Nature Futures 2 (28 page)

They put Piotr deep underground, in a hole in a honeycomb prison from which no one had ever escaped. His papers were burned, an axe taken to his computers, and his assistant taken away in the night.
Like Galileo
, Piotr thought, but there was no Inquisition for Piotr, no nobles who had taken his side, no eventual reprieve and exile to a far-off villa. For Piotr there was just a black hole and the rest of the world in all directions on the other side of the dark.

Piotr licked the condensation off the walls to live. He ate worms and rats and fought the other rats for those tiny bits of flesh he pulled from their comrades' papery bones. Strong enough to stand for longer than any guard or warden would have imagined, Piotr tried to escape.

He pressed himself up against the hewn stone walls of his cell, which had been built around him, and pushed hard. There was a chance, a small chance. A quantum chance. One in ten quadrillion, but it was there — Piotr could just flow through the wall. His mostly nothing and its mostly nothing, meshing perfectly.
Well no
, Piotr told himself, even as he pushed hard against the dark.
I am just insane. My cosmological horizon stops at my now-blind eyes.
It was those New-Agers with their breathless speeches and ridiculous websites, they're the ones who believe that rot. The Politburo let them run free, those “harmless kooks” (Piotr snorted as he thought those words), because the silly husbands and foolish wives of the powerful were taken with the pleasing notion of a reality that reorders itself to one's wishes. That attribute of the Universe was even an objective and observable phenomenon as far as the sufficiently wealthy (and sufficiently limited in imagination) were concerned.

The black hole he was in, Piotr reminded himself, was not a black hole. He was not a particle contained in the fluctuations of an event horizon. This wasn't a cage of maximum entropy, or a divot in the field of space-time. And there wasn't some other particle somewhere else on the other side of the wall to which Piotr was bound by ghostly chains of instantaneous information transmission. Piotr's home was just a hole dug by men so that other men could die in private for the public peace.

However, Piotr had nothing else to do. And he could run his lips and tongue against the wall, sucking up what little water there was. And he could push, alone in the dark, waiting for the cosmos to fall apart around him.

Piotr pushed for days, months. He stopped only to eat and to eliminate. At times he felt a groove in the wall, a groove shaped like his body. It was a trick of the dark — and his desperate mind, he thought at other times. Sometimes he scraped against the cool rock with his fingernails, seeking a seam or even imagining scratching his way to freedom. Perhaps there was only a five in one quadrillion chance of that.
Double my odds
, he thought. But he was tired, his limbs and digits weak from the diet of brackish water and rats that could squeeze through the cracks he never seemed to find in the wall.

One day — or was it night? — Piotr pushed hard against the wall, limbs spread, chest and groin pressed against rock, his own hot breath hanging like a cloud. There was a shift. He was no longer explicate — a thing to be moved about by the deeper reality of political expediency, of dark forces and unseen hands and subtle strings like those bound to the joints of a marionette. Piotr was the implicate, the thing at the dark centre reaching and expanding outwards across the plane of the world. He was the Unmoved Mover of non-locality and all that which could be called locality both, the logarithmic shadow on the horizon of his black hole and that which cast the shadow as well.
Sistemi del mondo!
Piotr didn't think. He was. In and out. Information everywhere, written across the whole of the cosmos.

With a whoosh of cold air, something gave way, and there was a yowl and an impact that shook the cell, warping its walls like a soap bubble. Light! Grey and coruscating like a far of explosion seen from under ocean waves, but light. “I did it!” shouted Piotr's assistant, a man of rags and bones and wide red eyes. “I'm free! I fell right through the floor of my cell and…” he trailed off and squinted up at Piotr. “Oh.”

Piotr offered his congratulations, colleague to colleague.

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including
Love is the Law
and
The Last Weekend
. His short fiction has appeared in
Best American Mystery Stories
,
Asimov's Science Fiction
,
Tor.com
and many other venues. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in California.

Hard Man to Surprise

David Marusek

On Wednesdays after work, Adam meets with Vera and Pete at a bar across the street from his office.

