Meet Me in the Future

by Kameron Hurley

  Praise for Meet Me in the Future

  “Kameron Hurley is a badass. Her powerful stories will shred your preconceptions, and may leave you permanently off-kilter.”

  —Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous and founder of io9

  “A visceral, unrelenting, and heart-filled exploration of what it means to be human in any future; Kameron Hurley is writing the science fiction our world needs.”

  —Jacqueline Koyanagi, author of Ascension

  [STARRED] “With snapshots of futures that haunt, obsess, or tantalize, this collection from Hugo-winner Hurley (The Light Brigade) offers 16 hard-edged pieces that gleam like gems in a mosaic.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  [STARRED] “One of the best story collections of the past few years . . . emotionally powerful, lyrical, occasionally hopeful, and flirt[s] with the profound.”

  —Booklist

  “Very high quality.”

  —Kirkus

  “Brutal, sharp, and impossible to ignore, Kameron’s stories are a howl that throws back the encroaching void.”

  —Tobias S. Buckell, author of Hurricane Fever

  “Meet Me in the Future is a brilliant story collection that both amazes the reader with Hurley’s incredible imaginative genius and writing chops.”

  —Grimdark Magazine

  Praise for Kameron Hurley

  “Hurley is one of the most important voices in the field.”

  —James S.A. Corey, author of The Expanse series

  “Kameron Hurley’s writing is the most exciting thing I’ve seen on the genre page.”

  —Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon

  “One word will do it: Badass.”

  —John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War and Redshirts

  “Discovering Kameron Hurley’s work is like finding a whole new galaxy, and she is the star at its center.”

  —Chuck Wendig, author of the Miriam Black series

  “Kameron Hurley is ferociously imaginative—with an emphasis on ferocious . . . smart, dark, visceral, and wonderfully, hectically entertaining.”

  —Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls

  “Hurley has created one of the most engrossing environments in modern sf.”

  —Booklist

  Praise for Apocalypse Nyx

  “Apocalypse Nyx [is] packed with more glare, grit, and snarl than a junkyard full of mutated jackals.”

  —Brooke Bolander, author of The Only Harmless Great Thing

  “Wonderfully bloody, emotionally sharp.”

  —Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviews

  Praise for God’s War

  “Nyxnissa would quite clearly kick Conan’s ass.”

  —Strange Horizons

  “Are you frustrated with Mary Sue heroines? . . . [Nyx] makes Han Solo look like a boy scout.”

  —io9

  Praise for The Geek Feminist Revolution

  “Kameron Hurley writes essays that piss people off, make them think, make them act. This is good stuff. Read it.”

  —Kate Elliott, author of the Crown of Stars series

  “Filled me with blistering hope and rage. Amazing.”

  —Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous

  Bel Dame Apocrypha

  God’s War (2011)

  Infidel (2011)

  Rapture (2012)

  Worldbreaker Saga

  The Mirror Empire (2014)

  Empire Ascendant (2015)

  The Broken Heavens (2020)

  Standalone Novels

  The Stars Are Legion (2017)

  The Light Brigade (2019)

  Collections

  Apocalypse Nyx (2018)

  Nonfiction

  The Geek Feminist Revolution (2016)

  TACHYON | SAN FRANCISCO

  Meet Me in the Future

  Copyright © 2019 by Kameron Hurley

  This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.

  “An Introduction: Meet Me in The Future” copyright © 2019 by Kameron Hurley

  Interior and cover design by Elizabeth Story

  Cover art “The Cup” copyright © 2014 by Carl Sutton

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  tachyon@tachyonpublications.com

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: Jill Roberts

  Print ISBN 13: 978-1-61696-296-8

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-297-5

  “Elephants and Corpses” copyright © 2015 by Kameron Hurley. First published on Tor.com, May 13, 2015.

  “When We Fall” copyright © 2018 by Kameron Hurley. First published on Escape Pod #611, January 18, 2018.

  “The Red Secretary” copyright © 2015 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 15, April-May 2016.

  “The Sinners and the Sea” copyright © 2016 by Kameron Hurley. First published on Patreon: Kameron Hurley is creating Short stories, March 31, 2016.

  “The Women of Our Occupation” copyright © 2006 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Strange Horizons, July 31, 2006.

  “The Fisherman and the Pig” copyright © 2017 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #235, September 28, 2017.

  “Garda” copyright © 2018 by Kameron Hurley. First published on B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, March 28, 2018.

  “The Plague Givers” copyright © 2016 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 10, May-June 2016.

  “Tumbledown” copyright © 2017 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Apex Magazine, Issue 100, September 2017.

