Mitigated Futures

by Buckell, Tobias S.

Maybe a tranquilizer dart of some sort?

  “I told you,” Pan said, “I also created the resistance.”

  “But that doesn't make any sense,” Stanuel said.

  “It does if you stop thinking of me as a person, but as an avatar of your collective emulators. Every ruling system has an opposition, the day after I was voted into power, I had to create a series of checks and balances against myself. That was the resistance.”

  “But I was recruited by people.”

  “And they were recruited by my people, working for me, who were told it was to create a tame opposition as a honey trap.” Pan flickered as he walked through a tree. An incongruous vision, as Stanuel floated through the no gravity garden.

  “Why would you want to die?”

  “Because, I may not be what all of you want, just what most of you want. I have to create an opportunity for me to be stopped, or else, I really am a tyrant and not the best solution. That is why Pepper was hired to bring the E.M.P device aboard. That was why, ultimately, he left it with you.”

  “So it's all in my hands,” Stanuel said.

  “Yes. Live in a better economy, a safer economy, but one ruled by what you have created. Or muddle along yourselves.” Pan moved in front of Stanuel, floating with him.

  Stanuel held up the metal tube and hovered his thumb over the button. “Men should be free.”

  Pan nodded sadly. “But Stanuel, you all will never be able to get things done the way I can. It will be such a mess of compromise, personality, mistakes, wrong choices, emotional choices, mob rule, and imperfect decisions. You could well destroy Haven with your imprecise decisions.”

  It was a siren call. But even though Pan was perfect, and right, it was the same song that led smart men to call tyrants leaders and do so happily. The promise of quick action, clean and fast decisions.

  Alluring.

  “I know it will be messy,” Stanuel said, voice quavering. “And I have no idea how it will work out. But at least it will be ours.”

  He made his choice and pressed the button. He watched as the lights throughout Haven dimmed and flickered. Pan disappeared with a sigh, a ghost banished. The darkness marched its glorious way through the cavernous gardens toward Stanuel, who folded up in the air by a tree while he waited for the dark to take him in its freeing embrace.

  The Universe Reef

  There is a theory called panspermia, which posits that life on Earth may have come from elsewhere. Tiny microbes, or some form of primitive life tough enough to survive in the vacuum of space could have arrived here on an asteroid that landed early in Earth’s life. If that is true, there could be life being spread all over the place. Maybe all over the universe.

  When invited to write a short piece for Nature Magazine I thought about taking panspermia one step further. If life is spread out throughout the universe, then wouldn’t evolution also get involved. Wouldn’t some organisms be designed to spread from planet to planet in weird and interesting ways?

  It was out of that seed this story germinated.

  Jackson buckles his leathers tighter, and pulls on a fur. “The height causes that cold,” he shouts. “We’re like mountaineers!”

  I want to flee the bitter cold and escape the wind, which seems to pierce my skin and scrub my bones. But I don’t want to miss seeing the Stone Table with my own eyes.

  We’re standing out on a catwalk that juts out from the skin of the airship and connects to the giant propellors on either side of the mid-belly area. The large blades are still, as the captain has found us a current of air. To save fuel we’re drifting, occasionally correcting our course when engines to the rear of the whale-like lighter-than-air machine roar to life.

  Underneath our feet: a mile of air. And then below that is the brown, rippling mass of the Reef.

  ***

  Once upon a time, there was no Reef. The world looked vastly different. There are preserved pictures of this time, spirited away from the museums before they fell to the reef. But more than we can ever remember will always be trapped where they were stored in great cities of legend like Paris, London, or Washington, where great men once had grand adventures.

  What history, legend, and archeologists agree on was that something split the sky asunder. And the debris that rained down from above was not just meteorite. Something else struck the earth and the water.

  It was a reef. Tiny beings that deposited tiny skeletons which were built on and ossified, and entire ecosystem accreted around them. And more alien organisms flowered around the reef, all hiding away inside the remains of the rocks that fell. The alien flora spread across the ground, and left oceans alone.

  The Reef ate cities as it spread across the world, seeking out metal with a hunger than no one could quench.

  Our ancestors fought it. Men from a different time, from those old nations, with those old technologies, unleashed hell upon the Reef. And sometimes they would slow it. Sometimes they would even kill it.

  But it always came back.

  It was the Reef. Inexorable and implacable: It reshaped the world.

  ***

  Jackson Smithik is an adventurer. Those thick dreadlocks of his are growing gray with age, and is face is leathery from exposure to the sun. He was the first person, post-Collapse, to sail across the Atlantic, back to skirt the Reef-choked coasts of Africa, down to the cape, and then sail out to make contact with the Indian and then Pacific Islands.

  Because it was only the smaller islands that survived the Reef, isolated by the ocean and far from the Reef’s continental creep.

  Seventy years after his teenage captaincy and exploits, Smithik’s Jamaican Clippers roam the world’s oceans, connecting the world. And now, thanks to the advances of steam and steam-powered airships by the Icelandic Empire, Smithik Transport ships explore the skies.

  ***

  “There it is,” Smithik shouts. A gray wall rises out of the Reef, which covers what was once the land of South America. And above the Stone Table, rises The Tower.

