The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  Jack will take her to the Lowell Four Seasons on his bicycle. It’s the best that can be done since we’ve been without gasoline for many years. Lucy gingerly settles onto the top tube, sitting sideways, one hand holding her dress up. Jack wraps her in his arms protectively as he grabs the handles. And they are off, wobbling down the street.

  “Have fun,” I yell after them.

  * * *

  Laura’s betrayal was the hardest to take.

  “I thought you were going to help me and Carol with the baby,” I said.

  “What kind of world is this to bring a child into?” Laura said.

  “And you think things will be better if you go there, where there are no children, no new life?”

  “We’ve tried to keep this going for fifteen years, and every year it becomes harder and harder to believe in this charade. Maybe we were wrong. We should adapt.”

  “It’s only a charade when you’ve lost faith,” I said.

  “Faith inwhat?”

  “In humanity, in our way of life.”

  “I don’t want to fight our parents any more. I just want us to be together again, a family.”

  “Those things aren’t our parents. They are imitation algorithms. You’ve always wanted to avoid conflict, Laura. But some conflicts cannot be avoided. Our parents died when Dad lost faith, when he couldn’t resist the false promises made by machines.”

  At the end of the road into the woods was a little clearing, grassy, full of wildflowers. A shuttle was waiting in the middle. Laura stepped into the open door.

  Another life lost.

  * * *

  The children have permission to stay out until midnight. Lucy had asked me not to volunteer as a chaperone, and I complied, conceding her this bit of space for the night.

  Carol is restless. She tries to read but she’s been on the same page for an hour.

  “Don’t worry.” I try to comfort her.

  She tries to smile at me, but she can’t hide her anxiety. She looks up past my shoulder at the clock on the living room wall.

  I glance back too. “Doesn’t it feel later than 11?”

  “No,” Carol says. “Not at all. I don’t know what you mean.”

  Her voice is too eager, almost desperate. There’s a hint of fear in her eyes. She’s close to panicking.

  I open the door of the house and step into the dark street. The sky has grown clearer over the years, and many more stars are now visible. But I’m looking for the Moon. It’s not in the right place.

  I come back into the house and go into the bedroom. My old watch, one that I no longer wear because there are so few occasions when being on time matters, is in the nightstand drawer. I pull it out. It’s almost one in the morning. Someone had tampered with the living room clock.

  Carol stands in the door to the bedroom. The light is behind her so I can’t see her face.

  “What have you done?” I ask. I’m not angry, just disappointed.

  “She can’t talk to you. She doesn’t think you’ll listen.”

  Now the anger rises in me like hot bile.

  “Where are they?”

  Carol shakes her head, saying nothing.

  I remember the way Lucy said goodbye to me. I remember the way she walked carefully out to Jack’s bike, holding up her voluminous skirt, a skirt so wide that she could hide anything under it, a change of clothing and comfortable shoes for the woods. I remember Carol saying, “You’re all set.”

  “It’s too late,” Carol says. “Laura is coming to pick them up.”

  “Get out of the way. I have to save her.”

  “Save her forwhat?” Carol is suddenly furious. She does not move. “This is a play, a joke, a re-enactment of something that never was. Did you go to your prom on a bicycle? Did you play only songs that your parents listened to when they were kids? Did you grow up thinking that scavenging would be the only profession? Our way of life is long gone, dead, finished!

  “What will you have her do when this house falls apart in thirty years? What will she do when the last bottle of aspirin is gone, the last steel pot rusted through? Will you condemn her and her children to a life of picking through our garbage heaps, sliding down the technology ladder year after year until they’ve lost all the progress made by the human race in the last five thousand years?”

  I don’t have time to debate her. Gently, but firmly, I put my hands on her shoulders, ready to push her aside.

  “I will stay with you,” Carol says. “I will always stay with you because I love you so much that I’m not afraid of death. But she is a child. She should have a chance for something new.”

  Strength seems to drain from my arms. “You have it backwards.” I look into her eyes, willing her to have faith again. “Her life gives our lives meaning.”

  Her body suddenly goes limp, and she sinks to the floor, sobbing silently.

  “Let her go,” Carol says, quietly. “Just let her go.”

  “I can’t give up,” I tell Carol. “I’m human.”

  * * *

  I pump the pedals furiously once I’m past the gate in the fence. The cone of light cast by the flashlight jumps around as I try to hold it against the handlebars. But I know this road into the woods well. It leads to the clearing where Laura once stepped into that shuttle.

