The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  He drops the iron. Draws in a shuddering breath. Realises his eyes are stinging. He wipes his gloved hands across his face. They come back sticky.

  Get away. Get away from the car. But he doesn’t move.

  He doesn’t allow himself to look at the woman. He doesn’t want that imprinted in his mind. Breathes in again.

  It’s then that he realises he can no longer smell smoke. Makes himself look past the thing in the driver’s seat. Not even a wisp of smoke floats out of the vents.

  The fire has gone out of its own accord. Hasn’t it? There was a fire, wasn’t there?

  He backs away, is only aware that he’s stepped into the road when a car horn screams past him, followed by a muffled yell.

  He imagines himself getting back on the Ducati, riding away, the blood in his gloves slipping on the throttle; getting his grip, eating up the road, the sirens washing towards him, heading for the scene he’s just left behind, increasing his speed, becoming a roar and nothing else. He sees himself taking his exit, heading past the 24-hour Engen garage on the corner, the place where he usually stops for a Coke and a packet of smokes after one of his nights out. The pictures come clear and fast, so clear that his right hand clenches, as if he’s squeezing the accelerator.

  You can’t take it back. You can’t jump back to that moment and wish it away.

  Ahead, the N2 and freedom beckons, but he doesn’t make a move towards the bike. He waits. He wants to tell the police when they come what happened. That there was a fire, that she begged him, that he did what was right. That would be the respectable thing to do.

  But the sky lightens and the kids come to the fence to look at the new wreck. They’re talking loudly among themselves. They’re calling the adults who start shouting across at him, clashing their fists against the fence. Still the police don’t come.

  The kids start throwing stones: idly, he senses, not with any purpose. The traffic is thickening on the highway. The car is still; what’s inside is still.

  He takes out his cellphone, thumbs through the photos. Sees the woman from last night at the bar. She was good-looking. Then the one of her in bed, just before. She was turned on, drunk, smiling. She really liked him; it was just a minor setback. He slides through the other photos, the nearly complete card. It’s a beautiful set, and he feels pretty proud of himself. Maybe he wants to complete the card – he’s a collector, a prospector, after all. Maybe it’s not about earning the boys’ respect after all, but his own. If he just finishes what he started.

  He stands up, stretches, dusts himself down, and gets on the bike. He kicks up the stand, turns the key and hits the starter button. He thinks of the woman’s smile, blends into the encroaching rush, and is gone.

  PERIPATEIA

  VANDANA SINGH

  The roads taken and those not taken, the paths before us and the possibilities they can lead to – all these are considered in Vandana’s story blending scientific speculation and personal discovery. Here the road leads Sujata, a scientist trying to come to terms with loss, to a realization about the true nature of the universe.

  IT OCCURRED TO Sujata that what she was experiencing was a kind of life-after-living. Veenu’s abrupt and unexplained departure three days ago was a clean dividing line between what she had thought of as her life, and the inexplicable state of being that came after. A phase transition as fundamental as that of water boiling in the saucepan, turning to steam, she thought, stirring in the tea leaves. The brown ink spread through the water the way pain seeped through every part of her being. She’d become, in her post-life, a sponge for metaphors, a hammer to which everything was yet another nail in the coffin of that earlier existence. The other day she had found herself wandering disconsolately through the park between frolicking, screaming children, staring at Lost Cat notices on the utility poles, and she’d thought of posting a notice – Lost: The Ground Under my Feet.

  It was getting dark; she left the tea steeping in the pan and turned on the kitchen light. The brightness hurt her eyes. White walls, white counters, the potted coriander on the window-sill, a small dining table piled with sympathy cards. The fridge snored like a polar bear. On a shelf to its left was a little altar from the time Sujata’s mother had visited last year; it held a smiling Buddha and a Nataraja, a somewhat garish print of Lakshmi, and a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet showing an equally garish Christ. Sujata’s mother didn’t really have any basis for believing in God, a fact she would readily admit, but she liked to plan for contingencies. She’d put Jesus up there with the others, as she said, “just in case.” The wall across from the window bore witness to Sujata’s own probabilistic approach to the universe: it was covered almost entirely with sticky notes in yellow, green and pink, fluttering in the breeze from the window like so many prayer flags. Here, in Sujata’s tiny, neat hand, were maps of possibility, random thoughts, and notes on a variety of subjects that had caught her interest. In the middle there was a large sheet of paper with a graph showing two world-lines, hers in purple, Veenu’s in green, two lines crawling across the white space, more or less parallel, until three days ago when Veenu packed up and left. Since that time the purple line had crawled forward, tentative and alone.

  The latest series of sticky notes was an exercise in possibility. Imagine a phenomenon, and write down all possible explanations and descriptions. Then some time-dependent weighted combination of these was (maybe) an approximation to the ever-changing truth.

  Who or What is Veenu?

  An idea. A beginning and end in one, a snake chasing its tail.

  A lover, a partner, a friend.

  An offspring of the mind’s deepest sigh.

  A neural implant, an AI that enables us to network with others at a thought.

  Defined by my existence, the way Veenu’s existence defines mine.

