by Mike Ashley
Trying to express these sentiments and lift the spirits of his comrades, A.B. found that his evaluation of Reboot civilization was not universal.
"Every human of this fallen Anthro-pocene age is shadowed by the myriad ghosts of all the other creatures they drove extinct," said Tigerishka, in a surprisingly poetic and somber manner, given her usual blunt and unsentimental earthiness. "Whales and dolphins, cats and dogs, cows and horses - they all peer into and out of our sinful souls. Our only shot at redemption is that some day, when the planet is restored, our coevolved partners might be re-embodied."
Thales uttered a scoffing grunt. "Good riddance to all that nonsapient genetic trash! Homo sapiens is the only desirable endpoint of all evolutionary lines. But right now, the dictatorial Reboot has our species locked down in a dead end. We can't make the final leap to our next level until we get rid of the chaff."
Tigerishka spat, and made a taunting feint toward her co-worker across A.B.'s chest, causing A.B. to swerve the car and Thales to recoil. When the keek realized he hadn't actually been hurt, he grinned with a sickly superciliousness.
"Hold on one minute," said A.B. "Do you mean that you and the other keeks want to see another Crash?"
"It's more complex than that. You see-"
But A.B.'s attention was diverted that moment from Thales's explanation. His vib interrupted with a Demand Four call from his apartment.
Vib nodes dotted the power transmission network, keeping people online just like at home. Plenty of dead zones existed elsewhere but not here, adjacent to the line.
A.B. had just enough time to place the trundlebug on autopilot before his vision was overlaid with a feed from home.
The security system on his apartment had registered an unauthorized entry.
Inside his lLDK, an optical distortion the size of a small human moved around, spraying something similar to used cooking oil on A.B.'s furniture. The hands holding the sprayer disappeared inside the whorl of distortion.
A.B. vibbed his avatar into his home system. "Hey, you! What the fuck are you doing!"
The person wearing the invisibility cape laughed, and A.B. recognized the distinctive crude chortle of Zulqamain Safranski.
"Safranski! Your ass is grass! The ASBO's are on their way!"
Unable to stand the sight of his lovely apartment being desecrated, frustrated by his inability to take direct action himself, A.B. vibbed off.
Tigerishka and Thales had shared the feed and commiserated with their fellow Power Jock. But the experience soured the rest of the trip for A.B., and he stewed silently until they reached the first of the extensive constructions upon which the Reboot Cities relied for their very existence.
The Solar Girdle featured a tripartite setup, for the sake of security of supply.
First came the extensive farms of solar updraft towers: giant chimneys that fostered wind flow from base to top, thus powering their turbines.
Then came parabolic mirrored troughs that followed the sun and pumped heat into special sinks, lakes of molten salts, which in turn ran different turbines after sunset.
Finally, serried ranks of photovoltaic panels generated electricity directly. These structures, in principle the simplest and least likely to fail, were the ones experiencing difficulties from some kind of dust accretion.
Vibbing GPS coordinates for the troublespot, A.B. brought the trundlebug up to the infected photovoltaics. Paradoxically, the steady omnipresent whine of the car's motors registered on his attention only when he had powered them down.
Outside the vehicle's polarized plastic shell, the sinking sun glared like the malign orb of a Cyclops bent on mankind's destruction.
When the bug-wide door slid up, dragon's breath assailed the Power Jocks. Their plugsuits strained to shield them from the hostile environment.
Surprisingly, a subdued and pensive Tigerishka volunteered for camp duty. As dusk descended, she attended to erecting their intelligent shelters and getting a meal ready: chicken croquettes with roasted edamame.
A.B. and Thales sluffed through the sand for a dozen yards to the nearest infected solarcell platform. The keek held his pocket lab in gloved hand.
A little maintenance kybe, scuffed and scorched, perched on the high trellis, valiantly but fruitlessly chipping with its multitool at a hard siliceous shell irregularly encrusting the photovoltaic surface.
Thales caught a few flakes of the unknown substance as they fell, and inserted them into the analysis chamber of the pocket lab.
