A Big Red Sign (Short Story)

Writers write what they know, and so as a result, you can find a lot of fiction narrated by a lot of vaguely fictional writers. And, almost invariably, you'll get at least a reference to the fact that the vaguely whitewashed author surrogate in question liked to tell stories as a child. Almost inevitably, someone in the story will notice, too, and suggest that bright-eyed little Johnny SwearImadehimup ought to be a writer.

I was never like that, and nothing like that ever happened to me. It's not that I didn't have stories. I had plenty of stories. I had a whole roster of action heroes and a whole roster of sports heroes all made up in my head. Even my lego men had two decades of backstory minimum, and a wizard was an excuse to invent four hundred years' worth. I just never told my stories.

The first time that I got any inkling that I had an unusual affinity for story was in fifth grade, when we were assigned to write a one-page short story. Almost everyone in my class complained about this onerous task. I didn't object, but you have to understand, it wasn't because I was a writer. It was because my best friend in class was the smartest, and he didn't complain. I was second-smartest, and felt I should hold up my end by not complaining, either.

It's also worth noting that everybody else brought in a story that was just under one page, except my friend and I. His was just over two pages. Mine was pushing ten, a fact that could not possibly have gone unnoticed. Even then, though, nobody commented positively on the story. They just wondered why I bothered to write so much. I'm not sure what I answered, but I know that it was because the story wasn't over yet.

There was a time when I wrote because my parents wanted me to practice typing. What they really wanted was for me to complete one of these computer programs that teaches you typing lessons, but I don't think anything in the world could be more boring than that. If it came down to a choice between trying to write an adolescent, escapist, poorly-plotted, action-heavy science fiction trilogy and taking lessons from a machine reading a $5 CD, well, I was an adolescent. What choice did you think I was going to make?

I picked up that trilogy again in high school when my English teacher told me I'd be in for massive amounts of extra credit if I managed to write a novel, no matter how bad it was. Over the years, I wrote a lot of things for school credit, and some of them I put time and effort into and really enjoyed, but I still only saw myself as a student and not a writer. I was a student who enjoyed his assignments more than it was politic to let on, sure, but still just a student.

In college, being a student meant acting like a writer, or at least drinking like one. I read the classics with a glass of wine, the modernists with a bottle of whiskey, and the postmodernists with six-packs of awful, mass-produced beer. Just to put my own personal touch on it, I would read pulp when I had the runs. Stopping to go to the bathroom every ten minutes heightened the suspense. As a matter of course, I wrote poetry and then read it at open mics. I didn't like that even when I was into it. It was just the thing to do.

Before I was willing to admit there was no money in it, and before my wife was pregnant enough for the appeal of steady employment to sink in, I wrote fiction. It wasn't good fiction, and as I mention, it wasn't lucrative. I wrote it under a pseudonym, so hardly anybody I know is aware of it. Occasionally, I'll slip some mention of my old work into conversation, just to see what people think of it. So I've noticed, over the years, that there's one thing about my fiction that people invariably hate. They picked up on a pattern in my writing, and I picked up on a pattern in their taste.

I had a very transparent habit of killing off a certain character type. Any time one character was noticeably kind, innocent and likeable, it was a sure bet that they would get killed off. If you were the clearly and by far the best (invented) human being in any of my novels, short stories, even long poetry, you were totally fucked. Looking back now, I know that it's because one of the three best people I ever knew died young when I was seventeen. It didn't happen right in front of me, but I was too close to it not to be affected, and it came out in my writing. So I guess, for a while, I wrote to deal with that.

The other two in my top three are alive and well–thirty years older than me and likely to outlive me anyway–so I suppose that's one author's lousy fiction you won't have to wade through at the bookstore ever again.

Ever since Edwin was born, it has become an undeniable fact that I've gotten in the habit of writing because (and only if) there's a paycheck in it. This has become increasingly the case. At first, I was conspicuously aware of journalism as a new challenge and as something new to learn. Eventually, though, it just became what I do. It has reached the point now that if they had stopped paying me for it last week, I probably would have stopped writing six days ago, never to start again.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that unlike so many other writers, I can't point at one moment that truly set me on the path to being a writer. I can, however, point to the moment that pointed me away.

Working for the newspaper, I've written about a lot of things. I wrote a series of articles when a trigger-happy bank robber was still at large and committing a series of robberies. I covered the shooting that happened at our high school a couple of years ago. There was even the time that my next-door neighbor thought he killed a man in the next neighborhood over and then came home to find the man slumped dead over his kitchen table. It sounds like another one of my half-baked short-stories, but I promise I'm not making it up. It actually happened, and I was more pleased than I care to think on to have gotten that scoop hours ahead of any of the TV stations. Suffice it to say that I have been turning police reports into front page articles for more than a decade now.

It was that reputation that led the managing editor to send me out to the Crawford murder. Technically, it was Callahan's turn, but I was the one who went.

When I got to the Crawford house, it was all roped off with that yellow tape, which I expected. Standard crime scene stuff. You couldn't really tell what was going on inside the house, although I did overhear the a uniformed officer use the words “dismemberment” and “all over the living room.” Over the years, I have become something of an expert in the field of overhearing uniformed officers. Drew Crawford, who was a couple grades ahead of my Stephen in school, was sitting on the front stoop in handcuffs.

If the detective in charge of the scene was inside the house, I was just going to have to wait until he came out. The garage door was open, though, and there was already something of a commotion around it. A line of police officers had formed to keep the neighbors and various passersby from crowding around and seeing inside, but standing back from the commotion, I could catch glimpses of what was going on inside. It looked like the entire interior had been painted a very dark shade of red. Someone from the crime scene unit even game out with a paintbrush and a bucket sealed in separate evidence bags.

That was not nearly as disturbing as what happened next. The Crawford kid had been watching the police intently when I got there, but as I was walking up onto the driveway to talk to one of the officers, I guess I caught his eye and he recognized me. He rushed up to the yellow tape, although he didn't make any effort to break through it. He just stood there for a second, staring at me and grinning. Then he began half-singing, half shouting at me.

“Half for work, and half for play, then sleep like a baby to wrap up the day!”

As the officers were grabbing him and pulling him back, he made no move to resist. He just grinned at me again. And then he winked.

I couldn't write about that with the detached, journalistic pen of a newsman. I couldn't write about it in a way that only seemed to matter. It couldn't be just a job, just the paycheck, just another day. It had to be anything but. Instead, went down to the bar and spent most of the night drinking, and after the bartender kicked me out to close up, I spent the rest of it writing this.

I really, sincerely hope it is the last thing I ever write.

Jason Wood Comes to His Senses (Short Story)

Jason Wood never did figure out how he lost his sense of smell. Every so often, his family and some of his close friends would admonish him to see a doctor about it, but Jason was a man long accustomed to dismissing all physical ailments as being an “old football injury” or merely “something I ate.” It had begun so long ago that it couldn't be blamed on the food, which left “old football injury.”

There might not have been enough clues left for the doctor to piece together anyway. The truth was that Jason remembered virtually nothing about his early childhood (old football injury), and nothing at all about smells. At best, Jason could vaguely recall that at the age of nine, there were eight things he could smell. Four of them he found pleasant enough: garlic, tasty food other than garlic (all of this smelled exactly the same to Jason, even at age nine), gasoline and his own flatulence. The four remaining smells Jason could perceive were coffee, cigarette smoke, rain showers and food he didn't like (which all smelled the same to him, and more or less like onions). Those, Jason absolutely detested.

One by one, Jason lost his ability to smell those things as well. Rain showers were the first to go, which made sense. He could barely smell those when he was nine. Cigarette smoke was next, and that didn't surprise him, either. He couldn't smell any other kind of smoke at all. Coffee and gasoline held out the longest. People told Jason that he was lucky he couldn't smell things, and he more or less believed them.

