Futures Near and Far Read online

  FUTURES NEAR AND FAR

  Dave Smeds

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  November 25, 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-456-7

  Copyright © 2014 Dave Smeds

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Suicidal Tendencies

  Termites

  New Breed

  A Marathon Runner in the Human Race

  The Easy Way Down from Avernus

  Reef Apes

  Homespun and Handmade

  Evaporation

  Foreigners

  The Cookie Jar

  Fearless

  A Raven on My Shoulder

  Copyright & Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Dave Smeds

  About Book View Café

  INTRODUCTION

  When putting together a short-fiction collection, any author who writes across a variety of genres is tempted to offer a sample of that range. Some readers appreciate that eclectic sort of approach. But I’ve been at this fiction-writing game for a while. I have enough stories of various types that I don’t have to mix-and-match. My last collection, Raiding the Hoard of Enchantment, was made up entirely of imaginary-world selections. Futures Near and Far is for those of you out there who prefer science fiction and just science fiction. As in, tales of space travel and nanotechnology and genetic engineering and virtual reality and extraterrestrial lifeforms. Here you are. Nary a dragon nor a vampire nor a superhero-in-tights to be seen.

  Return to Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION TO “SUICIDAL TENDENCIES”

  One day in 1914, over forty years before my birth, my great-grandfather Herman Smeds, an elderly man suffering from incurable cancer of the mouth, got tired of the pain. He took a rope, walked down to the river that bordered my grandparents’ farm in central California, and hung himself from one of the huge oak trees on the bank.

  That’s typical of how suicide has touched my life. Remotely. I have known suicidal people — some of whom succeeded in their quests for death — but it has played no large part in my life, nor have I ever considered killing myself. I wanted to get that straight, given the tendency of some readers to speculate about the auctorial motives that lead to a story with suicide as a major theme.

  The inspiration for this story was not personal. Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation was still a recent book and I was one of the many people fascinated by the long-term potential of nanotechnology. “Suicidal Tendencies” was the first of three works written as set-pieces examining aspects of a fictional milieu I was developing for a novel, Light Years Apart. I never completed that novel and no longer plan to, in part because the stories — which also include “Reef Apes” and “A Marathon Runner in the Human Race” — reached a standard that I did not feel the novel would. The stories, I am happy to say, are complete in their own right. Each paints a picture of how humans and human society may change in response to nanotechnology. Each has its own theme. “Suicidal Tendencies” directs itself to suicide, “Reef Apes” looks at rape, and “Marathon Runner” deals with romance. I also wrote a fourth story, “Evaporation,” which you will find elsewhere in these pages. It is also set in a future where “nanodocs” have rendered people immortal and physically youthful, but “Evaporation” was never meant to fit within the continuity of the others and I don’t regard it as part of the set. For that matter, you should keep in mind that even the three don’t quite fit into the same imaginary future. For instance, in “Suicidal Tendencies,” memories are sometimes edited to cope with trauma. In the other two, memories are what they are, and a person must cope in full with the recollections of what they’ve experienced.

  “Suicidal Tendencies” allowed me to work in black humor in a way I have not done at any other point in my career. The result seemed to please fans and reviewers. I keep telling myself I have to do something like this again. I’m not sure if that can be planned, though. The mother/daughter relationship that lies at the heart of the tale required me to approach the material in just this way. I couldn’t have done it differently and have remained true to the characters and their situation.

  Welcome to a portrait of a generation gap.

  SUICIDAL TENDENCIES

  Mother

  My daughter killed me Tuesday morning.

  I opened my front door and there she was in the hallway, armed with a wood axe.

  “Cheryl—” I blurted.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said, and swung the axe.

  My ribs made a funny sound. Chock. The noise reminded me of a dropped watermelon striking a tile floor. Suddenly all the thoughts that come with death burst forth in my head. Memories. Fear. Denial. It’s going to miss, it’s going to miss. But it had already struck, and I was sliding quickly into shock.

  My left knee banged against the doorsill; the right collapsed altogether. My face swung down over a puddle of blood. It seemed odd to discover this red, wet liquid soaking into my welcome mat. It didn’t register that the torrent originated from the vicinity of my left lung.

  I suppose I felt a lot of pain, but my nanodocs have edited out the memory. It must have hurt, because my mouth popped open and stayed that way. I couldn’t say a single word. Just as well, I suppose, considering the language I would have used had I been capable.

  Cheryl whacked me on the spine next. I sprawled over the threshold. I guess I must have died at about that point, because the next thing I knew my ethereal self manifested up near the ceiling. I had a bird’s-eye view as Cheryl brought the axe down like Paul Bunyan on my neck. My head bounced down the hallway and came to a stop against the potted fern by the elevator.

  Cheryl regarded my decapitated body. The damn kid didn’t even have the decency to turn green. She sighed, tossed the axe and her bloodstained clothes into the recycler, cleaned herself up, generated a new outfit from my wardrobe player, and left the apartment. She stole the barrette from my hair on her way to the elevator.

  My ethereal self haunted the corridor, still too connected to the flesh to disappear into the Big White Light. Below me the nanodocs initiated resuscitation.

