Coming Soon Enough: Six Tales of Technology’s Future

by Nancy Kress

  Isadora blushed.

  “Did you paint the dragon?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m studying to get into City Arts.”

  “Quite a talented family.”

  She blushed. “I hope Christobal wins.”

  “I hope Christobal’s dragon doesn’t get knocked out of the sky.” He noticed an inordinate number of what looked like airplanes and helicopters. Proven designs that would work even if an imbecile flew them. With a dragon, they’d win easily—or lose spectacularly.

  There were more ways to lose than to win.

  What had driven him to help the boy try a dragon? He was a fool, and if he were a father he would be a failure. Trying to do the impossible got you burned.

  They drew the third elimination heat. Four entries in each heat, only two of which would proceed to the semifinals. Points were awarded for art and speed, but an entry had to be at least one of the first three over: The slowest took an automatic elimination.

  The first two heats were brutal. Two planes slammed into each other and fell in pieces near the start of one. In the other, a helicopter flew out of bounds and into the stands, where its plastic rotor cut a teacher from one of the other high schools. No serious damage, but her scalp wound bled so much the news drone covering the contest took close-ups and sent the video out to non-science channels in hopes that it would go viral.

  Farren hadn’t realized it would be a race. He’d imagined a test, everybody doing a single flight. He nudged Christobal. “You didn’t tell me we have to be faster than the others.” He might have suggested a few different choices.

  “I didn’t know.”

  The boy was almost as naive as Farren himself had been at that age. Maybe more. Farren pitied him for that, at least a little.

  He and Christobal stood side by side just behind the goal posts, each holding up a wing. The sun angled so that they stood in the shadow of a long and thin dragon. Their entry dwarfed both of the planes in their heat. The other entrant, a bird, was so small it could ride the dragon to victory. One of the planes looked very traditional, but the other was a latticework of material so thin Farren suspected the girl who had built it was praying for a windless moment. She looked over at the dragon with a surprised face, part awe and part naked curiosity.

  The horn blew.

  The traditional plane took off in a slow and steady, straightforward direction. The latticework plane hung low on the field, flying just a foot or so above the grass. The bird fluttered up and down so that the dragon’s head collided with it.

  The dragon’s head dropped, the tail rose, and for a moment Farren thought they’d be grounded by eight ounces of feathers. But then the bird fell to the ground, and the dragon righted itself, now a bit behind. The bird’s maker pounded at her remote to no avail. Christobal increased speed, leaning his body forward as if he could make the dragon fly faster. The latticework-plane girl moved right and left with her creation, making a beautiful arc across the field, just ahead of the dragon.

  The other plane simply flew unerringly toward the end of the field, ahead of them all.

  The dragon followed the girl’s plane in, but they both qualified for the next heat because the first plane was judged merely competent at best. A squeak win based on style points instead of engineering.

  Back in the tent, Isadora leapt on Christobal, babbling about how beautifully the dragon had flown. Christobal smiled at her, warm and indulgent, a perfect big brother. He knelt beside Farren, the two of them going over the swell of the wings and exercising each joint in the tail. One of the tiny tubes that the heart used to pump oil had cracked, and they fitted another tube.

  The bell rang for the next round.

  “This is the one that matters,” Christobal said. “Everybody who reaches the finals gets in.”

  “You have to be fast,” Isadora said earnestly.

  “Can you make it faster?” Farren asked, curious how Christobal would respond.

  “Add more pressure to the valve, more oil?” he said, grinning at Farren. “Make the heart work harder?”

  “Try it.”

  Christobal adjusted a tiny part.

  There were two others in their semifinal; there would be only one winner. This time, there were no points for style; only speed mattered. Their competitors were a bird designed to mimic an eagle and a plane that had beaten its competitors across in half their time during its qualifying heat.

  All three took off fast. The plane faltered quickly, an engine failing, so it tumbled sideways. At the halfway point, dragon and eagle each flapped their wings in near-synchrony, the eagle pulling ever-so-slightly ahead.

  “It’s getting hot,” Christobal said, looking at telemetry from the dragon on his screen. “The wing joints.”

  Farren glanced at the readouts. “You’re right. But go faster anyway,” he hissed. “There is no second place.”

  Christobal’s eyes widened. He pushed the lever forward.

  The dragon nosed ahead.

  The eagle jolted past.

  The dragon caught up.

  They traded places back and forth.

  Farren held his breath.

  The dragon twisted right, into the eagle.

  Both fell.

  The eagle landed on its back just shy of the finish line, but the dragon tumbled past it, landing in a crumpled heap just over the line. A bit of wing flapped in the wind, clearly separated from the printed bone structure.

  They carried it back to the tent in two pieces.

  Marina’s smile was wide as the field, encompassing both of them. “Congratulations.”

  Isadora didn’t look happy at all. “What happened?”

  “I made it fly too fast.” Christobal cradled the broken chest. “I broke its heart.”

  “But you got into Tech,” Farren said.

