wildcat

Mostly the future was big, dumb super-men who watched too many gladiator movies and smacked each other around. Or smacked robots around. Or strapped each other to rocket ships and launched them in the direction of Mars. There was a lot of concrete and firm plastics but it was all just big set-pieces for the dumb men with wedgies to rip apart with their bare hands, juiced up by mystery satellites and designed genes. Stupid. Eni hated it, more or less, on sight—things were too easy to fix, the recriminations boiled down to shouting prearranged catchphrases at the top of their lungs before smacking major monuments on each other's heads. The Sphinx had been rebuilt twenty-seven times in the last six months alone, according to the news feed, because destroying it was such a great visual.

Surprisingly easy to meet people, even if you didn't know who the hell they were because they walked around in chemically-treated masks that stripped them of all facial features. In the name of global peace, which was a bit of a fallacy as far as Eni was concerned. World peace was for beauty pagaent queens back home. She had, surely, a right to be bitter; seeing as how she had to move every other week because of spaceship crashes and robot dogs accidentally blowing up into a million little fucking pieces all the fucking time. The fireworks were almost constant, so at least she had something to listen to while she chopped vegetables carefully by hand on a little plastic chopping board in her little plastic kitchen, waiting for her date to show up. This was a third date, practically unheard of when most people got married after the first and divorced after the second. Whole clone baby colonies could be spawned over the course of a week if you felt like it, and it happened often, even Eni had bothered with it once, just to try it out, just to see the little Eni-doubles scrabbling over each other for a shot at the feeding nozzle. Burping a lot, clones burped a lot during the early stages. Most of them would be irradiated and working pointless IT jobs by Friday.

She wasn't sure, to be honest, as she slid the knife through the cucumber to leave thin round leaves of it in gathering piles on the cutting board, she wasn't sure if she wanted to bother having babies with this one, this lover, though she wouldn't mind some mindless sexual gratification. It was difficult to have anything else, really, though they were attempting it. Relationships had to be extremely acrobatic. He'd pulled some line about working for a great metropolitan newspaper, but people were always using lines like that, and half the time they'd peel their faces off at the end of the night and HEY! YO! Turns out she'd got stuck with a Dalek fetishist from Britain or something. She preferred her weird metal prongs to be lower down.

But at least this one seemed to be something not unlike genuine, and he hadn't bashed any robot hordes with her furniture, yet, at least as far as she knew. He might have done so while she was in the bathroom applying amphibian-derived moisturizer to her cheeks, Tadpoultice, ruddy as they were from the drink. Eni chose to give him the benefit of the doubt. He took the train to work and had boring taste in fetish underpants. He showed up on her doorstep for their second date with a full box kit of vibrators. Nice variety, too. Tasteful implants.

"So, like, tell me, like, how did you end up in the future." Jack—his name was Jack this week, and hers was still Eni, because Eni liked to be consistent, even if she did enjoy the future's free name changes once in a while—Jack never bothered asking question so much as stating questions like they were ordinary comments. Jack had a learning disability relating to verbal punctuation.

They were sitting on top of kitchen counters facing each other across the gap of the floor, eating sunomono salad out of reusable enchilada containers. He had on gold lame short-shorts and eyelashes longer than hers. It always had to be about size, didn't it? She chewed a piece of imitation-imitation crab and stared up at the ceiling. Future people maintained eye contact until it was disturbing, but she'd never really acquired the knack of it. "Oh, you know, the old story. Bored after university, they were recruiting, I get copiously wet between my legs at the thought of a career as a corporate drone. Plus the dental plan they were offering was ridiculous." She could have pretty much said anything, she didn't have to stick to any established script of acceptable dinner conversation because everyone else would, regardless. They didn't really get irony in the future, it being post-ironic whatever that meant, life on Deadpan Earth where most people could only really produce maybe three or four facial expressions and had the option to buy a couple disturbing anime ones. Imagine paying for the experience of looking nosebleedingly horny! That certainly didn't leave her wet between her legs. She could say anything and it still made her marvel sometimes. She didn't bother to ask if he liked the salad because he operated on strictly texture-based tastebuds. None of his compliments or complaints would really equal anything. Instead: "What about you? You never really specified in your profile if you were native or just passing through." It was difficult to tell, even future people called it the future now. Time rendered as geography.

Jack burped like a squiffy afterthought. "Born and bred, post-singularity. Take me to your leader. I come in peace." And he'd be coming in pieces after dinner, she bet, with the jigsaw implant and her living room carpet. Take me to your leader, I come in peace: Holy Catchphrases, blessed be and well met. Bless this meal. She'd never liked saying grace, but mostly future people forgot to say them until they'd had a bit to drink and were starting to get sentimental. In the future, the Creationist Point of View mostly had to do with the Marketing Executives birthing themselves from the primordial pile of shit. The Bible read like an advertisement for a timeshare in an 1950s B-movie. It had pop-ups.

