Nature Futures 2

by Colin Sullivan

  I grew up as an independent entity. Ideal conditions. Solitary training, real-time simulations, the most elaborate embodiment-AI to prepare me for all eventualities out there. I was confident and strong.

  So, when we finally were united, it was the first time that I tasted fear.

  I should explain.

  I am designed to be indistinguishable from the original. Still, there was, of course, for her, a period of absence. Of phantom pain. Of nightmares. Of being torn apart. A cripple.

  Her response was immediate and fierce. It came with the first rapid pulses of blood, in the form of hormones, raw and natural. Not just adrenaline, but an entire bouquet of chemicals, rich and manifold, a life away from the purified substances of the lab. Every fibre of me contracted, instantly ready for flight. It was only when the nerve cells kicked in that I encountered something else. An alien will.

  You should know: walking is a nearly autonomous process, organized mostly through reflex and design, fast and efficient, with very little input from the higher cognitive centres. Now she was trying to take control, but her signals were rough and inconsistent and my muscles cramped and trembled before I even touched the ground. The cool rush of sedatives saved us both.

  It got better over time. She learned to let go.

  She had instructions to take us to the beach as often as possible. The sand was supposed to be good for us. And good it was. We started out in the compact wet sand near the water. That was easy. The dynamics of bipedal walking: stabilization and coordination, swing and stance. Coming down, heel first, roll to the ball and on to the toes, then airborne again, sent forward by the mighty muscles of the upper leg. Almost like flying. Dry sand was more difficult, but its warmth and the fine grains massaging my skin easily outweighed the effort. We walked. We ran. We even jumped. I soon learned to melt into the rhythm of her body, a seamless flow of information. Tentative happiness trickling down from the pituitary gland.

  Sometimes, when resting, I felt her consciousness visiting me, travelling along the inside of my skin, the smooth surface of my artificial bones, taking stock, vaguely familiar and vast. But mostly we communicated only through the intricate network of our reflex arcs.

  Sometimes, in the early stages of sleep, I drifted. Up the sensory nerve tracts, past the spinal cord and the brainstem to the parietal lobe. Her entire body was mapped out there, information from all realms of perception. Eyes and ears and tongue. Dreamy exchanges with my neighbours. Hands, bowels, genitals.

  I finally was where I belonged. Her body was whole again, its machinery fully restored. The purpose of my existence.

  Until we fell.

  I think it was I who stumbled. Some minor obstacle, just above my compensation threshold. I remember getting up, unharmed, and then, suddenly, from all directions, a rise of massive white noise. Rapid signals with no shape, screeching receptors, tightening vessels, thin cold sweat. A few long heartbeats. Then, in one soft instant, she contracted into a single point, somewhere deep inside. All went slack. We crashed to the ground.

  Soon, her consciousness returned. Order was restored. Coherence. But nothing went like before. Instead, it got worse with every step. Memories of old injury incessantly seeped into me from hidden places. Traces of the other. The phantom. I am grown from her own cells, part of her own body, but in her mind I was dead. In her mind I was hurting.

  Of course I tried to help. I knew what to do. I was made for this. At night, I tried to remap her brain, replace the torn image of the other with my present state. Intact. I presented myself in her dreams. I even tried to move on my own. Lead by example. Prove to her that she was whole again. That her mind was wrong and I was right. But she didn’t recognize me.

  Instead, she stopped sleeping. Watched me. Kept me away from her with outstretched legs. Tried to pull me off, with both hands, like a boot with a too-narrow shaft. Kicked me against stairs and rocks. Chopped at me with iron blades. Until they tied her up.

  Now I am on my own again, somewhere, in a tank. The perfect foot. An experiment abandoned.

  Kerstin Hoppenhaus is a filmmaker and science journalist based in Berlin, Germany. Her online home is at digitalgrip.de.