  A traveler through the whorls and eddies of space and time, whose world-line sometimes intercepts with mine.

  An imaginary friend who didn’t go away when I grew up.

  She picked up the last one, which had fallen off the wall, and stuck it back next to the others.

  “You’re so weird,” Veenu used to say, in an indulgent tone. She approved of eccentricity as a matter of principle, but was the more practical of the two of them. “Why don’t you go back to your paper on the Higgs field?”

  The paper on the Higgs field had been sitting in Sujata’s laptop for three months. The trouble, she had said to Veenu – goodness, was that just a few days ago? – the trouble was that the paper was straightforward and eminently publishable, and therefore not very interesting. She’d rather write a paper entitled ‘The Higgs Field Considered as a Metaphor for the Entanglement of Matter in Time’, or ‘Alien Manipulations and the Unfinished Universe’.

  She was sipping the too-bitter tea when the road appeared. As always, the apparition came without warning; the only hint of its impending arrival was a dull headache and a slight visual aura. Then the wall, the one with the sticky notes and the graph, began to shimmer and crackle like an old television set between channels. After which there was no wall at all, just the white and dusty road.

  She dropped the cup. Bits of china crunched under her shoes as she walked through where the wall had been, and stood on the road. It smelled vaguely of burning insulation, with a hint of cinnamon.

  She had developed a ritual by now: look to the left, into the past first, a check for accuracy. Yes, there was the misty bulk of the university building where she worked, and the coffee shop where she and Veenu used to hang out most evenings until the impossible happened – and beyond that, a sloping green hill from her undergraduate days, and then the trees she climbed as a child, and the chai shop she frequented in high school. The order was a little muddled, and the images vague and shifting in the mist, but she could recognize each thing.

  She steeled herself to look to the right, toward the future. There was a deafening beat in her ears. Would there be any indication of Veenu’s return?

  On every pre
vious sighting the future had appeared as a turbulent dust haze, a shifting cloud bank, through which vague images were sometimes discernible. On occasion these were visions of the road itself, flowing like a dark river through an unfamiliar green land, branching and bifurcating into the horizon. This she had interpreted as some kind of probability graph, a reassurance that the future was not determined, that she could choose her path. Sometimes other, more mysterious or terrifying silhouettes emerged from the cloud bank – a decrepit house by a river, a figure on a sloping roof, a sadness that was without shape or form, but recognizable as a sharp jab in the ribs, a sudden breathlessness. Once there had been an incongruous white tower like one of the minarets of the Taj, but she had never encountered it in real life, and it had not been there in subsequent sightings of the road. Her hypothesis was that some futures were more likely than others, and that the future with the white minaret had simply been eliminated through the games of chance.

  She closed her eyes before looking. When she opened them, she saw, to her complete astonishment, that the road ended to her right. No mist, no vague shapes, no branching paths into a semi-determined future, but just a clean line where the road abruptly stopped. There was nothing beyond it but a blank wall. She was so astounded by this that she staggered toward the demarcation before remembering that it was never any use walking on the road, left or right. It was the sort of road where the destination maintained a constant distance from the traveler, no matter how fast or far she walked. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, but nothing had changed. She thought: this means I’m going to die.

  Abruptly she was back in the kitchen. The lower part of her left trouser-leg was cold and wet with tea, and there were bits of china on the floor everywhere. The air was still. The familiarity and emptiness filled her with foreboding. She looked at the wall she had walked through – it was solid again, and a few more of the sticky notes had fallen off.

  There was no sign of impending death. Perhaps it would come tomorrow, or the day after. Or maybe there was another interpretation for that clearly demarcated finish line. Something had ended. But what, exactly?

  She stayed up half the night, sipping tea and munching on dry crackers, thinking about Veenu and waiting for death. When death refused to oblige, she went to bed.

  NEXT EVENING, AFTER a day at work in which she felt as though she was swimming upstream through a bewilderingly swift river, Sujata returned to the house, exhausted.

  There were more cards in the mailbox. She picked them up and threw them on the dining table in the kitchen. The house was silent as a tomb, except for the refrigerator’s constant purr. She stood in the dark by the window. The neighborhood was quiet, lights on behind curtained windows. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The neat lawns and fenced backyards of suburban America – every house a prison unto itself. Her reverie was disturbed by the cards falling off the table. A fury took hold of her then – she picked up a mass of cards in her hands and threw them up into the air. They were all around her like a pack of predatory birds. She was finally going insane, or so it seemed; the cards flapped away at her, calling out what was written in them in high-pitched voices. Thinking of you, wishing you strength for this difficult time. Theater tickets. People trying to be kind, without actually getting involved, people trying to mask their shock at the unthinkable: Veenu leaving, without warning, without a word! As though what had happened to Sujata was something shameful, something that might infect their own blessedly ordinary lives or threaten the security of their relationships. She batted at the cards, tearing them from the air, tearing them into little bits. At last the cards fell silent, lying torn and tattered on the floor, and she knelt down, sobbing like a child, pleading with the universe for some kind of explanation. The universe, not being obliged to reply, remained silent.

