Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  50 minutes oxygen remaining

  My display is giving me regular updates now. I’m trying to stay calm, breathing as shallowly as possible, but I know I’m pushing my luck.

  “How’s your O2?” I ask, not daring to take my eyes off you.

  “Getting low.” Jorge’s reply is tense.

  “How low?”

  “25, 30 minutes.”

  My stomach knots. Our air compressors would have switched off at roughly the same time. Jorge’s lower reserves must be due to his fall and the corresponding pain. He’ll have been breathing harder than me.

  “Hang on, mate. Short breaths. We’ll get back.” But I don’t know if we will.

  I speed up as much as I dare, watching your nimble form all the while. It’s almost as if you recognise our new urgency. Your pace picks up along with the buggy’s. You shift one way and I follow, realising moments later that we’ve bypassed a boulder hulking in the brown fog. We skirt obstacles I can’t see, time and again, and I can almost feel Jorge squeezing his eyes shut as we rumble along in the blinding haze.

  20 minutes oxygen remaining

  I risk a glance at Jorge. His head is nodding.

  “Jorge! Don’t you pass out on me!”

  “Lightheaded,” he mutters.

  I’m feeling that way myself as I eke out my remaining supply. Your lithe shape seems to grow clearer even though the dust as is thick as ever. Your fur should be tinged red from the dust, but it isn’t. It’s not even shifting in the light winds. I suddenly long to feel its softness again. Your velvet ears. Your rough pads as you rest your paw on my knee.

  Jorge’s head drops against his chest. The movement startles me out of my storm-lulled reverie.

  “Jorge. Jorge!” He doesn’t respond.

  15 minutes oxygen remaining

  We’re not going to make it. A swell of panic rises in me for the first time. I’ve never doubted your ability to get us home. But you can’t help us breathe.

  “Baskerville.” I whisper your name, not sure if I’m seeking reassurance or a miracle.

  You stop. You look right at me, and I’m pivoting on your gaze, my dizzy head finding an anchor in your eyes. I brake before I know what I’m doing, and suddenly…Behind you. The settlement lights, finally glowing through the dust, beacons of safety in the gloom. We shouldn’t be here yet. Did you find a shortcut, my four-pawed scout?

  I pull up beside the nearest airlock and press the activation control. The lock cycles and turns green, and the door slides up. Whooshes of dust precede the buggy inside, and we’re home. Back to safety and clear vision and medical aid. The air clears as the chamber is flooded with breathable atmosphere. I pull off Jorge’s helmet and am relieved to see he’s still breathing, albeit in a ragged wheeze. He gasps in air and coughs on dust, and I tear off my own helmet and do the same. My head clears and I find myself looking for you as the dust dissipates and settles to the ground.

  I don’t know what I expect to see. You’re not here. Of course you aren’t. Yet the weight of loss threatens to swamp me again after following you all this way. Jorge groans in pain as he tries to move, and I’m back in the moment, glad of the distraction from my self-pity.

  I manage to help him inside, where Priya, Anders, and Lucy are waiting. They welcome us with open arms and smiles of relief. They whisk Jorge off to sickbay and I head back to clean up the buggy and put it away before dust settles firmly into its mechanisms. Alone again, I lean against the bulkhead and breathe deeply, fighting waves of fresh sorrow. I miss you so god-damned much.

  Standing here, under bright lights, breathing plentiful air, my face free of its visor and my vision clear right across the airlock, a twist of anxiety forms in my stomach. Was I completely mad to risk so much? Sure, I found Jorge, but I could have killed myself trying, or doomed us both on the journey back. What was I thinking?

  The mind plays terrible tricks when one’s senses are impaired. I recall I’d been thinking of you, missing you anew, only moments before the storm hit. Did I really just risk my own life and that of my fellow pioneer on the basis of dust visions and wishful thinking? We’d have been dead if I hadn’t. But even that truth doesn’t ease the lingering panic at the realisation of what an utter fool I’ve been.

