Nature Futures 2

by Colin Sullivan

  “I guess. But —”

  “And admit it: you’re just the tiniest bit curious.”

  Allison could hardly deny that. “Well … all right.”

  * * *

  Jennifer sat in front of the computer, Allison behind her, on the edge of Jennifer’s bed, craning her neck to see the screen. Geno-Me was slick and inviting, as befitted one of the world’s most popular social media sites. The stylized double helices bordering each page glowed their soft greens and blues.

  “Okay,” Jennifer said. “The physical stuff’s locked out, unless he’s friended you.” She glanced over her shoulder.

  Allison shook her head. “We didn’t talk much about it.” In her mind, she was reviewing the few dismissive words they’d spoken on the subject, trying to determine whether they’d established a tacit understanding that neither would look at the other’s profile. Kevin had called it ‘a marginally more accurate horoscope’ but didn’t people sometimes read horoscopes just for fun?

  “The personality stuff’s more fun anyway,” Jennifer said. “Okay, let’s see: H11Bβ, that’s cool. He has a good sense of humour?”

  “Definitely.”

  “But he has his serious side,” Jennifer said. Her hand and wrist were busy working the mouse. As the cursor slid across the 23 pairs of rather cartoonish chromosomes on the screen, small sections lit up, boxes of text appeared beside them, and other sections, seemingly unrelated, glowed in sympathy. “And — Uh oh.”

  “What?”

  “HOPPER9, B2F11, WELLER-WYMAN and no 17J-CROSSHAIRS. That’s got stubbornness written all over it. Have you noticed that?”

  “No. I mean, he didn’t want to see the movie I did. But I didn’t care.”

  “Well, you better get used to that. He’ll be picking the movies.”

  Allison couldn’t imagine a thing like that bothering her. Still, it was disconcerting to find a stain, however small, on her previously spotless conception of Kevin.

  “And, look, Allie: NICKEL7. That’d be okay if he had JIB4, or the elongated DONALDSON-HARVEY, but, nope. That means highly confrontational. Highly.”

  “Huh,” Allison said, remembering the business of Kevin shushing the pair of obnoxious teenagers who’d been talking during the movie. But wasn’t it admirable to stand up for one’s self, when the situation dictated? Then again, the kids hadn’t been so loud.

  “Oh, Allie: 76UNION-Y-SAIL. Hostility towards authority. Look, that’s linked to oppositional disorder … all kinds of things … crime.”

  Allison could come up with nothing to corroborate that, which somehow made it worse. She sounded unconvincing even to herself when she said, “But you can’t tell how these things are going to express themselves. Environment’s just as important. Right? Free will? What’s the saying? It’s a list of ingredients, not a recipe.”

  “Yeah, but look at the ingredients. You can’t make a cake with … sawdust and broken glass.”

  When Allison came in, Jennifer set aside her magazine, and said, “So?”

  Allison’s stoical expression faltered before she reached the sofa. By the time she was seated beside Jennifer, her mouth was bent in a steep frown, and her eyes were welling up.

  “It’s over.”

  “Oh, Allie. You broke it off? It’s probably for the best. Considering.”

  “He did.”

  “What? Don’t tell me he didn’t like your profile. That’s some nerve, with —”

  “He never looked at my stupid profile. But he knew I looked at his. He said he could tell right away, I was treating him differently. I could hear myself doing it, too, but I couldn’t stop. It’s like, when you know those things about someone … when you think you know…”

  “What was it, some kind of trap? Remember, he has VIKING-F11? They list that as strategic thinking, but one of the corollaries is deceit.”

  “It’s a trap, but he didn’t set it. The whole thing’s a trap.”

  “Was he very … confrontational?”

  “Stop it, Jen. It wasn’t even him we were looking at.”

  “We got the wrong profile?”

  “It was his profile, but not his genome. He posted a different one. One of those historical reconstructions they do.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Gandhi.”

  Jennifer stared. Finally she said, “Well, I’d call that deceitful. I bet he has VIKING, at least.”

  Allison stared back for a moment, then stood. “I’m going to bed.”

  Conor Powers-Smith lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where he works as a reporter and writes fiction in his spare time.

  Invisible

  João Ramalho-Santos

  He slid out of bed as the door closed behind the nurse who regularly came by to check if he was still breathing. Avoidance was always best; unlike academia, this was a place where quick wits were greeted, not by admiration, but with increased doses of meds. Keeping them controlled was the only goal. Nurses weren’t impressed by who their charges had been; they dealt with ex-politicians, ex-actors, ex-chief executives, ex-everything, focus on the ‘ex’. The trick was to be invisible, to walk the fine line between polite privacy and anti-social sullenness. Rather than musing on ‘how it had come to this’, he took it for what it was: a new challenge.

  Today, however, the wait had been excruciating, a package beckoning just outside the door. The nurse never brought the mail in, not part of the job description. But it was there; he knew it, next-day shipping never failed. Fifteenth edition. Two shelves on the bookcase held the fourteen previous ones, a steady increase in bulk following the chronology. In fact, these were the only books he had bothered to bring. He opened the door, trying to will away telltale creaks in hinges and joints, avoid any possible attention. But a small envelope was all that awaited.

