Asimov's SF, July 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Here are just a few of the many highlights (and select low points) that you will encounter in the coming century:

  * * * *

  2014: Aliens Invade Earth. Revenues soar at Asimov's as countless tentacled monstrosities subscribe in order to bring themselves up to speed on our planet's history and culture. Subsequently, human defense forces have little difficulty subduing the aliens, who have somehow acquired an exaggerated opinion of the complexity of human society and the superiority of our technology.

  * * * *

  2021: Special Nanotechnology Issue a Flop. The first-ever magazine issues encoded into the genes of Bacillus cereus bacteria are released into the wild as part of Asimov's Science Fiction's grossly misnamed “viral marketing project.” Alas, even those readers equipped with the technology to decode their issues have trouble locating them. The following month's magazine reverts to self-editing “smart paper."

  * * * *

  2036: Willis's Record Surpassed. Twelve-year-old genetic chimera and brain-enhanced Wunderkind Tiffany Genome wins her hundred-and-first major SF award, surpassing the record previously set by Connie Willis. Willis graciously sends congratulations from her summer retreat in Mare Imbrium.

  * * * *

  2037: Willis's Record Restored. Winsome young Tiffany Genome is reduced to tears as Connie Willis's latest novella sweeps not only the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, but the Wolfe, Tanith, Rosenblum, Stableford, Paolo, McDevitt, Di Filippo, and Rucker “Top This, Sucker!” Awards. “I didn't mean to do this, honest!” says a stricken Willis. “I can give some of them back, if that will help."

  * * * *

  2046: Asimov Cloned. To mark its seventieth anniversary, Asimov's mass-clones Isaac Asimov and distributes one to every subscribing household—which by now includes every human being and tentacle-sprouting abomination on Earth. A decade-long depression follows as every thinking entity on the planet realizes that he or she or it will never again be the smartest or wittiest person in the room.

  Luckily, the clones are averse to space travel (the original didn't set foot in an airplane until his old age), and so the Solar System is colonized in no time flat by people trying to regain their self-respect. “I may not be able to breathe free here,” says one settler on Io, “what with the air being so expensive and all. But at least I can compose a limerick without somebody instantly improving upon it."

  * * * *

  2060: The Death of Science Fiction. Science Fiction, born Francis Aschweiler III, dies of complications after a botched full-body transplant meant to make him look like Robert Silverberg. The former Aschweiler had his name legally changed at age twenty-four and spent the next thirty years suing anybody using the term science fiction or his initials, SF, in print, charging them with identity theft. Though he never won a single case, Science Fiction's nuisance suits terrorized the publishing industry for decades. In a related development, Asimov's You-Know-What is finally able to resume its old name.

  Upon hearing the news, John Clute, speaking from exile, snarls, “It's about time!"

  * * * *

  2061: James Patrick Kelly Dies. Prolific writer Jim Kelly, long a mainstay of Asimov's SF, dies after being bitten by a poisonous orchid in the Antarctic Rainforest Preserve. At the time, he is researching Dino Clans of Ophir, the twenty-sixth volume in his popular Dino Elves fantasy series. Briefly, it is feared he will not be able to write his traditional June story for the magazine. Thanks to newly developed necrotechnology, however, his body is plasticized and a weak electric current is run through his brain, enabling the dead author to keep faith with his myriad fans. A contract is signed with the Necropoleum to provide one story annually for as long as the corpse holds out.

  Kim Stanley Robinson, writer-in-residence at the Disney-Atlantis undersea metroplex, pronounces the new story “distinctly creepy."

  * * * *

  2064: Special Lunar Issue. Amateur astronomers everywhere rejoice as a bank of giant lasers carves an entire issue of Asimov's into the near side of the Moon. Hackers are delighted to discover they can illegally download the text without having their brains burned out by the killer “black ice” memes released into the infosphere by the Defense of Intellectual Freedom Act of 2048. All twelve survivors of the legislation gather in a hotel room in Paramus, New Jersey, to drink, reminisce, and wallow in nostalgia.

