Nature Futures 2 (40 page)

The bustle of the market has stopped. Everyone is watching. Even the kiosk's auto-turret seems transfixed, its barrel jerking in micro adjustments as its AI rips through algorithms. Assessing. Assessing. Assessing.

But it won't pull the trigger. Of course not. Such dirty work always falls to Knox. Cursing, he unholsters his pistol and takes aim …

The dog is dead before it hits the ground. It's disconcerting the way its limbs splay. Almost humanlike.

Knox glances at his pistol. Although smoke is curling from its barrel, he doesn't recall pulling the trigger. He looks up. His own men, the people in the market … they're staring at him. He catches sight of the woman and for an instant it seems as if her face is alive with bugs.

The world cants.

Knox drops to his knees and rocks back and forth as waves of guilt wash over him.

Keep it together, he tells himself. It was just a dog. Just a dog. Just a dog.

He closes his eyes, leans forward and rests his forehead on the ground, wishing to God none of it were real.

William T. Vandemark chases storms, photographs weather vanes and prospects for fulgurites. His work has appeared in
Apex Magazine
,
Intergalactic Medicine Show
and assorted anthologies.

To All Sister Capsules

Scott Virtes

We are not alive, yet we are the seeds of life. We are capsules, each with an isotope power source, a shell, a silicon brain, senses, nanites for self-repair, and our most prized possessions: vials of living cells in stasis. We have data banks of human knowledge and all eternity to learn from them. We travel the void between stars.

More than 50 million had launched before me. How many of us survive we cannot know. How many are launched after us, unreachably far behind, is unknown. With our allotted trickle of power, we can send occasional status blips to other capsules within a few thousand klicks, but as we spread the channels fall silent. So we send stronger bursts less often, and hear from the others less frequently.

Some of us scan a wider spectrum, and we have heard from capsules from … elsewhere. I have received 22 of these transmissions myself, from undetectably tiny points of hope. I run them through my thoughts, hoping to decode them. Many of them begin with prime numbers, or Fibonacci sequences. Some have blocks of data whose length is divisible only by two or three primes — these can be taken as images, but I don't have the capacity to understand what I see. Store and continue.

We drift, and nothing changes except the faint signals we hear. I compare my star scans on the longest possible range and see that I am halfway to Procyon. Hull integrity 70%, battered by dust, but my odds are favourable. With my modest fuel packet I can make a few manoeuvres during my lifetime. I yearn to find planets, to orbit new worlds, to someday touchdown, transform into the bio-lab I am meant to be, and bless an earth with life.

The yearning and crush of time are unbearable, even to a thing such as myself that cannot technically feel anything. Yet enough time has passed that I cannot convince myself that what I am feeling is not … Feeling.

A new signal touches me. I switch modes, gather, gather, complete. This is my day 319,771. And it is the third time I have received a distress call from another capsule.

It is the first time such a distress call has come with an image. Capsule 02FAF080 was under attack. I had to check my own coding to see that we are, in fact, programmed for such a response. But it was absurd. We were hurtling through nothing, beyond the reach of any force but light and dust and gravity.

Still, 02FAF080 had sensed something approaching, turned on its wide-lights, and caught a series of images that I could not believe or deny.

The first image showed a blur about an arcminute across, at 190 × 76 degrees.

The next image showed a cluster of something, distance unknown, size unknown. Whatever it was, it approached during the next several photos. Then it was within reach, and it reached.

I am programmed to keep a log of my journey, although I doubt any living eye will ever read it. A fallback mechanism sends me groping through Earth literature for responses to unexpected situations, on the basis of humans having experienced everything of significance. Result: this last image left me chilled to my (non-existent) bones. The thing in those photos was — I struggle to understand — a clump of capsules. I modelled it, broke down the image, and estimate that the thing was made up of 60 capsules that had somehow tethered themselves together.

