The Tomorrow Tower: Nine Science Fiction Short Stories

by John Moralee

  The Tomorrow Tower

  A collection of nine SF stories

  By

  John Moralee © 2012

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of John Moralee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  OTHER KINDLE TITLES

  Acting Dead

  Afterburn and Other Stories

  The Bone Yard and Other Stories

  The Good Soldier and Other Stories

  Blue Ice

  Under Dark Skies *

  Thirteen: Unlucky For Some *

  Bloodways

  * included in omnibus collection Afterburn and Other Stories

  Contents

  The Tomorrow Tower

  Rehab

  Couch Potato

  Tumbleweed

  Barney

  Red Sky

  Reality Games

  New Babylon

  Waves on a Distant Shore

  The Tomorrow Tower

  The bed was impossibly large, ten times the length of Iranda’s body. She sat up and brushed the layers of pink silk from her face as she looked around for the first time. Her pillows followed the movement, supporting her gently in a comfortable position that caused the bed sheets to undulate and tingle with delightful static. She yawned and stretched. At the foot of the bed was a crystal balcony where five strangers floated on soft cushions. The strangers were two women and three men, all with their backs to her. They were wearing silver crowns and loose, diaphanous robes that left them almost naked, revealing their deeply tanned and well-toned bodies. They were looking out at the deep blue ocean and a patchwork of reefs far below.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  No one replied.

  Suddenly, five dolphins pirouetted out of the water in perfect formation. Their mirror-smooth skins shone in the sunlight, raining rainbows. At the peak of their leaps, the dolphins flicked their flippers, once, twice, three times, before returning beneath the waves with volcanic splashes. There, they chased a shoal of silver fish towards a large island on the horizon. Iranda had the impression that the people were in control of the dolphins. With clinical accuracy, the dolphins circled the shoal and moved in for food, one after the other, while the rest herded the silver fish.

  Iranda could not remember this room. It was huge and very feminine, but also alien and not to her taste. Everything was a shade of pink, soft pink chairs and plush pink carpets competed to be pinker than the rest. Was it her room? She could not remember what she was doing here. And, worse, she could not remember the five people, though she was positive she knew them all intimately.

  Something awful had happened.

  Instinctively, she touched her abdomen. It was tender.

  The five strangers removed their crowns and applauded each other for a magnificent game. Slowly, their cushions rotated to face the bed. One man saw that she was awake and grinned.

  “Iranda! How do you feel?”

  “Weak,” she said.

  He floated across the room until he was above her. He stepped off the cushions and lay down beside her. He brushed the hair away from her eyes and kissed her gently. His lips were warm and wet. She felt awkward.

  “I should know you, shouldn’t I?”

  His smile vanished. “Iranda, I’m Kelsor. Kelsor - your lover.”

  The name meant nothing.

  “You must remember?”

  “No.”

  Kelsor looked at the others. “You said the pregnancy would work, Dison! No complications. Look, she doesn’t even know me! What have you done?”

  “I didn’t know she would die,” Dison said. “But look on the bright side - the replacement organs are working fine.”

  “But she lost the baby. And now her memory. How can she lose her memory, tell me that?”

  “Her neural implants will have saved her memories at the point of death. It’s just a matter of adjustment.” Dison paused. “I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Nobody’s tried a natural pregnancy in -”

  “Eighteen thousand years,” a women said.

  “Exactly, Helen. Eighteen thousand years. The knowledge was lost. Iranda accepted the risks before implantation, just like we all agreed. You can’t blame me, Kelsor. It was your DNA we used for the father.”

  “Why can’t I remember?” Iranda asked, but Kelsor and Dison were having an argument that excluded her. It was as if she wasn’t present.

  “Her neural implants will unload their data into her repaired brain one neurone at a time,” Dison said. “Sure, it may take a week or so for full memory recall, but it’s not as if it is permanent.”

  Kelsor bit his lip. “Will she be able to have another baby?”

  Dison shook his head. “Too dangerous.”

  This made Iranda sad. A baby, whatever that was, was the most important thing in the universe. It was soft and small and delicate and wonderful. And it was never to be. Dying meant nothing if she could have a baby.

  Kelsor closed his eyes. Water seeped from his lids. There was a name for it, but she could not remember. “Iranda, what do you remember? Can you remember our names?”

  She tried to think. She could remember dolphins were called dolphins, so the information could already be in her brain. Things were blurry, as though her past was there - but tantalisingly just out of reach. She looked at Kelsor and then at Dison and ... and there was a name coming, she could feel it ... and Helen and Eriqa ... and Morton. There were only six names to remember. Six humans left on Earth. Earth? The world. The planet. An image of a blue-white ball. Earth. She was remembering. “Yes, I know your names. I didn’t, but now I do. When I remember something it is as if I’d never forgotten. But it’s hard, hard to think. Why is it hard to think, Kelsor?”

