Tomorrow’s World

by Davie Henderson

  I found her in the station house, dictating a report on the morning’s call-outs. She looked up when I came in.

  I gave her my most charming smile and offered her a bite of my protein bar.

  She gave me a disapproving look for eating outside a designated food-consumption area. No doubt my next credit card statement would include a deduction for a conduct violation, with this precise time and date next to it.

  Paula finished her report at the same time I finished my bar. Well, she finished just before me, so my mouth was half full of food when I said: “I’ve got a present for you.”

  Say that to a Name and they’ll smile or look suspicious or at least a little curious. Paula merely gave me the sort of withering look that made me think I’d find another deduction on my next statement, this time for talking with my mouth full. I waited for her to ask what the present was.

  When it became obvious she wasn’t going to, I said, “I missed out on my lunch to get it for you.”

  She looked pointedly at the remains of the protein bar in my hand.

  “This isn’t real food; it doesn’t count,” I told her. Wanting to get in her good books, I waited until I’d swallowed the last bite before carrying on with my pitch: “Go on, ask me about your present.”

  She kept looking at me with an un-nerving stare. I wasn’t sure whether her silence was due to lack of curiosity, whether she’d guessed what I was up to, or if she was simply enjoying letting me squirm. I suspect it was the latter. Finally, she said, “Just tell me what’s on your mind, Travis.”

  “I’ve got a logic puzzle for you.”

  “I’ve already got the latest one, and I’ve done all the others.”

  “You don’t have this one. Nobody has this one. Except me.”

  She didn’t exactly gasp in surprise and move to the edge of her seat in anticipation, but she didn’t turn back to her screen, either. I took that as a good sign and carried on. “What’s more, I’m willing to bet it’s a puzzle you can’t solve.”

  “I’m willing to bet this has something to do with Doug MacDougall,” she said.

  I shouldn’t be surprised at the way her kind can read our minds, but I always am.

  “The case is closed, Travis,” she told me.

  “You might want to reconsider that once you hear about my logic puzzle. That is, unless you’re scared you won’t be able to solve it.”

  She knew she was being manipulated but was powerless to resist. Numbers pride themselves on their mental prowess and logicality. It seems to be at the core of their being. Maybe that’s because they lack the ability to dream and imagine and wonder; take away their awesome powers of logic and they have nothing. “I suppose you think you’re being clever,” she said.

  “I’m just interested to see if you’re as clever as you think you are. And I’m interested to find out what really happened to Doug MacDougall.”

  “He killed himself, Travis. End of story.”

  “Then how come he didn’t water his plants before he died?”

  “That’s your big mystery?” she asked, mocking me with her eyes and her words and the way she said them.

  I didn’t tell her it wasn’t my big mystery. For once I knew something she didn’t, and I wanted to savor the feeling of superiority.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you that if he was too messed up to look out for himself, he probably wasn’t in any fit state to take care of some stupid little pot plants?” she said.

  “There’s nothing to suggest he was too messed up to look out for himself.”

  “Apart from the fact we found his body slumped next to an empty syringe.”

  I went over things in my mind one more time, looking for an innocent explanation for what I’d learned at the forensics lab, scared I was setting myself up for a much bigger put-down than the one she’d just sarcastically delivered. When I couldn’t come up with any explanations that weren’t sinister I said, “The syringe is the really puzzling bit.”

  “How come?”

  “Doug had too much love of life and living things to kill himself with what was in it.”

  “Maybe he loved some living thing that didn’t love him back, and that’s why he killed himself.”

  “What would you know about love?” I said. For a moment I saw such hurt in her eyes I was sorry I’d said it. Quickly moving on, I said, “I decided to get a couple of tests done on the syringe.”

  “Which you’d no right to do without my authorization.”

  “Which you wouldn’t have given me. Anyway, the residue inside the syringe matches the Rush in Doug’s body.”

  “Where’s the puzzle in that?”

  “The puzzle is in what we found on the outside of the syringe.”

  “Other fingerprints beside MacDougall’s?” she asked. They can’t resist the temptation to show how clever they are by guessing what you’re about to say.

  I shook my head. I love it when they guess wrong. “There were no suspicious fingerprints on the syringe,” I told her.

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “There weren’t any fingerprints on the syringe at all.”

  For once, Perfect Paula was lost for words.

  Her silence didn’t last long. “They must have been accidentally wiped off somewhere down the line,” she said.

  I shook my head. “The chain of evidence couldn’t be more complete. I lifted the syringe from Doug’s apartment with a non-rub bag, and the next person to handle it was the forensics technician at LogiPol HQ. He did the tests while I waited, and I watched him do them.”

  And now I watched Paula as she tried to figure out the little puzzle I’d posed.

  “I’m trying to work out how he could have injected himself without leaving his fingerprints on the syringe, and I’m not coming close,” I said. “The only way I can solve the puzzle is by having someone else inject Doug. Someone who either wore gloves or wiped the syringe after sticking it into him. If you’ve got another explanation I’d love to hear it.”

