The Tomorrow Tower: Nine Science Fiction Short Stories

by John Moralee

  He heard someone inside. A woman who sounded like his wife.

  Rick made a move to enter the apartment, but Kaver blocked his path. “Who have you got in there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s somebody in there.”

  “No, there’s not.” Kaver began rolling up his sleeves. The threat was obvious.

  “Let me in, Kaver, you’ve got my wife in there -”

  “Are you accusing me of having an affair with Liz?”

  “Liz? You’re awfully familiar.”

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “Are you letting me in or not?”

  “Not.” Kaver stepped back and attempted to close the door. Rick pushed forward into the room. He smelt laundry and diapers. Kaver grabbed him, but he shrugged him off. The apartment was a mess, as though thirty people lived in one room. He heard the woman in the kitchen.

  “Don’t go in there,” Kaver said.

  Rick ignored him. As he entered, he was tangled in wet clothes hanging from a washing line. Tearing himself loose, he saw there was an ironing board in front of him. A bedraggled woman in a blue apron slaved over a mound of polyester shirts. Rick barely recognised his wife. Liz looked fifty years old. Yet she was bloated with pregnancy. She worked at the ironing while three babies gurgled in a cot under the sink. Kaver caught up with Rick.

  “She’s mine now! You can get out of here!”

  “Is this what you fantasised? Is this domestic hell your idea of marriage? What have you done?”

  “I haven’t done anything. You left her alone and she needed me. That’s all.” Kaver produced a marriage certificate from his pocket. “See? Your marriage was annulled and now she’s my girl.”

  “I don’t believe this. Look at her. She’s a slave.”

  Liz looked up from the laundry and asked Kaver if there was anything else she could do for him? Make dinner? It was as if Rick was invisible. Kaver told her to finish the ironing first. She obeyed. “See, she loves me now.”

  Rick’s anger exploded. “I come home and I find you using my wife as a door mat! How do you make that makes me feel?”

  “She loves me, can’t you see the truth? Watch -” He turned to Liz. “Honey, do you love me?”

  “Yes,” she said in a girlish voice. Rick had never hear Liz like that before. She doted on the creep.

  “That thing isn’t my wife, Kaver. Liz is an independent, intelligent woman. That thing is a parody of the perfect wife. Did you watch the Stepford Wives on TV and take it too seriously? Come on, what have you done?”

  Kaver’s face shared a dozen emotions ranging from anger to a straining bowel movement. Liz flickered like a candle. Kaver saw it too and opened his mouth in a big O. “Stop it!”

  Liz, the babies, the ironing board and the rest of the domestic nightmare warped and twisted and rapidly faded. They were left in a normal room, just Rick and Kaver facing each other like gunslingers. That thought produced Smith and Wesson 45’s in their hands. Kaver dropped it as if hot. “Don’t shoot me.” He shook head to foot.

  Despite Rick’s disgust at what Kaver had done with his wife dissolved; he felt sorry for the sad man and his pathetic dream. Even his dream had been woefully inadequate.

  “What have I done?” Kaver wept blood, literally. “I am useless.”

  Rick didn’t say anything in agreement. He needed the psychologist’s help. “Peter, you have to help me. I need to find the real Liz.”

  “Real? I don’t know what’s real these days. Is this room real? Are you? Am I?”

  “Peter, think back to the day of The Breakdown. Tell me what happened.”

  “What happened? What didn’t happen? Santa Claus came down my chimney, that’s what. And I don’t have a chimney. What’s real and what’s not, is that the question?” Kaver was dazed after losing his pseudo-family. “You should have seen the chaos. You know what? My department even had a part in the mistake. We were trying experiments of rats - giving them a dose of the sentient nanomachines. Did you know rats dream?”

  “No.”

  “They do. Unfortunately, they dreamt a hole in their cage. Rats ... they got out. The nanomachines multiplied out of the lab. It was crazy. A lot of people died in the seconds after the consensus broke down simply because they didn’t believe in themselves and de-existed. I don’t think - therefore I don’t exist.”

