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7th Sigma

7th Sigma

Steven Gould

Welcome to the territory. Leave your metal behind, all of it. The bugs will eat it, and they’ll go right through you to get it…Don’t carry it, don’t wear it, and for god’s sake don’t come here if you’ve got a pacemaker.

The bugs showed up about fifty years ago--self-replicating, solar-powered, metal-eating machines. No one knows where they came from. They don’t like water, though, so they’ve stayed in the desert Southwest. The territory. People still live here, but they do it without metal. Log cabins, ceramics, what plastic they can get that will survive the sun and heat. Technology has adapted, and so have the people.

Kimble Monroe has chosen to live in the territory. He was born here, and he is extraordinarily well adapted to it. He’s one in a million. Maybe one in a billion.

In 7th Sigma, Gould builds an extraordinary SF novel of survival and personal triumph against all the odds.

A Story, with Beans

A Story, with Beans

7th Sigma

Steven Gould

This short story originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2009. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010, edited by Rich Horton, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (2010), edited by Gardner Dozios, and After the End: Recent Apocalypses (2013), edited by Paula Guran.

Bugs in the Arroyo

Bugs in the Arroyo

7th Sigma

Steven Gould

The bugs eat metal and leave people and animals alone -- unless you crush one, and then they'll swarm and destroy everything they touch. When Kimball comes upon twelve-year-old Thayet, she's been stuck on a rock in a river of bugs for two days, no food, no water, and no way back.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.