Once Upon a Future

by Robert Reginald (ed)

  The grafts had taken with surprising smoothness along the terminator points on his shoulder and mid-thigh; the slightly slick/shiny flesh of the endicaraian beings did resemble sun-burned human skin, albeit a child’s skin in its lack of fine-grained texture, while the basic shape of the augment-limbs more or less mimicked those now removed.

  The main difference was in the hand and foot portions—while there was a definite indentation where the wrist and ankle would be, the “hand” and “foot” were flatter, less defined, and digitless, of course. The Leas swore that the new limbs had something akin to muscle tone, based on their daily manipulations of the limbs while he was in the coma, so with proper bracing, he might well be able to walk, after a fashion. And he could probably push buttons and flip levers with the new “hand,” too...if he could bring himself to learn how to do so.

  The scarring on his abdomen was visible, but minor, and the new cosmetic ear scaffolding had been covered with new skin, and attached to his head...and the slightly longer hair on his scalp covered the faint scar where the new ear adhered to the rest of his head.

  Suddenly, he noticed that she was in the room, and stopped his jerky efforts to pull the absent covers over his body. His head bobbed slightly on his neck as he turned to look her way, and began muttering, “The first litter of Boog’s, they were born to be service dogs, like their Alpha...he was a service dog, saved his owner...pushed her wheelchair, pulled off her shoes and socks...so his clones, they were predetermined to be service dogs the second they popped out of the host dogs’ behinds...only, the first dog, the Alpha, he had cancer, so all his clones, they got it too...good dog, bad genes. My Alpha...good genes, good body. Not ’sposed to...not ’sposed to be a...science project—”

  “We’re all science projects. We have been since the first set of clones were augmented with that mutation of the progeria SNP...all of us are experiments. No exceptions, Duncan...just variations. You’re just a little more unique. Think of it this way, you’re spec—”

  “Freak.” Spat out with a coldly conscious emphasis. Even his eyes looked clearer, as they glared at her from the high-resting mattress top.

  “I wouldn’t say that. Kluge sounds better...and this has proved to be effective, under the circum—”

  “Back in...1862, they called a ‘kluge’ an ‘ill-assorted collection of poorly matched parts, forming a distressing whole’...or a.k.a. freak—”

  Not knowing for sure which text from 1862 contained that definition, Annemie decided to let it go, and instead approached her lover, hands out, and try as he might, he couldn’t wiggle far enough away from her to prevent Annemie from gently stroking his new symbiotic flesh, each hand extended palm-down against his kluged arm and leg.

  Under her own flesh, the new skin rippled slightly, before smoothing down against the underlying sculpted bone armature beneath. And Duncan felt it—clearly, some sort of permanent bond had been created between his remaining stumps and the limbs grafted onto them, one which included active nerves and sense of touch.

  After a few minutes of silence, he cocked his head to one side and asked flatly, “How does it feel?”

  “Like skin...your skin, but younger. Not freakish. Different, but...not unappealing.”

  “And this?” He tried to hold up his right hand, moving it slightly at the pseudo-wrist to approximate an open palm facing upwards.

  “A little more kluge, but it looks good. Simple, streamlined.”

  “Embryo flipper...first trimester clone hand. Paddle-hand—”

  “If you insist on considering it that. If you insist on playing the freak, the cripple. If you really want it, be it—”

  “Want...same. As before—”

  “Our sameness is an illusion. An accident of creation in some lab. The Leas, they have the right attitude, enjoy what we are, for the time we’re here. Change, mix it up if they feel like it. Screw the paradigm—”

  “You let your hair grow out. Is mine—” he limply raised his left arm up, and let his hand flop down on his scalp “—need to have Veronica/Rabiah cut it...or you do it—”

  Shaking her head, she mouthed Nope, before rolling up the bottom of her tee shirt, the faded black one with the phrase—“What part of the quantum theory don’t you understand?”—printed in flaking electric blue letters across the front, and exposing her taut midriff, which now bore the inch-high lettered inked inscription:

  SI HOC LEGERE

  SIC NIMIUM

  ERUDITIONIS

  HABES

  He blearily stared at her new tattoo, mouthing the Latin silently, until he was able to translate in a breathy whisper, “‘If you can read this, you’re overeducated’...I never thought it was funny when the Jansurs still had the tee shirt it was printed on—”

  “I did.”