  I follow the bulk of the structure. It is too much. It is a mountain in the distance that tapers off into a needle that pierces the clouds. And keeps going.

  “This is what the Reef was for,” Smithik yells into my ear. His eyes gleam.

  ***

  Over some strong Blue Mountain coffee, back inside where it was warm, Smithik tells me, “Pre-Reef scientists had a theory called panspermia: they believed life on Earth was caused by small organisms aboard comets thrown from collisions in other solar systems crashed down to seed life here, and maybe elsewhere.

  “So a follow up infection, that’s not so hard to believe, yeah?”

  I nodded and kept notes. I’d been paid to document his first trip to actually step onto Stone Table since Smithik’s adventurers had found it and reported back.

  ***

  We land on the massive Reef-grown artificial stone structure and moor the airship. The joint Japanese and Hawaiian expedition group and the Iceland scientists who’d beat them there, greet us.

  Pictures are taken with the excited scientists and the man who’d funded the first expedition to Stone Table, found when Caribbean telescopes had spotted the slowly self-assembling tower to space.

  “We can’t say if the Reef is designed to create the tower, programmed by some distant intelligence,” the scientists say to Smithik as I scribble. “It could be just the way the Reef reproduces, creating a way to fling its spores back into space.”

  “But the Stone Table, and the grooves in The Tower, they’ll allow us to climb it with a machine into space? Doesn’t that prove it’s made for intelligence?” Smithik asks.

  “Sometimes nature builds something something else can use. Maybe its hoping we’ll spread Reef spore as we use this to get into space.”

  “As if we were bees,” Smithik nods.

  ***

  Late in the night I stand with Smithik at the base of The Tower, looking up at the night sky.

  “Pre-Reef men once walked on the moon,
” he says.

  “And you think we’ll go back?”

  “Whether we’re part of some galactic eco-system that the Reef is just a spore of, or whether something designed it, the more we explore out there the more we’ll understand what happened down here.”

  ***

  The great adventurer dies that night. But his spirit lives on in the Smithik Ascender, a plan by the international scientists to build a steam-powered climber that will ascend The Tower to space.

  What we will find, no one knows.

  Placa Del Fuego

  When I finished the third novel in my Xenowealth series for Tor Books I set out right away to begin the fourth one. I managed to get twenty or so thousand words in before everyone started realizing that we just weren’t seeing the sorts of numbers we were hoping for. My novels hadn’t been doing horribly, mind you, they all earned out. We just weren’t seeing growth in the bookstores. Overall sales were flat.

  After some deep thinking, we decided to try and go in a different direction for my next book with Tor. That book ended up being a near future eco-thriller of sorts. But I still had this early chunk of a novel that I liked.

  And then there was an interruption in my career after I was hospitalized for a heart defect. Finding time to write during recovery was tough. After recovery, Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld Magazine approached me about writing a new story them. At this point I was still floundering around, not sure what my career would now look like due to the delays that developed because of my health.

  But I knew I had a cool story in Tiago’s first encounter with Nashara. So I took those fifteen thousand words and whittled them down into a nine thousand word story and showed it to Neil. He purchased it, and I was able to send fans of the Xenowealth books to read this story as a taste of what the next book would have been like.

  Later, due to email I received from people reading this story and who were hoping for me to continue the Xenowealth series, I was able to continue writing that novel directly for fans. I started with the story, and re-expanded it into the beginning of that novel.

  Sometimes projects can develop in strange and interesting ways.

  Tiago would normally have taken his cut of the picked pockets and stopped right here at the Seaside Plaza. On the very edge, past the vendors on the cobblestone sea walk, Tiago would sit with his legs over the rocky sea wall and look out over the harbor.

  Today he only detoured through the plaza to throw the crowd in between him and the woman chasing him.

  He’d gotten a brief glimpse of her before the running started: tall, dark eyes, dark skin, dark leather jacket and microfibre pants, careful dreadlocks pulled back into a pony tail.

  She was fast in the crowd. She wasn’t dodging around legs, using the ebb and flow of the masses to see open routes like Tiago. No, people who got in her way were just… thrown out of the way.

  Too strong. She was some sort of soldier, Tiago thought, refocusing ahead.

  He might have gotten himself into a bit of a situation.

  Slipping onto the seawall path, he sprinted harder, deciding that she was covering the gap in the crowd. To his right the harbor was filled with ships and their cargo, anchored and waiting for a spot to clear on the docks. One of them was throwing out a parasail, the windfoil bucking in the inconsistant harbor wind, but then filling out, rising up into the air hundreds of feet overhead, and then some.

  The ship began to pick its way out of the harbor, headed between the tall forest of wind turbines at the harbor’s edge: a dangerous move to unleash a windfoil in the harbor, but suddenly Tiago noticed other ships unfurling sails in haste. A cloud of brightly colored parafoils leapt to the harbor sky like butterflies swarming from a shaken limb.

  This was worrying enough that Tiago slowed, somewhat, and looked to his left. The warehouses, three and four stories tall, dominated the first row of buildings. But behind them, climbing tenaciously up the side of the mountain, homes and houses colorfully dotted the slopes.