  I shake my head of the fruitless thought and grab the vacuum brush to clean up the buggy. There’s a fresh layer of dust all over the floor, too. My bootprints mark it as I approach, and there…

  I choke back a sob. It can’t be.

  It is.

  I kneel in the dust and cup its shape in my hands.

  It’s a single pawprint, perfectly rendered, perfectly yours, imprinted like none before and none to come, in the ancient Martian dust.

  Daddy's Girl(Short story)

  by Eleanor R. Wood

  Originally published by Crossed Genres

  Daddy lived in the cupboard under the stairs. I hardly ever saw him. Myra saw her dad twice a week, even though he didn’t live with them. Daddy still lived with us, but his eyes were dim and his limbs were still. Sometimes I’d sneak into the cupboard when Mum wasn’t looking and dust the cobwebs from his skin. I would sit beside him and lift one of his heavy arms around me and pretend he was really hugging me even though the arm hung limply beside me if I let go of his hand. But I could still lean against his steadfast frame and breathe in his faint metallic scent, laced with stale traces of his cologne.

  It was the scent of safety, and love, and protection.

  I took on two paper routes when Daddy was put away. For the first week he remained lifeless on the sofa, sitting there like he’d just sat down to watch TV or help me with homework. But one day I came home to find him gone. Mum came in from work and told me, in a tight voice, that she’d put him under the stairs. ‘For now.’ Because we didn’t know what had broken, and it was too painful to have him sitting there.

  People had started reading the news on paper again with the price of electricity so high. Paper needed delivering, and we needed the money. Mum already worked every available shift, so the more I could help out, the sooner we’d have Daddy home again. Properly home. Sitting at the table while we ate dinner. Waiting for me when I got home from school. Mowing the back lawn on a sunny afternoon. Not slumped in the dusty darkness with the spiders and creaking stair boards.

  Months passed and our meagre savings still weren’t near enough. My birthday was coming up, and I cried at the thought of spending it without Daddy. My first ever birthday without him. My thirteenth. It was supposed to be a big day when you became a teenager. I just wanted to stay twelve until we were a family again.

  Mum heard me crying and came to sit on my bed. She stroked my hair, not needing to ask what was wrong.

  “What if we don’t ever save up enough, Mum?” I asked, my voice hitching on a sob.

  “We will, sweetheart. As long as we keep our belts tight and put aside everything we can, eventually we’ll have enough.”

  “But that could take years!”

  “I know, baby. But we’ll do it. He would never give up on us, and we won’t ever give up on him.”

  I knew it was true; I’d known Daddy’s story my whole life. Mum hadn’t given up on him after the accident, either. Even when the doctors told her not to cling to a pipedream. Even when the dream came true and she was offered the uncertainty of testing a prototype that had never been tried before. He was the man she loved. The father of her unborn child. She had to give him a chance, even a radical one on the fringes of science. His body was useless, but his mind was alive and trapped.

  So they freed him. His first body was little more than a computer, but they built him a proper one with synthetic flesh and the likeness of his own face. And he was my daddy. The only one I’d ever known.

  Most children are told the tale of how their parents met. I was told how mine met all over again, and how Mum had placed the wriggling bundle that was me into Daddy’s brand new arms. How he’d looked into my eyes and longed for real tears to express his ov
erwhelming joy.

  I had enough real tears for both of us now. I finished my paper route one evening and rode my bike out to the old quarry. Daddy used to take me to see the city skyline from the top of it, cupped in the lip of brutally gouged stone that formed the quarry’s outer edge. Many of the tallest buildings looked desolate now, even from here. I remembered a time when they’d been gleaming and bright, beacons of human success and financial prowess. The company that built Daddy had been housed in one of them. They’d gone bust just like all the others, leaving us with no hope if anything went wrong. And of course it had gone wrong, and my daddy was sitting lifeless under the stairs waiting in vain for us to scrape enough together to have him mended.

  The sobs broke through my chest before I even realised they were building. I screamed a throat-rending yell that bounced off the quarry walls and repeated itself until it diminished to nothing. I grabbed a rock and flung it at the distant skyscrapers, my rage finally finding an outlet in their failure.

