Nature Futures, page 17
Is it just an urban legend that the first basilisk destroyed its creator?
Almost everything about the incident at the Cambridge IV supercomputer facility where Berryman conducted his last experiments has been suppressed and classified as highly undesirable knowledge. It’s generally believed that Berryman and most of the facility staff died.
Subsequently, copies of basilisk B-1 leaked out. This image is famously known as the Parrot for its shape when blurred enough to allow safe viewing. B-1 remains the favorite choice of urban terrorists who use aerosols and stencils to spray basilisk images on walls by night.
But others were at work on Berryman’s speculations. B-2 was soon generated at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and, disastrously, B-3 at MIT.
Are there basilisks in the Mandelbrot set fractal?
Yes. There are two known families, at symmetrical positions, visible under extreme magnification. No, we’re not telling you where.
How can I get permission to display images on my Web site?
This is a news.announce.newusers question, but keeps cropping up here. In brief: you can’t, without a rarely granted government license. Using anything other than plain ASCII text on Web sites or in e-mail is a guaranteed way of terminating your net account. We’re all nostalgic about the old, colorful Web, and about television, but today’s risks are simply too great.
Is it true that Microsoft uses basilisk booby traps to protect Windows 2005 from disassembly and pirating?
We could not possibly comment.
Gathering of the Clans
REINALDO JOSé LOPES
Reinaldo José Lopes is a science writer at Folha de S. Paulo, Brazil’s leading daily newspaper. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil.
You could see the pavilions for miles around in the bright summer morning. Only a little less conspicuous was the line of people moving slowly toward two signposts. “Got your marker ready? This way, please,” said one. “First time? Come and shed your blood,” informed the other. And above them, a bigger signpost shouted in fake Celtic letters: “Welcome to the fifth GATHERING OF THE CLANS!”
The enthusiasm was almost palpable—or was it the smell of sweat?—except for a tiny segment of the line where a group of friends was arguing. They seemed to be having a hard time convincing one of them that yes, despite the evidence, this was going to be cool.
“Don’t be such a baby, Pat. It’ll be fun.”
“And I still say it’s gonna be ludicrous. And I hate needles. Do you really think they’ll use a different one for every single person in this crowd?”
“You sound like a sissy. It’s just a drop, for goodness’ sake! You know how efficient those sequencers are nowadays. They read the bases, tell you who was your great-great-great-grandpa of a couple of thousand years ago, and that’s it—you’re free to drink mead and get the chicks.”
“Yeah, Pat, what’s wrong with that? After all, we’re just connecting with our past, buddy. Thought you appreciated that.”
“Look, I’m as likely to engage in hero worship as anyone. It’s the impersonality of it that bothers me. There was certainly a point in us claiming descent from Hengist and Horsa. Those guys at least had a story—they cut Finn and his gang to pieces and conquered Britain. Been there, done that. People can connect with that kind of stuff. But now you’re asking me to worship a DNA sequence. No, sir—I’d rather go drink mead with old Hengist in Valhalla.”
Soon they were right in front of the gates, where a stout fellow in white was grinning at Pat—everyone, of course, had made sure he was the first to get in.
“Alright, mate, what’s it gonna be? Mt? Y? Autosomal markers?”
Pat sighed. “Whatever. Surprise me.”
Very carefully, his thumb was pierced. Ten seconds later, a robotic voice that seemed to be suffering from a dreadful case of personality emulation (of the irritatingly happy sort) announced: “Congratulations! Your mtDNA has been assigned to the V haplogroup, fairly common in western and northern Europe, where it originated right after the Last Glacial Maximum! Your people were probably among the earliest and greatest artists the human race has known, creating those fine murals of extinct megafauna in Altamira and Lascaux. Way to go!”
“Thrilling,” growled Pat. “Can I go now?”
“Hang on a sec,” said the gatekeeper, “you need your totem!” He gave Pat a little plastic horse that looked like a poor imitation of the ones from Lascaux. Pat sighed still louder, grabbed the horse, and moved on.
