Besides all that – what fun to find yourself living on such a peculiar little planet, a World with a Fold! Don’t you think? . . .
Date unknown. Sorry, I’ve given up counting. Not long after the last entry, however.
With my affairs in order I’m jumping ship. Why?
Point one: I’ve eaten all the food. Not the Spam, obviously.
Point two: I think I’m running out of world, or at least the sort of world I can live on. It’s a long time since I saw a mastodon, or a dinosaur. I still cross over island groups, but now they are inhabited, if at all, by nothing but purplish slime and what look like mats of algae. Very ancient indeed, no doubt.
And ahead things change again. The sky looks greenish, and I wonder if I am approaching a place, or a time, where the oxygen runs out. I wake up in the night panting for breath, but of course that could just be bad dreams.
Anyhow, time to ditch. It’s the end of the line for me, but not necessarily for the Goering. I think I’ve found a way to botch the flight deck equipment: not enough to make her fully manoeuvrable again, but at least enough to turn her around and send her back the way she came, under the command of Hans. I don’t know how long she can keep flying. The Merlins have been souped up with fancy lubricants and bearings for longevity, but of course there are no engineers left to service them. If the Merlins do hold out the Goering might one day come looming over Piccadilly Circus again, I suppose, and what a sight she will be. Of course there will be no way of stopping her I can think of, but I leave that as another exercise for you, dear reader.
As for me, I intend to take the Spit. She hasn’t been flown since Day 1, and is as good as new as far as I can tell. I might try for one of those slime-covered rocks in the sea.
Or I might try for something I’ve glimpsed on the horizon, under the greenish sky. Lights. A city? Not human, surely, but who knows what lies waiting for us on the other side of the Fold in the World?
What else must I say before I go?
I hope we won’t be the last to come this way. I hope that the next to do so come, unlike us, in peace.
Mummy, keep feeding my cats for me, and I’m sorry about the lack of grandchildren. Bea will have to make up the numbers (sorry, sis!).
Enough, before I start splashing these pages with salt water. This is Bliss Stirling, girl reporter for the BBC, over and out!
[Editor’s note: There the transcript ends. Found lodged in a space between bulkheads, it remains the only written record of the Goering’s journey to have survived on board the hulk. No filmed or tape-recorded material has been salvaged. The journal is published with respect to the memory of Miss Stirling. However as Miss Stirling was contracted by the BBC and the Royal Geographic Society specifically to cover the Goering’s Pacific expedition, all these materials must be regarded as COPYRIGHT the British Broadcasting Conglomerate MCMLII. Signed PETER CARINHALL, Board of Governors, BBC.]
FLOWERS FROM ALICE
Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Both Cory Doctorow (b. 1971) and Charles Stross (b. 1964) seemed to burst out of nowhere in the last few years to general universal acclaim. Yet Stross has been writing science fiction since 1987 and Doctorow since 1990. Born in Toronto, Doctorow sold his first story to the Canadian science-fiction magazine On Spec, where it appeared in the Winter 1990 “Special Youth” issue. He continued to sell the odd story here and there but the world suddenly sat up and noticed when “Craphound” appeared in Science Fiction Age in 1998. It> was short-listed for both the Aurora and Theodore Sturgeon awards for that year’s best short fiction. He then went from strength-to-strength receiving the John W. Campbell Award in 2000 as the Best New Writer. On the strength of that perhaps he can be excused for the audacity of his first book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (2000), which gave the impression he had been around for years. You’ll find some of his short fiction in A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003), which won the Canadian Sunburst Award. His novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), Eastern Standard Tribe (2004) and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005).
At the same time Charles Stross was similarly experimenting and dabbling when suddenly it all came together with his wonderfully anarchic books Singularity Sky (2003), Iron Sunrise (2004), The Atrocity Archives (2004) and Accelerando (2005), amongst others.
Both authors have a common strength in their appreciation of the potential of the computer age and nanotechnology and use it to ingenious effect in the following story.
