The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - July/August 2016

by Various

  So I tried the same thing we'd done in art class.

  I tried putting on other authors' styles. No, that's wrong. I tried to put myself into their way of seeing and evoke the same moods and constructions. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't—I have a couple of Nebula nominations for the most ambitious of my failures.

  Not having a style of my own, not having a voice, I fell into the trap of inventing a different voice for each new effort—an actor's trick, I would become the character I was writing and I'd write in his voice. Unless it was a sequel, I never wrote the same voice twice. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

  Which is why I have no voice of my own. No brand. No nothing. No power.

  Dr. Morgan disagrees with me. He's been reading everything I've written for the past ten years. (Ever since that business with the strange green boy.) He has to. It's part of the court agreement.

  He says I do have a voice.

  Yes, I still have self-esteem issues left over from an awkward adolescence, and until I accept myself and take ownership of my issues, I will remain stuck repeating the same hallucinatory patterns, but he also says the way I ramble lazily through my narratives, dredging up memories like unplugging a clogged toilet, is a voice—I'm turning into the self-deprecating Marcel Proust of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (If I don't say it, someone else will—probably that creepy little critic who gnaws at my ankle from time to time.)

  Dr. Morgan thinks he's right—but I'm just as certain he's not.

  All the digressions in this narrative, Gordon? They're not digressions. They're part of the larger pattern. The thing that Harlan wasn't talking about.

  If you can see it.

  If anyone can see it.

  Okay, the local answer? I have to accept that we live in a world where these things not only occur—they're commonplace.

  There really are green people living in the northwest. That thing on the train was real. The entanglement device worked. And no, I'm not hearing things. There is something inside the Stoker Award.

  I have my own personal evidence. I've been losing nearly two pounds a day, I look like the cover of a classic E. C. comic, but I'm less than two weeks away from my target weight, so I'll keep the trophy on the shelf for another twenty pounds.

  After that—I do have to find a safe place for it. I can't throw it into the ocean. Harlan warned me about that. There are prohibitions. Something about the Environmental Protection Agency and ectoplasmic pollution control.

  Gotta stop now, Gordon.

  There's someone knocking at the door. It's probably my son. He says I look gaunt. He's here to take me to the doctor. I'll have to get back to you later, I'm still working on the other story, yes. You'll see it soon.

  Just one last thing—the question that after an hour-long phone call, Harlan still hadn't answered.

  What's really inside that little house?

  Who am I living with?

  And who— or what ?—was lying next to me in my bed last night?

  All best.

  Your pal,

  David Gerrold

  * * *

  Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful

  By Gregor Hartmann | 6444 words

  Gregor Hartmann makes his living translating Japanese patents, mainly dealing with materials science and nanotechnology, into English. Although he disavows any specific connection between this story and recent research, it demonstrates a keen awareness of the way that scientific projects started for one purpose often lead to other unexpected applications. And, sometimes, unintended consequences.

  I APPRECIATE HAVING A chance to respond to the charges against me. Walking around with a federal tracking device clamped on my left ankle is humiliating. More modern than a ball and chain, I guess, but not a good conversation starter. The other day in Berkeley I saw a car broken down beside the road. Trying to be helpful, I offered to take a look under the hood. When the driver noticed my tracker, he rolled up the window and locked the doors. So I slunk away.

  Could things have gone differently? I ask myself that question every day.

  My part in the disaster began when I walked into Materials Science Corporation in Fremont. The first thing I noticed was how clean the building smelled. To be precise, how it didn't smell. Since MatSciCo specialized in extremely tiny structures, the air was scrubbed to remove dust, pollen, flakes of skin, molecules of aftershave—all microscopic particles. I have asthma, so I'm very sensitive to air pollution. The fumes from a wood-burning fire, which most people enjoy? Poison gas, to me. Scouts do a lot of camping. If it hadn't been for the darn campfires, I'm sure I would've made Eagle. At MatSciCo I took one deep breath of pure empty nothing and felt at home.

