The Future Is Short Read online

  “Ergo, you look … well.” The voice was cold, but that was not uncommon for even the most advanced of the robotic Duplicates. The fact that she had sent her Dupe was yet another slap in his face, a face she had more than once seemed to regret looked more Solian than Padarean. The “nose” and “ears” were the hardest for most Padareans to look past, as Padareans had only slits in those areas. The eyes, too, were different, rounder and more colorful than those of Padareans, and had he seen her actually shudder the last time they were together?

  “Were you precluded from coming in person, my Predestined?” Ergo looked into the cold screen that held the visage of Onni’s face. Her narrow gray eyes showed no reaction to this.

  “I was not feeling well, and did not wish you to take any ill effects to share with your shipmates.”

  He pursed his lips, something a Padarean couldn’t do since they had none. “We will be away from each other for some time; I would think this a reason to be here in person.”

  “May we speak in Pad, please?” Onni said, tilting her head in frustration. Solian English had become quite popular, first as a cultural phenomena, spoken only by the more affectionate of the first Solian broadcasts that had reached Padar, including and especially the one about Solians trekking through the stars. But, over time, it had become a popular if not dominant language, spoken all over the planet. Traditionalists detested English too, of course.

  “Is this better?” Ergo responded in the dominant Padarean tongue, clicks and all.

  “Yes.” Onni looked away, distracted from the viewer, but the Dupe did not turn. She was looking off-screen, something considered rude in Dupe relations. She quickly faced forward again.

  “Well, I hope your journey is successful. I apologize again for not being there in my full form.”

  “You are forgiven, my Predestined.” Ergo grabbed her hand, or at least her hand by proxy. He tried his best to look at her with hope, but knew this was probably not their last goodbye.

  Onni managed a thin smile. “Goodbye, Ergo. Safe travels.” At that her Duplicate withdrew its hand, turned, and walked away.

  He turned, as well, and looked out again at the Jure. At least “she” would welcome him. And perhaps there was something out there waiting for him that would make this separation from Onni all worthwhile

  Jon Ricson writes science fiction, detective, and other entertainment literature. He resides outside Orlando, Florida, and you can often find him walking the streets of Disney or Universal soaking in the creativity.

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  38.

  Hank and Rosa

  Nōnen Títi

  Exhausted, soaked through, and short of breath from the climb against the ice-cold wind, Hank and Rosa finally reached the top of the rocks above the beach. There, way below them, on the edge of the water, lay the means to their survival.

  “She looks so small,” Rosa shouted over the noise of the wind in her ears.

  “Hurry,” Hank answered, taking her hand and pulling her downward over the sand and rocks that littered the treacherous Queen Maud Land coastal flat, across which, from all directions, people and animals were heading towards the only refuge that would stay afloat while the super storms raged over the planet and drowned the earth.

  One after the other, the storms had terrorized the land for almost ten decades now. Large portions of the continents had sunk. A hundred million people had drowned in the last year alone. Entire populations were on the move, searching for higher ground—where they were not welcome.

  At times, Rosa had longed to see the places Mum and Dad so fondly remembered from before—places like San Francisco, New York, The Netherlands, and Bangladesh—but they were long gone.

  The scientists had issued warnings, which the United World Government, from the safety of its Himalayan offices, refused to take seriously. One of Mum and Dad’s colleagues at the South Pole Science Observatory, Sibyl, a self-proclaimed prophet, had started to build their refuge on the new coast, a coast that had not existed until recently and yet was perfectly drawn on the map Rosa now kept safely hidden under her clothing—the ancient map of sea admiral and cartographer, Piri Mehmed.

  At first, Mum and Dad had dismissed the idea of the looming disaster, until multiple cyclones and hurricanes started to form simultaneously, each fuelled by the increasingly large oceans that resulted when most of the polar ice melted, and each coinciding with the full moon. They had still trusted the technology when Sibyl had announced to the world that these storms would collide in a super storm that could wipe out humanity, and that she was willing to save only as many people and animals as could fit on her refuge.

