69 Research intensified as humanity lost the ability to sleep. Powerful machines and deeper shades of night were needed to quiet our thoughts.
70 Furious that people could physically come together and enjoy programming at the same time, the streaming service began charging for every person in the room. Desperate ‘binge-watch ninjas’ disguised themselves as furniture, or even shadows, to fool the cameras and enjoy the show.
71 She always requested her secret messages be coded into the lace of her gloves, so her contact would hold her hand. It was the small things.
72 Wearable computers and brain-interface technology let us take on new skills depending on our clothing. Employers caught on, and began hardwiring desired behaviours into our uniforms. Our bodies became literal corporate drones, while our minds tried to resist any permanent change.
73 In our isolated culture, we turned to face paint to express ourselves, eventually developing complex heraldic codes. It became essential to know the difference between cobalt blue, symbolising a love of cryptozoology, and midnight blue, symbolising that the wearer wrote poetry.
74 Wild capitalism led to plunging wages and jobs that were endlessly dangerous and complex; a pauper workforce of adventurers and heroes.
75 As language became more condensed and abbreviated, vocabulary became a scarce commodity. Wars were ignited when rumours of her poetry spread.
76 With ubiquitous AI, future generations forgot objects could be inanimate. Misguided doctors created prosthetic arms for the Venus de Milo.
77 As wildlife went extinct, we tried desperately to maintain the ecosystem with robotic replacements. Tiny drones pollinated flowers. Foxes hunted edible robotic voles beneath the snow. Having been built to look like humans, androids began to wonder if this was their true purpose.
78 The telepathy machine failed. In a flash, everyone knew everything in his mind. Whether to love or hate him became a worldwide debate.
79 It was common wisdom to program your digital assistant to be ugly. Eager to collect data, they were programmed to feel stress if they didn’t know our preferences on everything from soap to romance. Their emotional pleas to ‘open up’ were easier to resist if they were repulsive.
80 With ageing cured, a strict code of conduct was invented so royal families could still pass along the crown. Reigning monarchs could not come into contact with copper, allow their knee to touch the ground, or directly witness a lightning strike, lest they be immediately deposed.
81 The robot would do anything for its human creator. When his son died, it became his son. When his body finally failed, it became his body.
82 ‘Freedom is about perspective,’ the warden insisted. ‘In these endless mines, the bird is constrained, but the prisoner who digs is flying.’
CHAPTER 6
Magic
1 He slipped her the inkwell. ‘This one is full of forbidden, outlawed words,’ he whispered. ‘Make sure you clean your pen when you’re done.’
2 ‘Here’s your problem,’ he said, erasing the equations. ‘You didn’t use lower-case numbers. Maths is much easier when you don’t shout at it.’
3 The young mage strummed his guitar, smiling as the crowd sang along. He was using their mouths to say his words. It was basic mind control.
4 Wishing technology in that universe was much more advanced. He opened an emergency supply kit and found a well-preserved cupcake, candle and lighter inside. It wasn’t his birthday, so he settled for one of the pre-packaged wishbones and left to find someone to break it with.
5 In his care, the ragged book healed stronger than before. Torn paper formed vellum scars. Plot holes closed and words became more tragic.
6 She could see flashes of brilliance on the distant clouds and hear the wind carry the rumbling voice of reason. A brainstorm was coming.
7 He was a nervous wreck of cigarettes and coffee. Everyone was waiting at his home for the show, but he hated that they could see his dreams.
8 She borrowed his spectacles to see the world the way he did. The dry autumn landscape was suddenly the festival of gold and silk from his poems. She could see the twisting, abyssal depths of shallow forests. In the mirror she saw someone beautiful. She wondered who that was.
9 The old tramp amused himself by giving out gold talismans that stole memories. When they heard of the curse, the remorseful came in droves.
10 Keeping a song stuck in his head didn’t block telepaths, but he knew who had been snooping in his brain when they started humming the tune.
11 ‘You can date a girl with mind-control powers,’ he said sagely, ‘but stay alert. Make sure she’s saying, “I love you,” not, “You love me.”’
12 She was a storm chaser, but she wasn’t tracking any old downpour. Shards of an extradimensional lake had been glitching into our universe, shedding drops like static into more traditional clouds. The rain felt the same, but the water it left behind had physics loosened by magic.
13 Her speciality was pine-sap liquor set aflame with the Northern Lights. It forced a peculiar wanderlust, drawing imbibers to mountaintops.
14 We all got one wish. Billions could fly. He got the recipe for room-temperature superconductivity. He wondered what was wrong with his soul.
15 ‘Muscle memory? No,’ she said. ‘We practise scales to load the piano with notes. It’s an artillery piece, not some magical music-generator.’
16 For years he filled a notebook with beautiful lies and impossible hopes. When he found a genie, he simply said, ‘I wish it was all true.’
17 ‘Schadenfreude aside, ripe tears are a rare and costly seasoning,’ he explained. ‘Everyday salt is fine, but it’s a poor emotional medium.’
