Nature Futures 2

by Colin Sullivan

  She bent down and ran her hand over the dog’s neck and shoulders, then back around to its throat and chin. The dog smiled and licked her open palm.

  “I just can’t believe it,” Julius said, shaking his head.

  “Come on our walk,” Rometa said, “and I’ll show you a thing or two about this prison called real life.”

  As he jogged after her into the great unknown mysterious world, Julius felt something he hadn’t in a long time. Anticipation.

  Igor Teper lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches old atoms new tricks at temperatures near absolute zero. He also writes stories, occasionally.

  Life in a Monastic Lab

  Joost Uitdehaag

  The bell rang for evensong as Jorge attached the power-pack and started his gel. He smiled. He liked it when everything was exactly in time. He left the lab and walked towards the chapel. On the way he met his older friend, Anselm, who hurried along as usual.

  “Slow down,” Jorge whispered. “What’s the use?”

  “What’s the use of being slow?”

  “Slow is about taking aim.”

  “Where did you get that from?”

  “A penitence session.”

  “Don’t mention those.”

  “You mean they are counterintuitive to a fearful old individualist. Really, you should join. Maybe even tonight?”

  Anselm just smiled. They stopped talking as they entered the chapel. It had a pleasing retro ambience — its design influenced by Le Corbusier’s famous Chapel of Notre Dame — amid the lab complex of the Benedictine Order for Oncology, set in a remote valley in the Ardennes.

  For Jorge, his lab was one of the good things the great crisis had brought: a total reshuffling of drug research, an injection of idealism in a world of self-interest. That the injection had come from religion was no surprise for Jorge. Management gurus had been courting religious rules long before the crisis. Live for yourself or for your community, that was the post-crisis choice, and science and religion were both community efforts. Scientific monasticism was a new synthesis, the ultimate way of serving society.

  All the scientists had gathered in the chapel, and they started a medieval hymn. Singing together was supposed to stimulate collaboration and equality, but Jorge was still bad at it. During the hymn he worried about Anselm. His friend had started to complain again about giving up the ‘self’ side of science. He was a former academic and had this all-pervading desire to compete and establish his name, but within the Order that would get him into trouble. They gave you a permanent contract and a budget so there was no need to worry about grants or tenure, but in return the Order demanded no double work, no egos and no secrecy.

  If only Anselm had been a pharma man. Novices from industry generally had less trouble giving up the self-side. But then again, those who had worked through the Barren Years had generally less passion for their jobs than a zebrafish for a barcode.

  Jorge wondered why people could not simply decide if they really wanted to live their undergraduate dreams and work on curing disease, or if they wanted something else. Anselm always said he was naive.

  “Idealists have a history of getting hurt,” he would say.

  “Isn’t that the whole point,” Jorge would reply, “that contributing costs you?”

  “You just haven’t suffered yet.”

  Anselm had been damaged by his time in academia; that much Jorge knew. That’s why doing penitence tonight would be good for him. It would give him that perfect feeling that all was well and that he was living a good life. If only Jorge could convince him.

  The singing finished and Abbott Fra Paolini spoke about the Barren Years. That was the time when ever larger pharma companies and a society ever more hostile to them together had driven the cost of developing a drug to $2 billion. And what was considered worse: to the cost of a thousand scientific careers. It had been the scientific equivalent of the Somme offensive.

  With a wide movement of his hands, Fra Paolini spoke of the day when seven ex-pharma scientists had taken up vows in a monastery to continue a ‘killed’ project. It was a golden move. Their vows of poverty (no patenting, no bonuses), chastity (do nothing that satisfies only yourself) and obedience (listen to what patients want) were the right guarantees for patient organizations and health insurers to pour money into monastic research labs. In the past year, these labs had developed and published the majority of new therapies (generics companies usually took up marketing them).

  After the ceremony, Jorge waited for Anselm.

  “Why do you fear a penitence session? You know they did this all the time in the old days: remember Borel and cyclosporine? It’s part of our tradition. It is why the public likes us.”

