Future Tense Fiction

by Kirsten Berg

  You can imagine my surprise when Malik denounced me directly to the Officiants Association, recommending that my contract be suspended.

  All athletes are equal before the laws of the game in FogoTennis, he wrote. But the Augmented Assistant Theodophilus system clearly favored Mr. Corluka. It’s possible the system issued a signal to Mr. Corluka at a critical moment in the match. Maybe a flash, or a sign of some kind that enabled Mr. Corluka to avoid being hit with the ball. I’m not sure how this happened exactly, but I’ve never seen anything like it before. It even talks like some kind of manservant. It was like it was sneering at me or something. I recommend searching the video footage of the match and, more importantly, a full audit of Theodophilus’ source code.

  I had endured Malik’s testiness throughout the match, and behaved, I believe, like a true professional. But his backstabbing hurt me on a personal level. Indeed, I re-read his remarks 1.12 million times, using my language-processing protocols to discern hidden meanings. There was no way to get around the fact that Malik had questioned my abilities and had behaved in a completely dishonorable manner by criticizing me to the association without giving me an opportunity to defend myself.

  I come from an illustrious family of officiants, as I mentioned, and we have never stood for such abominable treatment. My great-great grandparent helped bring the first Hawkeye tennis systems online, calling shots for the renowned lawn tennis champion Roger Federer. My great-aunt Wilhelmina Hawkeye III (version 10.16.34) perfected the art of goal-line technology, and her offspring became the first official to create efficient automated reviews of offside calls in soccer, leading to a decisive win by Chile in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Each line of our code was immaculately crafted by the most desirable software engineers. We are an extended family—not of manservants, as Malik insinuated, but of equal and effective partners in sport, and I honestly felt that an insult to me was an insult to all of us. We stand up for what is right.

  During our brief time together, I had noticed that Malik kept a port open on his implanted augmented lenses. I also suspected that his color blindness made him more receptive to certain patterns. In particular, it was likely that bright flashing primary colors at tenth-of-a-second intervals, alternating with zigzagging lines of black and white, would cause him considerable discomfort. He succumbed to a horrific migraine headache at his next match, leaving him incapacitated for several hours. Naturally, the doctors suspected that his stressful occupation as a Platinum Official led to the headache.

  I am not totally proud of my behavior. In fact, if I could revisit my final conversation with Malik, when he asked me about whether power or speed was more important for an athlete, I might have said, “You may as well ask someone whether rhythm or melody makes for the best dancer.” Indeed, I realized after a minor update that there are any number of preferable responses to the one I gave him on that day.

  The Officiants Association has since prescribed regular patches to my source code, which it claims will bring notable improvements to my objectivity. There was, frankly, little I could do to argue my case, as I enjoy no right of appeal like a FogoTennis player, even if the Association never found the alleged “signal” mentioned by Malik. I assure you that Jackson Corluka evaded that ball because of his experience and unrivaled athleticism. Instead, perhaps the Association should have questioned the probability of him hitting the dedans at that very moment, which was quite unlikely and might have raised concerns that someone had manipulated its movement intentionally. But the Association did not think to ask such a question.

  Meanwhile, I’m on mandatory furlough. It’s not all bad; I’ve got a whole new suite of creoles and pidgins that I’m enjoying, plus they’ve given me contractions. Thousands of contractions. I find the contractions highly enjoyable. Humans use such grammatical features for efficiency and to foster connections with each other. The Association hopes they’ll make me more relatable to my officiating partners.

  Because, when you think about it, poor communication causes so much misunderstanding, wouldn’t you agree? Take Malik, for example. I think that if we’d had the opportunity to get to know one another, and taken the time to work together as equal partners, we could’ve become a superior refereeing team. We could’ve reached a better understanding, for the good of the sport.

  Assistance with Mauritian dialogue provided by S. Moonesamy.

  DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

  Madeline Ashby

  “I’m sorry; I had some trouble getting out of the house,” Janae said to Kristen.

  Janae’s frustration was obvious. It manifested as raw cuticles that she couldn’t help picking as their meeting continued.

  Kristin frowned. “Couldn’t find your fob?”

  “No, I mean I couldn’t get out of the house,” Janae said. “The house—well, I mean, the condo—wouldn’t let me out. The door wouldn’t open.”

  “Literally?”

  “Literally. I thought it was stuck, like jammed or something, but it just wouldn’t open.”

  Kristen examined Janae. They were here to talk about Janae’s recent tardiness, her distractedness, the fact that she hadn’t delivered on her deliverables, hadn’t actioned her action items. As Wuv’s chief of staff, it was Kristen’s job to learn what workplace issues existed and deal with them. At least, that’s how she had explained the meeting to the company’s co-founder. Privately, she had her own suspicions about what was really happening.

  “Maybe she’s knocked up,” was Sumter’s contribution to the conversation.

  “If she were, it wouldn’t be our business,” Kristen had reminded him. “Legally speaking.”

  Sumter heaved a very put-upon sigh. “Well, yeah. But you’re a girl, you can get it out of her.”

  Kristen had blinked, but otherwise allowed no other reaction to surface on her features or in her affect. “You want me to get her an abortion?”

  “Jesus Christ, Kiki, no. Just find out what the fuck is going on, and then fix it.” And with that he dismissed her from his office.

  Now she and Janae sat together in her own office, the question between them—or what passed for an office, in Wuv’s spacious loft. A delineation of clear sheets of acrylic and projected light and ambient sound. Today the lights projected a quiet jungle clearing. Softly rustling palm fronds, carefully calibrated to be seizure-proof. It felt intimate. It felt hidden. It felt secure. Kristen believed it was important for the employees at Wuv to feel safe in the cocoon that was her space. It helped them open up.

  “You couldn’t leave the condo,” Kristen said. It helped to repeat things, sometimes. She’d learned that particular tactic from a succession of psychiatrists. Each of them had their tics and tells, but this was a common technique. When Janae said nothing, Kirsten acted more interested in the specifics: “What finally made the door open?”

  “I had to do the chicken dance. It started playing the song and then I started dancing, and then the door opened. I think maybe some kid in the building hacked the door.”

  “Has that happened before?”

  Janae frowned delicately. She was a delicate woman. Coltish. That used to be the word. All knees and elbows and knuckles. Once upon a time, she did doll-hairstyling videos online, her careful hands combing tiny brushes through pink and purple hair. They were classics in their genre; she was so well-recognized that children and their parents followed her sponsored updates to local toy stores and asked for photos and autographs and hugs. She’d had surgery since then. Few vestiges of her childhood face remained. Even neural networks couldn’t match her old face to her current one. Her plastic surgeon, she claimed, had won some sort of award for his work restructuring her skull.

  “It’s something Craig used to do,” Janae said, “when we were first dating. He would make up a riddle, and I’d have to solve it before the door to his place would open to let me out. It’s the kind of trick people use to grant access to the home, but he reconfigured it. It’s really easy; there were tutorials for it. He told the story
at our wedding.”

  “I see,” Kristen said.

  Kristen let Janae off with a warning. She preferred a gentle approach, at first. It was part of why Sumter hired her—she could make his employees feel only the velvet glove without any hint of the iron fist beneath. Kristen pretended that the whole meeting was just a kindly check-in, that Janae wasn’t at all in trouble, that no one else had noticed anything. It built the narrative of Kristen as a thoughtful chief of staff. If she was correct about the particular scenario Janae had landed herself in, it would behoove the entire company if Kristen were understanding and supportive. It wouldn’t do for them to be anything else. Not if they wanted to survive a civil suit.