  I felt a little better, but I realised then that I needed to do more than extra paper rounds. I needed to feel I was contributing something useful. Daddy’s experts were still out there somewhere, scattered into more austere professions, but they were no use without the mammoth funds. Saving up enough was going to take years. So be it. I would put those years to good use.

  ***

  By the time I was sixteen, my shelves were piled with physics textbooks and robotics manuals. Myra’s bedroom walls were covered in posters of bare-chested hunks I’d never heard of because I had my nose in New Scientist while she was reading Seventeen. I had a picture of Hiroshi Ishiguro above my bed.

  “You fancy that guy?” Myra asked one day.

  I rolled my eyes in frustration. “I don’t fancy him, Myra. I admire him. He was a robotics pioneer who built one of the first interactive humanoid robots.”

  She looked around my room with an expression of disdain. “You seriously need to get out more.”

  That was the day I realised I’d outgrown her friendship. I sat under the stairs with Daddy that evening, feeling closer to him than I did to any of my peers. I pulled his arm around me and told him what Myra had said. He listened in stoic silence as always. I kissed him on the cheek and vowed he’d always be more important to me than silly nail-varnish-wearing girls.

  ***

  By the time I was eighteen, the economy was slowly recovering. Food bank queues were ever shorter, councils were repairing roads again, and most importantly of all, I’d earned a scholarship to Cambridge. I was ecstatic. By now Mum and I had scraped together a few thousand, but still nowhere near enough to have Daddy fixed. Without a scholarship, there was no way I could have gone to university.

  I made Mum promise to keep Daddy free of cobwebs and dust while I was away.

  ***

  By the time I was twenty-three, I was embarking on a Master’s degree in computational neuroscience and cognitive robotics. The depression had stunted the development of android technology, so they were still rare and expensive. The lab had one as a subject for study, but its consciousness was entirely artificial.

  I was examining its servomotors late one afternoon. One of my fellow students, Raz, was working on something else two benches over. He stopped to watch me.

  “Did you know Edinburgh had an uploaded consciousness model?” he asked. “I’d sell my gran to get my hands on one of those.”

  “What happened to it?” I tried to sound casual.

  “I dunno.” He flicked dark hair out of his eyes. “Somebody said it got tired of being a lab rat and walked out, but I heard that was just a stupid rumour. It’s not like they have human rights!” He seemed to find this funny.

  Until then, I’d been considering the idea of bringing Daddy here. There were enough experts at the university to mend him, possibly at reduced cost, but I realised he would become a coveted object for study. I couldn’t do that to him.

  I lowered my head, got on with my work, and politely ignored Raz for the rest of the semester. I was the only Cambridge postgrad who had ever seen an android with uploaded human consciousness, and I never mentioned it to anyone. Daddy wasn’t an android to me. He was my dad, and I missed him terribly.

  I studied, and learned, and worked a waitressing job in my spare time. I deposited all but my most basic expenses into the savings account I shared with Mum. For Daddy.

  ***

  I built my first artificially intelligent model for my dissertation. I’d built smaller robots before; I’d been building them since I was fifteen, but this was the first machine I’d built that could learn and think for itself. I modelled its brain on that of a human toddler, with all the same capacity for growth. I wanted to see how long it took to develop the mental skills of a human adult.

  I graduated with honours and received a commendation from the university.

  ***

  The pioneering research into transferring human consciousness had all but ground to a halt when its funding dried up. But now that the recession was fading, there were new companies eager to invest in up-and-coming technology, and several were vying to be the first to patent prosthetic bodies for living consciousness. Less than a year into my doctorate, I was approached by a headhunter.

  “We’d love to have you on board, Miss Landry.”

  They would fund my doctorate if I agreed to carry out research on their behalf. It was the foot in the door I’d been dreaming of.

