Future Tense Fiction

by Kirsten Berg

  I used to think he was just protecting himself against his own disappointment. I didn’t understand until much later that my parents were trying to keep our hopes in check.

  Mx. Evelyn hadn’t been the key I’d been hoping for. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Human memory is an even more unreliable narrator than the A.I. it gave birth to. But later that same night, my comm lit up again. It was the union rep. They’d found me someone who would talk.

  The nurse’s name was Darryl Stanner, and he was one of the oldest humans I had ever seen. His face loomed elephantine in the display, my comm still zoomed in on the old A.I. footage. I quickly pinched the picture in, looking away from his dilated pores and the pooling skin that hung below his eyes. When I looked back, he was manageable. Human scale. Fine.

  “Hello? Are you there? I can see you, but I can’t hear anything.”

  “Hello! Hello, Mx. Stanner. Hi. I don’t know if your rep told you, but I’m trying to find out any information you might have about a safe surrender. Um, my safe surrender. Is that OK with you?”

  He blinked a few times, slowly. “I have the file here, it came through my old rep. I know what you’re after, but I’m afraid my memory’s not what it used to be. I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you.”

  “I’m just asking if you’ll try,” I said, smiling. “I’ll be happy to leave you alone if you don’t remember anything at all. But I’m hoping you might recall some details of that evening, because I was left on the night that Ambassador Lngren was shot.”

  “Oh,” he said, his enormous caterpillar eyebrows rolling up over the ridge in his skull. “Of course I remember that night. Terrible thing, just terrible.”

  “So you remember the shooting?”

  “Like it was yesterday,” he breathed, his glacial speech speeding to a furious crawl. “It was all anybody could talk about. It was like this big secret was out. The Pinners knew what we were. What we are. What a world. What a shock.”

  “Do you remember the child who was left at the hospital that night?”

  “Oh yeah, of course.”

  “Really?” I tried not to sound too eager, but I’m sure he could see my lean forward, pressing toward the past. “Can you tell me what you remember?”

  He sighed, sounding as tired as time itself. “That night was total chaos. Everyone thought we were going to war. But that was back before we knew how weak Pinners are. How fragile. The woman who dropped you off was afraid she’d break you. I never saw someone carry a baby so carefully. Like you were an eggshell.”

  I nodded, more soberly than I felt. “Anything you can tell me about her would be very much appreciated.”

  He looked down at his lap. “I mean, she was scared. Like we were all scared. Big eyes. I think she was wearing a sweater that belonged to someone else. Just so vulnerable, like she’d break in two if I was mean to her.”

  “But she was human,” I said, almost more to myself than to him. “Not vulnerable like a Pinner, but human?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, she was as human as I am.”

  “Did she say something about what had happened? Did you two talk about the news at all?”

  Stanner’s huge floating head shook slowly, the edges disappearing when he got out of scanner range. “She didn’t have anything to say. Just that real scared way about her. She was real young. Pretty. But I just felt so bad for her. Pinners dropped off hemi kids all the time. But her? I could tell it was breaking her heart to do it. It’s just not the same with humans, you know.”

  I wanted him to tell me she was remarkable—that her eyes were a color he had never seen before. That she wore half a broken necklace. That she promised she’d come back for me. That she’d said, “Someday,” with a hopeful and faraway look.

  “Was she alone? Did someone drop her off, or pick her up, that you saw?”

  Stanner shrugged. “Not that I saw. I was pretty distracted. You know, with everything going on.”

  I imagined the halls and waiting rooms of the hospital, doctors and nurses and patients clustered around different screens and feeds, whis pering, wondering. Me, the eggshell future of two races tucked against Stanner’s chest. Was I sleeping? Did I cry for my human mother? This piece of my life did not belong to me; only someone else could hold it. And what he held, instead, was the moment in history that overshadowed me.

  “Thank you for trying, Mx. Stanner. I really appreciate it.” My voice was trembling.

  “Don’t take it too hard, kid. You know you’re better off not remembering any of that. She wanted to be forgotten. Let it go.”

  A quick swipe of my trembling fingers ended the call. His face vanished, leaving only reflection in the dark glass. I did not say goodbye.

