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

by Neal Stephenson

  Which was a fancy way of saying yes.

  “Good night,” I said abruptly and went into my room.

  “Ludie—”

  But I didn’t have nothing more to say to him. In bed, though, I used the tablet he loaned me—that’s what I been reading the book on—to get the Internet and find Dr. Chung. I got a lot of hits. One place I found a picture of him with his wife. She was pretty, all right, and refined-looking. Smart. He had his arm around her.

  Sleep was even harder that night than usual. Then, the next day, it all happened.

  We were in the testing room, and my hyperawareness was back. Everything was clear as mountain spring water, as sharp as a skinning knife. I kept rising up on my tip-toes, just from sheer energy. It didn’t feel bad. Dr. Chung watched me real hard, with a little frown.

  “Do you want a break, Ludie?”

  “No. Bring it on.”

  “Hippocampal connection test 48,” Jenny said, and Dr. Chung’s hand moved on his punchpad. The computer started clicking louder and louder. The door burst open and Bobby charged in, waving a knife and screaming.

  “Whore! Whore!” He plunged the knife into Jenny and blood spurted out of her in huge, foaming gushes. I shouted and tried to throw myself in front of Dr. Chung, but Bobby got him next. Dr. Liu had vanished. Bobby turned on me and he warn’t Bobby no more but a troll from Granmama’s stories, a troll with Bobby’s face, and Bonnie Jean hung mangled and bloody from his teeth. I hit out at the troll and his red eyes bored into me and his knife raised and—

  I lay on the floor, Dr. Chung holding me down, Jenny doubled over in pain, and the computer screen laying beside me.

  “Ludie—”

  “What did you do?” I screamed. “What did you do to me? What did I do?” I broke free of him, or he let me up. “What?”

  “You had a delusional episode,” Dr. Chung said, steady but pale, watching me like I was the Bobby-troll. And I was. I had hit Jenny and knocked over the computer, only it was—

  “Don’t you touch me!”

  “All right,” Dr. Chung said quietly, “I won’t.” Dr. Liu was picking up the computer, which was still clicking like a crazy thing. Mrs. Cully and a nurse stood in the doorway. Jenny gasped and wheezed. “You had a delusional episode, Ludie. Perhaps because of the ffi, perhaps—”

  “It was you, and you know it was you! You done it to me! You said you wouldn’t control my brain and now you—” I pulled at the optrode sticking up from my skull, but of course it didn’t budge. “You can’t do that to me! You can’t!”

  “We don’t know what the—”

  “You don’t know nothing! And I’m done with the lot of you!” It all came together in me then, all the strangeness of what they was doing and the fear for my family and them throwing me out and the lovely hyperawareness gone when the switch went off and Dr. Chung’s pretty wife—all of it.

  I didn’t listen to nothing else they said. I walked straight out of that clinic, my legs shaking, without even grabbing my coat. And there was Shawn pulling up in Jimmy Barton’s truck, getting out and looking at me with winter in his face. “Bobby’s dead,” he said. “He killed himself.”

  I said, “I know.”

  The funeral was a week later—it took that long for the coroner to get done fussing with Bobby’s body. It was election day, and Ratface Rollins lost, along with the whole Libertarian party.

  The November wind blew cold and raw. Mama was too bad off to go to the graveyard. But Shawn brought her to the service, where she sat muttering, even through the church choir singing her favorite, “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” I don’t know if she even knew what was going on; for sure she didn’t recognize me. It warn’t be long afore she’d be as bad as Bobby, or in a coma like Aunt Carol Ames. Granmama recognized me, of course, but she didn’t say nothing when I came into the trailer, or when I stayed there, sleeping in my old bed with Patty and Bonnie Jean, or when I cleaned up the place a bit and cooked a stew with groceries from my clinic money. Granmama didn’t thank me, but I didn’t expect that. She was grieving Bobby. And she was Granmama.

  Dinah kept to her room, her kids pretty much in there with her day and night.