There was no discernible pattern to Jason's smelling loss. He didn't lose a steady one smell per year, and it didn't happen exponentially. He didn't wipe them all out at once when he took up drinking, either. Yet the fact remained that by the time Jason went off to college, he could not smell anything at all. Far from being surprised, Jason had been anticipating that the day when he could no longer smell coffee would come sooner or later.

Jason Wood never did figure out why, after more than ten years without one, he suddenly regained his full sense of smell while boarding an overbooked 747 two days before Christmas, but he wasn't surprised to find that he regretted it.

Odd Couple (Short Story)

I have shared my head with many stories. This is not unusual, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes that it is. I've found some who will argue that telling stories is what makes us human. Stories are, according to that theory, the defining characteristic of our species, Homo narrans. “Storytelling man,” they call us.

So it is probably not even freakish that I have been sharing my head for as long as I can remember. My stuffed animals had biographies and destinies. My earliest drawings had captions that ran onto the back of the page. Some of the captions filled most of that space, too. Once my handwriting became marginally legible, my parents realized that the writing was of a higher and more passionate quality than the drawing. I may not have been the only child ever to wish my parents would stick his pictures to the refrigerator backside-out, but I think I was the only kid I knew who actually convinced his parents to do it.

I do not ever remember restricting myself to output, either. When I was not busy creating stories, I would take in those created by others. I learned to read at the age of three, and took to it immediately and voraciously. Before that, I watched more television than is considered healthy, a habit that persisted after I learned to read and write, and which has found its way into all the cracks in my day when my eyes weren't up to reading I did not have any of my own ideas to develop. In my head was room enough for all these stories–only and always stories.

For a very long time, I did not share my head with any characters. It made me a very prolific and very mediocre writer. To date, I have only shared my head with one character. He was–or is–a daredevil. In the first draft his name was 'Crash,' if you can believe that. The story and the character both needed a working title, and I was always a fan of Bull Durham. There was a lot of Knut Hamsun's Hunger in the story. My reading had taken on a somewhat Scandinavian flavor at the time. By the time I finished a re-worked first draft, I had acquired a temporary habit of listening to an alternative radio station as I worked, and the novel grew into the title Jumper. The character's name, I guess, is Jon.

Sharing my head with a character–seeing the world in his words, thinking about what life would look like to someone outside my experience and immersed in something else entirely–invigorated my writing. My long-suffering friends, who had tolerated my stories, attempting to read them and responding (if they succeeded) with the shortest possible reviews–“cool,” “nice,” and “I like it” were the favorites–began sending me lengthy reviews to discuss things like “voice,” “tone,” and “character development.” A friend who used to work in the publishing industry helped me put together a synopsis, and a couple of agents were interested.

I awoke on the morning of December 27^th, 1999 to the earliest of the a late-morning sunrise in my window, prospects of my time-devouring hobby becoming a life-defining career in my outlook, and a loud, insistent voice.

“Sup?” the voice asked.

I immediately recognized it as a very informal version of the already-colloquial greeting “what's up?” I did not immediately recognize the voice. In fact, I just assumed I was imagining it. The TV was off, as was the radio, and the rest of the apartment was small enough that a glance at the TV and the radio was more than enough to confirm that I was alone. This explanation was seemingly confirmed when I spent a slow morning reading, a long shift as a line cook at a middling family restaurant, and then came home to correspondence from my contacts in publishing, all as usual. I heard nothing out of the ordinary.

December 28^th passed much as the previous day had, with two major differences: the earliest of the sunrise was obscured by low clouds, and the voice asked a follow-up question.

“Sup,” it said again as I awoke. Then, an hour later, while eating some toast and reading a somewhat absurd novel about soda advertisements, it asked “What's up, man?”

On December 29^th, I heard the voice three times–“sup,” as I awoke, “what's up man,” later in the morning, and “what are you doing?” on the way to work. I felt the last was a valid philosophical question, given the circumstances.

I had the 30^th off. True to the pattern, I heard the voice four times. I woke up to “sup.” I had my breakfast with a side of “what's up man?” That day, I was asked “what are you doing?” twice: once while reading and once while writing.

Soon, the voice grew less philosophical and more direct. “Why don't we go out and do something?” it asked. “Why don't you forget about submitting this book for rejection and take some real risk?” It also found a novel two-word review for my hobby-slash-purpose in life: “you're boring.” Then directness gave way to insistence, admonishing me to “get off my ass” and “live once in my life,” and calling me things like “virgin,” “pansy,” and “basement dweller.” Once, the voice sang that song “Take This Job and Shove It” repeatedly during my shift at the restaurant, starting with the old Johnny Paycheck tune and then moving to the punk rock version from the 80s and then the rap with Marky Mark guesting. The accent wasn't right for the country song and the artist formerly known as Crash wasn't much of a rapper, but it got the point across.

I had figured out who the voice was long ago, of course. I just didn't know how to shut it up. Ignoring it was impossible. It was too close to me. I couldn't even keep my mind on the TV. Trying to get any writing done was utterly hopeless. One time I threatened to burn its book, and it responded by saying “lighting fires in the house could be interesting. I say go for it!” I could only assume that anything the voice would do was a bad idea. Knowing that character was enough for me. I didn't want or need the risk to life and limb that actually being him would entail.

Finally, I decided to go skydiving. I figured if old folks do it for their anniversaries, it can't be as dangerous as it sounds. “Alright,” the voice agreed. “That's more like it. Still not my kind of fun, but at least it's actually fun. It's a start, anyway.” It was certainly expensive.

It worked, though. When the day finally came, the voice had enough respect (and sense) to let me listen to the instructor explain how to wear the pack and use the parachute. I have since read that some skydiving instructors will actually push first-time students out of the plane if they get nervous, but of course I had someone much closer to home to do that job for me.

And then, in freefall, I felt nothing. I heard nothing. I thought nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

What wouldn't I give, over and over, to feel that again? Absolutely nothing.

Since then, I haven't cut my writing back to absolutely nothing, but I haven't written much. Just this and telephone messages. As you can see, this took me thirteen years, and even that was like pulling teeth.

I'd much rather be out doing something.

They Grow Up So Fast (Short Story)

Written: 12/21/2013       Edited: 4/2/2017

The history of bioeletronic implants began well over one hundred years ago, with the invention of rather primitive cochlear implants. These devices, even in the late 1950s, could restore some semblance of a sense of hearing, to the amazement of many and the consternation of more than a few. It seems that bioelectronics has always been a controversial field, even before it was called bioelectronics.

For the first few decades, these cochlear implants were the only bioelectronic implants that existed in the mainstream. Research progressed beyond that, of course. The chief areas of interest in the field were to restore function to other senses and to limbs. However, it was a long time before any of these devices could be refined beyond the experimental stage. At the turn of the century, though, the field of bioelectronics turned a corner. The second half-century of research proved much more fruitful than the first half, and a much greater variety of devices became widely available to patients of even moderate means.

My birth came near the end of that period, and so I do not really remember any of it. Perhaps I remember family vacations from that time, or birthday gifts, or an especially bad skinned knee. Then again, perhaps those are only invented memories. In either case, as a child of that age, I did not know the first thing about bioelectronics, and so of that, I have nothing to remember.

My recollections span a different transitional period. Even when I was young, bioelectronics were being implanted as early as birth. These were optional procedures to fix certain congenital defects that were discovered during pregnancy, or even to enhance certain talents if parents had the inclination and the resources. There were even a few devices that had been developed as “safety features” to protect other people from a misbehaved and destructive child, though I can't imagine what kind of parents would have chosen to install such a thing in their newborn baby way back in the 60s. At that time, the mere mention of bioelectronic implants was enough to provoke outrage in certain people. That was only a vocal minority, but they were registered and avid voters, and they were very vocal.

By the time my two boys arrived, bioelectronics were standard, as much a part of childbirth as the Lamaze method and the Apgar test.

