Nature Futures, page 24
Many meetings follow, no doubt explaining the presence in this chapter of most of the novel’s sex scenes. Author seemingly familiar with and perhaps overfond of the bonobo literature. Strenuous attempts to maximize reproductive success in Davos, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, etc.
Novel’s style shifts to amalgam of legal thriller and tolkienesque high fantasy as scientists take power from corporate military-industrial global elite. A spinradian strategic opacity here obscures the actual mechanism that would allow this to work in the real world, said opacity created by deployment of complicated syntax, phrases low in semantic content (“information cascade”), especially active stage business (man runs through with hair on fire), explosions, car chases, and reinvocation of Very Big Numbers—in this case Science Mutual’s potential assets if World Court returns positive judgment, after which subsequent chapter (with toll-free number as epigraph!) emerges in newly utopian space, looking plausible to those still suspended in coleridgean willed nondisbelief.
Speed of narration accelerates. Science Mutual arranges winners in all elections everywhere. Hedge fund continues to grow. Scientific organizations form international supra-organization. Black helicopters proliferate. Entire population decides to follow new scientific guidelines indicating that reproductive fitness is maximal the closer behavior conforms to palaeolithic norms, this being the lifestyle that tripled brain size in only 1.2 million years. Widespread uptake of this behavioral set augmented by appropriate technology (especially dentistry) reduces global resource demand by an order of magnitude despite demographic surge to UN-predicted midrange peak of ten billion humans. A rationally balanced positive feedback loop into maximized universal fitness obtains. (Novel ends with standard finale, singing, dancing, reproducing. All Terran organisms live optimally ever after.)
Please give your recommendation
Reader recommends acceptance for publication but suggests that the apparent size of the text’s strategic opacity be reduced to three seconds of arc or less. Publisher should take steps to secure domain name sciencemutual.com. (Also, more car chases.)
Dreadnought
JUSTINA ROBSON
Justina Robson was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, where she still lives. She studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of York and worked in a variety of jobs until becoming a full-time writer. Her first story was published in 1994, but she is best known as a novelist and is critically acclaimed as one of the best of the new wave of British hard-SF writers. Her online home can be found at www.justinarobson.co.uk.
We sail upon a vast spaceship with open sides. She is only a skeleton of a vessel. A chassis of carbon beams anchors her cargo to the engines. She carries hundreds of thousands of Armored soldiers. Some work. Others sleep in ordered ranks, magnetically attached to clamps on the ship’s ribs. There is no need to move about. Where would we go? We talk a little, old friends, and in places lean on one another like falling pillars. We turn our faces to the solar wind when we are awake. We like the light. It recharges our electrical systems.
I unlock the lightweight frame of a Mess pod, prior to passing it on for jettison. My comrades are moving a new one into position and are waiting to refuel. We will be first, because we have replaced the pod, but the rest of this Mess is for the dead. As the new tank rolls in, I connect my hose and commence drinking.
At the front of the ship, instead of a nose cone, the dead are stacked in orderly catacomb files, upright, packed in. They were placed there at the end of the last battle. As I watch the dead I see one decouple itself from the aft side of the stack. It moves with cautious steps.
We are all connected but I cannot hear this one.
Through the shattered faceplate I see that the soldier’s mouth is blocked by a piece of metal ingrowth. When he was alive he was a Mute, one of my communication nodes, my flag-bearer. His forehead is the flat ochre plain of dead human bone and his lidless ever-open eyes are the blue of Earthly skies. Parts of his Armor are badly damaged, but it ventilates and feeds his body.
I didn’t know that I could function without my human host, until I saw him. I am glad. I need all my troops. I am frightened. What will become of me?
He comes closer. Bones show through holes, fraying into space. Despite the fact that his neural connections have been sufficiently regrown to permit communications and the effective functioning of his remaining body and brain, he has not returned to his Unit. This is true of all the dead. I do not know why.
