Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 23

Petrolea 1d

Back, First

“If you directed that Gob to attack us, you are putting in danger the lives of yourselves and others,” Victor spoke into whatever feeds back to Earth’s media-sphere the strikers had running. “Now please – Al-Waheed, are you going to get rid of that Gob or what?”

“I’m trying, sir.” The biologist’s tame Punisher spread four wings like helicopter rotors and launched itself. Its body shifted, streamlining as the factors that made up its skin and muscles tightened their grip on each other. A device like an eagle-taloned harpoon swung into position.

The Punisher’s helicopter blades sprayed gasoline rain as it fired its claw into the hungry Gob-swarm. Factors scattered, but the talons closed around the walnut-sized behavioral-somatic processors at the swarm’s core. Static swept the comms net as the Punisher hacked into the Gob’s brain. As if hypnotized, the factors emerged from their hiding places and marched onto the predator, adding themselves to its own swarm. The creature’s silhouette visibly swelled.

The Gob died, but not before Victor saw another squid-like flash, and another. The harvester rang with the impacts of more flying parasites. Facrots flowed over the harvester, too many for the Punisher or even Victor’s gauntlets to deal with.

“Stop attacking us!” Victor winced at the shrill register of his voice. There were larger creatures down there now, scuttling up from the mud to gnaw apart his vehicle. Something like a metal caterpillar with dragonfly wings wrapped around his wrist, but the slave-factors in Victor’s gauntlet severed a couple of the creature’s legs before Victor hurled it away.

“You’re attracting them,” came Merchant’s voice over the electronic death scream of the mechanoid. “Listen to me, Toledo. You must leave immediately before something worse comes.”

Victor scraped bits caterpillar off his gauntlet, fighting to bring his voice back down. “Are you threatening us, Dr. Merchant?”

“No, you ass. The jungle’s more dangerous than it’s ever been, and we’re a crowd of humans with floodlights making a bloody ruckus in it!”

Certainty trickled down Victor’s back, cold and viscous as crude oil: someone had screwed up here, and it was probably him. His ears pricked, as if that would do any good in his suit. And anyway that vibration wasn’t coming from his helmet speakers. It tunneled up from his feet. A low rumble, almost like the harvester’s engine. Except the harvester wasn’t moving.

They had to get out of here. “The faster you cooperate,” said Victor, “the faster we’re all back safe in Xanadu Base.”

Next

Petrolea 1c

Back, First

Outlined in the slick grays of sonar imaging, the fat cylindrical trunks of the Tanker Trees bulked in the background, each mechanical “plant” a self-assembling store of hydrocarbon energy big enough to keep a space station running for a week.

Titan, with its chemical resources, low gravity and outer-system real estate, would have been a tempting target for exploitation even without the famous photos taken by the Huygens probe in 2004. Cryovolcanoes capped with forests. Iron trees spreading windmill leaves over plains of methane snow. Robotic predators wading through lakes of liquid methane, buzz-saw mouths agape. The impossible mass of a Leviathan in flight. The fiery battles of mating Dragons.

The entire ecosystem had evolved, apparently, to condense Titan’s hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere into petrochemicals. Why shouldn’t humans step in and claim those resources?

Now, not even two years since Xanadu had become the first permanent base on Titan, the whole plan was falling apart.

“We’re protesting the wholesale destruction of yet another ecosystem,” said Dr. Merchant. “Now, listen to me, Toledo, you have to turn about and leave right away.”

Victor had lost focus, given her the chance to make one of her speeches. He knew how she’d look on the cameras that she had undoubtedly set up to document her great statement. The shining heroine making her stand in the gasoline rain, surrounded by hostile jungle and vile corporate shills like Victor.

“Look,” he said, “Al-Onazy says he’s going to give you what you want. Caps on harvesting, redrawn logging routes so we don’t disturb the local environment too much. But we must continue harvesting.”

“You are not the only thing harvesting out here, Mr. Toledo.”

Victor didn’t parse that sentence. Anyway his patience was gone. “Get your people up on my vehicle. Al-Onazy is willing to negotiate, but not–“

Something flashed through the darkness and Al-Waheed shouted, “Gob-swarm!”

The Gob’s arrowhead shape barely had time to register before the flying mechanoid burst into a cloud of thumbnail-sized wafers. These pattered against the bumper of the harvester and stuck there, sprouted antennae and scuttling legs, and revealed themselves as miniature Van Neumann robots. What the biologists called “factors.”

The factors scurried like ants, searching for metals and plastics to carve out and make into more little robots. Surely that chewing noise was in Victor’s imagination, not his earphones.

Next

Interchange’s ARC is up on Netgalley

If you use Netgalley, here’s your chance to read Interchange before the official release date in July.

Click on that thing ^

I’d be most grateful if you left a review. It’s the only way I’ll learn

Petrolea 1b

Back, First

Victor slowed the harvester, crunching over whatever metallic weeds had self-assembled since the last time this road had been used.

“Where are their lights?” he asked. “Are the strikers just waiting for us in the dark?”

“Of course, they are,” said Al-Waheed.

