Nature Futures 2 (20 page)

Me want gun now.

Me wish me never came here to this plane. Me want to leave here. Me miss quiet.

Me bored of LATINACHICKBOYS.

Me have rudimentary arm now. Me can feel me's form and shape. Me does not like what me feels. Too thick. Me want to be slim.

Me hate Me now.

Me hate everything now.

Everything stupid. Everything EPIC FAIL!!!

*   *   *

Dr Finch returned to the lab on the wet Tuesday morning following the long weekend. He dropped his morning coffee as he stared in horror at the primitive, misshapen and strangely humanoid life form that lay dead across his desk. It had one stumpy arm and a large rudimentary eye in the centre of its semi-transparent back. Long, moss-like tendrils had spread from the edges of the creature's mass and inched their way into his computer.

He took a step closer, his mouth hanging open, and nudged the mass of tissue with the point of his umbrella.

It did not move. It had slit its own throat with his letter opener.

Martin Hayes's latest books include the graphic novel
Aleister Crowley: Wandering the Waste
and the short-story collection
Get It Down and Other Weird Stories
. He can be found online at
paroneiria.com

Event Horizon

Jeff Hecht

The sad eyes of the well-dressed, neatly trimmed man looked oddly familiar, but it was his question that gave him away. “Found any little green men lately?”

Alexa couldn't believe it until she glanced at his convention badge. “Karl! It's been ages!” He had been scrawny and scruffy when they did astrobiology postdocs together a quarter-century ago. “What are you doing now?” She had lost track of him after she landed a tenure-track job.

“I gave up searching,” he said, the sadness in his voice matching that in his eyes.

“What happened to your models of how advanced civilizations would develop?”

“I never published anything,” he said. “After the fellowship fell through, I got a job building computer models of economic trends. It pays the bills. I talked about long-term market models here at the Futures conference.”

“Oh?” Alexa hadn't noticed his name.

“It was in the business sessions. I wouldn't expect you to notice. I saw you were in the far-future session, so I decided to come. I owe you something.”

Alexa looked at him blankly.

“I didn't think you would remember. We bet a meal on who would get a job first. When you did, I was too broke to take you to McDonald's. I can afford a nice dinner now, and I want to hear what you're doing.”

“That would be great,” Alexa said. With no travel budget and another big jump in her medical insurance, she had been about to skip dinner.

*   *   *

“What's surprising is that so many factors in the Drake equation are so favourable for extraterrestrial intelligence,” Alexa said, enjoying the restaurant's ambience. “Remember how the first hot Jupiters were so exciting when we were postdocs? Now we've got tens of thousands of terrestrial planets in habitable zones. There has to be life out there.” She paused to sip the wine, a vintage that she never could have afforded.

“But where are the little green men?” Karl asked.

“They're out there, but we haven't found them yet. No signals at radio or optical frequencies. Maybe they're sending something we can't detect, neutrinos or particles we'll never know about until they turn the colliders back on.”

“What are the odds on intelligence?”

“Once you get multicellular animals, models show intelligence is likely in a few hundred million years. Technology just needs hands. Dolphins and elephants are out of luck, but bears could do it. Maybe squirrels would have a chance.”

“But how long can technological civilizations last? We haven't blown ourselves up yet, but our resources are going up in smoke, and we have fouled the nest badly. How much of your annual carbon allowance did you burn getting here?”

“We don't need to visit other worlds. Sending laser or radio-frequency signals uses hardly any energy compared with interstellar travel. Anybody within 90 light years can listen to old broadcasts of
The Lone Ranger
.”

“But that isn't free. Who'll pay the bills when the foundations go broke?” Karl set down his wine glass. “My models tell me where the money is going. Do you know what's the fastest-growing part of the economy?”

“Climate controls and energy?” Alexa guessed.

Karl shook his head. “Health care. It hit 32% of the US gross domestic product last year. It was only 5% in 1960. That's a sixfold increase in fraction of the GDP in 70 years, and the economy has expanded a factor of 100 over that time, so dollar spending is up a factor of 600.”

Alexa thought of her insurance bill. “But medicine has improved tremendously. We conquered polio and measles, and we can manage diabetes. Life expectancy is longer than ever.”

“Barely,” Karl muttered. “The marginal return on investment has been declining for decades.” He slipped a mobile from his pocket and flashed a chart on the tablecloth with its nanoprojector. A line labelled ‘life expectancy' levelled off, but one marked ‘medical spending' rose exponentially.

“What does that mean?”

“The economy is approaching a medical event horizon. Better technology makes other products cheaper with time, but medicine has hit fundamental limits. Instead of buying more and more, each health-care dollar buys less and less. Companies advertise instant muscle tone-ups while you watch 3D, and people buy them although they aren't nearly as good as exercise. Our economy is spiralling into a black hole; all new resources go into health care. NASA can't get a penny for the 15-metre space telescope.”

“But that's just a temporary delay until we can work out the budget deficit.”

“You can dream,” Karl said. “But that's how any advanced civilization will behave. It's entirely rational for intelligent beings to try to maintain their own health and extend their own lifetimes. China slashed human space exploration to fund better health care. Little green men will do the same, so they will never land on the White House lawn.”

