21st Century Science Fiction (37 page)

M
ARISSA
L
INGEN
Born in Libertyville, Illinois, Marissa Lingen has lived in several areas of the United States. She trained in physics and mathematics, and worked for a time at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1999 she won the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Story Writing (now called the Dell Magazines Award) and has been writing short stories ever since. She has been publishing stories in the genre since 2002. Today she writes full-time, and lives in a small town south of Minneapolis.

“The Calculus Plague” literalizes the metaphoric concept of knowledge transmitted “virally,” and deftly asks the next question.

T
he Calculus Plague came first. Almost no one took offense at it. In fact, it took a while for anyone to find out about it at all. No one had any reason to talk about a dim memory of their high school math teacher, whose face didn’t seem familiar somehow, and what was her name again? His name? Well, what did it matter?

It wasn’t until Dr. Leslie Baxter, an economics professor at the U, heard her four-year-old son ask, “What’s Newton’s Method, Mommy?” that anyone began to notice anything wrong. At first Leslie assumed that Nicholas’s most recent babysitter had been talking about his calculus assignment over the phone when sitting for Nicholas, but when she confronted the young man, he admitted that he had taken part in a viral memory experiment that was aimed at teaching calculus through transmission of memories.

Young Nicholas Baxter was living proof that it did no good to remember something if you couldn’t understand it to begin with. Leslie assured Nicholas that she would explain the math when he was older. Then she went to the faculty judicial board to discuss forming a committee to establish ethical guidelines for faculty participation in viral memory transfer research.

They were still deciding who would be on the committee—from which departments, in which proportions, and was Dr. So-and-so too junior for the responsibility? Was Prof. Such-and-such too senior to agree to take it on?—when the second wave hit.

“I know I have never taken George’s seminar on Faulkner,” said Leslie furiously. “Never! I hate Faulkner, and George wasn’t on faculty anywhere I’ve studied.”

“But what does it hurt to remember some kids sitting around talking about
The Sound and the Fury
, Les?” asked her friend and colleague Amy Pradhan.

“Easy for
you
to say. You didn’t catch it.”

Amy shrugged. “I don’t think I’d be making a fuss if I had.”

Leslie shook her head. “Don’t take this wrong, but you don’t even like it when people drop by your house without calling first. But somehow it’d be better if it was your head?”

“It’s not like they can read your thoughts, Les.”

“No, they can make my thoughts. And that’s worse.”

“They’re not making you like Faulkner,” said Amy. “I know someone else who caught it and loved Faulkner, and she doesn’t hate it now. You can still respond as yourself.”

“Mighty big of them, to let me respond as myself.”

Amy grimaced. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

“Okay, okay. How’s Molly? Are you still seeing her?”

Amy blushed, and the conversation moved on to friends and family, books and movies, campus gossip, and other things that had nothing to do with Leslie coming down with a stuffy nose and Faulkner memories.

The usual people wrote their editorials and letters to the editor, but most people could not bother themselves to get excited about a virally transmitted memory of a lecture on Faulkner. Even the Faulkner-haters in the English department shrugged and moved on. Leslie found herself alone in confronting the project head, Dr. Solada Srisai. Srisai was tidy in the way of women who have had to fight very hard and very quietly for what they have. The warm red of her suit went perfectly with the warm brown of her skin. Leslie felt tall and chilly and ridiculous.

“I don’t think anyone will be hurt by knowing calculus, do you?” Solada murmured, when Leslie explained why she was there.

“You’re a biologist,” said Leslie. “You know how many forms you have to fill out to do human experimentation. If I want to ask a dozen freshmen whether they’d buy a cookie for a dollar, I have to fill out forms.”

“Our experimental subjects filled out their forms,” said Solada. “The viruses fell slightly outside our predicted parameters and got transmitted to a few people close to the original test subjects and then a few people close to them. This is a problem we will remedy in future trials, I assure you.”

A grad student with wire-rimmed glasses poked her head around the door. “Solada, we’ve got the people from the Empty Moon here.”

“Start going over their parameters,” said Solada. “I’ll be done with this in a minute.”

“Empty Moon?” said Leslie.