  “That’s to be expected. It’s just a rewiring process. You must rest.” He put his hands on her shoulder and gently urged her to lie down, but she resisted. She did not want to sleep. She had so much to remember.

  “No,” she said. “Please, I’m not tired. Not men - what’s the word? - not in my head. Not mentally. I can’t sleep. I’m ... hungry. Can I have some hunger, please?”

  “Food, you mean. And the answer is, of course, yes.”

  *

  The dining room was an exact replica of the Sistine Chapel, except for the sleek black dining table in its centre. Iranda sat next to Kelsor, who held her hand between courses and looked desperately into her eyes. The meal was languorous, a series of small courses of wafer-thin fish slices and delicate seaweeds with subtle flavours and textures that she ate slowly, relishing each dish. Every taste was a new sensation. The food was as fresh as could be, brought to the dining table in floating glass tanks by a man dressed in a long black jacket, black trousers, and a stiff white shirt. He was referred to as Butler. He cooked and prepared the food while they watched and chatted. He did not respond to her questions.

  “My dear,” Dison said, spinning a morsel of squid onto his fork, “he’s not programmed for verbal communication. Butler can obey orders, but he’s not a human, not li
ke us. Ignore him. He’s part of the furniture. The Tower controls him.”

  “Oh,” she said, not understanding. Butler looked like them. She could not understand how he was like a table or chair.

  Iranda learnt a lot during the sixteen courses. Her five companions were eager to talk with the new stranger and provide a history lesson.

  The place they lived in was simply called the Tower.

  It was a luxurious survival shelter using self-repairing and self-evolving nanotechnological architecture. Machines that were as small as atoms formed any environment they desired. The Tower provided for their every desire by speech or thought-operated commands. It was a huge factory changing itself to their chosen configurations by absorbing whatever it needed from the mineral-rich ocean. It rose half a kilometre above the World Ocean, but most of it was beneath the water. Like an iceberg, Dison said. He sent an image of a big white thing to her neural implants. Beneath the water was a place called the Undercity. The Six did not go there, and when she asked why they changed the subject. The Undercity was evidently an embarrassment. So she probed them more about the Tower.

  The Tower was the only human-made structure to survive the Great Flood.

  “What’s the Great Flood?”

  Kelsor told her that in the distant past there had been continents, massive areas of land above the water where millions and millions of people had lived. There were no visual records, but Iranda could imagine them. Wonderful places. Now there was nothing but water.

  There had been a global accident.

  An ice comet had hit the Earth on somewhere called America, wiping out most of the Earth’s population in one orbit-shifting cataclysm. As a result of the shorter orbit and input of billions of tonnes of ice, sea levels had risen kilometres in as many days. The continents were submerged. For the survivors there were few choices. Some left for space, and nobody knew what had happened to them. Some tried to live on the surface in ships and on floating artificial islands - reefcities - but the World Tides proved too dangerous and they soon perished. The rest created Undercity.

  Iranda probed her friends, eking out information bit by bit, byte by byte.

  Undercity was a haven for the refugees of the Great Flood. It had been built so the survivors could survive for millennia under the water, waiting for the sea levels to fall so they could reclaim the land. The theory was all they had to do was wait for the sea level to fall. But the society of wildly different cultures and religions, packed together in such a small space, soon fractured and fought a thousand-year war. The Six isolated themselves against the in-fighting by living in the Tower and preventing anyone else from entering. They had lived many thousand of years in isolation, kept alive by their internal nanotechnological repair systems and the Tower’s defence network. Now the Tower was once again above the water they were free to repopulate the Earth.

  “What happened to the rest of the people?”

  “That’s not dinner conversation,” Helen said.

  “I’ll show you later,” Kelsor promised. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Finishing the meal, Iranda felt as if she could eat another, but she did not want to wait another two hours for all of the courses. Why could they not just put it all on one plate and be done with it?

  To relearn about herself, Kelsor suggested she visit the library. So Iranda wandered through the vast halls of the tenth level. Ancient books and CDs and DVDs and VR hardware stacked the shelves ... the collected works of aeons. It was all new to her. She gorged on information, revelling in the learning process, needing to know, needing to imagine. And as she did so, her neural implants made connections, clarifying and expanding. She could have spent a thousand years in the library, but then Kelsor returned and asked her if she wanted to see the roof garden.

  “Yes, please.”

  They left the library, walked through an atrium filled with pre-Great Flood art, then boarded a glass elevator. They stopped at two floors, picking up the others.

  “Tower,” Dison said, “take us to the roof.”

  “Yes, Mr Dison.”

  “Who was that?” Iranda asked.

  Helen and Eriqa laughed. Dison said: “That’s the Tower’s personality. You can talk to it if you want anything. It’s not a true AI - they are too dangerous - but it does provide whatever we need.”

  “Hello, Tower,” Iranda said, embarrassed. Why couldn’t she remember these things?

