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

by Neal Stephenson

  Most organisms in the zone had acquired the capability of shedding spores or live fragments. Now, in a new twist, instead of becoming copies of their parents, airborne fragments of at least eight varieties quickly were generating intermediate, motile forms that ran off in every direction before settling down and developing into the adult form. The change had been quick and systemic, spreading like an old-fashioned computer virus, threatening to disperse rogue a-life far beyond the quarantine strip bulldozed around the perimeter of the hot zone. No one knew if it had been caused by a hacker who’d managed to infiltrate the core or by previously unexpressed code made active by some new, random recombination event. While government scientists scrambled to isolate and understand it, every security officer was seconded to firefighting, one shift on, one shift off.

  Ray spent two weeks working in the area around the core, helping to locate and dig up and burn a-life organisms that were spreading the new spores, then spent two weeks more riding through the zone, hunting down the so-called rollers. Things like pygmy tumbleweeds spun from wire; little latticed spheres like pillbugs. Ray captured some for analysis, sizzled the rest with a lance equipped with an arc-weld tip.

  There were hard winds blowing from the north, driving the rollers fast and far, and whipping up dust and sand. Ray and the others wore masks and goggles; at the end of every shift Ray knocked about a pound of desert out of his hat. The fun of the chase quickly wore off. It became work. Hard, repetitive, frustrating work.

  There was a place where guards and hackers and ware pirates drank, at a crossroads where an enterprising family had set up a charge station, a motel, and a bar, the Rattler’s Nest. It was an old-fashioned roadhouse, with a pine board floor and a long counter and a couple of pool tables. A pickup band played Friday nights; it was playing the night Ray came in, two days before Christmas, just off a shift chasing down rollers, and saw her. Janine Childs.

  She was sitting by herself in the corner by the jukebox, blond hair loose around the shoulders of a black riding jacket slashed with zipper pockets. Long legs in blue jeans and brown leather boots. Ray leaned against the bar and watched her watching the band. She seemed to be alone. After a while, one of the hackers drifted up to her, said something. She shook her head, and after a brief exchange, the hacker shrugged and drifted back to the knot of his buddies, bumping fists. Ray bought two bottles of Dos Equis from a barkeep wearing a Santa hat and walked over and stood there until she looked up.

  ‘Hey, cowboy.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘If that beer’s for me, you can call me Janine.’

  Her eyes were bright blue, with flecks of grey around the edges of the irises.

  They sat and talked, awkwardly at first, finding it hard to fit into each other’s rhythms.

  Janine said, ‘I see you favour the full-on cowboy look when you’re off duty. The boots and jeans, the sheepskin-collar jacket, that hat ... In California they take off hats in restaurants. In Arizona, I notice that they generally don’t. Can I try it?’

  He gave her his hat, showed her how to handle it by the brim front and back, how to pinch the brim to pull it down over her eyes.

  She looked good in it. Ray told her so. He said, ‘I notice you bought some good boots.’

  ‘I can picture myself living out here. You on one side of the law and me on the other. Like one of the old songs.’

  ‘Is that what this is about?’ Ray said.

  ‘It’s whatever we want it to be,’ Janine said.

  There was a silence they covered by drinking beer. The band was some kind of mutant Western swing deal. It wasn’t bad: two guitars and a stand-up bass, an accordion, a fiddle, a guy whaling on a minimal drum kit. A few couples were dancing, shuffling and turning in a two-step.

  Janine asked Ray how he’d come to work for the state; he told her how he’d joined the army and got into private security after he’d served his four years’ active duty, but hadn’t much liked it.

  ‘The people I worked with were okay, mostly, but some of the clients weren’t. The second time one of them put me in a bad situation, I walked. After that, I did all kinds of jobs. Construction. Painting houses. I’ve always worked. One time I stood on a street corner with one of those big signs, pointing people to a sale of golfing equipment. And then someone told me about the company that provides security for the zone, and here I am. I thought I’d stick it out for six months,’ Ray said. ‘But it stretched to two years, somehow. And since it doesn’t look like the lawyers are about to come to any kind of agreement about who owns the zone, I guess I’ll be here awhile. Maybe I found my level. How about you?’

  ‘I think that you don’t get on in life by sticking around in the same place,’ Janine said.

  ‘So this is just temporary,’ Ray said.

  ‘You’re wondering how I got into it.’

  ‘I’m wondering why someone so smart isn’t working for one of the biotech companies.’

  ‘When I was much younger and the ink was still wet on my PhD, I thought I could make a difference. I worked for a government project at the Salton Sea, using a-life organisms to remove arsenic from the lake bed of the part that was allowed to evaporate. After that, I was recruited by a Korean biotech company. Have you ever been to Kazakhstan?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘There’s a genuine space port, at Baikonur. And I’m sure some parts of the country are lovely. But the place where I was working was anything but. It was out on the steppe, nothing but grass and dust for hundreds of miles in any direction. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the research had been interesting, but it was production-line stuff, testing varieties of a-life organism for their ability to extract residual metals from the tailings of a uranium mine. And not as well paid as you might think. But I managed to save enough to try my luck here. And you know how that went.’

