Nature Futures 2

by Colin Sullivan

  The Ostracons of Europa

  Ken Hinckley

  There was something transcendent about the pattern etched into the ice-bound Europan surface looming 53 kilometres above Ricardo Cuerta’s submersible. The implacable gravity of Jupiter rewrote the great frozen palimpsest again and again, the pack ice heaved and rilled with fissures that hinted at the mysteries of the deep.

  That’s how he’d seen it from orbit. Now the intense blue-white glare of the spotlights seemed to be all that prevented the eternal midnight of the subsurface ocean from imploding his mind.

  Particulates clouded the supercooled brine. Flurries of malformed magnesium sulphate flakes tumbled through the cones of light cast by the submersible and vanished again into the darkness. Ricardo floated, with nothing but the spotlights of the submersible and the sheer thrall of wonder between himself and the abyss. Even now, submerged within the shattered moon, he still couldn’t fathom what that pattern meant.

  The black chimneys of a cryovolcano rose out of the gloom like a city of diseased skyscrapers. Ricardo torqued the joystick between his thumb and forefinger, applying just enough pressure to manoeuvre the perspex tube at the end of the armature a little closer. He needed a sample, had to bring back proof — if not for the cold gaze of Science, then at least to convince himself that he wasn’t confabulating wonders in the dark.

  Cold sweat drenched the polypro fabric clinging to his chest. The tang of constant anxiety oiled the fatigue lines etched into his face. The slightest mistake, the tiniest unintended twitch of a muscle, and he could easily break a chimney and bring the entire tottering structure down on the submersible. If he were lucky it would breach the observation bell and he would be dead a few tenths of a second later. If he were not so fortunate, it would cripple the craft, leaving him drifting and helpless in the dark. Communication with the rest of the crew awaiting his return at the surface was impossible. There would be no final cry for help; he would never be found.

  Ricardo licked the salt from his lips. It wasn’t so different, really, from the brine in which the submersible was drifting at this very moment. He could have been floating in himself. It had been ten years since Rosa had died. His wife, his bride, so young. Why did he have to travel so far from home to exile himself from his own darkness?

  And yet here he was, floating in the abyss.

  The spotlights fell upon a brilliant white chevron in the silt-shrouded murk. At first he thought it was enormous — there was no sense of scale, nothing familiar and human by which to judge the size of objects. It winked out, then appeared again, and Ricardo realized it was close at hand, something partially occluded by the soot-black columns of the cryovolcano.

  Something that moved.

  He let the submersible drift. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to startle it.

  Slowly it came into view.

  An alabaster-white carapace. Crimson-tipped thorns cresting sharp-jointed legs. A hooked beak framed by feathery fronds that sculled and groped at the deep.

  It was a monstrosity pried from the oil-cake layers of the Burgess shale and jolted to life. The gangly and utterly alien way it moved was infused with a crawling strangeness that sent chills prickling up Ricardo’s spine, across his shoulders and into the base of his brain. The words crab and spider and giant squid flashed through his mind, but of course it was none of these. He settled on xeno-arachnid, because, a man of science, he could not bring himself to call it what it was: monster.

  Its fronds quivered and reached out. Probing. Curious. Angling his way. Suddenly Ricardo’s mind flashed with comprehension: the creature had nothing that he recognized as eyes — but it, too, was dumbfounded with wonder.

  Its gaping beak seemed to gnaw at the darkness. It lifted two thorned legs, not threatening, slowly extending them towards the spotlights on the front of the submersible. Ricardo was about to pull back when the xeno-arachnid halted. Its fronds undulated in the shadows cast by its limbs. The beak repeated its gnawing motion, then again a third time. Slowly. More deliberately. Ricardo gasped and his eyes went wide.

  It was trying to tell him something.

  But what?

  Ricardo thought he glimpsed a shimmer, an iridescence just at the limits of his perception. He fingered the toggles for the spotlights and the interior lights, flicked them off one by one, and plunged himself into abject darkness.