  Bright light in the distance, and the sound of engines revving up.

  I take out my gun and fire a few shots into the air.

  The sound of the engines dies down.

  I emerge into the opening in the woods, under a sky full of bright, cold, pinprick stars. I jump off the bike and let it fall by the side of the path. The shuttle is in the middle of the clearing. Lucy and Jack, now in casual clothes, stand in the open doorway of the shuttle.

  “Lucy, sweetheart, come back out of there.”

  “Dad, I’m sorry. I’m going.”

  “No, you are not.”

  An electronic simulation of Laura’s voice comes out of the shuttle’s speakers. “Let her go, brother. She deserves to have a chance to see what you refuse to see. Or, better yet, come with us. We’ve all missed you.”

  I ignore her, it. “Lucy, there is no future there. What the machines promise you is not real. There are no children there, no hope, only a timeless, changeless, simulated existence as fragments of a machine.”

  “We have children now,” the copy of Laura’s voice says. “We’ve figured out how to create children of the mind, natives of the digital world. You should come and meet your nephews and nieces. You are the one clinging to a changeless existence. This is the next step in our evolution.”

  “You can experience nothing when you are not human.” I shake my head. I shouldn’t take its bait and debate a machine.

  “If you leave,” I tell Lucy, “you’ll die a death with no meaning. The dead will have won. I can’t let that happen.”

  I raise my gun. The barrel points at her. I will not lose my child to the dead.

  Jack tries to step in front of her, but Lucy pushes him away. Her eyes are full of sorrow, and the light from inside the shuttle frames her face and golden hair like an angel.

  Suddenly I see how much she looks like my mother. Mom’s features, having passed through me, have come alive again on my daughter. This is how life is meant to be lived. Grandparents, parents, children, each generation stepping out of the way of the next, an eternal striving towards the future, to progress.

  I think about how Mom’s choice was taken away from her, how she was not allowed to die as a human, how she was devoured by the dead, how she became a part of their ceaselessly looping, mindless recordings. My mother’s face, from memory, is superimposed onto the face of my daughter, my sweet, innocent, foolish Lucy.

  I tighten my grip on the gun.

  “Dad,” Lucy says, calmly, her face as steady as Mom’s all those years ago. “This is my choice. Not yours.”

  * * *

  It’s morning by the time Carol steps into the clearing. Warm sunlight through the leav
es dapples the empty circle of grass. Dewdrops hang from the tips of the grass blades, in each a miniature, suspended, vision of the world. Birdsong fills the waking silence. My bike is still on the ground by the path where I left it.

  Carol sits down by me without speaking. I put my arm around her shoulders and pull her close to me. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but it’s enough for us to sit together like this, our bodies pressed together, keeping each other warm. There’s no need for words. We look around at this pristine world, a garden inherited from the dead.

  We have all the time in the world.

  A Word from Ken Liu

  I noticed recently that I write a lot about people being left behind: by technological progress, by faith, by the unnameable yearning for the unexplored. Hmm, not sure why. Something to think about.

  The trend continues in “Staying Behind”. The tale is a prequel to my story “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer,” and happens in the years before everyone went to live in the Data Center. It is also the third in my series of stories on the theme of faith and reason (after “The Algorithms for Love and “Single-Bit Error”).

  Lisa really likes this story, and I hope you do too.

  Ken Liu—http://kenliu.name—is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places.

  Ken's debut novel was The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series. He also released a collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  In addition to his original fiction, Ken is also the translator of numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel to ever receive that honor.

  A Note to Readers

  Thank you so much for reading The Doomsday Chronicles.

  Through the work of a number of talented authors, editors, artists and other contributors—and the amazing support of readers like you—the Future Chronicles series has become one of the most acclaimed short story anthology series of the digital era, hitting the top ranks of not just the science fiction, fantasy and horror anthology lists, but the overall Amazon Top 10 Bestsellers list itself.

  The Future Chronicles has also inspired several other quality anthology series in speculative fiction and in other genres, and inspired scores of spin-off stories, novels, and series. It’s been amazing.

  If you enjoyed the stories in this book, please keep an eye out for other titles in the Future Chronicles collection.

  A full listing of titles, which can be read in any order, can be found at

  www.futurechronicles.net

  Finally, before you go, we’d like to ask you a very small favor, if you please: Would you write a short review at the site where you downloaded this book?

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  Thank you.

  Samuel Peralta

  www.amazon.com/author/samuelperalta

  __________

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