21st Century Science Fiction (35 page)

And so I traveled north. People stared at me on the train. I’m accustomed to that—when they see a freakishly tall black man, even the British overcome their famed (and largely mythical) reserve, and stare like scientists at a new specimen. The stares had become more hostile in recent years, as waves of African refugees fled their burning lands. I was born in Newcastle, like my parents, but that isn’t written on my face. When I spoke, people smiled to hear a black guy with a Geordie accent, and their hostility melted.

Now I was no longer black, but people still stared. My grey exo-skin, formed of myriad tiny nodules, was iridescent as a butterfly’s wings. I’d been told I could create patterns on it, like a cuttlefish, but I hadn’t yet learned the fine control required. There’d be plenty of shipboard time after departure for such sedentary trifles. I wanted to be active, to run and jump and swim, and test all the augments in the wild outdoors, under the winter sky.

Scarborough is, or was, a town on two levels. The old North Bay and South Bay beaches had long since drowned, but up on the cliffs the shops and quaint houses and the ruined castle stood firm. I hurried out of town and soon reached the coastal path—or rather, the latest incarnation of the coastal path, each a little further inland than the last. The Yorkshire coast had always been nibbled by erosion, even in more tranquil times. Now the process was accelerating. The rising sea level gouged its own scars from higher tides, and the warmer globe stirred up fiercer storms that lashed the cliffs and tore them down. Unstable slopes of clay alternated with fresh rock, exposed for the first time in millennia. Piles of jagged rubble shifted restlessly, the new stones not yet worn down into rounded pebbles.

After leaving the last house behind, I stopped to take off my shirt, jeans and shoes. I’d only worn them until now as a concession to blending in with the naturals (as we called the unaugmented). I hid the clothes under some gorse, for collection on my return. When naked, I stretched my arms wide, embracing the world and its weather and everything the future could throw at me.

The air was calm yet oppressive, in a brooding sulk between stormy tantrums. Grey clouds lay heavy on the sky, like celestial loft insulation. My augmented eyes detected polarized light from the sun behind the clouds, beyond the castle standing starkly on its promontory. I tried to remember why I could see polarized light, and failed. Perhaps there was no reason, and the designers had simply installed the ability because they could. Like software, I suffered feature bloat. But when we arrived at our new planet, who could guess what hazards lay in store? One day, seeing polarized light might save my life.

I smelled the mud of the path, the salt of the waves, and a slight whiff of raw sewage. Experimentally, I filtered out the sewage, leaving a smell more like my memories from childhood walks. Then I returned to defaults. I didn’t want to make a habit of ignoring reality and receiving only the sense impressions I found aesthetic.

Picking up speed, I marched beside the barbed wire fences that enclosed the farmers’ shrinking fields. At this season the fields contained only stubble and weeds, the wheat long since harvested. Crows pecked desultorily at the sodden ground. I barged through patches of gorse; the sharp spines tickled my exo-skin, but did not harm it. With my botanist’s eye, I noted all the inhabitants of the little cliff-edge habitat. Bracken and clover and thistles and horsetail—the names rattled through my head, an incantation of farewell. The starship’s seedbanks included many species, on the precautionary principle. But initially we’d concentrate on growing food crops, aiming to breed strains that would flourish on the colony world. The other plants . . . this might be the last time I’d ever see them.

It was once said that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrated a man’s mind wonderfully. Leaving Earth might be almost as drastic, and it had the same effect of making me feel euphorically alive. I registered every detail of the environment: the glistening spiders’ webs in the dead bracken, the harsh calls of squabbling crows, the distant roar of the ever-present sea below. When I reached a gully with a storm-fed river at the bottom, I didn’t bother following the path inland to a bridge; I charged down the slope, sliding on mud but keeping my balance, then splashed through the water and up the other side.

I found myself on a headland, crunching along a graveled path. An ancient notice-board asked me to clean up after my dog. Ahead lay a row of benches, on the seaward side of the path, much closer to the cliff edge than perhaps they once had been. They all bore commemorative plaques, with lettering mostly faded or rubbed away. I came upon a legible one that read:

Grass had grown up through the slats of the bench, and the wood had weathered to a mottled beige. I brushed aside the detritus of twigs and hawthorn berries, then smiled at myself for the outdated gesture. I wore no clothes to be dirtied, and my exo-skin could hardly be harmed by a few spiky twigs. In time I would abandon the foibles of a fragile human body, and stride confidently into any environment.

I sat, and looked out to sea. The wind whipped the waves into white froth, urging them to the coast. Gulls scudded on the breeze, their cries as jagged as the rocks they nested on. A childhood memory shot through me—eating chips on the seafront, a gull swooping to snatch a morsel. Within me swelled an emotion I couldn’t name.

After a moment I became aware of someone sitting next to me. Yet the bench hadn’t creaked under any additional weight. A hologram, then. When I turned to look, I saw the characteristic bright edges of a cheap hologram from the previous century.

“Hello, I’m Katriona. Would you like to talk?” The question had a rote quality, and I guessed that all visitors were greeted the same way; a negative answer would dismiss the hologram so that people could sit in peace. But I had several days of solitude ahead of me, and I didn’t mind pausing for a while. It seemed appropriate that my last conversation on a dying world would be with a dead person.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “I’m Winston.”