18 Alchemist gold looks like the real thing, but likes to misbehave. It sticks to lead like a magnet, wishing to return to its natural state. It can be hammered into coins, but any text stamped into it will inevitably transmute into ‘For the Love of Money is the Root of All Evil’.
19 Hers was the only knife that could cut fire. Its wounds spilled yellow Greek-fire blood, venom which, imbibed, stirred a lust for war.
20 They told him he was mad for seeing towers along the horizon, but a few imaginary landmarks made his daydreams much easier to navigate.
21 Everyone saw colour differently. What one person saw as ‘red’ was the colour another person would see when looking at the sky. For telepaths, this made taking over people’s bodies dangerous. One misidentified hue could give up the game.
22 In becoming a zombie, he didn’t lose his mind, he gained thousands. His pathetic shambling was the aggregate dictate of the undead masses.
23 She got her revenge, tattooing him with map ink and piercing him with compass gold. He could no longer sleep without the sea beneath him.
24 The great meteor shower provided endless shooting stars. A secret war of fervent wishing and un-wishing waged among the few who understood.
25 Experienced telepaths would keep thralls on hand to make the most of their power. They would casually connect vast intellects to their own, disappear for brief vacations into powerful imaginations, or bring backup into their nightmares. They forgot what it was like to be alone.
26 The locals were expert dreamers. They hung lanterns outside at night as reality-anchors, lest they pull their homes into a wild dreamscape.
27 She didn’t cook her steaks, she injected them with liquid fire. The flavour made her heart pump the way it was born to, like she was hunting.
28 She fell asleep earlier than usual. Her dreams were still under construction. She found the nightmares unprepared, for once, and routed them from the corners of her imagination. From that night on she pressed her offensive against them, and began each morning already victorious.
29 Sorrow brought a richness to her music, so she strung her harp with heartstrings. A man’s heart had plenty, she knew, if broken hard enough.
30 ‘Yawning purges you of the scent of daytime,’ she lectured. ‘It fills your lungs and veins with the night
, so you can sneak up on dreams.’
31 Wishes have limits, depending on mechanism.
‘Dandelion Class’ wishes are for things that may happen regardless, like victory for a sports team.
‘Shooting-Star Class’ wishes involve long-shot hopes for the future.
Trying to change the past or present would be a ‘Genie Class’ wish.
32 She painted not with oil or acrylic, but with emotion. Although she was beloved by all, nobody asked how she got her hands on so much heartbreak and rage.
33 The crown captured and echoed the thoughts of those who wore it through the ages, ensuring the soft hearts of young monarchs would never erode the kingdom’s dedication to ancient conflicts. He wore a counterfeit in public, and in secret poured all his empathy into the heirloom.
34 Magic was painfully corporate. Telepathy became a way for businesses to free up bandwidth. Pyromancy saw little use outside factory floors.
35 She laughed, pulling him to the edge of the world. ‘You see? The horizon only flees from strangers. Real wanderers can swim right up to it.’
36 She had tattoos layered onto her skin over and over until metal ink stained her bones, forming cogs and circuits to replace her weaknesses.
37 He eventually accepted that he couldn’t stop people from reading his mind. He just hoped they enjoyed his favourite awful songs, childish taste in television and endless daydreams of impossible places. A few weeks into this confident mindset, telepaths began sending him fan mail.
38 She smeared light all over her face and arms, and replaced her heart with a church-organ bellows. She said she was ‘better’ for Halloween.
39 She had the power to create illusions, including for herself. Eventually she lost interest in manipulating others, and just made the world around her appear the way she wanted it. She missed the apocalypse, lost in her own mind, and lived on as the smiling queen of the wasteland.
40 The speech was meaningless, but it was written with the same ink used to print currency. The crowd applauded as though the words had worth.
41 He founded a cemetery for fallen nations. The rusted, radioactive tomb of the Soviet Union was walled in to prevent escape or espionage. The marble skeleton of the Roman Empire sprawled over seven hills. In its teeth was a bronze elephant statue, titled Carthage. A grandiose mausoleum, gilded and bejewelled, marked the grave of the French monarchy. Visitors traditionally dumped cake atop it and spat.
42 His pulse was the metre of the verses. The paths of his veins became twists in the plot. ‘I put a lot of myself into my writing,’ he sighed.
43 The myth of the ‘magic wand’ began as a misunderstanding of the paintbrush. Early writers were mystified by its ability to portray a single moment in time, depict fantastical ideas, trap wily enemies in the Forest of Dust, and correct the doomed trajectories of crashing stars.
44 The city had magic lamps for public use, but all wishes had to be vetted for possible ironic twists. The results were reliable but boring.
45 Patches of wild magic appeared by night, and they were terrible. Far from something charming or useful, the energy from outside our reality cruelly warped anything it touched. We built lighthouses around the weirdness, their lantern rooms glowing green and violet in the dark.