My two little boys: Phil, age six, and Dirk, age five. They are part of the first generation of children to go to school in a classroom full of cyborgs, although it's hard to think of my own children that way. My two little boys: Phil and Dirk. They mean so much to Alex and me that it's hard to think of them as normal. But that's what they are: perfectly normal. Or at least they were, up until a year ago.

It was around that time that their teachers began to notice that their development had slowed somewhat. Their homework was sometimes being returned incomplete, and sometimes they had trouble answering some of the teachers' questions. Though it still seemed to me that they were growing up so fast, they were no longer growing as quickly as most of the other children. Phil and Dirk had always hovered around the 60^th or 70^th percentile for both height and weight, but had slipped from above-average to below-average. Now, both of them are the smallest in their class.

Eventually, the school advised that we take Phil and Dirk to see a doctor, so of course we did. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with them, any underlying cause. They were perfectly healthy boys (and they still are), they were just not developing as quickly as their peers. The doctors told us that sometimes this just happens, for no particular reason and with nobody in particular at fault. I myself had been the smallest in my class until a late growth spurt at the age of 19, and Alex is still quite small. Neither of us were scholarship students, either, although I was a late bloomer academically, too. If this is who Phil and Dirk are, neither of us will love them any less for it.

So the doctors sent us home, and that was the end of it, as far as they were concerned. There was no injury or illness, which meant there was nothing for them to worry about. Just not being average, all by itself, is not an abnormality. The teachers, who had a more personal relationship with our boys, were only mostly reassured by what they heard from the doctors. They were still a little bit concerned. Just to make sure, they set up a visit from Children's Services.

It wasn't intended to be a surprise visit. They told us that when they got here, although after what transpired, we didn't really believe that. It turned out that the notice had somehow gotten lost in processing, and ended up arriving two weeks after the social worker did. When the doorbell rang, Phil and Dirk were sitting listlessly in front of the television, Alex was watching them, overcome by loving adoration, and I was in the kitchen with flour all over my hands.

Alex let the woman from Children's Services in, and her eyes fell immediately upon Phil and Dirk. “They just fell asleep in front of the TV after a long day at school,” Alex told her. “Don't turn it off or you'll wake them up.” The lady picked up the remote control and turned the television off. Neither Phil nor Dirk stirred. Now the woman started to say something, but Alex interrupted. “I think it would be better if you didn't disturb them. They need their rest.”

The woman from Children's Services hardly paused a second before bending down to about eye level with the children. “Phil.” she said firmly. “Dirk?” Neither one stirred. Now the woman moved to touch the boys.

“Do you have to?” Alex asked. “They're just so beautiful when they sleep. Couldn't you just leave them be?” The woman put one hand on each boy and shook them lightly by the shoulder. Still, neither one woke. Dirk did slump forward, though, revealing the back of his neck–and revealing that neither of the boys was asleep at all.

Strictly speaking, they had been 'turned off.'

This bioelectric implant was originally one of those optional safety features that had been introduced back in the '60s. The idea was that it would be a non-injurious way of calming a destructive child or restraining one in a self-defense or a police arrest situation. And in fact it was non-injurious. Studies have repeatedly shown that turning a child off does her no harm at all.

There have been a lot of studies, too. There is a lot of data available. While this particular safety feature had originally been created for the benefit of others, almost every parent today uses it exclusively for the benefit of the child herself. The switch on the back of the neck has become a detour around any sort of painful or traumatic event in a young child's life, the kind that has the potential to affect the child psychologically. People who are 'turned off' don't remember a thing. Even into adulthood, the switch is useful for keeping injured people from struggling against painful but necessary first-responder treatment, or even just for preventing them from injuring themselves further in sheer panic.

There's no logical reason to use the switch on someone who is just lounging in front of a television, of course. But it turns out that life is not always logical. People certainly aren't. So one day almost two years ago, when Phil and Dirk were sitting in front of the TV watching football and arguing about the relative merits of Barcelona's club and New York's, I mentioned that they were growing up so quickly. Was it then logical for Alex to grow morose, agitated, and then finally angry about how soon they would be moody preteens, and then independent upperclassmen, and then finally leave altogether? It probably was not. Was it logical for me to turn them off when I realized we were about to have an argument? I would like think so.

I'm not sure if the idea to leave them off was logic, or mere desperation. When people are 'turned off,' their bodies enter a state of very minimal activity. In that state, they don't have enough metabolic activity to grow. The reduced metabolism also slows aging. Turned off for half of every day, a person's childhood would double in length. That was the idea. And Alex looked so happy just to watch them. I didn't have the heart to quit.

Once the Children's Services woman had calmed down a bit, there was nothing I could do but confess this to her. That of course got me sent up for a little while, but they're letting me out today. The switch is completely harmless, so my repeated use of it doesn't meet any legal definition of abuse. Once the state determined that, they had no choice but to declare me innocent of any wrongdoing and secure my release.

I'm not sure what I'll do now. Children's Services has ordered me to comply with a newly-created set of emergency procedures for using the switch, and the law against ignoring orders prepared by Children's Services is very clear.

I'm afraid that Alex and I will both miss watching them sleep.

They're going to grow up so fast.

The Kaonan Sector (Short Story)

“The Kaonan sector is about to get a little noisier.”

“The Kaonan sector? It's only the Kaonans out there, right? And they're a stable, low-traffic civilization. If they were about to ramp up activity, they would have told us. Even if they didn't tell us, I have other sources, and they haven't heard anything.”

“It's not the Kaonans. It's those infants twenty light-years toward the core.”

“The monkey-people?”

“The ones who call themselves 'humans,' yes.”

“The monkey people haven't done anything for several hundred rotations. If you hadn't made regular reports otherwise, I would have assumed they went extinct.”

“No, they're not extinct. Earth went dark, but the humans are still there.”

“If they're still there, why did they ever go dark?”

“They were busy.”

“Very busy?”

“Busy enough to give a name to their busyness. They called it 'the Great Reorganization.' It took quite a long time.”

“So they're a planet of bureaucrats?”

“Not anymore. Most of them are quite embarrassed by the name, actually.”

“If all of them hate it, why do they use it?”

“Because it fits. All of the speculation that one of their great military powers might have a second civil war went for naught. At one point, their President tried to start a civil war, and found that the army was split into far more than the two factions he had suspected. They wouldn't sever their ties with their own local origins, nor would they fire on their countrymen. There was no revolution, either. The civil war that didn't happen represented a failure on the part of national-level powers, but there was no immediate abdication of power and no replacement regime. Regional governments simply grew in power, and then they too gave way to independence at the local level.”

“If it went so smoothly, why did the humans go dark at all?”

“Well, it did not go entirely smoothly. With the breakdown of any sort of large-scale authority, life in the urban centers went from being a somewhat ridiculous concept, and statistically somewhat miserable, to being utterly horrifying. In the outlying areas, life became somewhat technologically backwards, but it was not a nightmare like it was in the city. Naturally, the urbanites–those who survived–fled there. Just as naturally, things did not get much better for them. Humans living in cities, on average, learned no transferable survival skills whatsoever. They had no chance of making it on their own. Natives of the rural areas had formed smaller, close-knit societies of friends and family, had no use for them, and were loathe to take in outsiders in the midst of the turmoil. Even the rural collectives, which tended to have more members who were capable of surviving without depending on large-scale commerce, did not all make it.”

“So the monkey-people went dark because of a near-extinction event?”

“There was a drastic reduction in the population, but it wasn't as extreme as a near extinction. In any case, much of the drop in population has been voluntary or semi-voluntary. Their population had reached an unhealthy level before, and it wasn't as though nobody was aware of it. Before, some governments had attempted to put population-control measures in place, but those were failures. Humans did not react particularly well to some distant, impersonal entity telling them what they could and could not do with their bodies. However, when the same edicts came from a beloved or respected neighbor, responses tended to be more favorable. The leaders of the new micro-societies succeeded where the largest and most powerful governments had failed.”

“You seem to be telling me what didn't cause the monkey-people's four-hundred rotations of silence. At what point will you come to the cause?”

