Nature Futures 2

by Colin Sullivan

  “I suppose,” I said dubiously.

  “And if it’s a probability function, then our quantum computer can handle it.” He scribbled an equation, crossed part of it out, then added something. “Oh, boy. This will revolutionize publishing.”

  I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  He stopped scribbling. “Imagine you open a book, and from the very first word, it’s exactly what you want to read. Every word is perfect, the characters fascinate you, the plot thrills you…”

  “That’d be cool,” I said.

  “And someone else opens their copy of the same book, and it’s perfect for them. Only if you compare the two books, the words aren’t the same. The story and characters aren’t even the same. The book has adapted itself to be the perfect book for whoever first opened it.”

  I frowned. “You mean, it’s like an e-book that changes based on personal preferences?”

  “No, this would be printed on paper. But the text itself would have been composed using a quantum computer, like the one we have at the office, using a program to create a quantum probability wave function that doesn’t collapse until someone actually observes what was printed.” Caleb sat back with a satisfied grin.

  “And when the wave collapses…” I said, not quite sure that I understood the implications.

  “The book becomes the best book ever written for whoever collapses the wave. It’s brilliant.” Caleb leaned forward. “And we can use it to make sure you get your name in print. How would you like to be the author of the greatest science-fiction story ever written?”

  * * *

  I stared at the sheets of paper lying facedown on the printer. “You’re certain I can’t take just a peek?”

  “If you do,” Caleb said, “the wave function will collapse and the story will become the best story for you, not for the editor of Analog. He needs to be the one to see it first.”

  “Can I at least know the title?” I felt kind of awkward submitting a story that I knew nothing about, even though Caleb assured me that I could still be considered the author, as the computer could not have been programmed to create a probability wave function for science-fiction stories without my help.

  “Nope,” he said. “I’ve hard-coded your name and contact information into the printout, but the rest remains undecided until the editor reads it.”

  With a sigh, I slid the manuscript into the manila envelope and sealed it.

  * * *

  Sixty days later, my SASE returned. I took it unopened to the office the next day — I wanted to open it with Caleb.

  “Could be an acceptance or a rejection,” I said.

  “Open it,” Caleb said, looking at the envelope. “You have to collapse the wave function. But I’m sure it’s an acceptance.”

  I opened it.

  “Read it out loud,” Caleb said.

  I looked past my name and began reading. “In my opinion, this is the greatest science-fiction story ever written.” My heart leapt within me, and I continued. “It is undoubtedly the best story you have ever submitted to me. But what on Earth made you think you could get away with submitting a verbatim copy of ‘Nightfall’ by Isaac Asimov?”

  Nebula Award winner and Hugo nominee Eric James Stone’s stories have appeared in Year’s Best SF and Analog, among other venues. His website is www.ericjamesstone.com.

  1-9-4-Blue-3-7-2-6-Gamma-Tetrahedron

  Ian Randal Strock

  I always knew I was destined for great things, even as a child. It was only when I started growing up that I learned how the world worked, and realized that great wealth would make those great things much easier to attain. Unfortunately, attaining great wealth wasn’t quite so easy.

  I didn’t find my fortune on Wall Street. My writing career looked to be pleasant, but not blockbuster. Lottery wins were hard to come by. And I didn’t even have a big enough stake to take the poker world by storm.

  Then, one day, I hit upon the solution. It was so simple I almost laughed with joy at it.

  I didn’t have to find my fortune all by myself.

  As long as the Universe would allow time travel, my future self already knew how I’d made my fortune. With time travel, of course, he’d come back to tell me how to do it, ensuring that he would have that fortune when the time came.

  So all I had to do was be prepared for my visit from my future self. Chance favours the prepared mind, and I was going to be prepared. I needed a foolproof way of recognizing my future self, because he might have only a moment to give me what I needed. He might not look like me any more. I needed something. A recognition code. Something I would know, he would remember, and no one else would ever even think of.

  1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

  A code. A code I repeated to myself nearly constantly at first, until it became ingrained in my brain. And then only regularly, to keep it fresh, so I would recognize it instantly. Who knew? My contact with my future self might be only a few seconds. I would need to be able to hear (or see) that code and know it immediately, so as not to waste whatever brief time interval we might have together.

  1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

  I kept plugging away, trying to write that best-selling novel (no luck yet); on Wall Street, everyone seemed to be making money but me; I hadn’t yet hit a winning lottery combination. But I knew my destiny was assured. Somewhere out there was the future me who had the answers; who knew how I would make my fortune. And he’d be back to tell me. After all, he needed to tell me how to do it, so that he would have that fortune.

  1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

  I went to work for an Internet start-up company, but it didn’t make it out of the gate. I tried my hand at poker, but was only a fair player, and without a large enough bankroll, the big-money tournaments were well out of my reach. I even started several businesses, on my own and with friends, but they all came to nought.

  1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

  There were times when I was depressed, thinking it was all a cosmic joke on me, that of course there was no way my future self would be able to tell me anything. But at my core, I held fast to that feeling; it felt so right, it made the Universe make sense. It had to be. My future self would tell me how to do it.