“My man,” he says, sliding into the booth. “Where's Vera?”

“Running late,” Pete says. “No, wait, here she is.”

Vera exacts a kiss from each of them and squeezes in next to Pete. “What a day!” she exclaims. “First I'm late for a meeting, then I lock myself in the stairwell. I had to climb down
20 floors
to find an exit!”

The men guffaw, and Adam says: “Kinda like that weekend we spent trapped on the Prudential roof, right?”

“Yes!” Vera shrieks. “Like that, only much shorter.” She waves her hand to summon the waitress. “You know, I haven't thought of that in years.”

*   *   *

Later, as they part company, Pete asks Adam about plans for his birthday, and Adam says he enjoyed the so-called surprise dinner they threw for him at Chili's last year.

Pete says, “Sounds like a plan. I'll make secret arrangements for three tables.”

Vera winks. “I'll quietly handle the guest list.”

*   *   *

That weekend Adam runs into Hector and Sylvester at Starbucks. He asks them if they're coming to Chili's on Friday.

“No doubt,” Sylvester says, but Hector gives him a blank look.

“My birthday?” Adam prompts him. “My ‘surprise' dinner?”

Hector pats his jacket pockets and hands Adam a blue card on which is printed:

Hello. It may seem strange that I don't recognize you, but I have recently undergone a memory extinction treatment to selectively erase a traumatic event from my mind. Quite possibly, you were also involved in that event, and the procedure has inadvertently wiped you as well. If this is the case, I apologize and wish you well.

Hector waits for Adam to finish reading. “All right then,” he says and leaves the coffee shop.

Adam is floored. “What the hell just happened?”

“I have no idea,” Sylvester says. “I'll go find out.”

Adam is left holding the blue card. He flips it over and finds the logo of Clean Slate Salons.

The thing is, a few years back Adam handed out one of these cards himself. One night, on what must have been the world's worst first date, Adam and his date were mugged on their way back to his car after a show in the city. They were not physically hurt, but for weeks afterwards Adam's bowels would loosen each time a gun was shoved in his face, which was every time he closed his eyes, and all through the night.

So Adam went to Clean Slate where he drank a carton of Protatter and lay on a couch in a booth with his head resting on a microtrode-encrusted pillow. A certified facilitator in Mumbai talked him through a complete ‘narrative' of his ‘incident', prompting him for every traumatic detail. Adam scrubbed the entire humiliating evening from his memory and tossed his date out with the bathwater. Hence the eventual blue card.

*   *   *

On Wednesday, Adam is waiting in the usual booth, but Pete and Vera are no-shows, and their icons fail to pop up on any of his maps. When he calls them he gets voicemail.

While he waits for them to call him back, he calls Sylvester to ask about Hector. It has occurred to him that if something bad happened to Hector, why hasn't he heard about it? He gets Sylvester's voicemail. He calls Rosemary to see what's up with Sylvester and gets voicemail. He tries Frank, Claudia and Conor. Finally, a little ticked off, he twitters: WHERE THE BLEEP IS EVERYONE? HELLO? Then he notices that no one is following him anymore. Followers: 0. He stares at the hollow digit in astonishment. How can such a number even be possible? He has a sinking feeling and calls Chili's to confirm his reservation for Friday and learns there is no such reservation. Or, rather, there was one, but it was cancelled.

*   *   *

Adam is standing outside Pete's building. He has pressed the bell and is waiting to be buzzed in, but instead the intercom crackles. “Yes?”

“It's Adam.”

“Adam who?”

“That's not funny.”

“Just a sec.”

Adam waits for the heavy door to buzz, but a moment later Pete peers at him through the glass, opens the door a crack and says, “You Adam?”

“Stop that!”

Pete hands him something and shuts the door. It's a blue card. “What did I do?” Adam shouts at the door. “Just tell me what I did!”