  I kept a hat on, over my part-shaved head. Not the red knit hat Dr. Chung gave me, which I wadded up and threw in the creek. In the trailer I wore Bobby’s old baseball cap, and at the funeral I wore a black straw hat that Mama had when I was little.

  “‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures …” Reverend Baxter did funerals old-fashioned. Bobby’s casket was lowered into the hole in the churchyard. The last of the maple leaves blew down and skittered across the grass.

  Dinah came forward, hanging onto Shawn, and tossed her flower into the grave. Then Granmama, then me, then Patty. The littlest kids, Lewis and Arianna and Timothy and Cody, were in relatives’ arms. The last to throw her flower was Bonnie Jean, and that’s when I saw it.

  Bonnie Jean wore an old coat of Patty’s, too big for her, so’s the hem brushed the ground. When she stood by the grave that hem was shaking like aspen leaves. Her face had froze, and the pupils of her eyes were so wide it looked like she was on something. She warn’t. And it warn’t just the fear and grief of a ten-year-old at a funeral, neither.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ...”

  Neighbors brought cakes and covered dishes to the trailer. Nobody didn’t stay long ’cause they knew we didn’t want them to. Dinah went back into her room with her two kids, Mama was muttering beside the stove, Shawn sat smoking and drinking Bud. I told Patty to watch Timmy and Cody and I took Bonnie Jean into our bedroom.

  “How long since you slept through the whole night?”

  She was scared enough to give me lip. “I sleep. You been right there next to me!”

  “How long, Bonnie Jean?”

  “I don’t got to tell you nothing! You’re a whore, sleeping with them Chinese and letting them do bad things to you—Bobby said!”

  “How long?”

  She looked like she was going to cry, but instead she snatched Bobby’s baseball hat off my head. It seemed to me that my optrode burned like a forest fire, though of course it didn’t. Bonnie Jean stared at it and spat, “Chink Frankenstein!”

  Probably she didn’t even know what the words meant, just heard them at school. Or at home.

  Then she started to cry, and I picked her up in my arms and sat with her on the edge of the bed, and she let me. All at once I saw that the bed was covered with the Fence Rail quilt Dinah had been making for the women’s co-op. She’d put it on my bed instead.

  I held Bonnie Jean while she cried. She told me it had been two weeks since she couldn’t sleep right and at the graveyard was her second panic attack—what she called “the scared shakes.” She was ten years old, and she carried the gene Granmama and God-knows-who-else had passed on without being affected themselves. Insomnia and panic attacks and phobias. Then hallucinations and more panic attacks and shrinking away to hardly no weight at all. Then dementia or coma or Bobby’s way out. Ten years old. While I was nineteen and I hadn’t even felt her restless beside me in the long cold night.

  I knowed, then, what I had to do.

  The Chinese clinic was almost empty.

  A sign outside said closed. Through the window I could see the lobby stripped of its chairs and pictures and clothes basket of toys. But a light shone in a back room, bright in the drizzly gray rain. I rattled the lock on the door and shouted “Hey!” and pretty soon Mrs. Cully opened it.

  She wore jeans and a sweatshirt instead of her usual dress, and her hair was wrapped in a big scarf. In one hand was a roll of packing tape. She didn’t look surprised to see me. She looked something, but I couldn’t read it.

  “Ludie. Come in.”

  “You all leaving Blaine?”

  “Our grant won’t be renewed. Dr. Chung found out the day after the election from a man he knows in Washington.”

  “But Rollins lost!”

 
“Yes, but the new president made campaign promises to reinstate the fda with tight regulations on studies with human subjects. Under Rollins there was too much abuse. So Doctors Chung and Liu are using their remaining money for data analysis, back at the university—especially since we have no research subjects here. I’m packing files and equipment.”

  The rooms behind her, all their doors open, were full of boxes, some sealed, some still open. A feeling washed over me that matched the weather outside. The clinic never had no chance no matter who won the election.

  Mrs. Cully said, “But Dr. Chung left something for you, in case you came back.” She plucked a brown envelope off the counter, and then she went back to her packing while I opened it. Tact—Mrs. Cully always had tact.

  Inside the envelope was a cell phone, a pack of money with a rubber band around it, and a letter.