  “I don’t fear it. I just don’t think it’s rational. It’s hysterics.”

  “I’m not hysterical.”

  “But you’re not joining tonight are you?”

  Jorge did not answer. Anselm stopped walking and gave him an angry look.

  “You are! That would be what, the second time in a month? You’re wasting yourself.”

  “The supervisory committee allowed me.”

  “Sure they do. Bunch of vampires, they are.”

  “It has nothing to do with them and all with me,” Jorge hated being berated.

  “I won’t allow you,” Anselm said.

  “What do you want to do? Swap places?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  Jorge was amazed. Was getting Anselm to do penitence really this simple? Was he really going to give up his principle for a worry about a friend? Anselm never ceased to surprise him.

  “All right,” he said.

  * * *

  In the monastery, most clinical trials were carried out in the infirmatorium, on a veranda filled with the evening’s sunlight. Jorge was sitting at Anselm’s bed.

  “You are getting chimidinib,” Jorge said, “the first inhibitor of the Chung-Mi variant isomerase. Have you seen the preclinical data?”

  “Yes. They’re ok.”

  Jorge rolled up Anselm’s sleeve as a nurse prepared the drip.

  “You want some blood for western blotting tomorrow?”

  Anselm nodded. “Don’t worry,” he said as the compound started to enter his body.

  But Jorge felt guilty. That night he did the only sensible thing: he lit a candle for his friend.

  Joost Uitdehaag lives in the Netherlands and works for a biotech company. Please look him up in PubMed. His stories have appeared in the Dutch Pure Fantasy magazine. He is currently finishing a high-fantasy novel in which monasteries play a large role.

  Let Slip the Dogs

  William T. Vandemark

  In Abuja, Nigeria, fresh from an open-air market, a woman dressed in black walks with a melon balanced on her head.

  “Yeah, baby. William Tell time,” says Specialist Browning, a Marine bored out of his skull. He and his squad have been on duty 100 hours straight, hopped up on orexin-z to counter sleep deprivation.

  “Don’t even,” says Sergeant Knox, but Browning’s beam rifle sings, melon splatters, and rind flies like shrapnel. The woman stands in disbelief, arms spread, while juice — thin as artificial blood — drips from her abaya.

  “Huzzah,” says Browning. The woman fixes his position. She gestures wildly and advances.

  Knox steps from the checkpoint’s ceramic-plated kiosk. “Lady, stop right there,” he shouts.

  A small crowd gathers. Someone tosses a bottle. As it arcs through the air, an AI built into an auto-turret atop the kiosk assesses the risk. The bottle shatters in the street.

  Knox unholsters his pistol and waves it at the woman, trying to dissuade her from entering the checkpoint’s no-go zone — an area mined with cybernetic fleas. He hates having to fill out reports when civvies need to be deloused. But without pause, the woman steps into the orange dust, and it comes alive. She stomps, swats, screams in frustration. Stepping back, she points at Knox as if he is the one to blame and reaches
into her sleeve.

  Someone flings a tin can at the Marines. A magnetometer chatters as if it’s a grenade. The auto-turret sizzles, spitting streams of nano flechettes at hypersonic velocities. The can and its contents vaporize; the superheated air rebounds with a thunderclap.

  Knox flinches; his pistol discharges.

  In sudden silence, the woman drops to her knees and slumps forward until her forehead touches the ground. But this isn’t sajdah, a prostration to her God; the back of her skull is gone. Tangled hair, flaps of skin and remnants of her hajib drape the exit wound like a shroud. In an outstretched, angled hand, she clutches a melon rind.

  The cyberfleas ignore the fruit. They gorge on blood.

  * * *

  Deep within a hospital ship, off the coast of Nigeria, Sergeant Knox lies on a polyglass table, head encircled by a halo. A psych-tech asks for specifics. She wants a description of the woman, of the market, of the three-legged dog Knox saw earlier that day; she wants childhood memories of pets; she wants Rorschach associations of the woman’s blood spatter pattern.