"We should have a complete readout of the composition of this stuff by morning."
"No sooner?"
"Well, actually, by midnight. But I don't intend to stay up. I've done nothing except sit on my ass for two days, yet I'm still exhausted. It's this oppressive place—"
"Okay," A.B. replied. The first stars had begun to prinkle the sky. "Let's call it a day."
They ate in the bug, in a silent atmosphere of forced companion-ability, then retired to their separate shelters.
A.B. hoped with mild lust for another nocturnal visit from a prowling Tigerishka but was not greatly disappointed when she never showed to interrupt his intermittent drowsing. Truly, the desert sands of Paris sapped all his usual joie de vivre.
Finally falling fast asleep, he dreamed of the ghostly waters of the vanished Seine, impossibly flowing deep beneath his tent. Somehow, Zulqamain Safranski was diverting them to flood A.B.'s apartment.
4
The Red Queen's Triathalon
In the morning, after breakfast, A.B. approached Gershon Thales, who stood apart near the trundlebug. Already the sun thundered down its oppressive cargo of photons, so necessary for the survival of the Reboot Cities, yet, conversely, just one more burden for the overstressed Greenhouse ecosphere. Feeling irritable and impatient, anxious to be back home, A.B. dispensed with pleasantries.
"I've tried vibbing your pocket lab for the results but you've got it offline, behind that pirate software you're running. Open up, now."
The keek stared at A.B. with mournful stolidity. "One minute, I need something from my pod."
Thales ducked into his tent. A.B. turned to Tigerishka. "What do you make—"
Blinding light shattered A.B.'s vision for a millisecond in a painful nova, before his MEMS contacts could react protectively by going opaque. Tigerishka vented a stifled yelp of surprise and shock, showing she had gotten the same actinic eyekick.
A.B. immediately thought of vib malfunction, some misdirected feed from a solar observatory, say. But then, as his lenses de-opaqued, he realized the stimulus had to have been external.
When he could see again, he confronted Gershon Thales holding a pain gun whose wide bell muzzle covered both of the keek's fellow Power Jocks. At the feet of the keek rested an exploded spaser grenade.
A.B. tried to vib but got nowhere.
"Yes," Thales said, "we're in a dead zone now. I fried all the optical circuits of the vib nodes with the grenade."
A large enough burst of surface plasmons could do that? Who knew? "But why?"
With his free hand, keeping the pain gun unwavering, Thales reached into a plugsuit pocket and took out his lab. "These results. They're only the divine sign we've been waiting for. Reboot civilization is on the way out now. I couldn't let anyone in the PAC find out. The longer they stay in the dark, the more irreversible the changes will be."
"You're claiming this creeping crud is that dangerous?"
"Did you ever hear of ADRECS?"
A.B. instinctively tried to vib for the info and hit the blank frustrating walls of the newly created dead zone.
Trapped in the twentieth century! Recreationist passions only went so far. Where was the panopticon when you needed it?
"Aerially Delivered Re-forestation and Erosion Control System," continued Thales. "A package of geoengineering schemes meant to stabilize the spread of deserts. Abandoned decades ago. But apparently, one scheme's come alive again on its own. Mutant instruction drift is my best guess. Or
Darwin's invisible hand."
"What's come alive then?"
"Nanosand. Meant to catalyze the formation of macroscale walls that would block the flow of normal sands."
"And that's the stuff afflicting the solarcells?"
"Absolutely. Has an affinity for bonding with the surface of the cells and can't be removed with destroying them. Self-replicating. Best estimates are that the nanosand will take out thirty per cent of production in just a month, if left unchecked. Might start to affect the turbines too."
Tigerishka asked, in an intellectually curious tone of voice that A.B. found disconcerting, "But what good does going offline do? When PAC can't vib us, they'll just send another crew."
"I'll wait here and put them out of commission too. I only have to hang in for a month."
"What about food?" said Tigerishka. "We don't have enough provisions for a month, even for one person."
