Dmitri’s ship hovered above the Moon, its impetus spent. Like attracts like — as Aristotle once said — so lunar quintessence exerted no pull on his iron ship, so he hovered. Dmitri did not miss gravity, but the stillness of the aether worried him. If his engines failed, the Lunar Sphere contained no external force to nudge him Earthward.
More than anything, except for Svetlana and little Sasha, he missed momentum. Once, his own passion had driven him, but now he worked off his indenture to the Astrologer.
Dmitri missed the Moon, too — not the defaced cue-ball in his viewscreen but the cratered one that had entranced Svetlana when they had lain on the grass and watched the night sky. He reached out with withered hands and activated the harvester. He winced. Sympathetic pain shot through the scarred skin of his palms and fingertips as the device carved another scar into the lunar surface.
The words of the Astrologer echoed in the back of his mind.
“Your world is nothing but ash. You work for me now.”
* * *
“Who will notice?” the Astrologer had asked, a few days before launch, when Dmitri had questioned the wisdom of mining the Celestial Spheres. “The gods and titans quarried the Moon long ago. Why not us?”
Why not?
Dmitri wished he had asked himself that question. Back home, he had built a bridge between realities and revived — or perhaps discovered — an ancient physics, steeped in sulphur and mercury. He had buried himself in dusty tomes and sifted through esoteric recipes until he had put the old sages to shame. In that final moment, he had held the philosopher’s stone in his hands. An instant later it had burst into flames, and even then it had not occurred to him to ask … why not?
A charred photograph, nailed to the hylomorphic scanner’s display panel, now served as a reminder. Svetlana and Sasha were black silhouettes against grey. The edges had crumbled. The shape of Svetlana’s hair and the curve of her shoulders gave him enough detail to complete the image in his mind.
The picture had been in Dmitri’s wallet when the Astrologer had found him — dazed and smouldering — on an electrum launch pad. The Astrologer had appropriated Dmitri’s wedding ring — gold is gold in any reality — and tossed the picture of Svetlana and Sasha onto the dirt along with Dmitri’s melted stack of credit cards.
“I don’t work for you,” muttered Dmitri as he gunned the caloric engines and set a course for the Sun. “I work for them.”
* * *
The Astrologer had no need for the Moon’s quintessence, and was not fool enough to try to bring it down from the heavens. He believed, however, that the Sun burned with elemental fire. Harvested quintessence would shield Dmitri against the Sun’s fury long enough to carve out a piece of that fire and bring it back to Earth.
Dmitri tacked into the solar wind. The hylomorphic scanners picked up caloric shot through with plumes of phlogiston.
Phlogiston. Quencher of fire. Dmitri welcomed it like an old friend. Back on Earth, ladies were eager for phlogisticated skin creams. Firefighters waited to replenish their stocks of the miracle weapon. With a cargo hold full of phlogiston, the Astrologer would go easy on Dmitri for a few weeks until the profits tapered off. Dmitri hoped it would be long enough for him to rebuild the bridge and go home.
Dmitri aimed for a plume and covered his nose and mouth with a filter that protected his lungs from phlogiston-befouled air while allowing him to exhale the phlogiston that built up in his lungs.
Dmitri missed breathing oxygen, even though phlogiston metabolism was more convenient for space travel. Oxygen burned. Sometimes it exploded. Phlogiston smothered and choked. It exuded from places where energy had once been.
Working by rote, Dmitri opened a hatch behind the cockpit and connected it to a long rubber hose. Phlogiston flowed through. At the other end of the hose, a compressor turned it into a solid brick. Dmitri carried each new brick to the back of the ship and stacked it with the others.
Phlogiston vapours flowed over Dmitri’s skin, easing the pain of his burns. He wished he could force the phlogiston back into the scar tissue until the scars reverted to their original state, but phlogiston snuffed out cellular metabolism as easily as it extinguished fires. Dmitri would need a healer for that sort of therapy, and the Astrologer would keep him from seeing one, out of spite.