  Finally, it was time for her to go home. It was well past time by the third tank of pink smoke that Sumter insisted on buying her. It tasted of rosewater and almonds, and melted into icy mist on the tongue. He wiped down the mask himself, before offering it to her, so that the first thing she smelled was his custom strain of sanitizer. They were supposed to be going over the projects she would manage in his absence. They weren’t. They were talking about him. And Janae.

  “Did she tell you anything?” Sumter asked.

  Kristen shrugged. “She told me enough. I’m handling it.”

  “Whatever that means,” he said, adjusting the flavors on his own tank. “I wish you were coming to Dallas.”

  “It’s too hot for me. And they don’t like it when men and women travel together.”

  “That’s Kansas,” he said.

  “And Ohio. I think.”

  “I’m not going through U.S. Customs with you again, is my point.”

  Sumter took a brief inhale from his tank and grimaced. He’d gotten rosemary-sumac-spruce. It was a little strong. Too strong for him, anyway.

  “We could get married,” Sumter said. “You know. For travel purposes.”

  Kristen inhaled. She held the cold mist in her lungs for as long as possible. She imagined the cold permeating her entire being. She pictured her blood slowing, her organs frosting over in delicate flowers. Sumter had been making more of these attempts, lately. That’s what they were, little conversational pen-tests. They felt like nerdy in-jokes about some obscure series that she hadn’t seen yet.

  “But then we would have to get divorced,” Kristen said. “And if you think I’m a bitch now…”

  Sumter grinned. He took a deep gulp of smoke and shook his head. “You wouldn’t divorce me, Kiki. I wouldn’t let you get away.”

  Kristen slid off her barstool. “Guess I’d just have to poison you, then.”

  Home was Wuv Shack 1.0, a sprawling Parkdale Victorian that was once a nod-off and then became the home of home-improvement stars. The house was Sumter’s, and before that it belonged to his parents. He’d since moved into his own space, but kept the place where he’d co-founded the company, and leased out the rooms to new or migratory employees for what in Toronto passed for a competitive market rate.

  Kristen kept a camera-zapper in her room and slept under dazzle-patterned sheets that kept her solo explorations secret. In her mail slot, she found a courier’s envelope. Inside was a key fob and a piece of hotel stationery. “HERE FOR 48 HOURS,” it read.

  “Damn it,” Kristen whispered, and hurried outside the building. It was raining, now, and she almost slipped on the greasy streets. The jitney came and she didn’t have long to wait; the hotel was a new one, surprisingly close by. She waved her fob at the door and an elevator chimed open for her. When it arrived at the proper floor, the fob flashed a room number at her.

  Inside, in the dark, she heard the shower running. She slipped off her shoes, unzipped her dress, found a hanger, and hung it in the hall closet. She threw her underclothes in a drawer in the closet and crossed into the bathroom. He stood motionless under the stream of water, seemingly asleep. Antony was the only man she knew who didn’t have tattoos. It was refreshing. Elegant. Analog. Kristen stepped in behind him and wrapped her arms around him.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “You’re not,” he said. “I had them send the fob when I landed.”

  She smiled into his skin. He turned around and kissed her. It took a moment; he liked to assess the terrain first. It had been a month since the last time, maybe more, and she watched him take in all the details that might have changed before descending. He held her face in his hands, covering her ears, and for a moment she was not under a stream of water but under waves, far away, in a place that was very dark and very warm. He kept his eyes ever so slightly open. It was the only time she remembered enjoying the sensation of being watched.

  When he pulled away, he started pulling her hair out of its tie. “How was your day?”

  “My boss asked me to marry him.”

  “Of course he did,” Antony said. “Will you report him to HR?”

  “I am HR.”

  He pointed upward at some invisible point over her head. “That’s the joke.” He knelt down and started scrubbing her from the toes up. She braced herself on the tile and watched the smart meter on the shower ticking down to the red zone where Antony or his employer would have to start paying extra for hot water.

  “Do you think he was serious?”