Why wasn’t he running this mission? Victor’s place in the hierarchy had more to do with his driver’s certification than his skills in leadership or wilderness survival, and he’d obviously just asked a stupid question. Why would the strikers keep their lights off? Oh. “Because lights would attract mechanoids?” he asked.

“You got it, boss,” said Al-Waheed. “Even Merchant and her tree-huggers don’t love the critters that much.”

“All right. Switching to global address frequencies.” Victor brought the harvester to a grumbling halt and called up an eye-movement menu in his visor, scrolled through options…

Al-Waheed cleared his throat. “Maybe switch on your sonar?”

“Uh, right.” That was another finicky eye-menu. The software was designed for command by wrist-mounted keyboard, but Victor’s left wrist was occupied by his handshake gauntlet.

“Dr. Merchant, if you’re listening,” Victor raised his voice, as if that might give his signal more power. “Stop this nonsense.”

“Nonsense?” The answering voice was crackly, faint with distance and interference from jungle life, but the behavioral biologist’s glossy accent was unmistakable. “You bloody fool, you drove the harvester out here to arrest us?”

She spoke so quickly. Victor concentrated, making sure he understood her and his response was grammatically correct English. “Nobody will arrest you, Dr. Merchant,” he said. “But you and your people are not safe out here.”

“Neither are you,” she said. “Who is this?”

“Victor,” said Victor. “Victor Toledo, I–“

“Damn it, Toledo, why did they send you out here in that thing?”

He bristled. “The resources we extract with these harvesters, they go into your paychecks as well, you know.” Victor stood, leaning forward, breathing hard as his suit’s software painted his visor with sonar and infrared. “I don’t understand it! Why do you protest like this?”

Ah. There they were. The strikers stood hand in hand, in a human chain stretched across the road into the forest.

Next

Petrolea 1a

Petrolea

Chapter 1

It was raining gasoline on Titan.

Victor Toledo had his wipers on, but they didn’t do much except smear the petrochemicals over the visor of his environment suit.

Visibility: 3 meters

Outside temperature: -180 C

Suit batteries: full

O2 tanks: full

Signal strength: excellent

Handshake gauntlet status: stand by

Beyond the glowing readouts projected onto the inside of his visor, Victor could just make out the edges of the harvester he rode, defined by the endless churning movement of the caterpillar treads. Ahead, beyond the bumper of the huge forestry machine, he could see nothing but falling fuel.

The access road and the jungle beyond were invisible, but every few minutes, the glassy vane of a Windmill Tree sliced the curtain of rain. Mechanoids scurried like clockwork spiders. The feral robots froze as the harvester passed, tracking the machine with hungry sensors.

A human figure, clumsy and bulbous in his environment suit, swam out of the rain. Al-Waheed, one of the few biologists who hadn’t joined the strike. He planted his feet and stuck up his left hand to signal Victor. His right arm stuck out in front of him, providing a roost for his tame Punisher. The eagle-sized mechanoid hunched in the rain, a heap of dripping iron pinions and glowing red headlights.

“They’re close,” said the biologist over the comms net. Victor didn’t know whether “they” meant the striking scientists and engineers or the Tanker trees those strikers were risking their lives trying to protect. Both, he supposed.

Next

February Newsletter: Storytelling and worldbuilding

So there I was, leaned back in my IKEA poäng, road noises and children’s laughter streaming through the little window in my attic study. I gesturing at the phone clipped to its wobbly stand, trying to ignore my own image and its distracting double chin (it’s just the low angle!). I tugged on my necklace, which is something I only do when I’m in a call. And I had my little notebook open in my hand, with its pencil cut down small enough to fit through its spiral binding. I was talking to  Paul.

For some reason, I have a lot of friends named Paul. This one is Paul Lefevre-Venet, who…how do I even talk about this guy? Here’s his instagram, if that helps. His studio’s instagram?

Paul is one of those people who reveal some fascinating aspect of their personal history every time you talk to them. “Well, it’s like when I was a pilot, you know?” or “When you’re coming home from a day of catching lobsters, and the setting sun shines on the heads of the seals…” or “War is impersonal.” And that’s just scratching the surface. Stories on top of stories.

I’d ask Paul, like, “how was your week?” And he’d tell me about the cats who hang around two old men in the shopping arcade where he lives, their constant conversation both a part of everyone’s life and a reflection of it. Paul told me about his father, who used to take him to the barber so he could listen to how men talked. He said “you know how when you ask an old man a question, he gives you a story instead of an answer?” Maybe he was feeling self-conscious.

I think I responded with something like “but I like your stories!” Then, after we were done talking, I ran races outside with my kids. I made myself coffee and kissed Pavlina as we brushed past each other. I had my class, and when I and my students successfully our stories, we became closer. I went to pick up my daughter’s package from the post office, and when the lady there tried to give me a hard time for collecting someone else’s mail, I said, “but she’s just five years old.”

“Five years old? Oh, she’s a sweet little girl!” said the mail lady. “I thought your daughter was an adult.”

“Do I look that old?” I smiled when I said it, and she smiled back and gave me the package. I felt as if Paul was standing behind me. It was just like one of his stories. It is this sort of world his stories build.

I ought to be a story teller. I am, after all, an author. But until recently, I didn’t know how to tell stories outside of my work. “Deinonychus hunted in packs,” I’d say. Or, “I didn’t like that book.”

