by Lavie Tidhar
After a few minutes of absolute confusion and, in some cases, total denial, the discombobulated denizens of the future returned to the elevator and told it to get them back to where they had come from. Fortunately, it was able to do so.
The First Prototype, as this elevator is called today, is on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian—but not before the post-virtual environment was carefully dissected and examined in search of what caused it to behave so unexpectedly. Something to do with quantum teleportation, apparently, but the details were never disclosed to the public. (Perhaps, as some media pundits said, because even the scientists didn't know how the hell such a thing happened.)
Be it as it may, time travel rapidly became a fad, and—who would have expected that?—a sort of escape valve for the stressed citizen. People cherished the idea of travelling to a fine, quiet time, not to any turning point in History where they could be attacked by terrorists or die in an earthquake, for instance. Nobody tried to alter the past in order to change the future.
One of these Safe Years—as they were called—was the very first year reached by the elevator: 1999.
(Now, there were some dissenters who argued that even 2001 could be considered a Safe Year, in every city other than New York, but the majority preferred to stay on the safe side.) It was a year when anything could have happened—except that it didn't.
Again, dissenters begged to differ—they said that it all depended on whose view it was, for in 1999 the following things happened: a 6.1 Richter scale earthquake hit western Colombia, killing at least 1,000; a fire in the Mont Blanc Tunnel in the Alps, killed 39 people, closing the tunnel for nearly 3 years; a magnitude 5.9 earthquake hit Athens, killing 143 and injuring more than 2,000. Another quake, this one Richter 7.6, killed about 2,400 people in Taiwan; not to mention the Kosovo War.
Accusations of Anglocentric attitudes ensued. (An argument much discussed was that Earth is a really big planet, and they recognised that many things happened outside the Anglo-American sphere of influence—most of the things that happened in the world, actually. Earth had come a long way in globalisation and, after all, time travel was discovered by a team of French, Indian, and Brazilian scientists in Accra, Ghana, so that was expected.)
The second phase of research and development was most focused in the matter of geopolitics. Using systems of co-ordinates and geolocation tools, they managed to make the time-travelling environment travel around the world as well as in time, so people could visit other cities in different historical periods instead of their own. It would seem to be most practical and convenient—until the second prototype was lost just outside Earth's orbit. (You must be painstakingly accurate in order to compensate for the travelling of Earth itself around the Sun and across the galaxy, eventually. Not something to be taken lightly.)
Then it was pointed out that this apparent flaw could be used as an advantage. It would take a lot of effort and calculation, but nothing a quantum computer couldn't handle.
Again, 1999 was a crucial year, much to the dismay of critics and nay-sayers, but for reason other than the historicity criterion: it was pointed out that the time travel mechanism would need a slingshot-effect to dislocate the prototype adequately through the space-time grid and do it safely enough with the maximum degree of precision and minimum risk.
1999 just happened to have the Y2K bug. Of course, it could have been any other thing, but why bother to try and invent it when the bug was already in place, just waiting for a chance to be useful? The "rollover" from 99 to 00 hadn't played havoc with data processing as had been feared, but the transition to 2000 in the digital systems would jumpstart the mechanism and power the slingshot through this now-called Zero Year and enable the time-travelling environment to go anywhere in the space-time continuum. And they were not thinking only of Earth.
Humankind discovered interstellar travel in the mid-22nd Century.
To Wu Yan, for his help and enthusiasm
Shadow
Tade Thompson
Tade Thompson grew up in Nigeria (he is Yoruba, which, he says, influences most of his writing) and currently lives in the United Kingdom. His stories have appeared in Expanded Horizons, Ideomancer and in the Nigerian writers collective project In My Dreams it was Different.
I met a man with no shadow today.
He crossed into the village limits near dusk, furtive but resolute. He wanted to find the Mamman. He did not understand my description of the route, partly because he spoke gutter Yoruba learnt from leather traders, and partly because I have a stutter.
I decided to take him there because I thought it would be a very sad thing losing one's shadow. He was grateful, but fell silent after our initial conversation. I told him to wait while I checked my traps, for I am a hunter.