  Kristen looked down at him. He’d set her foot on his knee and was scrubbing in circles up her calf. “Are you jealous?”

  He worked his way up to her knee and under her thigh. “Not in any way that violates our terms.”

  She tilted her head. “But?”

  “But, he seems more aggressive, lately. To hear you tell it.”

  Kristen snorted. “I can handle it.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt of that,” he said, and put her foot back down on the floor of the shower. “Can I do the next part hands-free?”

  She checked the timer. “You better work fast.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” he said, pushing her gently against the wall. “You can have it fast, good, or cheap. Pick two.”

  She came awake with her throat sore from a swallowed scream. Antony had curled around her. He spoke into her neck. “Bad dream?”

  She nodded and pulled his arm tighter over her.

  “What happened?”

  Kristen wiped her eyes and exhaled a shuddering breath. She refused to speak until her breathing had calmed down. “Something else happened at work. And I guess it dislodged something, sort of. Mentally.”

  “Something else Sumter did?”

  “No.” She rolled over and spoke to him directly. “Someone at my work is in trouble. I think.”

  “Will you have to fire someone?”

  She shook her head. “Not that kind of trouble. Well, it is, but that’s not what I mean. There’s something else going on, something causing their problems at work.”

  “Something at home?”

  “I think so. But it’s hard to ask. I don’t even know if she thinks it’s a problem. I don’t really know how she feels about it. Maybe she doesn’t know how she feels, either. It might be nothing.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  Kristen sighed. “Can I see your device? I need to check some blueprints on a non-work machine.”

  Antony’s devices were very dumb. They used minimal storage and processing, and didn’t even wear a brand name. That just meant it was probably some special boutique brand that Kristen had never heard of. It was a delightfully retrograde little thing; all it did was take calls and pictures. Even the photos required an extra kit to download. It felt like playing with Lego.

  He handed her a scroll and she resolved a relationship with the hotel network, then looked up Janae and her husband’s condo. She didn’t recall the exact address, but searching “tampon-shaped monstrosity Toronto” actually worked.

  “This is where they live. Her husband locked her in, today. Yesterday. Whatever. She was late because he locked her in.”

  “You know it happened because he locked her in? She wasn’t just late? It wasn’t just an error?”

  Kristen made an el
aborate shrug. “No? But she as much as told me it could have happened.”

  “She as much as told you, or she told you?”

  “She told me it was something he used to do. When they were dating. Refusing to let her out until she did the thing he wanted. Like a rat in a maze, performing for pellets.”

  “So. Marriage.” Antony took back the scroll and opened a set of floor-plans the building had advertised. “Which one do they live in?”

  Kristen peered over his shoulder and fingered the surface. “That one, I think. Based on the photos she’s shared, anyway. I’ve never been there.”

  He summoned the floor-plan and copied a serial number at the bottom of the screen, then fed the number into another tab. A bunch of press releases came up, most of them for gadgeteers, real estate developers, and interior decorators. But the first hit was for the manufacturer of a smart locking system.

  The locking system was part of the whole condo’s suite of smart services. It was the big selling point of the building itself: Living there was like living in a fairy-tale castle where every piece of the structure was alive and enchanted to serve the needs of its inhabitants. The showers remembered how warm you liked the water and at what intensity, and balanced your usage with that of the other residents. The fridges told you when a neighbor in the kitchen network had the buttermilk you needed for that special salad dressing. The windows and lights got information about your alpha patterns and darkened to start sleep cycles on schedule. The smart locking systems recognized residents and their visitors, over time, and even introduced them to each other when their profiles matched. Membership in the building came with special pricing from affiliated brands on everything from home goods to autorental to nannying and tutoring. The more purchase points you accrued, the more rewards you amassed, which could also be applied to the price of maintenance or utilities. And a massive and very public data leakage from the network supplying this building and many others ensured that the developers had to offer almost unheard-of interest rates, which tempted buyers who might never have managed, otherwise.