  Waiting in the lobby was Dr. Vikram Karmarkar, my new boss. Bird-of-paradise silk shirt. Ironic red-framed eyeglasses. Slacks with a knife-edge crease. None of the physicists I'd met in college dressed so stylishly. Grinning, he ceremoniously presented me with an ID badge and intranet access fob. "Welcome to the Surface Phenomena Lab," he trilled. English was his third language (after Marathi and Hindi); he spoke with a Bollywood lilt.

  I mumbled something inane. It was my first job; I was afraid of screwing up.

  "No need to be nervous, Jimmy. You wheel have much fun. We are shallow here in the Surface Phenomena Lab. It is our motto. We keep things superficial. "

  I laughed, and relaxed a little.

  A blond man approached, wearing a blue polo shirt with the company logo. Vik introduced him as Reed Maloney. "Reed is our business overlord. He controls our budget. Anything you want, just ask. He loves signing big checks for equipment that wheel be obsolete in two years."

  "Unless you break it first," Reed huffed. He was as pale as Vik was dark. He shook my hand with both of his, making the greeting twice as official. "You respect capital equipment?"

  "Machines and I get along," I said.

  "Good. You want the straight scoop, come to me, not Dr. Goofball here. He's a theoretician. Prone to puffing up with hot air and floating away."

  Instead of being offended, Vik rose to his toes and pretended to be floating. He tiptoed off, zigzagging from side to side as if he were a balloon drifting on the breeze.

  Reed sighed. "Do what you can to keep him in line. The lab could use some gravitas."

  I gulped. I was twenty-one? Fresh out of school? But I knew what I had to say.

  "Can do," I vowed.

  "Good man." He hesitated, then clapped me on the shoulder. A routine gesture, but he did it self-consciously, as if trying a new yoga move he'd read about.

  Vik's project was to bond without using an adhesive. In fields like semiconductors and optical connectors it's a sexy topic. He was experimenting with etching tiny ridges and valleys in two extremely flat surfaces. Tiny as in nanometer: a billionth of a meter. Put the surfaces together, mesh the valleys and ridges, and the two objects would cling using only intermolecular forces.

  Neat, huh? No glue. In the micro-world, glue is evil. No matter how small the amount, when glue heats up, some of its components might vaporize or liquefy and damage the device it's in. If Vik could discover a simple and cheap way to bond two surfaces without an adhesive, MatSciCo could license the process and cash in.

  They gave me a fancy title which essentially amounted to "technician." One of my tasks was to help Vik by operating the electron beam gun that tested his ideas. Does "gun" make you think bang-bang ? Actually, an electron beam gun is a big, stationary apparatus that fires a stream of electrons at a target. Electrons don't have much mass, but when a lot of them move at half the speed of light, the beam packs a punch. I wrote complicated programs that controlled the beam path, how long a particular point was irradiated, how long or short the pulses were. Once the program was written, I loaded the target into the vacuum chamber, evacuated it to high vacuum, then pushed the start button. In the Silicon Valley hierarchy, technician isn't much better than janitor, but the craft appealed to me. Also, I'm an introvert. I found it easier to work with a machine than
with techies who were always trying to outsmart each other.

  Since the electron beam generated heat, a fan cooled the target when it emerged from the chamber. That's how Vik discovered the phenomenon he named chromagenesis.

  One day, I zapped an aluminum block with Beemer, our German-made electron gun. I extracted the block from the vacuum chamber and put it under the fan. While we were waiting for it to cool, Vik noticed a blue haze on the aluminum. Faint, but distinctly blue. I figured it was a side effect of the alloy elements in the aluminum. Vik was intrigued. When the metal cooled, he examined it with a scanning electron microscope. The color had vanished.

  At first he thought the blue haze was caused by heat. Yet under the right conditions it appeared even when the metal was cold. Vik made me zap different aluminum alloys etched with the same pattern. He deduced the alloy wasn't the key variable, it was the grooves. Eventually he realized the blue only appeared when air was moving over the engraved aluminum. Why? he wondered.