I had caught one bush rat and the leg of an antelope who had chewed his limb off in order to escape my pot. I reset the traps under the studious gaze of the man with no shadow.
The sun hid beneath the horizon, and even my shadow did not survive. We crossed the brook of tears without getting our feet wet and waved greeting to the three drinkers at the palm-wine bar, men with whom I had been circumcised, but whose features had been blunted by ogogoro, their bodies the harvest of a misspent youth.
We walked past my house and I handed my puzzled wife the bag with the bush rat and my belt of charms. I kept the rifle slung over my shoulder. The Mamman had magic, but gunpowder and lead would work on anything that had a heart, shadowed or not.
"Your shadow is born when you are," said the Mamman, "but it outlives you. You should cast a shadow until your body rots."
She was fat, with massive swinging breasts that held intricate tattoos, and she had a sensual carelessness about her near-nakedness.
"You may go," she said to me.
I shook my head. "I want to hear what he has to say."
"Very well." To the man, she said: "What have you brought for me?"
The man unwrapped a small package and lay a dried, blackened object at the Mamman's side. "This is the trigger finger of the greatest warrior my village has ever known."
"Did you kill him?" she asked.
"No, but it is mine to give away." He offered no further explanation.
The Mamman put it away and, licking her lips, sat back down. "I've known two others who lost their shadows in my time."
"I did not lose it," said the man. "I drove it away."
"Explain, outlander. I get bored easily and when I'm bored I amuse myself by sucking the brains out of the eyeballs of mouthy customers."
It was a story of war.
The man's village had been outnumbered by invaders from the north. Fair-skinned, heavily-clothed warriors with curved swords and strange customs. They outnumbered the indigenous people two to one and had mounted cavalry and bows and arrows.
"The witch doctor had a solution. He would bring alive our shadows, in the process, doubling the army strength, but we had to win the battle before sundown because he could only hold the spell from dawn till dusk of one day. We also had to fight alongside our counterparts so that they could find their way back to merge just before sundown. As it turned out, the invaders were so afraid of the dark warriors that they fled, but the shadow-selves were more…dishonourable."
There was a massacre, with the slaughter and sodomisation of unarmed men in the process of surrendering.
"Most of my villagers allowed this, encouraged it even, but I objected. My shadow wished to continue, but I tried to prevent it. It tried to turn on me, but I fought it off. It hissed and sputtered and slinked away, and I did not see it again before sundown. I have not cast a shadow since. It made my wife and family uncomfortable and I had heard of the Mamman here. I loaded provisions, left my kinsmen, and here I am."
The Mamman was silent for a long time. Then she scratched herself absently. Our shadows flickered in the candlelight, with an eerie gap where the stranger's should have been.
"It's not such a bad thing to lack a shadow-self," she s
aid.
"Then give me yours," said the man.
The Mamman laughed. It sounded like many jackals at once, and her spittle sprayed around. I dared not wipe it off my chin. The woman stood and crumbs of something dropped to the floor. "There are two ways of solving this problem. We can find your errant shadow or take one from a recently-deceased person. The latter will not look like you and may not move at exactly the same moment as you, but nobody will notice who doesn't observe closely. Choose wisely."
This is how I came to be a resurrectionist, digging into the grave of one Saliu Ogunrombi, who had died in the last wave of Yellow Fever.
There was no moon. There was the rhythmic digging of myself and the man with no shadow. The Mamman sat on a stool, waiting, smoking.
The ritual itself was undramatic, and consisted of holding Saliu upright and lighting torches behind him. The Mamman said something to the resultant shadow and it detached from Saliu and bobbed over to the stranger.
At dawn, I settled at my wife's side, freshly showered and with no intention of doing the day's hunting. Her hand drifted between my legs, but grave digging is tiring work and there was no oak tree for her to climb, just a willow.
Before I fell asleep I remembered the last words the Mamman had said to me, as the man walked away with his new shadow.
"In a year he will return to us. To me. He will tell me to release him from this shadow."