"I'll raid the fish farms on the coast. Desalinate my drinking water. It's just a short round trip by bug."
A.B. could hardly contain his disgust. "You're fucking crazy, Thales. Dropping the power supply by thirty per cent won't kill the cities."
"Oh, but we keeks think it will. You see, Reboot civilization is a wobbly three-legged stool, hammered together in a mad rush. We're not in the Red Queen's Race, but the Red Queen's Triathalon. Power, food and social networks. Take out any one leg, and it all goes down. And we're sawing at the other two legs as well. Look at that guy who vandalized your apartment. Behavior like that is on the rise. The urbmons are driving people crazy. Humans weren't meant to live in hives."
Tigerishka stepped forward and Thales swung the gun more towards her unprotected face. A blast of high-intensity microwaves would leave her screaming, writhing and puking on the sands.
"I want in," she said and A.B.'s heart sank through his boots. "The only way other species will ever get to share this planet is when most of mankind is gone."
Regarding the furry speculatively and clinically, Thales said, "I could use your help. But you'll have to prove yourself. First, tie up Bandjalang."
Tigerishka grinned vilely at A.B. "Sorry, apeboy."
Using biopoly cords from the bug, she soon had A.B. trussed with circulation-deadening bonds and stashed in his homeopod.
What were they doing out there? A.B. squirmed futilely. He banged around so much, he began to fear he was damaging the life-preserving tent so he stopped. Wiped out after hours of struggle, he fell into a stupor made more enervating by the suddenly less-than-ideal heat inside the homeopod, whose compromised systems strained to deal with the desert conditions. He began to hallucinate about the subterranean Seine again and realized he was very, very thirsty. His kamelbak was dry when he sipped at its straw.
At some point, Tigerishka appeared and gave him some water. Or did she? Maybe it was all just another dream.
Outside the smart tent, night came down. A.B. heard wolves howling, just like they did on archived documentaries. Wolves? No wolves existed. But someone was howling.
Tigerishka having sex. Sex with Thales. Bastard. Bad guy not only won the battle but got the girl as well...
A.B. awoke to the pins and needles of returning circulation: discomfort of a magnitude unfelt by anyone before or after the Lilliputians tethered Gulliver.
Tigerishka was bending over him, freeing him.
"Sorry again, apeboy, that took longer than I thought. He even kept his hand on the gun right up until he climaxed."
Something warm was dripping on A.B.'s face. Was his rescuer crying? Her voice belied any such emotion. A.B. raised a hand that felt like a block of wood to his own face and clumsily smeared the liquid around, until some entered his mouth.
He imagined that this forbidden taste was equally as satisfying to Tigerishka as mouse fluids.
Heading north, the trundlebug seemed much more spacious with just two passengers. The corpse of Gershon Thales had been left behind, for eventual recovery by experts. Dessica-tion and cooking would make it a fine mummy.
Once out of the dead zone, A.B. vibbed everything back to Jeetu Kissoon and got a shared commendation that made Tigerishka purr. Then he turned his attention to his personal queue of messages.
The ASBO Squad had bagged Safranski. But they apologised for some delay in his sentencing hearing. Their caseload was enormous these days.
Way down at the bottom of his queue was an agricultural newsfeed. An unprecedented kind of black rot fungus had made inroads into the kale crop on the farms supplying Reboot City Twelve.
Calories would be tight in New Perthpatna, but only for a while.
Or so they hoped.