  Only when the solar storm plunged the entire planet into darkness, devoid of any working equipment, had Dad taken the map from the observatory museum and handed it to Hank and Rosa. “Run and don’t look back. They’re not going to wait. Use the map as payment; find the raft and save your lives,” he had said.

  Hank and Rosa had not had a chance to think about it, no time to say goodbye. Nobody knew how much of the land would sink from under their feet; the key was to get to the refuge. There had been no time even to be sad and think of Mum and Dad being left behind for the sea to swallow.

  Rosa felt her eyes go hot at the memory. Civilization seemed so far away and so long ago, yet it was only three days since they’d left the observatory; three days of walking, using the map to guide them, with only water and biscuits to sustain them, until the refuge was now only a few hundred meters away.

  “Have you still got it?” Hank asked her again.

  Rosa nodded, holding tightly on to him with one hand and clutching their precious map against her chest with the other. “What if she won’t accept us; what if they want to avoid inbreeding later?”

  “She won’t know. The solar storm blew out all the equipment; there’s no data.”

  Rosa nodded and concentrated on not falling over the rocks, while watching the last animals enter the ship. She was so tired, but there was no time to waste, so they started running again until, finally, they reached Sibyl, who welcomed them as she kissed the map and hurried them aboard.

  From now on, they’d be at the mercy of water and wind; no Gulf Stream left for direction; no weather prediction without satellites. Yet they would float, while the continents sank, one by one.

  Nōnen Títi (www.nonentiti.com), pen name of Mirjam Maclean, is a writer with a background in health care, education, and philosophy who writes fiction and nonfiction books inspired by the inborn differences that influence the beliefs, behaviour, and natural talents of every person.

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  WENDING

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  39.

  Did Curiosity Kill the Cat?

  Andy Lake

  Well, the headline writers couldn’t resist it, could they? ‘Did Curiosity Kill the Cat?’

  As head of the Mars Exploration Research Centre, only I know the answer to the mystery that has puzzled the world since that strange discovery. And by the time you read this, it’s a secret I will have taken with me to the grave.

  I still remember the excitement that day 15 years ago, when the Mars Rover Curiosity found bones on the Red Planet. Extraterrestrial life had been found!

  And then—the discovery of further remains that were, quite clearly, a cat. The media said Curiosity had run over the cat. The first roadkill in outer space.

  So who put the cat there?

  Theories multiplied. The Chinese had been conducting secret missions, sending animals to Mars. Aliens had abducted life forms from Earth, then somehow mislaid one on the way home. Perhaps time-travelling humans had visited Mars, or Bastet, the Egyptian cat-god.

  One crank cult believed a species of future felines, the creatures we evolve into over the next 10,000 years, traveled through time and lost one of their infants there.

  Of course none of this is true. The truth is more prosaic, yet also bizarre. It goes back to 2003, when I w
as senior engineer on the Beagle 2 project—the most expensive flop in the history of the British space programme.

  We had such high hopes. Beagle 2 would be launched from the orbiting Mars Express. It would bounce to a safe landing on Mars. It would open up its clam-like structure, and send back a rich vein of data about the Red Planet. But we lost contact with it after it separated from Mars Express—and that was that.

  What went wrong? Investigations suggested a problem during descent. It fell too fast, and burned up. Its parachutes failed to open, or airbags failed to deploy. Its design was insufficient to withstand the heat, velocity, or impact. All logical, but incorrect.

  In reality, the problem started in Baikonur in Kazakhstan, on launch day. As usual, we were in a flap. I was late. On the way to the Cosmodrome I saw on the side of the road a sack that seemed to be alive. I stopped the taxi, and went to look. Inside the sack were three young cats, in a pitiable condition. Being an animal lover, I took the cats with me. On arrival I gave them some milk in the kitchen, and left them in the care of a cleaner.

