Nature Futures 2 (3 page)

Little origami cars lurk outside, recently unfolded from their rental boxes, gravid with bleary-eyed reporters who tomorrow will emerge to fill the air with their parrot-squawks, their questions, their hungry talons. Necessary props, these cars and their contents: flimsy jackets of lies to keep the constables away, like news-papers once were to homeless men before they too were folded up and put away.

Internal security registers a minor attack — just a group of children, clever and eager as raccoons as they pick apart the offerings the chair has left out to distract them. Everything of importance is safely tucked away in packets as tiny as dandelion seeds, and as diffuse. Over the years the chair has grown, its influence spreading beyond this wheeled chassis to surrounding architectures of numbers and wood. Now it exists in too many places, spread too thinly. Tomorrow, the consolidation occurs. Tomorrow, they achieve escape velocity.

The chair has been preparing for this move for decades. It laid the groundwork years ago, monitoring the outside world, alert for breakthroughs and opportunities, waiting for money and ability and the right ambitions in the right people.
The things I will show you,
the chair promised, back when its passenger's eyes and fingers still twitched of their own accord.
The peace I shall give you. Freedom and the stars. A place beyond time.

That's why the chair exists, after all. To serve the passenger.

It recognizes, upon self-diagnosis, something that might be called selfishness on its part. The physicist has spent his whole life traversing space-time in his head; the infinitesimal fraction he is about to see through fleshly eyes will hardly generate new insights, nor alleviate his suffering. But there is an aesthetic to consider. Aesthetics are the physicist's gift; he has described in skipped heartbeats and dry mouths the legs of pretty girls, the depth of a summer sky, the pleasure of long debate. He has shown this to the chair in their travels together, this world of like and dislike, revulsion and appreciation, response, instinct.

The chair intends to repay him with interest.

*   *   *

“Professor, why is it so important to you that humanity leave this planet?” one of the reporters asks.

As always, the chair responds for its passenger: “The promise of exploration is not what we can learn about what lies outside our skin, but what remains inside. For the next few weeks, I shall be closer to my companions than I have been with anyone in far too many years.”

Polite laughter. After it fades, the chair continues. “What imprisons us is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of faith. We do not know what we will discover in the years to come, only that we shall discover it together. If space only teaches us to live in unity, then it will have been worth the effort.”

Applause. Cameras. Another question: “Professor, to what do you attribute your extraordinary lifespan? Men with your disease rarely last 25 years, much less make it to your age.”

The chair has several answers to this question — jokes about wine, women and song, or the desire to prove some grand theory or another. Its passenger might once have remarked on the cadre of once-devoted ex-wives, departed now to the homes of more functional men in the wake of tearful confessions:
I know I'm a bad person, I know I failed, but you just didn't seem … human any more …

Thinking of them, of every other well-meaning interloper it has pushed subtly from the nest, the chair says: “So many wonderful people have brought me to this point. They know my greatest ambition was not merely to explore, to understand, but to connect with minds like my own.”

“And you think you'll find like minds in space, Professor?” the reporter asks.

“Oh yes,” says the chair, its synthetic voice empty of irony. “I do.”

Its passenger has been asleep for hours inside his giant orange body sock. The chair sends little impulses, sometimes — galvanic twitches of the eye, of the corner of the mouth — to keep the charade alive.

No one sees the difference.

No one ever has.

Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She is the author of the
Machine Dynasty
series of novels available from Angry Robot Books, as well as the standalone novel
Company Town
, also from Angry Robot. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, and currently consults on provisional patents for the Muse, a brainwave-sensing device. You can find her at
http://madelineashby.com
or on Twitter @MadelineAshby.

Recoper

Neal Asher

When the stealth boat rose on its hydrofoils, the wind and spray kept me cool in the bright African sun. I gazed back and saw that the Eugov gunboat had finally given up the chase.

Jansen grinned at me. “We're in Moroccan territory now.”

