Twelve Tomorrows - Visionary stories of the near future inspired by today's technologies

by Neal Stephenson

  So, in my scheme, two new tubes are involved. Breathing and eating once often had to take place simultaneously, through the same duct. Air and food passages met and crossed at the pharynx, under the old, the age-old, dispensation—to which the West still fatally adheres. The dangers here of choking are obvious.

  It was simple work to tee in a bypass. Slightly longer bypasses were needed to deflect the base of the bladder, which had always lain against the uterus and vagina in a woman and against the prostate gland in the male. This could easily be deflected by another tube branching off to the bowel.

  It was here I played my master stroke. A longer tube was designed to run from the intestines internally down the right leg to the big toe, so that Lu Shei’s recent embarrassment could never arise again. With my invention, those of either sex requiring the relief of defecation had merely to stick out their foot to jettison the unwanted nightsoil or shit and piss, if I may use those popular terms for the sake of clarity. No more untidy removal of garments. Sandals immediately became popular.

  These revolutionary improvements had for one generation to be conducted by acupuncture anaesthesia. But evolutionary research into DNA strategies made the new refined corrections inheritable. Thus these improvements to the human race were safeguarded and that ‘world of mortals’ of which Wi Ting had spoken so wittily became altogether a happier and healthier place.

  At first these brilliant developments were known technically as ‘Xio eu jian,’ or strong and weak points. Then a law was passed. Now these great benefits are known by my name.

  I am, by government decree, the Mighty Mi Tok of Beijing. ■

  In Sight

  Cheryl Rydbom

  “Did you see the numbers on that shooting?” Mari likes to chatter when she’s nervous, and she’s always nervous just before a job. “Two dozen stills submitted within thirty minutes of the 9-1-1. Three were so good that the cops had to pay out reward money. They didn’t even need to stoop to snooping ident chips.”

  “You don’t believe that.” My eyes are locked on the building across the street, and I’m only half listening. People are exercising in the windows of the third floor, but it’s the double glass-front doors that have my attention. “They cross-referenced the shots against chips during that time frame.”

  The doors open and one of the gym’s regulars walks out.

  “Here we go.”

  I cross at the light, catching up with the woman as she heads uptown, back to work. She always showers at the gym, which is a little inconvenient, but I can work in heels and a suit.

  I only have to get within five feet to make an untraceable, almost instant, surface clone. Seconds later, I’m heading back to her gym. I pull on yellow-lensed specs and ready my cloaking patch. As soon as I cross the building’s threshold, for all intents and purposes, I’ll be Layla Bradley, and Layla Bradley prefers yellow sunglasses. Building security might notice if such an obvious affectation was missing.

  “No tourists around you,” says Mari, now speaking into my ear.

  Recently the government funded a low-maintenance surveillance system. They pay good credits for witness photographs. Now, with the glut of inexpensive camera-equipped devices available, they have eyes everywhere.

  As I step through the double glass doors, I press the patch onto my wrist and tap on the clone. No one at security even glances at me. I exit the elevator at the gym’s entrance and shut off the cloned chip. Now I’m invisible. It’s a quick jog up the stairs, in heels, to the roof.

  I’ve configured my workspace so many times it takes just seconds. Tripod, laser, antenna, scope, and tablet.

  “Hey, Robyn, I’m sending you an updated still. He’s on the move.”

  I click my tongue. Sure our VoIP is encrypted, but Mari knows better than to use my name.

  A grainy picture of Jack Prince appears in the middle of my vision. It doesn’t look much different from the head shot I already have, but now I know he’s wearing his navy jacket. I adjust the picture’s opacity and shift it to my periphery.

  “The more I read about this guy, the less I like him,” she says.

  She flashes an article to me. She’s highlighted a couple of sentences: Prince Enterprises outbids Angel Wings on real estate intended for women’s shelter. Mr. Jack Prince, Prince Enterprises’ CEO, suggests that the charity might find a more suitable location outside city limits.

  I blink away the article as she mutters, “Arrogant bastard.”

  For me to have been assigned his dossier, he was more than just arrogant.