  “Warped Passages” copyright © 2017 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies, edited by John Joseph Adams (Saga Press: New York).

  “Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!” copyright © 2017 by Kameron Hurley. First published on Tor.com, March 8, 2017.

  “Enyo-Enyo” copyright © 2013 by Kameron Hurley. First published in The Lowest Heaven, edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin (Jurassic London: London).

  “The Corpse Archives” copyright © 2015 by Kameron Hurley. First self-published as The Corpse Archives. May 5, 2015.

  “The War of Heroes” copyright © 2016 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 75, August 2016.

  “The Light Brigade” copyright © 2016 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 66, August 2016.

  “The Improbable War” copyright © 2015 by Kameron Hurley. First published in Popular Science, July 2015.

  CONTENTS

  An Introduction: Meet Me in The Future

  by Kameron Hurley

  Elephants and Corpses

  When We Fall

  The Red Secretary

  The Sinners and the Sea

  The Women of Our Occupation

  The Fisherman and the Pig

  Garda

  The Plague Givers

  Tumbledown

  Warped Passages

  Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!

  Enyo-Enyo

  The Corpse Archives

  The War of Heroes

  The Light Brigade

  The Improbable War

  About the Author

  AN INTRODUCTION:

  MEET ME IN THE FUTURE

  YOU’RE HERE. I’M HERE.

  So.

  Let’s
talk about the future.

  Not the future I’m currently writing this from, the future of the gasping, maniacal dystopic state disseminating propaganda to us via pocket computers that stream nightmares into our eyes. That’s the future somebody else wrote. It’s the future that’s already here.

  Let’s talk about another future. The one that comes after this one.

  Those are the futures I want to write about. And yes, from here in the present there are multiple possible versions of that future. Some are gooey, icky, sticky futures that are messy and hopeful and maudlin all at the same time. Some are snapshots of a future that comes after one like the one I’m in. Some are explorations of how things could be far worse. But most of all—these are stories about how things could be really different.

  I’m not a natural short fiction writer. My heart will always belong to novels. They give me room to stretch and breathe. But the juicy bite-sized pieces of fiction between these pages have taught me how to stop dithering around and get to the heart of what a tale is about instead of meandering along through the weeds until something amazing happens. I don’t have as much time to screw up when I’m writing short fiction.

  Maybe that keeps me coming back.

  My agent suggested that when I tell you all why I wrote each of these stories, I should be completely honest with you. Yes, certainly, writing is fun. But I also wrote these stories for money. Writers need to eat. I expect I’ll be working a day job until I die, a long tradition among authors. Most of us just don’t talk about it. I still get up before six nearly every morning to plonk out a few words (like these!) before heading off to make more words for big brands and corporations. By the time those day-job words get through the grinder of the creative process and client review, they are often unrecognizable.

  But we all gotta eat.

  Expenses pile up: vet bills, home maintenance, my liquor habit. The money that comes in tends to go right back out immediately. I feel like I’m constantly hustling. I know I’m not alone. Here in Fury Road America, we also need to afford health insurance and medication. Much of the money I made on these stories went toward helping me pay for my meds and my extreme healthcare deductible. Every story keeps me from the death-through-lack-of-vital-meds Thunderdome a little longer.

  My fight with my own malignant, malfunctioning body and experience running the rat maze of the United States healthcare system has bled into my work in interesting ways. It creeps in even when I’m not immediately aware of it. Stories like “The Corpse Archives” or even “Elephants and Corpses” show a keen interest in exploring the body itself in all of its gory mushiness. The body-hopping mercenary Nev, who appears in both “Elephants and Corpses” and “The Fisherman and the Pig,” gets to explore a good many bodies throughout his adventures. Some imperfect, some ill-fitting. I’ve spent a long time in a body that has gained and lost a hundred pounds at a go several times. It spent a year eating itself. Now it’s slowly poisoning me over decades, ensuring I have about fifteen years less than I would have otherwise. Nev’s quiet life as a body mercenary fishing up corpses to live in often feels sublime in comparison.

  My struggles with my own body led me to write “Tumbledown,” too, the story of a paraplegic on a hostile planet tasked with an Iditarod-like serum run her peers think is suicide. I spend a lot of time thinking about how those of us who aren’t the Aryan ideal continue to be underestimated, sidelined, and maligned, and how it’s fear of becoming as we are that fuels so much hatred against us. We are more than the sum of our bodies. The struggle with our bodies can give us a unique strength, an insight into the meaty body and our temporal limitations. My obsession with bodies and their problems has certainly given me a unique perspective on the world. I don’t see logic and reason and clean, cool lines; I don’t see sterile metal spaceships. I see messy, bloody bodies, mutations, minds bathed in chemicals, renegade DNA, bacterial wars, and organic spaceships with regenerating skins and mushy interiors.