“Hey, what’s wrong with Marvin there?” asked the gatekeeper.
“Oh, the usual thing. Don’t talk to him about life,” answered his friends, laughing.
The Gathering seemed to confirm Pat’s worst fears. In one corner, somebody dressed as a Mongol warrior was calling “all Star-Cluster kids under ten” to learn how to shoot with a composite bow, just like Grandpa Genghis. A few yards away, some French families were being instructed in the minutiae of cannibalism among the Tupinambá tribes of Brazil—it turned out a young chief from that nation had married the daughter of a Norman trader in the sixteenth century. Elsewhere, a rabbi was always ready in case you found out your chromosomes were Jewish and wanted an impromptu bar mitzvah.
Pat wandered miserably until he spotted a girl with long black hair who also seemed to be walking alone. Predictably, he was happy to inflict on her (Vera was the name, and she was from the Basque Country in Spain) all the talk about how ridiculous the whole Gathering concept was. Vera seemed to dig his grumpy-old-man charm, but didn’t quite agree.
“I think everyone is aware of that stuff,” she said. “But think of it for a second. Isn’t it wonderful that all these different people are learning about a past that seems plain legend but is written in our blood? Besides, look at the scale of it. We used to think in terms of two or three generations at most. Now you can look back thousands of years and still recognize yourself.”
Pat was still unconvinced. “I see what you mean. But I don’t know quite how to feel about it. You see, I … Whoa!”
They had wandered to the very heart of the Gathering and were right in front of an awesome panel. Picture the largest family tree you have ever seen, hundreds of feet across. There was a huge “YOU ARE HERE” on the right side, and all the lineages of men (well, of women, actually, because it was an mtDNA family tree) ramified from “EVE” on the left, crowned with their achievements, from the Internet to, yes, the horses of Lascaux.
“Well, I don’t think you can argue with that,” muttered Pat.
“I guess you can’t,” smiled Vera.
“You didn’t tell me what your clan was,” he asked.
“Oh,” said Vera, “here it is.” She showed him a plastic horse.
It was only his imagination, but he could almost see Vera in a different guise altogether. She was clad warmly in fur, and in ochre the most fantastic designs graced her white skin. She raised a torch and, for a split second, all the beasts of the Ice Age danced in the rock roof. There was only one thing to do: he kissed the apparition.
“You don’t think that counts as incest, do you?” joked Pat. She laughed.
Taking Good Care of Myself
IAN R. MACLEOD
Ian R. MacLeod almost became a lawyer but drifted into the civil service and thence into full-time writing. He did not make his first sale until his mid-thirties, but the 1990s saw a prodigious output of stories and three novels. The first, The Great Wheel, won the Locus Award for the Best First Novel of 1997. He lives in Bewdley, Worcestershire, England, and his Web site can be found at www.ianrmacleod.com.
The social worker came a day or so before I arrived. He was as briskly pleasant as the occasion, which I’d long been dreading, allowed. He was dressed bizarrely, but people from the future always are.
“We’ll need to send a few helpful machines back with you,” he murmured as he inspected our spare bedroom and the bathroom and then the kitchen, which no doubt looked ridiculously primitive to him. “But nothing that’ll get in your way.”
Helen was equally reassuring when she came home that evening. “It’s a tremendous challenge,” she told me. “You always say you like challenges.”
“I mean stuff like climbing, hang gliding, pushing things to the edge, not looking after some senile version of myself.”
“Josh.” She gave me one of her looks. “You have no choice.”
She was right—and there was plenty of space in our nice house. It was as if we’d always planned on doing precisely this, although I hated the very thought.
I arrived a couple of mornings after, flanked by swish-looking machines, although I was just as pale and dithery as I’d feared. The creature I’d eventually become couldn’t walk, could barely see, and certainly didn’t comprehend what was happening to him. Exactly how long, I wondered (and secretly hoped), can I possibly last like this?