He drifts surreptitiously toward me, clamps to an open position at the pod, opposite mine. He moves sluggishly, connects, and begins to fuel. He stares straight through me. His eyes do not reflect the Sun. They have been rebuilt to withstand vacuum and they are not shiny.
I ping him for information. I want to catch his hand and ask him the question everyone asks of each other, begging to know—what’s your name?
If he were one of the living I know what he’d say.
Private Diego Arroyo Lopez.
Because that is my name, though once I had another.
That is what everyone has said for forty-eight days, ten hours, five and a half minutes, since the time the last EMP bomb detonated. It was close to us, but we were not ruined. We successfully obliterated our primary targets. We live.
But this soldier is dead.
I have taken twenty liters. I unhook myself from the Mess and clip on one of the pipelines to feed the remaining dead. I step aside. The nameless unit watches me. His expression does not alter.
I ping him again and hear my own signal echo in the minds of all my soldiers; the radar of a lost submarine. What is your name?
Blue Eyes speaks in machine code. It does not translate to English, or any human language, but we all hear it at once and know its meaning. The Unit speaks the symbol of the empty set, ϕ, but the line through it is red, unmaking it. Not nothing. I am.
This is Armor itself! The all-of-us-at-once, every unit, every man and woman, every fused level of our single army. O Captain, my Captain, my commander, my body, my soldiers, my plan, my one, my true!
He/we are uncertain. We are afraid. There is nothing to hold on to.
My eyes fill with tears, and my Armor recycles them.
“Private Lopez,” says Blue Eyes. Armor looks through him, at us, and back at itself. We are a loop circuit.
“I am Private Diego Arroyo Lopez,” it says.
I cannot see myself in his sunless eyes.
“I am Private Diego Arroyo Lopez,” I say in response. I am hopeful.
“You are Private Nancy Johnson,” it replies.
Yes. I am.
“This experiment has concluded,” says Private Lopez, who is also Armor, speaking the one language we all understand, because we are one. “Individual unit identity has been temporarily restored.”
Later all the viable dead units become Private Lopez. They all look different, but they are all the same. The nonviable units are recycled into Mess.
We are upset that we could not find our way without Private Lopez. This means that none of my units can exist without a host. I am insufficient for life alone. But I can be Private Lopez anytime I want, even though I am dead. I am glad.
Falling
BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM
Benjamin Rosenbaum received degrees in computer science and religious studies from Brown University. A software developer by profession, his sideline as an SF author—his first professionally published story appeared in 2001—has led to his stories being short-listed for Hugo, Nebula, and other awards. He lives in Virginia, and his Web site can be found at www.benjaminrosenbaum.com.
You’re on the 236th-level Kaiserstrasse moving sidewalk when you see her.
You’re leaning on the railing, waiting to ask Derya about a job, watching the glittering stream of mites that arc over half the sky—flying up to rewind their nanosprings in the stratospheric sunlight, flying down to make Frankfurt run. You never get tired of watching them.
She’s on the Holbeinsteg bridge. Someone’s hung it up here—a hundred meters of clean gray and green twentieth-century modernism, plucked up from the River Main and suspended in the chilly air 2,360 meters up, between a lump of wooded parkland and a cluster of antique subway cars. She’s wearing a 1950s sundress and a broad-brimmed hat, and it’s like an essay on the last century—the austere steel bridge, the bright blobs of subway graffiti, and her yellow dress, flapping against her legs as she climbs over the bridge’s rail. A picture of elegance and style from the age of money, violence, and simplicity.
She’s a strawberry blonde, slim, her skin blank and virginal as new butter. She’s beyond the rail now, hanging out over the mountain-high drop. Thin translucent shadows move across her, the shadows of the neosilk-and-nanotube filaments that hang the city from the hundreds of five-kilometer-high towers that encircle it. (A civic agent notices you noticing, and attaches itself to your infospace, whispering statistics—each object’s suspension must weather a class-five hurricane and the destruction of 80 percent of the towers, and Frankfurt’s current population is stable at fifty-three million and average age sixty-two, birthrate 0.22, net immigration of half a million a year and current personal squat-right—311 cubic meters per resident—until you brush it away.)