  But as his eyes adjusted, he realized the darkness was not absolute, the darkness was not eternal.

  Not at all. He had only just begun to see the light.

  The xeno-arachnid’s legs glowed with a ghostly bioluminescence. Its carapace grew brighter and slowly turned to face him. The legs — four of them working in unison — scrabbled across the surface, wove in sombre blues and muted whites a tapestry of overlapping calligraphies that became more and more complex with each pass of its limbs.

  The pattern lightning-bolted in Ricardo’s mind to something he recognized, to patterns larger still. The massive pack-ice shards of Europa’s frozen crust. The jumbled cuneiform of pressure ridges and rifts stamped into the icy potsherds fracturing the surface.

  The rafting of the Europan surface was not random at all.

  The creature was writing its story, a small fragment of the same immense narrative that was etched into the Rosetta-stone shards that circumscribed the Europan globe.

  Ricardo held no proof, but he knew. The xeno-arachnid was telling him. He knew. The light in the darkness was written on its carapace. The creature was like him, a kindred spirit, an exile, and their names were scrawled upon the ostracons of Europa.

  Ken Hinckley is a writer, as well as a principal scientist at Microsoft Research, where he studies human–computer interaction, including sensors, pen computing and multi-modal input. His website is kenhinckley.wordpress.com.

  Her Name was Jane

  Joses Ho

  My name is Noah.

  I’m going to start writing, because I’m following the only piece of advice that I can clearly recall. I heard it from a cab driver as I rode in his taxi. He said: “The people you write about should be the ones who you dream about.”

  Jane and I, as I remember, might have been chatting about our favourite authors, something along those lines, I’m not sure. We both looked up at the taxi driver’s eyes, dimly reflected through the rear-view mirror.

  “Do you write stories in your spare time?” I can’t recall which one of us asked him that, Jane or I, but I remember thinking: “Now we’re getting drawn into a conversation with a stranger. This might not bode well for a first date.”

  To be honest, I’m not sure which date Jane and I were on. I know it was our last.

  “I used to write.” He continued looking at us through the mirror as we sped along. “Non-fiction, though. Papers. Quite a few. Scientific ones.”

  His eyes turned back to the road, and he said: “It wasn’t too long ago either. Two or three years. Or maybe two or three months.”

  “What do you mean?” He turned his face back, and I think his eyes met mine.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  I said, half-laughing: “Well, now you have to tell us, right?” I turned slightly to look at Jane, but I can’t recall what her expression was.

  The taxi driver turned back, and said: “Well, then I guess I’ll show you.” I don’t think he said anything else for the rest of the journey. Jane and I probably just sat in awkward silence until we reached her place, and I don’t think I bothered to talk to the driver as he drove me back to mine.

  And, as I recall, that night the dreams started.

  Those first dreams, I remember, were of my childhood — happy days with my older sister Karen. We would hide from the torrential rain, squeezing into our dollhouse, giggling like the pre-adolescent girls we were as Mother screamed over the downpour: “Karen! Jane! Come back inside!” The funny thing is, now that I think about it, I’ve never had a sister. I’ve never had a dollhouse in any garden. I don’t know anyone named Karen, either. I
woke up that morning terrified, in a bedroom I knew was mine but didn’t recognize. I remember shattering the bathroom mirror, because the reflection wasn’t Jane’s, or Rob’s.

  Rob — he’s the taxi driver, the most over-qualified cabbie in the world. He never told us in the taxi, but I know his name because the next night, I dreamt I was Rob. I was in Paris, listening to the lecture that started it all. The speaker might have been a Nobel laureate, but I can’t recall his name. But I can see, even now, the quantum field equations he had, leaping off the PowerPoint slide. He had a glorious, wonderful theory. He hypothesized that DNA could, if placed in a low-frequency electric field, be teleported between two test tubes. I remember most of the audience walking out halfway, shocked and stunned at the quackery he was proposing.

