The Future Is Short Read online

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  3.

  Here Be Dragons

  J.J. Alleson

  There was a woman here once, named Mo. A wondrous dancer. That’s how she taught me. History, maths, chem, astro-fizz. “Time for school, Denzel!”

  Eyes still closed, I’d smile. Whenever I opened them, she always looked the same. Pale. Long blonde hair, mussed; grey-misted gaze full of love. The world on her shoulders. She’d help me dress; comb my hair, whispering softly, “The Shield-suits will fix your legs soon, Denny. You’ll be able to run as fast as you can.”

  “Like the Gingerbread Man?”

  “Faster. Like Conran.”

  Mo didn’t much resemble Conran or me. We’re identical. Both dark-skinned, with ebony corkscrew curls. Con didn’t need her, she’d say. He could walk; go to out-school—a no-go area for me. Mo said Earth had wasted all its money on space exploration and intergalactic communications. She said that chain reactions from environmental disasters had killed too many, created deformities. That the next generation had to be protected.

  Conran agreed with her. “It’s just freaks and dodos out there now.”

  I knew they were both fudging. Con’s friends were Primes, who stared endlessly at my withered legs. And the gliders I saw through the ’zone-shields were clearly Alpha-Hs. But everyone has secrets. Mine were hidden deep in Hol-EF/Cca 4-2340 of the virtuarchives—the Fairy Tales section.

  I’m a fire dragon.

  At ten, I had my first birthday party. Girls came. That evening, still pumped with excitement, I fell asleep on silky blue sheets. I woke up on singed, smoking ones. Con got the blame: Mo gave him a day-long bout of Celtic curses which made my own ears burn. But Con’s never picked up Cornish. He simply gave Mo a blank look and carried on playing Galaxy Division.

  At thirteen, the Shield-suits came for me—like thieves in the night. Brought me back at dawn. They left me standing solo in the hallway like some triumphant trophy.

  “Shh,” they said, “It’s a surprise.”

  Surprise …? Back then, my child’s mind has no time for caution. I skip decks; leap upper levels; race down corridors. I can go outside! Have friends! Meet girls!

  ***

  Flying into Mo’s cube, I shake her awake excitedly. “MammMammMammIcanwalkIcanRUN!”

  Mo snaps upright, sentry position, and I see something inconceivable in her eyes. A killing terror. She slaps at me. “Away, ye FREAK!” Icy horror strikes me. I stumble back, mute. She knows … Mo knows all about my fire.

  My own terror erupts when those Celtic curses begin. And under a diamond-white roar of despair, my whole world dissolves. Flesh; blood; bones. From ashes to dust, Mo’s screams are born and die an echo.

  Without warning, Con’s there, mirroring my frozen, dull-eyed shock. We’re both blank. Hollow; with no hearts left to break. Where my tears track, his follow. He bears his own grief and mine, by lifting me and carrying me effortlessly into my own cube. He lies there beside me, and says—to no-one at all—in a voice with no tone at all: “Penultimate Earthling Ended.”

  ***

  There was a woman here once, named Morwen. Named Amma, Mother. Mamm. She danced tales of Anansi. Rip Van Winkle. Of Isis, Allah, Vodun, the Khrishna-Christ. Of Twains, Austens, and Andersens. She sang of Ethiop’s fables; of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Of humans.

  She’s gone now. Yet Kawgh an Jowl y’th vin Conran, the Devil’s shit-mouthed deceiver remains. Like Jan Tregeagle, labouring on endless tasks all across Bodmin Moor, Con and the New Gods still feed me the knowledge of an entire planet. But I’m all full up. Now, I’m ready to burn.

  Hic sunt dracones.

  They’re manipulating my XYs with Morwen’s stored DNA. If they do make a woman, I’m taking her with me. We’ll run even faster than the Gingerbread Man. For now, I do the only thing I can to stop my dragonfire.

  I dance. I sing.

  J.J. Alleson is a London-based freelance editor, multi-genre writer, and poet. She writes across the spectrum of romance, science fiction, murder mystery, and the paranormal. Her anthology of science fiction short stories, A Step in Time, will be available on Amazon, Smashwords, and other online platforms from December 2014. [email protected] http://www.jjalleson.com

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  4.