“It’s a new café,” said Solada. “We’ve come to an agreement with them about marketing. Volunteers—who have all the
forms
filled out, Dr. Baxter—will be infected with positive memories of the food at the Empty Moon Café, and we’ll track their reports of how often they eat there and what they order compared to what they remember.”

“Don’t you have an ethical problem with this?” Leslie demanded.

Solada shrugged. “Not everybody likes the same food. If they go to the Empty Moon and have a terrible sandwich, or the service is slow, they’ll figure their first memory was a fluke. They’ll go somewhere else. Or if they’re in the mood for Mexican, they’ll go for Mexican. We’ll make sure that this virus is far less mutative and virulent than the others—which were really not bad considering how colds usually spread on a college campus. Well within the error range one might expect.”

“Not within the error range
I’d
expect,” said Leslie. “I’ll be conveying this to a faculty ethics committee, Dr. Srisai.”

Solada shrugged and smiled dismissively. “You must do as your conscience dictates, of course.”

The business at the Empty Moon Café was booming. Leslie told herself very firmly that her memory of the awesome endive salad she’d had there was a snare and a delusion; she stayed away even when Amy wanted to meet there for coffee.

No one else seemed to care when she tried to tell them about the newest marketing ploy.

A few weeks later, Leslie was doing the dishes while her husband put Nicholas to bed. Her doorbell rang three times in quick succession, and then there was a pounding on the door. Wiping her hands on the dishtowel, she went to answer it. Amy was standing on the doorstep, an ashen undertone to her dark skin.

“There’s been—” Amy swallowed hard, and managed to get a strangled, “Oh, God,” past her lips.

“Come in. Sit down. I’ll get you tea. What’s happened?”

“Tom Barras—he’s—”

“Deep breaths,” said Leslie, putting the kettle on.

“You know I’ve been one of the faculty advisors to the GLBT group on campus,” said Amy. “There’s been an attack. A member of the group—Tom Barras—a nice bi boy, civil engineering major—is in the hospital.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know! I thought we were—I know gay-bashing still happens, but I thought we were better than that here.” Leslie bit back a comment about illusions of the ivory tower. Her friend needed a listening ear, not a lecture. Amy got herself calmed down, gradually, and Leslie went to bed feeling faintly ill. She and her husband insisted on putting Amy’s bike in the back of their car and driving her home, just in case.

The story of the assault came out gradually: Tom’s attacker, Anthony Dorland, said he had previously been set upon behind Hogarth Hall by a group of men. One of them had groped him repeatedly, making suggestive personal comments, while the others looked on and laughed. “I couldn’t do anything about it,” Anthony told campus security in strangled tones. “I was alone. But then I was out last night, and I heard his voice. It was the same voice, I know it. I would know it anywhere. He was coming out of his meeting, and so I waited until he was alone. I don’t care what he does with people who like it, but I’m not that way! He shouldn’t force himself on people like that! It’s not right! So I thought, well, let’s see how you like it when you’re all alone and someone jumps on you.”

When campus security asked Dorland why he had not fought back immediately or reported the incident, he looked confused. “He was so much bigger than me, and he had all his friends—I don’t know—I just felt like I couldn’t. Like no one would believe me.” Pressed for a time of incident, he said, “I don’t know. A while ago. A few weeks ago, maybe? I don’t know.”

The police officers looked from one young man to the other. Tom was several inches shorter than Anthony, and slightly built.

Tom returned to consciousness a day later, to the great relief of his family and friends, including Amy. A few days after that, the faculty started hearing rumors of other students who had experienced the same thing but could not say when it had happened. Some of them had roommates who said they didn’t remember their roommate coming in beaten up or upset; others had roommates with identical memories—and identical sniffles.

Scores on calculus midterms shot up by an average of fifteen points.

Leslie noticed a few students wearing surgical masks on campus one morning. The next day it was a few more. She took Nicholas to get one at the campus bookstore and encountered Solada Srisai coming out with a bag. Without thinking, she grabbed Nicholas close to her.

“Mommy!” Nicholas protested.