  Her silence spoke volumes, which I greatly enjoyed reading.

  Rather than admit she was stumped—Numbers hate that nearly as much as admitting they’re wrong—she finally said, “If someone wanted to make it look like suicide, why not press MacDougall’s fingers against the syringe after killing him, to get his prints on it?”

  I’d already asked myself the same question, so I had some answers ready: “They might not have had time. Or maybe they thought the scenario looked so cut-and-dried there wouldn’t be an investigation. They could be too dumb to have thought of it, or so arrogant they think they can get away with stuff like that because they’re so much cleverer than us. Maybe they get a kick out of knowing there’s a risk of being caught. Or maybe it’s something else entirely, something more bizarre than I’m able to think of. All I know is that I’d like to find out what really happened. Doug deserves that much. Besides, justice demands an explanation. And so does my own curiosity.”

  “Without a motive you don’t have a case.”

  “I only have no case if you have an explanation for the lack of prints on the syringe,” I said. “Do you?”

  I wanted her to admit she was stumped. But, of course, she didn’t.

  I let the silence stretch for long enough to be awkward, then gave her a way out by saying, “I think it’s at least worth having a word with his daughter, finding out if she had a motive or knows of anyone who does. What do you say?” I asked, knowing my perfect partner couldn’t say no.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE LAST DAYS OF OLD EARTH

  “WE’LL COME BACK LATER,” PAULA SAID TO ME. WE were standing outside one of Haven Nine’s classrooms, looking through the clear panel in the door. The lights were off and one wall of the room was alive with dramatic images from the Old Days; an audiovisual presentation was in progress. I watched the pupils. They were little more than silhouettes and shadows. Some leaned forward over their carbon-fiber desks, obviously fascinated by what they saw. Others sat
back and stared at the wallscreen with little interest, fidgeting restlessly. You can see the difference between us and them even at this age and when it’s too dark to make out faces.

  Annie MacDougall stood to one side of the wallscreen, dividing her attention between the images and her class. The sound-proofing was so good we couldn’t hear her words, but the pictures told me she was giving a history lecture. I love learning about the past. So, ignoring what Paula said about coming back later, I quietly opened the door and entered the classroom.

  “Travis!” Paula said in an angry whisper that turned every head in our direction.

  We were saved by an atomic bomb exploding—a giant mushroom cloud filled the wallscreen, its awful beauty drawing all eyes to it. All eyes but the teacher’s. She stared at us, her face illuminated by the nuclear blast. She had her father’s dirty blond hair, but her features were pretty and feminine. They didn’t hold my attention, however; it was drawn by her left arm, which was less than half the size it should have been and ended in a hand not much bigger than a toddler’s. I guess she’d paid the price for the damage done to Doug’s DNA by his lifelong love of prospecting for plants. Whatever, instead of getting a limb graft, Annie MacDougall had tailored her coverall to fit her arm. It must take real guts to stand up in front of a class that’s more than half full of physically perfect people when you have a disability of that nature, and I found myself full of admiration for her.

  The screen went black. I used the cover of darkness to sit down in an empty seat, and Paula hurriedly sat next to me. She gave me a dig in the ribs to express her anger at the way I’d ignored her order. Since we were in a classroom I figured it was okay to act like a child, and stuck my tongue out at her.

  A young Name behind us laughed at my clowning but the sound died in his throat when the wallscreen came to life again, because it showed footage of badly burned, bewildered figures stumbling through the ruins of Hiroshima. Annie MacDougall let the image speak for itself, then said, “The Second World War was followed by the so-called Cold War, with the United States and Russia locked in a ruinous arms race and the entire world living in fear of atomic Armageddon.”

  Images of missile silos and nuclear submarines flashed across the screen.

  “In the end, it was market forces rather than military might which ended the Cold War.” The screen showed a picture of American fast-food franchises within sight of the Kremlin, followed by images of the Berlin Wall being torn down.

  I sensed Paula fidgeting beside me. For some reason Numbers can’t relate to the past and have no interest in it. If you asked them to explain why they feel that way, they’d no doubt say the past is gone and time spent thinking about it is wasted. They’d say it’s more logical to think about the present and the future because you can do something about them. I think there’s more to it than that, though. I think their lack of interest in the past stems from the fact they don’t feel connected to it in any way. Sometimes I envy them because they have no sense of shame and guilt over what was done to the planet. But most of the time I pity them, because they can never know the excitement of finding out about their forefathers. They can never uncover ancestral acts of heroism and romance and kindness, take pride in knowing a part of all of that lives on in themselves. Numbers learn the important dates from the past and remember them long after we do, but they don’t understand the stories behind them. They could tell you when the Taj Mahal was built, but couldn’t hope to understand the love that led to its construction.

