Omega Point
Page 37
Otto looked into the blackness of the hole in the arco for a while. Amazing, he thought, that the whole damn thing hadn't come down. But away from where their office had once been the damage was minimal. A testimony to modern construction and woven carbons and, he thought, perhaps to k52's genuine but misguided attempts to work for the human race – he could have employed a much bigger bomb.
Otto doubled back, let himself be screened for contamination. He underwent a nanobot wash at the edge of the construction site, and went back home.
His apartment was neat, as he'd left it several weeks ago, keeping itself clean and biding its time, far away enough to be unaffected by the micro-nuke.
Otto caught a smell of himself. He hadn't changed in days. He decided there and then to have a shower, and then call Ekbaum. Damn the hour – if he was going to force him into his lab, he could lose a little sleep in return.
First there was one thing he needed to do.
He had to say goodbye.
He went into his room and opened the closet. He pressed the security switch to his gunlocker. It slid open.
Honour's memory cube was where it always was, ensconced in a specially cut recess lined with felt, like his guns.
He smiled, wondering what Honour would think of the man who kept his wife in the gun closet.
He hefted the cube in his hand. It was slightly smaller than Honour's fist, opaque and faulted in the way that memory cubes were, mysterious with potent fractals.
It was all he had of her.
That, and the memory of a Jerusalem built of trumpets upon a December night, and a smiling face, happy in the candlelight.
He closed his eyes and pressed the cube to his forehead for a moment, the memory of her strong in his mind. He stood like that for a long time.
He wiped his eye with the back of his hand and pushed the cube gently back into its recess.
He would call Ekbaum. Later.
About the Author
An experienced science fiction journalist and critic, Guy worked for SFX magazine as deputy editor, where he still freelances, he edited gaming magazine White Dwarf and was the editor of Death Ray magazine. He lives in Somerset with his wife, young son, an enormous, evil-tempered Norwegian forest cat called, ironically, Buddy, and an even bigger Malamute dog named Magnus.
guyhaley.wordpress.com
Acknowledgments
It seems apposite at the end of this, the ultimate conclusion of the first Richards & Klein investigation, to give thanks to all those who have contributed to my growth as a writer.
I must say a big Northern ta to the original team at SFX Magazine, Dave Golder especially, who took in an angry young Yorkshireman in 1997 and turned him into something less angry. I'd like also to give a great deal of gratitude to famed editor Jo Fletcher, who gave much-needed commentary and tough love on my earlier works, similarly to John Jarrold and all those agents and fiction magazine editors who sent me back handwritten rejections, not the wished-for "yes", but vital encouragement. To my parents, to whom Reality 36 was dedicated, I say thanks for my creation, my brothers, my upbringing, all those books, and for listening to my stories. More gratitude to the men of the now defunct short story group The Quota, Matt, Gav, my brother Aidan, Jes and Andy, whether long- or short-serving, all of whose comments helped me improve when I became really serious about writing, and to Marco and Lee at Angry Robot, for giving me the chance. In the best twenty-first-century tradition: cheers one and all.
Lastly, to my beautiful wife Emma. You're at the heart of my Reality, I love you, and I thank you for, well, everything.
Writing the Future
I've heard it said that some writers get sort of uptight when you ask them where their ideas come from. I'm not one of those people. Writing is one giant steaming compost heap of ideas in the headspace. Chuck information, opinions, and whimsy on there, let it mulch down for a few weeks, and spread it upon the fields of thought and pray something pretty or useful comes up out of it. That's the basics, you might decide to add a bit of alcohol to speed the process. I find long dog walks help.
In this manner, the world of Richards & Klein came about. In writing Reality 36 and Omega Point, I tried to create a plausible future reality. Of course, every science fiction writer who attempts this gets it hopelessly, hopelessly wrong. For every Arthur C Clarke's geostationary satellites, there are a hundred pipe smoking misogynists piloting atomic rocket ships. No one saw the mobile phone coming, or even the microchip revolution. Look back at the SF of the past, and it looks suspiciously like the past writ large, and not the future at all.
I state this as a disclaimer.
A second disclaimer is this: with Richards and Klein I have tried to avoid the dominance of "one big SF idea". In the best "big idea" SF – that written by Philip K Dick, or Adam Roberts – the big idea acts as a fulcrum upon which a parable about the present may be expertly articulated. In the worst, we have the world of today, tomorrow with added techno-zombies/brain implants/space travel or something similar, which is neither great writing nor good SF.
I have nothing against "big idea" SF, especially if it's used to provide cutting insights into the human condition. Actually, even if it is techno-zombies I like it, provided it's done in an entertaining, fresh way.