  There Is a Silent Secret in the Woods of Ar-Cortiex

  Paula Friedman

  What I ’member about Granmer was she loved the silence, and she showin’ me, out on the high forest hillside, what people usedta call “birds.” See, this was out on Ar-Cortiex III, back when I was a kidsie and Daddy worked as gobernor of the whole Ar-Cortiex System. “See birdie,” Granmer’d tell me, n’ she’d point, say “birdie-birdie” and how big “in our thin air” them wings. And tell me, “Sylvie, know the forest sings a secret, but you gotta go discover it you’self.” I’d laugh and listen, and hear silence. Them were the days.

  Back on Earth-Crowd’dr, though, two decades later, after Dad’s death and my Marvin’s, sick on that thick air, we got forced to join the lined-up folk, awaiting export (“exile,” Oaksing calls it—she’s my treesie, brought from Cortiex, skinny-light like me ’n Granmer, and all leaf-silk fur). It was ’cause-of Granmer, mostly; she’d got old. And can’t take Earth-loud noise.

  Hey hell, she never could—that’s Granmer. Kinda-like me and Marv, y’know? Grew upsie on Ar-Cortiex.

  So, hearing now her screamsies here, crunched in that bed, tubeses and stuff, I hear them birdies, silence, forest back on Cortiex III; ’member how my little Granmer took me out for treats, and now she’s sayin’ “Help me, end me, Sylvie, no more this”; I know she means the noise. Kinda all around in Hospi-Crowds like here. I say, “I’ll try.” I can’t, though—not Earth noise.

  All started with that tooth, see. Infected—’fore then, back on Cortiex where “air’s so thin / ya wanna spin,” Granmer was full-on perky. But here, and with them twenty-eleven days’ wait per an appointment, wow that tooth got bad, them microbes “climbed her bones, / got up so high / they sought the sky,” as Oaksing told me, and docs stuck her right into a Hospi-Crowd. So Granmer—oh they kept her life up, kept her ears on, all that, but—she’s never been the same. And so every day she’s here, my Granmer, locked in Hospi-Crowd, where all the televisies and “gamesies play, / all night and day” and every other moment, too—bzzz-thump-bzzz-zhppp, no stop to it.

  ’n they drug her up, too, ’cause she shouts “Stop the noise! Let me sleep!” which ain’t allowed. To shout—’tain’t allowed, in crowds. It bothers folksies. Here on Earth.

  Me? I’ve sent Josie and my mother out to exile over Delta Araiadne, sent Kalie and the boy along with. They’ll be okay; there’s grass on Delta, folksies say. “The sky is blue, the trees are pink, / the snakes don’t climb out of the stink”—y’see? They’ll be okay.

  But I stay here with Granmer. I take her on my lap, then sigh and carry her out through the corridors’ bang-bangs, past televisie, televisie blarin’ and the guys’ constructin’ Noisies next each wall. I carries her on—on beyond. And then I put her on my lap, here out on The Last Meadow (more kinda a square), and I put Oaksing by her too, so she lies back to hear Cortiex’s music of the heart, and, ’spita every throbbin’ from the Noisies’ tractors, and in ’spite she’s got her palm across her mouth to hide all them lost teeth, she smiles. And I say, “There, now you comfortable, Granmer? No need we ever be goin’ back.” And she still smiles. And taps my finger, the one that usedtahave Marvin’s ring, and says too low. So I says, “Whatzat, Granmer?” and she draws, with her skinny fingers, six words.

  Bless you. You found it. Love.

  Paula Friedman is author of The Rescuer’s Path (2012), which Ursula K. Le Guin has called “exciting, physically vivid, and romantic.” Friedman has received two Pushcart nominations and several literary awards; her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She seeks a new siamese cat and a Macarthur, No
bel, or other major award/grant. [email protected] http://www.paula-friedman.com

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  5.