  “Is that what happened to Liz?”

  “Liz ... I don’t know. I thought ... I don’t know what I thought.”

  You thought she loved you. “What happened to my kids?”

  “I don’t know. Look, I expect they de-existed.”

  “They’re dead?”

  “Yes and no. Or rather they might be both. Think about it, have you seen any children?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly. Either their concepts of the world are too immature to maintain them in our reality or they are still here and we can’t see them, isolated in their own consensus bubbles.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you saying they are dead or alive?”

  “I’ve seen many people caught in their own bubbles. Some may be invisible in the general world consensus. This part of the universe is now flexible. The laws of physics can do just about anything.”

  “Great, thanks a lot.”

  As Rick left Kaver, he noticed the reappearance of a family photograph. Kaver, Liz and their babies in a loving embrace. He left quickly before Kaver’s fantasy fully formed again.

  Back at the house, Rick decided to look for clues as to where his family had disappeared to. He checked everything inside and out, read letters three times over looking for clues. Nothing. He removed clothes from wardrobes and stepped inside in case a Narnia-type place had been created. Nothing.

  He despaired at the lack of information he possessed. A year had passed and there was nothing to show for it. He picked Liz’s new clothes from the melee and started putting them back in her drawers, for want of nothing better to do. He stopped. New clothes? Yes, a dress he hadn’t seen before. Some blouses. He’d found a glitch. New clothes meant -

  - meant it was not part of his conscious self.

  So Liz was alive!

  (But where?)

  He ran to Liz’s study and to the computer that she had used to keep in constant contact with the university. He leafed through her notebook, found the password: Reality Games. He told the computer to call Boston University. He got through to the AI, affectionately nicknamed Bubba (Boston University Big BrAin). Bubba’s artificial reality was fixed in the ‘normal’ reference world and still functioned as expected. Thank the God of Machines, he thought.

  “What can I do for you, Mr Taylor?”

  What did he want?

  “Access the notes from Dr Kaver and my wife’s studies up to their last entry.”

  “Done. What do you need to know, Mr Taylor?”

  “Tell me what happened to the people who disappeared.”

  Bubba considered this for a long time. “Nobody has disappeared to my knowledge.”

  “Not to your knowledge?” He was losing his temper with the AI. Bubba detected the speech altercation and told him that it was true that the department of computer psychology had been unused by many of the pre-disaster personnel, but the disappearances were not real but imaginary.

  “Are you saying I’m crazy?”

  “No, according to my theories this it to be expected. Children during their early development have different cognitive abilities. They are only aware of what they have experienced. They now live in the bubbles they have created. You wife, being part of two such similar minds, should exist in the over-lapping bubbles of Hazel and Tim. It is this reality which is closed to you because you were not present when the consensus broke down.”

  “What can I do about it?”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  “That’s all, Bubba,” he said. He sat for a long time. Were Liz and the children occupying the same space but in a different conscious
layer? The nanomachines could regulate the senses perceived. Was he the blind one? He walked outside and touched Tim’s push-bike; the little red plastic vehicle was his son’s favourite toy. Did Tim play with it now?

  Rick walked round the house to the garden and sat on the bench he had made two summers ago. He had sat with the twins on his lap and told them stories. The toddlers had listened to every word, enraptured. He sat until dark, neither thinking or feeling. The stars twinkled into existence. Staring for a long time at the firmament, he saw individual galaxies and stars in those galaxies. It was like an astrophotograph in detail and beauty. How was that possible? Was he imaging it or was the Earth giving him the skills to see further?

  He closed his eyes and wished that Liz and Tim and Hazel were with him. If he wanted something so much, could it really happen?

  Could it happen? Could it? COULD IT?

  I WANT MY LIFE BACK!

  And he could visual it, the world where Tim and Hazel and his wife Liz still lived.