  Whatever gift of memory Pinner coffee has been trying to give me, it can’t be hers. My mother was human, and she wanted me to have nothing that was hers. I’ve lost her, but my father is out there somewhere. He’s in the black recess of space, or the last few drips of darkness in my cup.

  I tried to go back to the beginning. I tried to do what the human orphans in stories do: go on a quest. I tried to follow the roads of memory and go back. Other orphans find out that they’re secretly royalty. They find out that their parents loved them but gave them up because of dire circumstance. They realize that their real family is the one who chose them. They ask for more.

  All I have are fragments of memory, and none of them my own. I have the story of the night my mother abandoned me, the same night when a Pinner was first killed by a human. I have a forgetful old nurse and a buggy old A.I., both of whom were there and both of whom were too distracted by programming of one kind or another to bear witness for me. I have a father who can’t live on this world and must have returned to one I’ve never seen. There is no more.

  I arrived on the Pinner homeworld two days ago. The people are not at all what I expected. They welcomed me like I’d been missed. They told me my chances of being sterilized by the radiation here are 50-50. They also told me that there is a registry here for hemis to find their Pinner parents, but that’s just a place to start. What we’re looking for can’t be found in a list of names. Instead, most of us have started taking fresh onging at full strength and connecting to the reservoir of collective memory that it unlocks. Drinking it has helped me remember a place and a people that belong to me, though I’ve never known them.

  Memory, like DNA, is made up mostly of pieces that belong to other people. I sent a message back to Earth, to every other hemi I know.

  I told them I’m halfway home.

  LIONS AND GAZELLES

  Hannu Rajaniemi

  “Where do you think we are?” the young Middle Eastern woman with the intense eyes asked.

  Jyri smiled at her and accepted a smoothie from a tanned aide.

  “I think this is a Greek island.” He pointed at the desolate gray cliffs. They loomed above the ruined village where the 50 contestants in the Race were having breakfast. “Look at all the dead vegetation. And the sea is the right color.”

  In truth, he had no idea. At SFO, he’d been ushered into a private jet with tinted windows. The last leg of the journey had been in an autocopter’s opaque passenger pod. The Race’s location, like everything else about it, was a closely guarded secret.

  But his gesture distracted the woman long enough for Jyri to steal a glance at her impossibly muscled legs. Definitely a myostatin knockout—a gene edit for muscle hypertrophy. Crude, but effective. He would have to watch out for her.

  Suddenly, she zeroed in on something over Jyri’s shoulder.

  “Excuse me, need to catch up with someone. Nice talking to you.”

  Before he could say anything, she elbowed past him, filling a gap in the scrum around Marcus Simak, the CEO of SynCell—the largest cultured meat company in the world. She launched into a well-rehearsed pitch. Jyri swore. He, too, had been stalking Simak, waiting for an opening.

  His mouth was dry. This was the most coveted part of the event: access
to the world’s most powerful tech CEOs, who could change your destiny with a flick of their fingers. He would only get one more shot before they started literally running away from him. Even worse, he wanted to run, too. Every muscle in his body felt like a loaded spring. The synthetic urge pounded in his temples, mixing with the din of the crowd.

  Jyri fought it down, forced himself to take a thick minty sip of his smoothie and scanned the runners in the white mesh suits—ghostlike in the pre-dawn light—for a new target.

  It was easy to divide the crowd into three groups: the entrepreneurs, like Jyri, here to show off their tech, hungry-eyed and ill at ease in their biohacked bodies; the hangers-on, company VPs and celebrities, with their Instagram–filter complexions and fluorescent tattoos; and finally, the Whales like Simak: the god-emperors of A.I., synbio, agrotech, and space.

  Jyri spotted Maxine Zheng, Simak’s upstart rival, just 10 feet away. Fresh-faced, petite, and wiry, her vast robotic cloud labs powered the Second Biotech Revolution—including Jyri’s own startup, CarrotStick.

  Jyri edged into the group caught in Zheng’s trillion-dollar gravity. Up close, her skin had a glistening dolphin-like sheen. Allegedly, the Whales’ edits included cetacean genes that protected them from cancer and other hoi polloi ailments.

