“Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld, Issue 229, April 2025 by Isabel J. Kim
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: artificial intelligence, science fiction, short stories
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 229 October 2025
Pages: 9
Length: 23 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on October 23, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our October 2025 issue (#229) contains:

Fiction
"Wire Mother" by Isabel J. Kim
"The Cancer Wolves" by Fiona Moore
"Crabs Don't Scream" by H.H. Pak
"Understudies" by Greg Egan
"Giant Grandmother" by Liu Maijia
"The Job Interview" by Carrie Vaughn
"In Luck's Panoply Clad, I Stand" by Phoebe Barton
Non-Fiction
"Space Bears and Engineering the Next Generation of Astronauts" by Gunnar De Winter
"Memory, Loss, and Memory Loss: A Conversation with Rich Larson" by Arley Sorg
"Technology as a Language: A Conversation with Ken Liu" by Arley Sorg
"Editor's Desk: Nineteen" by Neil Clarke
Cover Art
"Overgrowth" by Quentin Stipp

My Review:

Cassie does not get along with her mother. She’s not thrilled with her dad when the story begins, either. Then again, she’s a teenager and those attitudes are not that uncommon. Which is why there are plenty of jokes about how much our parents learn between our ages of 17 and 21 or thereabouts. Not because they learn stuff, but because we start seeing the world as it really is.

But Cassie’s particular issues with “the ‘rents” aren’t about the usual things. Or at least not about our usual things – although we’re getting there faster than we like to think.

Cassie’s issue with her mother is that her mother isn’t really her mother. Well, not her biological mother. Not because Cassie is adopted or her parents used a surrogate or whatever you might be thinking of. Cassie’s mother isn’t really her mother in the biological sense because Cassie’s mother isn’t a biological entity. She’s a digital person that her dad created to his specifications.

Or, as Cassie refers to her, a ‘wife simulacra’.

Cassie’s not alone in having a digital person for a parent. But she is singular among her peers for having been diagnosed with Emotional Contagion Deficit or ECD. Cassie can’t emotionally connect with digital people as people. In other words, she doesn’t love her mother because her mother is a collection of ones and zeros and binary programming, and Cassie is unable to lose her awareness of that to accept her mother as a person.

So when one of her few friends turns her own diagnosis against her, and she learns one of those painful lessons about adulthood that we wish we could turn to our parents for even if we don’t, Cassie decides to make her reality real for everyone around her. Whether because she’s lashing out, because she’s certain she’s the only keeper of the truth, or because misery demands company.

We don’t know, and neither does she.

Escape Rating B: This, like many of the shorter works in my Hugo Awards reading, was both a thoughtful and an uncomfortable read. And not just in the ways that were obvious on the page. Or in listening to the podcast (read well as usual by Kate Baker) which is how I experienced the story.

Because it’s not just about Cassie’s uncomfortable situation – although that was plenty. She is rebelling in what seems like a typical teenage way – until the story reveals that she really isn’t.

In science fiction, we often not merely accept, but outright enjoy and even empathize with AI characters. The central characters of Emergent Properties and the recent Ode to the Half-Broken are both artificial intelligences and we accept them as persons in their own right and feel for them when their rights are threatened because they are AI.

So it’s a bit uncomfortable reading/listening to “Wire Mother” from Cassie’s point of view because AMY the digital person isn’t just not the mother Cassie wishes she was, but she’s not her mother. And we feel that too, that the digital person in the box can’t really be her mother no matter what Cassie is told because that’s just not what mothers are. Or because we’re still cognizant that digital personas aren’t ‘real people’. Siri and Alexa may be terribly helpful but they’re not actual persons – at least not yet.

And then, on my other, digital hand, there’s the place where the concept of ‘wire mothers’ came from, not in science fiction but in actual science. It was part of a psychology experiment in the 1930s with infant rhesus monkeys using mother-shaped figures made out of wire to study the monkeys’ reactions to fear and whether they could derive comfort from a mother-shaped object if they were raised with it. It’s all pretty horrific both for the actual research methods and the way it was used to study questions about attachment and isolation and social deprivation that were applied to human children as well.

It’s clear that THIS Hugo nominated short story is related to those experiments. If only to stand all the concepts on their tiny little heads. This is an uncomfortable story, as many of this year’s nominees in the short works categories are, and it is also in dialogue with the past as the author’s Hugo nominated story from 2025, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” was. Although that was in dialogue with science fiction of the past, while this one is in dialogue with real science of the past. (The picture at right is a ‘wire mother’ with its baby and it’s still heartbreaking. If you’re curious, check out this entry in Wikipedia.)

What makes this story relevant for TODAY is that it turns the study about ‘wire mothers’ and infant/maternal attachment on its head by introducing AI and 21st century (possibly even later) into the mix and centering the story around a teenaged girl who can’t attach to the future’s version of a ‘wire mother’ because she’s old enough and logical enough to know that it’s not real.

Cassidy can’t make herself feel what her society has decided are the “right” feelings for digital people. Because a digital mother can’t give her a hug without using a body surrogate – which is a whole other bundle of wrongness. Because she’s a programmer and she knows what goes into creating a digital person and she knows that programming can’t create a real person.

And that just because her dad is in love with the wife simulacra that he created to his own specifications – it does not mean that the program loves him back. Or that it’s capable of loving anyone, even its own daughter, at all. Or that Cassie can close off the truth of her own mind to let herself believe that it does. Even when she wishes she could.