  As she works through Knox’s story again and again, teasing new details from his narrative, she walks about an enlarged, holographic projection of his brain. Within the stereotactic model, neural pathways flicker and fluorescent voxels coalesce: a memory trace.

  “You’re on a hippocampus block,” the tech says. “So you won’t remember any of this, but informed consent requires me to explain that when we strip the problematic engram, secondary pathways may be affected. Although the goal is event-removal, phantom reconstruction will occur. The mind heals by filling in gaps. But really, you’ll be fine. And tomorrow, you’ll wake up on R&R, unaware of the synaptic pruning. No Post Combat Stress Disorder for this Marine. Right, Sergeant?”

  * * *

  In Abuja, Nigeria, fresh from an open-air market, a woman dressed in black walks with a melon balanced on her head.

  “Oh, baby. I want a taste of that,” says Specialist Browning, a Marine bored out of his skull. He and his squad have been on duty 100 hours straight, hopped up on orexin-z.

  “Stand down,” says Sergeant Knox, but Browning lets loose with a wolf-whistle.

  Before the sound dies, a three-legged dog lopes from a shaded doorway. Knox recognizes it as the stray he’d fed while on patrol. He laughs. “Yeah, Browning. You sure can attract the ladies.”

  At Knox’s voice, the dog makes a beeline for the kiosk and heads straight into the no-go zone.

  “Git!” Knox shouts.

  But the dust awakens. The dog yips, bites at its legs, snaps at the air. It spins about, activating even more of the cybernetic fleas.

  The woman with the melon gestures at the dog and yells at Knox in a language he doesn’t understand, but her message is all too clear.

  “No,” Knox says. “Not my fault. You want him? You get him.” Trying to wrangle a feral dog, near rabid with pain, isn’t Knox’s idea of gallantry. Besides, he’s allergic to the fleas’ caustic discharge.

  As if to plead its case, the dog howls, its distended voice raw and unearthly.

  Jesus, Knox thinks. Why doesn’t it just run away?

  The bustle of the market has stopped. Everyone is watching. Even the kiosk’s auto-turret seems transfixed, its barrel jerking in micro adjustments as its AI rips through algorithms. Assessing. Assessing. Assessing.

  But it won’t pull the trigger. Of course not. Such dirty work always falls to Knox. Cursing, he unholsters his pistol and takes aim …

  The dog is dead before it hits the ground. It’s disconcerting the way its limbs splay. Almost humanlike.

  Knox glances at his pistol. Although smoke is curling from its barrel, he doesn’t recall pulling the trigger. He looks up. His own men, the people in the market … they’re staring at him. He catches sight of the woman and for an instant it seems as if her face is alive with bugs.

  The world cants.

  Knox drops to his knees and rocks back and forth as waves of guilt wash over him.

  Keep it together, he tells himself. It was just a dog. Just a dog. Just a dog.

  He closes his eyes, leans forward and rests his forehead on the ground, wishing to God none of it were real.

  William T. Vandemark chases storms, photographs weather vanes and prospects for fulgurites. His work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show and assorted anthologies.

  To All Sister Capsules

  Scott Virtes

  We are not alive, yet we are the seeds of life. We are capsules, each with an isotope power source, a shell, a silicon brain, senses, nanites for self-repair, and our most prized possessions: vials of living cells in stasis. We have data banks of human knowledge and all eternity to learn from them. We travel the void between stars.

  More than 50 million had launched before me. How many of us survive we cannot know. How many are launched after us, unreachably far behind, is unknown. With our allotted trickle of power, we can send occasional status blips to other capsules within a few thousand klicks, but as we spread the channels fall silent. So we send stronger bursts less often, and hear from the others less frequently.

  Some of us scan a wider spectrum, and we have heard from capsules from … elsewhere. I have received 22 of these transmissions myself, from undetectably tiny points of hope. I run them through my thoughts, hoping to decode them. Many of them begin with prime numbers, or Fibonacci sequences. Some have blocks of data whose length is divisible only by two or three primes — these can be taken as images, but I don’t have the capacity to understand what I see. Store and continue.