But what if instead I said, “there I was, cleaning clay off this Tenontosaurus vertebra, my fingertips all gritty with dried glue, and I come across this sharp little black tooth, about the size of your pinkie nail.” Or. “There I was, trying not to think about problems in my life, and this story I’m reading just plows into a wall. ‘Is this supposed to be the end? This howl of hopeless frustration? This isn’t a story, it’s fancy complaining!’ I know my anger is just another attempt to distract myself from my real problems, but that doesn’t make me less mad.”

Maybe I’ll tell the ending of that second story later. Maybe you even want to hear the one about the Tenontosaurus. Tell me, what stories do you want to hear from me? I’ll try to write them.

In any case, I’m going answer more questions with stories from now on. Telling a story forces you to stop hiding behind abstractions. It makes you put more effort into understanding what happened to you, and who it is who you’re talking to. You’re kinder and more generous, specific and vulnerable.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if it was stories that made us real?

Well. In other news:

I posted two short stories this month: a piece of “aspirational hard SF” where I think about what Sofia might look like in 30 years*, and the flash fic I wrote for an exoplanet demographics conference.

The Centuries Unlimited is grinding through its zeta(!) version. But now I’m finding myself deleting sections, adding them back in, and deleting them again, which is a sign that it’s finally done. Let’s hope my agent agrees.

And I finished the first draft of “Levski’s Boots!” I’m really rather proud of it. It has some fun alternate history in it, as well as real work in figuring out how to make decisions for the right reasons (even if they don’t turn out to be the right decisions). I’ll hopefully have it ready for beta-readers in the next two weeks or so, so if you want to critique “Levski’s Boots,” please tell me. 

And here’s what I liked this month:

“Love is a Bonus Book,” Studio Dragon’s first attempt to write “It’s Okay to Not be Okay.” “Okay” is way better (it’s male love interest has a personality, for one thing), but there are moments in “Bonus Book” that really shine. Oh, the existential angst of the shredding machine!

I discovered Oranges by Lawrence, Appalachian Wine by Eleventyseven, and On the Outside by Gentri. And I’ve been singing Into the West a lot in my head.

Then there’s Jingo by Terry Pratchett – I don’t think I’d read this since high school. I picked it back up to inspire me for “Levski’s Boots,” and boy did it ever! The geo-politics, the meditations on seizing opportunity, and the terror of what might have been. Exactly what I’ve been writing. A little bit what I’ve been living, too.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni – It was written as an object lesson in teambuilding, and this story does teach a good series of lessons. I especially like how we get into the heads of people having an argument. None of them is perfect, none of them thinks they’re in the wrong, and they all want the same thing. So why don’t they work together? It’s a very interesting problem.

Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan – A mummified body is found on the moon. It’s human, but carbon-dated to 50,000 years ago. So what gives? The book follows both the story of the scientists who unravel the mystery of Charlie the Moon Mummy, and the story of Charlie’s own life as it’s pieced together. The science fiction is mostly in that second part, but the first part has some real scientific process and just people being people.

Oscar Wilde: Collected Stories by Oscar Wilde –  “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” and “The Canterville Ghost” especially are funny, ridiculous, and more compassionate than tragic. Oscar Wilde knew how people worked, and he forgave them for it.

The Oracle Year by Charles Soule – I was disappointed in this one. The writing is good and the premise is interesting (the main character has a list of predictions that all come true) but since we never find out where those predictions came from, who created them, how, and why, the story falls flat. It’s just people reacting to an arbitrary crisis.

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen – The thoughts you think effect your life according to their nature. If you want a good life, think good thoughts. And that’s it, repeated over and over in different words. I agree with the message, but I prefer The Book of Joy, which digs deeper into a wider range of advice, and backs up the advice with personal experiences. Stories, again.

The Brain Fog Fix by Dr. Mike Dow –  There are good lists here of more and less healthy food, and a decent hypothesis about how we can promote our mental health by eating the chemical precursors of neurotransmitters. However, Dr. Dow confuses correlation for causation and often stoops to scaring the reader. I finished the book, but it made me feel like I wasn’t enough.

Ruins by Orson Scott Card –  A solid piece of work. I liked the premise (hyperspace anomaly duplicates a single colony ship, which lands on the same planet fourteen times), and I really liked the characters struggling with self-transformation in a team. What sort of people must they become in order to effectively work together?

Imperium by Robert Harris – A calm read, but with just enough tension to pull you forward. There are some fairly deep meditations on how to be a good person in a bad society, and what good that does.

That’s all for this months. Let’s hope for some smooth sailing in March. See you then.

*This is the first fiction I wrote in Bulgarian, by the way. The English version is actually a translation.

 

Well, Boom

Energy curdled back into mass as the ship translated out of light speed. After a pause for the crew to get used to experiencing time again, the ship’s instruments extended.

From the crew’s perspective, they’d finished an extensive survey of this part of space just a moment ago. For this part of space, however, 600 years had passed, so it was important to make sure nothing had changed.

Something had.

“It used to be a star like the sun,” explained the astrophysicist, whose name was Gaviria. “It had a family of planets ranging in size from a little larger than Earth to a little smaller than Neptune, all of them orbiting closer than the orbit of Jupiter.”