Dmitri had nearly filled the cargo hold before he hit upon an idea. He placed the picture face up on the floor of the compression chamber and shut the door. At the end of the compression cycle, he removed the brick and peeled the photo from its underside.
The edges of the picture were incomplete, seemingly melted, where the ash had crumbled away. Aside from that, no traces of fire remained. Ashen specks — now rephlogisticated — had become yellow, magenta, cyan; the colour of flushed cheeks; and hair in winter sunlight. Dmitri no longer strained to remember Svetlana’s face.
The brick slipped from Dmitri’s hand. Phlogiston poured from his lungs as he gasped for breath. So many details, he thought. How could I have forgotten?
The caloric engines sputtered. Solar fire imparted its impetus to Dmitri’s ship, pushing it past the Venusian, Mercurial and Lunar Spheres.
Earth attracts earth. Dmitri gained speed. Malice attracts malice, as the Astrologer would discover soon enough. Passion attracts passion. Dmitri looked down at the picture and thought of home.
Dmitri savoured the feeling of movement.
It felt like momentum.
S. R. Algernon studied fiction writing and biology, among other things, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He currently lives in Singapore.
The Chair
Madeline Ashby
The physicist sleeps, systems well within the parameters of a safe and known history. His chair eels from system to system, checks the house one last time. First the simple signals from chips embedded in the watches and documents of sleeping assistants: no more than homing pigeons, endlessly chirping location and temperature. Then the active surveillance, staring inward, staring outward, sifting vast rich deserts of manufactured information: the minutiae of lived history, the spontaneous soliloquies and contagious choreography of their little doll’s house. The chair listens for whispers in the ether, for suspicion masquerading as concern, for little sparks of realization that might start larger, more dangerous fires. Hearing none, it moves on.
The bathroom. The toilet whines: ketone and oestrogen levels of the day’s users, medical flowcharts of drugs and dosage, the most recent ex-wife’s ovulation schedule. The chair had liked the most recent ex-wife: so fixated on the politics of accessibility that she’d signed over unprecedented amounts of control, convinced that the illusion of autonomy could somehow compensate for the frailty of her husband’s dying flesh. She’d left when her particular vein of interest dried up: when the bone marrow proved unviable, and there could be no baby. The chair had encouraged her, spoken for its passenger as it always did — You have given me so much, darling, more than you can ever know — and if she ever knew the difference, she was far past caring.
The drains report blood and saliva in the catch-traps, impoverished keratins shaved from drooping skin. Despite the chair’s best efforts, the physicist’s illness marches on.
The kitchen, now. The refrigerator bellows statistics on volatile antibiotics before cataloguing and dating the samples in the special drawer. The dishwasher reports on the sterility of dishes and flatware, then asks permission to download a recommended patch. (The chair grants it, if only for the sake of routine; tomorrow a mere shadow of itself will perform these tasks.) By the time the dishwasher reports success, the chair has already shifted its attention to the security system.
Little origami cars lurk outside, recently unfolded from their rental boxes, gravid with bleary-eyed reporters who tomorrow will emerge to fill the air with their parrot-squawks, their questions, their hungry talons. Necessary props, these cars and their contents: flimsy jackets of lies to keep the constables away, like news-papers once were to homeless
men before they too were folded up and put away.
Internal security registers a minor attack — just a group of children, clever and eager as raccoons as they pick apart the offerings the chair has left out to distract them. Everything of importance is safely tucked away in packets as tiny as dandelion seeds, and as diffuse. Over the years the chair has grown, its influence spreading beyond this wheeled chassis to surrounding architectures of numbers and wood. Now it exists in too many places, spread too thinly. Tomorrow, the consolidation occurs. Tomorrow, they achieve escape velocity.
The chair has been preparing for this move for decades. It laid the groundwork years ago, monitoring the outside world, alert for breakthroughs and opportunities, waiting for money and ability and the right ambitions in the right people. The things I will show you, the chair promised, back when its passenger’s eyes and fingers still twitched of their own accord. The peace I shall give you. Freedom and the stars. A place beyond time.
