Nature Futures 2 (38 page)

Roy paused, looking around at the young, eager faces surrounding him.

“Well, there is one story,” he said quietly and paused.

He looked down at the floor, as if trying to decide how — or whether — to tell it. The room went quiet, his audience waiting, respectfully. Then, amazingly, Roy seemed to be on the verge of weeping.

“What is it Roy?” asked Joe, coming forward with some surprise and concern. There were soft sounds of sobbing coming from Roy by now.

“God, I didn't know,” he gasped. “How would anyone have known?” he whispered.

Joe quickly ushered all the cadets out of the room. His remaining senior colleagues brought their chairs closer to Roy then sat and waited. After a few minutes, Roy raised his eyes and looked around at them, gratefully.

“My dear friends,” he said softly. “After I tell you this, you won't want to know me.”

“Go on, Roy,” said Joe, who was sitting beside him, patting him gently on the back. “What is it?”

“Joe, you remember the first Moon Base Spaceport?”

Joe nodded.

“Well, you and I were both rookies the year it opened? Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. What chaos!” he laughed. “Will, you were also there with us, weren't you?”

Will Devine, the second-in-command, nodded. “Yeah, that was some opening. We had lines that seemed to stretch all the way back to Earth, waiting to clear immigration. There were all sorts — businessmen, scientists, tourists, school kids — all wanting a peek at the Moon. We should have sold tickets!”

“Yeah, well, for the rest of you who weren't there, Joe and Will were out front with the travellers. I was in the back, in the hot-room — where we dealt with, you know, any suspicious characters.”

Roy flashed them all a knowing wink that produced a few grins. He seemed to have recovered some of his old self.

“Do either of you remember that guy you brought in to me that day? You know, that tall, skinny guy with a funny face? You were both annoyed that he didn't have any papers.”

“Yeah, that was the damndest thing. Not only did he not have any travel documents, he looked like something that had just stepped out of one of those old Frankenstein movies — like plastic surgery gone wrong,” said Joe with feeling.

Will nodded vigorously in agreement. “Actually, we were really just mad because he just wasn't aware of the trouble he was causing for us. He seemed to have no idea that he needed some sort of travel document to get into the base. He was just like a kid — but didn't look like one,” he finished with a shudder.

Roy sighed. “Well, whatever the reason, you guys brought him to me. That's where it started.”

He paused a little before going on.

“You guys were right. He looked like someone had put him together wrong. In fact he was so weird I did a strip search on him — not because I thought he was really carrying any drugs, but because I just wanted to see the rest of him.”

“And?” prompted Joe, curious.

“God, he really was a Frankenstein's monster! His ears and eyes weren't even at the same level. He actually had two left feet — and two right hands. And, man, he had no anus! There was just a dimple where it was supposed to be! I felt so sick I wanted to vomit.”

He paused again.

“What happened next Roy?” asked Will.

“Well, I'm sure any of you would have reacted the same way,” said Roy defensively, glancing around quickly as if for confirmation. “That thing
touched
me!” He gasped suddenly, as if suddenly short of breath.

“Roy, what did you do?” Joe asked, with sudden dread.

“I lost it, guys. His touch was so cold and … well, before I knew it I had hit him with my riot stick. It was just a reflex reaction.”

There was a collective intake of breath.

“Roy, you told us that you sent him through after some further questioning — you said you were satisfied with his answers,” Joe said in disbelief.

Roy seemed not to have heard him.

“He didn't bleed — well not blood anyway. His body just seemed to burst with that first strike, like a waterbed. This grey liquid seemed to come out of his eyes and nose — like he was leaking. After that, I did vomit. By the time I had got back to clean up the mess, his body seemed to have dissolved in my vomit.”

There was another short silence then Roy looked around at them.

“When I searched his bag, you know what I found? You'll never believe this, so I'll show you.”

He went over to his locker, unlocked it and took out an old envelope. He slid out what was inside and held it up for the group to see.

There was another collective gasp from the group.

“Isn't that…? Yeah, it is! I remember seeing it in books when I was at school. It's the welcome disc from that Voyager spaceship that was sent out hundreds of years ago!” said Joe, in awe.

“Yeah, it is,” said Roy, starting to weep again.

This time, no one tried to comfort him.

Julian Tang is a clinical/academic virologist. He would like to dedicate this story to his wife, Florence, who keeps him calm and sane, while navigating the delays and frustrations of modern international travel.

21st-Century Girl

Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Do you dream of mammoths?” a talk-show host once asked me. I knew not to give him my first choice of answer; that would have enlightened his audience over the course of three and a half hours — so long as they had the basic grounding in biosciences required to understand it. I also knew enough to avoid my second answer, which was that his question was unintelligent, and that the entire interview had taken time I could have spent better in the laboratory.

What I actually said was: “No more than you do,” and the sound that the audience made told me that they liked that. I had gained their sympathy somehow. I couldn't see precisely the mechanism by which this had happened, but I filed the memory away with all the others, my empirical evidence of the human condition by which I attempt to govern my social interaction with my fellow hominids.

Another one I get is: “You must have had a difficult childhood.” That throws me because it isn't a question, and so you can't really answer it. It's a statement, to which the only response, if response is even required, is: “Yes.” Of course I must. Why say the obvious, except that interviews are all about them saying the obvious, and me replying with lies and simplifications because that is, I have learned, what they want to hear.

When I was 15, my foster-parents took me aside for The Talk. The bulk of my difficult childhood was behind me, although I had yet to learn most of the coping strategies I now rely on. I was essentially friendless, more comfortable interacting online than off, an academic overachiever and unable to understand why that didn't come with the positive social pay-off that I had been led to expect. I didn't like crowds or strangers much. My world was comfortable with only a few other people in it.