  Christobal looked at him, suddenly silent and still. “Thank you,” he said.

  Farren stopped. They were done. The dragon was in no shape to fly in the finals. They’d have to go cheer for the latticework plane. “You’re welcome.”

  The little family all stood close together, the crumpled dragon on the floor in front of them. Farren stood on the other side of the tent, near the door.

  Christobal smiled. “Will you help me make a bigger dragon?”

  Farren hesitated. He cleared his throat. He thought about “no,” but the word refused to form. “Sure. I’ll do it.”

  “We have all summer.”

  Farren smiled. A summer probably seemed like forever to Christobal.

  “I can spare a summer.”

  Incoming

  By Geoffrey A. Landis

  “A sports bar? Are you kidding me?” Morgan Grace said. She looked around at the basketball photos and memorabilia. A green and white jersey labeled Celtics 33 was prominently featured, behind thick glass. She wondered who that was.

  “Kidding? What? Take a look.” Kyle Li, the man who had invited her to the working group, waved his arms at the walls around him. “Twenty high-definition televisions. Where else are you going to find a workspace with that many monitors on short notice? And good seating, tables to work on, and conveniently accessible from the freeway?”

  “And ten beers on tap,” Pranav said. “Best command post ever.” Pranav Singh was the linguist. He was supposedly the best ever, with a genius for computer-decoded pattern recognition that had cracked previously indecipherable languages, including not only human texts but songs of dolphins, wolf howls, and the pheromone languages of insects. But he just looked like a generic chubby nerd. Morgan felt out of place, a biologist among rocket scientists and computer geeks. But it was an eclectic group Kyle had gathered. Everyone was out of place.

  “Well, I guess,” she said. “I just didn’t picture some
thing like this as the command post for an alien invasion.”

  The televisions weren’t showing sports; they were mirroring computer screens. Around the room were half a dozen people, mostly bent over laptops. A few of them had looked up as Kyle brought her into the room, but they were now all back at their screens or conversing softly with one another.

  “Well, we can hope that the Air Force has a secret command post somewhere,” Kyle said, “with a squadron of supersecret rocket fighters, and super-duper-secret superweapons.” Kyle looked up at the biggest of the screens. “But I don’t think so. This isn’t a scenario they plan for in war college.”

  Kyle Li was the chairman of the NSF’s committee on astrobiology, which was why he had been selected to put together the working group to advise on the invasion. He was the only one in the room wearing a suit; apparently he was more of a political scientist these days than an actual science scientist. Whom he was supposed to advise, or whether they had any intention of listening, Morgan wasn’t quite sure. But this was apparently Washington’s reflex response to any problem: Put together a working group. And he had a budget.

  The biggest screen—fully seven feet across, covering most of one wall, and prominently labeled “The Big Game!”—showed a handful of dots. Knowing what they signified, Morgan shivered. “That’s the feed from Green Bank?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “How far are they?”

  “About a quarter of a billion kilometers. Above the solar plane but inside the orbit of Jupiter.”

  “Still pretty far, then.”

  “Not so far. They’ve slowed down, but they’re still moving at over one percent of the speed of light.”

  “Do you need a space to sit down, Dr. Grace?” Pranav asked. He shifted his laptop and pushed a pile of papers over, clearing a place underneath a framed poster of a baseball player scribbled over with faded signatures. “Here—take this spot.”

  She sat down, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  “Well, we now know the answer to the Fermi paradox,” Pranav said. “The great silence from the SETI search. Turns out, any life form dumb enough to beam radio waves to the skies gets wiped out.”

  “Are we sure that they’re hostile?” Morgan asked.

  “I’m sorry, but even I can tell an armada when I see it heading for us,” Kyle said. “These guys aren’t coming in peace.”

  “Why aren’t they hiding their radio transmissions, then?” she asked.

  “Why should they? They’re coming in through the interstellar medium so fast they’re glowing in the X-ray spectrum. It’s not like they’ve got any chance of stealth.”

  “Are we even trying to talk to them?”

  “Kid, we’re beaming at them with every spare kilowatt we can scrape up, but they’re not answering.”

  “What are we saying?”

  “Hello. Peace. Welcome, friends.” Kyle shrugged. “You know, the usual.”

  “You’ve tried mathematics?”

  Kyle glanced over at Pranav, who was sprawled back in the booth. He looked at her with an expression usually reserved for talking to very slow children. “Of course. The whole SETI protocol.”

  “But no answer.”

  “Nothing deliberately beamed our way,” Kyle said.

  Pranav added, “We are picking up their chatter. We’ve gotten some of their words. The numbers one, two, and six. Names of the elements up to number eighteen on the periodic table, argon. Some of their nouns: deceleration, laser, thrust, planet, atmosphere, temperature.”

  “But you can’t tell what they’re saying.”

  “We know enough to tell that they’re not saying ‘We come in peace,’ that’s for sure,” Kyle said.

  Now she was curious. “Can I hear it?”