  “But you said you didn’t—”

  “I guess I said a lot of things to make you happy...no, make that made me want to make you happy. At the time, I believed I had to.”

  Duncan/Badru’s eyes left her bared midriff, and rolled down in their sockets, as he peered at his altered body yet again. He said something which was too soft for her to hear, so she leaned closer, placing one hand on his abdomen (mindful not to touch his long scar), and the other on his left thigh, just above the “Annemia Always” tattoo, the one the tattoo artist had screwed up, misspelling her name, which meant Duncan argued his way out of paying full price for it, since the original drawing he’d handed to the guy did have an “e” at the end.

  “You said?”

  “Did you mean what you said now, about my...body? The...new parts? Or was that something you thought I wanted to hear, too.”

  Love, now and forever, that was what her Alpha told her, just before she went into that long, cold sleep, and allowed her Next to continue not only her life, but her dreams...with Duncan. As he was, and as he would always be. Physically imperfect now, emotionally imperfect for perhaps always.

  Leaning down, she lifted up his right hand in both of hers, and gently pressed her pursed lips against the new flesh, before whispering, “I’d lie about a tee shirt, but about this...it’s not who I am, who any of the Annemies are.”

  Duncan/Badru nodded, and said, “Tell Veronica/Rab—Veronica, that she should get out her tattoo gun. I want a new one, too. The one Jansur Alpha suggested we all get, back in that lecture hall—”

  “Not ‘Boog’ Four’—”

  “Why not? You got the tee-shirt one—”

  A sense of presque vu rippled through Annemie/Rabiah’s body as they verbally sparred...the rhythm and pacing of the banter was familiar, something almost-seen before, but the subject was utterly new. Which when it came to any of the Duncans, was nothing short of a true paradigm shift....

  * * * *

  During the months he did live with his kluged limbs, Duncan/Badru never did get fully back into the swing of his former daily routine on the ship; he never quite learned to walk per se, but he always managed to drag himself down to Deck Six, to stare down at Duncan/Anum’s slow but natural progress toward late adolescence. And perhaps it was his own memory of exactly what he looked like at the age of sixteen that triggered what he managed to do before he then limp-crawl-surged into the Dissolution Chamber on his own, and strapped himself down one-handed, and affixed the electrodes and needles in his own neck and scalp, before beginning his anagram process minutes before Dr. Lea found him in the chamber. There was nothing he could do but allow the process to finish, before calling Annemie/Rabiah—still relatively healthy, still vigorously untouched by the insidious effects of cosmic radiation which surrounded them—to his bedside. Perhaps he willed himself to go, or maybe the symbiotic beings were tired of their host body, for as he wordlessly died before her, the limbs shuddered in place, then physically detached from their host body, and curled tightly around the artificial bones beneath them. Reflexively getting to her feet as she backed away from the body of her Fourth Clone mate, Annemie/Rabiah dimly heard a commotion in the corridor beyond,
and as the voices became clearer, a frantic exchange between the Leas, she slowly began to smile as she made out their words:

  “—damaged Duncan/Anum—”

  “He didn’t destroy the—”

  “No, but they’re badly broken—he’ll need at least a month of ’woom time to heal properly before he can be Emerge-ated—”

  “Don’t tell me, Jas—the right limbs—”

  “Hey, we’re talking Duncan, so—”

  Looking down at the body of her mate, she shook her head and said softly to herself, “You knew the memories of what happened to you would transfer no matter what, so you made sure your Next would be able to continue the same sort of new beginning you had after the kluge...so utterly Duncan of you. Prevent change any way you can, maintain that status quo no matter what...but I’ve learned how to out-think you, love. I can stand being mateless for a couple of years, and while you were incapacitated, we all learned how to compensate for your absence.