No different, really, from hundreds of other children across the world.

I had thought that I knew what The Talk was going to be. They had never said, but I knew I wasn't their natural offspring, by deduction from first principles. I didn't look like them. I was built differently, and I'd spent ages looking at my face in the mirror, tracing the contours of nose and chin and forehead. I was a striking girl. People who know about me now say I'm ugly, but that's a judgement influenced by their foreknowledge — they think I
should
be ugly, and so they recast my features in that unflattering light. Striking, is the word I prefer. Not even unique, if you take each feature on its own. Not resembling my foster-parents, though.

I know
, I told them.
I'm adopted
. They were unsure how to proceed. I could see that this was not, in fact, what The Talk was to be about. Perhaps I shouldn't have said anything, but that is something I still have difficulties with: knowing when to withhold knowledge. It seems so counter-intuitive to do so.

We had The Talk, at last. I wonder how many other disaffected, unsociable children wait for just that revelation:
you are something special; there is a reason why you are not like them
. The Talk was about adoption, in a way, about telling me who my parents were. My mother was stem-cell research and my father was gene sequencing.

When I was 20, and had been accepted for my doctorate, I made the decision to go public. You will recall the media storm. Nobody knew quite what to do with me. The geneticists behind my genesis had done something unethical, and yet at the same time their detractors wanted to study me. There were legal battles, in which I was a determined participant. If I was to be a test subject, stripped of human rights, then at the same time my reviled creators were guilty of nothing more than making a
thing
. Alternatively, if they had broken the boundaries of professional ethics, then it could only be because I was a human being.

In having me raised among their own kind, in showing that I was intellectually, and at least borderline socially, functional, they sealed their own professional fate and secured mine. They must have known. They have been forgiven, since, because genius is too valuable a quality to waste. As for me …

I did not go into my current discipline purely because of my unique past. I became a geneticist because it is an area in which my cognitive strengths shine. My ability to find patterns in complex data, and to focus without distraction on the small details of my work, is as apposite for the minutiae of modelling gene-sequencing outcomes as it would have been for the painstaking production of exacting stone tools. In fact, the further I progress in my profession, the more I meet people who are just like me, despite our different heritages — and the less our different heritages matter in any meaningful way.

I will have sisters, soon, and brothers, as close to me as blood-kin. That project is proceeding specifically because I have been more than a success: I and my people have valuable intellectual traits that the world can use. I am not working on that team, though. I have other genomes to sequence, other verdicts of history to reverse.

And still people want to know, “What's it like, being you? What is it like to be brought back, to be taken from your proper time?” And I answer that this is my time, that I am a child of the twenty-first century. And if I,
Homo sapiens neoneanderthalensis
, did not evolve to live in cities and use the Internet and make advances in the field of genetics, then neither did
Homo sapiens sapiens
, and we will both have to make do.

And why would I need to dream of mammoths when these days I can step out of my office and just watch them?

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed
Shadows of the Apt
fantasy series, from the first volume,
Empire In Black and Gold
in 2008, to the final book,
Seal of the Worm
, in 2014, with a new series and a standalone science fiction novel scheduled for 2015. He has been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award and a British Fantasy Award and his first full-length science fiction novel,
Portia's Children
comes out in 2015. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist.

A Sentence to Life

Igor Teper

Better to be dead.

Sitting on a park bench, watching the swans scribe their inscrutable trajectories on the lake's surface, streams of joggers, dog walkers, families with strollers flowing around him, but never too close, Julius felt more alone than ever. Better to be dead.

He knew he couldn't blame Tabytha, could only blame himself, but the whole thing was just so outrageous. If she hadn't broken his heart, then stomped on it; hadn't made him feel so betrayed and humiliated, he never would have posted all those detailed descriptions of meals consisting of boiled, broiled, braised, baked, grilled, poached, sautéed and stewed crow on the site where she documented her meals. He never would have posted exhaustive, fawning reviews of every film in the
Passion of the Zombie Vampire
heptalogy on the site where she logged her media consumption. He never would have replaced all her profile photos with selections from the ratemylooks.com all-time bottom-20 and updated her relationship status to ‘putrescing'.

Doing it, he'd been gleeful and self-satisfied, even euphoric — but, afterwards, he'd felt even worse than before, as if anticipating the price he'd pay. Was now paying.

With cybercrime overtaking fleshcrime in annual costs; with cybercriminals capable, through self-replicating agent programs, of being in an unlimited number of places at once; with prisons overflowing, the Cybercrime Act of 2032 had been overdetermined. The digitization of life that had made cyberbanishment meaningful had also made it inevitable.

Cyberbanishment: the deletion of all his cyberaccounts and, far worse, the deactivation of his arfid and his arfreader. Sitting there, in the park, he was surrounded by people, but, to him, they were faceless ciphers, with no names, no interests, no relationships, none of the scores of personal details that their arfids were broadcasting for everyone else's arfreaders to project onto their retinas. And, to them, he was an ersatz person, revealing nothing and thus capable of anything. Even the dogs, with their mandated arfids, were fuller members of society than him.

For several hours, Julius had tried to make eye contact with someone, with anyone, but people's eyes just passed over him, as if he were an inanimate part of the landscape. The most he got, at least from adults, were several double takes as people saw him, then, worried that their arfreader was malfunctioning, looked at someone else, and, reassured, glanced, very quickly, back at him. Dogs and small children with no arfreaders did look at him, but their alarmed guardians quickly steered them away.