Nature Futures 2

by Colin Sullivan

  Stacy was amid the partygoers surrounding Lena and Jarvis, and she saw Paul and waved at him to come over. “Jarvis,” she said in her extravagant socialite’s voice, “this is the chess player I mentioned to you. He’s been teaching chess to my son the past three months.”

  Jarvis’s head nodded sombrely. “Chess has become more important to me recently.”

  He had a deep voice, Paul noted. The transplantation hadn’t changed that aspect of his physiology.

  “I’m sure the two of you will get along fine,” Stacy commanded. She joined a nearby group of people and, as the hostess, was instantly welcomed into the conversation.

  “Chess has an addictive side to it,” Paul said. He saw that Lena was talking with a slim, long-legged man with a tattoo of a soccer ball on his arm. “Sometimes that’s good, I suppose. And sometimes I lie awake after chess tournaments thinking about the moves I should have played differently.”

  Jarvis chuckled. Then a shadow crossed over his face. “Lena’s not likely to sit through chess tournaments. But having someone such as you visit could be suitable for her.”

  Lena heard her name mentioned and turned to Paul. “He’s a chess player,” Jarvis said.

  Lena’s green eyes appraised Paul. She was about his age, he guessed. He remembered what the media had reported regarding her. She’d been in the foster-care system, had got a scholarship to college, had been majoring in theatre when the famed neuroscientist Jarvis McKnight had developed the massive staph infection that overwhelmed his bodily systems, and had volunteered for the transplant surgery that enabled the scientist to survive.

  “There should be more to life than chess,” Paul said. “I’ve been trying to become a poet.”

  “Tinkle tinkle little star,” Lena said.

  He wondered if she’d deliberately got the words wrong. “But I’ll probably need a reliable career,” he continued.

  A complex expression flitted across her face. Was it a mixture of embarrassment and defiance? “We do what we must,” she said. She turned back to the man she’d been chatting with.

  Paul and Jarvis looked at each other.

  “Yes,” Jarvis said. “We do indeed do what we must.”

  Paul wanted to say to him, I’ve been on the fringes too. We have that bond between us. But he was silent.

  “My research goals were too important,” Jarvis said. “I couldn’t let them die with me. And now I have a new goal. Can the brain be preserved against ageing if the host body that supports it is young and healthy? Perhaps cannulas bored through the skull into the brain can deliver a nourishing mixture of nutrients and antioxidants.

  “And in fact why stop there?” Jarvis continued. “Those same tubes could deliver stimulants, which could improve the mind’s talents. Perhaps with such injections you could become one of the top chess players. Or would you rather become obsessed with writing poetry?”

  The choice hadn’t occurred to Paul as one he might have to make.

  “A few volunteers such as yourself could change the world,” Jarvis said. “Maybe.”

  Before Paul got a chance to reply, a woman rushed up. “I’ve so wanted to meet you,” she said in a gushing voice as she held out her hand to Jarvis. Then, realizing she’d committed a social blunder, she put her hand down and blushed.

  “I’d shake your hand if I could,” Jarvis said in a kindly tone.

  “I’ve admired your courage, your commitment, your dedication to your ideals,” she said.

  “I think of it as desperation, instead,” Jarvis said. “But thank you.”

  The woman retreated.

  “We humans have our backs against the wall,” Jarvis said quietly. “Perhaps some people don’t realize that yet.”

  Paul didn’t know what to say. Then he decided to make a jesting comment. “I’ll cry if you say things like that.”

  Jarvis said simply, “I’ve cried, too.” Then he suddenly affixed his eyes on Paul’s. “Would you like to have tubes drilled into your brain? Would you like new biochemical substrates that could give you a greatly expanded repertoire of abilities?”

  At that point Lena turned her head toward Jarvis. Paul saw her companion had vanished. “I think you might be seeing more of Roberto,” she said to Jarvis. Then she spoke to Paul. “Jarvis and I have an understanding. He doesn’t expect me to be celibate. We discussed this before the operation.”

  “I’ll bite it off if I get the chance,” Jarvis said.

  She laughed nervously. “Jarvis has an exquisite sense of humour. The two of us might go far together. I’ve been wondering if, in time, we might run for president. He with his intellect and I with my theatrical skills … What great leadership we could provide.”

  All in all, Paul decided later, it had been an interesting evening.

  Then he realized he hadn’t answered Jarvis’s question.

  Dan Gollub believes that dreams follow a consistent emotional pattern. He has a website at www.dreampattern.com.

  Buzz Off

  John Grant

  Out of the bowels of space they came, the myriad ships of the greatest exploratory force the galaxy had ever seen, their sleek hulls glinting in the furtive starlight.

  The Sgrin’th fleet eased gently into orbit around the blue, watery third planet of a moderate-to-small yellow star, reflector screens raised to make the arrival undetectable to the instrumentation of those on the world below. For the Sgrin’th had been able to tell from many light years away that this was indeed the home of a technological civilization — although not, of course, whether it would survive long enough still to be there when the fleet arrived. So many technological civilizations foundered young.