  “Capitalism was now king,” Annie MacDougall said. The backdrop changed to a stock exchange in London or New York. Traders frantically waved pieces of paper to get attention, while above them a neon ticker-tape conveyed the latest share prices, telling of fortunes made and lost in the blink of an eye. The classroom around me was filled with the frenzied bidding of jostling brokers from a bygone age, each shouting louder than the next. A bell rang to signal the close of business, the brokers fell silent, and Annie MacDougall said, “You’re witnessing the collective madness of unbridled individual greed, of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  “Perhaps it’s human nature to never be satisfied with what you have. Over the ages this desire for more was a great asset. It drove men to the ends of the earth, firing their imaginations and fuelling their ingenuity, leading them to risk their lives and make great discoveries in the process.

  “But, by the end of the twentieth century, people had developed the technology to actually satisfy an unhealthy amount of their desires. You could say they’d gained a great deal of knowledge without acquiring the wisdom or self-restraint that would have made it a blessing rather than a curse. Completely failing to recognize that there’s a balance between living standards and quality of life, they single-mindedly strove to improve the former without due thought for the latter.

  “Nothing illustrates the folly of this time better than attitudes toward the motor car. It became commonplace for households in the developed world to have two or three—”

  The screen filled with an aerial view of a city grid-locked by eight lanes of nose-to-tail traffic, accompanied by a soundtrack of bad-tempered horn-honking.

  “And when traffic became unmanageable the ‘solution’ adopted was the worst one possible—the building of more roads.

  “As with cars, so with other things. Each household had two or three television sets, three or four computers. Technology made consumer goods obsolete within months rather than years, and everyone wanted the latest model, the next big thing.

  “And, thanks to the onset of the information age and the power of advertising, people in the underdeveloped world became increasingly aware of what those in the west had, and wanted such things for themselves.”

  Her point was made by shots of a hillside favela where every second shanty had a satellite TV dish.

  “These growing expectations effectively had a multiplier effect on the environmental footprint left by a global population which was doubling in less than a lifetime, with over a million more mouths to feed every week.

  “The inevitable result was the rapid depletion of resources far beyond Earth’s ability to replenish them—” An aerial view of an isolated patch of rainforest in a windblown plain of dust flashed across the screen.

  “And the pollution of the planet beyond its ability to recover—” A lake filled with scummy water and dead fish made further words unnecessary.

  “Mankind was living on borrowed time, lulled into a false sense of security by Earth’s amazing resilience and our own extraordinary selfishness and short-sighted—”

  “Their extraordinary selfishness and short-sightedness,” one of the students said.

  Annie MacDougall paused and looked in the direction of the bored, know-it-all voice.

  I didn’t have to do likewise to know the speaker was a Number.

  “You said ‘lulled into a false sense of security by our own selfishness and short-sightedness’,” the student said, as if he was the teacher. “You should have said their.”

  Annie was either very good-natured or simply resigned to dealing with obnoxious smart-asses, because she managed to keep her cool. “You have a point,” she conceded. “However, if I’d said their, someone could have told me that I should have said our. Perhaps I should have said simply ‘lulled into a false sense of security by selfishness and shortsightedness’.”

  “It’s more accurate and concise,” the student said snottily.

  I’d had enough and was about to turn around and tell the know-it-all to shut up, but Paula covered my mouth with her hand before I could get the words out.

  For a moment Annie MacDougall looked like she was going to rebuke the smartass student, but she thought better of it and clicked the tiny audio-visual controller in her good hand to bring up the next image. It showed a city being lashed by a hurricane. Trees were uprooted, roofs ripped off buildings, and cars floated down streets that had been turned into waterways by torrential rain.
“There were warning signs that we were doing irreparable damage to—” Annie stopped to correct herself—”that irreparable damage was being done to the planet. But those warnings were initially dismissed as aberrations or arbitrary acts of God.

  “As the warning signs increased in frequency and intensity, so they became harder to dismiss. However, efforts to tackle the global warming that lay behind these catastrophes were completely ineffective.”

  “Really?” another of those arrogant voices said sarcastically.

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell us why they were ineffective,” Annie MacDougall said.

  When her offer wasn’t taken up, she said, “Then maybe you’ll show enough manners to keep quiet while I tell you.” A click of the AV controller filled the wallscreen with a picture of a wind farm. “The early efforts to counteract global warming took the form of mainly token gestures in the developed world, where countries struggled merely to reduce the increase in harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

  “Meanwhile there were vast increases in such emissions from the developing world, especially China and India.

  “Remedial action was hindered by the impossibility of producing a definitive model to predict the threat being faced; global warming is a complex function of an almost infinite amount of interlinked variables, each of them responding with different sensitivity, and each affecting all the others. As a result, the early models ranged from the idea that big increases in greenhouses gases had a small effect as the Earth would find ways to compensate, to the notion of an unknown threshold—a point beyond which drastic changes would take place. People tended to believe the former as it was what they wanted to believe, and because the latter prospect was so frightening.