  I see his jacket first and use it to lock my scope. He stops to admire some phone accessories at a sidewalk kiosk. My pattern-matching app draws a grid of thin green lines across both his face and the picture, confirming his identity as he fingers some external speakers. The lines are even greener against the yellow lenses.

  I narrow my eyes, breathe out a long, slow breath, and pull the trigger.

  A focused beam of radio waves drills through Prince’s clothes, a long-range mimic of a short-ranged e-pay reader. Microseconds pass and nothing, then text scrolls as the point-to-point connection is established. It takes another three seconds to obliterate the remaining security protocols and copy the contents of his chip. At the soft chime, I break the connection. I have the clone. Unlike the one of Layla Bradley, this is more than just Prince’s public identity; it’s everything he’s ever stored.

  “Shit! What’d you do?” Mari’s voice is shrill.

  I’m already moving to dismantle my equipment. “All done. Time to exit.”

  “Alarms are going off everywhere. Prince is on the phone. Pretty sure it’s with the police.”

  I blink and two milliseconds pass while I process her words. “He had it trapped.”

  “Clearly.” Mari’s exasperation morphs into professionalism. “Hit him again and I can get you out.”

  Another blink and my fingers are frantically tapping on the tablet. “This clone has an expiration.”

  Mari doesn’t say anything for several long seconds. My fingers mask the silence, but not the sound of sirens in the distance.

  Then she harrumphs. “Two minutes and I’m gone.”

  “Good.”

  After a hit, we usually have several hours to bleed the target and distribute their funds: I have ninety seconds. Fortunately, most of the code is in place. I kick off the script to access Prince’s credits, and while it’s processing, I open the list of predetermined charities. I plug them into a second script, set up percentages, and crawl back to my scope.

  “C’mon!” Mari is close to hyperventilating. “Prince is still on the phone, but he’s searching the street. Tell me you’re hidden.”

  “I’m hidden.” I’m deep in shadow, lying flat on my belly, on the roof of an eight-story building.

  I glare into the eyepiece, adjusting my laser’s power. Prince is gesturing widely enough to have caught the attention of the citizenry. Camera-ready devices of all shapes are pointed in his direction. I expel my lungs and pull the trigger again.

  Prince stumbles backward, shaking his hand like it’s been burned.

  Mari chuckles maniacally, but I take it as confirmation that Prince’s chip is wiped. I pull down my gear and move into the deeper shadows.

  While the first script is still churning, I stow everything but the tablet. Finally, it pings. The balance is staggering. It’s way too much to distribute without consideration.

  “I need an emergency account.”

  “Dammit.”

  Mari’s fingernails click on her tablet. Only seconds pass, but the wait is interminable. The sirens are almost on top of me. Just as I’m about to hurry her, she sends me the number and I transfer everything to the new account.

  I fly down five flights, stopping outside the gym to brush grit from my slacks and switch on the Layla Bradley clone.

  “Diversion?”

  “Just get out of there. Trust me; no one will be looking at you.” Mari is giddy, which is rarely a good t
hing and never a subtle thing.

  Blinding blue lights flash on top of the haphazardly strewn police cars. The officers are already moving through the crowd, scanners out. If I step outside, there might be enough of a distraction to keep the photo-happy citizenry from noticing me, but I’m too paranoid to trust might. I spot a college kid, across the street, fingers on his glasses as he pivots slowly.

  A cacophony of bangs and pops erupts. I dash outside, along with everyone else. More noise. Some people scream, but the sounds are just sounds. Nothing malevolent. Every lens is pointed in the direction of the noise, including the college kid’s. In Prince’s direction. My heels help me peer over the crowd to see smoking speakers at the accessories kiosk.

  Someone yells, “Freeze!”

  All the police officers train their weapons on Prince.

  A staticky voice, from the archaic radio in an open squad car, says, “This guy’s ident chip is unstable. His ID keeps changing.”

  Another voice crackles, “It’s copying nearby chips. My scanner is reading duplicates.”

  Prince starts yelling about lawyers and I start moving.

  “Nice distraction.”

  Mari snorts. “The sonic fireworks or the flash-install of surface cloning software on his ident chip?”