  Short fiction has also taught me a great deal of discipline. It’s taught me to build stories not just around “shit that happens” or “gooey organic ships” but to center them on the emotional experiences of the characters and how they are affected by the world around them. I built the entirety of “When We Fall” on the story another writer told me about the profound emotional connection they shared with a rescue worker after a house fell on them. My writing brain shifted into overdrive during that conversation. I returned to that life-changing moment again and again: this emotional connection in the face of death. This moment where everything changes. How could I capture that in a speculative story? I returned to my organic ships. I created a heroine often lost and forgotten, one who had to make the choice to let someone go, to be abandoned again, in order to find the love she truly sought.

  I’ve had my fair share of facing down death, too, and it’s a theme that comes up often. Dying, nearly dying, trying not to die, thinking about dying and mortality. When you have a chronic illness, you spend a lot of time thinking about mortality, and what comes after you. Who will remember you when you’re gone?

  The story “Our Faces, Radiant Sisters! Our Faces Full of Light!” was written on commission for Tor.com’s flash fiction series about women who keep going long after they’ve been told to stop. Women who endure. The women who continue again and again to fight monsters, despite knowing that it’s usually a zero-sum game. feels a lot more like real life to me than slaying a dragon and being done with it. The dragons have babies. The dragons get radicalized. There are always more monsters. And more heroes.

  The fight between the past and the future is ongoing.

  These themes come up again in “The Improbable War,” another piece commissioned by Popular Science magazine for a series about—of all things!—love. I find it amusing that when asked to write a story about love, I wrote a story about war and memory and sacrifice and some kind of strange wall made of dead people who are a probability machine. Don’t ask me how it works! This is fiction, people.

  We will talk more about war in a minute, but it turns out that another story with “War” in the title isn’t really about war at all, either. I sat with the first few pages of “The War of Heroes” for years, trying to figure out what came next. What was the point of the story? It was during a re-watch of old Star Trek episodes that I realized it was a story about how “civilization” might be defined in various cultures. What if the Enterprise was boldly going out into the universe sowing violence in order to determine sentience? How would our heroine deal with that? What was her sacrifice? What could she save? Would she be remembered? What would a world look like without war?

  Yes, I write a lot about war. My grandparents met in World War II. My grandfather was an American GI and my grandmother was living in Nancy, France, under Nazi occupation. I grew up with terrifying stories of Nazis storming into homes, shooting people on the street, airplane dogfights over the town, and my greatgrandfather’s interrogation by the SS. I remember these stories now only in hazy snatches. My grandmother often told the story of the SS coming into her home, trying to find incriminating evidence that her father was part of the French resistance. But when they opened the drawer where he usually kept his gun, the gun was not there. When they turned on the radio thinking they would find it tuned to the banned BBC, they found only static. They still took him away, but my grandmother was adamant that the reason he survived his interrogation was because of these near-misses.

  Both my grandparents are dead, and by the time I started exploring these stories in my fiction, I had no one to check them against. Perhaps that was best. It meant I used those stories as inspiration for a number of pieces about war and resistance, stories like “The Women of Our Occupation,” which features a scene very like the one where the SS entered my grandmother’s house, and asks what happens when the conquerors become the conquered. That theme in particular is one I think about a lot here in my immediate present.

  War rarely has clear “good guys” and “bad g
uys.” The muddy gray mire of war, and who writes the history of it, fascinates me. In “The Red Secretary,” I wanted to see what a world looked like where war was cyclical, almost religious, with one terrible rule: all of those who participated in violent conflict, no matter which side triumphed, had to be killed afterward. No one who had committed violence, they reasoned, could participate in building a truly peaceful society. “Garda” also explores the aftermath of a great war—how those involved recover (or not), and how societies continue to buckle and seethe with the aftereffects of such violence. I live in a country deeply scarred by its own past of war and genocide and slavery. We think these wounds heal, but in truth, they only fester, the thinnest layer of new skin masking the injury, but the pus and rot continue to bubble beneath. The rot spills out continually, often when you least expect it . . . just when you think you’re starting to get better.

  The first story I created for subscribers to my Patreon—a service that allows fans to support original fiction for a buck a month—was, appropriately enough, also a war story. I was on a time-travel kick at the time, reading far too much short fiction about time-jumping. “The Light Brigade” was the result, the story of a time-hopping grunt who isn’t quite sure what side of the war they’re supposed to be on. That story eventually became the basis for a novel by the same name, which has a far more intricate plot that required legitimate math-based diagrams and Excel spreadsheets.