Marletta, the astrophysicist, spoke over Gaviria in his excitement. “So far, so similar to many other star systems. Really, it’s closer to the galaxy’s standard average than the Solar System.”

“Or it was when we translated to light,” said Gaviria.

“But?” asked Zhang.

Once a biochemist, Zhang had recently been elected to the post of “Social Coordinator,” or as he called himself, “cat herder.”

“Its planets have shrunk,” said Gaviria.

“Huh.” Zhang wondered why he was having this conversation. Aha. There it was. “You want me to authorize an away team.”

In free fall as he was, Marletta could not jump up and down with excitement. The best he could do was anchor himself to a hand-rail and vibrate in place. “It’s close. It’s super close!”

Zhang looked at Gaviria, who said, “Point nine eight light years.”

“Would a two-year-ship-time trip fit our flight plan?” Zhang’s question was directed at the ship’s computer, which cleared the mission. Soon, the three of them were packed and in their landing pod, which the ship translated into light. The team was away.

***

After either a year or no time at all, the landing pod re-materialized above a planet. Zhang, Marletta, and Gaviria watched the hazy, blue-white ball flicker in their portholes. As their pod translated itself into a safe landing trajectory, the planet vanished and reappeared, changing position and orientation. It grew closer.

Now, the planet filled all the portholes on one side of the pod. The diamond light of its home star limned its upper edge. Now, that light was tinged red by atmosphere, and the edge had become the horizon. The horizon developed mountains. Finally, the pod settled, the planet became the ground, and Gaviria, Marletta, and Zhang walked out onto it.

Zhang hopped experimentally, feeling his suit flex under the extra gee. He couldn’t smell anything except his own canned air, but his mics picked up the sound of running water, wind over rocks, and a distant bass pulse that might be surf.

They’d touched down on a hill overlooking a floodplain, where a river flowed into an ocean. The sun rose above the mountains on the other side of the plain, casting pink-yellow light onto clouds, folded rocks, and the forest growing out of the river.

The plants, if they were plants, had no leaves, branches or trunks. The green, blunt-nosed cones simply sat there, their roots – if they had roots – invisible under the water.

They might still prove to be some strange kind of geology, but Zhang allowed himself to take a leap of faith, and sighed, “Life.”

Part of the reason Zhang had accepted the post of cat herder was that there wasn’t usually much call for a biochemist. It wasn’t the first extraterrestrial biosphere that the Von Neumann Fleet had discovered, but it was a first for his individual ship.

“Samples samples aha,” Gaviria hummed to herself. She headed for a cone-plant growing in a nearby stream.

Marletta looked out over the blue ocean and green floodplain. “Life how? Six hundred years ago, this place was a sub-Neptune.”

“It’s much closer to its star than our Neptune,” said Zhang. “Right?”

Marletta flapped his hands. “And with a denser core. And not as close as Earth…really, it was intermediate between Earth and Neptune.”

“Which is unusual?”

“Well, yes. Usually you either have a terrestrial planet like Earth: a secondary atmosphere out-gassed from the rock.” Marletta held his hands apart, as if measuring a grapefruit. “Or,” He spread his hands out to the diameter of a beach ball.  “Or, you get a gas giant like Neptune, with an envelope of hydrogen and helium gathered out of the primordial matter that built its star. Those light gasses spread out farther, so the planet looks bigger from space.” He moved his palms inward, the volume between them now the size of basketball. “But then over time, heat from the planet and the star would have blown that primordial atmosphere away. That’s why we assumed that the intermediate diameters, like the one-point-five Earth diameter this planet used to have, were so rare.”

“Rarer now!” said Gaviria. She chipped away at the green cone-plant with her multi-tool. The surface of the organism was as hard as the heat shielding of their landing pod. “Since we left Earth, every planet in this system has shrunk down.”

Zhang watched Gaviria work. “And in only six hundred years,” he mused. “I’m assuming that’s much faster than any stellar or geological process could account for.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Gaviria.

But Zhang didn’t have to line up his evidence for a review board. He was a cat herder now, and he could jump to whatever he wanted. “Marletta, did the observations we made from Earth indicate oxygen in this planet’s atmosphere?”

“Well, we don’t know,” said Marletta. “We never recorded any absorption spectra through the original atmosphere. All we have are the transit and radial velocity data that told us the size and mass of this system’s planets. But…” His brain caught up with his mouth.

On Earth, Marletta would have spun around to face Gaviria and her cone-plant. In two gees, he wobbled like a penguin, but eventually got himself turned in the right direction. “You mean photosynthesis?”

“How much longer?” Zhang asked Gaviria. His logic was leading him into uncomfortable places.

Gaviria gave her cone-plant another whack with her multitool, which didn’t even scratch the surface. “Just let me get my sample. It’s not going to go off right now, just because we’re talking about it.”

“‘Go off,'” Zhang repeated.

Marletta thought out loud. “Water and carbon dioxide go in, oxygen and carbohydrates come out. O2 gas rises to mix with the H2, and now every time there’s a bolt of lightning or other spark…”

“Well,” said Gaviria, “boom.”

Marletta swore in English, and Zhang made a decision.

