The Future Is Short (5 page)
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8.
JD Mitchell
The light of campfires illuminated the sides of the whittled-away mountains, but the stars overhead burned brighter, and, for a second, Ernest could almost imagine that truth lay behind the rumors. Somewhere in the gulf between the spheres lay the warmth of other suns.
Music came from the harmonicas of miners. Once silenced by the 14-hour labor of “hydra-licking” the sides of mountains, the men awoke. Even in their stupor, the second wind of celebratory leisure manifested as spirited dances, where men agreed to take the armbands as women, and “tops” and “bottoms” jigged and pranced on the remains of the Sierra Nevadas.
Ernest turned toward Blind Tom. All in the camps thought Tom belonged to the class of imbeciles. They thought he was simple—an animal, they called him, as he danced upon the makeshift stages in the
camps. But Ernest knew differently, so followed him. Blind Tom said they had little time. With gold dust smuggled from the tailings of the water monitors, Ernest and Blind Tom would purchase a ride on the space cannons.
Into the void.
The Black Cherokee called the space beyond the Earth the Exo Dust.
First must
come the great diversion, as Blind Tom called their escape. Blind Tom had once worked for the minstrelsy of the Williams and Walker, and the popular tunes functioned well to capture the attention of the white audience. Poor, poor Americans, most of them veterans of the War of the Rebellion, occupied the company camps. The rush for Californian Gold brought them, and Chileno taxes and surcharges put them in their place. But the “coon music,” as the Americans called the songs Blind Tom played … that kept the miners in their seats. For once, the concept “captive” audience didn’t mean a Black Cherokee.
Blind Tom and Ernest performed a Williams and Clark original, “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” The ragtime tempo held lyrics that seemed to play to the Californio fears of the urban Free Blacks. The Zip Coons, they called the more successful of Ernest’s race, even the ones that’d purchased their freedom from the Cherokee with money from the mines. Blind Tom, though—Ernest knew how he’d been used to games to win freedom.
Blind Tom proved right, yes. Ernest backed him up on Spanish guitar, and the white Dixie miners, they gave up their laughs, and money, to the “boys.” Before the Man in the Moon could set, Blind Tom and Ernest found a hover-skimmer ride, and across the seasonal inner seas of Alta California’s great valley they traveled down the Delta from Sacto to Yerba Buena.
Chrysopylae and the sky-wharves of Angel Island overfilled with the rich and the monied—wannabe diasporas.
“Sammy” Brannan—that empressario and “king of the American Jews (Mormons!)” —partnered with a Ming Chinese company, and the Ming mandarin-men built a towering white Columbiad that aimed, with the most celestial-of-heavenly angles, through the Golden Gate of Old Gold Mountain.
A space-cannon
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When Blind Tom counted their gold dust, not even enough tilings remained to purchase one ride to New Kansas. It was cruel just enough to be funny.
Ernest could barely laugh, then. Blind Tom, though, he wasn’t done. Not yet. For as much as Ernest had wanted to get shot past the Moon, and, as if in a slingshot, get flung like a hunk of scrap into the Exo Dust, the lights in the city soon turned brighter. And the trip, that much better. They’d make a good living performing their “coon music,” and have the last laugh—all that jazz, yea.
JD Mitchell has been a writer since he first played with Legos. Since then, adventures as a butcher and teacher have inspired and informed many of his narratives. His main interest lies in the origins of science fiction, specifically as a way for him to study the problems of the present day.
[email protected]
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9.
Thaddeus Howze
I failed the first tests when I was just a little kid. You know the ones. The preliminary PSE’s.
Psychopathy, Sociopathy, and Empathy psychology exams administered to everyone in elementary school. They showed me the pictures of people I was supposed to feel sympathy for and I felt nothing. Even back then, I knew there was something wrong with that. No tender feelings for animals, either.
A puppy had the same emotional content as a cockroach. None at all.
I didn’t understand at first but when my parents started whispering about our missing dog, I quickly put two and two together. I didn’t even tell them about it. They just knew. I didn’t understand why it was so important that I feel something about some dumb old dog. He was sick and dying anyway. I didn’t even enjoy it.
My parents were afraid of me. I knew that. I didn’t feel it. I knew it. Something about the way they looked at me. Something about how my mother would hug me, hold me close, whisper to me how I would be okay. My father didn’t even disguise his feelings. His disgust was clearly evident. I memorized his face, his emotional depth. I could replicate the behavior perfectly after seeing it one time.
