Agata would say something, but she was just sitting quietly, attentively. Zhenya continued on the bus there, I kept thinking of. I kept thinking of this gigantic clock they have in our break room at the warehouse. The way it's placed, you see your own face in it all the time. You can't look away from it. You can't enjoy your food. I keep wondering if they designed it that way on purpose. To make it so you can't enjoy your time away from work. But why would they do that? You have 15 minutes to eat lunch, and all you can think of is 10 minutes left. 9 minutes left, 8 minutes. Now it's almost over. 7 minutes, 6 minutes. 5. I barely have time to finish my soup. 4, 3. You can't think of anything else. And there I am in the hospital with the nurse working the needle around in my arm, thinking, 10, 9, 8. What the fuck am I doing here? But the worst part was I couldn't think of how I'd rather be spending my day. Nothing came to me at all. That really is the worst part. Isn't. Isn't fair for death to take our last living days from us, too? If only I could stop thinking of it. You won't be able to. But I have a plan for you. I want you to go to the aquarium. The aquarium? Yeah. Like when you were a kid. Go there and open your eyes wide and really look at how weird the fish are. I don't know. If the 9B bus comes in five minutes. You can catch it if you hurry. We'll talk when you get back. At the aquarium, there was a whole room of octopuses. And that was where she ended up spending most of her time. There were ones no bigger than a finger, deadly as anything on the planet. There were ones with arms so long and delicate they seemed like hair. There was an enormous one in an exhibit that looked like an underwater cave. It spent its time stuffed up in a top corner, a smear of suckers against the glass, disappointing all of the children who had come to see it. Then, when there was no one in the room but it and Zhenya, it floated down and drifted in its tank, changing from one color to another, moving through forms and textures. Zhenya watched it from a polite distance. She felt it was watching her too, standing there under the colored lights, locked in one boring shape and color, mesmerized. The aquarium had an enormous display of jellyfish, lit from below in orange against a blue background. Zhenya stood in front of it for an hour, watching the jellyfish create one abstract design after another with their illuminated bodies. I thought you might like the octopuses, agata said. They don't have much of a social life either. Very funny. But, you know, not having a social life is what I noticed about the jellyfish more. There were so many of them in the tank together, but they were never aware of one another. And then in the cafeteria of the aquarium, she had looked down on the harbor, the people on the sidewalk in an ugly drizzle, and thought the same thing. Except for the families clumped together, no one seemed aware of the people around them. The lights of their terminals shone in their faces as they drifted in one direction or another. And of course the jellyfish didn't seem aware of me either, or of being in a tank. They just moved. Actually, the octopuses seemed social. On Agata's table was a circle of stacked playing cards with another stack of cards in the center of the circle. Did they. I mean, I spent a lot of time in there, and the octopuses seemed to be aware of me and of the things that were going on around them. Not just aware, interested. And yet, Agata said, they live their lives alone, without the company of their own kind, until they mate and then die. Maybe they don't feel alone, zhenya said. I was thinking. Maybe they just aren't interested in other octopuses. Maybe what they are interested in is everything else, the whole rest of the world. Agata seemed to consider that for a moment. I like that idea. It reminds me of someone at work. All Zhenya could think of was how easy it would be to step out in front of one of the loaders and be done with it. Everything was mixed up in her. She wanted every moment that was left, and also none of it at all. The worst was the break room with its clock. She spent her breaks in the bathroom, where there was a clock on the door of each stall, but at least they were smaller. She didn't eat during her shift. With the nausea, she didn't feel much like eating anyway. The woman in HR knew and wouldn't look at her. Her other co workers didn't seem to know there was that, at least. What would they do if they knew? Why was she so determined to keep it a secret? Because it was the same as with her mother. Because they wouldn't care. None of them would care, but they were forced to pretend they did, and she wouldn't be able to stand it, watching them try to make concerned faces. The obvious thing to do, of course, would be to quit, but she didn't have the money to do that. Go and see a play, agata said. If you look online, you can find half a dozen of them. Community theaters, things like that. What you need to do is look at the world. Why? Soon I won't be here anymore, but the world will. The circular game of cards Agata was playing was a kind of solitaire. She'd explained its rules To Zhenya, the game seemed dull and pointless. Zhenya had never understood these kinds of games, the kind people used to kill time. To Zhenya there had never seemed to be enough time, even before. Certainly not now, of course, but even before any of this, between work and sleeping and eating, there had never seemed to be time enough for much of anything at all. I want to know what it is like being you, zhenya said. You are talking to me, telling me to do this or