Nature Futures 2 (32 page)

And fifteen did. The controversy was dead, to resurface in other chapters on the history of the field, but not useful in day-to-day practice, realm of the “well-established”. Later he would check if Wikipedia and Google Scholar agreed, but the grin was already turning into his first real smile in years. Regardless of all the awards and accolades, the true pinnacle of the academic profession had now been reached. Peers considered his work good enough to be truly immortal.

And here too he was finally invisible.

João Ramalho-Santos has been sighted at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology and the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. And several other places. He likes them all equally, but when he is in one, he often wishes he were in another. Some of his stories have been published on
LabLit.com
.

A Better Mousetrap

Mike Resnick

Men have always talked about building a better mousetrap, just the way they talk about a car that runs on water rather than gasoline, or nuclear fission that doesn't have any harmful by-products. But it wasn't until they reopened the Heisenberg Space Station out between Europa and Callisto that they realized they
really
needed a better mousetrap.

The first team of scientists — four men and two women — docked their ship there on 2 November 3014
AD
, at exactly 7:43 p.m. H.T. (Heisenberg time). They buttressed the hatch up against the entrance to the station, sealed it, then opened both doors and stepped into the station, the first humans to do so in more than 900 years.

Exactly 43 seconds later, one of the women screamed, and the other jumped onto a chair that was bolted into the floor. Three of the men started cursing, and the fourth, a wimpy little fellow, fainted dead away.

It seemed that some of the station's inhabitants were waiting for them. They'd been there nine long centuries, and were glad to have some company. Having just eaten the last of the huge stores of preserved food that prior crews had laid in, they were even happier to have a new source of protein.

“What are they?” asked the wimpy scientist when they woke him up.

“Mice,” said the nuclear physicist. “Or maybe rats.”

“I don't care what they are!” said the roboticist from atop her chair. “Get them away from me!”

“No problem,” said the biochemist. “I'll whip up a fast-acting poison and lay it out for them.”

At which point the wimpy scientist fainted again.

So the biochemist mixed up the poison, and left it out for the mice, and the crew went about setting up their workstations, ate dinner and went to bed, expecting to find a few hundred dead mice in the morning.

What they found were some plump mice, happily licking their chops and looking for more poisoned bait.

“They've evolved,” said the biochemist. “They've obviously developed an immunity to poison. I suppose we'll just have to find some other way to kill them.”

“I know just the thing,” said the nano-technologist. “I'll design a mechanical microbe that will invade their systems and attack them from the inside, and I'll slip it in some cheese.”

The mice came, and they saw, and they ate — and they came back the next morning looking for more.

“I don't understand it,” said the nano-technologist. “Those microbes would kill any one of us. Why didn't they kill the mice?”

No one knew, so they captured one of the mice, drew blood samples, stomach samples, gene samples and still had no answer. The best suggestion came from the biochemist, who theorized that their forced evolution had created an internal environment so hospitable to microbes, even engineered ones, that the microbes ignored their programming and set up shop in the mice's intestines.

The roboticist tried next. She created an army of tiny metal warriors and sent them forth to do battle under chairs and beds, inside bulkheads, wherever the mice were hiding.

That was when they learned that the mice had evolved mentally as well as physically, and that their commanders were far superior at warfare to the roboticist, who had programmed her metal army. The robots were outflanked and outmanoeuvred, and finally surrendered only 17 hours into the battle.

The nuclear physicist didn't do much better with his jerrybuilt disintegrator ray. The mice were impervious to it, and the only harm it did was to two bathrooms and the coffee-maker in the galley.

“Well, I'm all out of ideas,” said the biochemist.

“The dirty little swine have beaten us at every turn,” muttered the nuclear scientist.

“Idiots!” said the wimpy little scientist disgustedly.

“The mice?”

“No,” he said. “I was referring to my colleagues.”

“You should talk!” snapped the roboticist. “All you ever do is faint.”

“I have never denied my limitations,” said the scientist, “though it is thoughtless of you to refer to them. Just for that, I've a good mind not to solve your problem.”

“So you think you're the one who can build a better mousetrap?” she said sardonically.

“Most certainly.”

“Even though they've withstood poison, microbes, military robots and disintegrator rays?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, hot-shot. What will you need?”

“Just a little help from our geneticist.”

“And nothing else?”

“Not at the moment,” said the scientist.

So they left him and the geneticist alone for a month and tried not to notice all the damage the mice were doing. And then one day the scientist announced that the better mousetrap had been created and was ready to perform its function.

The others all snickered at him.

“That's
it
?” asked the nanotechnologist when he displayed it. “That's the better mousetrap that we've been waiting for all month?”

“You don't really think something this primitive is going to work, do you?” demanded the biochemist.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” muttered the wimpy scientist.

They all laughed. (Well, they laughed at Newton and Einstein too.)

Within a week every mouse on the station had been eliminated, including three that had somehow migrated onto the docked ship. It had been swift, efficient and devastating.

“Who'd have believed it?” said the roboticist as they all gathered around the better mousetrap.

“Where did you ever hear about something like this?” asked the nanotechnologist.

“Sometimes you have to read books that aren't exclusive to your field of study,” answered the scientist.

“Meow,” agreed the better mousetrap.

Mike Resnick is the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction, according to
Locus
, the trade journal of the science-fiction field.

The Pair-bond Imperative

Jennifer Rohn

After the third time Eve came home late from work, her mother Mary activated the trace. On the small hand-held, she watched her daughter linger at the door of the domed bee farm, standing too close to a fair-haired young man. There was laughter, there was head-ducking; there was a hand stretched out to touch a forearm: her hand, his forearm. Five minutes of conversation, lips moving in animation. Then, after a display of reluctant body language, they parted like a broken comb of sticky honey.