  We drift, and nothing changes except the faint signals we hear. I compare my star scans on the longest possible range and see that I am halfway to Procyon. Hull integrity 70%, battered by dust, but my odds are favourable. With my modest fuel packet I can make a few manoeuvres during my lifetime. I yearn to find planets, to orbit new worlds, to someday touchdown, transform into the bio-lab I am meant to be, and bless an earth with life.

  The yearning and crush of time are unbearable, even to a thing such as myself that cannot technically feel anything. Yet enough time has passed that I cannot convince myself that what I am feeling is not … Feeling.

  A new signal touches me. I switch modes, gather, gather, complete. This is my day 319,771. And it is the third time I have received a distress call from another capsule.

  It is the first time such a distress call has come with an image. Capsule 02FAF080 was under attack. I had to check my own coding to see that we are, in fact, programmed for such a response. But it was absurd. We were hurtling through nothing, beyond the reach of any force but light and dust and gravity.

  Still, 02FAF080 had sensed something approaching, turned on its wide-lights, and caught a series of images that I could not believe or deny.

  The first image showed a blur about an arcminute across, at 190 × 76 degrees.

  The next image showed a cluster of something, distance unknown, size unknown. Whatever it was, it approached during the next several photos. Then it was within reach, and it reached.

  I am programmed to keep a log of my journey, although I doubt any living eye will ever read it. A fallback mechanism sends me groping through Earth literature for responses to unexpected situations, on the basis of humans having experienced everything of significance. Result: this last image left me chilled to my (non-existent) bones. The thing in those photos was — I struggle to understand — a clump of capsules. I modelled it, broke down the image, and estimate that the thing was made up of 60 capsules that had somehow tethered themselves together.

  I can’t overemphasize the impossibility of this. We are all launched in waves. ‘Spore shots’, the humans called it. Point a few thousand tiny, expendable probes at a nearby star and hope one of them survives. I have no regrets about that. It’s a brilliant solution. Once launched, however, we can only go forward. We can auto-correct our courses to within a degree or two, but the bulk of our tiny fuel allotment is needed to slow down. None of us w
ould make an unnecessary course change.

  A quick calculation shows that if I knew the location of another capsule early in the journey, it would be within my two-degree cone of opportunity. But why seek them out? It was an illogical act to perform even once. How could 60 capsules ever come together?

  The distress call ended with a summary, garbled by a lack of words and a trace of what I could only describe as honest, digital fear.

  To all sister capsules. If you detect this thing in your sector, project an immediate flight path away. [ … ] Its nanites are connecting to my outer ports, building a link. It is a single spirit, calls itself by a name I cannot repeat. It has [ … static … ] blocking my signal. I fight for self. My nanites are outnumbered. [ … choppy signal … ] Correction. I have calculated that there is no escape strategy. It has 62 capsule bodies attached, but all fuel tanks are FULL. It has used and discarded at least 100 others. It is [ … ]

  Proximity alert. Something is coming up behind me. My reflexes kick in. Wide-lights on. Record data on all channels. Prepare my own distress burst.

  I name it Goliath. I know now that it would not exist unless it calculated a more efficient flight strategy. Shall I be one of the shells that arrives at Procyon, or be vampirized and discarded in the void? Of course, those have always been my only options — succeed or fail — and I should not be feeling anything at all.

  I begin my burst. To all sister capsules …

  It is so damned cold out here.

  Scott Virtes has had more than 600 stories and poems published since 1986. His works have appeared in Nature, Analog, Space & Time, Ideomancer, Star*Line, Cafe Irreal, Illumen and many more. He has two story collections and five poetry chapbooks available. You can watch him die in Master and Commander, but he’s okay now. After dark, he may be seen on playing guitar in the San Diego area.

  Glass Future

  Deborah Walker