  Zheng was talking to a tall young man who was deathly pale but had the build of an Ethiopian runner: long legs and a bellows-like chest.

  “That’s neat,” she said. “But I’m honestly more into neurotech, these days.”

  That was Jyri’s cue. He pushed forward, the one-liner pitch ready. Hi, I’m Jyri Salo from CarrotStick. We re-engineer your dopamine receptors to hack motivation—

  “Jyri!”

  A strong hand gripped his shoulder. He turned around and almost swore aloud.

  Not here, not now.

  Alessandro Botticelli’s white teeth flashed against a dark curly beard. He wore thick rings on stubby fingers, and his tattooed forearms rippled with muscle. His calves could have been carved from red granite. The ruddy hue of his skin was new. Probably an edit increasing red blood cell production for aerobic endurance, but these days you never knew.

  “It’s so good to see you, man!” The Italian gripped Jyri’s hand and pulled him into a bear hug. “I can’t believe you made it here, how are you doing, are you still working on that little company of ours? I love it!”

  The familiar lilting accent made Jyri’s teeth hurt. He cringed. That little company. Of ours. Had he no shame?

  “Doing great,” he said aloud, jaw clenched.

  “That’s awesome, man,” Alessandro said. “Congrats. Me, I’ve just been so busy, it started to get too much, you know. So I decide to get in shape, really in shape. Maxine said I should do this, so here I am! It’s going to be sick!”

  Jyri could not face the white teeth, the green eyes, and looked away.

  “I’m happy for you,” he said.

  “Hey, man, thanks! Do you want an intro? She’s right there, and she’d probably be into what you’ve been working on.”

  Zheng was behind a wall of muscled bodies again. Jyri took a deep breath to say yes but tasted old anger. He shook his head.

  “That’s fine. We chatted already.”

  The Italian slapped him on the shoulder, hard.

  “Awesome! Hey, we should really catch up! Maybe after this thing?”

  “Sure.” Jyri’s stomach was an acid pit. He waved a hand at Alessandro and walked away, stumbling to the edge of the crowd. He took a long draught of his smoothie, but could barely get the viscous mixture down. He forced himself to drink it anyway. It was a dirty secret of ultrarunning that gorging gave you an advantage. Besides, it washed the taste of bile away.

  Jyri had met Alessandro at one of the first networking events he had attended after he came over from Finland with little more than an idea. They bonded over their shared running hobby, Alessandro offered help with fundraising, and before Jyri knew it, the Italian was an equal co-founder of CarrotStick.

  There was a time when they spent nearly every waking hour together, whiteboarding ideas, filing patents, sweating over pitch decks and grinding through endless investor meetings. It was a true Valley bromance. And then, when they got an offer to join the hottest accelerator in the Bay Area, Alessandro bailed on him, suddenly announcing he wasn’t going to be able to do CarrotStick full-time. A VC firm they had pitched together had circled back to offer Alessandro a job. Apparently they had been impressed by his drive, and he claimed it was a better match for his life’s mission. Whatever that was.

  The accelerator turned CarrotStick down—given its “founder commitment issues”—and left Jyri scrambling for funding while burning through his savings and doing around-the-clock lab work. Alessandro wore his unchanging grin through the negotiations over his founder shares. He wore Jyri down, never raising his voice, and finally Jyri gave in to what advisers later told him was a ridiculous equity stake for an inactive founder.

  Afterward, Jyri blocked Alessandro on every social media app. Every now and then, a piece of news leaked through his friends’ feeds. Alessandro’s new startup broke all sorts of Series A financing records; his popular science feed won a prize; he married a young VR yoga instructor who frequented both the exercise classes and fantasies of millions of men and women around the world.

  Most gallingly, despite Jyri’s efforts at a news blockade, he’d watched Alessandro brag in interviews about how his creativity and hard work had led to an early small success: a company called CarrotStick.

  Jyri wouldn’t let Alessandro ruin this, he decided. He’d get to Zheng on his own, no matter what. Fists clenched, he turned back to look at the crowd—and met the eyes of a woman sitting on a sun-bleached bench nearby.