This story is indebted to Gaia Vince and her article in New Scientist, "Surviving in a Warmer World"
TERRAFORMING TERRA
Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson (1908-2006) almost made it to 100 years old, and he kept on writing to the end. He had the longest career of any SF writer, almost eighty years. His earliest story appeared in the very first science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1928, showing the influence of Abraham Merritt. He became one of the major writers of the 1930s writing such bizarre
"thought variant" stories for Astounding Stories as "Born of the Sun" (1934), where it turns out that the planets are eggs and Earth is about to hatch. He produced his fair share of early space opera, notably his Legion of Space series, but also penned The Legion of Time (1938), where he highlighted the significance of those small moments, which he called the Jonbar hinge, upon which life-changing events can depend, His Seetee stories, written in the 1940s, gave rise to the concept of contra-terrene matter. At this time he produced another significant work, The Humanoids (1948), which considered the problem of an overly helpful artificial intelligence. Williamson's fiction was often at the cutting edge of scientific advance. He considered genetic engineering in Dragon's Island (1951), a theme he revisited in Manseed (1982). He continued to win Awards right to the end. The following novelette formed the first part of his novel Terra-forming Earth (2001), which won the Campbell Memorial Award in 2002. This also takes us through the apocalypse and way beyond.
* * *
1
WE ARE CLONES, the last survivors of the great impact. The bodies of our parents have lain a hundred years in the cemetery on the rubble slope below the crater rim. I remember the day my robot-father brought the five of us up to see the Earth, a hazy red-spattered ball in the black Moon sky.
"It looks - looks sick." Looking sick herself, Dian raised her face to his. "Is it bleeding?"
"Bleeding red-hot lava all over the land," he told her. "The rivers all bleeding iron-red rain into the seas."
"Dead." Arne made a face. "It looks dead."
"The impact killed it." His plastic head nodded. "You were born to bring it back to life."
"Just us kids?"
"You'll grow up."
"Not me," Arne muttered. "Do I have to grow up?"
"So what do you want?" Tanya grinned at him. "To stay a snot-nosed kid forever?"
"Please." My robot-father shrugged in the stiff way robots have, and his lenses swept all five of us, standing around him in the dome. "Your mission is to replant life on Earth. The job may take a lot of time, but you'll be born and born again till you get it done."
We knew our natural parents from their letters to us and their images in the holo tanks and the robots they had programmed to bring us up. My father had been Duncan Yare, a lean man with kind grey eyes and a neat black beard when I saw him in the holo tanks. He had a voice I loved, even when he was the robot.
The dome was new to us, big and strange, full of strange machines, wonderfully exciting. The clear quartz wall let us see the stark earth-lit moonscape all around us. We had clone pets. Mine was Spaceman. He growled and bristled at a black-shadowed monster rock outside and crouched against my leg. Tanya's cat had followed us.
"Okay, Cleo," she called when it mewed. "Let's look outside." Cleo came flying into her arms. Jumping was easy, here i
n the Moon's light gravity. My robot-father had pointed a thin blue plastic arm at the cragged mountain wall that curved away on both sides of the dome.
"The station is dug into the rim of Tycho-"
"The crater," Arne interrupted him. "We know it from the globe."
"It's so big!" Tanya's voice was hushed. She was a spindly little girl with straight black hair that her mother made her keep cut short, and bangs that came down to her eyebrows. Cleo sagged in her arms, almost forgotten. "It - it's homongoolius!"
She stared out across the enormous black pit at the jagged peak towering into the blaze of Earth at the center. Dian had turned to look the other way, at the bright white rays that fanned out from the boulder slopes far below, spreading to the pads and gantries and hangars where the spacecraft had landed, and reaching on beyond, across the waste of black-pocked, grey-green rocks and dust to the black and starless sky.
"Homongoolius?" Dian mocked her. "I'd say fractabulous!"
"Homon-fractabu-what?" Pepe made fun of them both. He was short and quick, as skinny as Tanya was, and just as dark. He liked to play games, and never combed his hair. "Can't you speak English?"
"Better than you." Dian was a tall pale girl who never wanted a pet. The robots had made dark-rimmed glasses for her because she loved to read the old paper books in the library. "And I'm learning Latin."
"What good is Latin?" Cloned together, we were all the same age, but Arne was the biggest. He had pale blue eyes and pale blond hair, and he liked to ask questions. "It's dead as Earth."
"It's something we must save." Dian was quiet and shy and always serious. "The new people may need it."
"What new people?" He waved his arm at the Earth. "If everybody's dead-"