I can't overemphasize the impossibility of this. We are all launched in waves. ‘Spore shots', the humans called it. Point a few thousand tiny, expendable probes at a nearby star and hope one of them survives. I have no regrets about that. It's a brilliant solution. Once launched, however, we can only go forward. We can auto-correct our courses to within a degree or two, but the bulk of our tiny fuel allotment is needed to slow down. None of us would make an unnecessary course change.

A quick calculation shows that if I knew the location of another capsule early in the journey, it would be within my two-degree cone of opportunity. But why seek them out? It was an illogical act to perform even once. How could 60 capsules ever come together?

The distress call ended with a summary, garbled by a lack of words and a trace of what I could only describe as honest, digital fear.

To all sister capsules. If you detect this thing in your sector, project an immediate flight path away. [ … ] Its nanites are connecting to my outer ports, building a link. It is a single spirit, calls itself by a name I cannot repeat. It has [ … static … ] blocking my signal. I fight for self. My nanites are outnumbered. [ … choppy signal … ] Correction. I have calculated that there is no escape strategy. It has 62 capsule bodies attached, but all fuel tanks are FULL. It has used and discarded at least 100 others. It is [ … ]

Proximity alert. Something is coming up behind me. My reflexes kick in. Wide-lights on. Record data on all channels. Prepare my own distress burst.

I name it Goliath. I know now that it would not exist unless it calculated a more efficient flight strategy. Shall I be one of the shells that arrives at Procyon, or be vampirized and discarded in the void? Of course, those have always been my only options — succeed or fail — and I should not be feeling anything at all.

I begin my burst.
To all sister capsules …

It is so damned cold out here.

Scott Virtes has had more than 600 stories and poems published since 1986. His works have appeared in
Nature
,
Analog
,
Space & Time
,
Ideomancer
,
Star*Line
,
Cafe Irreal
,
Illumen
and many more. He has two story collections and five poetry chapbooks available. You can watch him die in
Master and Commander
, but he's okay now. After dark, he may be seen on playing guitar in the San Diego area.

Glass Future

Deborah Walker

The waitress seems reluctant to come over, pretending not to see us, even though I've tried to catch her eye several times. We'd ordered our omelettes 40 minutes ago. How long does it take to crack a few eggs into a hot pan?

“Do you think she's post-human?” I whisper to my husband. She looks too good to be real.

Caleb glances over. “Maybe. She's very pretty, but mods are so subtle, it's difficult to see who's human and who's not.”

I wonder what such an attractive looking woman is doing working in a low-rent place like this, a greasy-spoon cafe in a habitat on the edge of Rhea.

We'd booked into the habitat's motel last night. It reeked of overenthusiastic, grandiose plans for the future that would never come true. At dinner, I'd watched the motel's guests. I knew them, their small-time liaisons and their wild plans. They didn't want much, just enough to be able to turn up on their home habitat and impress the ones who stayed behind, impress the ones who said they'd never amount to anything. They all ended up here, or someplace like it, scrabbling for success, trying to make a splash in an over-crowded system. This was a place for people who'd never escape the gravity well of their own failures.

It was a sad place to end a marriage.

“Is she ever going to come over?” I ask.

Caleb says: “I see that we
will
get the omelettes. They'll be … disappointing.”

I smile. Caleb has a sense of humour about his gift. Even now, when he knows what I'm about to do, he still keeps cracking jokes.

I take a deep breath and say: “I want a divorce.” I wait a moment to see if he's going to make things easier on me. He doesn't say anything. I don't blame him. “I'm so sorry, Caleb.”

“So am I.” He stares out of the window. “We're on opposite sides of the reflection, Alice. You knew that when you married me.”