  You’ve guessed the rest. Somehow, in our busy-ness, we let down our guard. Somehow, in our final check, one of the cats crept in and, I suspect, got into Beagle 2’s protective shell.

  My joy at the successful launch turned to unease when I only found two cats in the rest area. Discreetly I hunted high and low, but one had gone.

  Truly, as they say, no act of kindness goes unpunished. Doubly so, in this case. The poor creature I tried to rescue must have been dead soon after take-off. And the Beagle failed, at huge cost.

  Maybe its weight put all our calculations out of kilter. Maybe its oozing body juices seeped into the electrics. Who knows exactly?

  But how I winced whenever someone used the word ‘catastrophe’. I blushed with shame when economists talked of a ‘dead cat bounce’ during the recession.

  I kept it all to myself, hoping the cat had slipped safely away before take-off. But when Rover sniffed out the cat’s bones ten years later, my fears were confirmed. Still I kept quiet.

  I am not proud of this. Every day, when I look in the mirror, I see a man who is not a great and revered scientist, but a fraud. And yet …. If I had owned up, my career would have ended, at no benefit to mankind. I made the mess. I should clear it up and take us forward.

  And standing behind me in the mirror, I see the shadow of bungling, hubristic humanity.

  So I know we will go on, making a hash of everything we touch, undermining our hopes by our stupidity, then covering up our crimes and follies in the hope of profit, or in the self-deceiving hope of making amends. Onwards to the stars, my friends!

  Andy Lake’s day job is researching, writing, and advising companies and governments about the future of work. When he takes his suit off, he writes about the future of anything. His futures are full of many opportunities which we subvert through our ignorance, recklessness, and idiosyncrasies. In short, “the future is something other than what is intended.” http://www.andylake.co.uk

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  40.

  Back To Basics

  Joanna Lamprey

  The brief, three years ago, had been electrifying. Interstellar travel was a reality, with the first exploration ship due to launch in five years. Nick Taylor had been one of three thousand experts pulled onto the project, and the years since had been the most exciting, exhausting, alarming, and thrilling years of his young life.

  His section covered crew wellbeing—even at interstellar speed, the closest promising-looking planet was four years away. The ship would transport a team of experts, spend a year on the planet—all going well, of course—and return. Most of the passengers would travel in stasis, since it wasn’t logistically possible to provision up to ten years for so many people, but the minimum crew of nine—three at a time on duty, 24/7—was their main worry. How could nine people be kept from going stark staring mad in eight years, during the hours they were neither working nor sleeping?

  The section personnel were gathered today for an update on that vital issue, rehashing the many suggestions that had been tabled—revolving all the personnel in and out of stasis, or choosing only crew who shared a single language; loading ship databanks with thousands of films and books; hurriedly inventing a Voyager-style holodeck. That one never drew many laughs; it was so obviously what was needed. Entertaining a crew, even a multilingual one, wasn’t the impossibility; relaxing them, however—the five volunteer teams living in trial conditions were all stressed almost to incoherence within months.

  Overall coordinator Tom Burkett tapped a pen against his glass for attention, and the heated conversations died. “You’ll remember at the original brief we invited some SF writers, in the hope they could think outside the box on this? We’ve got a presentation from William Robertson coming up next. We’ll go through now.”

  William Robertson! Nick had been a fan all his teens, still was if he had time to read, and craned eagerly over the heads of the people walking in front of him for his first close-up glimpse of the author.

  Robertson was taller, heavier, and older than anyone in the room; he nodded unsmiling greetings as they entered the room, where nineteen chairs were grouped around a steel fire bowl. Fire? Nick took his place with the others, and Robertson, leaning on one of his trademark sticks, bent to touch a lighter to the bowl.

  Flames leapt and Burkett spoke up. “No talking. Relax and watch.”