  ***

  The working atmosphere in the lab was a strange one. We were fellows, all sharing the same passions and goals, relating to one another in ways we couldn’t with others in our daily lives. Yet we were also rivals, competing for that first ground-breaking discovery or technological advancement. The harsh competition meant we closely guarded our discoveries, kept our advancements under wraps, and took every advantage ruthlessly. It was the only way to get ahead.

  My closest competitor was a guy named Mark. He seemed decent, but I’d never got close enough to really know him. As the two highest academic achievers and the two most likely to hit a breakthrough, we held each other in mutual respect but kept our distance. Another lab partner, Susie, pulled me up on it one day.

  “Do you really have to minimise your computer files every time Mark walks past?”

  “Don’t you?” I asked.

  “No!” Her tone suggested I was being ridiculous. “I’m not about to let him rifle through my notes, but a glance at my screen won’t tell him anything.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I muttered. “You know he only keeps paper notes in case anyone hacks his system, right? He takes the damned things everywhere with him.”

  “So because he’s paranoid, you have to be too?”

  “I wouldn’t call protecting my research ‘paranoia’. The guy’s practically a genius, Suse. He doesn’t need any help from the likes of us.”

  She laughed. “So said the pot to the kettle…”

  I rolled my eyes at her. In truth, we all had our own methods of protecting our work. We shared trivia. We kept our trump cards close to our chests.

  ***

  Mum was visiting her sister in Scotland. I went to see Daddy for the first time in weeks. He gazed through me when I opened the cupboard and crouched down in front of him.

  “Come on, Daddy. It’s time.”

  His joints creaked as I shifted him forward. I’d often wondered how Mum had managed to get him in here. His frame was reinforced aluminium, but he still weighed about the same as an average-sized man. He was a dead weight as I dragged him out of the cupboard that had been his home for the past fourteen years. I winced an apology when his head bumped the floor. I heard a tear as his trouser leg caught on an exposed nail. I was breathing hard before I’d got him halfway down the hall.

  I wrangled him into an awkward position on the back seat of my car, glad of the fading dusk that gave me some privacy against nosy neighbours. I drove straight to the lab, the hour-long journey giving me time to consider how I’d get Daddy in
side unseen. I talked to him about it on the way, marvelling at taking a car journey with my dad for the first time since my childhood.

  It was difficult and tiring, but after draping Daddy in a blanket and positioning my access card so the entry scanners could read it without my letting go of him, I managed to negotiate the lift to the second floor and finally get him inside my lab. No one else was there; it was Friday night, and they’d all gone home for the weekend, leaving me two whole days to tinker with the most important project I’d ever taken on.

  I heaved him face down onto a workbench, pulling a muscle in my back. I stumbled to a chair and sat, wincing at the pain and trying in vain to massage it away. After a few moments, it eased enough that I could stand and stretch a little. I popped some paracetamol to take care of the rest. No time for distractions; I had work to do.

  There was an access port at the base of Daddy’s skull, hidden beneath his hair. I realised straight away that it was an old connection. My cables wouldn’t fit, but there had to be an adaptor around somewhere. I scoured the lab and found one connected to an old computer interface. With its help, I plugged a cable into Daddy and hooked him up to my diagnostic computer. I checked his power supply while it was running. He ran mainly on an ultra-compact gas turbine tucked under his ribcage. I opened the panel and an intense memory hit me: Daddy standing in the kitchen, his torso panel open as he fitted a fresh gas cylinder. I remembered looking for my own panel and wondering why I didn’t have one.

  “Little girls have tummies instead,” he’d answered my plaintive query. “They fill them with tasty things like toast and jam to give them energy for the day. My energy goes in here…” he closed his panel “…and yours goes in here!” He’d pounced on my tummy and tickled me into hysterics.

  I smiled at the memory and went to check if we had the right model cylinder. When I returned, the computer was flashing its diagnosis. My heart sank. It had flagged two errors, one of which I could handle. But the other problem was beyond my scope. A machine like Daddy would have been built and maintained by a team of people. I’d been a fool to hope I could mend whatever was wrong with him unaided.