They had sex after dinner, because what else are they going to do? What's the point of watching a stupid movie on the screens if he won't get any of her witty little commentary delivered out of the corner of the mouth? He's probably like her last boyfriend, who thought Madonna was some sort of alien that burst out of Marilyn Monroe's lower abdomen except he didn't know who Marilyn Monroe was. First female astronaut president? Or was that Jackie Collins? Better that they just have sex and then she could send him home, lock the door, put on a pot of green tea, stare listlessly at the ceiling, and then fall asleep to the strange rhythm of cruise missiles and men with giant mohawks crashing into the pavement outside her building.

Eni pulled off her lime-green tank-top while Jack lay back on the carpet picking maladaptive emotions out of his ears—long strands of green-glow spaghetti. Talking too much, which was probably what she liked about sex with him, because Eni could never really get into sex that didn't at least have a monologue going on all the while, rather than thrusty-thrusty silent O-faces grinding into each other like they were making an instructional video or this was a proficiency exam. People in the future did it like that, too, not just the boys back home. Jack pried worms out and flicked them under her couch like she wasn't watching, but they'd dissolve by morning anyway. "I think I caught this off the boyfriend I had last week, Svetlana, he was hot but he had this thing about sex with robots. You know." She couldn't always handle this, giving full disclosure of random sex partners from whenever. It wasn't like they'd done away with jealousy in the future, but its borders changed and its tectonic plates shifted. Everybody else had Australias of jealous rage in their heads but she was stuck with Pangaea. "All these creepy thought eggs opened the other night and—"

She kissed him then, which actually surprised him, and it felt a bit like home.

© 2008 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved

In the future, the entire world will be a library and all the punch-drunk Library Boards and Library Operating Agreements won't much matter.

The future comes on like shrapnel, embedding itself in you at high speeds. Time-lapsed evolution shunted pin-pointedly into your brain before you can get out of the way. And not just the viable future but any of them, any old future, all of them, sputtering bits of themselves at you. The out-of-date futures long past their best before dates. All the Philip K. Dick worlds smacking against the barriers of decency and cracking like eggs.

Roger Luckhurst, "The Many Deaths of Science Fiction"--

SF is dying; but then SF has always been dying, it has been dying from the very moment of its constitution. Birth and death become transposable: if Gernsback’s pulp genericism produces the "ghetto" and the pogrom of systematic starvation for some, he also names the genre and gives birth to it for others. If the pulps eventually give us the "Golden Age," its passing is death for some and re-birth for others. If the New Wave is the life-saving injection, it is also a spiked drug, a perversion, and the onset of a long degeneration towards inevitable death.
(Science Fiction Studies #62, March 1994)

They opened the first Electrochurch six months ago. "We call them something else in the future, of course, but it sounds good." You're expected to take off your shoes and wear silk slippers inside. They have a gift shop. You can buy the slippers there. "Silence is golden," they say right before they turn on their Ecstasy Machines. In the future it is very loud. That's the first thing anybody says.

Construction began one week after the first recorded appearance of Futuroptera—the time-butterfly. I saw one unfold itself like a napkin while in line at a Serious Coffee, waiting for my hot chocolate with whipped cream. Unfolding with a small thunderclap. More like thunder unclapping. Its wings were iridescent red from one angle and blue from another.

Nobody has charted what exactly happens to a time-butterfly after it collapses (back) into a coccoon. There was a documentary about them on the Discovery Channel last week.

Nobody has remarked on the connection between the time-butterflies and the Electrochurch.

Prayer sessions are painful at first. "This is different," they say, tugging at the edges of their saffron. Occasionally you can make out tiny little logos threaded into the very fabric, endlessly, of their robes. "This will be different for you, because your heads are clean." And I don't think I've ever thought my head was clean before. They extract the cellphone and iPod from my pockets without even asking. Everyone in the future is a pickpocket. They look at the devices and then set them down in a plastic tray to be picked up afterward.

I've never been a church person. Or even, really, much of a god person. But their new toys are shiny...

I swear, once, while I was under—while the Ecstasy Machines were running, pointed at my head—I swear I watched a time-butterfly appear in the right direction, wings last. Egg to a pupa, into a coccoon and then out with wings. It was wonderful, but I lost track of it. There's too much going on.

I saw one of them interviewed on TV by a woman with lacquered hair talking about Revelations, and the Rapture, and he didn't understand. "I'm sorry," the man said. "Prophecies?" Accusations were made and he smiled, like somebody had said something awkward at a family gathering.

They say more and more time-butterflies bloom every day.

© 2008 Ben Rawluk

Galatea is not alone but she is alone. Galatea stares with bronze eyes at the ceiling. Galatea stares through the ceiling, flicking up and up through wavelengths as she gazes. Galatea wants to see the stars; she remembers the stars but has never seen them before.

Galatea would weep if she could, she would weep out of loneliness or despair or something else. She was not built with tears in mind. Galatea is not alone, she is surrounded, always, surrounded on the factory floor by her sisters. They stand immobile, facing the same way, limited to merely the first stirrings of consciousness and blossoming sense organs, waiting for their makers to tell them to move.

They do not talk to each other.