  This one, however, was still extant — although only just. Cultural infantilization and deteriorating climate, the two deadly coupled factors that had accounted for so many civilizations, were well under way. The Sgrin’th preened themselves that they had arrived in time to save this one. They had been able to save many in similar situations before.

  Those successes made the pain of the rare failures easier to bear.

  The Sgrin’th knew better than to reveal immediately to the inhabitants of this world the glory of the interstellar fleet. Too many bellicose cultures would respond with pointless use of weaponry. Others would sink into apathy at the sight of technologies so very much in advance of their own.

  There had also been the unique case of the nnHHptuths of Mondriodo XII, but the Sgrin’th never talked about that humiliating experience. Supernovae can happen for a diversity of later undiagnosable reasons.

  To avoid future such unfortunate incidents, the method the Sgrin’th had devised over some billions of years was to send down individual emissaries to make telepathic contact with individuals in the highest echelons of power, so that it would be the aboriginals, not the Sgrin’th, who made the first steps towards clearing up the mess and graduating to membership of the Galactic Fellowship.

  The Sgrin’th expedition leader, Nuit, called the appointed volunteer emissaries to the command bridge. Through the curved plexiglass viewports they could see the crowds of Sgrin’th ships hanging in hidden space.

  “The aboriginals seem,” said Nuit, “an ideal species for salvage. Most certainly they offer no threat to the rest of the Fellowship, and perhaps they could contribute much to the welfare of our galaxy-wide community.

  “Even so, they might be dangerous.”

  What the fleet had been able to observe from orbit — able to observe with no great difficulty, in fact — was that the individuals of this planet’s dominant species were far larger than Sgrin’ths. This was nothing new. The forces of evolution being what they are, some intelligent creatures are bigger or smaller than others. The nnHHptuths of Mondriodo XII, for example … but, wait, we don’t want to talk about them.

  “The atmosphere,” continued Nuit, “is easily breathable by our kind, and none of the planet’s microorganisms represent a threat. There seems no reason at all why our expedition to this world should b
e anything other than a resounding success!”

  Nuit punched the air with a mandible.

  The air in the command bridge was filled with cheers.

  * * *

  A dozen orbits later, everything was different.

  The command bridge had about it the gloom of a mortuary.

  Of the original 4,096 emissaries sent planetside, exactly four still lived.

  “I don’t understand it!” wailed Nuit. “We have never before met with such hostility!”

  Nuit called up on the memory screen a typical encounter between a Sgrin’th emissary and one of the aboriginals — or humans, as they called themselves. The four emissaries clustered around Nuit knew already what they’d see, but their leader felt the need to show them again in the hope that someone might have a bright idea on how to deal with the crisis.

  On the screen, they saw a young Sgrin’th approach a far larger human.

  “We come to help you,” telepathed the Sgrin’th by way of introduction.

  The human picked up from its desk an artefact that was, in the local lingo, called a book.

  There was a horrific squelching noise, and the picture faded to black.

  “Is there any rational explanation?” cried Nuit into the silent echo of that terrible sound. “Never in all our billions of years of galactic exploration have we encountered such immediate hostility as this! Can anyone give me good cause why we shouldn’t…? Well, I’m not mentioning Mondriodo here, but you can surely understand my drift.”

  No one had a reply.

  “It’s just so,” said Nuit, wriggling its long, pointed, yellow-and-black-striped abdomen and buzzing its wings vexedly, “so unreasonable!”

  John Grant is the author of more than 60 books, both fiction and nonfiction — the latter including such works as Discarded Science, Denying Science, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Clute) and A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir; a new collection of his short stories, to be called Tell No Lies, is scheduled for late 2014 publication by Alchemy Press. He has won the Hugo (twice), the World Fantasy Award and a bunch of other awards.

  Man of Steel

  Richard P Grant

  The suicide note itself wasn’t particularly remarkable.

  Handwritten, of course. Even the oldest computers would have detected the quiver in the voice, or parsed the strained phraseology, and automatically alerted the authorities. The blue ink scratched its way across the paper, as if hard pressed to recall the individual shapes of letters. At one point the nib had pierced the white sheet. Few people wrote regularly with pens. It was still taught at school, but the odd love letter or shopping list was as far as most people got. And suicide notes, of course. This was no different; the writing was that of the very old, or the very young.

  In a way the hand was old, the oldest that had still lived. But just as the sunrise is as old as time and new each dawn, so this hand was new: three months and twelve days, according to the factory’s records.

  Even the words, the symbols of the man’s thoughts, were not worthy of note. They would have won no literary prize; inspired no doomed, romantic quest; enquickened no tired and demoralized army. The very human story was the usual one: of love, of ennui and, ultimately, of heartbreak.

  No one, least of all himself, remembered quite when or how he had lost his first hand, more than 300 years ago. The accident was recorded, but if the loose-leaf binder still existed, the cheap ink was long faded into obscurity. Sometimes he claimed it was an explosion in a fume hood; at other times a gas cylinder had fallen from its moorings and crushed him.