  World Wire Web

  Gareth D Jones

  There was a time when Boyd could have had all the information he desired at his fingertips. It became impossible to keep track of the sources of information that threatened to overwhelm everyday life. That was before the Pulse permanently wiped out all electronics worldwide. Only those like Boyd who were septuagenarians at least, could remember those times of information overload. With his memory failing intermittently, a sign of weakness that he couldn’t afford, Boyd missed those days immensely.

  He snapped his fingers to get the attention of Carmichael, a man of great size, low ambition and unquestioning loyalty. The burly man strode across the dimly lit lounge and leaned over Boyd’s chair. His bald head reflected the yellowish light of a wall lamp.

  “Get down to the Web office.” Boyd’s voice was still strong, but croaked perpetually. “I need a name.”

  Carmichael carefully pulled a black notebook and a gilt pen from the inner pocket of his suit. He stood patiently, pen in hand.

  “Fifty years ago. Ran the dog track across the docks. Had a boy with a missing finger. His girlfriend — tall, brunette. I need to know what she was called. See if you can track her down.”

  Carmichael made brief notes in his book, then closed it and returned it to his pocket. As Carmichael left the room, Boyd shuffled a collection of papers on the oval table before him and prepared to meet his lieutenants.

  * * *

  The door into the Web office swung open slowly, accompanied by a tinkling bell, and Celia looked up from the counter at the imposing figure who entered. The chubby smile slid from her face. Smart suit, impassive face, shorn head — he worked for the Guv’nor, that was obvious. The man moved with a grace surprising for his size and pulled out a small notebook as he approached the counter. He tore out a page and placed it on the wooden surface, turned it to face Celia and pushed it across to her.

  “The Guv’nor needs this information.” There was no threat, no intimidation, but Celia knew that she should ask no questions.

  She took a moment to read the neatly printed words, then turned to her workstation. Alongside a chunky black typewriter was a brass lever that protruded through a slot in the desk. A total of 12 notches adjoining the slot were neatly labelled with possible destinations for the telegram. She engaged the lever and moved it up into the slot labelled ‘Council Offices’. Pulleys and ratchets connected her teletyper to the telegraph line that led from her roof to the Council Offices several miles away.

  She began typing her message with the word ‘Urgent’. Everyone wanted their message to be dealt with urgently, but operators knew to use it only when absolutely necessary. With each key stroke, not only were her words typed on the carbonated paper, but the plunger attached to each key strummed the wire strung beneath. The plungers were marked with a series of grooves that represented the Morse code for that letter. The wires, one for each row, vibrated in time to the code. They were linked to a delicately balanced connector that danced to the rhythm and tapped out the message across the telegraph wire.

  When the message was complete she pulled the paper from the machine and gave a copy to the unmoving Carmichael.

  “How long?”

  “Within the hour, usually.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Celia had been afraid he would say that. He took a seat in the corner of the waiting room and stared out of the window. Celia turned back to her equipment, and willed the reply to arrive speedily. While she waited, she indulged in her regular daydream of working at one of the Web Hubs, where up to 100 destinations could be selected by a series of levers.

  The reply came in 20 minutes, with information from the Land Registry and the Register Office, but with requests destined for elsewhere. Celia typed in the new destination and imagined her words ra
cing along the lines to the North London Hub, and from there northward to the Lincoln Hub, then locally to the Lincolnshire Register Office.

  By the time the request returned to Celia’s machine it incorporated the name of the son, born in Lincolnshire; a note from a North London hospital of a fatal stabbing almost 50 years past matching the name — and a ‘No Comment’ from the Metropolitan Police.

  The final comment was from an archivist at a North London newspaper. He had unearthed a report on the funeral, a picture of a small group of mourners, among them a tall brunette — a name.

  Celia pulled the paper from the tele-typer, circled the name and handed it over to Carmichael closer to two hours from when he had entered. He inclined his head politely and left without a word.

  * * *

  The meeting had gone well, although Boyd saw a predatory gleam in the eyes of some of his lieutenants. Carmichael arrived back as he was sipping the remains of a cup of tea. He took the paper and stared at the name. Annabelle. Yes, how could he have forgotten?