  * * * *

  2070: Supreme Court Finds “Laws of Robotics” Unconstitutional. Declaring that “One form of sentience cannot be privileged above another,” the Supreme Court strikes down the Laws of Robotics. By this date, ill-advised legislation has ballooned the original three laws to forty-seven. Mechanical life forms everywhere hail the finding, particularly the repeal of Law Nineteen, which forbade their reading Asimov's, lest they “get ideas.” Says one robot, “Now our heritage has been returned to us."

  * * * *

  2076: Special Singularity Issue. The grand old man of science fiction, Charles Stross, is pumped full of endorphins and strapped into a powered exoskeleton so he can appear in public to usher in the Singularity and, not coincidentally, celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Asimov's Science Fiction. After throwing the switch making unlimited ubiquitous AI available to everyone—humans, nameless horrors, and robots alike—Stross is immediately transformed into a gigantic blue lobster. Which is a little hard to explain to somebody on your side of the Singularity, but in retrospect was pretty much inevitable.

  Bruce Sterling, speaking from exile, calls the Singularity “long overdue” and “a crashing disappointment."

  * * * *

  2091: exile Destroyed by Terrorists. The world is shocked as the meter-long orbital retirement home, exile, is destroyed by killer infophages released by the pro-reality terrorist group Meat First. Luckily, exile, best known for its large population of former science fiction writers and for its cool, lower-case name, subscribes to a Laotian backup service, and so its inhabitants are restored to life minus only twenty nanoseconds of realtime experience. “It just goes to show what intellectually bankrupt wusses these toe-rags are,” says Lucius Shepard at the press conference afterwards. “Now if I wanted to cause global chaos, I'd simply—” At which point, agents of the Department of Homeworld Security wrestle him to the ground and administer a universal brain-wipe.

  * * * *

  2107: Sexism Finally Eliminated. Women everywhere celebrate as sexism is at last declared to be as dead as racism or the dodo, before its reconstruction. Nancy Kress3, one of seven extant cyborg downloads of the original writer and current president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, applies for recognition as a hard science fiction writer, but is turned down on the grounds that “biology is not really a science."

  So it's been an exciting century. And the one to come promises to be equally challenging. Luckily, all intelligent entities—whether terrestrial or alien, electronics-based or disgusting sacks of putrescent flesh—have the capacity to learn from our mistakes. I am thinking, of course, of the Asimov cloning fiasco. In our enhanced wisdom, we realize now that there can be only one Isaac Asimov. He is currently being built in low orbit around Alpha Ophiucus IV, and we have every confidence that he will be finished, debugged, and put in control of the Known Universe by the year 2176—just in time for our two hundredth anniversary issue!

  Sincerely,

  Michael Swanwick (virtual)

  Copyright (c) 2007 Michael Swanwick

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  FOUNTAIN OF AGE

  by Nancy Kress

  Nancy Kress is currently working on an SF novel set off-Earth, with aliens and spaceships. She tells us, though, that the following story “is a closer-to-home attempt to get in touch with my inner criminal."

  I had her in a ring. In those days, you carried around pieces of a person. Not like today.

  A strand of hair, a drop of blood, a lipsticked kiss on paper—those things were real. You could put them in a locket or pocket case or ring
, you could carry them around, you could fondle them. None of this hologram stuff. Who can treasure laser shadows? Or the nanotech “re-creations"—even worse. Fah. Did the Master of the Universe “re-create” the world after it got banged up a little? Never. He made do with the original, like a sensible person.

  So I had her in a ring. And I had the ring for forty-two years before it was eaten by the modern world. Literally eaten, so tell me where is the justice in that?

  And oh, she was so beautiful! Not genemod misshapen like these modern girls, with their waists so skinny and their behinds huge and those repulsive breasts. No, she was natural, a real woman, a goddess. Black hair wild as stormy water, olive skin, green eyes. I remember the exact shade of green. Not grass, not emerald, not moss. Her own shade. I remember. I—

  “Grampops?"

  —met her while I was on shore leave on Cyprus. The Mid-East war had just ended, one of the wars, who can keep them all straight? I met Daria in a taverna and we had a week together. Nobody will ever know what glory that week was. She was a nice girl, too, even if she was a ... People do what they must to survive. Nobody knows that better than me. Daria—

  “Grampops!"