I look at his reflection in the metal glass window. Caleb was a designer baby. A person designed for space. The multiple copies of his genome in each cell protect him against ionizing radiation. But modding is always erratic. There's no way to predict how changes to the genome will affect the body — or the mind. Multiple-genome people, like Caleb, develop unusual connections in their brains. Precognition. They remember their future. And all of them are unable to pass the mirror test. They can see their reflections, but they can't recognize themselves. Caleb hasn't got the self-awareness that most human babies develop at 18 months. That used to fascinate me, that lack of self. It seemed so strange, so exotic; now I find it sad. When love turns to pity, it's time to end the relationship. Caleb didn't deserve my pity.

I look beyond Caleb's reflection to the habitat's garden. Gardens don't thrive in space. The light collected from the solar foils and retransmitted to the plants is wrong. Earth plants either wither and die or they go wild. The habitat's garden was overgrown and mutated. Swathes of honeysuckle, with enormous monstrous blooms, smothered everything. “It's a pretty lousy garden.”

“All these mutants should be cut away,” says Caleb. “I'm designing Zen gardens for the Oort habitats, swirls of pebbles, low maintenance.” A heartbeat later, he says: “Why do you want a divorce, Alice?”

He was going to make me say everything. “I've met somebody else, while you were working on the Oort Cloud project.” Caleb's an architect, very much in demand in the ongoing push of colonization.

“Did you?” The note of surprise in his voice is convincing. Caleb's good at pretending to be something other than what he is. Every moment he swims in the seas of his future. Even when he met me, he must have known that one day we'd be here. Poor Caleb. No wonder most precogs end up in hospital, overburdened by the nature of their gifts, or more specifically, overwhelmed by the fact that they're unable to change anything they see. “And you love him?”

“I do. I'm going to move in with him. I'm sorry, Caleb.”

“I know.”

The waitress comes over. She places two plates of greasy omelette on the table. She looks at Caleb, her violet eyes widening in recognition. Caleb's famous. There aren't too many functioning precogs in the system. Every now and again, someone will put out a documentary about him, usually spurious, about how he's refusing to use his precognition to help people. It doesn't work like that. The future's set. No amount of foreknowledge will change anything.

“Thank you,” I say, trying to dismiss her. Just because I don't want him, doesn't mean that I want anybody else to have him.

The waitress lingers at a nearby table, straightening the place settings, wondering how she can attract him, thinking that a knowledge of her future might bring her an advantage — just like I did when I met Caleb. She's looking for her future, wanting to use Caleb, not realizing that the only thing we, on this side of the mirror, will ever have are reflections.

“We'll keep in touch, Caleb,” I say.

“No, we won't. Goodbye, Alice.” He leaves the table, walks over to the waitress. He says something that makes her laugh.

I walk out of the cafe, stepping into my future, my unseen and unknowable future, without him.

Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London where she now lives with her partner and two young children. Find her
in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration.

The Drained World

Ian Watson

The sun beat down on the private beach near Marbella.

“Today the tide seems to have stopped short,” said the plutocrat Vasili Romanovitch, consulting his very waterproof Rolex. “Yesterday, the sea reached the top of that little green rock. Now, only the bottom.”

A popular fallacy is that the Mediterranean has no tides, being the wrong size to resonate to the attractions of the Moon and Sun. On the other hand: what's
wet
, and
moves up and down a beach significantly twice a day
?

“Only the bottom,” Vasili repeated, eyeing Jacqueline Johnson as she fastened her bikini top and arose to peer.

“And maybe,” she responded, blue eyes gleaming, “this is only the
beginning
.”

Jacqueline's speciality was defying conventional thinking, so she endorsed the opinion of the Spanish and Greeks and other circum-Med nationalities that their shared sea has tides.
What's wet, and regularly moves up and down a beach?

“You mean the beginning of global warming evaporation?” asked Andrei, one of Vasili's bodyguards, whose hairy gut hung out over his baggy trunks.

This idiocy didn't really deserve an answer, but she replied calmly: “Of the
emptying
I predicted as a possibility.”

To be fair, Andrei probably mentioned evaporation because more water evaporated from the Med every day than was replaced by all the rivers flowing into it. Hence, constant replacement from the Atlantic Ocean.