“I was just coming to it. You see, humanity had evolved outside of large, heavily-commercialized societies, but their technology had not. With more pressing concerns, people completely forgot how to make or use most of it, and the rest was difficult to operate or maintain. And, in any case, it was only one or two generations before most of humanity was content simply to talk among their fellows in their own small collectives. The human brain is optimized for small-group socialization, just as you would expect in a sentient being with significant intelligence and personality. In a way, humans have gone back to their roots.”

“And what has changed now?”

“Nothing more or less than the direction of human ambition. For a long time, humanity did not look to the stars as a destination, or a field of study, or anything other than scenery. Now, their gaze has returned.”

“Are they capable of reaching that destination?”

“Not right now, no, though they are almost assuredly capable of making contact. They are not the primitive, tribal people of a dark species. Their Great Reorganization did not cause them fall into the pattern of endless small-scale warfare that characterized much of their early existence. They have reestablished strong commercial ties, although not on a scale that would threaten to condense and consume their society into anything as unhealthy as urbanized civilization. They are close to eclipsing their previous technological peak, but this time, instead of using that technology to produce more and more commercial goods, they are using it to cultivate leisure and improved lifestyles. If they believed seeing the stars would improve their lifestyle, they could get there eventually, and if we gave them a reason, I believe they could achieve it within mere dozens of rotations. Their first round of interstellar transmissions are imminent.”

“So we must determine whether to respond.”

“That is it exactly.”

“Standard policy toward the monkey-people is to monitor their activity, remain undetectable, and under no circumstances respond to any of their communication.”

“First-year exopolitics.”

“You are not in position to change standard policy. Nevertheless, I value your expertise on the planet Earth, and I will hear your recommendation. Would you advise a change to standard policy?”

“Not right away. But I would advise that we listen. Perhaps the new humanity will have something to say that is worth consideration.”

The Last Year (Short Story)

The timeline first malfunctioned on June 6^th, at 7:21 AM GMT*. Technically, the year was 2117, although that designation quickly became irrelevant. It was, for all intents and purposes, The Last Year.

There's no way the original malfunction would have been observable, given its location. Even if it had occurred in a technically observable location, it would most likely not have observed. In fact, it occurred in the Andromeda galaxy, within the supermassive black hole's immediate sphere of influence. On June 6^th, at 7:21 AM, a neutron simply appeared from nowhere. That is not an altogether unheard of event, but under normal circumstances, matter appears with its antimatter counterpart, and both are destroyed in short order. This neutron appeared unaccompanied, and remained.

It remained, anyway, for long enough to be pulled into the supermassive black hole.

Approximately one second later, two protons and two electrons appeared, again unaccompanied. They might, perhaps, have coalesced into a hydrogen atom, had they not also been consumed by the supermassive black hole.

Approximately one second after this, three protons, three electrons, and one neutron appeared, only to suffer the same fate as the anomalous matter that had preceded it. This pattern continued unchecked, and radiated outward.

Approximately twenty-six hours, fifty-four minutes, and thirty-two seconds later, the disappearances began. A single hydrogen atom in the process of being sucked into the supermassive black hole simply disappeared. One second later, three subatomic particles in an otherwise stable oxygen atom suffered the same fate. This new pattern followed the same trend as the appearances.

On July 1^st of 2117, humanity discovered a method for opening a gateway to another timeline. For most of the next three months, this would be regarded as the defining scientific discovery of the year.

On September 4^th of 2117, at 10:26 PM GMT, the appearances reached earth. One proton and one electron in an Ozone molecule disappeared, resulting in unobserved chaos at an atomic scale.

The next day, at about noon, the appearances claimed their first casualty, when a small particle of Boron which appeared in the upper troposphere had its fall to earth interrupted several times. It managed to accrete a massive hailstone around it before finally falling to earth and striking a woman in the head. Her death was noticed; its ultimate cause was not.

Shortly after that, science confirmed the phenomenon of appearances when a small mass of subatomic particles, in a state indescribable beyond “seething” and “searing,” appeared in a classroom in a university in Bolivia. It interrupted a biology lecture.

By the beginning of the next day, the disappearances reached Earth. The appearances, meanwhile, had become alarming.

Scientists, the people who truly understood how the universe worked – or was supposed to work – realized the magnitude of what was happening, understood that if it was not stopped, it would be the end of man, and in a hurry. These people turned to the gateway, believing it would save them. Their first idea was to simply feed matter into it, attempting to counteract, offset, or interrupt the phenomenon.

Up until this time, nothing but electrons had been sent through the gateway, carrying data. Engineers and scientists on both sides had been very careful to balance the data sent and received, so as not to create any unintended consequences. Now, the time for caution had seemingly passed. The scientists first tried to push a small puff if helium gas through the gateway.

They were fortunately not to be killed by the attempt. The gas was instantly destroyed, releasing a massive amount of energy which, luckily, only widened the gateway rather than killing everyone present.

Realizing they could not simply funnel matter through the gateway, the team now looked to exchange matter. This plan did not carry with it any hope of sparing the unaffected timeline, but it might allow the people living there to escape. To test this theory, engineers in the affected timeline would attempt to pass one kilogram of nickel through the gateway, and receive one kilogram of cobalt from the other side.

The results of this experiment were as follows: the walls of the laboratory on the unaffected side became splattered with one kilogram of molten cobalt; the walls of the laboratory on the affected side became splattered with slightly less than one kilogram of molten nickel (the remainder of which disappeared at some time during the course of the experiment); the walls of both laboratories became splattered with the remains of dead scientists and engineers. Subsequent to this experiment, a new team of scientists in the unaffected timeline set to work closing the gateway to the affected timeline.

On the affected side, even the scientific community was upon the point of panic. Everyone else was well beyond that point; life had become essentially unlivable. Everywhere, the roads were clogged with frightened people hoping to escape the inescapable. Slow-moving at first, the traffic everywhere became stopped when random pieces of the road surface, the cars, or the drivers disappeared, causing fatal accidents involving dozens of cars. The hail of falling objects was unending.  Everywhere the eye could see lay the leavings of a decaying landscape: broken things, broken animals, broken people.

Desperate physicists now turned to a pair of farfetched, last-gasp solutions. Some hoped they could find a point of origin for the instability, and perhaps create a black hole that would consume its source. They succeeded in creating a small black hole in low earth orbit without destroying the Earth, but failed to find an appropriate place to deploy a larger one. Despite the futility, these people did remarkable work.

The remaining physicists went for broke, and attempted to discover a means of time travel. The idea was that if they could access the phenomenon in its earliest stages of escalation, they could counteract it, or at least have longer to prepare for it. These scientists came very close to proving the complete impossibility of time travel. The undoubtedly would have completed their work if they had been given more than five days to do it.

They did not even get six. On September 10^th, a ball of heterogeneous matter approximately the size of the moon appeared less than two hundred thousand kilometers from Earth and was immediately affected by Earth's gravity well. It passed wide of an actual collision, and its momentum was just reversing to make a second pass when a chunk of planet Earth approximately half the size of Africa disappeared.

This was the last event observed by humanity.

*This is an extreme oversimplification. Time does not malfunction, because time does not function. It is above function, beyond function. Time is the one thing immutable. In the end, of course, that was precisely the problem.

To See Her Again (Short Story)

I don't have her anymore. I lost her and I left her and I'll never get her back. I can still remember exactly what she looked like. Every curve, every crevice, every shadow, every shape, remains exactly as it was.

The fact that my visual memory is as vivid as vision now both does and does not make up for the fact that I can no longer actually see her, or anything else.

The money was too good to pass up. It was only logical to agree to the upload. Maybe for some people it isn't as tempting. For one thing, it's not as much of an advantage in some professions, but somebody worked out that an accountant is four times as efficient if he's in the net, and in some companies, the pay raise was almost proportional to that.

Ironically, it had to have been some other accountant who worked those numbers out.