In Richard and Klein there is a big idea of sorts. To me, Reality 36 and Omega Point are about mankind's collective parenthood of a range of new thinking beings. Maybe that's what they are about in your mind, maybe not. Every time someone reads a book it creates something unique, and that's just as true for the author as it is for a reader.
But this is a theme, at least to my mind (and I can't stress that enough, writers are not entirely in control of their works, at least not consciously), it's not a real "what if there was a computer in the sky controlling me" kind of big idea.
So, no real big idea. What I wanted was to sketch out a world that, if not accurate (hell, it's the future, we don't know yet), was at least plausible. The kind of world where, if someone asked me "What happened to Somalia?" or "What kind of food is popular?" or "How do your diffuse models of localised food production operate?" I'd at least be able to have a stab at answering. To create a living, breathing world for an adventure, it's as important to consider how people pay their taxes as it is to know how many settings a raygun has.
To get to the future, one has to consider the present. All science fiction does this, no matter how bizarre. All SF is a slave to the time in which it is written. Mine is no different. Environmental collapse, global warming, the end of western power, new economics – all play a part in Richard and Klein's reality, as much as fancy technology. I suppose there are two sides to this, and two strands to each side. The first side is what I'll call socio-historical change (it's not history yet, it isn't history in the future, but one day, it will be), the other is technological change. The two strands to each of these are: the actuality of the new situation, and humanity's reaction to said new actuality; as a species, and individually. There is the interaction between all of these, which complicates the picture, somewhat.
There are a few large scale actualities in my 22nd century: the ice sheet tip, the existence of artificial intelligence, global temperature rise, a past flu pandemic, the rise of localism, a past peak oil crisis, and the dominance of China as global superpower. On the small scale there are many, many more, most of which are not even alluded to in the books, but they are there in my head.
Ideas for Richards and Klein's world come from all over the place, but there are two main sources. For the actualities large and small, much comes from today's popular science press (bbc.com, New Scientist and Space.com being the main contributors), random stories grabbed from all over the internet for the others. History informs me how these details might build into a coherent future, and how human reaction to the actualities of the future might go. I believe strongly that the only way to escape the cage of the present when writing science fiction is to look further back into the past. The roots of t
he present and the future both can be found in history. To base a vision of the future on one slice of time – our contemporary time – is to risk an unanchored, unbelievable construct. To believe that the culture of the writer will not change is the first and greatest of sins here.
For example, take China. It seems clear to most of us now that China will be the next superpower. It already is, in several key regards. So it's a no brainer to have it be so powerful in Richards and Klein's future. But if you take into account that historically China has the oldest, continuously existent civilisation on the planet, that for eighteen of the past twenty centuries it has been the most prosperous political entity, that for a good proportion of those twenty centuries it has been the most technologically advanced… well, then its dominance seems more inevitable and less an accident of a passing phase of history (to whit, the outsourcing of much of the world's manufacturing to China). Contrarily, if you look at the history of Europe, the last three centuries are something of an historical anomaly, a passing phase. The conditions that ensured the dominance of European culture are coming to an end now. Likewise, the Second Great Migration alluded to in the books is drawn from the first one; if human beings can move en masse in response to some calamity once, why then not again? All this is fairly obvious, naturally.
What isn't obvious is how all this will actually play out. If people were writing SF in the 15th century, very few of them would have predicted the age of European Empires. Only a rare combination of factors working together allowed this to happen at all, a key one being a weak, inward-looking China. No-one, and certainly not SF writers, can predict that kind of confluence of circumstance. Only one major development can alter the entire world. Like the electronics revolution means that we're all whizzing "amusing" pictures of cats at each other on our smart phones rather than exploring the solar system in rocket ships. That kind of thing.
I'll leave you to decide which reality is preferable.
I can't stress enough that all this is there as background for what I hope are entertaining science fiction adventure stories. That mass transit of manufactured goods is mostly a thing of the past in Richards day is far less important than you, the reader, having a good time, that you get drawn in to the story, and empathise with the characters. There are things in here that I doubt will happen. Flying cars, for one. But they are fun. With luck, these little details seem to fit together (unlike the bizarre road system in the film of Minority Report. It's always bothered me. It was tacked on to that future world only to provide a platform for a stunt sequence. There – got that off my chest). Have I predicted the future? No! But I have tried hard to create a plausible, believable reality. If I have been successful in that goal is for you to decide. Before you do, I'll let you into a secret. Much of the technology in Richards & Klein I reckon will be with us a lot sooner than the 22nd century. Why set it so far out? I'll almost certainly be dead by then, so won't have to suffer the embarrassment of having got it all totally wrong…
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An Angry Robot paperback original 2012
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Copyright © Guy Haley 2012
Guy Haley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 85766 148 7
EBook ISBN: 978 0 85766 150 0
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.