*   *   *

Today is Adam's birthday. He takes a personal day from work, sleeps in, rides his bike along the river, catches a matinee. Around 6:00 p.m. he returns home with a couple of DVDs, a pizza and a six-pack of beer.

No sooner does Adam get through the door than all the lights come on and a crowd of people spring from the furniture shouting “Surprise!”

Vera is there, and Pete, Sylvester, Hector and Rosemary. Frank is there and Claudia, Conor and a dozen more, all in party hats. “Surprise!” they shout. Streamers and balloons deck the living room, and the countertop is stacked with gifts.

“Did we surprise you?” Vera asks. “You look surprised.”

“Here, let me help with that,” Pete says and takes the beer from Adam. “Sorry about punking you, but you're a hard man to surprise.”

“It was a bet, actually,” Hector says.

“So are you surprised?” Vera demands.

Adam peers around at the expectant faces. “Oh, I'm surprised all right,” he says and reaches for something in his pocket. “I just hope I have enough of these.”

Science-fiction author David Marusek lives in a constant state of mild surprise in Fairbanks, Alaska. Don't friend him on Facebook. Don't follow his tweets. The only way to keep up with Marusek is to sign up for his occasional novel updates at
www.marusek.com
.

Twitterspace

William Meikle

@Voyager2: I am currently 13 hrs 11 mins 26 secs of light-travel time from Earth

Dave was excited to find that he could follow the Voyager spacecraft on Twitter. He'd been obsessed with space, aliens and UFOs for as long as he could remember. He wanted to believe so bad, and being in touch with Voyager made him feel like he was reaching out into the vastness. In a small way, it felt like he was attempting
first contact
. His excitement soon turned to disappointment: the messages weren't coming from the craft but were being typed in by a nerd at NASA. It did however set him to thinking.

What if they're already here? What if they're watching us?

He did a search on Twitter — #aliens, #ufo and #invasion. The results were illuminating.
@weegreenmen
and
@saucerzrus
in particular shared many links, and many of them had nothing to do with aliens. What they
did
have a lot to do with was military infrastructure and economics for all the major powers on the planet. That was enough to make Dave think some more.

@weegreenmen: Check out Reuters. Big fluctuations in sterling today #invasion

He followed their tweets for several weeks. During that time he found out more than he needed to know about troop movements in Afghanistan, the North Korean nuclear programme, the perilous state of the Eurozone economies and, strangely, long-range weather forecasts for the Northern Hemisphere.

@saucerzrus: #ufo #aliens Major weather bomb in the Maritimes. Whoo-Hoo!

By now Dave was convinced he was on to something. The only way he would be able to find out what, was to join in on the conversation. He created a user on Twitter for the purpose. He spent a while looking for just the right name, and finally went with
@littlegreybuddies
. Then he needed a hook, to get their attention. The thing they were currently most interested in was weather patterns, so he started with that. He began by posting links to the North Atlantic storm watch sites, and actually found himself getting interested in the real-time tracking systems he found. That led him into ever more esoteric areas of research involving analyses of the movements of the jet stream, and apocalyptic warnings of serious trouble ahead for the world's climate.

@littlegreybuddies: Looks like the UK is in for a severe chill. So much for Global Warming #jetstream

That got their attention. He started to see his messages retweeted to the #aliens, #ufo and #invasion hash-tags. Slowly at first, he began retweeting messages posted by
@weegreenmen
and
@saucerzrus
, then started replying to their messages. In turn they started including him in their conversations, and seemed especially interested in his ongoing weather research.

@saucerzrus: #ufo #aliens Not long now till LUTZ #countdown

Buoyed by his acceptance Dave now felt that he had to do something to make sure he stayed there long enough to find out what was going on. He delved into university server systems and crept as close as he could to worldwide military information. From that he cobbled together a model of the coming month of where troops would be gathered, what the weather would be, and forecasted three weeks to come. He uploaded it all to a local ftp server and posted the link. Then he sat back and waited.

@saucerzrus: #ufo #aliens Hey @littlegreybuddies, THX man. #countdown brought forward