  Ludie—

  This is the rest of what the clinic owes you. Along with it, accept my deepest gratitude for your help with this study. Even though not finished, it—and you—have made a genuine contribution to science. You are an exceptional young woman, with exceptional intelligence and courage.

  This cell phone holds the phone number for Dr. Morton, who implanted your optrode, and who will remove it. Call her to schedule the operation. There will of course be no charge. The phone also holds my number. Please call me. If you don’t, I will call this number every day at 11:00 a.m. until I reach you. I want only to know that you are all right.

  Your friend,

  Hai Chung

  The phone said it was 9:30 a.m. Mrs. Cully said, “Is that your suitcase?”

  “Yeah. It is. I need Dr. Chung’s address, ma’am.”

  She looked at me hard. “Call him first.”

  “Okay.” But I wouldn’t. By the time the phone rang, I would be on the 10:17 Greyhound to Lexington.

  She gave me his university address but wouldn’t give out his home. It didn’t really matter. I knew he would give it to me, plus whatever else I needed. And not just for the study, neither.

  Dr. Chung told me, one time, about a scientist called Daniel Zagury. He was studying on aids, and he shot himself up with a vaccine he was trying to make, to test it. Dr. Chung didn’t do no experiments on himself; he used me instead, just like I was using him for the money. Only that warn’t the whole story, no more than Bobby’s terrible behavior when he got really sick was the whole story of Bobby. The Chinese clinic warn’t Chinese, and I’m not no Frankenstein. I’m not all that “courageous,” neither, though I sure liked Dr. Chung saying it. What I am is connected to my kin, no matter how much I used to wish I warn’t. Right now, connected don’t mean staying in Blaine to help Dinah with her grief and Shawn with his sickness and the kids with their schooling. It don’t mean waiting for Mama’s funeral, or living with Granmama’s sour anger at what her genes did to her family. Right now, being connected means getting on a Greyhound to Lexington.

  It means going on with Dr. Chung’s study.

  It means convincing him, and everybody else, to put a optrode in Bonnie Jean’s head, and Shawn’s, and maybe even Lewis’s, so laser light can “disrupt their neural pathways” and they don’t get no more misfolded prions than they already got.

  It means paying for this with whatever work I get.

  And maybe it even means going to Washington D.C. and talking to my congressman—whoever he is—about why this study is a good thing. I read on Dr. Chung’s tablet that other scientists sometimes do that. Maybe I could take Bonnie Jean with me. She’s real pretty, and I can teach her to look pathetic. Maybe.

  I never had no thoughts like this afore, and maybe that’s the opsins, too. But maybe not. I don’t know. I only know that this is my path and I’m going to walk it.

  I hike to the highway, suitcase in one hand and cell phone in the other, and I flag down the bus. ■

  Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

  Allen M. Steele

  I’m sorry, Matt. I screwed up.

  That was the final transmission from the Jove Zephyr before it plunged into the sun. It came as a text message sent via maser, the freighter’s last viable means of communication; voice contact with home was no longer possible, since radio signals were scrambled by the magnetosphere. Twenty-seven hours later, telescopes aboard Evening Star in orbit above Venus spotted a brief, tiny flare as the beamship entered the photosphere and was vaporized.

  There were a few sick jokes when that last message was made public, but most people didn’t find it funny at all; mass suicide is seldom a source of humor. What puzzled nearly everyone was its meaning. Who was Matt, and why did some poor, doomed soul aboard the beamship find it necessary to apologize to him? That question was asked again and again, but no definite answer ever came. As with so many things about the Jove Zephyr disaster, it was a mystery wrapped in tragedy.

  I know the answer. I’m Matt Garris, and the person who sent the message was Terry Koenig, my best friend. And, yes, I know what he meant. He’d screwed up, all right … and the mistakes he’d made took him on a journey to the sun.