  At last she gathered the torn cards and put them in the recycling, and washed her face. Three of her sticky notes had fallen off the white wall. She picked them up and stuck them back on.

  Alien Manipulations in an Unfinished Universe: an Anti-Occam’s Razor Hypothesis

  The neutrino was predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. It took until 1956 to discover that it actually existed.

  One of the great predictions of particle physics, from considerations of symmetry, was the omega particle. Predicted in 1962, discovered in 1964.

  In an effort to distract herself, Sujata made some tea, set out a plate of cookies, and began to complete the list. Pink sticky notes on the prediction and discovery of the tau neutrino, the top and bottom quarks, dark matter, the Higgs Boson.

  When Sujata was in graduate school, she had founded the Anti-Occam’s Razor society. Membership varied between one and four. Occam’s Razor, a guiding principle of science, posited that the simplest idea that explained a phenomenon was most likely to be correct. She had always found this a dull notion, a surrendering of the imagination to the tyranny of the mundane. She liked to invent complicated explanations for straightforward phenomena, a kind of intellectual Rube-Goldbergism, just to thumb her nose at William of Occam. It was a joke, of course.

  Over the years, as an extension of the long joke of ideas, she’d come up with the Alien Manipulation hypothesis. This is how she had first explained it to Veenu:

  The universe is a massive quantum-mechanical relativistic Rube Goldberg machine in continual need of adjustment by a bunch of super-intelligent aliens. Suppose an intelligent species comes up with a theory, and a prediction. The aliens then adjust the machine in order to make the prediction come true. One reason why interstellar civilizations cannot meet is because contradictory predictions must be avoided. There is bedrock reality – you know, Pythagoras theorem, gravity, not falling through floors. But beyond bedrock reality there are multiple ways to explain the universe, and the duplicitous alien manipulators ensure that we are taken in by our own illusions. But – if everything we predicted was exactly right, we would become suspicious, or worse, even more arrogant than we are now. So they throw in the occasional surprise result – accelerating expansion of the universe, stars at the edges of galaxies moving faster than visible matter would entail.

  They had laughed about it, she and Veenu. That the universe is an illusion had been suspected by many a mystic in many a tradition, but to construct an argument based on logic and physics was truly fun. Every once in a while Sujata would get a feeling of a feather (or antenna) being drawn slowly down her spine, and she would shiver. It was as though the alien overlords of the universe were warning her not to think (outside the box) too much. Because however indulgent these entities might be toward the intellectual inventions of human beings, the one idea they would not want people to take too seriously was this: that the whole thing was a goddamned magic show; that all laws were ad hoc, imperfect, made-up, inelegant. If the Standard Model was so messy that even particle physicists called it the sub-standard model, then better to let people believe that it was only a part of a greater, more elegant truth, instead of accepting that reality itself was a mess.

  Veenu: How would you know that the universe is one giant theater performance, with your hypothetical aliens running the show? I mean, if it is all show, how would you get to go backstage?

  Sujata (after a week): I think you’d have to bump up against something that was irrefutably there – a phenomenon or an artifact or a prop – that didn’t fit anywhere on stage. Something that couldn’t be explained in any schema.

  Veenu: So you mean you’d have to catch the aliens napping?

  Sujata: Yes. Yes, I know. Sounds unlikely.

  Veenu (accusingly): And you wouldn’t know whether your unexplained phenomenon was just a really hard problem you were up against, or whether it was something that violated all explanations of reality... I think your idea is full of shit.

  Sujata (unreasonably annoyed): Well, of course! Can’t you take a joke? Of course it’s full of shit!

  It was at that moment she realized she sort-of believed the shit. Despite all reason, all sensible feeling, it
rang true, at least in a coarse-grained way. There were details to work out... So far, for each phenomenon in her life she had found a schema, a scaffolding in which things fit, made sense. When they didn’t, it usually meant that there were other schemas to be invented and elaborated. An essential element of science was the faith, after all, that the universe was comprehensible.

  Until the day Veenu walked away.

  Furiously she began to scribble a new series of sticky notes, in green:

  Hypotheses for Veenu’s Departure

  Schema One: I am a terrible person who did something wrong. I am so stupid that I don’t even know what it is I did wrong. Stupid, naïve, what’s the difference? (Unless she has amnesia, she can’t recall anything that could cause Veenu to leave.)

  Schema Two: There’s been some misunderstanding. (There’ve been misunderstandings before and they’ve always managed to work through them.)

  Schema Three: Veenu left because there was something urgent that needed doing, nothing to do with me. (An attractive idea, Veenu as a secret agent with some kind of covert agenda, but there are no supporting pieces of evidence – although if the agent was really secret, would there be?)

  Schema Four: Veenu is insane and irrational. (Veenu is one of the most clear-headed and rational people she knows.)

  Schema Five: Veenu is not what I thought she was; despite these years of knowing Veenu, I really don’t know Veenu. So I am blind as well as naïve and stupid.

  She stayed up that night coming up with seventeen more schemas, researching each, and coming up empty. The facts didn’t fit the hypotheses, although there were some facts that fit some, if only slightly. Of all of them, only Schema Five had a somewhat higher probability than the others.