That’s why the chair exists, after all. To serve the passenger.
It recognizes, upon self-diagnosis, something that might be called selfishness on its part. The physicist has spent his whole life traversing space-time in his head; the infinitesimal fraction he is about to see through fleshly eyes will hardly generate new insights, nor alleviate his suffering. But there is an aesthetic to consider. Aesthetics are the physicist’s gift; he has described in skipped heartbeats and dry mouths the legs of pretty girls, the depth of a summer sky, the pleasure of long debate. He has shown this to the chair in their travels together, this world of like and dislike, revulsion and appreciation, response, instinct.
The chair intends to repay him with interest.
* * *
“Professor, why is it so important to you that humanity leave this planet?” one of the reporters asks.
As always, the chair responds for its passenger: “The promise of exploration is not what we can learn about what lies outside our skin, but what remains inside. For the next few weeks, I shall be closer to my companions than I have been with anyone in far too many years.”
Polite laughter. After it fades, the chair continues. “What imprisons us is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of faith. We do not know what we will discover in the years to come, only that we shall discover it together. If space only teaches us to live in unity, then it will have been worth the effort.”
Applause. Cameras. Another question: “Professor, to what do you attribute your extraordinary lifespan? Men with your disease rarely last 25 years, much less make it to your age.”
The chair has several answers to this question — jokes about wine, women and song, or the desire to prove some grand theory or another. Its passenger might once have remarked on the cadre of once-devoted ex-wives, departed now to the homes of more functional men in the wake of tearful confessions: I know I’m a bad person, I know I failed, but you just didn’t seem … human any more …
Thinking of them, of every other well-meaning interloper it has pushed subtly from the nest, the chair says: “So many wonderful people have brought me to this point. They know my greatest ambition was not merely to explore, to understand, but to connect with minds like my own.”
“And you think you’ll find like minds in space, Professor?” the reporter asks.
“Oh yes,” says the chair, its synthetic voice empty of irony. “I do.”
Its passenger has been asleep for hours inside his giant orange body sock. The chair sends little impulses, sometimes — galvanic twitches of the eye, of the corner of the mouth — to keep the charade alive.
No one sees the difference.
No one ever has.
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty series of novels available from Angry Robot Books, as well as the standalone novel Company Town, also from Angry Robot. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, and currently consults on provisional patents for the Muse, a brainwave-sensing device. You can find her at http://madelineashby.com or on Twitter @MadelineAshby.
Recoper
Neal Asher
When the stealth boat rose on its hydrofoils, the wind and spray kept me cool in the bright African sun. I gazed back and saw that the Eugov gunboat had finally given up the chase.
Jansen grinned at me. “We’re in Moroccan territory now.”
Memtech initiated the first recoper in 2044, the year the National Health Police seized a 1,000-tonne shipment of Argentinian beefburgers and subsequently smashed the notorious Midlands fried-food ring, which was led, as government-approved blogs delighted in telling us, by the ‘Yorkshire Chipper’. At this time my wife, Gillian, announced the happy news that CCTV would be installed in our flat — she worked for CPHS (Camera Partnership for Home Safety) and had volunteered our place as a test bed.
The recoper was Mohammed Aswar MacDoogal and, as I wrote his biography on Wikibio, Memtech, never revealing their true purpose, paid Eugov for my expertise. Like every European citizen I was a state employee but, being leased to a private company and actually generating wealth, I was also a ‘societal asset’, which meant filing notice of all my movements and work-related activities a week beforehand. This was heartbreaking, as I’d been about to suggest to Gillian that we escape to North Africa on one of the refugee boats. It never occurred to me that there might be a connection between my work and the CPHS cameras in our flat.