  A sudden surge of adrenaline-flavoured fear gushed through him. The publishing company had gone all-digital. Inside the envelope would be a DVD, a USB pen, a code to access some website far away. No longer the heaviness of textbooks, the rustle of knowledge to be thumbed through, the smell of fresh ink; just jumps, links and animations, information beaten into easy morsels. Yet another challenge, he mused, firing up the laptop, searching for glasses, battling arthritis for the envelope’s contents.

  The chapter was not where he expected; the new authors had wanted to shift things around, leave their mark. Wouldn’t work: by now the book was known by a sole last name, and that original author had been dead since the tenth edition, his name transitioning from scholar to brand. But even creative authors couldn’t escape the obvious organizations in science, he thought, finding what he was looking for.

  One introductory line. “It has long been well established that…” No references were given. The chapter then proceeded to describe what had recently happened in the field. Why, the new authors must have thought, reference the obvious at the beginning? They had merely added what seemed like a million links at the end, for those with a taste for the historical. He grinned, gazed at the bookcase.

  The first four editions he forgave, only the drive for completeness justified their purchase. He was in high school when the first two came out, in college for the others. The fifth he had learned to understand. When it was published he had only presented at a meeting, and at the time hadn’t even been fully aware of what the data meant. It was the sixth and seventh he had real issues with. By then his PhD thesis had been completed, the data published, their implications clear. Yet it remained ignored, just a few odd details that didn’t quite fit accepted dogma, certainly not enough to warrant the rewriting of textbooks, as one helpful professor candidly explained. So he formed his own lab to work on the ‘odd details’. Luckily these were the old days, funding for non-canonical work was still easy, if off the beaten prestige path. He published like mad, bothered editors, made sure the eighth and ninth editions had to reluctantly state: “Despite a general consensus this may not be the case in very particular circumstances.” Finally he was referenced, the work
tangible; even though any casual reader understood the textbook was being, at best, charitable. By edition number ten his relentless campaign had got others to pay attention, to try out his hypotheses. No longer the ramblings of a lone maverick, the text finally admitted that there were competing views, suggested that resolving this issue would be a challenge for the future.

  And the future came through in editions eleven to thirteen, his work gradually becoming the “general consensus”, the previous fading into afterthought. The thirteenth edition was particularly satisfying because he had since retired, the ideas no longer dependent on his own stubbornness, but on the best truth available.

  Five years ago, when he first read the fourteenth, he had to admit to a twinge of disappointment. “Initial theories were contradicted by work that clearly established…” the chapter said, still referencing his papers. Nothing else. It was as if the fiery battles discussed in previous editions, and that his entire career was based upon, hadn’t happened at all. But slowly he understood the bigger picture, realized what the next edition, what all future versions, would have to say.

  And fifteen did. The controversy was dead, to resurface in other chapters on the history of the field, but not useful in day-to-day practice, realm of the “well-established”. Later he would check if Wikipedia and Google Scholar agreed, but the grin was already turning into his first real smile in years. Regardless of all the awards and accolades, the true pinnacle of the academic profession had now been reached. Peers considered his work good enough to be truly immortal.

  And here too he was finally invisible.

  João Ramalho-Santos has been sighted at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology and the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. And several other places. He likes them all equally, but when he is in one, he often wishes he were in another. Some of his stories have been published on LabLit.com.

  A Better Mousetrap

  Mike Resnick

  Men have always talked about building a better mousetrap, just the way they talk about a car that runs on water rather than gasoline, or nuclear fission that doesn’t have any harmful by-products. But it wasn’t until they reopened the Heisenberg Space Station out between Europa and Callisto that they realized they really needed a better mousetrap.

  The first team of scientists — four men and two women — docked their ship there on 2 November 3014 AD, at exactly 7:43 p.m. H.T. (Heisenberg time). They buttressed the hatch up against the entrance to the station, sealed it, then opened both doors and stepped into the station, the first humans to do so in more than 900 years.

  Exactly 43 seconds later, one of the women screamed, and the other jumped onto a chair that was bolted into the floor. Three of the men started cursing, and the fourth, a wimpy little fellow, fainted dead away.

  It seemed that some of the station’s inhabitants were waiting for them. They’d been there nine long centuries, and were glad to have some company. Having just eaten the last of the huge stores of preserved food that prior crews had laid in, they were even happier to have a new source of protein.

  “What are they?” asked the wimpy scientist when they woke him up.

  “Mice,” said the nuclear physicist. “Or maybe rats.”

  “I don’t care what they are!” said the roboticist from atop her chair. “Get them away from me!”

  “No problem,” said the biochemist. “I’ll whip up a fast-acting poison and lay it out for them.”

  At which point the wimpy scientist fainted again.

  So the biochemist mixed up the poison, and left it out for the mice, and the crew went about setting up their workstations, ate dinner and went to bed, expecting to find a few hundred dead mice in the morning.

