You are listening to a Clarks World magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clark's World Citizens.

I hope this podcast finds you very well.

This is our third story for the month of April 2017,

Issue 127. Not much news to report except that I hope that you're doing remarkably well

in that spring, depending on where you live in this world, is starting to bloom.

And for those of you who are going into fall,

enjoy the cold. Our third story for the month is titled Left of Bang,

preemptive self-actualization for Autonomous Systems

It is by Vajra Chandra Suaterra.

Vajra lives in Colombo Sri Lanka. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons,

and the Apex Book of World SF, among others. You can find him at his website,ajra. me and that's Vajjra. M. E. M. E. If you like what you hear,

July 2013 brought you pockets full of stones.

So I invite you to sit back, relax, and let me tell you a short story.

My wrists are my weakest juncture, an innervated air gap between myself and my aching hands orphaned on their far side. When I go over the railing, I clutch at it desperately, and my disconnected hands briefly take

my whole weight, and I gasp because I think that they won't work and I'll fall

and then like always I'm shocked when I don't until my gyroscopes balance and I

purposefully let go. My palms suddenly empty, fingers creaking as they relax after the strain.

I land hard and roll. The smoke should sting my eyes. It doesn't, but I stay low anyway. The fires and

tents. I head for the door expecting any moment to be crushed by something or to go up in flames, but nothing

falls on me and I dodge everything that lands in my path.

And then I'm outside and I've survived the first trial assassination and the crowd the funders the commissars the geneticists

...