  Reed thought Vik was wasting time. In his ground state, Reed was an affable Mormon whose idea of fun was a fifty-kilometer bike ride through the hills behind Fremont. Unfortunately, he was taking a management class at San Jose State. Every Saturday he learned a new management style; every Monday he came in and tried it on us. One week he showed family photos and was artificially friendly. Another week he flipped the other way and acted tough. I especially hated the week he became a Chinese-style business sage. If I had a question, I wanted an answer, not a cryptic quote from Sun Tzu.

  When Reed realized how much time Vik was spending on the mysterious blue color, he told him to stop. A contract milestone was near; we were ordered to focus on bonding. Vik promised to do so—and sneaked in on Sundays to experiment. Since Vik was the idea man and I was his "gun boy" who could actually run Beemer without blowing up a cathode cartridge, Vik coaxed me to help. Which wasn't hard. I was a Tenderfoot at MatSciCo and eager to learn. So I was in the lab the Sunday Reed busted us.

  We were watching gauges and waiting for the pumps to thin the air in the chamber so the electron beam wouldn't lose focus. Vik was gleefully explaining how he coded expense reports to outwit Reed when you-know-who sauntered in.

  We froze.

  Reed peered around, careful not to touch anything, like a cop who didn't want to contaminate the crime scene. He heaved a dramatic sigh and gave us a smug look.

  "Eighty-three percent of the money going into this lab is federal. I have to account for every dollar. If you have purchased even one piece of unauthorized equipment, one piece, you have defrauded the U.S. Government, an offense punishable by two to five years in prison."

  I was terrified. Two months into my first job and I was a felon? I felt faint.

  Vik, bless him, was not intimidated. "Oh, bugger," he said. "You spoiled my surprise." He made a comically sad face.

  Reed was suspicious. "What surprise?"

  "I was going to do a demo for you tomorrow. After the staff meeting. Actually, I was thinking about doing it before the staff meeting. Reed, my friend, you wheel be very happy at what I have discovered. You wheel be able to make very big plans now. Very big plans."

  "How so?"

  With astounding calmness, Vik stepped to the whiteboard and uncapped a blue Magic Marker. I don't know if he'd already figured it out or if at that very instant he put the pieces together and solved the puzzle. Either way, he was magnificent.

  Vik explained that when air flows over a flat surface, the triboelectric effect briefly strips an electron from the outer shell of an N 2 molecule. To maintain octet stability, the molecule shares an electron with another N 2 molecule, which in turn shares with another N 2 molecule, and so on. Normally, collisions quickly knock them apart. But if the tiny ridges and valleys in the aluminum block had a certain pattern, they shaped the airflow so that density variations let more molecules hook up, creating self-assembling N 2 quasi-crystalline aggregations. The tiny blobs didn't last long. But! During their brief lives they refracted light. Because they were so small, they happened to refract short-wavelength light, around 475 nm, a blue wavelength. Given enough airflow, so many tiny blobs formed that they became visible to the naked eye as a blue mist. Vik sprinkled dots on the whiteboard like a sudden spring shower.

  I thought the info was too technical for a business guy, but Vik knew how to pitch. His impromptu presentation was like a dog whistle. Reed heard frequencies I couldn't. As Vik explained, Reed started to sense commercial possibilities. I could practically see the pupils of his eyes become dollar signs.

  Since Vik was the theoretician and I was the technician, it came to pass that I was authorized to build a "chromator." The first product, the "ColorFall," was installed at a mall in Palo Alto. The chromator was mounted high on a boring wall in the Grand Court. A hidden fan moved air over a surface etched with the pattern of ridges and valleys that created tiny "bubbles" (a term insisted on by our PR people, who hated "self-assembling N 2 quasi-crystalline aggregations" for some reason). Blue mist trickled down the wall, cascaded over a nest of smooth, round stones, and vanished.

  The slowly descending mist was as soothing as a waterfall, only safer. No leaks, no splatter. No water to mop up. No one would ever slip in a puddle and sue the mall. Our machine produced a waterfall that was blueberry-pie blue, Nordic-eye blue, state-fair-ribbon blue. When a bubble disintegrated, it went back to being N 2 molecules, otherwise known as the main component of air, so the color magically melted away. Tired shoppers gathered to stare and be soothed. The mall had to set up rope lines like at Disneyland.