  Kyle looked at Pranav, and Pranav said, “Sure, why not?” He turned to his laptop and enlarged a window showing a waveform. “There.”

  “I want to hear it, not just look at it.”

  Pranav hit the sound button on the machine and turned the volume up. It was a language mostly of clicks and taps, like a dozen restless schoolboys fidgeting in an echoing schoolroom, punctuated with chimes and a high whine.

  “You can make sense of that?”

  Pranav shrugged. “Pattern recognition. It’s compute intensive.” He tapped the machine, and the sound turned off again. “We don’t usually listen to it by ear. This machine isn’t doing the analysis; that’s being done on a cluster of supercomputers located in Utah. We use a metasemantic analysis algorithm based on—”

  “Okay, I believe you,” Morgan said. “I don’t need the details.”

  “We’re also trying to learn from their technology,” Kyle said. “I don’t know what their propulsion system’s burning, but it’s way beyond anything we have. Fusion, at least. Antimatter, maybe. Possibly something weirder—strangelets? Some of my guys are suggesting it’s stimulated proton decay. All I can tell you is, we’ve got nothing like it. They can take what they want, if they want.”

  “Coming to take our Earth women, I say,” Pranav said.

  Morgan said, “That’s ridiculous. Biologically, they are going to be about as interested in mating with us as we are in mating with squids. Less.”

  Pranav raised a hand. “That was a joke.”

  “A sexist one. And not very funny.”

  “Sorry. But, you know, basic biology will be the same everywhere. Carbon, hydrogen—same stuff.”

  “You’re an idiot,” Morgan said.

  “Come on.” Pranav looked insulted. Presumably he wasn’t used to women—or biology professors—calling him an idiot.

  “No. Do you know anything about biology? No, you don’t. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Here’s a question for you: Do you know why the Earth has a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere?”

  “Of course,” Pranav said. “Photosynthesis.”

  “Sure. But that’s not enough. Photosynthesis just means producing biochemicals from sunlight. Why produce oxygen?”

  “Well, that’s just how photosynthesis works.”

  Morgan shook her head. “Nope. Early photosynthesis probably used rhodopsin, not chlorophyll. It’s anaerobic. There’s probably a hundred different ways to do photosynthesis. Why pick the one that releases oxygen?”

  “To breathe?” Pranav guessed.

  She shook her head. “When life first started, nothing breathed oxygen, ’cause there wasn’t any. Then some clever bacteria worked out a new type of photosynthesis, one that released oxygen. And they leaked it to the environment. Not to breathe—nobody had worked out breathing yet. But it’s corrosive stuff; other life forms in the area stayed away from the bugs emitting the nasty gas. They were in competition with all the anaerobic organisms: It was simply a weapon in a war of chemistry. The ones that couldn’t tolerate it? Mass extinction.”

  “And your point is?”

  “My point is that it was nothing but happenstance that the plants that exuded oxygen happened to win the day. It could have gone another way, and we’d have a planet without an oxygen atmosphere, and we’d have life that didn’t use oxygen.

  “There are dozens of other places where the kind of biology we have was the result of equally random happenstance. Why do we store cellular energy with the ATP molecule? There are a hundred other molecules that are just as good, but all life on Earth uses ATP. Why do we have genetics using DNA, and not some other chain molecule? Why are proteins left-handed? Life won’t all be the same. You can count on it.”

  Behind her, people were suddenly shouting and screaming. Kyle had stopped paying attention to Pranav and Morgan’s conversation. He was at a table with two touch screen tablets in front of him, and he was using both hands to page through screen after screen of images, apparently looking at satellite views of the Earth. He
found the one he wanted and put it onto the large monitor. Everyone in the room went silent. It was a satellite view looking down at an empty expanse of ocean. In the center of the image, a patch of the ocean was glowing. As they watched, the glow faded from bright orange to a brick red, and a perfectly circular cloud was left behind, slowly expanding toward the edges of the screen.

  “That’s it?” somebody asked, breaking the silence, an instant before “What the hell was that?” and “Oh, my God” came from other corners of the room.

  “They apparently hit the Earth with something,” Kyle said. He was standing at the front of the room now, next to the “Big Game!” television. “A laser beam, possibly? X-ray laser?” He turned to the room. “Anybody have an estimate on the power?”

  “About a zettawatt,” someone said, “based on the beam size and thermal signature.” It was a bearded young man. He was scribbling calculations on a pad of paper rather than a computer, but a couple of others sitting near him, doing similar calculations on laptops, nodded agreement with him.

  “Petawatt?” Kyle asked.

  “No, zettawatt. That’s a million petawatts.”

  “That’s bad?” Morgan asked.

  “I would say yes,” Kyle said. “Very bad.”

  “What did they hit?” Pranav asked.

  “Mid-Pacific ocean,” Kyle said. “Now, why’d they aim for that?” He looked thoughtful.

  From down the room, there was a burst of noise, and someone said, “Another one just hit.”