  Jyri frowned. She was neither an aide nor a runner: She wore a loose, shapeless black dress that left her arms bare. They bore faded tattoos of bats. Her ashen hair stuck out in pigtails. She twirled an e-cigarette between her fingers. A knowing smile flickered on her lips.

  Then it clicked. This had to be La Gama, the Doe. She was one of the legendary ultrarunners who had competed against the Tarahumara Indians in the canyons of northern Mexico, before climate change pushed them out and they gave up their millennia-long tradition of running.

  Twelve years ago, the Whales had hired her to plan the biennial Races. She took all her experience from running races like Barkley Marathons and Badwater, and created an entirely new kind of contest for superhuman athletes. La Gama decided who ran based on an elaborate application that included biomarkers, genome sequences, and patents for the contestant’s enhancements.

  She stood up. Jyri’s heart sank. The networking was over. Now, the only way to stand out from the startup pack and catch the Whales’ attention was by running.

  A hush spread across the square. The Whales turned to look at her, and all the other runners followed suit. For a moment, the only sound was the listless chirping of crickets.

  “Running,” she said, “used to be how we hunted. We evolved to chase things until they fell down from sheer exhaustion. The legacy is still there, in our upright spine, nuchal ligament, and Achilles tendons.

  “All your lives, you have hunted with your brains. I want you to hunt and kill with your legs. Meet your prey.”

  She lifted a hand and hooked her fingers. A large pack of robots slunk out of the surrounding chalk-white ruins. Each was the size of a large antelope, had gazelle-like legs, and a black headless body. Hair at the back of Jyri’s neck stood up. They moved too sinuously to be prey.

  “Meet Goats 1 to 50,” La Gama said. “They have full batteries. As do you. This Race is a persistence hunt. No stages, no set distances, no water stations, no time limit, no rest: Just run a goat down. The first one to bring back the contents of its belly wins.”

  She laid a hand on the smooth rump of the bot next to her, on a small cave painting–like drawing. A shutter irised opened on its side, then snapped shut before Jyri could see what was within.


  La Gama slapped her hands. “That’s it. The sun is coming up, and so, like lions and gazelles, you had all better be running.”

  The starting line was unmarked. They simply assembled in rows on the narrow road that snaked up toward the hills. The goatbot herd scampered past them and stopped on the crest of the first slope. The rising sun painted the cliffs purple.

  They all knew the basic rules. No communications. No support crews. No pacers. Most importantly, no cybernetic enhancements or prosthetics—nothing with silicon or electricity. But anything biological was fair game: They were the Grail knights of the Second Biotech Age. They had backpacks with water and energy gels, and that was it.

  Jyri peeked at the row of white-clad bodies. Alessandro’s eyes were closed and his lips were moving. Was that hypocrite praying?

  La Gama lifted the e-cig to her lips.

  Jyri’s anger mixed with the need to run, almost unbearable now. Every last bit of CarrotStick’s cash and crypto had gone into finetuning his body—and more importantly, his brain.

  The key ingredient was motivation.

  La Gama took a deep pull from the e-cig. Its end glowed electric blue. She blew out one menthol-smelling wisp of smoke. That was the starting pistol shot.

  The runners exploded into motion. Jyri’s hungry feet devoured the road through the thin-soled Race shoes.

  CarrotStick’s actual mission was to make smart drugs that hacked the brain’s reward circuits, and made you addicted to problem-solving, coding, A.I. algorithm design. It had been much harder than he had expected. The company’s runway was almost gone when one of his investors told Jyri about the Race. He realized they could just copy the dopamine receptor variants of the greatest ultra-athletes of all time—the relentless drive that carried them through a 100-mile race.

  That drive was Jyri’s now. CarrotStick had manufactured a synthetic virus that carried the best receptor gene variant into his brain. Every step said yes in his mind. He felt like he could run forever.

  The woman with the myostatin knockout legs was suddenly abreast of him, then edged ahead. On their own accord, Jyri’s feet sped up. He gulped deep breaths, held on to the drive’s reins. It was not time to push yet.