  1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

  I tried to imagine what would be the best place, the right time for my future self to visit, to share the words or data I needed to know, and then I realized it didn’t matter. My future self already knew when and where we would meet. After that meeting, I’d know it, too, and then I could remember it for us.

  ONE-NINE-FOUR-BLUE-THREE-SEVEN-TWO-SIX-GAMMA-TETRAHEDRON.

  It was my code. I never wrote it down; never told it to anyone; never even told anyone my code existed. It was going to work; it had to work.

  1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

  One day, I was sitting in the park, reading a book, taking a break, when someone sat down on the bench beside me. “One-nine-four-blue-three-seven-two-six-gamma-tetrahedron,” he said.

  I dropped my book. “I’ve been waiting for you,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, in a voice I’d only heard on tape. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not going to be rich anytime soon. I need a sample of your blood, to prove I’ve been here.”

  “And then what? Will we be rich after that?”

  “Doubtful,” the future me said. “I’m just a junior member of the team. They only chose me for the trip because I’m expendable, and because I told them I had a foolproof way of finding my earlier self. But the fabric of the Universe won’t allow more than three or four trips, so this is a proof-of-concept trip that will probably never be repeated.”

  “But what about the stock market, or the lottery, or —”

  “I’m not rich in my time, so I can’t help you, there. But can I have a sample of your blood?”

  I sat there, stunned, while he drew a sample. Then he walked away. I didn’t eve
n pay attention.

  8-5-omega-0-3-3-orange. 8-5-omega-0-3-3-orange.

  There must be an alternate universe, one in which I find my fortune, and can travel between universes to tell myself how to do it …

  Ian Randal Strock is the owner/publisher/editor-in-chief of Fantastic Books (www.FantasticBooks.biz), and a writer of fiction and non-fiction. His name is unique on the web, so any page talking about Ian Strock or Ian Randal Strock is a reference to him.

  Extremes

  Rachel Swirsky

  So there I was, as near to the lava vents as I could get in a Bubble, with the robots droning on about extremophile lifeforms and whatever. Blank metal looks. Blank metal voices. “… Organisms that thrive in physically or geochemically extreme…” All the passengers and me, we’re ignoring them, just staring down at the red and the burble, and I start to wonder, what if I took off my suit?

  Fire hot, death bad, etc. etc.. Except that’s all brain stem. Very twentieth.

  We’ve all done that thing where we stick our hand on the stove and keep it there just for the XP, you know, to see how it feels. And it’s riot, blistering agony, but then you’ve got through it, you’ve proved you’re a real man or a real woman or a real tweener and they make you a new hand and that’s that.

  So wouldn’t it be kinda sport? Just to dive? Char, burn, bubbling red and black, hot liquid ouch — but then they’d kick you into new skin and there you’d be. Only, like, with new experience cuz you’ve lived extremophile.

  Would that be effer? That would be effer. Would that chat up any Fifi you want? That would chat up all the Fifis in the solar.

  So I doff the suit, naked and already rocking from heat through the Bubble, push the emergency, klaxons going off all behind me, robots off to restrain the other passengers, the gasps, the shouting and me going free into the magma flow, me and hot, red rock and the little buggers that live in it.

  Like I said — riot, blistering agony.

  But I wake up, and I’m in the growing tank, swimming around all fetal, with my brain loaded into a proxy computer while I’m waiting for flesh to pile. And me, I’m sport. Sports rocket. I’d lived the lava vent. Held my hand to the stove, but 20 million times more X.

  I’m expecting everyone to be like you are so rocket, so whoa, but no one’s zinging, so I tap my direct and

  whoa but

  everyone’s talking about me, but not me-me, because there’s like another me, and it’s still swimming down there in the lava, and how is that possible? It’s taken less than a day for every trace of me-me — the one that’s not lava-me — to disappear from the top link lists. I’m subterranean. I’m invisible. I’m replaced by lava-swimming me, and this weird link-up he’s broadcasting that no one understands. Boom. It’s everywhere.

  I try to find out what’s going on, but no one will zing, they’re all directing this other me instead, so I have to go infoblip and it turns out no one’s yessir, but …

  They think it’s got something to do with the plastic mods from when our greats took the sleep to this planet, when they were stitching into our gene code, in case we needed to have five legs or huge eyes or whatever, to cope with the new planet. And they tried to neg it all when we got here, but they left in strings for the medlinks and once you’re that small on the micro, no one’s 100 sure what everything does, like you ping one bit on and two off, and then you get sunburn-proof skin and everyone knows that, but later, it turns out that it makes everyone really like neon orange, too.

  So somehow, the fluid, the plastic, the string, all pulled and twisted, and there’s me, in the lava, adapting and sending back this sphincter-screech footage no one can decode, and no one will zing me cuz they’re all zinging him.

  And that’s who I’ve been since. Me that’s not the real me. No one even recognizes me, because me and him, first, we don’t look at all the same, and also second, they don’t expect to see him not being in lava.