If you take into account the reduced expenses, the pay raise was actually more than proportional. Electrical power is cheaper than food, which, with all the alternatives available, has almost become a specialty item these days. But I sort of enjoyed food. Solid state memory, of course, is far cheaper than housing, either to rent or to own. Bandwidth doesn't save you much over public transportation, until you take into account that bandwidth used for work purposes is free, but with the raise, a man can go wild on recreational bandwidth and still come out ahead. Many do.

I didn't sign on for the cheap recreational bandwidth, though. I signed as soon as they said I wouldn't want her anymore. They didn't lie to me. They just believed. Some of the same executives who made that claim also made the jump, and took the upload. They didn't know. If they had, I'm sure they would have stayed. The experts were fairly sure that the hormones and other physical involvement in that process, which weren't part of the upload, were integral parts of the desire, and that without them, it wouldn't have its hold.

I guess I didn't help myself by wanting to believe. It just wore on me, knowing I would only ever have the photograph. I thought this would be better. I was wrong. See, the computer can simulate those desires pretty well, and of course I remember the rest of it in aching detail. The problem is that I no longer have any physical recourse to reduce or forestall that desire. The computer doesn't have any mechanism built in to deal with it, because it wasn't supposed to be there. So it just builds and builds and builds up until...well, let's just say that if the accountants who calculated the salary adjustments had used me as a test case, salaries would have been docked for taking the upload.

Still, I would take a discount on my old salary and all the added expenses–all of it–back, to see her again, if only it could be done.

Soy Patties and Cricket Poppers (Short Story)

It was the emotional argument that lasted the longest. There were other arguments, because such polarizing, controversial topics always spawn multiple arguments, but the others were put to bed long before the emotional argument.

By contrast, the emotion argument was one of the first to go, when a particularly ambitious neurologist proved that emotion is simply the conscious or semi-conscious experience of animal instinct. Logical people, of course, had known this essentially forever. They just hadn't been able to prove it. Now that they could, the phrase “human emotion” began to be acknowledged as nonsense, and with it the argument that humans are exceptional in their experience of emotion.

For a while, there were attempts to couch the emotional argument in scientific terms. People said that a reverence for human life follows logically because we all share a genome. This was easily unmasked as pathos in logical clothing. The truth is that people share DNA with a whole lot of things. If geneticists suddenly insisted on making a thorough count of base pairs and then rounding at three significant digits, chimpanzees would be humans. In fact, humans share a preponderance of their DNA with banana slugs, and a majority with bananas.

The semantic argument lasted longer. Previous generations of politicians had succeeded in making the word “euthanasia” political poison. People came out in droves to vote on euthanasia, and they voted nine to one against.

But politicians know that the way to win an unwinnable fight is not to fight it. People knew to vote against euthanasia because it sounds like suicide to Protestants and eugenics to progressives. People didn't really know what to make of “advanced strategic expedited senescence,” except ASES, but they didn't seem to have a problem voting for something that sounds like “aces.”  The final challenge was to make ASES pay for itself, because the people were not about to vote for another program that would need to be funded,

This turned out to be harder than it sounded. By the time ACES was really gaining steam, only one person in ten thousand had ever tasted what people in the previous century had referred to as “real meat.” The ever-increasing population and the ever-decreasing space devoted to agriculture made it impractical to raise livestock on any but the smallest of scales. This led to scarcity, scarcity led to demand, and demand priced “real meat” too high for all but the wealthy. With things like Cricket Poppers and Soy Patties now being legally marketed as “meat,” most of the rest didn't know what they were missing, and so assumed that there was nothing to miss. Curiosity and fetishism can only create so much of a market, and the commercial demand for certain kinds of meat will always be minimal.

So ASES found another market. At this point, the only remaining holdouts were those truly dedicated to the emotional argument, idealists who wanted to live in a world where humanity is an exalted principle, not an agricultural product. Unfortunately for the idealists, they live with everyone else in a world of Soy Patties and Cricket Poppers, and trying to get people worked up about cricket feed and soy fertilizer has always been a losing battle.

The Explosion (Short Story)

Written 11-16-2013,  Updated 4-2-2017

The experiment was actually very popular before the catastrophe. Almost everyone forgets that, but it's true. I guess that's understandable. Ninety percent of the general public was in favor of the experiment. The experiment went horribly awry. One hundred percent of the general public was worse off for it. Why would they want to remember that most of them kind of asked for it?

The educated might remember a thing like that, if it meant they could hold it over everybody's head. Of course, in this case, educated people were as enthused about the experiment as anyone else. I was, too. You'd have to use a very narrow definition of educated to say otherwise. You would have to define “educated” as those who were educated in the field, and were privy to details of the experiment, but were not involve in it. The majority of those people were indeed opposed to the experiment. They made noise, too. They were just drowned out by a general public consisting of almost everyone else.

It's strange that I'm pondering the definition of an educated person at a time like this. I'm about to do the single most dangerous thing I've done since the immediate post-explosion period. At that time, the act of living was extraordinarily dangerous, anywhere and all the times. There's a reason so few of us are alive today. But now, I'm going to do something almost equally dangerous. I'm going out of town.

You see, it isn't safe to travel anymore. It hasn't been, ever since the explosion that was the downfall of society. I always figured that the downfall of human society would come soon and would probably be be man-made. I expected it to be something small, something everyone overlooked–water pollution was my odds-on favorite. If it was not to be our fault, I thought a particularly hardy fungus might suddenly develop a taste for staple grains and end up out-competing us for our own crops.

I did not expect it to be anything with a conspicuous place in the popular imagination. If you had told me beforehand that civilization would end in an explosion, I would have said it was a little on the nose, that most of the nuclear powers had come around to politically reasonable rule, but that nuclear weapons were never not dangerous, and if two or three elections went really wrong, well, fewer people than ever were talking about nuclear weapons, and I suppose it could happen.

It wasn't a nuclear explosion that changed the world forever, though. It was a population explosion. A population explosion of dinosaurs. Everyone was talking about the dinosaurs. I could not have been more wrong.

Still, if anyone had expected dinosaurs to end the world, I don't think they would have. Even the pessimists, the genetic engineers who opposed the experiment, thought that any disastrous end to the project would be a contained disaster. There was a reason Paleo Playground was built on Antarctica. It was thought that genetic sterilization of the really dangerous beasts, and a remote location where the animals could not survive outside a climate-controlled park zone, would keep the risks confined to a minimal area. Opposition to the project was based on the fact that if enough went wrong, scientists and visitors were likely to die. Some thought that to take this risk for what would largely be a for-profit commercial venture was unprincipled. Nobody thought that it was a global risk.

There were a couple of outside factors that changed the equation. The first of these was the hole in the ozone layer. Not too long before the beginnings of the experiment, the hole in the ozone layer actually began to shrink. It was heralded as a small victory in a much larger conservationist movement. It was also the reason that ultraviolet radiation in Antarctica was not immediately raised as a concern.

Then the transition in from developing to developed came on for real in China and India, and it blew the recovering environment wide open. I do not mean to blame the Chinese and Indian people. They were only doing what the rest of the world had taught them that they should want to do. If there is blame to be assigned, I blame the culture of the developed world. If there is no blame, then there is no blame. Regardless, the Ozone's tenuous progress was reversed in a heartbeat. After that, things really took a turn for the worse. At its first peak, the hole would not have endangered Paleo Playground. At its second peak, the whole continent was just overrun. The scientists had left the genomes of docile prey animals intact, because feeding the major attractions would have been astronomically expensive if reproduction had to be engineered, instead of just proceeding via natural means. Truly dangerous dinosaurs were genetically sterilized. This measure was thought to be a strong safeguard. The sudden increase in UV light introduced the possibility that the precaution could be reversed. Possibility, as we know, is the first step to Murphy's Law at work.