“We need to go.”

“Stop being paranoid, this all happened hundreds of years ago.” Gaviria scratched at the cone again.

Marletta stopped, his colleague’s assumptions overriding his sense of self-preservation. “Wait. That’s still not fast enough. The entire atmosphere couldn’t have, uh, explosively oxidized in only six hundred years.”

Zhang answered the implied question. “There must have been biological processes actively speeding things up. Sequestrating the hydrogen? Controlling the rate of reaction?” He shook his head, remembering he was supposed to be herding these cats. “Let’s go, Gaviria. We can print out better tools on the pod.” After a light-speed jump into deep space, he added silently.

“I suppose so,” Gaviria reluctantly put away her multitool and hoisted herself out of the stream.

Marletta couldn’t snap his fingers in his suit, but he tried. “And it didn’t just happen on this planet, did it? Every planet in the system lost its hydrogen atmosphere within the same six-hundred-year window!”

“Panspermia!” crowed Gaviria from the bank.

Zhang groaned because he had always hated the idea of panspermia. Also, because steam was rising from the cone-plant behind his geologist.

***

It was a good thing, they decided later, that Gaviria hadn’t been able to crack the ablative shielding on the cone-plant. If she had, it could well have exploded.

As it was, though, the plant only launched.

Back in the safety of their pod, the three humans watched as the green, ceramic-shelled organism lifted into the sky on its pillar of fire, and began its mission to spread life to other stars.

 

 

This story was inspired by William Misener’s “To Cool is to Keep: Residual H/He Atmospheres of Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes.” Thanks go out to him and everyone at the 2020 NASA Exoplanet Science Institutes Exoplanet Demographics conference.

This story was published in “Heavy Metal Jupiters,” the zine of the Exoplanet Demographics 2020 conference.

 

January Newsletter

Well, it’s halfway through February when I’m writing this. At least it’s not next week, right?

The problem is that the biggest thing that happened to me in January isn’t my story. I can’t tell it, but it wouldn’t be honest to say anything else important happened to me in January. So, you get nothing

Tune in next time for more tales of agony and ecstasy. And in the mean time, here’s some other news:

I spent the month working on my submission for the Tales from Alternate Earths 3 anthology. It’ll be called “Levski’s Boots,” and it’s the most difficult thing I’ve written so far. Here’s the playlist

I started putting up short stories on the website again. In January there were three: an experiment with aspirational fiction, an exploration of the potential of haunted houses as a source of clean energy, and my understanding of general relativity (as an ill-conceived marketing gimmick). Enjoy!

And of course, Interchange is now available for pre-order. This is the sequel to Junction, in which Anne and Daisuke go back to that planet to poke more alien beasts and work through their issues. Tell me if you want to write a review and I’ll put your name down for an eARC.

The launch is July 22, so I’ll be planning for that. I’ve got a podcast appearance lined up and I might be part of programming at Flights of Foundry, and of course there will be a virtual launch party like the one I did for First Knife. Other than that…do any of you have any ideas about how I can tell people about my new book?

And without further ado, stuff I liked in January:

How to Build Meaningful Relationships through Conversations by Carol Ann Lloyd – A good general introduction, referencing a lot of Stephen Covey. As usual with these things, the best part was the stories about people. I didn’t need the Shakespeare references.

Caesar’s Bicycle by John Barnes – As I liked the timeline wars books, the flaws in the premise were beginning to get hard to ignore. So this is a fitting conclusion to the series. A little lighter on the shoot-em-up (for good, character-psychology reasons) and heavier on the “so this is life, huh?” philosophical moments. Maybe it was just my life when I read the book, but I appreciated the many times when the characters have to shrug and say “welp, that didn’t work.” There’s an especially good scene on a hot air balloon. I would have liked a bit more gee-whiz technology, though.

The Mortal Passage Trilogy by Roger Williams – This series is explicitly set up as scifi stories in which there is no strong AI, superluminal flight, or alien life. Science fiction, but not speculative fiction, you might say. The result is a more melancholy version of I am Bob. It’s got its moments.

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubinstein – The true story about post-communism Hungary’s most successful bank robber. I think it captures the gonzo spirit of the transition period (at least when I told my wife about it, she says “yup, that’s what it was like”) and if you had a cast of characters this colorful in fiction, nobody would believe it. It dragged a bit toward the end, though. Real life doesn’t give us a clean three-act story. And the authorial voice was a bit too much “isn’t eastern Europe wacky?”

Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold – This was a compilation of excellent short stories tied together by a framing story that was actually pretty good too. “Labyrinth” is cute, “The Mountains of Mourning” is heart-piecing, and “Borders of Infinity” itself is the best metaphor I have seen for the human condition.

 

30y+

This Thirty Years Plus story is inspired by Joanne Rixon’s op-ed in the Tacoma News Tribune. I encourage you to write your own.

2050

The year is 2050 and a storm washes Sloveykov Square. Rain curtains hide buildings of concrete, glass, and transverse laminated timber. Also invisible is the apartment of Yulia Raymundo Smirnova.

From the metro station “St. st. Cyril and Methodius” – still sunny – Yulia watches the lightning right above her home and considers her next move.