  This was stupid—there couldn’t be an open fire on a spaceship!—but Nick watched obediently. His frayed nerves eased; he could smell wood burning, and an elusive faint trace of something else. Someone, presumably Robertson, threw a chunk of rock salt on the fire, which sparked and burned blue. There was something else … people, shadows against shadows, and the plaintive strains of a harmonica. Horses snorted nearby, and stars burned huge in the night sky. One of the men threw a log on the fire in a flurry of sparks—

  Nick flinched, and was back in his seat.

  “How the hell did you do that?” he exclaimed involuntarily. The others were looking equally startled, and Robertson grinned into his tidy beard.

  “Since we first learned to summon fire,” he rumbled, unexpectedly Scots, “it has been our comfort, our safety, our dreamy pleasure, triggering our most primal feelings of wellbeing. I released a permitted narcotic—milder than a wee dram—to prime you. The crew will have the same narcotic. Imagination—memory—you’ll have all experienced summat different. And will, every time you look into the flames, no matter how often you look. Our trial team use it a few times a week, and their stress levels have dropped back well below concern levels.”

  He swung his stick at the fire pot, which flickered as the stick went straight through the image.

  “It’s not real?” Ann Moore wasn’t the only one to gasp, but she was the only one to speak.

  “Och, it’s real, burning right now, and it will for the next two years. Every flicker, every added log, all captured on holographic film for the journey. Smoke and mirrors, ken? Smoke and mirrors.”

  Joanna Lamprey lives in Scotland, near Edinburgh, mainly writes whodunits set in the very beautiful area surrounding the Firth of Forth, under the name E J Lamprey, and will one day achieve an alien amateur detective who solves murders brilliantly. One day. http://www.elegsabiff.com/sf-microstories/

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  41.

  Escape

  Andrew Gurcak

  Heat, stench, water, violence—everywhere, all the time, no escaping for Boseda. His earliest memories were of being chased by Area Boys across the plank bridges that joined the houses and shops perched on stilts above the open sewer lagoon. Maybe he was a Beninese orphan, abandoned along a street or waterway. Someone must have shouted a name and he answered, or he didn’t and they beat him until he did. So he was Boseda of Makoko, of the worst slum in Lagos.

  Boseda survived through quickness and wiles—enough, barely. When he began to pluck melodies from the din around the
shacks and stalls, and not only mimic but expand them, his life got better. And then better. At first, he hummed and sang to himself just to have one thing, one nice thing, in his control. His sometime friends started pressing him to entertain them. He hit on the idea of stopping in front of a stall, starting a popular song, then improvising extravagant riffs. Passersby paused to listen and the shopkeeper would hustle them for a sale, tossing the boy a few coins. Boseda soon began demanding coins upfront, began scheduling his stops, and finally was trawled by an A&R exec from a local recording outfit. They first had him cover foreign hits, but soon he was fashioning his own songs with wildfire success—Nigeria, next sub-Saharan Africa, then worldwide. He needed only one name, and Boseda became one of the wealthiest entertainers on the planet.

  He was vastly amused by his successes, and whenever reporters interviewed him, he would first chat at length with them, gauging their story slants, then spin out what would most entertain them, laughingly waving off inconsistencies. What people called truth was to him no more than a choice at a crossroads—always his to make and dependent only on where to go next. That, and from childhood, the odds of being caught, if he chose poorly.

  Boseda enjoyed his wealth, but more his ability now to explore the wide world. It was the late 21st century, after all, and he was determined to learn from others as excellent in their fields as he was in his. He befriended technologists and became obsessed with breaking out of what he sometimes saw as a life grown no less cramped than that of his boyhood. He began talking to anyone who would listen about actually sailing to a star. “The road to any star can’t be harder than mine from Makoko to London.” He grilled experts in interstellar propulsion and suspended animation, discussing with total earnestness such an adventure, however impossible the odds of success. He would travel solo, and would not be dissuaded by wise people warning him of his dreams’ foolishness.