Asimov’s, July/August 2026
Harlan Bah drives his elderly father, Simeon, to a Fed-Corp clinic in a frozen Center City to finally get “gummed” — a childhood-standard neurogel brain implant that preserves personality and wards off dementia. Simeon has resisted the procedure for decades, and in the car and at the clinic he spirals through anxieties about the treatment altering who he is. Harlan, mildly exasperated but affectionate, brushes off his father’s fears and gets him signed in.
While waiting, Harlan’s real job comes into focus: he’s a freelance insurance investigator trying to catch a “mamm” — a bio-modded, part-animal hybrid — named Finn Fang in an act of fraud, to deny his claim on behalf of a healthcare conglomerate called YourLife. His stakeout takes him to a hybrid nightclub called the UnderCoat, in the marginalized Pigeon District, where mamms gather to socialize, dance, and escape the pressures of being seen as “only human.” Outside the club, Harlan meets Annika, a leopard-and-serpent hybrid who tends the club’s “gum-bar,” mixing neurochemical cocktails that let gummed people manipulate their own perception. She needles him about his discomfort with mamm culture and draws a parallel he can’t quite dismiss: society casually accepts children being permanently altered by braingum, yet recoils at consenting adults modifying their own bodies for pleasure or identity.
Meanwhile, Simeon’s post-procedure texts reveal a man transformed — newly grateful, decluttering the house, apologizing to everyone, humming old songs he’d always claimed to hate, and insisting he “feels like a new man.” His daughter, overwhelmed by her own life, is unsettled by the change and wants Harlan to call the clinic; Harlan brushes her off too, unwilling to confront what’s happening to his father.
Back at the UnderCoat, Annika strikes a bargain: she’ll get Harlan the video evidence he needs of Finn Fang if he’ll first let her “crack his noggin” — dose him with an experimental substance called The Passenger. He agrees, and the drug plunges him into a vivid, fragmented internal experience: his mind splinters into a chorus of competing voices, each equally “him,” disagreeing about desire, shame, curiosity, and fear as his body moves through the club on its own volition, flirting, dancing, and nearly capturing footage of Finn. He’s caught trying to film Finn Fang, dragged outside, and beaten by a bouncer and by Finn himself, until Annika intervenes and stops the assault.
Bruised but coherent again, Harlan and Annika talk through the disorienting experience — how many “parts” of him seemed to be fighting for control, and whether any single one is the “real” him or just another passenger riding the braingum. Annika later texts him a secretly filmed video: not of Finn dancing, but of Finn assaulting him — footage that, ironically, gives Harlan exactly the evidence he needs to close his fraud case. That night, back at his father’s dinner table, Harlan watches Simeon say grace for the first time since his wife’s death, aware that his father — like himself — is simply whoever he is in the moment. As dinner continues, Harlan quietly checks two new match notifications from the mamm dating app SnaRl, hinting that the walls he’d built around his own curiosity have already begun to crack.
Zack Be is an author, obscure songwriter, and couples/sex therapist who completed his Ph.D. at University of Maryland in 2025. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Writers of the Future Vol. 36. His story “Locus of Control” was the winner of the 2024 Jim Baen Memorial Science Fiction Award, and he is the editor of the Inner Workings anthology, available now from Calendar of Fools. More info about Zack’s writing and music can be found at or anywhere on social media @bezackbe.