  There was another space of silence while Ray wondered what to say to that. Janine asked him how the roller hunt was going; he said, ‘You heard about that, huh?’

  He was relieved, in a way, that she’d finally gotten around to the point.

  She said, ‘The same way everyone else did.’

  ‘You know, only government scientists are allowed in the core. And grunts like me are watched all the time. The little cameras in our glasses, drones ... There are pat-downs at the end of every shift, dogs trained to sniff out a-life stuff. And if anyone approaches us, on the outside, chances are it’s a company agent.’

  ‘I’m not an agent, Ray. And I’m not asking you to do anything illegal. Really. I’m just expressing an interest in your work.’

  ‘As far as that goes, I guess you know we have it under control.’

  ‘I know that’s what the spokesman for the Department of Agriculture has been saying for the past two weeks.’

  ‘Well, it’s true,’ Ray said. ‘We’ll soon have things back to normal.’

  ‘But it isn’t over yet, and when it’s over, it won’t be over. It’ll be the new normal.’

  Ray thought about that. He said, ‘One of the scientists told me everything out there is a transitional form. On its way to becoming something else.’ ‘We haven’t started to find out what we can do with a-life organisms. Or what they can do, given the chance. “From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Good old Charlie Darwin.’

  They clinked bottles, drank to good old Charlie Darwin.

  ‘Do you dance?’ Janine Childs said.

  They danced. He discovered all over again that she was exactly his height. They drank a couple more beers, danced again. Around midnight the band segued into ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and every drunk in the place whooped onto the little dance floor.

  Janine leaned against Ray and said into his ear, ‘I have a room, in the motel.’

  In the motel, he made the mistake of accepting her offer of a drink. A generous shot of tequila in a glass she fetched f
rom the bathroom. He remembered her watching him knock it back, and then he woke with a foul headache, alone on the untouched bed. Her stuff was gone. So was his Stetson.

  He didn’t tell anyone about it. He wasn’t even sure exactly what had happened, but he had the feeling that he’d been fooled somehow.

  The roller hunt in the core of the hot zone continued over Christmas and into the New Year. Every day, Ray found and dispatched fewer rollers than the last. There came a time when he spent three shifts in succession without spotting a single one. Soon afterwards, the governor declared that the emergency was over.

  The next day, Ray handed in his resignation. He told himself he’d put in enough time chasing down hackers and salvage gangs. He told himself that Janine Childs was right: it doesn’t pay to stick around in the same place for too long.

  He tried to trace her, but had no luck. She was in the wind, as they said.

  He drifted from job to job, ended up working security for the Salton Sea plantations where she had once worked. It was a monoculture of pretty basic a-life organisms, but even so, hackers were slipping under the wire, inserting rogue traits. At night, patches of red or green bioluminescence showed where they’d been at work.

  Ray had been there about a year when he saw a brief item in the news. The State of Arizona was suing an experimental a-life facility that had recently started up in South Korea, on the grounds that the organisms it was using were based on code stolen from the hot zone. The head of the place was Dr. Janine Childs. Ray e-mailed her, expecting to hear nothing. A reply hit his in-box the next day.

  It wasn’t an apology or an explanation, but a tall story about this old scientist in Denmark who was into yeast and wanted to do research on the strains lager makers used, each one slightly different, each one producing a different brew. He wrote to the breweries, asking for samples, and without exception every one declined, citing commercial reasons. But the old scientist had what he wanted anyway: he took swabs from the rejection letters, swiped the swabs on agar plates, and cultured the yeasts that grew up. The air of each brewery was full of floating yeast cells, which had contaminated the paper of the letters.

  Ray thought about this, and realised that he had an answer to his little mystery. And the next day he went back out on the line. Only a few forms are ready to make the transition into something new. Most have to make do with what they already are. ■

  Pathways

  Nancy Kress

  The Chinese clinic warn’t like I expected. It warn’t even Chinese.

  I got there afore it opened. I was hoping to get inside afore anybody else came, any neighbors who knew us or busybodies from Blaine. But Carrie Campbell was already parked in her truck, the baby on her lap. We nodded to each other but didn’t speak. The Campbells are better off than us—Dave works in the mine up to Allington—but old Gacy Campbell been feuding with Dr. Harman for decades and Carrie was probably glad to have someplace else to take the baby. He didn’t look good, snuffling and whimpering.

  When the doors opened, I went in first, afore Carrie was even out of the truck. It was going to take her a while. She was pregnant again.

  “Yes?” said the woman behind the desk. Just a cheap metal desk, which steadied me some. The room was nothing special, just a few chairs, some pictures on the wall, a clothes basket of toys in the corner. What really surprised me was that the woman warn’t Chinese. Blue eyes, brown hair, middle-aged. She looked a bit like Granmama, but she had all her teeth. “Can I help you?”

  “I want to see a doctor.”

  “Certainly.” She smiled. Yeah, all her teeth. “What seems to be the problem, miss?”

  “No problem.” From someplace in the back another woman came out, this one dressed like a nurse. She warn’t Chinese either.

