Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  Father Nolan shrugged. “I just dropped in. I have a key. She's got used to having me around, during this, well, crisis. I don't mind. I share my duties at the parish.” He complacently chewed his toast.

  “When I was a kid, you smug priests used to make me feel like tripping you up.”

  Father Nolan laughed. “You're a good boy. You'd never do that.”

  “‘A good boy.’ Father, I'm fifty years old.”

  “But you're always a little boy to your mother.” He nodded at the fridge, where photographs were stuck to the metal door by magnets. “Your brother and sister. You're the middle one, yes?”

  “Sister older, brother younger.”

  “Mary and Peter. Good Catholic names. But it's unusual to find a Simon and a Peter in the same Catholic family.”

  “I know.” Since Simon had learned about Simon Peter the apostle, he had sometimes wondered if Mother had chosen Peter's name on purpose—as if she was disappointed with the first Simon and hoped for a better version. “They've both got kids. I'm sure she'd rather one of them was here, frankly. Grandkids jumping all over her.”

  “You're the one who's here. That's what's important.”

  Simon studied him. “I don't believe, you know. Not sure if I ever did, once I was able to think for myself. You can be as calm and certain as you like. I think it's all a bluff.”

  Father Nolan laughed. “That's okay. What you choose to believe or not is irrelevant to the destiny of my immortal soul. And indeed yours.”

  It had been a very long time indeed since Simon had even considered the possibility that he might have a soul, some quality that might endure beyond his own death.

  He shivered, and stood up. “I think I need some air. Maybe I'll buy a paper.”

  “We'll be fine here.”

  “Help yourself to tea. It's in the—”

  “Winston Churchill caddy. I know.” Father Nolan smiled, and chewed his toast.

  He walked up the close, towards the park.

  This stub of a road had seemed endless when he was a child. Full of detail, every drain or stopcock cover or broken paving stone a feature in some game or other. Now he felt a stab of pity for a child who perhaps could have done with a bit more stimulation.

  But the close seemed long today, stretching off ahead of him, like the hours governed by Uncle Billy's clock.

  And though the sky was clear blue, the light was odd. Weakening. Once he'd sat through a partial eclipse over London, a darkening that was not the setting of the sun but an eerie dimming. That was what this was like. But there was no eclipse due today; he'd have known.

  It took an effort to reach the top of the close. And more of an effort to wait for a gap in the stream of dark, anonymous cars, and to cross to the footpath by the park wall.

  He walked along the wall, letting his fingers trail along the grubby, wind-eroded sandstone. It had happened so quickly. Would mother really never make this little journey again? Was that awful bagged fish really the last meal the woman who had fed him as a baby would ever make for him? Grief swirled around in him, unfocused. He thought vaguely about the calls he would have to make.

  At the gate, he stopped.

  There was no park. No sooty oak trees, no grass, no dogshit.

  He saw a plain, a marsh. The sunlight gleamed from a sheet of flat, green, sticky-looking water. Pillowlike shapes pushed out of the water, their surfaces slimy crusts, green and purple.

  Nothing moved. There was no sound.

  Of the park, the parade of shops beyond, there was no sign.

  It was like the scene he thought he had glimpsed through his mother's lounge window yesterday. But that had been from the corner of his eye, and had vanished when he looked directly. This was different.

  He turned away. The main road was still there, the cars streaming along.

  Carefully, he walked back down the road, and into the close. Every step he took towards home made him feel more secure, and the daylight grew stronger.

  He didn't dare look back.

  At home, Father Nolan was still sitting with mother. It wasn't yet lunchtime.

  Simon got himself a glass of water and went to the dining room. He booted up his laptop. He dialed into work, to check his e-mails. He was trying not to think about what he'd seen.

  He got error messages. The work site didn't exist.

  He heard Father Nolan climbing the stairs, a splashing sound, the toilet flushing. Emptying a bed pan, maybe.

  He tried Google. That still existed.

  There was a word that had come into his head when he thought about what had become of the park. Stromatolite. He Googled it.

  Communities of algae. A photo showed mounds just like the ones on the park. Heaped-up mats of bacteria, one on top of another, with mud and sand trapped in between. They had their own complexities, of a sort, each mound a tiny biosphere in its own right.

  And they were very ancient, a relic of the days before animals, before insects, before multicelled creatures of any kind.

  He followed links, digging at random, drawn by his own professional interest in genetics. The first stromatolites had actually been the height of complexity compared to what had gone before. Once there had been nothing but communities of crude cells in which even “species” could not be said to exist, and genetic information was massively transferred sideways between lineages, as well as from parent cell to offspring. The world was muddy, a vast cellular orgy. But if you looked closely it had been fast-evolving, inventive, resilient.

  Google failed, the browser returning a site-not-found error message.

  And then the laptop's modem reported it couldn't find a dial tone.

  It seemed to be growing darker. But it wasn't yet noon. He didn't want to look out of the window.

  Father Nolan walked in. “She's asking for you.”

  Simon hesitated. “I'd better call Mary and Peter. They ought to know.”

  The priest just waited.

  At his first try, he got a number-unobtainable tone. Then the dial tone disappeared. He tried his mobile. There was no service.