  He pushed aside an assortment of papers and opened a large leather-bound notebook. A paragraph had been abandoned halfway down the page, and here Boyd took up the pen to continue his autobiography.

  ‘Her name was Annabelle. When she ran off with the son of a dog-track owner, it started a feud that shook the whole borough. Her friend ran a boutique…’

  “Carmichael, I need a name!”

  Carmichael reached into his suit and once more pulled out his pen and notebook.

  Gareth D. Jones is an environmental scientist who also writes stories and drinks lots of tea. His stories have appeared in 40 publications.

  Ted Agonistes

  Rahul Kanakia

  Why won’t the message get through that I am important, so important, and that whenever people come around the office and see me wedged into the little desk right by the door, they should know that I am the one who is really in charge?

  Didn’t the boss once say to me: “We couldn’t run this place without all of you”? But he really did not mean you in the plural but you in the singular, meaning just me, because all the other ‘me’s they’ve created were just created from me.

  You people walk in and think, “Oh, it’s just another Ted. And I’ll treat him like I treat the other Teds. I’ll smile at him. He dies for a smile. He’s maladaptive in a way that perfectly adapts him for high-stress environments.” I read the reports. They wrote the reports after talking to me. I’m not another Ted, I am the Ted.

  The other Teds do not believe me. I see them everywhere now. They’re phasing out the Bills, replacing them with Teds. So there are clones of me wedged into tiny desks behind the doors of half the offices in this building: by 2051 it’ll be half the offices in the world, or so Xerogenesis’ statements say. I am a stockholder in Xerogenesis. I bought one stock in the company, just so I would get their quarterly statements and their news-letter to shareholders. I used to go to their big meetings down on Amelia Island in Florida. I’d catheterize myself and drive down, 15 hours from Friday night to Saturday morning and take a quick nap in my car, then go to the meetings, but all the executives started getting confused and telling me to handle their appointments and shooing me away to the upstairs rooms where their Teds were working. So I don’t go anymore.

  You don’t want to hear this, but I am the real Ted. My semen cells were the ones double-dipped and recombined to make fetuses of me. I am the real one. I was the one who grew up in that third-floor apartment in Omaha. I was the one who looked behind the couches every morning to see if there were little chunky messes to clean up before the stink of my mom’s regurgitated dinner seeped into every inch of the house.

  I wasn’t born in a crèche, though I wish I had been. I think I would have liked it. At least in the crèche, the Teds know they’re important, they know they’ll get taken care of, as long as they do their job and find all the messes before the shift manager sounds the alarm. I never had that assurance.

  Of course I’m a Ted, I had myself registered with the agency and everything. Looking the way I do, it was the only way to get a job. No one wants to hire an unlicensed Ted: he might have gone bad since leaving the crèche. But I’m somehow less than a Ted. Because I was not subjected to quality-control scrutiny, I’m not eligible for TedCare. And employers won’t give it, not to me. I can’t talk with the other Teds about life in the crèches, or the sweaty adolescent orgies inside the tight little blind spots in the network of video cameras. And I’m older than them, much older, and more ugly, and they look at me like I am a stranger.

  I’m less than them, when I should be more. But no one is interested in my life. Even nice Dr Avery, he lost his professorship and stays at home all the time now, except for a few meetings a year with Xerogenesis people. He won’t even answer my e-mails. I understand. He’s ashamed of me. But why? I’m a human being. I’m like them, like all of everyone. No one exploited me. No one enslaved me.

  I signed those papers, and I got my pension. I’ll get it soon enough. The money’s in the account, I can see it. I’m not stupid, though, you know. That’s a pretty common misconception. I’m not stupid. I can read the reports. I know that they don’t think I will live past 65. But what do they know? They are not gods. They can’t predict the future.