  “I don’t understand,” the woman behind the desk said. From her accent she warn’t from around here—like I didn’t already know that. “Are you sick?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then how can I—”

  Carrie waddled into the door, the baby balanced on her belly. Now my visit would be table-talk everywhere. All at once I just wanted to get it over with.

  “I’m not sick,” I said, too loud. “I just want to see a doctor.” I took a deep breath. “My name is Ludmilla Connors.”

  The nurse stopped walking toward Carrie. The woman behind the counter half stood up, then sat down again. She tried to pretend like she hadn’t done it, like she warn’t pleased. If Bobby were that bad a liar, he’d a been in jail even more than he was.

  “Certainly,” the woman said. I didn’t see her do nothing, but a man came out from the back, and he was Chinese. So was the woman who followed him.

  “I’m Ludmilla Connors,” I told him, and I clenched my ass together real hard to keep my legs steady. “And I want to volunteer for the experiment. But only if it pays what I heard. Only if.”

  The woman behind the desk took me back to a room with a table and some chairs and a whole lot of filing cabinets, and she left me there with the Chinese people. I looked at their smooth faces with those slanted, mostly closed eyes, and I wished I hadn’t come. I guess these two were the reason everybody hereabouts called it the “Chinese clinic,” even if everybody else there looked like regular Americans.

  “Hello, Ms. Connors,” the man said and he spoke English real good, even if it was hard to understand some words. “We are glad you are here. I am Dr. Dan Chung and this is my chief technician Jenny.”

  “Uh huh.” He didn’t look like no “Dan,” and if she was “Jenny,” I was a fish.

  “Your mother is Courtney Connors and your father was Robert Connors?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “We have family trees for everyone on the mountain. It’s part of our work, you know. You said you want to aid us in this research?”

  “I said I want to get paid.”

  “Of course. You will be. You are nineteen.”

  “Yeah.” It warn’t a question, and I didn’t like that they knew so much about me. “How much money?”

  He told me. It warn’t as much as the rumors said, but it was enough. Unless they actually killed me, it was enough. And I didn’t think they’d do that. The government wouldn’t let them do that—not even this stinking government.

  “Okay,” I said. “Start the experiment.”

  Jenny smiled. I knew that kind of smile, like she was so much better than me. My fists clenched. Dr. Chung said, “Jenny, you may leave. Send in Mrs. Cully, please.”

  I liked the surprised look on Jenny’s face, and then the angry look she tried to hide. Bitch.

  Mrs. Cully didn’t act like Jenny. She brought in a tray with coffee and cookies: just regular store-bought Pepperidge Farm, not Chinese. Under the tray was a bunch of papers. Mrs. Cully sat down at the table with us.

  “These are legal papers, Ms. Connors,” Dr. Chung said. “Before we begin, you must sign them. If you wish, you can take them home to read, or to a lawyer. Or you can sign them here, now. They give us permission to conduct the research, including the surgery. They say that you understand this procedure is experimental. They give the university, myself, and Dr. Liu all rights to information gained from your participation. They say that we do not guarantee any cure, or even any alleviation, of any medical disorder you may have. Do you want to ask questions?”

  I did, but not just yet. Half of me was grateful that he didn’t ask if I can read, the way tourists and social workers sometimes do. I can, but I didn’t understand all the words on this page: indemnify, liability, patent rights. The other half of me resented that he was rushing me so.

  I said something I warn’t intending: “If Ratface Rollins warn’t president, this clinic wouldn’t be here at all!”

  “I agree,” Dr. Chung said. “But you Americans elected a Libertarian.”

  “Us Americans? Aren’t you one?”

  “No. I am a Chinese national, working in the United States on a visa arranged by my university.”
/>   I didn’t know what to say to that, so I grabbed the pen and signed everything. “Let’s get it over with, then.”

  Both Dr. Chung and Mrs. Cully looked startled. She said, “But ... Ludmilla, didn’t you understand that this will take several visits, spread out over months?”

  “Yeah, I know. And that you’re going to pay me over several months, too, but the first bit today.”

  “Yes. After your interview.”

  She had one of those little recording cubes that I only seen on TV. They can play back an interview like a movie, or they can send the words to a computer to get put on screen. Maybe today would be just talking. That would be fine with me. I took a cookie.

  “Initial interview with experimental subject Ludmilla Connors,” Dr. Chung said, and gave the date and time. “Ms. Connors, you are here of your own free will?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you are a member of the Connors family, daughter of Courtney Ames Connors and the late Robert Connors?”

  “Did you know my dad at the hospital? Were you one of his doctors?”

  “No. But I am familiar with his symptoms and his early death. I am sorry.”

  I warn’t sorry. Dad was a son-of-a-bitch even afore he got sick. Maybe knowing it was coming, that it was in his genes, made him that way, but a little girl don’t care about that. I only cared that he hit me and screamed at me—hit and screamed at everybody until the night he took after Dinah so bad that Bobby shot him. Now Bobby, just four months after finishing doing his time at Luther Luckett, was getting sick, too. I knew I had to tell this foreigner all that, but it was hard. My family don’t ask for help. “We don’t got much,” Granmama always said, “but we got our pride.”