  The big choice must have been whether to put my head back on my body, or my body back under my head. The docs chose the latter, probably because rebuilding the brain would take all that double-checking. I agreed with the choice — not that my condition allowed me to have any input.

  Molecule by molecule, the docs stole material from the mess on the apartment threshold and funneled it down the hallway. A grainy stream, looking for all the world like a parade of sugar ants, gathered at my neck.

  Once they got going, the docs worked quickly. My spine formed, only to vanish under layers of connective tissue, nerves, muscle, and fat. The corpse in the doorway dissolved steadily. The docs didn’t neglect the blood in the carpet and the welcome mat; raw material was raw material.

  Something pulled at my ethereal self. I descended.

  I awoke to the tickle of a fern frond against my eyebrow. Instinctively I reached for my throat. No seam. Of course not.

  Someone was standing beside me.

  I jerked into a sitting position, hands up to guard my head. Then I saw who it was.

  “Oh. Hi. Joan.”

  I extracted the words with invisible forceps. I guess part of me wasn’t convinced my vocal cords would function.

  My neighbor surveyed me as if she were a Mark Twain schoolmarm. Never mind that her body morph presented her as a stylish, if a bit voluptuous, nineteen-year-old blonde. Her carriage betrayed that she was really a prune-faced, four-hundred-year-old gossip.

  “Your daughter again?” Joan asked. Her eyebrows drew together, broadcasting symp
athy, yet somehow that concern did not extend to helping me up.

  “Yeah. My daughter.” I didn’t offer specifics. Joan was bound to make up something even more embarrassing than the truth, no matter what I told her. Might as well not give her grist for the mill. At least she probably hadn’t seen the axe.

  “The kids today — they just aren’t like we were.” The eyebrows stayed drawn.

  Count on Joan for a handy cliché. Yet to my dismay, I had to agree with her this time.

  “Got to run. Drop by later if you need to talk,” Joan said, putting on her confidante hat.

  Sure, Joan.

  Once she was gone, I climbed to my feet. My reflection shimmered in the brass of the elevator door. My hair hung in disarray. If someone had shouted “Boo!” right then, my head would have fallen off again. I stumbled into my apartment, closed the door, and sagged onto my sofa.

  Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl. Sixty-one years old and still acting like four.

  The clock in the entertainment console advanced to 9:22am. Twelve minutes had passed since Cheryl had arrived at my door. That alone told me how careful the nanodocs had been as they repaired my tissues, edited the pain out of my memory, made safety checks, and kick-started my autonomic functions.

  I’d been killed, one way or another, five other times in my life. But used to it or not, I could barely rise from the sofa.

  I grabbed my kimono off the floor by the front door. My hand fit right through the rents over the left breast and center of the back. I tossed the garment into the recycler and coded the wardrobe player to generate another in the morning. Same style, but I altered the sash to lavender. No way could I stand to wear a red one for a while.

  I stank. The docs had put back every particle of my body, right down to the thin layer of perspiration that had burst from my skin the instant the axe swung.

  I stepped into the cleanser. My skin tingled as the scrubbers vacuumed out my pores and dissolved the carpet lint in my hair. Feeling distinctly better, I sat down at my dining table and ordered it to create a pot of hot chamomile tea. Only after the first cupful — when I was damn good and ready — did I ask the Link to put me in touch with Cheryl’s therapist.

  “You were right,” I said as soon as Ellen’s virtual self materialized in one of my dining chairs.

  “Matricide?” she asked.

  “A regular tribute to Lizzy Borden,” I replied. Ellen listened intently to the description of the assault. Like many psychologists, she affected the appearance of a studious person just entering classic middle age, complete with crow’s feet at the outer corners of her eyes, an extra freckle or two on the cheeks, and strands of gray in her auburn hair. All these centuries since eternal youth became the norm, it’s still easier to take advice from someone who projects an aura of maturity and experience.

  I wondered what sort of morph she wore during her private time. Preadolescent, maybe?

  “Well,” Ellen said. “I wish she’d proven me wrong. At least you weren’t taken totally by surprise.”

  I thought of the swinging axe. Not taken by surprise? I shuddered. She’d forewarned me that Cheryl would try to kill me, but that didn’t mean I was prepared for the attempt to succeed, or to be done so . . . vividly.

  “I don’t know if I can go through this again,” I said. “You should have seen her face.”

  Ellen placed her phantom hand atop mine. Strangely, it soothed me. Any other person would have acknowledged the intangibility of the Link and not bothered to reach out. She seemed to know it was what I needed. It was an example of why she’d reached adept level in her profession.

  “What would you ordinarily have done if you didn’t have me to call?” she asked.

  I saw what she was getting at. “I would have called Cheryl and asked her what the hell was up.”

  The psychologist nodded. “And she knows that. We’ve got to show her that the rules have changed.”

  “I know. I didn’t really think she’d resort to murder, though.”

  “She’s never had to before.” Ellen leaned back. “You know, it’s not too late to change the plan. I could still petition for a personality remorph. It would be easier on everybody.”

  My fingers tightened around the teacup. “Not easier for Cheryl.”