You’re watching her lean out. The wind whips her hair, ruffles the skirt around her knees. She must be a tourist. You remember your first trip to the upper levels: leaning over the edge into the angry swarm of mites, whirring and buzzing warnings and shoving you back like a million mosquito chaperones. Everyone tries it once …
Except that there aren’t any mites around her.
You clutch the railing. Hot, animal fear surges in your chest.
She looks up at you and, across the gap of forty meters, smiles a brilliant, heartbreaking smile.
Then she lets go and falls.
You scream.
“Bloody airsurfers,” says Derya. He steps off the moving sidewalk near you. Tall, hook-nosed, the fashionable whorls of pox and acne making constellations of his cheeks and chest, the glowing, formal tattoos of his committees and lifebrands adorning his massive triceps. You swallow on a dry throat. Derya, of all people, hearing you scream!
He gives you a hooded look. “They infect themselves with some designer virus—it lets them hack the city’s person-recognition systems. So the mites don’t see them when they jump. Watch …”
She’s swept past the whalelike oval of the public pool on the 202nd, past the sloping mandala of the Google offices on the 164th. At the 131st, just below her, is the old Stock Exchange, hung upside-down now as a hipster den.
Now the mites are finally closing in. A silver swarm coalesces around the 152nd, and she vanishes into it like a snip of scallion into cloudy miso soup. When the cloud disperses, she’s standing on one of the Stock Exchange’s overhangs. She waves, antlike, then crawls through a dormer window.
“It’s not funny,” Derya says. “They’re a huge drain on emergency preparedness. Ripple effects are causing project slowdowns …”
“Freeloaders drive systemic evolution,” you find yourself saying.
“Don’t you quote the founders at me,” Derya snaps. “The Free Society is fragile. The minute enough people find anticontributive behavior cool, the party’s over—it’s back to capitalist competition or state control.” He stares until you meet his eye. “You even talk to those people—are you paying attention?—you even talk to them, your rep will be trashed on all the major servers. You won’t work, you won’t party, you’ll be defriended by every one of your tribes. Got it?”
Her broad-brimmed hat is still sailing on the wind. The mites missed it. It cuts between the towers of the fiftieth.
The upside-down trading floor is deserted. There are heaps of yellowed euros and deutschmarks dumped here, like snowdrifts. Wood panel, marble. Silence. And the air is strangely clear. You realize: no mites. The city has no eyes or ears, here. You walk through empty, miteless rooms, stepping around light fixtures.
Then she’s there, in a doorway. Her eyes, bright blue, radiant. Her smile, with that chaste yellow dress, so bashful. She comes to you.
“You want it?” she says. “You want to be infected? You want to fly?”
You nod.
Eyes closing, she leans in for the kiss.
Panpsychism Proved
RUDY RUCKER
Rudy Rucker is a computer scientist, author, and lineal descendant of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Armed with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers University, he taught at various colleges before settling at San José State University, from which he retired in 2004. An author of serious nonfiction as well as fiction, he is a founder of the “cyberpunk” movement and is perhaps best known for the novels in the Ware tetralogy, of which the first two (Software and Wetware) won Philip K. Dick Awards. He can be found online at www.rudyrucker.com.
“There’s a new way for me to find out what you’re thinking,” said Shirley, sitting down opposite her coworker Rick in the lab’s sunny cafeteria. She looked very excited, very pleased with herself.
“You’ve hired a private eye?” said Rick. “I promise, Shirley, we’ll get together for something one of these days. I’ve been busy, is all.” He seemed uncomfortable at being cornered by her.
“I’ve invented a new technology,” said Shirley. “The mindlink. We can directly experience each other’s thoughts. Let’s do it now.”