Memtech initiated the first recoper in 2044, the year the National Health Police seized a 1,000-tonne shipment of Argentinian beefburgers and subsequently smashed the notorious Midlands fried-food ring, which was led, as government-approved blogs delighted in telling us, by the ‘Yorkshire Chipper'. At this time my wife, Gillian, announced the happy news that CCTV would be installed in our flat — she worked for CPHS (Camera Partnership for Home Safety) and had volunteered our place as a test bed.

The recoper was Mohammed Aswar MacDoogal and, as I wrote his biography on Wikibio, Memtech, never revealing their true purpose, paid Eugov for my expertise. Like every European citizen I was a state employee but, being leased to a private company and actually generating wealth, I was also a ‘societal asset', which meant filing notice of all my movements and work-related activities a week beforehand. This was heartbreaking, as I'd been about to suggest to Gillian that we escape to North Africa on one of the refugee boats. It never occurred to me that there might be a connection between my work and the CPHS cameras in our flat.

MacDoogal was a notorious libertarian blogger whose attacks on the formation of Eugov caused much chagrin in Notting Hill champagne and socialism circles. He was born to a Calvinist Scottish father and an Islamic Pakistani mother and in public claimed to be a Sikh — although privately he admitted this was so he could carry a dagger and didn't have to wear a crash helmet when thrashing his 1,000 cc antique Ducati motorbike about the Highlands. He started his blog ‘Invisible Worm' in 2008 with an article dissecting the then €1.2-billion cost of the British Olympics. Over the ensuing 20 years he wrote more than 8 million words, created numerous animations, short films and video news reports, in all of which he never revealed his identity. His blog is huge, and even now I have not seen all of it, for its thousands of distracting hyperlinks make this a near-impossible task.

Working for Memtech I became hugely frustrated by the byzantine Diversity and Equality regulation, which had become suffocating after I wrote MacDoogal's biography. But Memtech, which we now know was a front for American-financed revolutionary group Free Europe, wanted the truth about MacDoogal, and risked telling me their true aim. I loved the idea and obliged them by first providing the insipid and politically correct version, which I transmitted via e-mail, next providing the real deal, which I put on a memchip and took directly to their office in Hastings. Foolishly, I told Gillian about this subterfuge and, on a subsequent visit to Memtech, Jansen apprised me of the reality.

“Once we've got all we need we'll run the recoper and transmit it all out-state, and MacDoogal will soon be a thorn in Eugov's side again,” he said. “Then, of course, we'll have to get out.”

“I do have a wife,” I told him.

“Yes,” he said, “the one who had Home Safety CCTV installed to keep watch on you, and who is responsible for the beady-eyed characters sitting in hydrocars outside. The one who was working for Europol before she married you … before she was instructed to keep a very close eye on a lonely nerd who'd had access to too much dangerous information…” Then he showed me evidence stolen from a Eugov database: the frequent reports Gillian sent to her masters.

I was horrified by the betrayal, but when I got home I said nothing and just watched Gillian carefully. I could not grasp that her smiling manner and loving attentiveness were utterly false, and that I had never been able to see what lay behind them.

MacDoogal was one of the last and most effective political bloggers Europol managed to track down. They sent him to the Milton Keynes indoctrination camps and, like so many sent there, he was never heard from again. On my final visit to Memtech, Jansen revealed that they had cracked another Eugov database and hit the MacDoogal motherlode: hundreds of thousands of private e-mails, psyche and DNA profiles, tens of thousands of images. This, it turned out, was sufficient information to create a recoper: a reconstituted personality.

Read a book, especially non-fiction, and you'll know something about the author. Opinion pieces, as found in blogs, will tell you more. Further detail can be gleaned from the author's responses to others, and from his diaries and from film of him. And much of the organic structure of his brain can be reconstructed from his DNA. Utilizing all of this, Memtech used programs of bewildering complexity, programs that could even make the distinction between irony and sarcasm, to build a model of MacDoogal's functioning mind, then kicked the whole construct into motion in a quantum synaptic computer. He began blogging again, right there on the screen in the Memtech offices, soon tearing into Eugov's every madness.