  The Daughter

  J.F. Williams

  Hundreds of glogla clung together in the great spherical cluster as it wended its way in the deep water and swept through the thickest clouds of plankton. A fissure had opened in the seabed far below and a bubble of gas charged toward the colony, interrupting the feeding and diverting the cluster’s lazy progress. But only for a moment. The elders with their many tentacles held firm, preventing any rupture to the sphere. It shuddered and rippled but all their barbs remained fixed in their purchase. Except for one daughter’s. One of her six limbs released its grip, exposing one of six stomata, and in that moment a selka worm slipped in.

  She could feel the worm inside her, its tiny, writhing form swimming up the vessels of her inner fluids, finally resting against the glofa at her center. That organ of feeling swelled at the selka’s touch, as when a plankton cloud was unexpectedly thick and nourishing, or the waters quieted after a storm, or one of the mothers’ limbs cleaved and became a daughter. Emboldened by this emotion, her barbs retracted completely and she freed herself from the cluster. Her glofa continued to swell in bursts as she beat her tentacles and pushed her body higher and higher. She heard the distant call from her mother, a subtle vibration in the water, pleading “No!”

  How much time had passed, she did not know or care. As she continued rising, her entire form swelled, no longer constrained by the pressure of the deep. She was intoxicated by life now, and danger only felt like adventure. As the pressure lightened, so did the water; it become warmer and the dancing shafts of light from the two suns—one white, one yellow—became brighter, smarting her six eyes. Finally, she reached the surface and her forward limbs padded against the sandy beach, pulling her up and halfway out of the drink.

  What she saw now made her glofa cramp. Spread out on the sand were the flattened, hardened corpses of unknown cousins. None of her eyes could detect a sign of movement and there were no vibrations of speech, just sand and rocks and bright light, and hundreds of desiccated glogla. The selka, flat, transparent and pink to her sight, had reversed its journey and shot out from the same stoma that it had entered. It shriveled when it landed on the sand, as though crushed by some unseen grip of tentacles. She felt her life force follow that worm. She was weak. Sleep came to her, but left just as soon—a piercing touch on one limb at the water’s edge. It was mother.

  Pulled back by mother’s tentacles, she submerged and heard the many frantic vibrations of her home cluster. It had nearly doubled in size in these shallows, but slowly shrank as they all plunged back to the cool, dark depths, rich with plankton.

  The cluster continued its lazy journey and she was content, passing the time filtering plankton through the fanlike structures on her back and sometimes retelling the tale of her adventure to the younger daughters. In these vibrations, there were always the pleas for caution and warnings about the selka, who swarmed around still, waiting for the unwary to open their stomata.

  Some time passed before she felt the itch of a new bud—a seventh. As there was no eighth, this one might cleave after awhile and become her first daughter. Her thinking organ entertained the possibility that this daughter might someday harbor a selka herself and rise to the surface, and know warmth and light and freedom. And while this should have caused a worry, she felt her glofa swell a little at the thought.

  J.F. Williams has been working in Information Technology for the past quarter-century but started out as a proofreader and spent years writing synopses of movies and TV programs for newspaper TV listings, placing him among the most widely read anonymous writers in the U.S. and Canada of that time. He published his first novel, an epic science-fiction adventure called The Brickweavers, in August 2012.

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  6.

  Collateral Damage

  Andrew Gurcak

  Excerpts from Wikipedia entry for Maysoon Daoud (2015–2067(?)) (updated 2115)

  She was born a Palestinian in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border. Her father, a merchant, was rumored to be a key arms smuggler to Palestinian rebels. Her mother was killed in a fire ignited by an Israeli air attack, during which Maysoon, four at the time, suffered burns over 30 percent of her body. She underwent numerous surgeries that, as she described in her autobiography, Calculations from the Underground, “left me looking like a quilt stitched by blind quilters.” She early displayed a prodigious gift for visualizing—from maps, sketches and descriptions—the networks of over a thousand smugglers’ tunnels. Daoud described her childhood with her father and his compatriots thus: “I would sit in his lap, completely absorbed in their talk. The tunnels’ names and numbers were as characters in fairy tales to me. I dreamt of those passages. I lived to hear the men talk of their exploits in them.” Her aptitudes came to the attention of a mathematician at Al-Aqsa University. Still in her early teens, she coauthored with him “A Note on the Delahan-Trapp Conjecture for Blind-Corner Graphs” described by her as “a novice’s attempt to categorize the mazes of tunnels that captivated me as a child.” A Cambridge professor, upon reading it, hurriedly contacted Al-Aqsa, eventually leading to a series of intense conversations with Daoud. After numerous religious, political, and medical issues were resolved, Daoud was sent to read mathematics at Cambridge, obtaining a doctorate at the age of twenty “by rummaging in bizarre geometries, while soaked and shivering in that chill, wet country.”