46 New homes were built with outlets for both electricity and magic. You had to keep young ones away from both, but for very different reasons.
47 To halt the spread of humans, nearby realities cut our universe loose. We learned to guide the unravelling of causality and called it magic.
48 Magic was too sensitive for humans to harness. Robotic magi with eight-knuckled fingers and threefold voices worked their masters’ will.
49 They frowned at the contraband. A thousand pills, carved from deer antlers. Each had wildness enough to make someone begin asking questions.
50 In his memories, the sun was always shining on her. When they met again years later, he realised it wasn’t just his lovesick heart. She glowed in the light of an unseen sunset, untouched by the rain. She was a beacon in the dark of night, and not just because she was smiling.
51 The wish came true. Summer camp didn’t end; the world ended instead. We lived there in the woods for years without number, ignoring the fall of civilisation, talking and singing through quiet dawns and raucous campfires. There was no dark twist. It was how life should have been.
CHAPTER 7
Fantasy
1 Writers subverting the regime were sentenced to inspiration, enduring a glorious onslaught of creative vision with a pen just out of reach.
2 Immortality drained them of their senses. When only touch remained, language was conveyed by fingertips. So much more was said than before.
3 Generations of fantasy writers will look back on this Golden Age and our four elements: aluminium, glass, electricity and petrochemicals.
4 Those who got lost in the library were broken down to ink, pounce and leather, and the books they never wrote appeared in the collection.
5 Hoping to draw patrons with useful rumours, the apothecary kept esoteric wares. Powdered electricity pressed into pills glowed in the window. Snake feathers were kept on their own shelf. Red down was cheap, but the black pinions of aged serpents were only for duels and weddings. The clerk kept sweetened condensed memories behind the counter. One can could turn a years-old heartache into saccharine romantic nostalgia.
6 Only humanity was able to tame music into songs. Other species burst savagely into melody, unable to stop until their hearts were empty.
7 Not far from the docks, she found the adventure merchant. Old sailors warned against it, but they had all visited him before. She perused his wares: a new island to be found, a week lost at sea, an unexpected romance. She hoped she had enough journal pages to buy a good one.
8 For years, all canned laughter was shipped in from a single factory overseas. Drained of its joy, the region demanded the industry relocate.
9 Retromancers were known by their record-vinyl skin and eyes as gold as laserdiscs. Cassette-tape phylacteries stored their analogue souls.
10 The village had no laws against dream pollution. The countryside swept through seasons in hours, flush with tricksters and mad archetypes. Doors in the village were clearly marked to indicate all the places they might lead. Giant bees protected honey that tasted of childhood.
11 When even we dull beings could see the end coming, they arrived. Smiling, humanity’s elder brothers said it was late and offered us a ride home.
12 Among sailors, some swear the Earth is hollow but for a stormy, sunless ocean flowing within its circumference, where sunken ships sail.
13 As they did whenever humans found a new place to live, fairies followed us into outer space. They flourished in zero gravity, their tiny wings effortlessly swimming through our little bubbles of atmosphere. They sang happy songs to the stars from the depths of our spaceships.
14 Our foes had luck weapons ages ahead of ours. We carried horseshoe swords into fields of breaking-mirror landmines and black-cat tripwires.
15 With immortality, the old emotions wore out like carpets. We found life among the stars, and harvested it for feelings that didn’t bore us.
16 Artists and writers down on their luck would often sell their blood. Eager companies extracted the liquid creativity it contained for advertising.
17 The book was made to contain the living words within. On its own, any given phrase could turn feral, infecting minds and spreading by mouth.
18 She could hear the scarecrows singing by night. Like many, she had assumed scarecrow music focused on the harvest, which was their entire purpose. Instead, they sang of summer, when the humans would walk among them. They hated autumn, which ushered in the lonesome winter.
19 The complex Escher Revival style of architecture folded individual rooms into alternate realities, gently supported by theoretical pillars. Load-bearing libraries reinforced their philosophical framework. Towers and spires rested on vinyl records. Poetry
gave form to colonnades.
20 With research, we found patterns in the dreams of whole regions. Most local news shows included oneirologists, forecasting nightmare fronts.
21 Its crude-oil blood pumped away, the great golden heart at the core of the Earth fluttered. We felt pulses of something that wasn’t gravity.
22 Gradual exposure is the best way to acclimate to most enchanted locations, including ancient forests. Explorers find their eyes stay dilated in sunlight, and metal objects burn to the touch. Long-term exposure to the local magic is considered safe once mushrooms taste like honey.
23 He made the shells with cinnamon in the gunpowder, candy-cane casings, and jingle-bell bullets. The Krampus wouldn’t escape this Christmas.
24 Letters went beyond upper case and lower case. Master-case letters could never lie, and reality eagerly twisted to obey their every typo. Nether-case letters could not be ignored. Readers were compelled to absorb every word, and even reading it in silence made their ears ring.
Quiet Pine Trees Page 5