“That false memory of sexual assault,” Leslie hissed. “My son caught calculus. What would you have done if he’d caught danger and fear like that? What would you have done to keep him from having nightmares that a bunch of adult men were—” She looked down at Nicholas and chose her words carefully. “Were hurting him. Personally. What would you have done about that?”

“That one wasn’t mine,” said Solada.

“They are
all
yours,” said Leslie. “The minute you taught your grad students that it was okay to release these things without trials, without controls, without testing—the minute you taught them that it was okay to skip all that, because it was holding back progress, you earned all of this.
All of it
.”

“Mommy,” said Nicholas, and Leslie realized that her hands were shaking.

“Let me tell you what the alternative was,” said Solada, steering Leslie and Nicholas towards a bench. “Do you want to know what my alternative was?”

“Another project completely?”

“Yes. Sure. Another project completely.” Solada glared at her. “And do you know what
that
would mean? It would mean that the person who developed virally contagious memories would not have done so out in the open. You would never have heard about it. Your son wouldn’t have been at risk for catching a memory of calculus—or, okay, a memory of sexual assault because an overzealous grad student decided it would be a good idea for potential rapists to know what it felt like.

“No. Your son would have been at risk for catching memories that told him that the Republican Party was the only one he could trust. Or that if he truly loved you, he would always trust exactly what the Democratic Party had to say. Or that our government would
never
fight a war without a darn good reason. Or that he should buy this cola, or drive this car, or wear those sneakers. Do you see what I mean? It was me now or a secret project two years from now.”

“And that makes it okay?” said Leslie. “The fact that it could be worse?”

Solada leaned towards her on the bench; Leslie had calmed down enough not to pull Nicholas away. “If I blow the whistle on my own project, it looks like I’m trying to grab the spotlight; nobody pays any attention. But you! What are you doing? I counted on someone like you to kick up a fuss in the press. Faculty advisory committees? Official university censure? What is wrong with you? Start a blog to rant about it! Call reporters! Tell your students to tell their parents! The student paper is not enough. Rumors are not enough.”

“You’re saying you wanted me to—”

“You or someone like you. For God’s sake, yes. Get the word out. Make sure everybody knows that this is something we can do. Make sure they ask themselves questions about how we’re doing it.” Solada shook her head. “I’m amazed it didn’t happen before. I thought surely the Empty Moon thing would be the last straw for you. Or someone like you. And I never dreamed that one of my students would use it politically, the way I thought the big parties would.

“So be fast about it, Dr. Baxter. Be as loud as you can. I’m willing to be the wicked queen here. Better a wicked queen than an eminence grise.”

And with that she was gone, leaving Leslie stunned and clinging to her son. Most of the media contacts she had were in the obscure economic press. Would it be best to call a national news magazine? The local newspaper, or its big city neighbor? She’d never tried to break a story before. It had never been this important before.

“Mommy, did you take me here another time?” asked Nicholas.

Leslie’s heart went into her throat.

“And Daddy was here, too, and you bought me hot chocolate?” he continued hopefully.

She relaxed. It was a real memory; they had come to the student union before Christmas. “I’ll buy you hot chocolate again,” she assured him, “and then we’ll go over to my office and you can draw pictures. Mommy has some phone calls to make.”

P
AUL
C
ORNELL
Born in Wiltshire, Paul Cornell spent most of the 1990s as an accomplished and popular writer of television, comic books, and
Doctor Who
prose fiction. Later, after
Doctor Who
was revived as an ongoing television series in 2005, Cornell wrote three of its best-received episodes, all of which were Hugo finalists. In this century, while continuing to write comics and television with evident gusto and enjoyment, Cornell has gradually turned to also writing original fiction unconnected to anyone else’s franchise.

“One of Our Bastards Is Missing” is the second in the ongoing chronicles of Major Jonathan Hamilton, who serves Britain in an alternative continuum in which the empires of the nineteenth century have lived on into a world of solar-system development and mysterious alternate physics. For many writers, such a scenario would be the occasion for a romp that doesn’t think too hard about the people such a world would hurt. In Cornell’s hands, it’s still a romp, but he’s sneakier about it than you might expect.