Some stories let you know what kind of story you’re in early in the proceedings. If characters are wrestling with eldritch beings from beyond time and space, odds are good you’re reading cosmic horror; if the protagonist or antagonist has a penchant for blood and aversion to sunlight, congratulations—you have a tale of vampirism before you.
Preemie Mohamed’s One Message Remains isn’t really like that. The title story, which occupies about half of this book’s pages, opens with its protagonist—one Major Lyall Tzajos—in the midst of writing a letter to his wife. It soon transpires that the Major is in the country of the Dastians on some sort of military mission of which his wife does not approve, and there’s a general sense of imperialism about the whole thing. While he isn’t British—his culture is Treotan—Lyall certainly seems British-coded, not unlike how mid–20th century Biblical epics would give Roman soldiers and officials English accents.
What’s less clear in the opening pages is where Lyall is, what the nature of the conflict is, and how this may or may not be fantasy or science fiction. And in that sense of raw potential, “One Message Remains” is close kin to works as disparate as Kelly Link’s “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear” and B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space. Both Link and Yeager take their time hinting that something is uncanny and askew in their worlds before getting into the meat of what that is; so too does Mohamed meticulously tease out just where this novella is going. In other words, we’re just as confused as Lyall Tzajos when the familiar world begins to turn impossible.
To be fair, this familiar world also includes the presence of “teleplasm,” a manifestation of the souls of the dead. Early in the story, Mohamed takes the reader into Lyall’s thoughts as he gazes out over the “thin violet fog” of a cloud of the substance before him:
Strange to look at it, see it as the same as our own, isn’t it. You’d think it would look different. But then, so many peoples of the world. Maybe not enough colors to cover them all. Or not able to perceive the difference… well, the army tested you for color vision before you could join, and—
Lyall’s letters home are a running motif in this story, and through them we see that he is a true believer in his government’s cause—or at least does a good job in presenting himself as one. This is how he describes his mission in one such letter:
We have been selected to do what the occupants of Eastern Seudast cannot. You understand that this is a mission of noble charity, due to Eastern Seudast’s great poverty, and also in the absence of their former government ordering them to do so.
It’s a brave, albeit paternalistic, façade, but there would be no story here if that was all there was. And “One Message Remains” is in part the story of Lyall’s internal conflict after his body becomes inhabited by a kind of restless collective spirit. Over the course of the story, Lyall learns what many occupying armies have over time: that charging into a nation without fully understanding local customs can prove dangerous in several respects.
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The other three stories in this volume are set in the same wider world, though they offer very different glimpses of customs, conflicts, and secret histories found there. “The General’s Turn” follows a game of wits in an immensely complex game “conducted upon the gears of a clock.” In “Forsaking All Others,” a soldier deserts his position and begins a perilous journey to what he hopes is a safe place. And, most unnervingly, “The Weight of What Is Hollow” centers around the refinement of an especially visceral device used in capital punishment: the bone-gallows, which is exactly what its name suggests.
“One Message Remains” casts a heavy shadow over the remaining stories in One Message Remains, and it’s not hard to see the three shorter works in here as variations on some of the themes Mohamed reckons with in the book’s longest work. Speaking broadly, the three stories that close out this book all reckon with different questions of loyalty, duty, and justice which, taken together with “One Message Remains,” make for a powerful meditation on power and control.
There’s another book that One Message Remains recalls in its intermingling of the familiar and the uncanny, the ethereal and the martial. That would be Rebecca Campbell’s The Talosite, set during an alternate-universe World War I in which reanimated bodies are used as weapons of war; here, too, there’s a sense of the wartime dead not receiving the eternal rest that they’re certainly owed. Both here and in Campbell’s book there’s a sense of the uncanny that both works as a thoughtful metaphor and a visceral, immediate element within the story itself.
Even in a world that seems far removed from ours, Mohamed still raises big questions that are just as applicable to our lives in 2025 as her characters’ particular situations. Over the course of the story, protagonist Taya begins to question her place in this society:
Was it normal, did other people feel this way, did every subject of every empire go to sleep at night thinking I am afraid of the people who run my country, did they think I fear my state? Grandfather said it was about duty, not fear. But both were her masters.
The setting of the stories within One Message Remains is very different from Mohamed’s bibliography thus far, but it shares with them a set of memorable characters and a reckoning with some of the grandest ethical questions out there. It’s another impressive addition to an increasingly essential bibliography.
One Message Remains is published by Psychopomp.
