The Future Is Short (4 page)
What she saw now made her glofa cramp.
Spread out on the sand were the flattened, hardened corpses of unknown cousins. None of her eyes could detect a sign of movement and there were no vibrations of speech, just sand and rocks and bright light, and hundreds of desiccated glogla. The selka, flat, transparent and pink to her sight, had reversed its journey and shot out from the same stoma that it had entered. It shriveled when it landed on the sand, as though crushed by some unseen grip of tentacles. She felt her life force follow that worm. She was weak. Sleep came to her, but left just as soon—a piercing touch on one limb at the water’s edge. It was mother.
Pulled back by mother’s tentacles, she submerged and heard the many frantic vibrations of her home cluster. It had nearly doubled in size in these shallows, but slowly shrank as they all plunged back to the cool, dark depths, rich with plankton.
The cluster continued its lazy journey and she was content, passing the time filtering plankton through the fanlike structures on her back and sometimes retelling the tale of her adventure to the younger daughters. In these vibrations, there were always the pleas for caution and warnings about the selka, who swarmed around still, waiting for the unwary to open their stomata.
Some time passed before she felt the itch of a new bud—a seventh. As there was no eighth, this one might cleave after awhile and become her first daughter. Her thinking organ entertained the possibility that this daughter might someday harbor a selka herself and rise to the surface, and know warmth and light and freedom. And while this should have caused a worry, she felt her glofa swell a little at the thought.
J.F. Williams has been working in Information Technology for the past quarter-century but started out as a proofreader and spent years writing synopses of movies and TV programs for newspaper TV listings, placing him among the most widely read anonymous writers in the U.S. and Canada of that time. He published his first novel, an epic science-fiction adventure called The Brickweavers, in August 2012.
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6.
Andrew Gurcak
Excerpts from Wikipedia entry for Maysoon Daoud (2015–2067(?))
(updated 2115)
She was born a Palestinian in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border. Her father, a merchant, was rumored to be a key arms smuggler to Palestinian rebels. Her mother was killed in a fire ignited by an Israeli air attack, during which Maysoon, four at the time, suffered burns over 30 percent of her body. She underwent numerous surgeries that, as she described in her autobiography, Calculations from the Underground, “left me looking like a quilt stitched by blind quilters.” She early displayed a prodigious gift for visualizing—from maps, sketches and descriptions—the networks of over a thousand smugglers’ tunnels. Daoud described her childhood with her father and his compatriots thus: “I would sit in his lap, completely absorbed in their talk. The tunnels’ names and numbers were as characters in fairy tales to me. I dreamt of those passages. I lived to hear the men talk of their exploits in them.” Her aptitudes came to the attention of a mathematician at Al-Aqsa University. Still in her early teens, she coauthored with him “A Note on the Delahan-Trapp Conjecture for Blind-Corner Graphs” described by her as “a novice’s attempt to categorize the mazes of tunnels that captivated me as a child.” A Cambridge professor, upon reading it, hurriedly contacted Al-Aqsa, eventually leading to a series of intense conversations with Daoud. After numerous religious, political, and medical issues were resolved, Daoud was sent to read mathematics at Cambridge, obtaining a doctorate at the age of twenty “by rummaging in bizarre geometries, while soaked and shivering in that chill, wet country.”
In 2039, Daoud abruptly decided to “put aside my playthings and solve real problems.” She resigned a position at Berkeley to co-found Stone’s Throw Proteomics, near San Diego. There she began the work that would lead to renown and infamy. She immersed herself in epigenetics, the study of the means by which environmental conditions could modify how genes would program the proteins of life. She invented intricate geometries to build increasingly abstract spaces where she could manipulate genes through subtle changes in their chemical environments. Then, in a progression of breakthrough formulations, Daoud found the means to bolster the entire human genome so that individuals would become inherently immune to nearly all diseases, and then, as remarkably, rendered those alterations amenable to mass production. Moreover, she could perform these modifications safely on living humans. Her methods depended upon manipulations of a person’s mitochondrial DNA (mDNA), inherited solely through the maternal line. If parents underwent Daoud treatments, then those massive improvements in their metabolisms could be reliably passed on to children. Within ten years, Daoud was recognized as one of the greatest scientists of any era, and, in unprecedented decisions, she was awarded Nobels simultaneously for Medicine and Peace, all before her fortieth birthday.
There were, however, a very small number of people for whom her treatments were ineffective. It was not until several years had passed that practitioners found that women of Jewish ancestries would not benefit from Daoud’s methods. Further studies revealed a very small minority of women of non-Jewish Palestinian ancestry would also not benefit from the treatments. Although never confirmed, that minority was suspected to include Daoud herself. Daoud never admitted to deliberately excluding anyone, and she adamantly maintained that she had not committed active harm against any living person. Still, fewer and fewer Jewish women were chosen for wives, to bear children susceptible to diseases, some fatal, that now afflicted no one else. Inevitably, the number of Jews in the world would dwindle. Outrage ensued, as other scientists could not replicate, much less modify, Daoud’s methods. Experts speculated that the exclusion, if deliberate, required far more effort on Daoud’s part than that needed for her initial immunological discoveries. Daoud responded caustically to criticisms: “If my work had led to healing 1 percent of the world’s population, I would be honored with medals every month. For mending 99 percent of the people, I am instead vilified each day.” The Nobel committee rescinded her Peace prize.
