Nature Futures 2 (37 page)

1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

There were times when I was depressed, thinking it was all a cosmic joke on me, that of course there was no way my future self would be able to tell me anything. But at my core, I held fast to that feeling; it felt so right, it made the Universe make sense. It had to be. My future self would tell me how to do it.

1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

I tried to imagine what would be the best place, the right time for my future self to visit, to share the words or data I needed to know, and then I realized it didn't matter. My future self already knew when and where we would meet. After that meeting, I'd know it, too, and then I could remember it for us.

ONE-NINE-FOUR-BLUE-THREE-SEVEN-TWO-SIX-GAMMA-TETRAHEDRON.

It was my code. I never wrote it down; never told it to anyone; never even told anyone my code existed. It was going to work; it had to work.

1-9-4-blue-3-7-2-6-gamma-tetrahedron.

One day, I was sitting in the park, reading a book, taking a break, when someone sat down on the bench beside me. “One-nine-four-blue-three-seven-two-six-gamma-tetrahedron,” he said.

I dropped my book. “I've been waiting for you,” I said.

“I know,” he said, in a voice I'd only heard on tape. “I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we're not going to be rich anytime soon. I need a sample of your blood, to prove I've been here.”

“And then what? Will we be rich after that?”

“Doubtful,” the future me said. “I'm just a junior member of the team. They only chose me for the trip because I'm expendable, and because I told them I had a foolproof way of finding my earlier self. But the fabric of the Universe won't allow more than three or four trips, so this is a proof-of-concept trip that will probably never be repeated.”

“But what about the stock market, or the lottery, or —”

“I'm not rich in my time, so I can't help you, there. But can I have a sample of your blood?”

I sat there, stunned, while he drew a sample. Then he walked away. I didn't even pay attention.

8-5-omega-0-3-3-orange. 8-5-omega-0-3-3-orange.

There must be an alternate universe, one in which I find my fortune, and can travel between universes to tell myself how to do it …

Ian Randal Strock is the owner/publisher/editor-in-chief of Fantastic Books (
www.FantasticBooks.biz
), and a writer of fiction and non-fiction. His name is unique on the web, so any page talking about Ian Strock or Ian Randal Strock is a reference to him.

Extremes

Rachel Swirsky

So there I was, as near to the lava vents as I could get in a Bubble, with the robots droning on about extremophile lifeforms and whatever. Blank metal looks. Blank metal voices. “… Organisms that thrive in physically or geochemically extreme…” All the passengers and me, we're ignoring them, just staring down at the red and the burble, and I start to wonder, what if I took off my suit?

Fire hot, death bad, etc. etc.. Except that's all brain stem. Very twentieth.

We've all done that thing where we stick our hand on the stove and keep it there just for the XP, you know, to see how it feels. And it's riot, blistering agony, but then you've got through it, you've proved you're a real man or a real woman or a real tweener and they make you a new hand and that's that.

So wouldn't it be kinda sport? Just to dive? Char, burn, bubbling red and black, hot liquid ouch — but then they'd kick you into new skin and there you'd be. Only, like, with new experience cuz you've lived extremophile.

Would that be effer? That would be effer. Would that chat up any Fifi you want? That would chat up all the Fifis in the solar.

So I doff the suit, naked and already rocking from heat through the Bubble, push the emergency, klaxons going off all behind me, robots off to restrain the other passengers, the gasps, the shouting and me going free into the magma flow, me and hot, red rock and the little buggers that live in it.

Like I said — riot, blistering agony.

But I wake up, and I'm in the growing tank, swimming around all fetal, with my brain loaded into a proxy computer while I'm waiting for flesh to pile. And me, I'm sport. Sports rocket. I'd lived the lava vent. Held my hand to the stove, but 20 million times more X.

I'm expecting everyone to be like you are so rocket, so whoa, but no one's zinging, so I tap my direct and

whoa but

everyone's talking about me, but not me-me, because there's like another me, and it's still swimming down there in the lava, and how is that possible? It's taken less than a day for every trace of me-me — the one that's not lava-me — to disappear from the top link lists. I'm subterranean. I'm invisible. I'm replaced by lava-swimming me, and this weird link-up he's broadcasting that no one understands. Boom. It's everywhere.

I try to find out what's going on, but no one will zing, they're all directing this other me instead, so I have to go infoblip and it turns out no one's yessir, but …

They think it's got something to do with the plastic mods from when our greats took the sleep to this planet, when they were stitching into our gene code, in case we needed to have five legs or huge eyes or whatever, to cope with the new planet. And they tried to neg it all when we got here, but they left in strings for the medlinks and once you're that small on the micro, no one's 100 sure what everything does, like you ping one bit on and two off, and then you get sunburn-proof skin and everyone knows that, but later, it turns out that it makes everyone really like neon orange, too.

So somehow, the fluid, the plastic, the string, all pulled and twisted, and there's me, in the lava,
adapting
and sending back this sphincter-screech footage no one can decode, and no one will zing me cuz they're all zinging him.

And that's who I've been since. Me that's not the real me. No one even recognizes me, because me and him, first, we don't look at all the same, and also second, they don't expect to see him not being in lava.

Technically he's the A1 and I'm the clone, so my friends and family mostly are on him. He's famous, and I'm just A2. The robots made me because my rec said to do that if I was ever as good as dead, and they figured I was. They didn't know I'd still be all A1 in the lava, and even though I am, it's not like he thinks much like I do, much like any human does. It's not like he knows how to zing, or how to do anything but send footage nothing can translate.

I tried to make an infoblip on what it's like to melt in lava, but everyone's more interested in what it's like to
live
in lava, which I guess I twig, and besides, I get spam-waved a lot because he and I've got the same ID, and it looks like I'm forging.