  “Welcome back, Miss Iranda. How are you feeling?”

  “Great,” she replied.

  The elevator rose. When the doors opened, Iranda gasped at the view. The roof garden was really a vast park on the top of the tower, dark green Douglas firs sweeping away into the distance. It was as dense as jungle in places. A sandy path led the way like a river of butter. Dison led the way, naming the plants. He plucked a banana from an overhanging branch and handed it to Iranda. It was sweet. Soon palm trees heavy with coconuts mixed with weeping willows and giant redwoods, a jigsaw puzzle of climates in just a few acres. Iranda could hear a waterfall, and the chatter of birds and insects high up in the swollen canopy. She followed the others through a garden filled with parakeets and butterflies and buzzing bees; then the trees thinned, unveiling the stone wall at the edge of the tower and an ebony staircase. She climbed the staircase until she was above the forest canopy on a transparent platform that revealed the full extent of the roof garden.

  “I thought everything was wiped out in the Great Flood.”

  “Everything was on the surface,” Dison said. “But the Tower stored DNA samples of every species for repopulating the Earth. The gene bank contains billions of lifeforms, from whales down to viruses. It’s taken a thousand years to get this ecosystem on-line, but it’s worth it, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Iranda ran to the platform’s edge. Below, the World Ocean was a myriad of blues and greens, dotted with verdant reef-islands. A sprawling archipelago abundant with life. The sun was directly overhead, warm and comforting, glinting off the water like diamonds and sapphires. She had been here before, many times. It was home.

  A soft hissing caught her attention.

  She spun around and saw six mirrored parasols growing out of the ground. The parasols quickly shaded six wicker chairs, also grown from basic molecules as she watched with wonder. Butler ascended from the forest with six crowns in his hands.

  “Kelsor, what are those crowns for? I saw them the other day and -”

  “Do as I do,” Kelsor said, pulling her towards a chair. It was comfortably moulded to her own shape.

  Kelsor took the chair next to hers. Butler placed a crown on his head and stepped back. Kelsor closed his eyes and his body slackened.

  Seeing the others do the same, Iranda waited until Butler arrived with her crown. The crown was surprisingly light. Once it rested on her scalp there was a shift in perception. As well as being in her own body, she was also outside it, looking down. Iranda, on the chair, looked up and saw a silver glimmer in the air. She could see herself from the glimmer’s position, a full panoramic view. She could hear voices. The Six. Kelsor’s voice was in her mind saying the thing she was looking at was called a sprite.

  A sprite?

  Yes. It’s an empathic machine. Close your eyes and detach completely from your body, become the sprite.

  I don’t know how!

  Just do it.

  She closed her eyes. Instantly, the layer of herself in her body vanished.

  Now she was the sprite.

  Five sprites joined her position above the sleeping people. She could see the sprites clearly, little bug-like machines with lights flickering across their pearl-textured surfaces. She could see and hear, but feel nothing. They were in direct communication with her.

  What am I?

  You are in transition. Iranda, follow us. When you see what we do, you’ll understand.

  One by one, the sprites set off over the roof and down on the air current towards the ocean. She trailed after them, propelled by nanotech
engines in her wings.

  The water ahead sparkled.

  Dolphins?

  Yes.

  The sprites were sleek torpedoes honing towards the dolphins. The sprites parted company and crashed into the dolphins and merged, all except Iranda. She was reluctant.

  Choose one, Kelsor urged.

  Iranda selected the nearest. Spinning, flying, she hit the dolphin’s grey flank half-expecting herself to be destroyed by the impact. But the contact was wet and pliant, and in a moment she was inside the dolphin’s blood. Instinctively, she swam upstream. There was a map in her head, of arteries and veins. She headed for the brain. In a matter of microseconds, she latched on. Her body detonated, sending femtotech machines in all directions.

  Awareness blossomed like a supernova.

  She was the dolphin.

  It was incredible. Iranda had total control and total experience. Her mind was filled with the strange but beautiful shapes of echolocation. To see with sound was dizzyingly awesome. A part of her head - the melon - sent high-pitched clicks out into the environment, bouncing off the surface, and other dolphins, forming a clear picture that complimented her vision. The experience was so vivid that at first she floundered, but reborn memories bubbled up from her neural implants and took over the autonomic processes. She was swimming through clear water, her skin adapting to the feel of the water, as soft as a lover’s caress. A deep red reef was ahead scintillating with life.

  Race you, Kelsor thought to her.

  She watched the dolphins accelerate, their flippers and tails sending a colourful turbulence behind them. She chased them, marvelling at how natural being a dolphin felt. She was born to live like this. The reef grew larger ... and she overtook Helen and Dison. Eriqa and Morton swam parallel for thirty seconds, but a burst of energy sent her past them. Kelsor was almost at the reef. She could hear him laughing, and it was then she realised she was laughing. This was so much fun!