"Why?" I asked.
"He will say his wife has left him and the people of his village shun him. He will say the new shadow-self has changed his behaviour and he cannot control himself."
I said nothing.
"And he will be right."
"What is a shadow, Ma?" I asked. I did not stutter when with her.
She did not answer, but walked into the twilight. Presently, I had gone home.
I looked at the walls of my bedroom, at the shadows receding with the rising sun, and the rise and fall of my wife's chest.
I slept.
Shibuya no Love
Hannu Rajaniemi
Hannu Rajaniemi's first novel, The Quantum Thief, has been hailed as "brilliant" by John Clute and he has been called the best new hard SF writer to emerge in recent years. Two more novels are forthcoming. A Finn, Rajaniemi currently lives in Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in string theory, and is the director and co-founder of ThinkTank Maths.
They were eating takoyaki by the statue of Hachiko the dog when Norie told her to buy a quantum lovegety.
Riina's Japanese was not very good in spite of two years of Oriental Studies and three months in Tokyo, and the translation software on her phone did not immediately recognise the term, so she just stared at the small caramel-skinned girl blankly for a few seconds, mouth full of fried dough and octopus. "A what?" she managed finally, wiping crumbs from her lips.
Norie, who sat on the edge of the fountain and dangled her impossibly tanned legs in the air, giggled.
"You don't have them in Finland? How do you meet boys there? Oh, I forgot, you have the sauna!"
"It's not a—" Riina stopped. The concept of non-erotic unisex nudity in a steamy room was something only her Canadian friends had grasped so far. "Never mind. Tell me about the lovegety."
"It's the most kawaii thing! I keep mine on all the time. Look!" Norie held up her wrist. Her phone was embedded in a Cartier platinum bracelet with a jewel-studded Hello Kitty engraving that her boyfriend Shinichi had given her for her birthday. Riina had admired it several times, but had not paid attention to the little teardrop-shaped plastic thing dangling from it until now. It was hardly bigger than the tip of her index finger, and its pink surface had the characteristic Teflon sheen of a nanovat-grown product. There was a silvery heart-shaped logo on one side.
"They had these already when my mother was a schoolgirl—that's how she met my father! Then they went out of fashion for several years, but now there is this crazy otak in Akihabara making new and better ones. Quantum versions. Everybody has one!"
"So, what does it do?"
"I can't tell you—you have to try it! C'mon, let's go-find you one!" Norie leaped up, took Riina's hand in her own and tugged her towards the techno beat of Shibuya and District 109 that was its heart. A forest of orange hairdos, brown legs and spidery eyelashes swallowed the girls. There was a crowd around the statue: it was one of the few clear landmarks in the district, and tourists loved the story of the dog who waited for its master for years after his death.
Riina hesitated. Norie tended to assume that she was equally good at assimilating the new memes that boiled up from the teenage paradise of Shibuya as her Japanese friends, who seemed to be able to turn the latest otaku toy into a subculture or a fashion statement in a matter of minutes. She was starting to become desensitised to future shock, but the labyrinths of the new and the old in this country still confused her. She wondered how her father managed: good protocol/etiquette software, probably. It was simply impossible to figure out the right kind of bow, the correct form of address towards a senior or a superior.
Let alone get a date.
She sighed and allowed Norie to tow her deeper into the crowd. The Japanese girl's neon-rimmed eyes were bright, and her small white teeth were flashing, her canary-yellow backpack bopping up and down.
"Seriously—lovegetys are sooo kawaii!"
The boy looked like a painted little satyr: silver lips and eyelids, orange ash-streaked hair and a heavy gold chain around his neck. He couldn't have been older than twelve, but then, in Shibuya, a fifteen-year-old was ancient and venerable. The drone of the base beat that seemed to permeate everything in 109 obscured the rapid-fire exchange between Norie and the boy, but it wasn't long before he smiled hungrily and held his palm out towards Riina, the little pink thing bright against his dark skin like a tiny flower. She took it, and it was still warm from the boy's hand, a living thing almost. Her MasterCard thumbnail sang an inaudible song to the boy's account, and suddenly she was the proud owner of a quantum lovegety.