  What they found were some plump mice, happily licking their chops and looking for more poisoned bait.

  “They’ve evolved,” said the biochemist. “They’ve obviously developed an immunity to poison. I suppose we’ll just have to find some other way to kill them.”

  “I know just the thing,” said the nano-technologist. “I’ll design a mechanical microbe that will invade their systems and attack them from the inside, and I’ll slip it in some cheese.”

  The mice came, and they saw, and they ate — and they came back the next morning looking for more.

  “I don’t understand it,” said the nano-technologist. “Those microbes would kill any one of us. Why didn’t they kill the mice?”

  No one knew, so they captured one of the mice, drew blood samples, stomach samples, gene samples and still had no answer. The best suggestion came from the biochemist, who theorized that their forced evolution had created an internal environment so hospitable to microbes, even engineered ones, that the microbes ignored their programming and set up shop in the mice’s intestines.

  The roboticist tried next. She created an army of tiny metal warriors and sent them forth to do battle under chairs and beds, inside bulkheads, wherever the mice were hiding.

  That was when they learned that the mice had evolved mentally as well as physically, and that their commanders were far superior at warfare to the roboticist, who had programmed her metal army. The robots were outflanked and outmanoeuvred, and finally surrendered only 17 hours into the battle.

  The nuclear physicist didn’t do much better with his jerrybuilt disintegrator ray. The mice were impervious to it, and the only harm it did was to two bathrooms and the coffee-maker in the galley.

  “Well, I’m all out of ideas,” said the biochemist.

  “The dirty little swine have beaten us at every turn,” muttered the nuclear scientist.

  “Idiots!” said the wimpy little scientist disgustedly.

  “The mice?”

  “No,” he said. “I was referring to my colleagues.”

  “You should talk!” snapped the roboticist. “All you ever do is faint.”

  “I have never denied my limitations,” said the scientist, “though it is thoughtless of you to refer to them. Just for that, I’ve a good mind not to solve your problem.”

  “So you think you’re the one who can build a better mousetrap?” she said sardonically.

  “Most certainly.”

  “Even though they’ve withstood poison, microbes, military robots and disintegrator rays?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, hot-shot. What will you need?”

  “Just a little help from our geneticist.”

  “And nothing else?”

  “Not at the moment,” said the scientist.

  So they left him and the geneticist alone for a month and tried not to notice all the damage the mice were doing. And then one day the scientist announced that the better mousetrap had been created and was ready to perform its function.

  The others all snickered at him.

  “That’s it?” asked the nanotechnologist when he displayed it. “That’s the better mousetrap that we’ve been waiting for all month?”

  “You don’t really think something this primitive is going to work, do you?” demanded the biochemist.

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” muttered the wimpy scientist.

  They all laughed. (Well, they laughed at Newton and Einstein too.)

  Within a week every mouse on the station had been eliminated, including three that had somehow migrated onto the docked ship. It had been swift, efficient and devastating.

  “Who’d have believed it?” said the roboticist as they all gathered around the better mousetrap.

  “Where did you ever hear about something like this?” asked the nanotechnologist.

  “Sometimes you have to read books that aren’t exclusive to your field of study,” answered the scientist.

  “Meow,” agreed the better mousetrap.

  Mike Resnick is the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction, according to Locus, the trade journal of the science-fiction field.

  The Pair-bond Imperative

  Jennifer Rohn

  After the third time
Eve came home late from work, her mother Mary activated the trace. On the small hand-held, she watched her daughter linger at the door of the domed bee farm, standing too close to a fair-haired young man. There was laughter, there was head-ducking; there was a hand stretched out to touch a forearm: her hand, his forearm. Five minutes of conversation, lips moving in animation. Then, after a display of reluctant body language, they parted like a broken comb of sticky honey.

  For the next three days, Mary tuned in for clocking-off time. The man always arrived first and waited until Eve emerged, shy eyes brightening, from her designated station. They had known each other long enough to fall into a pattern, Mary saw. Despite the unexpected loveliness Eve radiated, this girl on the cusp of womanhood, her mother was both embarrassed and alarmed by the rawness of the emotions in evidence. For Mary did not share Eve’s delight when she looked at the man. No, all she could see was that his sandy-blond hair was only a shade lighter than her daughter’s bronzy head; streaked with red in the sun, yes, but still technically blond. And straight, equally fine and straight. They could have been brother and sister.

  The colony had stopped DNA typing and other molecular techniques long ago, when food and energy production had become the main priority and such technology had been deemed an unsustainable luxury. Instead, they relied on the ancient methods practised by early scientists such as Gregor Mendel: phenotypic differences as a measure of genetic distinction.

  After the catastrophic epidemic that had taken Eve’s grandparents along with nine-tenths of the colony’s inhabitants, the gene pool was too small to permit anything other than the most ruthlessly disparate matches; even then it was still unclear whether the group had a long-term future. The need to survive made mating choice another luxury. Women had to have children by as many different, and dissimilar, fathers as possible, for as many years as they were able. To allow pair-bonding was impossible; attachments under such restrictions would be disastrous.