Restore the Heart into Love

Author: John Chu

Published in Uncanny #4, May/June 2015

Description, by Lois Tilton [Locus]: "After xenophobic violence breaks out across Earth, the Byzantium Library launches into space with a complete archive of the world’s cultural heritage, its sponsors hoping that by the time the ship returns the world will have returned to sanity. It’s been a long voyage, with the crew spending most of its time in hibernation, being waked only when necessary, when something goes wrong. Which, lately, is happening more and more often as the archival media and backups fail..... Max suspects sabotage, as the entire batch of corrupted files are in the traditional Chinese archive, files from Taiwan, which had been in conflict with China. Not only is the medium degrading, the characters in the files have been altered from the complex traditional form to the 20th-century simplified form....... Max had learned Chinese to please [his mother], to be able to communicate fully with her, and it’s from her that he’d learned the value of the traditional forms of the characters......"