So there's me. The most boring me out of 2. I'm thinking of going into deep ice, or out into vacuum, see if there's something special about my code, see if I can switch-change again. Might do it one, two, three times, if it works. Extreme-o-mes. Me-o-philes. But when I'm done, chill, I'm all bout nulling that good-as-dead rec. Gonna wink out, normal-me. No more A2. Just A1s on the edges, all alien and unknown.

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa and graduated from Clarion West in 2005. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including
Tor.com
,
Subterranean Magazine
and
Clarkesworld Magazine
. She has also been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award, among others, and twice received the Nebula Award. She would not dive into lava, but being married to a geologist, she probably knows someone who would.

White Lies

Grace Tang

“Anthony, is it normal at our age not to remember parts of our lives? Parts people would consider important?”

I froze for the smallest split second, but years of acting had trained me well. In fact, there were days when I forgot that my colleague was not what he appeared to be. I willed my fork to resume its passage from my mouth back to my plate, slowly and calmly.

“Why do you ask, Darren?”

“I was talking to a student of mine who's graduating soon. He's very excited, naturally.”

I nodded as we both gave up pretending to care about lunch.

“Problem was, when I tried to recall my own graduation, I drew a blank.”

My heart was racing. Lisa would not be happy to hear this. While he spoke, I typed furiously but stealthily on my phone under the table.
Subject Three is catching on
.

“It gets worse. After more thought, I realized I could recall only the barest details about my time in college.”

I maintained my perfect poker face, “Hmm. I guess I don't remember much from college either.” Fond memories of college flooded my brain.

My phone buzzed, balanced on my knee. I glanced down.
Come now
.

“Gotta go?” Darren had caught me looking at my phone.

“Uh, yeah, Lisa wants to see me.”

He'd noticed my nervousness. “The problem with collaborating with your wife, huh? Never know whether you're in trouble because of work, or because you forgot your anniversary.”

Lisa looked much older than her 40 years as I entered her office, out of breath. “What happened?” she asked.

“It was his missing memories of graduation that triggered it.”

“Damn, those were always the hardest,” she rubbed her fingers on her temples. “It's almost impossible to fake memories of a major life event.”

We had been in graduate school together when she'd started work on implanting information directly into the brains of rhesus macaques. Almost like magic, her monkeys knew where food was hidden in rooms they had never been in, and recognized other monkeys they'd never met.

When she managed to impart basic mathematics to her charges with no effort on their part, her work was broadcast on every major news network in the world. Lisa should have been the happiest person in the scientific community. Instead, one evening, I found her sitting on the floor in the corner of the lab, face in her hands.

“Lisa, what's wrong?”

She looked up and wiped the smudged mascara from her cheeks.

“The Dean of Research visited me today. He said the world hadn't seen anything this exciting since Dolly the sheep.”

“And that's bad because…?”

“Like cloning, it's never going to move past animal work. They won't let me use human subjects.”

But I knew it would take more than rules to stop Lisa. When her research assistant, a mediocre student at best, started acing every exam a few months later, I knew exactly what was going on. I still remember the night we were the last two people in lab, and I seized my chance.

“How are you doing it?”

Lisa struggled to contain her smile, as if glad that someone had finally figured it out. She checked to see no one else was around. “It wasn't stable at first … as soon as she realized there was no way she could know all the stuff she did without having ever gone to a single class, the knowledge vanished.”

“Looks like it's working now.”

“It was an easy fix — I figured out that unlike the macaques, humans couldn't handle the sudden unexplained appearance of vast amounts of factual knowledge. So when I put facts and skills in her brain, I also threw in memories of having gone to lectures, studying, all that stuff.”

It was then I realized why the project had been stopped.

“Granted, autobiographical memories are much harder to implant than semantic facts. It's very similar to hypnosis — you suggest something to them, and their brains fill in the rest.”

“So in other words, you're telling people very convincing lies?”

“Just white lies, Anthony…”

When I still looked unsure, she led me to her equipment room — she rarely let anyone back there. I was honoured.

“How'd you like to work on the next one with me?”

I slept on it. Half of me wanted to report this to the authorities, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up. And by then, I realized I liked Lisa for more than her intellect …

The first time Lisa brought Darren to the lab, I smelt him before I saw him. Plucked from the streets, he hadn't had a shower in days. And yet five years later, Darren was a fellow assistant professor, about to deliver a lecture on molecular neuro-science down the hall.

Lisa paced in front of me. “I was stupid. I was depending too much on the human mind's ability to fool itself. Just suggest to someone they were abused by their father as a child, and they'll tell you under oath how it happened. Here I am, hard-wiring memories into his head, and he doesn't buy it. What more can I do?”

I couldn't keep it in any longer.

“Lisa, do you ever feel this is wrong?”

“Not this again…” she sighed. “We took a homeless, illiterate man off the streets and made him a genius. How is this wrong?”

Defeated, I left for my office. Work was taking its toll on our relationship. Deep in thought, I fiddled with my wedding ring.

The blood drained from my face. Try as I might, I could not recall a single detail of my wedding day.

Grace Tang has lived in Singapore, Wisconsin and California. She hopes to one day develop the attention span to finish a novel, but for now she's sticking to flash fiction.

Expatriate

Julian Tang

Roy Gredenski grinned as his rookies roared with laughter at his latest tale. He was celebrating his thirtieth year in the Customs and Immigration Department.

“Roy, do you have any other stories for the youngsters?” grinned his captain, Joe Werner, from the back of the room, where his other senior colleagues were sitting. They'd heard them all before but the tales only seemed to get better with each retelling.