For the next three days, Mary tuned in for clocking-off time. The man always arrived first and waited until Eve emerged, shy eyes brightening, from her designated station. They had known each other long enough to fall into a pattern, Mary saw. Despite the unexpected loveliness Eve radiated, this girl on the cusp of womanhood, her mother was both embarrassed and alarmed by the rawness of the emotions in evidence. For Mary did not share Eve's delight when she looked at the man. No, all she could see was that his sandy-blond hair was only a shade lighter than her daughter's bronzy head; streaked with red in the sun, yes, but still technically blond. And straight, equally fine and straight. They could have been brother and sister.

The colony had stopped DNA typing and other molecular techniques long ago, when food and energy production had become the main priority and such technology had been deemed an unsustainable luxury. Instead, they relied on the ancient methods practised by early scientists such as Gregor Mendel: phenotypic differences as a measure of genetic distinction.

After the catastrophic epidemic that had taken Eve's grandparents along with nine-tenths of the colony's inhabitants, the gene pool was too small to permit anything other than the most ruthlessly disparate matches; even then it was still unclear whether the group had a long-term future. The need to survive made mating choice another luxury. Women had to have children by as many different, and dissimilar, fathers as possible, for as many years as they were able. To allow pair-bonding was impossible; attachments under such restrictions would be disastrous.

Eve knew the rules like everyone else, but, unlike her mother, when she looked at the man, who was called Paul, she stubbornly saw only differences. His hair was like nothing else on the planetoid: it was the hue of honeycombs held up to the sun, glowing coppery-gold, or perhaps the soft shade of citron fuzz on the insects that created them. His eyes weren't the same blue as hers or anyone else's; they were the blue of the midsummer double-solstice sky when the system's two suns remained half-set all night long, causing a perpetual twilight and a muted glow that blocked out the starlight. When she looked at him, she didn't think about her duty, or the survival of her people. She saw the knowing reciprocal glimmer of his face and felt a deep, implacable tug that had yet to be bred out of their species. She wanted, like a desire for food or water, something that was both part of him and part of her, though she had little conscious understanding of the underlying genetic imperative.

Meanwhile, Mary and her circle of half-sisters consulted with the local procreation officer. Yes, he agreed: although Eve was still a few months shy of her sixteenth birthday, the danger should be eliminated as soon as possible. Rules could be bent. After checking the database and finding the most dissimilar sperm donor possible — a dark-skinned, black-haired man whose psych appraisals suggested he was as docile as Eve was rebellious — the officer authorized the IVF personally.

Eve stood in the queue, close to tears, until the doctor was ready to see her. She was asked about her periods, given a rough uterine scan, and handed a vial of hormone tablets and strict instructions on how to begin taking them. And discharged, then, as perfunctorily as one of the sows whose insemination her half-brother oversaw a few domes down from the bee farm.

Paul had been transferred the day before, and they had not even had the chance to say goodbye. But Eve called in a favour from another half-sister who worked in the labour-allocation unit. Late that night, after flushing the hormone tablets down the toilet, she climbed out of her bedroom window and met him in the cornfields. The air was warm and redolent of newly ploughed earth; the moons had set and pale stars were the only witness. Four weeks later when she arrived at her egg-harvesting appointment with news of a missed period, it was too late. New life was impossibly precious: no pregnancy could be terminated under the rules of the colony, no matter how genetically imprudent.

The baby boy had hair halfway between bronze and copper, like silk on an ear of corn. And he gazed at Eve with eyes somewhere between the blue of midnight and dawn. She was never allowed to see Paul again, but somehow, with the child, this was bearable. And although Eve bore many more children, Mary secretly thought that this particular grandchild was the most beautiful and distinctive of all.

Jennifer Rohn is a cell biologist at University College London and the editor of
LabLit.com
.

Immeasurable

H. E. Roulo

Students streamed out of Yvonne's geology class, rolling up their flexible displays and shoving them into backpacks. Yvonne lingered outside, dreading what came next: she needed to press the button.

The funeral home had just sent her a microfluidic hot key that would take action with one nail press. The new button rose like a blister on the band of the flesh-coloured Metric that clung to her wrist. Her racing heartbeat and clammy skin revealed her anxiety, casting her Meta-score down with each moment she delayed, but her finger refused to tap — even if it meant losing points.

Peggy careered around the corner of the building, blonde hair brushing the wolf on her airbrushed T-shirt. She grinned at Yvonne. “How'd you do today?”

Yvonne glanced at her Metric as if she hadn't been staring at it. “I scored basic learning and self-actualization points. Just another weekday in class.”

Peggy frowned. “No class participation bonus? That's not like you. Hey, let's walk the long way back to the dorms. I'm short on exercise.”

Across campus, a student in a college sweatshirt threw a Frisbee to a girl in a tank top. Other students sat beneath a tree, listening to a guitar. They'd all be filling their socializing bars, and it looked like fun. On another day, in another mood, Yvonne might have joined them.

Peggy's touch startled her. “Hello? You're barely here.”

“Brian —,” Yvonne choked on her brother's name, and watched the Frisbee fly into the bushes. “His ashes are ready to be dispersed.”

The girl in the tank top fished in the undergrowth for the Frisbee and stood up with a glad cry, a wrapper flapping in her hand. Her partner groaned, obviously wishing he'd found it. The girl dropped the litter into a bin, Metric dinging.

Peggy pouted. “Damn, the college announced a green initiative, and bonus goals like
community improvement
. She probably got 500 points. I'm behind for the day. I didn't get up with my alarm and I skipped breakfast. I chose pizza Friday night as my reward — doesn't look like I'm going to get it.”