  It was very dark.

  Father Nolan held out his hand. “Come.”

  In the lounge the curtains were drawn. The excluded daylight was odd, dim, greenish. The only strong light came from mother's fancy new reading stand.

  The telly was like an empty eye socket. Simon wondered what he would find if he turned it on.

  Mother sat in her armchair, swathed in blankets. Of her body only her face showed, and two hands that looked as if all the bones had been drawn out of them. There was a stink of piss and shit, a tang of blood.

  Father Nolan sat beside mother on a footstool, the bedpan at his feet.

  “I probably ought to thank you for doing this,” Simon said.

  “It comes with the job. I gave her the Last Rites, Simon. I should tell you that.”

  Mother, her eyes closed, murmured something. Father Nolan leaned close so he could hear, and smiled. “Let tomorrow worry about itself, Eileen.”

  Simon asked, “What's happening tomorrow?”

  “She asked if there will be a tomorrow.”

  Simon stared at him. “When I was a kid,” he said slowly, “I used to wonder what would happen when I die. It seemed outrageous that the universe should go on, after I, the center of everything, was taken away. Just as my mother said to me yesterday.

  “Then I grew up a bit more. I started to think maybe everybody feels that way. Every finite mortal creature. The two things don't go together, do they, my smallness and the bigness of the sky?”

  Father Nolan just listened.

  Simon stepped towards the window. “What will I see if I pull back the curtain?”

  “Don't,” said Father Nolan.

  “Do you know what's going on?”

  “I'm here for her. Not you.”

  “If I ask you, will you tell me?”

  The priest hesitated. “You're a good boy. I suppose you deserve that.”

&n
bsp; Simon touched Uncle Billy's clock, pressed his palm against the wall behind it. “Is any of this real?”

  “As real as it needs to be.”

  “Is this really the year 2010?”

  “No.”

  “Then when?”

  “The future. Not as far as you might think.”

  “People are different.”

  “There are no people.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “No. But you're capable of understanding,” Father Nolan said. “It's no accident you work in biotechnology, you know. It was set up that way, so if you ever asked these questions, you'd have the background to grasp the answer.”

  “What has my job got to do with it?”

  “Nothing in itself. It's where things are leading. Those Day-Glo fish you sell. How do you do that?”

  Simon shrugged. “I don't know the details. I do software. Gene splicing, basically.”

  “You splice genes from where?”

  “A modified soya, I think. Other sources.”

  “Yes. You swap genes around, horizontally, from microbes to plants to animals, even into people. It's a new kind of gene transfer—or rather a very old one.”

  “Before the stromatolites.”

  “Yes. You're planning to put this gene-transfer technology on the open market, aren't you?”

  It was like the drive to put a PC in every home, a few decades back. The domestication would start with biotech in the mines and factories and stores. Home use would follow. Eventually advanced home biotech kits, capable of dicing and splicing genomes and nurturing the results, would become as pervasive as PCs and mobile phones. Everybody would have one, and would use it to make new varieties of dogs and budgies, exotic orchids and apples. To create a new life-form and release it into the world would be as easy as blogging.

  Simon said, “It's the logical next step, in marketing terms. Like putting massive computing power in the hands of the public. That would have seemed inconceivable, in 1950. And the secondary results will be as unimaginable as the Internet once was. Do you think it's immoral? Unnatural?”

  Father Nolan grinned. “If I were what I look like, perhaps I'd think that.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “I'm the end-product of your company's business plans. Yours and a thousand others.”

  It was a question of accelerating trends. The world's genetic inheritance would become open source. And then, a generation later, the technology would merge with the biology.

  “It was only a few decades after your birthday-card goldfish that things took off,” Father Nolan said. “Remarkable. Only a few decades, to topple a regime of life that lasted two billion years.”

  “And things were different after that.”

  “Oh, yes. Darwinian evolution was slo-ow. For all the fancy critters that were thrown up, there was hardly a change in the basic biochemical machinery across two billion years.

  “Now there are no non-interbreeding species. Indeed, no individuals. The Darwinian interlude is over, and we are back to gene sharing, the way it used to be.

  “And everything has changed. Global climate change became trivial, for instance. With the fetters off, the biosphere adapted to the new conditions, optimizing its metabolic and reproductive efficiency as it went.

  “And then,” he said, “off into space.”

  These words, simply spoken, implied a marvelous future.

  “Who is my mother?”

  “We are in a lacuna,” Father Nolan said.

  “A what?”

  “A gap. A hole. In the totality of a living world. Sorry if that sounds a bit pompous. Your mother is a part of the totality, but cut away, you see. Living out a life as a human once lived it.”

  “Why? Is she being punished?”

  “No.” He laughed. “It's the contrary. She wanted to do this. It's hard to express. We are a multipolar consciousness. She is part of the rest of us—do you see? She was an expression of a global desire.”

  “To do what?”

  “Not to forget.” He stood up. Grave, patient, he had the manner of a priest, despite his hairy nose, his stained shirt. “I think you're ready.” He led Simon to the window, and pulled back the curtain.

  Green stars.

  The garden was gone.