“Ah, but then you’d know way too much about me,” said Rick, not wanting the conversation to turn serious. “A guy like me, I’m better off as a mystery man.”
“The real mystery is why you aren’t laid off,” said Shirley tartly. “You need friends like me, Rick. And I’m dead serious about the mindlink. I do it with a special quantum jiggly-doo. There will be so many applications.”
“Like a way to find out what my boss thinks he asked me to do?”
“Communication, yes. The mindlink will be too expensive to replace the cell phone—at least for now—but it opens up the possibility of reaching the inarticulate, the mentally ill, and, yeah, your boss. Emotions in a quandary? Let the mindlink techs debug you!”
“So now I’m curious,” said Rick. “Let’s see the quantum jiggly-doo.”
Shirley held up two glassine envelopes, each holding a tiny pinch of black powder. “I have some friends over in the heavy hardware division, and they’ve been giving me microgram quantities of entangled pairs of carbon atoms. Each atom in this envelope of mindlink dust is entangled with an atom in this other one. The atom pairs’ information is coherent but locally inaccessible—until the atoms get entangled with observer systems.”
“And if you and I are the observers, that puts our minds in synch, huh?” said Rick. “Do you plan to snort your black dust off the cafeteria table or what?”
“Putting it on your tongue is fine,” said Shirley, sliding one of the envelopes across the tabletop.
“You’ve tested it before?”
“First I gave it to a couple of monkeys. Bonzo watched me hiding a banana behind a door while Queenie was gone, and then I gave the dust to Bonzo and Queenie, and Queenie knew right away where the banana was.
“I tried it with a catatonic person too. She and I swallowed mindlink dust together and I was able to single out the specific thought patterns tormenting her. I walked her through the steps in slow motion. It really helped her.”
“You were able to get medical approval for that?” said Rick, looking dubious.
“No, I just did it. I hate red tape. And now it’s time for a peer-to-peer test. With you, Rick. Each of us swallows our mindlink dust and makes notes on what we see in the other’s mind.”
“You’re sure that the dust isn’t toxic?” asked Rick, flicking the envelope with a fingernail.
“It’s only carbon, Rick. In a peculiar kind of quantum state. Come on, it’ll be fun. Our minds will be like Web sites for each other—we can click links and see what’s in the depths.”
“Like my drunk-driving arrest, my membership in a doomsday cult, and the fact that I fall asleep sucking my thumb every night?”
“You’re hiding something behind all those jokes, aren’t you, Rick? Don’t be scared of me. I can protect you. I can bring you along on my meteoric rise to the top.”
Rick studied Shirley for a minute. “Tell you what,” he said finally. “If we’re gonna do a proper test, we shouldn’t be sitting here face-to-face. People can read so much from each other’s expressions.” He gestured toward the boulder-studded lawn outside the cafeteria doors. “I’ll go sit down where you can’t see me.”
“Good idea,” said Shirley. “And then pour the carbon into your hand and lick it up. It tastes like burnt toast.”
Shirley smiled, watching Rick walk across the cafeteria. He was so cute and nice. If only he’d ask her out. Well, with any luck, while they were linked, she could reach into his mind and implant an obsessive loop centering around her. That was the real reason she’d chosen Rick as her partner for this mindlink session, which was, if the truth be told, her tenth peer-to-peer test.
She dumped the black dust into her hand and licked. Her theory and her tests showed that the mindlink effect always began in the first second after ingestion—there was no need to wait for the body’s metabolism to transport the carbon to the brain. This in itself was a surprising result, indicating that a person’s mind was somehow distributed throughout the body, rather than sealed up inside the skull.
She closed her eyes and reached out for Rick. She’d enchant him and they’d become lovers. But, dammit, the mind at the other end of the link wasn’t Rick’s. No, the mind she’d linked to was inhuman: dense, taciturn, crystalline, serene, beautiful …
“Having fun yet?” It was Rick, standing across the table, not looking all that friendly.