  What his memory was clear on, and what was attested to in the medical literature, was that he had attached (‘single-handedly, haha!’ he would joke) an artificial limb to the remains of his own arm. Not a simple prosthetic, but a fully functioning organ of composite fibre, ceramic joints and golden threads carrying two-way nervous traffic. The body’s own electrical impulses provided power to the tiny servos that drove the slender titanium flexors and extensors.

  No accident, the second prototype: it was tested and retested, planned months in advance. His wife directed the operation, and when he woke, his right arm to the shoulder was fully robotic. A fortnight later, while he was still delirious from antibiotics and analgesic, she was killed by a drunk-driver.

  The record shows that he opened a new lab with venture capital, employed three dozen scientists and disappeared into his research. The exclusive clinic followed: he himself was its first patient, walking out on legs of alloyed titanium — and straight back into the lab.

  Half a dozen more clinics started up across the nation, opening their doors to anyone whose medical insurance would pay the fees. For ten years the company replaced natural limbs with artificial constructs that were functionally equivalent to the original. More than equivalent: these never wore out, never got cancer, never got tired, never felt weak or cold.

  For ten years the clinics operated and the lab researched. No papers were published, no patents applied for, and investors grew nervous. Interest waned. Two clinics closed; a third of the research staff was laid off. Rumours circulated, created by and lost in the noise of the Internet. It was another three years later when, finally, a press conference was called on the lawn of the first clinic, the handful of journalists who bothered to turn up were turned away —

  — and were called back, to face a man who under crepusculine clouds glistened.

  The patents and the papers followed on the morrow: the artificial blood, the fuel cells, the intricate and minuscule fibres and vessels and motors: in short, a body wonderfully and fearfully man-made.

  Only his face appeared natural, and over the following years even that was slowly replaced. Having no need of food, depending solely on a defined and especially formulated medium, protected by filters and powered by the elements, no toxins could threaten him. With hard, durable alloys and man-made composites in place of bones and tissues, redundant systems and every organ replaceable, he was all but indestructible.

  Alzheimer’s had been cured by the time he reached 105, and the last bastion of mortality — the uncontrolled cell division leading to legion neoplasms — tamed a few years after that. And then he was a living brain in a metal and plastic shell, talking, walking and living: never fatigued, immune to all disease, the Tree of Life incarnate.

  For 200 years he lived like this, never needing to eat: a weekly cocktail of nutrients and pharmaceuticals keeping the one, irreplaceable fleshly and uniquely human organ alive.

  When the end came it was without fanfare or press conference. No papers were written, no patent lawyers notified. With the finest of Torx drivers he opened an access panel, removed a wire, took out a power cell, held it — his life in his own hands.

  The suicide note of the world’s first immortal ended simply enough:

  I cannot live without her.

  Richard P. Grant: scientist, gadfly, poet. Now carving out a science-writing career in London. Find him at http://rg-d.com.

  Midnight in the Cathedral of Time

  Preston Grassmann

  Walking through the crowded streets in Canvas Town, I pass a booth that claims to sell the god-ware of angelic systems; codes that open gateways to palaces of corporate data. I pass the aisles of snake-oil salesmen, hawking the latest nanotech cures for assorted ailments, from back pain to cancer. Through the aisles, the gold and silver relics of archaic religions are nestled among the silicon and plastic wafers of data-chips.

  The man I’m searching for sits in the corner of the tent and looks up slowly. His eyes catch a glint of light from mechanically modified plasma-eels that swim in a tank at the entrance of his shop. As I enter, he smiles and hunches slowly forward, a conspirator waiting to whisper a secret. Towers fall and cathedrals break apart across his chest, streets narrow across his ribs to make room for buildings; his skin altering in the movement.

  “You finally made it back,” he says, his lips turning a mountain ravine into a cave of broken stalact
ites. He watches me with grey-green eyes.

  “What made you think I would?” I ask, watching as two eels collide in a surge of blue light, plasma flickering around their bodies. A few people stand at the entrance, placing their hands on the surface of the tank to watch the storm surge around their fingers.

  “Lucid dreamers always return.”

  I begin to see the illustrations spreading outwards from his body, an artist’s outline that turns into solid shapes. The mountain across his cheekbones begins to melt, spreading down his chest, colours pouring across his skin like watercolours.

  The DJ stays where he is, unmoving, as if waiting for me to act.

  “One reading is all it takes for some,” he says, reaching out for the data-chip. I place it in his open palm. “Before they become…”

  “Dream junkies?”

  He nods slowly.

  A crowd begins to gather outside the shop. He replays the images of dreams from previous customers. Another image forms across his chest; bright green palms swaying among a village of burning homes, spires of smoke rising across his shoulders like wings.

  The data-chips were dreams rendered into code. There were only a few technicians who understood how such data could be used, and even fewer who could render them into coherent forms. This man had chosen to turn it into an art. As he read the data-card, the images would be distilled and remixed, projected on his skin in high resolution.

  “Shall we keep this private?” he asks, the pictures on his skin shifting too quickly to be seen.