  A large, dark mass of gray haze topped the rocky crest and slowly fell down toward the harbor like a heavy cloud.

  “Oh shit.” Tiago stopped. People in the Plaza were turning too, and murmuring started to spread. They stood up from picnics or meals and the edges of the crowd were already leaving.

  The woman smacked into Tiago and grabbed his upper arm.

  “Take your damn money,” Tiago shouted. I don’t want it. I’m sorry. Just let me go.”

  She looked puzzled as he shoved the paper money into the pockets of her jacket. He may have even given her more than he’d stolen, he wasn’t sure.

  “What’s…”

  Tiago pointed up the mountain. “It’s going to rain.”

  She looked over the buildings and let him go. “I forgot.”

  Forgot? There were two things on the island to remember: stay out of the rain, and avoid the Doacq’s attention by staying inside at night.

  He bolted. The last thing he saw was the armada of harbor ships, parafoils all full overhead, pulling their hulls up onto their hydrofoil skids as they all scattered to get well clear of the island.

  Then the sirens began to wail all throughout Placa del Fuego, alerting its citizens to the descending danger.

  ***

  From the open sweep of the docks and seawall of the harbor, Tiago headed into the heart of Harbortown. He could breathe easier seeing overhangs above him, and walls he could put his back to.

  People hurried about with carbon-fiber or steel umbrellas. Some had already gotten into their hazmat gear.

  The klaxons wailed in the background, constantly blearing out their call for all to find shelter. Shops slammed thick windows shut and bolted them, while people yanked tables and chairs and billboards inside. Customers packed in, shoulder to shoulder.

  No self respecting shop would let Tiago inside: he was an urchin. His clothes were ripped and melted, his face dirty, and he ran on bare feet.

  They’d toss him out on his ass faster than he could get inside.

  A faint stinging mist started to fill the air. Tiago squinted and slowed down. The unfamiliar would run faster, but then they’d inhale more. He cupped his hands over his mouth, a piece of flannel in between his fingers to filter the air. He looked down at the cobblestoned street to protect his eyes.

  His calloused, flattened feet knew the street. Knew how many steps it would take to reach the alley, knew how many times he’d have to pull himself up on the old pipe running outside to get up onto the roof, and how many more steps across the concrete to get to his niche.

  It was a spot between two old storage buildings a few streets back from the waterfront, almost near the Xeno-town enclave. One of them had a large, reinforced concrete gutter along its edge, and when the second building had been built right along side, wall to wall, had left a sheltered ledge the length of the building.

  You wouldn’t know it to look at it. Twenty street kids had taken bricks and concrete and built a wall along the overhang, blending it into the architecture. It was behind this that Tiago had his very own room.

  To get to it, he stepped out over the edge of the building, and behind the wall.

  Safe.

  His skin stung from contact with the mist, but he could sit in the entryway along the corridor leading down to the seven foot by four foot concrete cubicles they called home, and watch the rain.

  It was a floating, frothy jelly, spit out from the trees on the island into the air, that slowly floated down. In most cases it just slowly burned at whatever it landed on, like some sort of an acid.

  But after that, all it took was a spark for it to ignite.

  In the distance the harbor pumps thrummed to life. All over the city the engineers were fighting back the rain with a mist of their own, taken from the harbor water to coat and rinse the harbor.

  Usually being on this side of the mountain protected them. But sometimes the wind changed. Sometimes the fire forests were unusually active.

  Either way, you didn’t
want to be outside. The burns and scars on the children huddled around the openings of their sanctuary testified to that.

  The steady rain continued, sizzling as it hit the ground outside.

  Tiago relaxed in the quiet among his neighbours as the city fought the rain. He could worry about explaining to Kay why he was coming back with no money from the morning’s work later, as much as that scared him. For now, he was just happy to be out of the rain.

  He just about leapt out of skin as the wall next to him crumpled and the woman who’d been chasing him shoved her way through and crouched in front of him.

  “Hello,” she said. “We still have business to finish.”

  Tiago jumped up to run and the other kids moved back away from him.

  But where could he go with the rain coming down so hard?

  He looked back at his pursuer. The rain had eaten away at the skin on her forearms, exposing silvery metal underneath. Metal pistons snicked as she flexed her fingers.

  A cyborg. Here on Placa del Fuego.

  Impossible.

  ***

  There was no advanced machinery on Placa del Fuego. It all failed on the island, until one reached three miles offshore. In Harbortown the sailors said scientists from other worlds clustered aboard large ships near the wormholes, monitoring what islanders called the deadzone and they called ‘an unexplained continuous EMP event.’ They claimed the epicenter was somewhere deep under the crust of the planet, right under Placa del Fuego.

  The wormholes that lead from the ocean around Place Del Fuego to the oceans of other worlds light years away were anchored in the water just on the edge of the deadzone, and the scientists were there to order the wormholes moved as the deadzone expanded slightly each month.

  One street rumor said that one of the alien races had buried a device under the island, intending to use it as a cover for a last stand during the human war for independence. Some said it was the Doacq that bought the deadzone with it.