  Two blocks away, I duck in and out of a restaurant, using its threshold to cover me as I rip off the cloaking patch. Good-bye, Layla Bradley. I trade the yellow sunglasses for dark ones.

  “Tomorrow’s headline.” Mari is burbling with barely suppressed laughter.

  Words flash across my vision: Prince to Pauper. ■

  Transitional Forms

  Paul McAuley

  At night, the hot zone was patched with drifts of soft pastel light. Violets and indigos; dark reds, translucent greens. Jellyfish genes for luminescence had been used as markers for tweaks in the first genetically modified organisms, and that tradition had been adopted by a-life hackers. The colours were tags, territorial claims that pulsed and twinkled like spring blossoms in an alien and verdant land.

  Ray Roberts had been patrolling the hot zone and the desert around its perimeter for two years now, and he still thought it beautiful, at night. During the day, the trees and other a-life organisms baked under the sun-bleached sky. Black twisted lattices like the charred skeletons of cacti; carbonised spikes and spurs like the armatures of nuclear-blasted buildings. Tangles of burnt wire. Fields of grim sculpture. But at night, shrouded in soft clouds of colour, it was a fairyland.

  That particular night, about a week after a salvage gang had infiltrated the zone and stripped copper and molybdenum beads from about twenty hectares of metal-concentrating trees, Ray was riding his bay gelding, Winston, along the dirt roads that switchbacked over the dump rock hills. He was plugged into the surveillance grid of cameras and drones. GPS tracked him to within a metre. He reported to dispatch every thirty minutes, and the reports of the other patrols crackled in his earpiece. The zone was on amber alert because the salvage gang would almost certainly be back for more, but that night everyone was reporting they’d nothing to report.

  Around midnight, he met up with two colleagues at one of the monitoring stations near the pit of the exhausted copper mine at the core of the zone. They watered their horses from the standpipe, exchanged gossip, moved on. At sunup, Ray and Winston were heading home along the old boundary road when he spotted something up on a ridge. A glint, a speck in the eye, a dead pixel in a heads-up display. He glassed it in UV and infrared, made the call when he was certain of what he was seeing, gave dispatch a good shot with the camera built into his glasses, got permission to check it out.

  He kept a wary eye on the spot, let Winston pick his way between rocks and mini-cathedrals of black spikes and clumps of prickly pear. At the top of the ridge, he reined in his horse and sat and waited, one hand close to the taser holstered at his hip. He’d never yet had to use it in anger, but you never could tell.

  To the naked eye, the tent’s canvas perfectly matched the ground’s dry pebbly texture. Pretty soon a woman emerged, as if swimming out of a rent in the air. T-shirt and jeans, dirty blond hair in a ponytail, sunglasses heliographing early morning sun as she looked up at him.

  Ray asked her if she was alone: ‘Neither of us need any surprises.’

  ‘There’s no one here but me and the ants.’

  ‘They do thrive out here.’

  ‘I saw an owl, too.’

  ‘This area’s been cleaned up by the a-life, pretty much. The desert’s coming back in.’

  Ray’s glasses had grabbed the woman’s face by now, checked it against the government databases. Janine Childs. BSc, PhD, both degrees from UCLA. A spell of employment in the California Department of Fish and Game, then some startup funded by South Korea, working in Kazakhstan. Currently freelance. The usual traffic citations, a divorce, no criminal record. Thirty-one, five-eleven, blond hair, blue eyes.

  She didn’t flinch when Ray swung down from his saddle. She was exactly his height.

  He said, ‘You know why I came up here?’

  ‘I guess I picked the wrong place to camp.’

  ‘I guess you did. You’re about ten kilometres inside a state-designated exclusion zone.’

  ‘I’ll pack up and move on right away. Unless you’re going to arrest me,’ Janine Childs said, with a nice smile. ‘Are you going to arrest me?’

  ‘That depends on what you have cached up yonder.’

  ‘Oh. I was hoping you hadn’t spotted that.’

  ‘Your camo is good, but it’s military surplus. And it’s surplus because someone figured out how to detect it. Let’s go see what you’ve got.’