Some people raise umbrellas or wave at ground taxis. Others descend back into the underpass or change their jackets into temporary shelters to await the resumption of flying services. The inflated tents of smart material much resemble those of the protestors in front of the National Assembly. They want the right for single-family homes to be built within the municipality of Sofia. In Yulia’s opinion, they won’t get it. That’s why she’s wondering whether to move to the countryside.

And why not? Yulia thinks while her feet carry her down into the underpass. Her husband already works from home, and many children attend online schools. Isn’t a private garden nicer than a municipal one? That’s the opinion of most of Yulia’s friends.

By habit she buys a newspaper, which she pays for with a tap of her wooden bank card. Her parents still use their smartphones for paying, reading, and everything else, but younger people want one gadget for one task. And even better if it’s made of bio materials.
Invisible circuits in the clothes of Yulia and the salesman record the transaction and she climbs the stairs to Knyazheska Garden. Around it sigh the electric and hydrogen cars of the great carbon-neutral traffic jam of the mid-21st century.

Expensive private cars get in the way of trolleys and cargo vans, but the driverless vehicles do not honk their horns. The cyclists are much louder. They don’t give a damn what’s pouring from the heavens – neither rain nor snow. They would ride merrily shouting through a rain of flaming tar, at least according to them.

The sycamores tremble over Levski street. The drones and swifts return to their nests under eaves and old solar panels. The monsoon continues as Yulia reads of Kaliningrad and the price of Arabian ammonia. Biomass energy with or without carbon dioxide capture? This month, the American scandal is “Neuralgate.” Taxes on parking in Sofia and subsidies for home hydrogen batteries will rise.

All of this changes the weather, but not all at once.

The first drops of today’s storm fall on the newspaper, which begins to transform into biodegradable mulch. Yulia lets it run between her fingers, to where it will nourish tomorrow’s grass.

Yulia stands. She will go home on foot. If she walks slowly, the rain might stop. Or else she might just get more wet. Well, alright. She’s realized that she loves to walk through her city in the rain.

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Годината е 2050 и буря мие Площад Словейков. Дъждените завеси крият сгради на бетон, стъкло, и напречен ламиниран дървен материал. Също невидим е апартамента на Юлия Раймундо Смирнова.

От метростанция “Св. св. Кирил и Методий” – още слънчевна – Юлия гледа светкавицата чак над дома й и счита за следващия си ход.

Едни хора вдигат чадари или махат към земните таксита. Други спускат се пак в подлеса или сменят якетата си в временните приюти за да чакат възобновяването на летящите услуги. Надуваемите палатки на умна материя много приличат тези от протестиращите пред народното събрание. Те искат правото да се стройят еднофамилни къщи в общината в София. Според Юлия няма да го спечелят. За това се чуди тя дали да се премести в провинцията.

И защо не? Юлиа мисли докато краката си я носят долу в подлеса. Мъжът й вече работи от вкъщи, и много деца посещават онлайн училищета. Собствената градина не ли е по-хубаво от обществената? Така е мнението на повече от приятели на Юлия.

По навик тя купи вестник, за който плати с едно потупване от дървената й банковна карта. Нейните родители ощте изполвате смартофоните си за плащане, четене, и всичко друго, но по-млади хора искат едно джадже за една задача. И все по-добре е то ако е направено от био материали.

Невидими схеми в дрехите на Юлия и продавача запишете продажбата и тя качва стълбите към Княжеска Градина. Около я се въздишат електрическите и водородните автомобили на якото въглерод-неутрално задръстване на средно-21ия век.

Скупи лични коли пречат тролеи и товарни микробуси, но безшофюрните превозни средства не бибипкат клаксони. Много по шумни са велосипедистите. Не тях пука какво полее от небесата – нито дъжд, нито сняг. Би карали весело викайки през един дъжд на пламтящ катран, поне според тях.

Чинарите треперят над ул. Левски. Дроновете и бързолетите тръгват в гнездите си под стрехи и стари слънчеви панели. Мусонът продължи като Юлия чете за Калининград и цената на арабски амоняк. Биомасна енергиа със или без съхранението на въглероден диоксид? Този месец, американският скандал е “Неврогейт.” Данъци за паркинг в София и субсидии за домашни водародни акумулатори ще се вдигнат.

Всички от това променява времето, но не все веднага.

Първите капки на днешнията бурия падне на вестника, който започне да се трансформира в биоразрадим мулч. Юлия дава му да изтече между пръстите й, към където той ще подхранва утрешната тревата.

Юлия застава. Ще тръгва са на пеша. Ако ходи бавно, дъждът може да се спре. Иначе може само тя да стана по-мокра. Ей добре. Осъзнала е че обича да разхожда из града си под дъжда.