“But we can still listen for them,” Alexa protested.

“You can try,” Karl sighed. “Maybe one of our neighbours in the Galaxy will broadcast their version of
The Lone Ranger
long enough for us to hear it.”

Jeff Hecht is Boston correspondent for
New Scientist
and a contributing editor to
Laser Focus World
.

The Perfect Egg

Tania Hershman

He looks up and catches its eye. Eye? Silly! Visual circuitry. Optical sensors. But he's sure, he's sure it looked right at him. He eats his perfectly boiled egg. Can't stop himself from saying: “Thank you, this is just right,” and swears he sees pleasure, just a hint, on its flawless face. Then it turns and begins to load the dishwasher. He dunks his toast into the runny yolk and tries not to dwell on it.

When he finishes, he gets up and puts his plate, knife and spoon into the sink. It is standing there, waiting.

“Please clean out the fridge, including the ice trays,” he says. “They need defrosting.” It nods. Is there a smile? I'm going mad, he thinks. He puts on his coat and leaves.

*   *   *

In the park he watches more of them sitting on benches, watching their charges in the playground. He's struck by what they
don't
. Don't fidget, scratch or mess with their hair. Don't turn their heads, chat with one another, read magazines or talk on mobile phones. They are absolutely still, completely focused. Just
there
.

He is tempted to run up and grab a child off the swings, just reach around its waist and pull the small body out, shrieking.

Just to see.

Just to know.

*   *   *

That night, he watches television while it irons in a corner of the living room. He is distracted from the sitcom that he won't admit he waits for each week by the smell of steaming fabric, the handkerchiefs he's had for 40 years or more, always neatly pressed. Worn a little, torn, but clean and wrinkle-free.

He stands up and, over by the ironing board, makes a big show of unzipping his fly.

No stirring. Not a flicker. It stops ironing and waits for further instructions.

He takes the trousers off, one leg and then the other, wobbling slightly as he tries to keep his dignity. He hands them over.

“Please do these too,” he says, and sits back on the sofa in his underwear. He starts to laugh as, on the screen, the wife comes home and shouts at the useless husband.

Next morning, after another perfect egg with toast, he says: “Come with me.” It walks behind him to the hall.

He opens the door to the cupboard underneath the stairs.

“Please go inside,” he says, and it obeys. He shuts the door and goes upstairs to his study where for several hours in his head are words like
blackness
,
suffocation
,
boredom
.

He switches on the computer and writes a long e-mail to the woman who used to be his wife, rambling and without punctuation. He says things he wishes he'd said in life, or in that life, at least. At first he calls it poetry and then he sees it's not. He deletes it and goes back down.

He walks about in the kitchen and from kitchen to living room, living room to downstairs bathroom. Then he stands in the hall, listening. He opens the cupboard door. Dark, no movement at all. It has no lights on. Oh my god, he thinks.

“Are you…?” he says.

It whirs quickly out of Sleep mode.

“Please, come out,” he says. It glides past him, nothing in its eyes or on its face. He has a sensation in his sinuses, unpleasant, unwelcome. He boils the kettle, leaves the full mug of tea on the counter, gets his coat and leaves.

*   *   *

In the park, he watches them again. Are they watching him watching them watching? He ambles over to the swings and puts a hand out, leaning on the rail as small girls giggle and try to touch the sky. No one moves or does anything. No one even looks in his direction.

How fast could they run if…?

Would it be just the one who'd tackle him to the playground floor? Or all of them, some sort of instantaneous communication rousing them to action?

After a few minutes, the screams and creaking of the swings gives him shooting pains through his skull. He heads for home.

*   *   *

He eats dinner, listening to the radio, the evening news. He finishes, puts the plate in the sink, then he says: “Please come with me.” And leads it upstairs. In the bedroom he instructs it to sit in the armchair in the corner. He puts on his pyjamas with some coyness, a wardrobe door shielding him. Then he gets into bed and pulls the covers tight around himself.

“Please watch,” he tells it. “Just keep an eye. Make sure that nothing … I mean, no sleeping.”

He switches off his bedside light and can see a faint green glow coming from the armchair. He lies with his eyes open for a few moments and then he falls asleep.

*   *   *

In the morning, refreshed, he eats his perfect egg.

“Thank you,” he says, and puts his plate, knife and fork into the sink. “Please do the carpets today,” he tells it, and heads towards the stairs.

Tania Hershman is the author of two story collections:
My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions
(Tangent Books, 2012) and
The White Road and Other Stories
(Salt, 2008; commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers). Tania's award-winning short stories and poetry have been widely published in print and online, and broadcast on BBC Radio. Tania is founder and curator of ShortStops (
www.shortstops.info
), a Royal Literary Fund fellow in the science faculty at Bristol University, and is studying for a PhD in creative writing at Bath Spa University exploring the intersection of fiction and particle physics. She is co-writer of
Writing Short Stories: A Writers' & Artists' Companion
(Bloomsbury, Dec 2014).
www.taniahershman.com

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.