Asimov’s, May/June 2026
The story unfolds in first person through the voice of an unnamed Secretary of Media for Maldrove, the oldest human colony world, distinguished by its pervasive red atmosphere. He is a man of consummate, almost gleeful dishonesty — a professional spinner of wars, cheerfully aware that the “misrepresentations” he deploys are in service of nothing so grand as truth, only power and institutional momentum. The story is structured in three movements: a pre-war interview with a single journalist, a series of wartime press briefings, and a university ceremony twenty years after the conflict.
In the opening section, the narrator grants a one-on-one interview to a young reporter named Lyle on the eve of a war with the colony world of Shenzen, ostensibly over trade routes. The narrator is at ease — dismissive, bourbon in hand, staging military flyovers as props. He coins the story’s central conceit by invoking his hero, real-world U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the taxonomy of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The phrase becomes a tool of rhetorical evasion: anything inconvenient can be filed away as a “known unknown” and thus rendered manageable, unthreatening, almost academic.
The story’s middle section tracks the narrator’s growing dominance once war actually breaks out. He runs his pressroom like a god — reporters standing, no chairs, darkness at the edges, holograms at his command. He bats away questions about civilian casualties, an occupied moon whose residents he insists are “cheering” rather than screaming, the firing of an anti-war professor, and a market crash. Each exchange is a performance of control, and he revels in it. The most pointed scene involves a hospital ship destroyed by Maldrovan forces; when a journalist presses him for proof that it wasn’t a legitimate medical vessel, he resorts to pure tautology — Maldrove wouldn’t attack a hospital ship, therefore the ship wasn’t a hospital ship. He privately coerces the journalist into silence with the promise of presidential access, even floating a “thought experiment” suggesting that hospital ships are legitimate targets regardless of their status.
The violence arrives near the story’s climax when an unrecognized young man infiltrates the pressroom and accuses the narrator directly of atrocities on Diada, calling what happens there an “unspeakable known.” He snaps his fingers, activating a patch on his skin, and burns himself alive in front of the assembled press corps. The narrator watches, unable to flee, the dying man’s eyes seeming to lock onto his even as they should have burned away — the red of Maldrove’s atmosphere finally entering the one room designed to exclude it.
The final section, set two decades later, shows how completely the narrator has metabolized this horror. He is receiving an honorary doctorate, charming an auditorium, casually mentioning that war crimes charges against him were quietly dropped. He dreams about the burning man, he admits — but dreams mean nothing. The red light that kept outside his windows now seeps under the locked auditorium doors, an inexorable haunting he cannot spin away.
McCarthy’s story is a savage satirical portrait of institutional doublespeak, structured as a kind of anti-Bildungsroman in which the protagonist learns nothing and loses nothing — except, perhaps, sleep. The red atmosphere of Maldrove functions as the story’s moral weather: a reality that can be tinted, filtered, and managed but never fully expelled.
Donald McCarthy is an author from Long Island, New York. He’s published short fiction with Asimov’s, Mythaxis Magazine, James Gunn’s Ad Astra, Pseudopod, The Creepy Podcast, The Grey Rooms, and more. His non-fiction has appeared at Salon, Undark Magazine, The Huffington Post, Nightmare Magazine, and more. A full list of his publications can be found at www.donaldmccarthy.com.