  “I hope you can stand Emerge-ation with fuzzy short-term memories...Jansur once told me that the longer memories are stored between Dissolution and Emerge-ation, the less distinct the most recent ones tend to become. So you’ll be waking up with crippled memories in a perfectly sturdy body...a slightly younger-than-usual body, and a much more hirsute, tattoo-and-piercing-free body than anytime before. Most definitely different than the one you left behind—or tried to re-enter....”

  As she walked out of the Dissolution Chamber after taking one last look at Duncan/Badru, one which would have to last her for quite some time, she mentally added, And this time, one of us will be older, mentally as well as chronologically, only a different one will be the more confident, experienced partner. Something I do hope both of us will remember, in all the subsequent bodies together....

  * * * *

  In memory of Baby Biscuit (August, 2004-August 4, 2008) and Max (?-2007-August 5, 2008); your lives fell far short of the mythical nine promised to your kind, far too short to be either fair or just, but they generated beautiful memories which will live on long after your brief time in this particular life. Two precious lives never to be again, but never to be forgotten.

  Afterword

  I don’t know if a lot of my readers are aware of this or not, but during the latter half of the 1990s and up until 2005, I mainly wrote erotica, under my own name (occasionally), and two pen names, one female and one male. I managed to get into far more erotica anthologies and magazines during that period than horror or science fiction markets; thanks to an early appearance in one of Susie Bright’s Best Erotica volumes in ’96, I was able to place many, many stories due in part to having that credit on my cover sheet—while I’m not going to reveal the two pen names here, since 1) if you, the reader, aren’t specifically into erotica to begin with, you probably won’t like those works, and 2) I used the names for a reason, specifically because those works were so radically different from my usual output that I felt that they literally were the work of two “other” writers, rather than something I’d put my name on. Not that I don’t like those stories—I actually think some of my best work as a writer per se appeared under those two pen names. It just wasn’t work I felt that fans of A. R. Morlan might like.

  I think I sold about three-quarters or possibly four-fifths of my erotica output during those ten years, far better than my ability to sell my trunk stories in the horror/fantasy/sf genres, with only a handful of outright rejects in that field; I have a small cache of trunk stories, far smaller than my other work under my own name, but one of them, a piece I’d done for one of Cecilia Tan’s Circlet Press trade paperback anthos—a gay sf one, by the way—kept niggling at the back of my mind, whispering to me, “Try rewriting me as straight sf....” It took almost nine years of mental nagging on the part of that plotline, but I finally rewrote the thing, changing the cast of characters from an all-(gay)-male crew to a mixed-sex cast of shipmates, plus I updated the storyline as based on the current trend of cloning house pets (including the infamous five-puppy cloning effort back in ’08), plus some additional space-travel-related information I’d read about.

  I think the reworking from erotica to more or less straight space opera style sf turned out fairly well; this is not my best sf story by any means, but those editors who saw it did like it well enough to share positive comments on it. I eventually sent a copy of it to a sometimes co-writer/pen pal of mine, James B. Johnson (a really fine writer in his own right), and he and I tossed ideas between us about turning this into a novel, with each chapter dealing with the successive batches of clone crewmen; but I eventually shelved that idea, since I’ve had a hard enough time trying to sell hard-copy-only manuscripts in an increasingly online-only field, and trying to sell a non-electronic version novel would be impossible. Jim didn’t want to take it on as a novel on his own, and I know I don’t have enough of a hard science background to be able to expand this into a proper hard sf novel, taking all possible space/science/medical ramifications into account, so that particular version of this story will not be coming to a bookstore near you anytime….