I don’t know why I invited Al to my wedding. Nostalgia, maybe. Residual lust. She was the first girl I ever kissed, after all. You never forget your first. I couldn’t help but turn my head when round-hipped, tall girls with pageboy hair walked by, hunched over their own breasts in terminal pubescent embarrassment, awkward and athletic at the same time. You don’t get much of that these days outside of Amish country, no parent would choose to have a kid who was quite so visibly strange as Al had been as a teenager, but there were still examples of the genre to be had, if you looked hard enough, and they stirred something within me.
I couldn’t forget Al, though it had been twenty years since that sweet and sloppy kiss on the beach, ten years since I’d run into her last, so severely postthat I hardly recognized her. Wasn’t a week went by that she didn’t wander through my imagination, evoking a lip-quirk that wasn’t a smile by about three notches. My to-be recognized it; it drove her up the wall, and she let me know about it during post-coital self-criticism sessions.
It was a very wrong idea to invite Al to the wedding, but the wedding itself was a bad idea, to be perfectly frank. And I won’t take all the blame for it, since Al decided to show up, after all, if “decided” can be applied to someone as postas she (s/he?) (they?) [(s|t)/he(y)?] was by then. But one morning, as we sat at our pre-nuptual breakfast table, my to-be and me, and spooned marmalade on our muffins and watched the hummingbirds visit the feeder outside our nook’s window; one morning, as we sat naked and sated and sticky with marmalade and other fluids; one morning, I looked into my fiancee’s eyes and I prodded at the phone tattooed on my wrist and dialed a directory server and began to recite the facts of Al’s life into my hollow tooth in full earshot of my lovely intended until the directory had enough information to identify Al from among all the billions of humans and trillions of multiplicitous post-humans that it knew about and the phone rang in my hollow tooth and I was talking to Al.
“Al,” I said, “Alice? Is that you? It’s Cyd!”
There was no sound on the end of the line because when you’re as self-consciously postas Al, you don’t make unintentional sound, so there was no sharp intake of breath or other cue to her reaction to this voice from her past, but she answered finally and said, “Cyd, wonderful, it’s been too long,” and the voice was warm and nuanced and rich as any human voice but more so, tailored for the strengths and acoustics of my skull and mouth which she had no doubt induced from the characteristics of the other end of the conversation. “You’re getting married, huh? She sounds wonderful. And you, you’re doing well too. Well! I should say so. Cyd, it’s good to hear from you. Of course one of me will come to your wedding. Can we help? Say we can! I, oh, the caterer, no, you don’t want to use that caterer, she’s booked for another wedding the day before and a wedding and a Bar Mitzvah the day after, you know, so please, let me help! I’m sending over a logistics plan now, I just evolved it for you, it’s very optimal.”
And my to-be shook her head and answered her phone and said, “Why hello, Alice! No, Cyd sprang this on me without warning – one of his little surprises. Yes, I can see you’re talking to him, too. Of course, I’d love to see the plans, it was so good of you to come up with them. Yes, yes, of course. And you’ll bring a date, won’t you?”
Meanwhile, in my tooth, Al’s still nattering on, “You don’t mind, do you? I respawned and put in a call to your beautiful lady. I’m resynching with the copy every couple instants, so I can tell you we
’re getting along famously, Cyd, you always did have such great taste but you’re hopeless with logistics. I see the job is going well, I knew you’d be an excellent polemicist, and it’s such a vital function in your social mileu!”
I didn’t get more than ten more words in, but the society of Al kept the conversation up for me. I never got bored, of course, because she had a trillion instances of me simulated somewhere in her being, and she tried a trillion different conversational gambits on all of them and chose the ones that evoked the optimal response, fine tuning as she monitored my breathing and vitals over the phone. She had access to every nuance of my life, of course, there’s no privacy with the post-humans, so there was hardly any catching up to do.
I didn’t expect her to show up on my door that afternoon.
My betrothed took it very well. She was working in her study on her latest morph porn, down on the ground floor, and I was upstairs with my neurofeedback machine, working up a suitable head of bile before writing my column. She beat me to the door.