  In 2039, Daoud abruptly decided to “put aside my playthings and solve real problems.” She resigned a position at Berkeley to co-found Stone’s Throw Proteomics, near San Diego. There she began the work that would lead to renown and infamy. She immersed herself in epigenetics, the study of the means by which environmental conditions could modify how genes would program the proteins of life. She invented intricate geometries to build increasingly abstract spaces where she could manipulate genes through subtle changes in their chemical environments. Then, in a progression of breakthrough formulations, Daoud found the means to bolster the entire human genome so that individuals would become inherently immune to nearly all diseases, and then, as remarkably, rendered those alterations amenable to mass production. Moreover, she could perform these modifications safely on living humans. Her methods depended upon manipulations of a person’s mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), inherited solely through the maternal line. If parents underwent Daoud treatments, then those massive improvements in their metabolisms could be reliably passed on to children. Within ten years, Daoud was recognized as one of the greatest scientists of any era, and, in unprecedented decisions, she was awarded Nobels simultaneously for Medicine and Peace, all before her fortieth birthday.

  There were, however, a very small number of people for whom her treatments were ineffective. It was not until several years had passed that practitioners found that women of Jewish ancestries would not benefit from Daoud’s methods. Further studies revealed a very small minority of women of non-Jewish Palestinian ancestry would also not benefit from the treatments. Although never confirmed, that minority was suspected to include Daoud herself. Daoud never admitted to deliberately excluding anyone, and she adamantly maintained that she had not committed active harm against any living person. Still, fewer and fewer Jewish women were chosen for wives, to bear children susceptible to diseases, some fatal, that now afflicted no one else. Inevitably, the number of Jews in the world would dwindle. Outrage ensued, as other scientists could not replicate, much less modify, Daoud’s methods. Experts speculated that the exclusion, if deliberate, required far more effort on Daoud’s part than that needed for her initial immunological discoveries. Daoud responded caustically to criticisms: “If my work had led to healing 1 percent of the world’s population, I would be honored with medals every month. For mending 99 percent of the people, I am instead vilified each day.” The Nobel committee rescinded her Peace prize.

  On May 9, 2067, she did not
show up at her office. Searches worldwide yielded no sign of her. The Mossad denied any knowledge of her whereabouts.

  As of the hundredth anniversary of Maysoon Daoud’s birth, Israeli scientists reported little progress in extending her treatments to Jewish women.

  Andrew Gurcak and his wife, Elaine Lees, divide their retirement time between Pittsburgh and the Finger Lakes region of New York. The Science Fiction Microstory Contest entries are his first fictional pieces. [email protected]

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  7.

  Snap and Crackle

  Ami L Hart

  Speak after the tone (Beep).

  I came to this place wanting solace, desiring to escape the horror carved upon my corneas. Correction—I didn’t come here. The local human settlers found me; pulled me from the frosty, gut-strewn mess that was my old life and deposited me here, the dusty dung heap of a town that’s apparently to be my new life.

  As fortune has it, there are no Snowy Bugbears resident this low down: giant, ugly, death-dealing things. I still see them, snacking on Larry’s unfortunately disgusting entrails, slopped across my vision each time I close my eyes. Shhh, don’t tell anyone, especially that frontier doctor—busy on my body like he owns it—that I don’t make a habit of closing my eyes.

  Sleep is over-rated anyway. It’s been three days since my last trip down the bloody, nightmarish rabbit hole to Slumberland; (gasp) what if he listens to this! I hadn’t thought of that … that busy body, with those rough pinchy fingers, like pinchers.