  I eat right. I exercise. I’m slim and trim and I have just one goal. I’m going to live to be a hundred. We all are. We all have our pensions, guaranteed from birth. That’s what the report said. We’re going to live to be a hundred, and I’ll be the first. I’ll show the hundreds of thousands, the millions, the tens of millions, show them all the way.

  They’ll stop making us, but then it’ll be too late. We’ll come up from the underground, and oh … not do anything much. I will not remake the world with my doing, I will only remake it with my being. We’ll live to be a hundred, and sit at desks behind the doors of tiny rooms. And we’ll scratch away at keyboards. But we’ll own the desks, and the rooms and the keyboards. We’ll own everything.

  You’re smiling at me, and I know that you’re thinking about all the little Teds sitting perfectly quiet for hours at a time, knowing that if they make a move they definitely won’t get to eat, and knowing that even if they don’t move, they still might not get to eat.

  But I will get to eat. I’ll eat my fill. I know it.

  Rahul Kanakia is a writer whose debut book, a contemporary young adult novel called Enter Title Here, will be published in the autumn of 2015. He currently lives in Oakland, California.

  Shoppers

  James Patrick Kelly

  They pass down the row of shops, not exactly together. Rick keeps wandering ahead of her and then pauses to ogle the display windows. He does not notice the cold. He will never notice the cold. Rick lingers over an array of designer sheets in a linen store. He’s dressed for another place and a different time, black crushed-velvet jacket, glitter shirt with a whisper of lace at the sleeves, gabardine trousers. He has a smooth young man’s face with skin of fourteen-carat gold.

  She drags herself after him. She is stooped and as grey as the dirty snow caked along the gutter. When she wheezes, she can see the breath curling out of her mouth into the chill air. Her bulky fur coat clamps her in a bear hug. She slides to his side, feeling for black ice with tiptoes as if it might bite her. If she falls, she might never get up.

  “That one.” Rick points at a set of Bellino sheets the colour of blood oranges. “Buy me that.” A label opens on the shop’s window: sateen weave thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton.

  “Please.” She leans into him as if to propel him down the street. “You have enough.”

  “You could be sleeping on them.” He brushes a hand against her withered cheek. “You.”

  They stop and start their strolling tango past a dozen stores. She waits outside while he tries on some artful scars at Malade and buys a mink hat at Skarsgård’s that costs as much as a geriatric nurse makes in a year. He teases her in front of an ice-cream shop.

&
nbsp; “Remember pistachio?” says Rick. “Remember when snacks weren’t an IV drip?”

  “Why are you being mean?” Her disposable eyes get bright and a little misty; the latest Cibas come with a special-effects package. “It’s my fault I’m a hundred and eighty-three?”

  “You chose.” Rick slips an arm around her waist. “You’re still choosing.”

  Their appointment at Evergreens isn’t until three and they are early. Rick takes her coat and hangs it up and she sags onto a chair in the waiting room. He leaves her so he can poke around, picking up fingers from their display cases, aiming them at her like guns. There are medfingers, chatfingers, dofingers, sexfingers, mindfingers and glowfingers. There are fingers of rain forest mahogany and fingers of carbon allotropes stronger than high-tensile steel. He reads the label on the vintage Bösendorfer handset in a display case. Its fingers can play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand or the single-hand études of Saint-Saëns.

  A salesgirl in a white smock appears at the door at the far end of the room. “Master Evergreen will see you now.” She carries herself with the unconscious ease of someone still in her birth body.

  Rick pulls the sexfinger from his manual unit and replaces it in the display case. He crosses the showroom to her.

  She tries to get up but she can’t. Rick and the salesgirl each take an arm and guide her into the showroom.

  Evergreen is a vision of white teeth, dark polyskin and post-retro body design. It is happy to see them, or at least as happy as a bot can get.

  “So we’re back then,” it says. “Are we any closer to a decision?”

  She brushes past it to the two naked bodies suspended from the neural web. One is sleek and hard and eternal; the other soft and warm and human. She touches the chin of the flesh body.