  *

  Rick felt a tugging of his wrist and a tiny, smooth hand in his own.

  “Daddy, can we play?”

  He opened his eyes to a new day. The sky was blue. He was in a meadow which he had last visited in his own childhood, where he'd spent many idle days chewing grass stalks, watching cotton-wool clouds reshape above. Today there was a gentle breeze and the smells of spring. Hazel and Tim went off to play with their kites. The picnic was good. Life was good. Rick vaguely remembered a life without his family, and he felt sadness. The past was not for him.

  Liz stood with her back to the sun. She was radiant and young again, just the way he remembered. “Is it you?”

  At first he did not know what she meant.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She cocked her head and smiled. “I’ve dreamt about you,” she said, “and so have the kids. We knew you’d come back. This picnic was their idea.”

  “Is this real?”

  “Is what real?”

  “This.”

  “Don’t be silly, Rick. Pass me a sandwich.”

  He passed one. “Is this what the children dream?”

  She shrugged and then bent down to kiss him on the cheek. “Does it matter? Anything is possible.” A rainbow appeared above them - though there was no water vapour to create it. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  “Just like I remember,” Rick said. “I hope it stays this way forever.”

  “It will,” Liz replied. They looked at the kids playing, and Rick knew the year would be one long summer full of pleasant memories.

  You see, that was the consensus.

  New Babylon

  A Western multimedia journalist once described Santari’s palace as the ‘New Babylon for the New Millennium’. As Santari stood on the highest balcony, admiring his Great Pyramid far below, he considered the statement an insult typical of a small-minded man. His palace was far greater than that ancient construction. The world’s best nanoengineers and biotechnicians had created for his pleasure the ultimate in abodes - a building responsive to his touch, to his mood, shaping itself to whatever he wished - and yet people compared it to a dead thing, a thing that no longer existed. It angered him. Why did ordinary people always make an example of the past when only the future could be changed? He did not know - or care.

  That was a lie, he knew.

  He did care - deeply.

  He stared at the Great Pyramid, fists clenched.

  The Great Pyramid was an expression of his distaste for the limited minds of his inferiors by harking back to the days before nanotechnology made construction a mere computer exercise. His palace may have been built in a day, but the pyramid was something requiring time and effort. He liked to think of it this way: A man could have a computer write a novel using the parameters of his choosing - length, style, plot, characters - but how much greater was the satisfaction of writing it himself, word by word, page by page, discovering it as he wrote? It was the same with his pyramid. A work of blood, sweat, tears. And soon it would be finished. No one could say that it was just another nanotech building. No one.

  Santari could see the human workers crawling over the Eighth Wonder of the World, chiselling out the greatest achievement of the century. Their noise was rhythmical, as he had ordered. He abhorred noise, so the work was done musically. The pyramid was twice the dimensions of its Egyptian namesake - and none of it had been touched by the despised nanotech architects. The effort was important. It was not an achievement to hire Japanese technology, he thought, when his people needed a direction. No. Each stone had been hewn by human hand from Egyptian rock and transported across the oceans by sea, not air. According to the multimedia releases, it was a memorial tomb for those who died in Zarabi’s first (and last) civil war in 2017. Santari smiled: If only the Outside World knew its true purpose.

  His weblink bleeped. He looked at his wrist and saw the young face of General Malawi. After the terrorist bombing of his old palace, there were many new faces in his Cabinet, colonels raised in rank to generals. Malawi was one of them. He looked too young for the five-star uniform. He’d barely grown a moustache. But he was loyal.

  “Sir, the ambassadors have arrived. Should I send them up?”

  “Do so.”

  Waiting, Santari watched his thousands of gardeners working on the pyramid’s surface. They had started work six months ago at the bottom, adding slow-grown plants and flowers, layer by layer. Now they were close to the top. Similarly, engineers had constructed rainbow waterfalls and glorious pools that glinted like the surface of a mirror, all crafted at the slow pace of humans. The engineers worked diligently. Idly, he wondered how many had loyalty implants.