  And I remember strolling down the Champs-Elysées, lost in my thoughts. The biological basis of memory, I reasoned, could be explained by epigenetic modifications to DNA. Genes shutting each other down, turning each other on, rewiring the brain, creating memories and erasing others. And I knew, with a few tweaks to those equations I had just seen, you could transmit the quantum signature of one neuronal epigenome to another. In other words, you could clone memories.

  The thing is, if you check my passport, I’ve never been to France in my entire life. And I don’t know what the hell the word ‘epigenetic’ means. And I can remember flying back and living in my lab for the next few months, despite the constant warnings from the institute that they would kick me out. And when they did, I recall being shunned by every university I sought a position with.

  I remember screaming at my wife and kids as they left the apartment with their luggage, insisting that this night-shift cabbie work would tide us over, don’t give up on me now, please, I’m this close to making it work. And then I see myself, waking up, hungover again, stumbling down to the taxi and rewiring the coils into the chassis, knowing there was only one way to find out if it did work.

  Last night I dreamt that there’s a cabal of cabbies, driving electromagnetic taxis around the city, secretly homogenizing the histories of random strangers. Because driving a taxi’s the easiest way to get people to climb into a 7 Hz field for at least 15.3 minutes. That’s all the time needed to swap your memories with someone else.

  You see, there’s only one way to know which of your memories are real. You compare them with newer dreams, ones you’re sure you’ve never had before. So I’m taking my advice, writing all of this down, so that I can sort out all these dreams. Because I’m not sure, anymore, which of these memories are actually mine.

  I don’t see her in my dreams anymore — and I’m not even sure if her name was Jane.

  Joses Ho is a neuroscientist by training. Originally from and currently based in Singapore, he has lived and studied in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Follow him on Twitter; his handle is @jacuzzijo.

  Midnight at the A&E

  Taik Hobson

  HAVING A BAD DAY?

  Out the window from the 37th floor I fall, facing towards the heavens, arms stretched out for the divine deliverance I know will never arrive. Not a half second following my ejaculation, out hop the Minions of Bhenvul (#3: Fear of what others might think) in mad choreographed glee, their smiles small half moons against the starless night. I count one, two … seven demons. Most of them will end up as demon guts on the asphalt but what difference will that make? I am one and they are minions. Stay on it! Taking aim, I activate both my RighteousRevolvers and the sky starts to rain demon blood; each shot a musical thunderclap in the key of C, true as its name[CP+5+5+5+5]. My head is still swimming from where I was struck earlier; poison of unimmortality working into my faculties, weakening my hold on the handle. And this isn’t even the big boss.

  ON A GUILT TRIP?… AGAIN?

  I tell myself I might still make it. Using all my Confidence Points I PURCHASE: GodHand[Grapple][CP-20/0]

  CAN’T KEEP THOSE NAGGING INSECURITIES AWAY?

  GodHand is go! With seven floors to spare, I get a hold and break my fall through one of the windows, landing in a dark, empty office room sprinkled with pieces of glass. Outside I hear a cascade of demon laughter ending in a succession of splats. They think it’s so funny; they don’t have a clue. You try asking Emma Sophine out for a date. The thought alone invites paralysis.

  I really shouldn’t be thinking about this right now. Bringing up my worries is a potentially fatal slip of the mind; like a signalling beacon it attracts them. Tells them where I am.

  AT THE A&E, WE CAN HELP

  Too late, I think, as the walls begin to morph. I’m out of the window just as shattered pieces of the original partition becomes a living maw, crystallized canines scraping up against my back and I know I’m in trouble. Resorting to a vertical dash, it’s all I can do to concentrate on each footstep as I try to keep a better watch on my thoughts. The Null Devourer, Spawn of Nefrul (#2: Lack of self worth) is a pandimensional entity that becomes the antithesis of everything thrown at it. If I don’t kill it now, I will be haunted by its bulbous visage for weeks to come. Warped face in my morning cereal, corrosive odour in my sweat. Watch your dreams turn into nightmares!

  Somehow, you always get more than you bargain for at the A&E. I wonder if that’s why I keep coming back.

