The last thing he remembered seeing was a face in the light behind the hole in reality, that perfect circle of nothingness with smoothly curved edges, wisps of light streaming out of it like god himself was peeping over its edge.
#
When Orshio came to, there was water almost up to his neck.
He flailed wildly at first, completely confused as to why he’d gone from the lovely and strange weightlessness of space to the familiar and dangerous viscosity of water. The viewscreen was somehow still stubbornly displaying symbols. The panelling all along the left flank of the Igodo’s control module had ruptured and the ship was filling with water fast.
He stopped as his senses returned to him. Get out. He had to get out. He took a deep breath and submerged, swimming through familiar passageways to the Igodo’s airlock. His skin was covered in cuts that stung so much he knew he had to be in seawater.
He reached the airlock, but it only opened halfway when it read his genetic signature. Damaged. It had to have been damaged. He swam up to take in air and calm down. The water was almost up to his nose now, soon the entire ship would be full of water. He breathed slowly, calming his nerves. Then he re-submerged. He swam back to the partly open door, held onto a rail, and, thinking carefully, punched the locked door with his bioplasmium fist like it was an old enemy. It gave. He swam into open water and up, up toward the shimmering surface.
When he surfaced, it was hot and bright, and the sun was dancing a silver line down the skin of the water. His dreadlocks felt heavy on his head. It took him a few seconds to realise he’d lost his red headband. In the distance, he heard sounds like voices, like shouts, like... Earth.
He spun around and saw he was floating only a few hundred feet from a beach. Behind the beach line, a lush green island rose and at its crest sat a beautiful glass bungalow that reflected the sun like a prism. Waves broke over a surrounding group of rocks to the left of the beach. Fishing boats were slowly straggling in through the constellation of rocks. Up and down the beach, there was a smattering of people of all shapes and colours and sizes with their towels and beach balls, their frisbees and their beach mats rolled up under their arms. There were at least thirty of them and some of them were shouting, some of them were waving animatedly at him, some of were pointing up to the sky. He turned again, eyes raised. In the distance, there was a small aircraft approaching.
Orshio started laughing.
He laughed and laughed and laughed.
He laughed because a few minutes ago, he’d been a third of the way across the solar system, because he’d seen the universe bend, because he’d performed an impossible manoeuvre, because he’d saved billions of people from a madman, because he’d wrestled against the essential forces of the universe and yet, somehow, he was alive, floating in the ocean beyond a beach on Earth like some bloody tourist.
He laughed and splashed around in the water like a child until the aircraft, which turned out to be a Transhuman Federation supersonic carrier arrived, dropped an autonomous winch cable and hauled him into its metal belly like a morsel of food.
Inside, he was attended to by people in medical gear and completely ensconced in an insulation super suit—a thin layer of smart nanomaterial that isolated him from his environment to keep him warm and prevent bacterial exchange in his delicate state—and was given a cup of hot rooibos tea. A pale older man with blonde hair and a stiff back, wearing the familiar white uniform of the Transhuman Federation forces with the Zulu shield, yin-and-yang, and spears, emblazoned on its breast walked up to him and said, ‘Good to see you are alive and in one piece, Captain.’
‘Thank you, Officer...?’
‘Petrov. But call me Stanislav. Welcome on board the Anansi.’
‘I guess I’m incredibly lucky. Looks like I landed in a nice location,’ Orshio said, smiling thinly before taking a sip of his tea. ‘What was that beach anyway?’
The officer smiled at him. ‘Machangulo Island, just off the coast of Mozambique. Lovely place, perfectly natural and very popular with tourists from all over the federation. We’re heading to Addis Ababa to meet the trade council. Your engineer explained the situation to us and it seems we all owe you a great debt. And you owe her an equal one. We would have fried you with plasma when you made an unscheduled entry into Earth orbit if we hadn’t received her message.’
Orshio laughed, ‘I cannot overstate how glad I am that you didn’t do that.’ Then he added. ‘I have to thank her when I see her.’