On May 9, 2067, she did not show up at her office. Searches worldwide yielded no sign of her. The Mossad denied any knowledge of her whereabouts.
As of the hundredth anniversary of Maysoon Daoud’s birth, Israeli scientists reported little progress in extending her treatments to Jewish women.
Andrew Gurcak and his wife, Elaine Lees, divide their retirement time between Pittsburgh and the Finger Lakes region of New York. The Science Fiction Microstory Contest entries are his first fictional pieces.
[email protected]
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7.
Ami L Hart
Speak after the tone (Beep).
I came to this place wanting solace, desiring to escape the horror carved upon my corneas. Correction—I didn’t come here. The local human settlers found me; pulled me from the frosty, gut-strewn mess that was my old life and deposited me here, the dusty dung heap of a town that’s apparently to be my new life.
As fortune has it, there are no Snowy Bugbears resident this low down: giant, ugly, death-dealing things. I still see them, snacking on Larry’s unfortunately disgusting entrails, slopped across my vision each time I close my eyes. Shhh, don’t tell anyone, especially that frontier doctor—busy on my body like he owns it—that I don’t make a habit of closing my eyes.
Sleep is over-rated anyway. It’s been three days since my last trip down the bloody, nightmarish rabbit hole to Slumberland; (gasp) what if he listens to this! I hadn’t thought of that
… that busy body, with those rough pinchy fingers, like pinchers.
I know … I’ll hide you, dear friend.
They expect me to attend some sort of rustic bonfire hoedown tonight, a feast. I can imagine it now; they will watch me eat, concern radiating from those simple eyes. I hate people watching me eat. How much I put inside my churning guts is my own business. Just the thought of it makes me want to
… excuse me.
***
(Beep)
It was horrible; I had to smile, switch it on like a lamp, but being broken I just spark, fizzle
… and sweat. What’s worse, Doc Pinchy Fingers insisted on sitting beside me. I suppose he considers us intellectual equals. I’m not sure where he got his medical degree from— a dark alley behind a roach motel?
His office is bug infested. It makes my skin crawl thinking about it, and I kept wondering if the terrible little things had caught a ride with him, inside that puffy brown leather jacket. There’s a lot of space in there; he’s not a large man.
Tonight made me realize how much I miss my fellow colleagues Larry and Jeff, even though their tech fascination bored me. Still, discussion involving the latest spectral surveying gear is preferable to the humanities.
Oh, the humanity!
At least I still have you, automated recipient of my thoughts. Goodnight, I hope you sleep well; I won’t. So I won’t sleep.
***
(Beep)
It crawled on me, those pinchy little legs stomping my hot skin. I searched the dark shadowy corners of my room, while brandishing a shoe. I still feel it, as if it’s invisible. Do invisible bugs exist on this planet? I can’t remember, can’t think.
(Pause)
I looked out the window and saw a passable sunrise through the dust, this morning. Not comparable to the way it used to rise over the pleasantly jutting glaciers, cut like diamonds.
Location, location.
Diamonds…
. They have bugs here that are translucent, their bodies cut like gems, casting rainbows as they walk. I remember that much, deceptive little things.
I used to like diamonds.
***
(Beep)
He came to my door; said he was checking on me. I politely told him that I wished to catch up on sleep after a bad night. He offered me pills; I opened the door a crack wider and took them. No! I didn’t imagine it, I saw it … crawling up and under his sleeve. I screamed internally. He can’t know that I know that he’s one of them. Those Bugbears always did have unusually complex nervous systems. Maybe they control these people remotely? Perhaps they wish to experiment on me, the Entomologist. The pills are a trick. I will light a fire and burn them.
***
(Beep)
They forgave me for burning down half their village. They told me I was sick. Me! They keep me locked in the small room adjoining the bug-infested doctor’s office, said it’s for my own safety. That infernal doctor puts me to sleep every night with that awful needle, but at least I don’t dream anymore and I still have you. They let me keep you, something about good therapy, although you disappear sometimes. Have you been talking to the doctor? I’ll break you if you have.
Ami Hart (pseudonym for Jesse Colvin) is a writer, painter, thinker, gamer from “Quaky- town”—Christchurch, New Zealand. She dabbles in a multitude of genres, frequently complaining that she suffers MWD (multiple
worlds disorder). She is currently writing her first science fiction novel. Ami blogs at
http://www.amilibertyhartwriter.com
and at
http://www.liberty-jessie.blogspot.co.nz
.