“Who is it?” I called irritably, responding more to the draft around my ankles than to any conscious stimulus. No reply. I unplugged myself, swore quietly, then closed my eyes and began to ramp down the anger. I found people responded all wrong to me when I was mad. “Who?” I called again.
“Cyd! How cozy, what a great office!” A flock of silver lighter-than-air golf-balls caromed off the doorframe and ricocheted around me – one softly pinged me on the end of the nose with a warm, tingling shock. It smelled utterly unlike a machine: human and slightly flowery –
“Al?” I asked.
The ball inflated, stretching its endoskeleton into a transducer surface. The others homed in on it, merging almost instantly into an inflatabubble that suddenly flashed into a hologram of Al as I’d last seen her in the flesh – only slightly tuned, her back straight and proud, her breasts fetchingly exposed by a Cretanstyle dress that had been in fashion around the time we split up. “Hiya, Cydonia!” That grin, those sturdy, well-engineered teeth, and a sudden flashback to a meeting in a mall all those years ago. “Don’t worry I’m downstairs talking to your love wearing the real primary-me body, this is just a remote, hey I love the antique render farm but isn’t it a bit out of tune? Please, let me to fix it!”
“Ung,” I said, shivering with fright, guts turning to jelly, and hackles rising – exactly the wrong reaction and deeply embarrassing, but there’s a reason I work behind a locked door most of the time. “Gimme five.”
“How kawaii!” Al burst apart into half a dozen beachball-sized balloons and bounced out onto the landing. “See you downstairs!”
I just stood there, muscles twitching in an adrenalin-induced haze as I wrestled to get my artificially induced anger under control. It took almost a minute, during which time I forced myself to listen as a series of loud thumping noises came from the hall downstairs and I heard the sound of voices, indistinct, through the open doors: my fiancee’s low and calm, and Al as enthusiastic and full of laughter as a puppy in a mid-belly-rub. Al had left an after-scent behind, one that gave me dizzying flashbacks to teenage sexual experimentation – my first sex change, Al’s first tongue job – and left me weak at the knees in an aftershock of memories. It’s funny how after the fire’s burned down all you can remember are the ashes of conflict, the arguments that drove you apart: until your ex shows up and reminds you what you’ve lost. Although knowing Al it might just as well be a joke as deliberate.
Presently I went downstairs, to find the door open and a couple of huge crates sitting in the front yard – too big to come through the door without telling the house to grow a service entrance. I followed the voices to the living room, where my fiancee was curled up in our kidney-shaped sofa, opposite Al, who had somehow draped herself across the valuable antique tube TV, and was reminiscing about nothing in particular at length. Her main incarnation looked alarmingly substantial, nothing like the soap-bubbles except for a slightly pearlescent lustre to her skin. “You’re so lucky with Cyd! So to speak. He’s such a stable, consistent, unassuming primal male pre-post-! I won’t say I envy you but you really need to make more of your big day together, I promise you, you won’t regret it. Remember when we spoofed out from under our teachers one day and we blew a month’s allowance at the distraction center and he said, Al, if I ever get—”
“Hello there,” I said, nodding to Al, civil enough now my autonomic nervous system wasn’t convinced I was under attack. “Do you metabolize? If so, can I offer you anything? Coffee, perhaps? What have you been up to all this time?” I barely registered my fiancee’s fixed, glassy-eyed stare, which was glued to Al’s left nipple ring like a target designator, or the way she was twitching her left index finger as if it was balanced on the hi-hat of a sidearm controller. These were normally bad signs, but right then I was still reeling from the shocking smell of Al’s skin. I know it was all part of her self-rep, but how could I possibly have forgotten it?
“Cyd!” She was off the television and across the room like the spirit of electricity, and grabbed me in a very physical bear-hug. The nipple ring was hard, and even though her body wasn’t made of CHON any more she felt startlingly real. She grinned at me with insane joy. “Wheel Three hundred and twenty seven million eight hundred and ninety six thousand one hundred and four, five, six, seconds, and you still feel good to grab!” Over her shoulder, “You’re a very lucky person to be marrying him, you know. Have you made up your mind what to do about are you doing about the catering? Did you like my suggestion for the after-banquet orgy? What about the switch fetish session? You are going to be so good together!”