  I was watching people enjoy the ColorFall when Reed came up beside me. "Well done, Jimmy," he said.

  "Thanks. I'm glad it worked. But there's something that bothers me."

  "What?"

  "I heard you tell reporters that the rocks came from Japan? From a stream on a sacred mountain?"

  "Yes?"

  "Didn't you actually buy them from a landscaper in Cupertino?"

  Reed became less smiley. He glanced around to see who was in earshot.

  "Jimmy, sometimes in business we have to take shortcuts. I did think about ordering special stones from Japan, but that would have delayed the opening. They look great, don't they? They really enhance the waterfall effect."

  "Sure." Although I didn't want to appear naive, I felt I had to object. "But isn't honesty the best policy?"

  "Not always," he said, frankly. "Look. We're creating an illusion here. The blue mist pretending to be a waterfall is an illusion. The provenance of the stones is an illusion. So the illusions are in sync, right?"

  My skepticism showed. He tried a different tack.

  "Reporters are lazy. I bet you a thousand dollars not one of them will bother to check."

  He went on in this vein until I finally pretended to agree, just to shut him up. I knew businessmen weren't as honest as scientists, but I hated having my nose rubbed in the fact. I mention this conversation because in retrospect I see that the situation was a fork in the trail. I had a choice, and I went down the wrong path.

  The ColorFall made Vik a hero at MatSciCo. He had noticed a subtle phenomenon and monetized it. To keep the buzz going, he repackaged the ColorFall and "invented" the ColorSpring. This time, the chromator pattern was etched inside a hollow cylinder. It was just a ColorFall rolled into a tube and planted on a base. A fan inside the base blew air upward, creating a little blue fountain. Our generation's lava lamp, Gizmodo proclaimed.

  A simple engineering tweak. I made a comment about how trite it was, and Vik got mad. The average scientist is lucky to have one good idea in a lifetime, he said, so you must be prepared to milk it. Like squeezing five papers out of a single experiment. When the chance comes, squeeze hard.

  He certainly exploited the situation. As scientific discoveries went, his was not going to change the world (or so we thought at the time), but it was pretty. Perfect for TV and the Internet. Vik went from anonymous researcher to TEDx guru faster than you can say "chromagenesis." He
was all over the media.

  The weirdest place he popped up was on the Cartoon Network, which launched a show with a character obviously based on him. The "Karmic Avenger" was a dark man who wore a turban with a jewel that shot a ray of blue light. His crime-fighting sidekicks were a tiger, an elephant, and a monkey with a British accent. Borderline racist, but Vik was flattered. So I called the Cartoon Network and talked them into giving me one of their life-size stand-up promotional figures. We sprang it on Vik one Monday at the staff meeting. Everyone was in on the joke. We told him there was a new hire he had to meet. Waving blue LED flashlights and singing the theme song, we marched in the Karmic Avenger. Vik fell out of his chair laughing.

  The adhesion contract was dumped on another group with less clout. Our team was dedicated to bubbles. All bubbles, 24/7. Reed did some behind-the-scenes magic, and presto! The Surface Phenomena Lab turned into the Chromagenic Product Development Group. Bigger head-count, more office space. Raises! I immediately opened the spreadsheet where I calculated when my student loans would be paid off. I plugged in my new salary, and lo! Freedom From Debt Day (F2D2) dropped from age forty-one to thirty-six. So yes, as you're obviously thinking, I did have a personal financial stake in not preventing the disaster.

  We threw a party to celebrate our ascension. Friday afternoon, in the conference room. Reed praised the great work we were doing, predicted that "group" was just the start; we were destined to become a division. Heady stuff, to jeans-and-T-shirt techies. Instead of his usual corporate casual, Reed suited up for the occasion. I don't know if he learned it in his management class or figured it out on his own, but the suave executive-suite look was one pose I liked. It was exactly the right touch. As if we techies were a scruffy indie band, and Reed was our classy business manager. Not cool, like us, but able to negotiate with other suits and land us big gigs.