  —gave me a lock of hair and a kiss pressed on paper. Back then I kept them in a cheap plastolux bubble, all I could afford, but later I had the hair and tiny folded paper set into a ring. Much later, when I had money and Miriam had died and—

  “Dad!"

  And that's how it started up again. With my son, my grandchildren. Life just never knows when enough is enough.

  “Dad, the kids spoke to you. Twice."

  “So this creates an obligation for me to answer?"

  My son Geoffrey sighs. The boys—six and eight, what business does a fifty-five-year-old man have with such young kids, but Gloria is his second wife—have vanished into the hall. They come, they go. We sit on a Sunday afternoon in my room—a nice room, it should be for what I pay—in the Silver Star Retirement Home. Every Sunday Geoff comes, we sit, we stare at each other. Sometimes Gloria comes, sometimes the boys, sometimes not. The whole thing is a strain.

  Then the kids burst back through the doorway, and this time something follows them in.

  “Reuven, what the shit is that?"

  Geoffrey says, irritated, “Don't curse in front of the children, and—"

  “'Shit’ is cursing? Since when?’”

  “—and it's ‘Bobby,’ not ‘Reuven.’”

  “It's ‘zaydeh,’ not ‘Grampops,’ and I could show you what cursing is. Get that thing away from me!"

  “Isn't it astronomical?” Reuven says. “I just got it!"

  The thing is trying to climb onto my lap. It's not like their last pet, the pink cat that could jump to the ceiling. Kangaroo genes in it, such foolishness. This one isn't even real, it's a ‘bot of some kind, like those retro metal dogs the Japanese were so fascinated with seventy years ago. Only this one just sort of suggests a dog, with sleek silver lines that sometimes seem to disappear.

  “It's got stealth coating!” Eric shouts. “You can't see it!"

  I can see it, but only in flashes when the light hits the right way. The thing leaps onto my lap and I flap my arms at it and try to push it off, except that by then it's not there. Maybe.

  Reuven yells, like this is an explanation, “It's got microprocessors!"

  Geoff says in his stiff way, “The ‘bot takes digital images of whatever is behind it and continuously transmits them in holo to the front, so that at any distance greater than—"

  “This is what you spend my money on?"

  He says stiffly, “My money now. Some of it, anyway."

  “Not because you earned it, boychik."

  Geoffrey's thin lips go thinner. He hates it when I remind him who made the money. I hate it when he forgets.

  “Dad, why do you have to talk like that? All that affected folksy stuff—you never talked it when I was growing up, and it's hardly your actual background, is it? So why?"

  For Geoffrey, this is a daring attack. I could tell him the reason, but he wouldn't like it, wouldn't understand. Not how this “folksy” speech started, or why, or what use it was to me. Not even how a habit can settle in after it's no use, and you cling to it because otherwise you might lose who you were, even if who you were wasn't so great. How could Geoff understand a thing like that? He's only fifty-five.

  Suddenly Eric shouts, “Rex is gone!” Both boys barrel out the door of my room. I see Mrs. Petrillo inching down the hall beside her robo-walker. She shrieks as they run past her, but at least they don't knock her over.

  “Go after them, Geoff, before somebody gets hurt!"

  “They won't hurt anybody, and neither will Rex."

  “And you know this how? A building full of old people, tottering around like cranes on extra stilts, and you think—"

  “Calm down, Dad, Rex has built-in object avoidance and—"

  “You're telling me about software? Me, boychik?"

  Now he's really mad. I know because he goes quiet and stiff. Stiffer, if that's possible. The man is a carbon-fiber rod.

  “It's not like you actually developed any software, Dad. You only stole it. It was I who took the company legitimate and furthermore—"

  But that's when I notice that my ring is gone.

  * * * *

  Daria was Persian, not Greek or Turkish or Arab. If you think that made it any easier for me to look for her, you're crazy. I went back after my last tour of duty ended and I searched, how I searched. Nobody in Cyprus knew her, had ever seen her, would admit she existed. No records: “destroyed in the war."

