Matthew Lyons

Matthew Lyons is a writer living and working in New York. His work has been previously published in Bastion Science Fiction, Maudlin House, Comb, and more. He's probably taller than you, not that it's a competition or anything. Complaints can be filed on twitter @reverendlyons. Author comments: I've never been a fan of can't. I know, that sounds like trite self-help nonsense, but it's true. Can't tends to be a limit we put on ourselves, or assigned to us by people who say they know better. You can't do this, we can't do that. Girls can't play ball, computers can't win at Go. Well, why not? And what does it say about us that we're so insistent about it? We're living in the future now. We can do anything we want. I wrote this story just after Lee Se-dol lost the first round of his tournament against AlphaGo, back when everyone was still shocked about it. People were so focused on how he felt being beaten like that, and nobody was talking about how AlphaGo felt about winning. That hardly seemed fair. The biggest challenge of writing this for me was maintaining that line between ability and mercy. She needed to be capable of both, after all. That's what makes a human. The question with her, as with everyone, was what path she'd choose. Would she let him win? Would she blow him out of the water? It's easy to Google the results, but the whys have always been more interesting to me. After all, everybody told her that she can't. Who knows, maybe next we'll say that a computer can't write jazz. See how well that works out for the naysayers.