The captain smiled, a clever look in his eyes. ‘No need to wait that long. We still have Ceres station on the emergency ansible channel. She’s eager to say hello.’
Orshio grinned.
He followed the officer into the communications room and let him lead him to an ansible console.
Orshio sat down, holding his injured belly. Lien-Ådel’s face burst onto the screen in dazzling light symbols. She was more excited than Orshio had ever seen her since they’d begun working together.
‘You magnificent bastard! How in the name of everything we’ve been taught did you pull that off?’ she asked, her mouth wide.
Orshio went straight-faced, ‘Honestly, I don’t know. My ancestors must have reached out from Okoto to guide my hand in flux. They even sent me crashing down at a holiday location. Seriously, I’m telling you, only the ancestors could have pulled off a stunt like that.’
Lien-Ådel’s image on the viewscreen, came closer, her mouth tight but a suppressed smile leaking from behind her eyes and the edges of her lips. ‘Come on Orshio, you really think your ancestors were out there? That they guided you in drift-flux?’
Orshio smiled. ‘Well, No. Not really. But it’ll be a good story to tell people who wonder how the hell I survived that insane manoeuvre, won’t it?’
They both erupted into wild, celebratory laughter that rang across the ocean of space and energy between them.
Wole Talabi is a full-time engineer, part-time writer and some-time editor from Nigeria. His stories have appeared in F&SF, Lightspeed, Omenana and several other places. He has edited two anthologies and co-written a play. His fiction has won a Nomma Award and been nominated for the Caine Prize and more. He currently lives and works in Malaysia.
Journal of a DNA Pirate
Stephen Embleton
Day One: October 26, 2085.
As you can fucking imagine, things have gone way too far. I mean way out there, universe-far, fuck-off-far, in fact galactically far out there. All those damned films from 80-90 years ago, where the future society has taken some freaky technology to the extreme of self-beautification and personal enhancement. Or the flip side where the development of some nasty piece of biological or technological breakthrough is used to smite cities and continents back on Old Earth or terraform here on Mars at the flick of a switch. All self-prophetic! I thought battle armour could be best used to assist factory workers and packers in lifting and moving items. But, oh no dear naive person, let’s use it strapped to some mindless idiot to help leap ravines and cleave an enemy’s skull in two.
And naturally our use of DNA as the ultimate mass storage technology has been bastardised into some biological abomination of science to justify manipulations of all sorts to our God-given makeup. That helix pattern was staring us in the face for so fucking long it’s a wonder we ever figured it out. I’m sure it was that damn LSD that revealed DNA’s hidden secrets—again.
Us straight thinking, normal homo-fuckin-sapiens are the only ones who seem to see the problem here. There is an inherent loophole the size of fucking Earth’s America glaring back at us from the ominous black hole that is ‘possibilities’ asking for us to stick something into its gaping chasm to feed its craving for life. Yes. It is coming. No. They have no fucking idea.
By latching onto the mechanisms and nature of DNA’s structure, scientists found the vast amounts of storage space almost breathtakingly simple. From discs to drives to sticks to wires, they had searched outside of us to answer the problem of capturing
and storing information. But what is information but the compilation of memories. And every cell of your body has memories. You cannot remove the x y z portion of your brain and now say ‘I forget.’ No. Your body tells us everything about you, your environment, and where you’ve come from. It tells us who your children, siblings, parents, and ancestors are—for generations back and generations to come. And yet we all came from the same particles. The oneness was there. The oneness is here.
Mimic DNA and you have nature’s perfect data storage system.
And mimic we did. Figure out how to manipulate data and you have the ultimate manipulation tool. And manipulate we did. Manipulate an embryo. Manipulate a species. Done. And done. So now we sit and wonder how we can manipulate ourselves—in realtime. Tomorrow I’d like to look like this. Extrapolate forward and see how I will look in 20 years. Make adjustments. And now? Tweak it here and there. That’s better. Forget about where we come from. A distant memory like the distant blue planet that birthed us, naturally.
