Alex Irvine's "Watching the Cow"

I just received my Jan./Feb. copy of Fantasy & Science Fiction and have been delighted by its consistency and quality. My favorite tale is Alex Irvine's "Watching the Cow," a convincing tale of familial love, VR technology, and the bizarre possibilities of our hyper-networked, hive-mind mentality. That cover art is as keen as the story, and you can read an interesting piece on the commissioning of the story here. It's one of those marginally rarer instances in which a story is contracted based on a visual, rather than the other way around...