The Future

by Naomi Alderman

Her bones gave up their minerals into her blood and the water in her tissues leaped from her pores, and the potassium and sodium and magnesium in all the axons and dendrites of her brain poured forth, coating the inside of her skull with salt and licking her sinuses, crusting over at last the surface of her eyeballs with salt.

They saw the future we live in coming. The story of Sodom is a story of terror. These cities: don’t trust them. They will all come crashing down.

Life will try something different and maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s smart enough to read and write and release greenhouse gases. There’ll be fish and birds and glittering insects, there’ll be a million beautiful things crawling over one another striving toward the sun.

‘You have to understood this,’ he said, ‘or you understood nothing. OK? Who knows if machine has lost game of noughts and crosses? Who knows if it won? I do! You do. We are the ones who can tell. We know when to take bead, when to give bead. We store that knowledge in beads and matchboxes, OK? We know when sentence makes sense, we know when piece of art has meaning. Machine don’t know, it just keeps typing, combining pixels, making sentences. Everything come from us. We tell it good, we tell it bad. It cannot understand. We are so lonely, so fucking lonely, we want another species think like us.’ He was rapidly losing coherence as he spoke. ‘We despise the animals because they don’t think just like us, we use them and we hurt them. We invent gods, we invent aliens, now we make a friend out of fucking matchboxes. We want to say it “thinks” but is not true. We want to give it everything, let it make choices, believe it can care for us. It is image of a man made of paper and beads and we so fucking lonely we call it a friend.’

There is no ‘neutral’ anymore. There is no leaving things as they would have been before the invention of the internet. Our minds have already learned how to interact with the algorithms and we are part of it.

Martha said: ‘What do you call it when you can’t do anything, but you can’t do nothing?’ Albert said: ‘I’ve tried despair already.’

Fortune tumbles down onto us like scraps of paper in the wind. Joyful fortune and miserable fortune. You can as little choose your own luck as choose which raindrop falls on your head.

Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures.

Listening to her was like watching a mind drown.

Only a few paces in, the darkness became absolute. The stone was around her and she felt the weight of the mountain as if it were pressing on her head. A feeling both unsettling and comforting, something remembered from long ago, the terror of what might be inside this small space with her. This is why we built houses with windows and blinds. This is why we invented glass. This is why we discovered electricity. This is why we split the atom. It’s because this feeling is unbearable.

There was no future now; time did not point as an arrow, it was a spiral, around the seasons again and again until one day her bones would sink into the earth and her flesh would go to start some other life again. Well. Good.