Now we are all data devices. I hold within and without my body all my memories, photos, personal information, data downloads, every fucking 1 and 0 you can imagine that I’d want to keep—in me. I want to copy that file, view that footage, transfer that pixel, just a wipe on a data screen, or someone’s arm, and it’s there. Uploaded. Copied. Ready to roll. Like flea ridden mangy canines we’re infested with our own filth. Our own debris. Our own excrement. No letting go. Flotsam and jetsam floating on our skin—dermasdata. WTF?
And here we are, ready to exploit human vanity. How can we distribute this beautifully crafted virus? What’s the quickest way to install, download, upload, activate, run, execute? Execute. Love it. By touch. Simple. And how do we get the greatest number of people to touch in one go? A protest. And what can we protest? The use of DNA. Nobody’d ever suspect a thing. A bunch of activists spreading death. Return with our tails between our legs, back to our Mother Earth where we belong and not infesting other worlds. Poetic.
We think that just because we can terraform a planet, we have the right to terraform our bodies and manipulate something that was doing fine without interference. We may have dropped a few nukes over the poles, rover-mined methane into the atmosphere and stopped our bodily liquids from boiling, but we still must wear our breathing aids outside. We are not the all-powerful gods of this or any planet.
And so, the plotting begins. But first you must get in tune with the void. The hole. To understand and stand by the belief you need to hear. Words are not hearing. Data is not hearing. Hearing is feeling. Feeling is connecting. Connecting is not jacking in. Connecting is connectionless. Feeling is touchless. Hearing is resonating. Understanding is believing.
If you can’t hear what it is that the hole is saying, allow me to unplug your wax-filled deaffies and sprinkle some space-dust on those cobweb-smothered drums. Here is the beat to follow. Here is the beat to resonate with. Here is the beat of your heart. Here is the beat that will begin the journey. And what will you hear it say? It will say:
Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.
Day Two
Public Experiment #1 has begun. A rumble and acceleration of the hyperloop allowed me to fumble an awkward hand onto a stranger. You’d think in this day and age that we would’ve become closer as humans and that the New Age hippies from the turn of the century would have won out in the whole hug thy neighbour, plant a tree, oneness with the planet thing. But the current Martian faux pas of touching has made even the most conservative and tight-assed religious no-no’s seem tame. Handshakes—limited to close friends and business associates—can make the boldest of individuals recoil in disgust as if you’ve placed a soiled palm in their face. Needless to say, the trips on the tube or other public transport is entertaining. And so, here we casually inject our first human test. An experiment that is a long time coming.
I have loathed the times spent on that damn locomotive heading for the subterranean factories and offices; piled in with so many others, all plugged into themselves rather than living fully alive on the Martian surface that surrounds their airtight homes. They should rather leave for the Moon colony than not experience this planet as it continues its transition from the deep orange reds to the turquoise and green patches spreading from the south. But the search for the perfect individual necessitated the most banal of activities—the daily commute. And although I prefer the freedom of my own two feet to that iron tube, I did enjoy studying the expressionless faces for clues of thoughts, emotions, and signposts, as to where they were in their lives. How happy are they really and what would they be doing differently right now if they knew what was ahead? But that is all romantic ideology. Anyone with a gun in their face is forced to re-evaluate their current life—or lack thereof—and if not, the bullet does the trick.
Preferring the ticking time-bomb to the lead capsule, we now can sit on the tube, breathing mask packed away, and take notes, compare data, and analyse the changes that the test subject will go through in the next few weeks. After much debate and to-ing and fro-ing we settled on (amidst sexual prejudices) a female subject. Points raised included the obvious physical makeup that could be analysed from a distance and the significance of the reproductive organs and their ‘exposure’.
Although we are aware of the initial changes that will present themselves, this has never been tried before, so we can’t, repeat, can’t assume anything. That will only sway the experiment’s results—and P00104 has made it clear that our intensions and focus on the desired results will only conspire to create those pre-desired results. Total physical meltdown may well be preferable, but how it is achieved is the key to phase one.