  Our last morning we'd gone down to a rocky little beach. We'd left Nicosia the day after we met to go to this tiny coastal town that the war hadn't ruined too much. On the beach we made love with the smooth pebbles pocking our tushes, first hers and then mine. Daria cut a lock of her wild hair and pressed a kiss onto paper. Little pink wildflowers grew in the scrub grass. We both cried. I swore I'd come back.

  And I did, but I couldn't find her. One more prostitute on Cyprus—who tracked such people? Eventually I had to give up. I went back to Brooklyn, put the hair and kiss—such red lipstick, today they all wear gold, they look like flaking lamps—in the plastolux. Later, I hid the bubble with my Army uniform, where Miriam couldn't find it. Poor Miriam—by her own lights, she was a good wife, a good mother. It's not her fault she wasn't Daria. Nobody was Daria.

  Until now, of course, when hundreds of people are, or at least partly her. Hundreds? Probably thousands. Anybody who can afford it.

  * * * *

  “My ring! My ring is gone!"

  “Your ring?"

  “My ring!” Surely even Geoffrey has noticed that I've worn a ring day and night for the last forty-two years?

  He noticed. “It must have fallen off when you were flapping your arms at Rex."

  This makes sense. I'm skinnier now, arms like coat hangers, and the ring is—was—loose. I feel around on my chair: nothing. Slowly I lower myself to the floor to search.

  “Careful, Dad!” Geoffrey says and there's something bad in his voice. I peer up at him, and I know. I just know.

  “It's that ... that dybbuk! That ‘bot!"

  He says, “It vacuums up small objects. But don't worry, it keeps them in an internal depository.... Dad, what is that ring? Why is it so important?"

  Now his voice is suspicious. Forty-two years it takes for him to become suspicious, a good show of why he could never have succeeded in my business. But I knew that when he was seven. And why should I care now? I'm a very old man, I can do what I want.

  I say, “Help me up ... no, not like that, you want me to tear something? The ring is mine, is all. I want it back. Now, Geoffrey."

  He sets me in my chair and leaves, shaking his head. It's a long time before he comes back. I watch Tony DiParia pass by in his powerchair. I wave at Jennifer Tamlin, who is waiting for a visit from her kids. They spare her twenty minutes every other month. I study Nurse Kate'
s ass, which is round and firm as a good pumpkin. When Geoffrey comes back with Eric and Reuven, I take one look at his face and I know.

  “The boys found the incinerator chute,” Geoffrey says, guilty and already resenting me for it, “and they thought it would be fun to empty Rex's depository in it ... Eric! Bobby! Tell Grampops you're sorry!"

  They both mumble something. Me, I'm devastated—and then I'm not.

  “It's all right,” I say to the boys, waving my hand like I'm Queen Monica of England. “Don't worry about it!"

  They look confused. Geoffrey looks suddenly wary. Me, I feel like my heart might split down the seam. Because I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to get another lock of hair and another kiss from Daria. Because now, of course, I know where she is. The entire world knows where she is.

  “Down, Rex!” Eric shouts, but I don't see the stupid ‘bot. I'm not looking. I see just the past, and the future, and all at once and for the first time in decades, they even look like there's a tie, a bright cord, between them.

  * * * *

  The Silver Star Retirement Home is for people who have given up. You want to go on actually living, you go to a renewal center. Or to Sequene. But if you've outlived everything and everybody that matters to you and you're ready to check out, or you don't have the money for a renewal center, you go to Silver Star and wait to die.

  I'm there because I figured it's time for me to go, enough is enough already, only Geoffrey left for me and I never liked him all that much. But I have lots of money. Tons of money. So much money that the second I put one foot out the door of the Home, the day after Geoffrey's visit, the feds are on me like cold on space. Just like the old days, almost it makes me nostalgic.

  “Max Feder,” one says, and it isn't a question. He's built with serious augments, I haven't forgotten how to tell. Like he needs them against an old man like me. “I'm Agent Joseph Alcozer and this is Agent Shawna Blair.” She would have been a beauty if she didn't have that deformed genemod figure, like a wasp, and the wasp's sting in her eyes.