Murphy really outdid himself with this one, though. Imagine a population of intact Tyrannosaurus Rex. They would certainly be very large. Their dietary requirements would be ghastly. In a way, though, this would work against the Tyrannosaurs and for the human race. I don't know that Tyrannosaurus would even take much interest in a human being as food. We're just too small to be worth the trouble to a creature that size. Perhaps if he ran across a dead person, or a very oblivious person who did not get out of the way, he would seize the opportunity. More often, though, people would run away. A fast person is faster than a Tyrannosaurs. A slow person would have a very decent chance of outrunning Tyrannosaurus, given the motivation of a Tyrannosaurus behind him. A small morsel like one of us is much scanter motivation to the Tyrannosaurus. Sure, a sizable population of Tyrannosaurs loose in the world would wreak havoc on buildings an infrastructure, but the people would mostly survive. The Tyrannosaurs, meanwhile, would run through any prey of their own size quite quickly. After that, they would begin to starve.

I think humanity could have waited out Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was our misfortune, then, that it was Utahraptor that got loose, instead.

According to the signage in the park, it was Velociraptor that got loose. This was a lie for the sake of marketing. Velociraptor was an incredibly popular dinosaur, at least in name. Utahraptor was less recognizable. Velociraptor as an animal was not deemed impressive enough to attract an audience, though. The public perception of Velociraptor was an unstoppable killing machine. It was calculated that to reveal it as a kid-sized killing machine would be a disappointment. So, the park created a population of Utahraptor, and put Velociraptor on the sign.

Velociraptor would have changed the world, too. I have little doubt of that. There would have been plenty of prey the right size for him. He would have thrived in the world. As he did so, I think, every child in the world would have been homeschooled until every last Velociraptor was hunted down and killed. No mother is going to send a child into an outdoors overrun by child-size killing machines.

An adult, though, would be pretty safe in an encounter with a single Velociraptor. A whole pack of them would be a different matter, but a whole pack of Velociraptors would likely focus on an animal big enough to feed them all. A person wouldn't qualify.

If Velociraptor is what you get when a cat gets to live out his dreams as a dinosaur, Utahraptor is what you get when a grizzly bear is also a tiger and a rhinoceros at the same time, and all of them get to live out their dreams as a single dinosaur. A man stands no change against Utahraptor without having some serious killing machines of his own at his disposal. People stand no chance of outrunning them, either. So it was troubling when we learned that Utahraptor (still being called Velociraptor, as the charade continued) was suddenly capable of reproducing. It was alarming when we learned that Utahraptor can swim. I'm sure they were cold and miserable swimming in the Antarctic, but nevertheless they washed up on other shores, often alive. The journey had a way of making the living ones very hungry, too.

Utahraptor pretty quickly did what logging had started in the tropical jungles. It came pretty close to cleansing them of all vertebrate life, and in a hurry. They might have been confined there, where the weather is right and the concentration of O₂ is higher.

The second outside factor was global warming. If Utahraptor had remained forever confined to the jungles, global warming would have done only the harm that was there to be done by expanding the jungles. With literally billions of people abandoning first the tropical, and then the subtropical areas, though, the world's forests regained much of their former territory. Now, most of the world has enough oxygen to support all but the largest of dinosaurs. There is no longer a supply of people to support the same populations of them, but other things will take our place in an ecosystem where we were merely plant-eating prey animals anyway.

Seeing these developments, most of those who did not die fled. Some exceptionally enterprising idiots attempted to remain behind and instead adapt by keeping dinosaurs, and using them in place of technology. This was every bit as insane as it sounds, and more. It turns out that life is not an episode of The Flintstones, and dinosaurs are not suitable replacements for public transportation and mining equipment and garbage disposals. The only function dinosaurs serve in human society is cause of death. We are tiny little meat snacks to them. They are death to us. The only thing keeping them close to human society does is to invite a death that comes more quickly.

Whether through death or abandonment, so many once-inhabited areas have been reclaimed by nature, by the oxygen-producing vegetation. I find that I miss a good old-fashioned clear-cut and the poorly-restrained logging industry such things once came to symbolize. Perhaps at some point, the vegetation will consume enough greenhouse gasses to reduce some of the warming and push the dinosaurs back into their old tropical range. I have little hope that I will live to see that day. And of course, I will not live in a place where I might see it happen.

Global warming and the runaway melting of the icecaps have made Antarctica more livable, which was both a fortune and a misfortune to myself and the huge numbers of displaced people suddenly moving in. We were more comfortable–and so were other things. Global warming has, I suppose inevitably, allowed more things to escape the confines of Paleo Playground.

The higher areas are still safe. It's not that dinosaurs can't climb. Some of them can. None of them are really built to do it comfortably, though. Plus, the air thins, and in forestless Antarctica, the available oxygen becomes marginal for megafauna at reasonably low elevations. It is rumored that there are mountains in subarctic and even temperate areas that are still relatively safe.

Communication with them is thoroughly impractical, though. Advancing the study of paleontology was not really a consideration in the creation of Paleo Playground, but one of the things we ended up learning anyway is that there are some dinosaurs that can detect electrical fields. Any sort of transmitting device tends to attract them. Things like phone lines and cell towers are basically bait. Making a phone call would be foolhardy if it brought a deadly animal into camp. The main practical problem, though, is that a phone call would have to pass through miles of uninhabited territory, where confused dinosaurs will simply destroy towers and lines on accident or out of frustration. This ends the call just as effectively.

In today's world, if you want to get data to someone, you put it on some solid state memory, and hand it to the person. If you want to archive data for the distant future, you seal up the memory real well and then bury it. We are fortunate enough to have some real hardy solid-state memory now. Vibrations and impacts to the ground above are not a problem, which is a nice problem not to have in a world full of animals that impact the ground and create a lot of vibrations.

Having a job is thoroughly impractical, too. It's more like we have lists of competencies, now. For example, I am good with gadgets. This means I am the driver, and a mechanic, and also an assistant to the head cook. This, combined with the fact that I am good at telling stories, also means that I am the storyteller.

It's a good thing I'm good with gadgets. I might be good at making the true stories interesting, and at inventing the fictional ones, but I can't remember the details very well at all. I need working electronic memory, and I can keep it working.

This is also why I am leaving. We would not organize a party for so frivolous a reason as to tell stories, but to trade. We do not grow quite enough food to survive here. It is simply too cold and too dry. We do make nuts and bolts, and they don't rust up here. Things rust out more quickly nearer to the coast, where food actually grows with reasonably little effort, when the tools aren't broken and useless. Whether it were that or any other reason, though, I need to make sure the truck keeps running. If the stoves quit working back home, people will just cook with fire for a couple days. A breakdown on the way through the low areas would be certain death if unrepaired. And since I am going anyway...

Pantsless Planet (Short Story)

Written 11-15-2013,  Updated 12-15-2014

I really don't feel like having pants on right now. That's one of the perks of having your own place...sort of. What I mean to say is that it's only sort of my place. I definitely don't have any pants on. I'm not going dissy yet.  I'd rather not go dissy.  Hopefully writing this will help.

Technically, I'm living in the cooperative multi-governmental Coalition for Intensive Extraterrestrial Research's place. (They insist on pronouncing it like “seer,” obviously.) These crawlers were not cheap, and getting them here was really expensive. They would have been cheaper if they didn't have to hold people, but they would not have been cheap.

The governments, of course, really wanted them to hold people. India wasn't part of the last Coalition, and no Indian has ever landed on another planet. They didn't want to be left out. The US, and a couple of other Coalition nations, put the Coalition on their tax forms as a voluntary contribution. Apparently it's much harder to get voluntary contributions for this sort of thing if no people go, especially in the States.

The engineers justified it to themselves by saying that the presence of an emergency human operator could help save or salvage equipment that would have become disabled or been destroyed otherwise. They also told us that even with all the censors on the exterior of the crawlers, and even with the cameras taking pictures with a dozen different filters, it's possible that a person might see something that would otherwise be missed. They say that humans are better at seeing patterns than almost any kind of human technology. “They” being people in general. I'm sure the Coalition's engineers said it, too, while they were having to build life-support into the crawlers.