  After Janine Childs had pulled back the camo tarp, Ray studied the fans and the tubing and the rolling strips of sticky paper, then said, ‘You’re collecting spores.’

  ‘Suppose I said I was doing pollen counts?’

  ‘In September? I’d say you’re either six months late or six months early. I’d also say you should have picked a spot a couple of kilometres further in, if you were expecting to pick up anything from the core. The spores don’t travel far, even on a good wind.’

  ‘Then I guess I’ve only broken the law a little bit. Will I get to keep my equipment?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say, ma’am.’

  ‘Janine.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She was one of those who liked to play the good sport when busted, asking Ray if he got a bonus for bringing in bandits, asking him how long he’d been riding the range, asking him where he’d bought his cowboy hat.

  ‘It’s a Stetson. Western Straw. There’s a place in Yuma sells them.’

  ‘It suits you better than the yellow safety jacket and black coveralls combo. Do they sell cowboy boots in that place in Yuma?’

  ‘They sell just about everything in that line.’

  Ray couldn’t tell if she was serious or just having fun, and discovered he didn’t mind.

  She said, ‘I was thinking of buying a pair. I bet you wear them, off duty.’

  Eventually the backup arrived, two troopers in a Blazer. Janine Childs handed over the keys to the rented 4x4 she’d hidden under a camo tarp on the back slope, submitted to being cuffed, and allowed Ray to help her into the rear seat of the Blazer.

  ‘Maybe I’ll see you again,’ she said.

  Ray filed papers back at the station. He heard a couple of days later that Janine Childs’s equipment had been confiscated and she’d been freed with a caution.

  ‘Think she has a taste for it?’ the section supervisor said.

  ‘She seemed to be having fun,’ Ray said.

  ‘Then she’ll be back,’ the supervisor said. ‘You ask me, people like her are being given too much slack these days. We catch them and hand them over to the troopers, and instead of prosecuting them the state throws them right back into the mix.’

  ‘I guess it keeps everyone in business,’ Ray said.

  Everyone knew that most of the hackers and war
e pirates were funded by the skunk works of biotech companies. The state confiscated the data and samples and equipment of everyone caught infiltrating the zone, then sold it back to the companies. It was the only way anyone could make any money until ownership of the zone was resolved.

  The supervisor was an old-time guy who’d been laid off from the Phoenix police force when it had been privatised. He said, ‘It’s policy, and we get paid to enforce it, but I don’t have to like it.’

  Two months passed. Ray helped round up the salvage gang when they came back for more, and caught a pair of ware pirates with rucksacks packed with samples sawn from a-life trees and shrubs, but he saw no sign or trace of Janine Childs. Then, early in November, a new tweak caused a serious stepwise change in the dense ecology of a-life organisms growing in the core of the hot zone.

  The original a-life organisms had been designed to extract low levels of copper, gold, silver, and molybdenum from the bench terraces of the old copper mine and the dump rock hills around it. Powered by various forms of artificial photosynthesis, they put down long roots that ramified through bedrock like the threads of fungus through rotten wood, and selectively grabbed heavy metals and concentrated them in ‘berries’ strung along their branches.

  The process had worked pretty well until the third major recession since the turn of the century had bankrupted both the company that had planted the a-life organisms and Arizona’s state government. The a-life organisms had spread unchecked into the desert around the mine, and the biotech company that had purchased a license to use the site as an experimental facility was discovered to have been performing all kinds of clandestine work. Some of the original a-life trees were still down in the mine’s pit, grown in tall tottering lattices like mediaeval siege towers, but most had been swamped by vigorous new forms of a-life. The rogue company had set loose an uncatalogued variety of organisms, many infected with so-called cut-up and misprint hacks that not only allowed the organisms to swap and recombine loops of their artificial DNA, but also created random transcription errors: mutations. Introducing a kind of sex into the mix, turning the core of the hot zone into an uncontrolled evolutionary experiment. While ownership of the zone and responsibility for cleaning it up was disputed in the courts, new varieties of a-life organisms spread through the zone like bacterial colonies growing across an agar plate, and hackers and ware pirates tried to infiltrate the zone and quarry its biodiversity, or use it as a test bed for new tweaks.