Scampering around our house like chromium shadows, the machines performed many of the more obvious and unpleasant duties, but much was still expected of me. I had to sit and talk, although my elderly self rarely said anything in response, and none of it was coherent. I also had to help myself eat, and wipe away the spilled drool afterward. I had to hold my own withered hand.
“Do you remember this house—I mean, you must have lived here?”
But I was much too far gone to understand. Not, perhaps, in a vegetative state yet, but stale meat at very best.
Sometimes, I took me out, pretending to push the clever chair that was in fact more than capable of doing everything—except getting rid of this cadaverous ghost—by itself. My work suffered. So did my relationship with Helen. I joined a self-help group. I sat in meeting halls filled with other unfortunates who’d had the care of their future selves foisted on them. We debated in slow circles why our future children, or the intelligences that perhaps governed them, had seen fit to make us do this. Were they punishing us for the mess we’d made of their world? Or were these addled creatures, with their lost minds, their failed memories, their thin grip on this or any other kind of reality, somehow the means of achieving time travel itself? Predictably, various means of killing were discussed, from quiet euthanasia to violent stabbings and clifftop falls. But that was the thing; complain as we might, not one of us ever seemed capable of harming ourselves. Not, anyway, the selves we would eventually become.
I declined. The machines, with a will of their own, grew yet more sophisticated and crouched permanently beside me as I lay immovably in my spare bedroom cradled in steel pipes and crystal insertions. They fed me fresh blood, fresh air. I doubted if this husk I’d become was conscious of any presence other than its own dim existence now, but still I found myself sitting beside me, and talking endlessly about things I couldn’t remember afterward. It was as if I was trapped in a trance, or that part of me was dying as well. I lay entirely naked now under clever sheets that cleaned themselves. Occasionally, inevitably, I would lift them up, and breathe the stale air of my own mortality, and study the thin limbs and puckered flesh of what I would eventually become. The death itself was surprisingly easy. The machines saw to it that there was no pain, and I was there; I made sure I didn’t die alone. A faint rattle, a tiny spasm. You’re left wondering what all the fuss is about.
After the funeral, which of course I also had to arrange myself, and was far more poorly attended than I might have hoped, and then the scattering of my ashes at the windy lip of one of my favorite climbs, I looked around at my life like a sleeper awakening. Helen had left me, although quietly, without fuss. My house felt empty, but I knew that it was more to do with that old man than with her. I’m back to climbing regularly now. I’m back to free fall and hang gliding. I find that I enjoy these sports, and many other kinds of dangerous and challenging physical activities, even more.
After all, I know they can’t kill me, and that the last phase of my life really isn’t so very bad. But things have changed, for all that, and I still sometimes find myself sitting alone in my spare bedroom gazing at the taut sheets of that empty bed, although I and all those future machines have long gone. The sad fact is, I miss myself dreadfully, now that I’m no longer here.
Undead Again
KEN MACLEOD
Ken MacLeod is an award-winning Scottish SF writer who lives near Edinburgh. He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology, has worked as a computer programmer, and has written a master’s thesis on biomechanics. His novels often explore the interface between high technology and left-wing politics, what some commentators have called “techno-progressive.”
It’s 2045 and I’m still a vampire. Damn.
The chap from Alcor UK is droning through his orientation lecture. New age of enlightenment, new industrial revolution, many changes, take some time to adjust, blah blah blah. I’m only half listening, being too busy shifting my foot to keep it out of the beam of direct sunlight creeping across the floor, and trying not to look at his neck.
I feel like saying: I’ve only been dead forty years, for Chr … for crying out loud. I saw the first age of enlightenment. I worked nights right through the original Industrial Revolution. I remember being naive enough to get excited about mesmerism, galvanism, spiritualism, socialism, roentgen rays, rationalism, radium, mendelism, Marconi, relativity, feminism, the Russian Revolution, the bomb, nightclubs, feminism (again), Apollo 11, socialism (again), the fall of Saigon, and the fall of the Wall.