  In two days, a platinum statue of himself would be placed on the top for the populace to admire. A feeling close to bliss filled Santari as he closed his eyes and felt the sun on his face. But his mood darkened, recalling the terrorist bombing that had killed his two sons and himself. His memory engrams had been patterned into a new body, a body now reshaped to look like the original Santari, but his sons had been closer to the blast. Their brains had been pulped by the explosion. If only Vashmir and Kassan were standing beside him, he would be complete. But all he felt was unease.

  He heard the chatter of the ambassadors as they left the elevator and took their first look at the Great Pyramid. They gaped like slack-jawed monkeys. Santari inwardly smiled. Fools.

  “Gentlemen ... and ladies ... what you see is nothing but a prelude to giving all of my people paradise within their lifetimes.”

  The American ambassador, Jack Holman, removed his sunglasses to squint at him. “Mr President, this is mighty impressive. If only the White House looked this good maybe people would stop shooting at it.”

  “Indeed,” Santari said, forcing a smile. He hated Americans. He thought Americans believed God was on their side, and everyone else should bow to their weapon superiority. Their god was money. Their religion was greed. He could taste bile each time he had to pretend to be friends with one. Santari’s sources had bribed one of Jack Holman’s aides, to find out the man’s foibles: Holman had two mistresses and a secret Swiss bank account. Worse than the information he’d learnt was the knowledge that Holman’s aides were corruptible, for Santari prided himself on the loyalty of his staff. Without loyalty he was nothing. Jack Holman was nothing.

  He led the foreigners to a shaded table overlooking the gardens. Two loyal servants offered French Champagne - vintage 2006 - that they accepted greedily. Santari refrained, given his distaste for alcohol. He had found that Westerners relaxed under such circumstances, so he could talk business. A status feed implanted in his right eye read their biorhythms and informed him when they were suitably relaxed.

  “My country is one of the top three natural oil producers in the world. However, geo-surveys have shown that in twenty years our wells will be dry.” And, he thought grimly, it will take less time for nanoengineers to start producing oil unnaturally. He paused and watched the American’s c
ool gaze. “I am a simple man, a man with no Oxford education, no blue blood in my veins, yet even I can see that unless something is done all I have struggled to create will vanish like water in the desert.”

  “I feel for you,” Holman said.

  Telltales read the ambassador’s body language, informing Santari the man was lying.

  “My country needs overseas investments in technology that it is simply not receiving. The present arms embargo for so-called human rights infringements gets in the path of progress. Your countries benefit considerably from our oil, so I’m sure you would not wish for the situation to change.”

  The French ambassador coughed. “You desire a special arrangement?”

  “I am only stating facts, Messier Pualac. Perhaps some of you can offer a solution?”

  *

  Santari signed Jack Holman’s papers with his DNA signature and was surprised when Jack Holman frowned. “Something wrong?”

  “Hell, damn machine’s not working. Lousy Japtech junk!” The ambassador strolled to the helicopter - no doubt to check the bank - and returned smiling. Already the millions would be in the ambassador’s Swiss account, sent by a coded communication. Jack Holman was a tough negotiator; he required twice the bribe of the French and British. Now he held a box of Havanan cigars.

  “I hear these are your favourite.”

  Santari grinned.

  “You are a truly decadent nation.” And I’d like to stamp on you with my foot.

  They shook hands and then Holman boarded the helicopter. Santari stepped back before the blades gathered speed. The ambassador waved as it lifted off, grinning.

  Santari watched the helicopter fly over the Great Pyramid before he returned to his private chambers to thoroughly wash his hands.

  He sensed someone in the doorway and reflexively grabbed the 9mm pistol beneath his jacket.

  He calmed when he saw it was General Malawi.

  “Yes?” He sounded not quite as forcible as he wished. “What is it?”