  Ellen pursed her lips. “Actually it would be. Once it’s done, the new Cheryl would thank us.”

  The new Cheryl. I cringed, thinking of someone I’d known who’d had a personality remorph. “No,” I said. “I can’t. Not yet.”

  Was that approval in the psychologist’s pensive smile? “Then we’ll have to work it through. I’ll talk to her today. I don’t expect much, though. You should expect to be killed at least one more time.”

  I blanched. “I understand.”

  Ellen prepared to blink out. “Anything else?” she asked.

  I sighed. “I feel like a terrible mother.”

  Ellen waited until I was willing to meet her glance straight on. “On the contrary. The problem is that you’ve been too good a mother. She needs the opposite right now.”

  I bit my lip, and pretended that I accepted that.

  Daughter

  “Your mom still hasn’t called, has she?” Giselle asked.

  I pretended not to hear. Jacques was getting ready to jump. I focussed on that.

  We were high in the Cascades, at the brink of a gorge. Scoured by glaciers and attacked by snow melt, the cliff below us was fissured and crumbling — not the smooth, tall, granite precipice type that attracts imagemakers and tourists. Steep, but nicely off the beaten track — we could usually get wilderness permits good at the site for an hour every week.

  I could feel Giselle’s smug grin, even if I didn’t look at it. I yawned, projecting nonchalance. Not that it would fool anyone. Giselle knew me better than that.

  Jacques leaped. He hit ass-first on a shelf about fifty feet down, probably breaking his pelvis. It slowed him down, but he regained enough momentum to tear open his viscera on a jagged projection a hundred feet below that. He bounced against the cliff, through brush and over ledges, losing parts of himself, and slammed to rest near the outcropping we all called Buffalo with an Attitude.

  “Not bad,” Giselle commented. “He was probably conscious until that last series of boulders.” We both knew that meant a lot to Jacques. He preferred to leave his memories unedited. No pain, no gain.

  “Coming with me?” Giselle sprang onto a rock at the very edge of the drop.

  I shrugged. “Nah. I’ll wait another minute or two.”

  “Oh, Cheryl,” she taunted. “If she hasn’t called by now, she’s not going to. You always expect so much.”

  “Why don’t you give yourself a Tabasco sauce enema?” I asked.

  She mocked an expression of deep offense. I glared at her. Her scowl transformed into a crooked smile, still a bit smug, but laced with a certain amount of empathy.

  Giselle and I operated from the same foundation. She, Jacques, and I constituted half of the sixty-something-year-olds in all Oregon. She knew what it was like to be a kid born in a society of Old Farts. Except for us, everybody alive had been around ever since nanotechnology had eliminated aging. None of them knew what it was like to grow up among immortals. When they’d been young, their elders had politely croaked, opening up the good jobs, the good home sites, providing at least a chance to excel in some aspect of life. Giselle and I had met at Reed College, had tried to compete in classes with students back for their seventh or twelfth or twentieth degrees, and had joined the local chapter of the Suicidals together.

  “Parents,” Giselle said, sighing. She had both a father and a mother, a fact I thought rather quaint. “Fuck ’em.”

  She leaned farther and farther back, until the slightest breeze would have committed her to the plunge. She gazed downward over her shoulder. The anticipation stiffened her nipples until headlights formed along the front of her pullover sweater.

  “Oh, look,” she said. “The coyotes are back.”


  I peered down. A small pack of the animals circled near the base of the precipice. They yapped and whined, searching for pawholds in the scree. Obviously they smelled the blood and intestines with which Jacques had decorated the side of the mountain. My best guess said they wouldn’t be able to reach the spot where most of the corpse rested.

  “Poor puppies,” Giselle said. “Do you think it’s the same bunch as last time?”

  “Naturally,” I said. Though we hadn’t been here for a month or so, the three of us visited often enough that the critters had figured out the routine. Time before last I’d revived from a fall to see a young female and her litter scampering off with one of my legs; my nanodocs had to steal material from a nearby streambed to fashion the replacement. The park rangers would’ve given us hell if they’d found out.

  Thrusting with her ankles, Giselle sailed clear of the cliff. Her trajectory, unlike that of Jacques, guaranteed she wouldn’t snag on anything on the way down.

  “Choke on thiiiiiisss,” she screamed at the coyotes as she picked up speed.

  She impacted quite fabulously on a shelf of jagged rocks well below Jacques’s partially repaired body. Even from my vantage point many hundreds of feet above I could see her brains spray, anointing the granite with a shade distinctly lighter than the crimson that smeared everything else.

  Suicide Number 6,327 for her. She was one ahead of me, but I’d soon fix that.

  Yet I waited. It was stupid. Giselle was right. If Monica had been going to call, she would have. But shit, all my dear mother had to do was say a few words to the Link and her virtual ass could sit itself down beside me, even for just a minute. Was that really too much to expect?

  I stared at the high peaks jutting up above timberline to the north, kicked a pebble over the edge, and got ready to follow it.

  “Call for you, Cheryl,” said the disembodied voice of the Link. “It’s Ellen Branson.”

  Just fucking great. Well, I could refuse it, but she’d only keep bugging me. “Put her through,” I said.