Compassion took longer.
It was more … rich, more complex. At the time I simply didn’t understand the depth of compassion. Later I found out—compassion and empathy were simply beyond the range of things I would ever feel.
At the age of five, I began to replicate the emotional appearances of everyone around me. I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling but I knew I was in danger if I could not learn this. Until I took the official tests, I was allowed to attend school. My classmates were a wealth of information.
Each charming, childlike face smiled at the most vacuous of things. Making shapes, coloring on paper, writing their names, things I mastered in hours, they took weeks to learn. I read War and Peace by the time I was six, but I didn’t tell anyone. I pretended to struggle just like my classmates and made the right noises, laughing and such.
The pretense sickened me.
Once I was out of school, I could disappear onto the bus and go home. My sitter, a forgettable local teenager, Megan, spent the bulk of her time on the phone with her friends, or on the computer looking at mostly naked men. I went into my room and read books I smuggled from the library. I could read a thousand pages a day.
I would be ten when they tested again. Their trepidation as my second test date drew near increased but they seemed hopeful announcing to the mysterious person on the phone about my progress, my displays of emotion and how perhaps the Childhood Psychological Survey group need not make a visit to our home. She was always crestfallen at the end of the call. I watched her conversation with the agent and found it curious.
The woman, Ms. Fischer, seemed to exhibit the very same nature she accused me of; she was cold and aloof. Her eyeglasses held eyes as distant as my own.
I saw the Psychopomp on the table and knew its history. The Psychopath Purges of 2050 from humanity worldwide promised to fix the urge for dominance that had all but destroyed the Earth as we knew it.
The evening before the test, a neighbor came over to report a missing cat. I told them I had never seen it. I was believable.
The day of the test, the Psychopomp determined I was incurable and would be destroyed. My parents wailed and gnashed their teeth. The agency police escorted me out of the house.
I felt no fear of death.
Ms. Fischer walked me to her car, her eyeglasses in her hand. She didn’t look at me.
“I lied to your parents. Do you want us to fix you? We can now. You can be as ordinary as anyone else. All of your cognitive gifts would be gone as well.”
“No.” I replied.
“Good. We don’t want to, either. You’ll work for us. Controlling the world is tireless work. We need someone like you who is willing to do anything . . .”
Thaddeus Howze is a technology consultant, science enthusiast, and speculative fiction author. His short fiction collection, Hayward's Reach, came out in 2011. His writings revolve around environmental themes and question the nature and value of humanity in a world enamored of technological cleverness. See his speculative fiction at
http://hubcityblues.com
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10.
Marianne G. Petrino
Humans evolved to prefer deception. In Milwaukee in 1955, during the height of the Cold War and flying saucer madness, my mother screwed a Grey and didn't even know it.
The Visitor nailed her at a bar. It was a looker. Tall and lean; emerald-eyed and black-haired; it had a half-smile to drive her wild between the beers, which flowed like the Menomonee. It had perfected its approach over centuries. This took no effort on its part. People saw what they wanted to see, its own electromagnetic field augmenting their expectations. This was what the little lady liked. A warm hand reached under her flannel shirt and touched her belly. A little pinprick made her jump. She thought it was static, a winter annoyance. But it was just me coming to be.
It was a good thing Alice was married, but the Grey always was careful that way. It studied the customs of time and place as it secretly perpetuated itself.
Jimmy was proud. He told all the men at the bottling plant that, finally, a baby was on the way, his manhood proven. He never expected to be cuckolded by an ancient astronaut. That cost him and his wife their lives.
I arrived at Halloween, all 5 pounds 6 ounces of alien-human hybrid. But I looked like my mother, fair of face and a carrot-top, so things were fine for a few years. Then, the Grey genes kicked in, took over, and I changed.
It unfolded on my sixth birthday. As I counted my new toys, three in all, my friends argued about my party dress. It was dazzling, powder blue with tiny white dots. Yet Mary insisted to Beth and Jean that it was lime green. That was her favorite color. That was how she wanted the dress to be. That is what she saw, just like Aunt Honora, who was always jealous of my mother's beauty. She considered me an even greater beauty and grew more envious every time we met.