Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

Three days before my surgery, I went back to you. The pain of it is always the same, like I’m being torn apart and placed back together with clumsy, inexpert fingers, but by now I’ve gotten used to it. I wanted you to see me as the man I’ve always known I am, that I slowly became. And I wanted to see if I could forgive you; if I could look at you and see anything besides my father’s slow decay, my own broken and betrayed heart.

I knocked at the door, dizzy, ears ringing, shivering, soaked from the storm that was so much worse than I remembered. I was lucky that you or Dara had left a blanket in the shelter, so I didn’t have to walk up to the front door naked; my flat, scarred chest at odds with my wide hips, the thatch of pubic hair with no flesh protruding from it. I’d been on hormones for a year, and this second puberty reminded me so much of my first one, with you in 1963: the acne and the awkwardness, the slow reveal of my future self.

You answered the door with your hair in curlers, just as I remembered, and fetched me one of Dad’s old robes. I fingered the monogramming at the breast pocket, and I wished, so hard, that I could walk upstairs and see him.

“What the hell,” you said. “I thought the whole family knew these years were off-limits while I’m linear.”

You didn’t quite recognize me, and you tilted your head. “Have we met before?”

I looked you in the eyes, and my voice cracked when I told you I was your son.

Your hand went to your mouth. “I’ll have a son?” you asked.

And I told you the truth: “You have one already.”

And your hand went to your gut, as if you would be sick. You shook your head, so hard that your curlers started coming loose. That’s when the door creaked open, just a crack. You flew over there and yanked it all the way open, snatching the child there up in your arms. I barely caught a glimpse of my own face looking back at me as you carried my child self up the stairs.

I left before I could introduce myself to you: my name is Heron, Mama. I haven’t forgiven you yet, but maybe someday, I will. And when I do, I will travel back one last time, to that night you left me and Dad for the future. I’ll tell you that your apology has finally been accepted, and will give you my blessing to live in exile, marooned in a future beyond all reach.

Little is known about the brutally minimalist Jamie Wahls, who presumably lives in a mimetic reality peppered with digital simulacra like the rest of us. His fiction has appeared in Sci Phi Journal , Clarkesworld , Strange Horizons , with more to come.

“Utopia, LOL?” is an excitable meme-filled take on virtual reality, utopia, and the desires of human beings. It was nominated for the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

HE’S SHIVERING as he emerges from the pod. No surprise, he was frozen for like a billion years.

I do all the stuff on the script, all the “Fear not! You are a welcomed citizen of our Utopia!” stuff while I’m toweling him off. Apparently he’s about as good as I am with awkward silence ’cause it’s not three seconds before he starts making small talk.

“So, how’d you get to be a….” He waves his hand.

“A Tour Guide to the Future?!”

“Yeah.” The guy smiles gratefully at me. “I imagine you had a lot of training…?”

“None whatsoever!” I chirp. He looks confused.

“Allocator chose me because I incidentally have the exact skills and qualifications necessary for this task, and because I had one of the highest enthusiasm scores!”

He accepts my extended hand, and steps down from the stasis tube. He coughs. Probably whatever untreatable illness put him in cryo in the first place.

“Oh, hang on a second,” I say. My uplink with Allocator tells me that the cough was noticed, and nites are inbound to remove some “cancer,” which is probably something I should look up.

I’m confused and eager to get on with my incredible Tour Guide to the Future schtick but I have to close my eyes and wait because the nites STILL aren’t here.

Patience was one of your weakest scores. But you proved you can wait. This is just like that final test Allocator put you through, the impossible one, where you could choose between one marshmallow NOW, or two marshmallows in one minute.

I quietly hum to myself while checking my messages, watching friends’ lives, placing bets on the upcoming matches of TurnIntoASnake and SeductionBowl, and simulating what my life would be like if I had a longer attention span.

It would be very different.

#Allocator:Good job waiting!

#Kit/dinaround::D thanks!

I beam at the praise, and check my time. I waited for eleven seconds!

Pretty dang good!

The old man clears his throat.

“You poor thing,” I gush. “Your throat is messed up too! Don’t worry, the nites are here.”

He looks at me. “The… knights? I don’t see anyone.”

I cover my mouth with a hand as I giggle. “Oh, you can’t see them. Well, you probably could with the right eyes, but we’re actually in universe zero right now so the physics are really strict. The nites are in the air.”

He looks up and around at the corners of the room. He’s frowning. It makes me frown too.

“In the air,” I explain. “We’re breathing them. They’re fixing your ‘cancer.’”

He looks downright alarmed. I’m not an expert but that’s not how I think a person should react to being cured of “cancer.”

“Wow,” he says. “Is that how far medical technology has come? Some kind of… medical nanobots?”

“They’re not medical,” I say. “They’re pretty all-purpose.”

On one hand I’m sort of tired of answering his questions because it’s all really obvious stuff but also it’s really fun! It’s always super neat to watch their eyes light up as I tell them about the world and that’s probably why I got picked for the position in the first place.

“Let’s have ice cream!” I demand.

Four seconds ago, I demanded that we have ice cream. There is now an ice cream cone forming in my hand. It is taking FOREVER.

The old man sees it and flinches.

“Oh no!” I cry. “What’s wrong? Do you hate ice cream?”

He looks at me with a really weird expression or maybe a couple different expressions.

“How are you doing that?” he asks. His voice is funny and tight.

“Oh. Allocator is making it for me?” I say. “Hey, let’s get into another reality.”

I spring up to my tiptoes. Moving is kinda fun but not as fun as it is in, like, the Manifold Wonders. Or in Bird Simulator. That one’s really good.

“What?”

I blink. I almost forgot! It’s time for me to be a good Tour Guide to the Future and repay Allocator’s trust in me.

“Post-Singularity humanity now exists entirely as uploaded consciousnesses in distributed Matryoshka brains, living in trillions of universes presided over by our Friendly AI, Allocator,” I say.

My ice cream is dripping! It can do that?

“Sorry, I didn’t really understand that,” he says. He doesn’t sound sorry. “Is there anyone else I can talk to?”

“Sure!” I say.

#Kit/dinaround:yo Big A, come talk to, uh

#Kit/dinaround:hang on

“What’s your name?” I ask. I forgot to ask earlier.

“Charlie,” he says. “And you?”

“Kit/dinaround,” I say, making extra-careful to pronounce the / so he won’t miss it.

“Oh,” he manages, “can I call you Kit?”

“I LOVE it!” I cry.

#Kit:Did you hear that?