that. But what is it like to being you? What do you mean? Do you play that game when I am not around? There is a play tonight, for example, agata said. It's called A Gray Magic. I'm going to buy you a ticket and send it to your phone. You don't want to talk about it, what it's like? No, agata said, I don't. And neither do you. The play was not particularly well acted, or well staged or well directed. The actors flubbed lines, and at one point someone dropped something backstage in the middle of a dramatic scene. The crash threw the rhythm of the actors off and made one of them actually cry out. But there was something in the writing of the play that stood out anyway, something that couldn't quite be drowned out by the amateur performance. The play was about two witches. Each of them was convinced that they were a good witch and that the other one was a bad witch. Each of them was determined to destroy the other, but neither of them was particularly powerful. Their spells turned out not to be much more than little annoyances, and in the meantime they both lived in little studio apartments in the city and had relationships with dull and overbearing men who they didn't seem to care much about and mostly used their magic to unclog drains and trick the turnstile into giving them free rides on public transit. In the end one of them finally managed to cause the other one to fall off a pedal boat in the Central Park's pond, but then jumped in and saved her. The play ended with the two of them, wet from head to foot, having coffee together in a diner in the middle of the night. After the play, Zhenya went to the diner down by the river, but first she walked out on the bridge a bit. The river was low. There was a full moon on the crenelated surface of the mud. In the mud were lodged an extraordinary number of electric bicycles and scooters, as if every person who ever used one of them came here when their ride was over and threw it off the bridge. They lay upright or on their sides in the mud, a tribe of drowned machines. In the diner, the night waitress looked so much like the day waitress that she must have been her older sister. She didn't speak to any of the customers, though, beyond taking their orders. Zhenya had a cup of coffee and thought of the play, but also about what being a playwright must be like. Because it wasn't just writing. It was relying on others to make it all work. A whole team of others, strangers to you, who might ruin your best scene by dropping something backstage. Maybe it wasn't the actors or the director you were relying on. Maybe it was the audience. You were relying on them to be patient enough to ignore the mediocre acting and the noise backstage and the people around them. You were relying on them to see through all of that to the core of the play. Walking home, the pain knocked her down. She had a moment where she couldn't think of anything at all coming out of it standing up. She didn't know who she was or where. Then she was herself again. She wasn't hurt by the fall. She continued home. It seems like trying to hold hands with strangers, she told Agata later. Like reaching out a hand and hoping they will reach out too. And did you? I did. I think other people did, too. Not everyone, but a lot of them. Do you still want to know what it is like to be me? I don't, zhenya said. I know the answer. I know there isn't anything it is like to be you. I know you aren't there when the Oculus isn't on. It's like the script of a play. It doesn't read itself with no one around. But that doesn't matter. The person who made you and sent you out into the world to give comfort to people who are dying. That's what is important, that matters. The words in a play aren't alive either, but they came from a living person and are brought back to life by the people who need them. And closing the script. That's what it is going to be like for me too. Just like that. Yes, when it comes. But what do you want to do tomorrow? Agata asked. I thought I would call in sick. I thought I would go to the aquarium again. I didn't finish looking at everything there, and I don't think they finished looking at me either. That sounds like a good way to spend a day. I think so, too. Good night, Agata. Good night, Zhenya. Zhenya turned the Oculus off and settled into the dark. Ray. Naylor is a Hugo and Locus Award winning science fiction author and U.S. foreign Service officer. Born in Quebec and raised in California, his writing deeply explores ecology, communication and consciousness. He is well known for his debut novel the Mountain and the Sea and his Hugo winning novella the Tusks of Extinction. His most recent work is Palaces of the Crowd which incidentally I am reading and it is amazing. Before I do the credits, I just wanted to say if you would like an ad free podcast experience with access to all kinds of fun behind the scenes extras and a glimpse into the making of the podcast. Check us out@patreon.com storytime and now the credits. It's Storytime with Wil wheaton was produced 2026 by Traveler Enterprises Incorporated, who holds the copyright. Our producer is Harris Lane. Our story producer and director is Gabrielle De Cure. Our content editor is Michael Thomas. The podcast is edited, mixed and mastered by Alex Barton of Phase Shift av. Very special thanks to Wes Stevens and Christopher Black. Recorded at Skyboat Media in the beautiful San Fernando Valley where I have lived for 53 almost 54 four years. We're full. Don't come here. Thanks a lot for listening. I love you all. I'll see you back next time. And until then, take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Bye.