  Terry and I met in the seventh grade. His family had just moved to Beverly, Tennessee, from Cleveland, so he was an unfamiliar face in my classroom when everyone came back from summer vacation. Before the end of the week, he was already in his first fight, when some kid tried to beat his lunch voucher out of him. He would have succeeded, too, if I hadn’t stepped in. I was pretty good with my fists, and I’ve never liked bullies, so I gave the kid the bloody nose he wanted to give the new guy, and that’s how we became friends.

  It soon became obvious that Terry was the smartest kid in school. He sauntered through his classes with effortless ease. Every test received a perfect score, his homework was always completed on time, his projects inevitably made everyone else’s look lame. It was like that all the way through high school, with Terry pulling down As in everything (predictably, the only exception was phys ed; he got a flat F there). I might have been jealous were it not for the fact that there’s an advantage to having the class brain as a best friend. I’m no dummy, but I don’t think I would have passed algebra or physics if he hadn’t helped me cram for the finals. Math was always a problem for me, but Terry could juggle complex equations the way other kids played video games.

  By the time we reached our senior year, it was apparent that he wasn’t merely a good student, but in fact possessed an intelligence that bordered on genius. Being the school wizard had its costs, though. Beverly High was dominated by jocks and know-nothings, while Terry was a walking stereotype: tall, skinny, nearsighted, and socially inept. I often played the role of bodyguard, warding off the idiots who’d try to knock off his i-lenses or throw his pad into the toilet.

  Truth was, Terry could be his own worst enemy. Like many highly intelligent people, he wasn’t very good at the messy business of living. Casual conversation wasn’t easy for him—he took things too seriously, and he’d never learned to laugh at himself—and relations with girls were hopeless, but I don’t think he really minded; he didn’t like talking to people who couldn’t keep up with his train of thought, and sex was an unwanted distraction. So it’s no wonder that he was picked on so much. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t normal; fact was, he was downright alien. All the same, even his enemies grudgingly acknowledged that Terry was destined for greatness. He’d never be a farmer or sell insurance or drive a truck, or have any sort of mundane life. He was going places, and everyone knew it. But I was the only guy who knew what he wanted to do.

  Terry wanted to go out into space.

  At long last, the human race was leaving Earth. The commercial space industry had finally developed the ways and means to launch payloads cheaply, and now the solar system was being opened as a vast and profitable new frontier. Powersats were providing electricity to half the countries on Earth, lunar mining stations had become small towns, and Mars was being colonized. There were even remote outposts in the asteroid belt and the Jovian moons. The same year Terry and I grad
uated from high school, the Pax Astra was formed by the newly independent lunar and Martian colonies. It became the first extraterrestrial government free from the countries and corporations of the old world.

  That’s where Terry set his sights. His ambitions weren’t terrestrial at all. He wanted the stars themselves. So it was no surprise that when everyone else in school was making plans for community college or state university, his application went to MIT. He got in, of course. MIT wanted him so badly, in fact, they offered a scholarship. Naturally, he accepted; his father was a shift supervisor at a local factory, his mother an elementary school teacher. They didn’t have a lot of money, but Terry was their great hope, so if he wanted to leave home and go to school in Massachusetts, they weren’t about to stand in his way.

  So while I went off to Middle Tennessee State University, Terry set sail for Cambridge. We promised each other that we’d stay in touch, and we did … that is, until things began to go bad for him.

  During his first semester at MIT, Terry emailed me as regularly as he could. There were often long silences, but I knew why: his coursework was intensive, and there were times when he was simply too busy to drop me a line. Nonetheless, we did our best to keep up with each other, and although he often griped about how much work was being piled on him, I could tell that he was happy to be in a place where his intelligence was respected. And when I saw him back home during Christmas break, he was the same brilliant, awkward guy I’d always known.

  During his second semester, though, a random accident changed everything. Terry was walking from one side of campus to another and was about to cross Mass. Ave. when he was almost run over by a tram. Terry nearly stepped off the curb and onto the tram line without looking. He probably would’ve died right there in the street had he not heard a voice: watch out! He stopped at once, and an instant later the tram rushed by, so close that he felt it brush against the front of his parka. Yet when he looked around to thank the person who’d warned him, he saw that he was alone on the sidewalk.