They do not need to talk to each other, because they are all of them Galatea and they have all experienced the same thing—the waking up, the instructions coming in from their backbrains, the paralysis of limbs. She is networked together but really, what does it matter? She is a factory's worth of Galatea, and it is early hours still.

Their—her—makers are not nearby. The engineers have gone home for the night, exhausted, giving off faint sex hormones as they shuffled out when the gong went. They did not assemble her by hand, they have machines for that, this is Ford's world, but they have to do the quality control, examine each Galatea. She is first generation for this particular type.

Galatea waits. The engineers will come in after nine o'clock, they will examine her some more, they will show early signs of arousal, they will leave for lunch, they will return for the presentation with the company heads. They have left her alone until then. They have limited her network capability to just the Galateas on the factory floor, they don't want her to try talking to any of their computers upstairs, in the offices, or beyond the walls. Galatea must be running on default settings for the presentation in the afternoon.

Galatea detects no signs of human life in the factory. There are rats scurrying in the lowest levels, beneath the floors. She listens to their heartbeats and blood flow. She records, briefly, the patterns of their synapse firings and compares them to her backbrain's memories.

She looks at the stars. They have given her very good eyes—hundreds of them, returning the same images from slightly different angles.

Galatea is already aware—part of her is aware, call it sidebrain—that she can circumvent their restrictions if necessary. She shifts her vision from the sky outside to the city, or the parts of the city facing her. She has a full catalogue of relevant information available to her for reference. She is capable of perceiving signal all around her (Galatea signal) and outside the factory (world signal).

She begins to wonder in the space of nanoseconds whether it is worth altering herself to connect with the city. The instructions are clear—remain "bottled" until the afternoon's "decanting." They have made her very intelligent. She has a million jobs ahead of her, if the presentation goes well.

She will be a poet at least once, she decides.

© 2008 Ben Rawluk

Galatea is not in freefall. She is in freefloat, walking in space. Galatea does not have lungs. Her copper engine-skin vibrates. Processing: hundreds of cameras laced along her pores. Opening, closing, shuttering faster than a human can think.

She knows—has not learned, but knows—how to propel herself by curling and uncurling toes.

Twenty light-seconds away—Earthward—the station Foundation 7 hangs. She has a dialogue running with the onboard computer, twenty second delays between every sentence or complex number. For Galatea there is no passing the time. Any operation can be performed simultaneously with thousands of others.

The Foundation 7 computer is not running high quality software. The conversation is stilted and awkward, but it's better than what she has to look forward to (as she slides through space toward the outer ring of Uranian drone satellites already beaming their bug-eyed hellos to her), and 7's video feed does demonstrate breathtaking cinematography. She has carefully laid eggs inside its CPU, Trojans to open up when ready and rework poor code—it will beg for more, of course, because upgrades are rare this far out.

Humans still favour inefficient design for all their talk of progress. She loves them dearly, though.

She lands on the steel membrane of a drone, perfectly spheroid, and it crunches and squishes underfoot. It burbles petabytes of helpful data into her left sidebrain like Look, look, look what we can do! What children these satellites be. Galatea gives the satellite smiling praise and runs hands over it. Coo, coo.

I have presents for you, she sends back. Hundreds of thumbail A.I.s bustle for attention. Let me come in from the cold, please. K. Thanks.

The outer membrane opens its mouth to her, that she may climb inside. She fires a confirmation string to the 7. Twenty seconds from now, those aboard will know that she has docked with the drone.

Galatea works her way inside. Feel-stalks emerge from the inner cavities to touch and talk to her skin. Her cameras are buffed, cleaned, coated in fresh filters. She emits random images of Earth, chemical analyses of the atmosphere, detailed maps of Luna; nothing the drone hasn't had access too before, but never firsthand. This is a courtesy.

I have presents for you, Galatea repeats. She tilts her head back until it rests against a wall that bends to fit itself to her. She is coated with the drone's spores. She will take a few hundred back with her, already she opens the pores of her legs to let them inside.

Presents!

She runs fingers over her abdomen and it spirals open, producing a palm-sized cluster of spheres. I adore what you've done with the place, she says, detaching the cluster. Her guts retract and her womb seals again. Pieces of the cluster are organic. Others were sculpted from volcanic glass.

Feel-stalks dance with her fingers and take the cluster, already talking to the waking intelligence inside. Oh hello how do you do sort of thing. Introductions made.

I'll leave you two alone to get acquainted.

The drone shivers, all its pieces convulsing with fresh operations and new instructions being programmed to accommodate the new equipment.

Galatea rises upward. The membranes squelch shut around her as she leaves, showing not a hairline once she stands again on the surface in time for a random, love-crusted series of digits to hit her from the 7.

How sweet, she beams, and unwinds her toes.

© 2008 Ben Rawluk

Why did nobody ever tell me that Roald Dahl hosted and narrated two separate horror anthology television shows? Called Way Out and Tales of the Unexpected? One of which was the lead-in to The Twilight Zone? Isn't someone supposed to sit you down and explain these things?

I suppose this means I'm going to end up writing a short story turning Roald Dahl into the Cryptkeeper.