But in order to keep the data as extensive and precise as possible, I have made detailed notes on today’s events. Here is a brief summary:
With the human dermasvirus#32 applied the evening before, I took a light, test shower (robustness of the virus needs to be fully tested, but let’s not fuck around with a technical delay like accidentally rinsing it off on the day). Left my apartment at 07:28 and took a refreshing walk to the nearby tube station. Almost immediately I was engulfed in the stream of people heading down the mouth of the stairwell and into the humid stench past the turnstiles. So crowded yet not a push or shove in sight. Freaks.
As previously noted, and with exceptional efficiency, the locomotive came to a near-silent stop at 07:40. Personal spaces were subconsciously cordoned off, sideways glances completed, and then into their respective zones we began our journey.
07:44, we slowed gently to a stop at the subject’s station (Station #S00205) and amidst the hoards, our subject emerged and planted herself on one of the few vacant seats on the side of the carriage. Subject’s physical description: 32 years of age (ascertained after physical contact with her), unmarried, Caucasian, dark brown (near black) wavy shoulder-length hair. Fair skin. Weighing 81.4 kgs and 1.58 metres in height. Slightly rounded shoulders and stooped posture. As with most of the passengers she keeps to herself and doesn’t make eye-contact. Fortunately, the temperature in the transport necessitates the removal of her gloves and the loosening of her brightly coloured scarf. The dermasvirus needs to contact the skin to be effective (especially for this initial experiment). The thick coat and long pants that she wears in the current climate makes it more difficult to implement any close contact—but this was considered.
After a few minutes of observation from a few metres (approx. 4 metres), I proceeded to edge closer to the subject—making it appear as though I were ready for my destination stop. She was standing with her right shoulder facing me (but I was slightly behind her) and as the transport made a switchover and the carriage rocked, I fell forward and proceeded to (heaven forbid) grab her hand. Although it appeared to be an instinctive reaction it took a few moments for her to acknowledge the cultural fuck up and rip her hand back and into her gloves. I apologised and proceeded to hide my face (seemingly embarrassed but more out of being inconspicuous). And so, it was done.
P00104 has in
dicated that he will be on the afternoon tube to take any visual information of the subject—although it will be too soon to see anything.
Sure, people need access rights or passwords to give and receive/accept data—but the virus circumvents all this. If only the on-planet government could get hold of that tech they’d have a fucking field day as far as personal rights go.
And now we wait.
Day Three
Thieving bastards! If there was a trace of your DNA left on me I’d melt your faces, your bank accounts, and your social networking pages in an instant. Fuckers took my comm-unit right from under my goddamn nose. Need to learn from them as far as entering someone’s personal space (let alone their pockets) to grab what’s not fucking theirs.
So, all the tiniest details and notes from today’s tube ride—watching our subject—are probably being wiped clean as we speak to make it sellable on the open-bloody-market! Damn, I knew I should’ve copied it via dermasdna before pocketing it.
Today’s report was therefore processed straight from the good old-fashioned grey matter. Nothing of significance to report (as with P00104’s afternoon observations). Far too early.
And here I sit, wracking my brain about who or what was near me during and after the journey. Long gone, I’m sure, but it’s going to eat at me anyway. I’m the goddamn thief here. You don’t steal from the stealer! Now I’ve got to watch my back as well as the experiment. How ridiculous is that?
The news coverage on the latest DNA developments is becoming more interesting by the day. Everyone seems to be fanatically enthusiastic about even the slightest tweak that some lab-rat can make to the current systems. Well, they’ve all got their heads up their bums if they are relying on scientists who follow their paycheques. Passion. That’s what it’s all lacking nowadays. Passion drives progress. Real progress I mean.
Need to get P00104 to develop a ‘melt-face-on-site’ DNA virus when this current experiment is completed. Expose on touch! And I don’t want it to rely on the chance of only dermas contact (let’s evolve from dermasdata and head straight to anything-goes-data).
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