  But for what it is, an exploration of science vs. human nature, I think it is entertaining enough, not bad for one of my rare sf-erotica rejects....

  GAME OVER, by Edward R. Morris

  When you die, I don’t think it’s your entire life that flashes before your eyes. Just the parts you wasted. The parts you can’t remember. The parts you gave away. When a world dies, even an artificial one, it remembers every part of itself as those parts are broken down.

  I don’t know which is scarier, or more pathetic. I have a feeling that question will be answered before too much longer. Until then, I can only keep moving, and hope.

  Yeah, welcome to the candlelight meeting. Hi, my name’s Sam Levinson, and I’m an online-addict.

  “Hi, Sam!” Ha. Ha.

  Ha. Every day we invent faster ways to communicate, and we still can’t talk to each other on public transit. Instead, we talk on the little phonebeads in our lobes all the time, spinning webs of babble just to hear the sound of an answering, even vaguely interested voice in this big, cold world. We act like little kids with walkie-talkies, puppies put to bed with ticking clocks, grabbing for anything to bring us back to the womb and the illusion of Eden.

  We want to clutch fast to what we think we lost from childhood. We want to feel less alone. Instead, the nature of the world drives us further down inside ourselves to a place much like this dying simulacrum I’m trapped in now, this cold claustrophobia like being pushed up under a bubble in permafrost far beneath this ground, this sky, this wind I can’t feel in my hair.

  Online gaming addiction is not, in my opinion, a true disease. It’s a snowball of disparate pathologies intruding from aspects of our lives we don’t want to deal with and the problems twining around them. It’s a compulsive overuse to hide our eyes from the bright day. It’s a behavior pattern.

  But any Behaviorist would tell you that if you simply change your reactions, your coping mechanisms, you will change the behavior. Scare yourself badly enough in-game and....

  And what, exactly? I’ll let you know when I get there. Right now, I’m still alone, stumbling through the dark.

  There are pirates all across the online metaverse, strung along the outer rings of every Gameworld. The more deliberately shocking the Game, the stranger the spores that sprout in the yeasty folds of its underbelly.

  Every Game has its holes when put into actual play. Every world-composition has its social impacts—economies shifting into imbalance; endless, inbred successions of power; impostor bots harvesting gold; high-level players creating game preserves to hunt monsters and force out the noobs; corpse-campers who wait for you to grow near death and then kill you for your points and gold....

  Having said that, the Game I’m stuck in right now, well…. Cube the words “deliberately shocking,” blast them through a thesaurus and out a set of concert amplifiers, and you’re there. Of all the hundreds of separate Gameworlds w
ith millions of players in each, of all the Gameservs public and private I ever pinballed between, why did I have to fixate on this one? Yeah. Lucky me. S.O.L.

  When the Fed cuts the power at noon tomorrow, Non-Game Civilian Time, this whole Gameworld (this cosm of little else now but rending honks of the system breaking down, the borders sealed, no new accounts, no tales yet to tell) goes Buh-Bye. The security protocols of the whole damn Überguild ( the Gameserv AI’s and Developers, to you) never accounted for newer full-sensorium headgear, especially the kind that can get frozen by a random clot in the blood whose sugar powers it as that blood pumps through my brain.

  I had to go and bankrupt myself to get top-of-the-line headgear, didn’t I? I had to go and fudge the medical forms and not tell them about my family’s collagen defect, our history of lipomas and myocardial infarctions and brain aneurisms. Didn’t I? One little free-floating globule of adipose annoyance in my blood, one little grain of fat, and CLICK. Stuck. Game Over. Thanks For Playing. Dammit. Dammit. DammitIgottagetoutahereIgottagetouttahereIgotta—

  Deep breath. The brain recoils in horror, and the senses rebel. Oh, the hindsight is twenty-twenty, but now I am catatonic in-Game no matter which way you slice it. It would take someone else to observe me this way and call 911.