My affianced had a strained smile that I recognized as the mirror image of my own bared-teeth snarl when someone interrupted my work. As usual, her face was reflecting my own mood, and I stared at her tits until I had the rhythm of her breath down, then matched it with my own, slowing down, bringing her down to the calm that I was forcing on myself. “Hey, Al,” I said, patting her shoulder awkwardly.
“Oh, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Hang on, let me underclock a little.” She closed her eyes and slowly touched her index finger to her nose. “Muuuuuch better,” she said. “Sorry, I’m not really fit for human company these days. I’ve been running at very highclockspeed lately. Order makes order, you know – I’m going to wind up faster than entropy winds down and overtake thermodynamics^ if I can. I’m about a week away from entangling enough particles in Alpha Centauri to instantiate there, then I’m going to eat the star and, whee, look out chaos!”
“Ambitious,” my betrothed said. I liked her absence of ambition, usually – so refreshing amid the grandiose schemes of the fucking post-s. “You’re certainly very kind to have done so much thinking about our little wedding, but we were planning to keep it all simple, you know. Just friends and family, a little dancing. Rather retro, but. . .” She trailed off, with a meaningful glance at me.
“But that’s how we want it,” I finished, taking my cue. I moved over the sofa and sat by my promised and rubbed her tiny little feet, the way she liked. Human-human contact. Who needs any more than this?
She jerked her feet away and sat up. “You two haven’t seen each other in so long, why don’t I leave you to catch up?” she said, in a tone that let me know that I had better object.
“No no no,” I said. “No. Work to do, too much work to do. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.” I was uncomfortably aware of the heat radiating off Al’s avatar, a quintillion smart motes clustered together, pliable, fuckable computation, the grinding microfriction of which was keeping her at about three degrees over blood-temp. “So good to see you, Al. What we’ll do, we’ll look over these plans and suggestions and whatnot, such very good stuff I’m so sure, and we’ll get in touch with you about helping out, right?”
She beamed and wedged herself onto the sofa between us, arms draped over our shoulders. “Of course, of course. You two, oh, I’m so happy for you. Perfect for each other!” She gave my intended a kiss on the
cheek, then gave me one that landed close enough to my earlobe to tickle the little hairs there. The kiss was fragrant and wet as the first one, and I heard faint, crashing surf. It was only after she’d moved back (having darted her tongue out and squirmed it to the skin under my beard) that I realized she’d been generating it. I crossed my legs and tried furiously to think my erection away.
She bounded out the door and then stood on our lawn, amidst the crates. She gestured at them, “They’re a wedding present!” she called, loud enough to rattle the picture-window. Our neighbor across the street scowled at her from his attic, where he painted still-lives of decaying fruit ten hours a day. “Enjoy!”
“Well, she hasn’t changed,” my love said, scowling. “You seemed very happy to see her again.”
“Yes,” I said, awkwardly, jiggling my crossed foot. “Well. I guess I’ll try to get her gifts inside before it rains or something, right? Why don’t you go back to work?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll go back to work. I’m sure the gifts are lovely. Call me once they’re unpacked, all right?”
“Sure,” I said, and jiggled my foot.
I considered ordering the house to carve a service door, but decided at length that peristalsis was the optimal solution – otherwise, I’d still have to find a way to drag the goddamned crates into the house. I shoved all our living-room furniture into a corner and went down to the cellar to scoop up the endless meters of the house trunk that we’d fabbed to help us move in, but hadn’t had a use for since. I spread it out along the lawn, stretching its mouth-membrane overtop of the largest of the three crates, then pulled the other end through the picture window. I retreated to the living-room and used a broom-handle to tickle the gag-reflex at the near-end of the tube and then leapt clear as the tube shudderingly vomited a gush of dust over the floor. I hit the scrubber-plate with my fist and escaped out the front door before I’d gotten more than a lungful of crud, chased by convection currents that cycled all the room’s air towards the filters in the baseboards.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 10