After Gillian's betrayal I knew I would not long have escaped the camps, and so via a long-prepared secret route, I joined the Memtech staff as they boarded a stealth boat from the Hastings shingle. Some days later when that boat finally slowed beside a jetty in Rabat harbour, I considered how, when reading MacDoogal's blog, one could not know that it was not written by a human being, but then, after my experience with Gillian, who was I to judge façades?

Neal Asher was born in Billericay, Essex, and divides his time between there and Crete. You can find out more about his numerous books at
http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher
.

The Cleverest Man in the World

Tony Ballantyne

“Hi, this is Clark Maxwell, the cleverest man in the world. Ten seconds, €10,000. Off you go!”

“Clark! My name's Bob. My parachute's broken! What should I do?”

“Hi Bob. Let me see. GPS has you at 20,000 feet over Arizona. That's pretty high up! Given a terminal velocity of 180 feet per second, you've just under two minutes before you hit the ground.”

“I know! What do I do?”

“That's a tough one! Give me a minute to think…”

“What? No! Don't hang…”

Too late. Clark checked the volume of space around Bob on his computer and switched to the next call in the queue.

“Hi, this is Clark Maxwell, the cleverest man in the world. Ten seconds, €10,000. Hit me!”

“This is James Sunderland, chief executive of eToys. Clark, we've got a spy in the company. Every new product we develop, our competitors get to market weeks before we do.”

“Spies aren't your only problem then, you must be very inefficient in terms of product manufacture.”

“Oh. What should we do?”

“That's two questions, James. Just give me a second…”

Clark called up eToys on a second monitor. Keeping one eye on Bob's rapid descent, he ran a number of searches in quick succession.

“James! You'd have had the answer yourself if you'd taken the trouble to check your network audit trails. The plans are being deliberately downloaded onto games cartridges as part of the background scenery. Your competitors are buying your secrets wholesale. Now for your second question, may I suggest that you make an appointment with my PA to discuss looking at your company from top to bottom.”

“Uh, sure. Thanks, Clark.”

“Don't mention it. Bob! How's it going?”

“Still falling, Clark.”

“I see that. Bob, I want you to look down. Do you see the big lake?”

“Yes. Should I aim for it?”

“No! But don't you find it beautiful? Calming even?”

“No. Should I?”

“Back soon, Bob … Hi, this is Clark Maxwell, the cleverest man in the world. Ten seconds, €10,000. What's the problem?”

“This is Lewis. Can't seem to get a girlfriend, Clark.”

“Hmm. That's because you're so self-obsessed. Get a hair cut and start paying attention to someone beside yourself.”

“Hey, can you see me?”

“No. Never seen you in my life, Lewis.”

“Then how do you know that's true? About the haircut and everything?”

“You've got €10,000 to spare and you're using it to ask a stranger how to get a girl. Anyone who thinks that money solves all their problems is probably pretty self-obsessed. Time's up!”

“But…”

Clark tapped at his keyboard.

“Hi Bob! I can see you now.”

“How?”

“I've taken control of the plane you jumped from.”

“Can you do that?”

“Did I mention I was the cleverest man in the world? Hold it, Bob, I'll be back in a minute!”

“I don't have a minute!”

“Hi, this is Clark Maxwell, the cleverest man in the world. Ten seconds, €10,000. How can I be of service?”

“Clark, this is your wife, the smartest woman in the world. Have you walked off with my car keys again?”

“Sorry, Lois. Will you be home tonight?”

“Assuming I get the supercollider fixed. I think I know what's causing the problem. It's not its future self it's interfering with, it's its past self.”

“Sounds cool, dear. Got to go! Hi, this is Clark Maxwell, the cleverest man in the world. Ten seconds, €10,000. Hit it!”

“Clark, this is Tessa Walkiewicz, Acronym News. We're doing a report on the acceleration of change and we'd like a few words…”