  Technically he’s the A1 and I’m the clone, so my friends and family mostly are on him. He’s famous, and I’m just A2. The robots made me because my rec said to do that if I was ever as good as dead, and they figured I was. They didn’t know I’d still be all A1 in the lava, and even though I am, it’s not like he thinks much like I do, much like any human does. It’s not like he knows how to zing, or how to do anything but send footage nothing can translate.

  I tried to make an infoblip on what it’s like to melt in lava, but everyone’s more interested in what it’s like to live in lava, which I guess I twig, and besides, I get spam-waved a lot because he and I’ve got the same ID, and it looks like I’m forging.

  So there’s me. The most boring me out of 2. I’m thinking of going into deep ice, or out into vacuum, see if there’s something special about my code, see if I can switch-change again. Might do it one, two, three times, if it works. Extreme-o-mes. Me-o-philes. But when I’m done, chill, I’m all bout nulling that good-as-dead rec. Gonna wink out, normal-me. No more A2. Just A1s on the edges, all alien and unknown.

  Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa and graduated from Clarion West in 2005. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine and Clarkesworld Magazine. She has also been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award, among others, and twice received the Nebula Award. She would not dive into lava, but being married to a geologist, she probably knows someone who would.

  White Lies

  Grace Tang

  “Anthony, is it normal at our age not to remember parts of our lives? Parts people would consider important?”

  I froze for the smallest split second, but years of acting had trained me well. In fact, there were days when I forgot that my colleague was not what he appeared to be. I willed my fork to resume its passage from my mouth back to my plate, slowly and calmly.

  “Why do you ask, Darren?”

  “I was talking to a student of mine who’s graduating soon. He’s very excited, naturally.”

  I nodded as we both gave up pretending to care about lunch.

  “Problem was, when I tried to recall my own graduation, I drew a blank.”

  My heart was racing. Lisa would not be happy to hear this. While he spoke, I typed furiously but stealthily on my phone under the table. Subject Three is catching on.

  “It gets worse. After more thought, I realized I could recall only the barest details about my time in college.”

  I maintained my perfect poker face, “Hmm. I guess I don’t remember much from college either.” Fond memories of college flooded my brain.

  My phone buzzed, balanced on my knee. I glanced down. Come now.

  “Gotta go?” Darren had caught me looking at my phone.

  “Uh, yeah, Lisa wants to see me.”

  He’d noticed my nervousness. “The problem with collaborating with your wife, huh? Never know whether you’re in trouble because of work, or because you forgot your anniversary.”

  Lisa looked much older than her 40 years as I entered her office, out of breath. “What happened?” she asked.

  “It was his missing memories of graduation that triggered it.”

  “Damn, those were always the hardest,” she rubbed her fingers on her temples. “It’s almost impossible to fake memories of a major life event.”

  We had been in graduate school together when she’d started work on implanting information directly into the brains of rhesus macaques. Almost like magic, her monkeys knew where food was hidden in rooms they had never been in, and recognized other monkeys they’d never met.

  When she managed to impart basic mathematics to her charges with no effort on their part, her work was broadcast on every major news network in the world. Lisa should have been the happiest person in the scientific community. Instead, one evening, I found her sitting on the floor in the corner of the lab, face in her hands.

  “Lisa, what’s wrong?”

  She looked up and wiped the smudg
ed mascara from her cheeks.

  “The Dean of Research visited me today. He said the world hadn’t seen anything this exciting since Dolly the sheep.”

  “And that’s bad because…?”

  “Like cloning, it’s never going to move past animal work. They won’t let me use human subjects.”

  But I knew it would take more than rules to stop Lisa. When her research assistant, a mediocre student at best, started acing every exam a few months later, I knew exactly what was going on. I still remember the night we were the last two people in lab, and I seized my chance.

  “How are you doing it?”

  Lisa struggled to contain her smile, as if glad that someone had finally figured it out. She checked to see no one else was around. “It wasn’t stable at first … as soon as she realized there was no way she could know all the stuff she did without having ever gone to a single class, the knowledge vanished.”

  “Looks like it’s working now.”

  “It was an easy fix — I figured out that unlike the macaques, humans couldn’t handle the sudden unexplained appearance of vast amounts of factual knowledge. So when I put facts and skills in her brain, I also threw in memories of having gone to lectures, studying, all that stuff.”

  It was then I realized why the project had been stopped.

  “Granted, autobiographical memories are much harder to implant than semantic facts. It’s very similar to hypnosis — you suggest something to them, and their brains fill in the rest.”

  “So in other words, you’re telling people very convincing lies?”

  “Just white lies, Anthony…”

  When I still looked unsure, she led me to her equipment room — she rarely let anyone back there. I was honoured.

  “How’d you like to work on the next one with me?”

  I slept on it. Half of me wanted to report this to the authorities, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up. And by then, I realized I liked Lisa for more than her intellect …

  The first time Lisa brought Darren to the lab, I smelt him before I saw him. Plucked from the streets, he hadn’t had a shower in days. And yet five years later, Darren was a fellow assistant professor, about to deliver a lecture on molecular neuro-science down the hall.