  FACE THOSE EMOTIONAL BLOCKS ONE ON ONE

  I’m storming up the side of the building, dispensing Righteousness left, right, centre and just about anywhere I can, the whole structure having turned squishy and flesh-like. To hit the Devourer I’ll have to move onto something smaller, but for now the strategy is to stay alive. Take that, oviposterior!

  “GYA-HA-HA-HAAAAW∼!”

  I look up in time to catch a falling minion in the face, a late addition to the previous mess, the pair of us thrown into a complete free fall from the impact. With my revolvers lost it takes every ounce of concentration just to keep the demon’s paws of wild electricity from brushing against me. In one of our twirls I register rows of lidless eyeballs where the building windows once were, moving in unison, tracking us hungrily. There’s nothing sophisticated about this Devourer; it’s just going for the one thing that’s keeping me alive at the moment. Case in point: I blink and the building that was a writhing overfed larva a second ago is now plain bricks and mortar, whereas the line from my grapple — the GodHand that’s keeping me from hitting the pavement — begins to swell and pop scales. This is too much.

  “Demon —” I manage under the stench of unworldly halitosis, “— meet Null Devourer.”

  SHOW THEM WHO’S IN CHARGE

  Commands get scrambled thru the shock of the electrified grapple line/half-morphed Devourer, wreaking havoc on my handle and firing off stray, half-baked signals. I’m screaming. Somewhere, I can smell spit sizzling off an overheated interface … console … the experience is … the experience … what … experience … what am I doing … am —

  AVATARIZE

  — doing?[CP+50] —

  —

  THEN EXORCISE

  … Avatarize … then Exorcise. The A&E … and … thank god for in-game commercials. My first thought when I come to is that I’m hanging by the ledge of an open window, handle realigning itself by the tips of my finger. Think. Emma Sophine. That’s why you’re here. So-deep-Phine-breath.

  And then I see her. Ijana, Queen of Horns (#1: Fear of rejection). This is it. Big Boss time. The one final barrier between me and bliss. I feel my stomach seize as my handle braces for action. Deep breaths now. In less than 10 seconds she will be directly beneath me, another 20 she’ll have moved into centre position, reconfiguring with her hive, making her virtually invulnerable. This is my chance. Kill her now and I can finally ask Emma out for a date. Kill her, and I will be holding That Hand.

  PURCHASE: SoulSword[Blade][CP-30/20]

  It’s funny, the things we do to avoid facing the real thing.

  I unsheath my SoulSword and jump. I have exactly no tricks left up my sleeve. The distance closes and the Queen looks
up from the sound of my screaming. For a half second I forget why I do this, when I see Ijana move her own crown of horns out of my way, leaving me with a clean shot at her forehead. And the third eye embedded in there.

  “DIE, DEMON! DIE!”

  THIS HAS BEEN A WORDED ACCOUNT OF AN IN-GAME SESSION. FOR OUR SPRING CAMPAIGN, PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE. HAVING A BAD DAY? AT THE A&E, WE CAN HELP.

  Having sworn off computer games in favour of a normal life, Taik Hobson lives in Japan.

  Trying to Let Go

  Kerstin Hoppenhaus

  When I was born, I was exactly one foot. And I still am — although it wasn’t planned that way. When the double-hardened kitchen-knife hit the wooden floor and stuck there, close enough for me to sense the force of its vibrations, they thought it was an accident. Turned out it wasn’t.

  My first memories are of floating in a gelatinous culture medium carefully kept at 37.1 °C. It took them five months and 17 days to grow me to my full size. Plus another four months of muscle build-up and coordinative training.

  I had been raised on a scaffolding of 28 nanofibre bones, a standard human foot — five toes, Egyptian form, first toe longer than the others. My skin is tender, with fine hair; my instep elegantly curved; my entire structure delicate, yet resilient. I’m perfect.

  More than that. I am packed with nerve cells and receptors, triplefold beyond natural capacity, prepared to capture the most fleeting bits of information from within and outside myself. A sensitive sole. That’s what they call me.