  The rest of the house was gone. The close, the park, Sheffield—Earth was gone, irrelevant. Mother had been right. It had all been placed there as a stage set for her own life. But now her life had dwindled to the four walls of this room, and the rest of it could be discarded, for she would never need it again.

  Just green stars. Simon pressed his ear to the window. He heard a reverberation, like an immense bell.

  “Earth life turning the galaxy green. Our thoughts span light-years. But we don't want to forget how it was to be human.” Father Nolan smiled. “It's a paradox. Without loss, we have in fact lost so much. As you said—the strange tragedy of being mortal in an unending universe. There's no more poetry. No more epitaphs. No more stories. Just a solemn calm.”

  “Mother wanted to experience it. Human life.”

  “On behalf of the rest of us, yes.”

  “And what are you, Father?”

  Father Nolan shrugged. “Everything else.” He let the curtain drop, hiding the green stars.

  The electric light was dimming.

  Father Nolan sat down beside Mother and held her hand. “Only a few more minutes. Then it will be done.”

  Michael sat on the other side of his mother. “What about me?”

  “You're only here for her.”

  “But I'm conscious!”

  “Well, of course you are. She chose you, you know. You always thought she didn't love you, didn't you? But she chose you to be beside her, at the end, when all the others—Peter, Mary, even her own father—have all gone. Isn't that enough?”

  “Do I have a soul, Father?”

  “I'm not qualified to say.”

  Mother turned her head towards him, he thought. But her eyes were closed.

  “Help me,” Simon whispered.

  Father Nolan looked at him. Then he closed his eyes and bowed his head. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  Simon said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  The glow of the single bulb faded slowly, to black.

  A. M. Dellamonica compares being a writer to being Spider-Man. “It may not always be easy—at times, it can be terribly hard. Sometimes you even want to quit. But storytelling is a form of superpower; once it gets hold of someone, it will express itself one way or another.” Someone who understands the web slinger so well can't help but take her responsibilities as a writer seriously. After all, with great storytelling power…

  My offworlder allies don't trust me.

  Squid, we call them, though their home planet is named Kabuva. They're twelve feet in length from top to tip, see, with bullet-shaped caps that pull tight over a spaghetti of tentacles. When they bell out these caps, they look less like calamari and more like giant umbrellas. The Brits used to call them “brollies,” as a matter of fact, back before England was annihilated.

  All the players in this game have nicknames. The other human army wrangling for control of Earth calls itself the Friends of Liberation. Pompous, right? We've shortened it to Fiends.

  As for us, the squid-sponsored Democratic Army, we're the Dems. “It's either Dems or us,” the Fiends say. Bad pun; they end up taking over the world, they'll probably outlaw laughing.

  It's just after dawn on a sunny July morning and I'm humping through East Los Angeles with a squad of ten heavily armed and overtired squid fry. Squid-squad, get it? Hence the song. How many Fiends can a squid-squad squash?

  It doesn't help that squid armor is silly looking—essentially an upside-down mussel shell that hooks to their bullet-shaped caps. When the going gets hot, they yank in their tentacles and seal the carapace tight, firing weapons from inside the all-but-impregnable canister.
Once sealed in, though, they can barely move.

  The newest fry teedle along on the tips of their tentacles, shell all but shut. Vets tend to leave it half open, on the grounds that the carapace sensors don't work for shit.

  We're here today because Intelligence has designated this neighborhood so thoroughly infiltrated by Fiends that there's no way to tell the bad guys from noncombatants. An evac order's gone out, and now we're one of the squads going block to block ensuring each house, shop, and low-rise is empty. Behind us floats a demolition ship, hanging just over the rooftops like a big blimpy starfish. Every time we give the all-clear on a building, the ship glides in and starts dusting the structure to nothingness.

  Once this whole area is flattened, the squid will compile a few dozen skyscrapers for the humans who lived here. These buildings will be wired, so that any Fiendish conversations go straight to Kabuva Intelligence. The general idea is neighborhood Fiends will have to move elsewhere…those that do will be tagged as probable hostiles and rounded up for interrogation.

  Bluto, on point, goes rigid and the squad snaps to alertness. He rips an apartment door off its hinges.

  “Cantil?” The unit commander, Loot, caresses the back of my neck; this is his idea of a nudge.

  “Anyone in there?” I call, first in American and then in Spanish. The amplifier built into my face mask makes my voice come out officious and strident, anything but reassuring. “It's okay. Come out and you won't be harmed.”

  The response is a pepper of bullets from antique machine guns, and the squad barges in happily. I wait in the hall. Loot's a good guy, as squid go; he doesn't expect me to pitch in when they're beating on probable civilians.

  Screams, thumps, punches. The firing stops. I inhale a dense reek of gunpowder. Ah, the good old days.

  Soon enough they're hauling out the troublemakers: a mother and son maybe, both netted like trout. The boy is unconscious; livid sucker marks show he's been throttled. The woman is shrieking.

  Loot asks: “What is she saying?”

  I tilt up my mask, taking the opportunity to poke a stick of gum into my mouth, and kneel beside her. “Ma'am? Nobody's going to hurt you. We need to evacuate—”