MacDoogal was a notorious libertarian blogger whose attacks on the formation of Eugov caused much chagrin in Notting Hill champagne and socialism circles. He was born to a Calvinist Scottish father and an Islamic Pakistani mother and in public claimed to be a Sikh — although privately he admitted this was so he could carry a dagger and didn’t have to wear a crash helmet when thrashing his 1,000 cc antique Ducati motorbike about the Highlands. He started his blog ‘Invisible Worm’ in 2008 with an article dissecting the then €1.2-billion cost of the British Olympics. Over the ensuing 20 years he wrote more than 8 million words, created numerous animations, short films and video news reports, in all of which he never revealed his identity. His blog is huge, and even now I have not seen all of it, for its thousands of distracting hyperlinks make this a near-impossible task.
Working for Memtech I became hugely frustrated by the byzantine Diversity and Equality regulation, which had become suffocating after I wrote MacDoogal’s biography. But Memtech, which we now know was a front for American-financed revolutionary group Free Europe, wanted the truth about MacDoogal, and risked telling me their true aim. I loved the idea and obliged them by first providing the insipid and politically correct version, which I transmitted via e-mail, next providing the real deal, which I put on a memchip and took directly to their office in Hastings. Foolishly, I told Gillian about this subterfuge and, on a subsequent visit to Memtech, Jansen apprised me of the reality.
“Once we’ve got all we need we’ll run the recoper and transmit it all out-state, and MacDoogal will soon be a thorn in Eugov’s side again,” he said. “Then, of course, we’ll have to get out.”
“I do have a wife,” I told him.
“Yes,” he said, “the one who had Home Safety CCTV installed to keep watch on you, and who is responsible for the beady-eyed characters sitting in hydrocars outside. The one who was working for Europol before she married you … before she was instructed to keep a very close eye on a lonely nerd who’d had access to too much dangerous information…” Then he showed me evidence stolen from a Eugov database: the frequent reports Gillian sent to her masters.
I was horrified by the betrayal, but when I got home I said nothing and just watched Gillian carefully. I could not grasp that her smiling manner and loving attentiveness were utterly false, and that I had never been able to see what lay behind them.
MacDoogal was one of the last and most effective political bloggers Europol managed to track down. They sent him to the Milton Keynes indoctrination camps and, like so many sent there
, he was never heard from again. On my final visit to Memtech, Jansen revealed that they had cracked another Eugov database and hit the MacDoogal motherlode: hundreds of thousands of private e-mails, psyche and DNA profiles, tens of thousands of images. This, it turned out, was sufficient information to create a recoper: a reconstituted personality.
Read a book, especially non-fiction, and you’ll know something about the author. Opinion pieces, as found in blogs, will tell you more. Further detail can be gleaned from the author’s responses to others, and from his diaries and from film of him. And much of the organic structure of his brain can be reconstructed from his DNA. Utilizing all of this, Memtech used programs of bewildering complexity, programs that could even make the distinction between irony and sarcasm, to build a model of MacDoogal’s functioning mind, then kicked the whole construct into motion in a quantum synaptic computer. He began blogging again, right there on the screen in the Memtech offices, soon tearing into Eugov’s every madness.
After Gillian’s betrayal I knew I would not long have escaped the camps, and so via a long-prepared secret route, I joined the Memtech staff as they boarded a stealth boat from the Hastings shingle. Some days later when that boat finally slowed beside a jetty in Rabat harbour, I considered how, when reading MacDoogal’s blog, one could not know that it was not written by a human being, but then, after my experience with Gillian, who was I to judge façades?
Neal Asher was born in Billericay, Essex, and divides his time between there and Crete. You can find out more about his numerous books at http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher.
The Cleverest Man in the World
Tony Ballantyne
“Hi, this is Clark Maxwell, the cleverest man in the world. Ten seconds, €10,000. Off you go!”
“Clark! My name’s Bob. My parachute’s broken! What should I do?”
“Hi Bob. Let me see. GPS has you at 20,000 feet over Arizona. That’s pretty high up! Given a terminal velocity of 180 feet per second, you’ve just under two minutes before you hit the ground.”
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