So the Coalition is putting me up in the tiny little cabin of this bigger-than-it-had-to-be crawler, and I technically live on government property. Still, I'm a significant fraction of the government presence on this planet. I can see the crawler to the right of me and to the left of me easily. A few hours ago, I could see another on each side if I strained. Still, they don't have a lot of authority over me. They probably don't even speak the same language as me. Even if they do, it's not all that likely that either of them is one of the officers. Even if they are both officers, the radios are only for emergencies. Keeping battery power in reserve on a spacecraft is expensive. Hell, I bet those guys probably aren't wearing any pants right now, either.  There's probably not a man on this planet wearing pants.

They might be, if they're armed forces guys. Those AF guys tend not to think creatively until something goes wrong, and being uncomfortable never counted as something going wrong to AF guys. But most of us are just civilians who passed the tests, and were willing to accept the risks and the inconveniences if it meant getting to hold a non-firing, do-nothing job for most of the rest of our lives. They tested us for vision, to see if we're observant, and to see if we could function on very little sleep. They triple-checked the records to make sure we weren't running out on any dependents. Most importantly, they tested us to see if we can be alone and uncommunicative (except for listening to a disembodied computer voice that refers to us as “human life forms”) for most of a year without forgetting who we are, or where we are, or becoming irrational or destructive–you know, going dissy.

They also scored our handwriting speed, because the most important part of our job is to record our observations, and it turns out that it's more efficient just to send a high-tech pen and a big stack of paper than it is to send any sort of computer with the input systems and batteries it would take to run it. I graded out as “exceptionally overqualified” on handwriting speed, and that's why I can write this.

That and the fact that there isn't much to see. In the briefing, we were told that the areas that we were mostly likely to find life were in the equatorial zone and about three-quarters of the way to the opposite pole. Right now, we're only a little more than halfway to the equator from the near pole. The Coalition would have preferred to start us out on the opposite pole, so that we would reach the hotspots when we were saner and our senses were keener, but it turns out that landing on that pole is somewhat problematic. There are systems to return the data to the ship, and perhaps even rescue the people, without a landing, but landing was obviously necessary to deploy the crawlers.

But to be honest, I really don't know if we're going to find anything or not. I'm not a biologist. They don't send scientists out in these things. Sending a really good scientist would be too big a risk, and sending lesser scientist would kind of defeat the purpose of sending one. The scientists they need are the ones who know what to do with unfamiliar data, the brilliant ones. I do remember ten years ago, when a crew came back from a planet that everyone said looked a lot more promising than this one. Before landing, they sent back pictures of a beautiful green marble. And all they found there was some CO₂ vapor and enough copper to put every hobo back home out of business permanently.

This planet is not considered as promising as the green marble was. We aren't here because it's one of the most promising known planets. It's not. We're here because it's one of three planets we believe are possibilities, that can be reached with the technology we have. Truth be told, almost all its water has drained into the vents in the crust, and we knew that before we got here. The media was billing it as “ancient Mars” when the project was preparing to leave. I imagine the media will wish they'd run a campaign to slowly lower expectations before we return. Then again, who knows? There used to be life on Mars.

What I do know is that if you're reading this account, the project has ended. Either it ended in discovery, and you are one of a billion people reading a wildly successful bestseller, or it ended in disappointment, and you somehow dug this up out of the biography section, which is little-browsed even by the standards of web libraries. I hope we found something. With the money from a bestseller, I could get my own place again, and I wouldn't have to wear any pants if I don't want to.

A Message in a Bottle (Short Story)

You are about to become the most famous, and most infamous, among all of your fellows. You will probably live in interesting times, and be the one to make them interesting. For that, I offer my gravest apologies.

You are probably wondering why this machine works, and how it works. If you are like me, you find the 'why' more interesting.

This is a question to which my answer will probably not be satisfactory. I can say that I wanted very badly for this machine to work. I can say that this machine is part of the universe in a way, and with a completeness, that most other things are not. If the one did not work, the other would not work either. The fact that you understand the machine on some level, and comprehend it to some degree, proves that both work. There are some details I find no benefit to chasing after; were I in your place, this would be one of those.

You may also be wondering who I am. To this, I can provide an answer that may be satisfactory. I have no name, but if you would accept a curriculum vitae–

I am the one who created this machine.

In addition to this machine, I also created a perimeter of receptor-transmitter devices to detect most of the plausible forms of long-distance communication between sentients. This was the easiest part, so I did it first. It is, however, far simpler to allow possibilities than account for them. Thus, there remains a chance that there are fellow sentients somewhere, which were not detected.

If you are like me, you will think this a possibility worth investigating. If you are not like me...then you must be especially fascinating.

Once the receptor-transmitter devices detected your civilization communicating, the machine would have taken a place in close proximity to your civilization. It would not simply appear to any one or all of you, of course; there is no sense in making this sort of contact with incurious species, one which would not go to some length to investigate the surroundings in its close proximity. Once found, of course, it will do what it does, as it is doing right now, but you know that.

This machine was more difficult, more complex than the detection devices supporting it. This, I made second.

The third part, you must know a little something about, as you have found the machine. The third part is everything else. If you are like me, you would have stories which speculate as to how the physical world, and the life therein, came to be. If everything else worked as I have planned, there might be many, with many stories, who speculate differently, with different stories. In stories, everything that is may have taken the lifetime of lifetimes, or only the space of a breath, to bring into being. Perhaps the storytellers have even speculated as to whether we are nearer the beginning than the end.

If you have such stories, then you are curious, and I would be happy to indulge your curiosity. To build the physical world was exacting, but not arduous. There was first the matter of matter, and of its opposite. It was not so simple to bring one about without the other, and once they were both present, neither wished to remain. You may, perhaps, have been aware of this conundrum; I do not know. The remedy was a very precise combination of dexterity, patience, and clever trickery. I ended up having to do it twice, which might have been frustrating. I suspect, given enough attempts, that I could repeat it again.

With the gross hardware in place, there remained a lot of what you might call fine tuning. The forces needed to be in balance so that atoms would be stable, and so that complex molecules might form, but then also break down. There needed to be a proper concentration of matter within space, so that matter would gather, and then not be too hot or too cold. The distribution of energy on both large and small scales could not be too homogenous or too volatile. There were many similar problems, characterized by the possibility of extremes and by solutions to be found in the middle of those; it would be tedious to list them all now that you have the idea. The attempt was to create an acceptable set of conditions, the consequence of which would be the eventual arising of intelligent life. The fact that you understand this machine on some level, and comprehend it to some degree, proves the attempt a success. I believe I was fortunate to have accomplished this in only two tries.

I guess, if you wished to speak in simple terms, I created you. It would be fairer to us both to say that I gave you an opportunity to exist, which you have taken. That is how I would prefer you tell it. The way I have designed it, life is just something that passes through water, though I suspect that to you it will seem so much more. It often does to me.

I would also be happy to indulge your curiosity as to your place on the timeline, but I'm afraid that question has no intelligible answer. Neither would the question of how long it took to complete the task I have just described. Before the task was completed, there was no time. Since then, there seems to be nothing but.

I am sure that you have many more questions, both personally and as one of your fellows. Those are of your own choosing, individually and collectively, and I cannot predict what they will be, beyond those I have already answered. As a consequence, I cannot have prepared the machine to address them. Please know that if you find a way to ask me those questions, or to answer them, that I will be almost overcome with pride.

I Remember When There Were Stars (Short Story)

I remember when there were stars.

According to the accepted definition, there were not useful stars in my lifetime. Stories are told of places where stars were beloved most for their visible light. Now, we know that there are other ways to see. Sound can be used to see, at a far lower energy cost than light. Two or even three more generations of us will live in a world with enough air for sound.

The sound will be gone someday. I'm sure the engineers will find something else to replace it. The engineers here are miracle-workers.