 

The Event Horizon

The crowd didn’t seem to be violent, at least. They weren’t holding up signs or chanting slogans. They didn’t even seem to be talking much with each other. They just ambled sedately around one of Bruce’s stores, heads bent towards the phones cupped in their palms.
Bruce Devritte, CEO and founder of The Byke Group, stood beside car and watched them. “At least they picked a good day for a riot,” riot.
Hunter Shapiro grunted and shook his head in the way that he thought concealed his impatience. “It’s not just ‘a.’ And it isn’t exactly ‘riot.'”
The word the programmers used was “herd.” That word would inevitably leak out of their internal communication and cause a PR stink, but Bruce had to admit that it was apt.
He squinted out over this suburban parking lot and across the street, toward the back end of the little cluster of commercial buildings. A handful of gray concrete boxes squatted under tangled phone lines: bank, restaurant, Byke authorized retailer. Helium balloons floated over this last, supporting a banner proclaiming “SALES EVENT.” There were probably cars and shrubs and dumpsters over there too, but Bruce couldn’t see them because the herd was in the way.
They were upper-middle-class, white and Asian, all genders, just a bit hipper than the baseline. Byke’s target demographic, in other words. These were the people who had responded so well to the Super-Normal User Experience that Bruce’s first employees had created, back when his company had been called Bicycle for the Mind. These people here were, in other words, his. In all senses of the word! He owned them and he owed them everything.
Mostly they played with their phones as they ambled in small loops, around and around the Byke store. Bruce was reminded of brooding penguins. Was there a collective noun for penguins? Would it go over better with the press than “herd”? He’d have to look into it.
“This is happening all over the country,” Hunter was saying. “It would have been all over the world, too, but we rolled back the update in Asia before most of our users woke up and we’ve never sold well in South America.”
Bruce nodded. Europe, thank God, was still bitterly grappling with last year’s update. By the time Brussels got to this one, the bugs would be worked out.
“Right,” said Bruce. “So, clearly this has something to do with the Sales Event.”
“Yes, and it’s the update we rolled out on midnight before the Sales Event.”
Bruce noticed his CTO had in fact told him that Bruce was wrong, despite his use of the phrase “yes and.” It seemed the communication seminars were not working as intended.
“Obviously it’s something wrong with the update,” said Bruce, and regretted it. He sounded petulant, like he was covering his ass. It wasn’t my fault. It was someone else monkeying with the settings.
That had to be the truth, though, because the basic idea, the concept of Proximity-based Clock speed Adjustment was beautiful. Breathtaking in its elegance.
What you did was, you used GPS data to track how close a Byke device was to a Byke store. Then you very slightly adjusted the clock speed of the phone. The closer you got to a store, the slower time ran. The adjustment affected everything from the device’s clock display to its map to its Augmented Reality apps.
If you set out from your house at 8am and walked at one mile per hour toward a Byke store that was one mile away, you would find yourself arriving at your destination at 8:45. Hurray! You’re making such good time today. Turn around, and you’d find yourself arriving home at 10:00. Oh no! What happened? You should never have walked away from a Byke store.
It was genius. The most perfect example of the philosophy of subconscious manipulation that had carried Bruce and his company so far. Wherever they might be planning to go, people would find their paths gently curving toward the nearest Byke store.
Walking through the door was just a little easier than walking out, and once you were there, why not buy a new subscription plan?
“So what happened?” Bruce demanded. “Some pointy-headed idiot in Sales turned up the scale of the adjustment, didn’t they? Thought they could net more customers from a larger radius.”
Hunter shook his head. He had hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and surveyed the crowd like a ranch hand eyeing his herd for signs of hood-and-mouth. “The adjustment scale is the same as before. We think the problem is synchrony.”
Ugh. Synchrony. That was why PCA only worked in markets with complete Byke saturation. To put it bluntly, people’s phones were lying to them about the time. Usually, the lies canceled out. A trip to and from the nearest Byke store still took two hours, it’s just that that time was sliced differently. Asymmetries did build up, though, especially if the user took long, out-of-town trips.
Differing time zones gave Byke some wiggle room, and you could do real-time search-and-replace for text, image, and voice, but you couldn’t stop people from talking to each other and comparing notes.
Users had begun to notice their clocks didn’t agree.
Their patch for that bug was to add another adjustment that slowed or sped up the clocks of two devices in contact with each other. The update had gone live at 3am this morning, and here Bruce was, looking at the result.
“Everything was fine until morning rush hour,” said Hunter. “A large number of people all left their homes and drove toward the commercial areas where they work.”
“Or in this case, walked,” said Bruce. Traffic in downtown Seattle was never great, but this morning it had been apocalyptic. The streets were blocked, cars and people spilling out from the parking lots of Byke stores.
“The closer they got to a store, the slower their clocks ran, the less distance there seemed to be between them and the store,” Hunter ground on, inexorable. “I mean, assuming a constant velocity. The effect magnified as more people gathered around stores and their phones synced. Eventually, it took zero time to walk in, and infinite time to walk out.”
“Well what the hell does that even mean? Infinite time?”
“What are they seeing on their phones, you mean?” Hunter turned away from his contemplation of the herd and reached into the car. He picked up a new Byke from the seat, pulled his multitool out on its extendable cord, and cut open the packaging. He handed the beveled rectangle of glass to Bruce.