The last dodgy nostrum I fell for was cryonics.
So don’t give me this futureshock shit, sunshine. The most disconcerting thing I’ve come across so far in 2045 is the latest ladies’ fashion: the old sleeveless minidress. The ozone hole has been fixed, and folk are frolicking in the sun. I hug myself with bare arms, and slide the castored chair back another inch.
Under the heel of my left wrist, I feel the thud of my regenerated heart. It beats time to the artery visible under the tanned skin of the resurrection man’s neck. The rest of my nature is unregenerate. I feel somewhat thwarted. This is not, this is definitely not, what I died for. And it seemed such a good idea at the time.
It always does.
By 1995 we thought we had a handle on the thing. It’s a virus. In all respects but one, it’s benign: it prevents aging and stimulates regeneration of any tissue damage short of, well, a stake through the heart. But it has a very low infectivity, so it takes a lot of mingling of fluids to spread. Natural selection has worked that one hard. Hence the unfortunate impulses. And by 1995, I can tell you, I was getting pretty sick of them. I cashed in my six Scottish Widows life insurance policies (let’s draw a veil over how I acquired them), signed up for cryonic preservation in the event of my death, and after a discreet ten years, met an unfortunate and bloody end at the hand of the coven senior, Kelvin.
“You’ll thank me later,” he said, just before he pushed home the point.
“See you in the future,” I croaked.
The last thing I saw was his grin. That, and the pavement below the spiked railings beside the steps of my flat. A tragic accident. The coroner, I just learned, blamed it on the long skirt. Vampires—always the fashion victims.
I leave the orientation room, hang around until dusk under the pretext of catching up with the news, and go out and find a vintage clothes shop. I walk out in Victorian widow’s weeds. They fit so well I suspect they were once mine.
“It didn’t work,” I tell Kelvin.
He sips his Bloody Mary and looks defensive. “It did in a way,” he says. “There are no viruses in your blood.”
That word again. I look away. We’re in some kind of goth club, which covers for the mode but doesn’t improve my mood.
“So why do I still feel… hungry?”
“Have a tapas,” he says. “But seriously … the way we figure it, the virus has to have transcribed itself into our DNA. So the nanotech cell repair just replicates it without a second thought.”
“So we’re stuck with it,” I say. “Living in the dark and every so often …”
“Not quite,” he says. “Now it’s been established that cryonics really does work, there’s been a whole new interest in a very old idea …”
The coffin lid opens. Kelvin’s looking down, as I expect. The real shock is the light, full spectrum and warm. It feels like something my skin has missed for centuries. I sit up, naked, and bask for a moment.
The overhead lights reproduce the spectrum of Alpha Centauri, which is where we’re going. The whole coven is here, all thirteen of them, happier and better fed than I’ve ever seen them. It’s taken us a lot of planning, a lot of money, and a lot of lying to get here, but we’re on our way.
“Welcome back,” says Kelvin. He grins around at the coven.
“Let’s thaw one out for her,” he says. “She must be hungry.”
As far as I can see stretch rows and rows of cryonic coffins containing interstellar colonists in what they euphemistically call cold sleep. Thousands of them.
Enough to keep us going until we reach that kinder sun.
Words, Words, Words
ELISABETH MALARTRE
Elisabeth Malartre is the pen name of a biologist and writer living in Laguna Beach, California, who teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
Richard calls Marilyn’s normal morning routine “the old gal doing her drugs.” She takes antioxidants to keep young; a hormone-replacement pill; a diuretic for high blood pressure; vitamins (“just because”); and a soft gel called Palaver, all with calcium-enriched orange juice. Then she has breakfast and reads the paper, working on the crossword between trips to the bathroom. She rarely answers the phone or goes out before 10:00 A.M., letting her pills do their work.