Norie gave her a nymph-like smirk as the satyr-boy vanished into the seething mass of Japan's young around them.
"Now comes the best part. We go to Starbucks, and you get to try it out!"
Most of Shibuya was like a graffiti: clashing, bright, screaming colours over a drab concrete surface, the clothes shops and holograms and neon signs and rainbow crowds, a stark contrast to the utilitarian 90s architecture. Starbucks was an exception—an intricate, cylindrical two-storey glass monstrosity, a ten-metre hologram of the white-green all-seeing mermaid hovering above it.
The girls sat at a small table on the second floor, sipping cardboard-flavoured cappuccinos. Norie helped Riina to calibrate the lovegety: it talked to her old Nokia toothphone eagerly, a little light blinking in the centre of the silver heart. Menus with swirling Japanese characters danced on her retina, barely comprehensible. "Get2 setting? What is that?"
"Never mind that; you don't want to set it that high for the first go. We'll go for "karaoke". Your VR stuff is a bit old-fashioned, but—there. It's mining the web and creating your profile now—done!" Norie visibly enjoyed her big-sister role, affecting a firm motherly tone.
"What do I do now?"
"Now? Silly girl, now you go and find a boy you like, and enjoy the show."
"Just a random guy? But what will I say to him?"
"You don't have to say anything, that's the point! Off you go now—just wander around and pretend that you're looking for the ladies' room. I'll call Shinichi, and we'll go for dinner with him after he gets off work—it'll be fun!"
Riina swallowed the last of her coffee and got up, feeling awkward. She took her purse, pocketed the lovegety and walked towards the signs pointing to the ladies' room, trying to look innocent and casting passing glances at the men sitting at the tables she passed. There were a couple of businessmen, a glazed look in their eyes as they imbibed caffeine seasoned with the latest stock fluctuations; a couple of rare daylight otaku wearing ill-fitting jeans, anime T-shirts and subterrane
an mutant complexions; and trendy neo-jinrui oozing illusory wealth, talking loudly and dressed in pin-striped gangster suits. She felt silly and focused her eyes on the white skirt-wearing pictogram ahead, shaking her head.
The lovegety beeped. A female voice chattered something in her ear like an exotic bird. Flashing icons guided her eyes towards a lone figure sitting by one of the large windows. Riina stopped, felt blood rising to her cheeks and tried to think about lying face down in a snowdrift, cold and dead. Usually, it worked.
Not this time. He had good cheekbones, short-cropped black hair and large brown eyes behind rimless AR glasses; he was scribbling something furiously with a stylus on the screen of an old-fashioned palmtop, forehead furrowed in concentration. Suddenly he stopped and looked up, straight at Riina, a surprised expression on his face. His name was Hiroaki, she suddenly knew: twenty-three, studying communications technology at Keio University, single, four previous relationships, likes old Takeshi Kitano films and Japanese jazz, owns a cat.
The lovegety buzzed again. Riina caught a glimpse of a brief animation: clunky cartoonish figures of a boy and a girl holding lovegetys. The devices sent out little arrows that shook hands in the air. "Karaoke Mode Initiated!" chirped the shrill voice of the gadget through her jawbone.
Riina was suddenly overwhelmed by a nauseatingly powerful sense of deja vu mixed with vertigo. It was as if she were falling, only sideways, weightless. She closed her eyes, and the feeling subsided. When she opened them again, she was looking straight into Hiroaki's eyes, and she felt his hand touching her cheek gently. A confused tangle of new memories unfolded in her head: a seafood dinner, games at the arcade, strolling through 109's boutiques of the bizarre, joking about the latest fashionable trinkets. Tension, hands and limbs brushing against another ever so lightly, Hiroaki missing his train to walk Riina home. And then— "The First Kiss!!!" piped the female demon in her ear, and her mouth was suddenly full of Hiroaki's tongue and taste, his lips moving a bit clumsily, uncertainly. But there was no clanging of teeth, no awkwardness.