Bruce looked at the Byke until its gaze awareness triggered and the device blushed. Its color shifted from transparent to a pale, rosy orange, like a peach bathed in the light of a Caribbean sunset.
Now in maximal visual contrast to its surroundings, the Byke sighed and warmed against Bruce’s fingers. Colors pulsed as the device identified Bruce and downloaded his baseline and preferences. It brought to mind a contented cat, a sleeping baby. The scent of baking cookies rose from it.
Bruce could almost feel his pupils dilate. God damn but he made a good product!
But the Byke could tell from his knew that Bruce was in the mood for business. Skin conductivity, pulse, and cortisol in his sweat caused its color to shift into a more businesslike blue, and a serious tenor voice spoke from the empty air between Bruce and Hunter.
“Mr. Devitte. Mr. Shapiro, how can I help you?”
“We want to find a good cup of coffee,” said Hunter. The standard test.
“Of course,” said the phone. “Just follow me.”
The Byke matched the color of Bruce’s hand and the asphalt behind it, seeming to turn back into clear crystal. When Bruce lifted it, the phone faithfully reproduced the edge of the parking lot, the buildings, and sky. One of those buildings shone a bit more brightly than the others, its colors warmer, and the scent of coffee spritzed into the air.
A damn good product! No follow-up questions. No, “I’m sorry, did you mean ‘Aged Cupcake Fees?'” It even knew that they would prefer to walk, and didn’t bother to suggest anywhere out of their line of sight.
“Would you like me to call ahead and place your order?” asked the Byke.
“It seems to be working fine,” said Bruce, trusting the device to understand he wasn’t talking to it.
Hunter shook his head. “You’re looking north. That’s a tangent to the Sales Event.”
Best to humor his subordinates. Bruce moved his hand in the direction he supposed must be east. At any rate, toward his store and its herd.
“Huh. That’s weird,” he said. He squinted and the display sharpened and zoomed. That was just what was supposed to happen, but still there was something off.
It was like one of those trick photos where they mess with the tilt depth or focus field or whatever, so that a normal street scene suddenly looks like a clutch of tiny toys. “Some sort of visual distortion?”
“Yes, and there’s a lot of user feedback incorporated into the display,” Hunter said, still not using “yes and” correctly. “The interactive evolutionary computation we mediate through gaze and skin-conductivity…” He lost track of his sentence and started again. “The phone outsources a lot of its graphics processing to the user’s visual cortex.”
What Bruce told investors was that the Byke “builds the picture that you would love most to see. No two people experience the same world, and no two users see exactly the same thing when they look through a Byke.”
That was his company’s whole philosophy. The post-modernists loved the hell out of it.
“You mean it’s hiding something from me,” said Bruce.
“Look away from the phone.”
That was surprisingly difficult, even though Bruce knew all the tricks his devices used to catch and keep their users’ attention. With an effort, he averted his eyes and looked at the real world.
The bank he’d been looking at seemed to leap away and grow explosively at the same time. Bruce jumped, “Jesus!”
“If you were navigating with the Byke, it would seem to take less time to walk closer to the Sales Event,” said Hunter. “The visual distortion – what we’re calling ‘contraction’ – is just the Byke’s graphics processor trying to make its clock agree with the user’s brain. Velocity is space over time, so if it takes you less time to travel a distance at a given speed, that distance must be shorter.”
Bruce digested that. “But not this much less time. This is a way bigger adjustment than anything I ever — .” He was about to expound more on this, but the Byke buzzed in his hand, subtly nudging him to look into it again.
When Bruce did, the bank seemed to jump toward him, tiny, friendly, and inviting.
“And you’re still not looking directly at the Byke store,” Hunter pointed out.
Bruce did not like having his cowardice pointed out like that. Now, taking more comfort in the warmth and vibration of the Byke in his hand than he would like to admit, he slid his view toward the crowd.
In a way, they now looked less crowded. More distant people were smaller, taking up less space. Those closest to the store were so tiny they hovered at the limit of vision. The Byke store itself was just gone, contracted into a black pinprick, its horizon encircled by a minuscule sign: SALES EVENT.
“Huh.”
“They’re trapped, Bruce,” Hunter said. “Their devices’ clock speed is so slow that they feel like it takes an eternity to walk across a parking lot.”
“But it’s just a feeling,” said Bruce. “It doesn’t actually take any more time than usual. Uh, right?”
Another irritating grunt-headshake. “Look away from the store.”
Bruce turned 180 degrees, passing through a fairly normal view of the restaurant and the street. And then a…
A…
The Byke hummed soothingly.
Bruce looked out upon an endless plain of asphalt. A parking lot like a continent receded into an unfathomable distance. There were shrubs there, stretching like redwoods before dumpsters as tall as skyscrapers, under a sky of brick. At a given speed, distances covered in less time must be shorter, so distances covered in more time must be greater.
Bruce stood at the edge of an abyss, the looming, gargantuan outer world pushing him ever further toward his store and its sales event horizon.
The CTO put his hand over Bruce’s eyes and the world sprang back into its normal proportions.
Bruce trembled. Now the buildings and cars looked fake. A projection on a warped screen, hiding the real reality. That vast asphalt plane, that hole in space. The store upon which all perspective lines converged.
“The store,” whispered Bruce. “What does it look like from the inside?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody has come out.”

The author would like to cite Spooky Action at a Distance by George Musser, “Molecularly selective nanoporous membrane-based wearable organic electrochemical device for noninvasive cortisol sensing” by Onur Parlak et al., and thank Professor David R. De Graff and Kim Marjanovic for their expert advice.