Stories are told of a time when stars were beloved for warmth. Warmth also has other sources. We now have a fungal mat that can be used as both food and clothing. It is a true miracle of modern science.

The true importance of stars is to feed the food. I never saw such stars. Nobody living has. I never ate such food. Hardly anyone living has. The wealthy preserved some. The last of it was eaten years ago. I know the flavors of all the fungal mats, and I have tasted some of the cheaper flavored proteins. They serve those at weddings sometimes.

There are stories about some who lived in the time of feeder stars. Some of those names are remembered. There are stories about some who lived in the time of warming stars too. None of those names are remembered.

The oldest stories are of those who said “today's mistakes are tomorrow's misfortunes.” There was a time when that was believed. It is no longer. Our current path might have been delayed for a generation or two if the Contrarian Society had not made their preparations for a heat death. This would have changed the date on which fate will arrive. It would not have changed our fate. The mistake of the Contrarian Society was the greatest of all that are told in our stories. Yesterday's mistakes only scheduled today's misfortunes.

The names from those times are long forgotten. Storage became expensive.

I wish I knew the names from those times. Those stories are my favorite. The mistakes of those times scheduled my fate. I would not have lived to see the end of starlight if the Contrarian Society had been eliminated earlier. I would not have lived at all, had they succeeded.

They will tell stories of the time I live in because of those mistakes. There is little else to pass the time. We marked the passage of time with the darkening when I was young. At one time the darkening was so slow that it was hardly noticed. That's what the stories say. In my youth, every time you turned around there was something else you could no longer see. This went on until nothing could be seen. I find that time does not seem as real without a way to see it. The time can still be marked by the movements of electrons around atoms, but it is hollow time.  It grows ever shorter, but seems not to pass at all.

We will tell stories as long as there is sound. What else is there to do?

There are so many stories here. I cannot tell you any more. The light is expensive, and there is no air between us. I'm lucky to have been able to tell you this one.

They are turning off the transmitters.

There's No Going Back to Madrid (Short Story)

It wouldn't be fair to say that the west didn't notice when they built a robot that could grow rice, but it would be understandable to say so. I know. I lived in the west at the time.

We really did notice, even at the time. I remember. It was my day to go in to the procurement office. I asked the woman in line ahead of me, “did you hear they have a robot that can grow rice now?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I read that. Did you hear about Real Madrid?” And, of course, I did hear about Real Madrid. It was on the second autoscroll screen of the WNN feed, the one right before robots and rice. It would, of course, be fair to say that the west largely failed to realize the significance of the event, and the significance of rice in general. In the west, rice was something that some people ate some of the time, and plenty of other things that people ate some of the time were already being carried from field to market in mechanized hands. There were parts of the world where the wealthy either ate rice out of love or avoided it out of a desire to eat anything else, and everyone else ate rice because of the availability of rice and the impracticality of eating anything else. It would hardly be unfair to say that in some places, rice was life.

But in the west, life went on just as it had the day before, and just as it would the day after.

Even where people apprehended the significance of the event, though, they failed to comprehend it. Sure, the governments understood that rice was wages, that rice was work, and that people would need something to eat and something to do. The governments felt themselves in an unenviable but nevertheless negotiable position. They could either bring the owners of robots, their own sources of funding, under at least enough control to fund the proverbial bread and circuses, or they could face imminent overthrow at the very best. To them, I'm sure, the choice seemed obvious.

What was not obvious to those in government at the time was the significance of a robot that could grow rice, in the field of robotics. It turns out that it takes a different kind of robot to grow rice than it does to grow anything else. Most of the agricultural drones in service at the time were products of a series of modifications of earlier drones with the same purpose, and before that, of still earlier drones that had serviced another, similar crop. They invented a wheat robot, and that soon spawned a robot for rye, sorghum, and pretty much every other grain you can think of–other than rice. They invented a potato drone, and within a year they had one for carrots, sweet potatoes, yams and manioc. Once they introduced the first mechanical bean farmer, it wasn't long before he was growing everything from white chili to frijoles negros. Corn was kind of an odd case, but corn was fuel, and fuel was on the rise, so the top three companies all fixed a fruit-picking attachment to a grain chassis, and it wasn't long before one of them tinkered with the hardware enough that it worked. They had a financial incentive to do so. There were still problems with the design, but in the meantime, the machine was fast enough to make up for it.

The difference between rice and virtually every other crop in the world was that with rice, faster was rarely an improvement. The transition from harvest to planting had to be fast, to squeeze another crop into the season, but people had done that for generations enough to get pretty good at it. While robots are by their nature neither patient nor impatient, all previous robots had been programmed in such a way as to settle upon the early, simple solution, the one that would get the job done. A robot to farm rice would need to constantly search for optimum solutions to problems, and not to settle, but to keep inventing more solutions, to be worthwhile; if it didn't, savings on the human labor that would were negated by a sharp reduction in yields.

Another difference between growing rice and growing anything else was the sheer labor involved. Generally, most of the actual energy put into a growing crop comes from the sky, in the form of sun and storm systems. This was also true in the case of rice, but the ratio was quite a bit different, and far more labor-intensive. This meant that in addition to the great problem of creating robots that would think differently and find the most effective solution, executing those most effective solutions required a robot that could perform many different tasks in the same area. This also meant that the robots had to be in the fields far more frequently. Though these were not the groundbreaking challenges that the programming was, they were significant problems in their own right. The first attempts were made by simply adding different attachments to the robot, but so many of them yielded a clumsy robot that had a tendency to ruin crops. The second attempt was made by engineering a fleet of robots, each of which was capable of executing a few tasks. These had a tendency to get in each other's way and even undo each other's work. Attempts were made to remedy this by creating more substantial monitoring and coordination systems, but even this was a partial solution at best. The robots could communicate efficiently, but this problem required them to communicate creatively.

It was not long before the governors and business administrators found that once robots could grow rice, they could do pretty much anything else, including govern and administrate. The governors and administrators then very quickly found that they, too, were out of a job. This development ushered in a new world of machines executing machine-made decisions, all fueled by machine-grown crops, and did so almost overnight.

The only problem then was all of these humans taking up space and eating perfectly good biofuels. Had the machines simply deemed us unnecessary, that would have been one thing, but we were treated as being detrimental. That was...best not described.

The holdouts were already in the mountains, which the robots determined they did not need–for the moment anyway. As a unique type of environment that comprised such a small fraction of the surface of the earth, mountains presented an engineering investment with an underwhelming return. The holdouts there, and the survivors who reached them, soon learned to adjust to a lifestyle supplemented only by machines that didn't think for themselves.

It was harder than it sounds to someone who wasn't there. Automobiles were set back well over a hundred years, and their makers sent back to the drawing board. Heck, all but the very cheapest brands of electric shavers had to be jettisoned. The hillfolk, who had stories of a time when automobiles didn't have computers in them, and pined for such times, proved remarkably proficient at keeping these new machines running. We were lucky that they had lived in the hills in the first place, lucky to have so many of them among our number.

Still, there were challenges the mountain people weren't up to. Once the machines decided that humans posed at least some threat should they decide to take up arms in an effort to reclaim what was once their world (and it would be unfair to say this wasn't discussed), they began preparing to take the war to us. At that point, the only viable option was flight. We had the foresight to preserve the means of re-creating the tunneling spacecraft that had been used to survey extrasolar planets. This had been seen as a last-ditch option best saved for a moment of true desperation, because the challenge of navigating one of those without a computer...it would be fairer to say that we didn't navigate at all. There were dark decades wasted out in the empty black, and if it's still there, the little surprise we left behind Saturn would not be so little anymore.

I don't know if it's still there or not, and it would be honest to say that no one plans on looking.

I suspect that we're afraid of our own reactions to what we would find. Many among us might find ourselves disappointed if the black hole has resealed itself, or joyful that it remains. I would like to say that, mostly, there are more important things to be done on our new world, where we are aided only by machines that cannot think

And nobody–not one person–eats rice.