The hologram showed a middle-aged white woman, her hair as grey as river-bed stones, her clothes a tasteful expanse of soft-toned lavender skirt and low-heeled expensive shoes. I wondered if she’d chosen this conventional self-effacing look, or if some memorial designer had imposed a template projecting the dead as aged and faded, not upstaging the living. Perhaps she’d have preferred to be depicted as young and wild and beautiful, as she’d no doubt once been—or would like to have been.

“It’s a cold day to be wandering around starkers,” she said, smiling.

I had forgotten I wore no clothes. I gave her a brief account of my augmentations. “I’m going to the stars!” I said, the excitement of it suddenly bursting out.

“What, all of them? Do they make copies of you, and send you all across the sky?”

“No, it’s not like that.” However, the suggestion caused me a moment of disorientation. I had walked into the hospital on my old human feet, been anaesthetized, then—quite some time later—had walked out in shiny new augmented form. Did only one of me leave, or had others emerged elsewhere, discarded for defects or optimized for different missions?
Don’t be silly
, I told myself.
It’s only an exo-skin. The same heart still beats underneath
. That heart, along with the rest of me, had yesterday passed the final pre-departure medical checks.

“We go to one planet first,” I said, “which will be challenge enough. But later—who knows?” No one had any idea what the lifespan of an augmented human might prove to be; since all the mechanical components could be upgraded, the limit would be reached by any biological parts that couldn’t be replaced. “It does depend on discovering other planets worth visiting. There are many worlds out there, but only a few even barely habitable.”

I described our destination world, hugging a red-dwarf sun, its elliptical orbit creating temperature swings, fierce weather and huge tides. “The colonists are a mixed bunch: naturals who’ll mostly have to stay back at base; then the augmented, people like me who should be able to survive outside; and the gene-modders—they reckon they’ll be best off in the long run, but it’ll take them generations to get the gene-tweaks right.” There’d already been tension between the groups, as we squabbled over the starship’s finite cargo capacity, but I refrained from mentioning it. “I’m sorry—I’ve gone on long enough. Tell me about yourself. Did you live around here? Was this your favorite place?”

“Yorkshire lass born and bred, that’s me,” said Katriona’s hologram. “Born in Whitby, spent a few years on a farm in Dentdale, but came back—
suck my flabby tits
—to the coast when I married my husband. He was a fisherman, God rest his soul.
Arsewipe!
When he was away, I used to walk along the coast and watch the North Sea, imagining him out there on the waves.”

My face must have showed my surprise.

“Is it happening again?” asked Katriona. “I was hacked a long time ago, I think. I don’t remember very much since I died—I’m more of a recording than a simulation. I only have a little memory, enough for short-term interaction.” She spoke in a bitter tone, as though resenting her limitations. “What more does a memorial bench need? Ah, I loved this coast, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to sit here forever. . . .
Nose-picking tournament, prize for the biggest booger!
”

“Would you like me to take you away?” I asked. It would be easy enough to pry loose the chip. The encoded personality could perhaps be installed on the starship’s computer with the other uploaded colonists, yet I sensed that Katriona wouldn’t pass the entrance tests. She was obsolete, and the dead were awfully snobbish about the company they kept. I’d worked with them in the simulator, and I could envisage what they’d say. “Why, Winston, I know you mean well, but she’s not the right sort for a mission like this. She has no relevant expertise. Her encoding is coarse, her algorithms are outdated, and she’s absolutely riddled with parasitic memes.”

Just imagining this response made me all the more determined to fight it. But Katriona saved me the necessity. “That’s all right, dear. I’m too old and set in my ways to go to the stars. I just want to rejoin my husband, and one day I will.” She stared out to sea again, and I had a sudden intuition of what had happened to her husband.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I take it he was never”—I groped for an appropriate word—“memorialized.”

“There’s a marker in the
fuckflaps
graveyard,” she said, “but he was never recorded like me. Drowning’s a quick death, but it’s not something you plan for. And we never recovered the body, so it couldn’t be done afterward. He’s still down there somewhere. . . .”

It struck me that if Katriona’s husband had been augmented, he need not have drowned. My limbs could tirelessly swim, and my exo-skin could filter oxygen from the water. As it would be tactless to proclaim my hardiness, I cast about for a neutral reply. “The North Sea was all land, once. Your ancestors hunted mammoths there, before the sea rose.”

“And now the sea is rising again.” She spoke with such finality that I knew our conversation was over.

“God speed you to your rest,” I said. When I stood up, the hologram vanished.

I walked onward, and the rain began.

• • • •

I relished the storm. It blew down from the northeast, with ice in its teeth. They call it the lazy wind, because it doesn’t bother to go around you—it just goes straight through you.

The afternoon darkened, with winter twilight soon expiring. The rain thickened into hail, bouncing off me with an audible rattle. Cracks of thunder rang out, an ominous rumbling as though the raging sea had washed away the pillars of the sky, pulling the heavens down. Lightning flashed somewhere behind me.

I turned and looked along the coastal path, back to the necropolis of benches I had passed earlier. The holograms were all lit up. I wondered who would sit on the benches in this weather, until I realized that the lightning must have short-circuited the activation protocols.

The holograms were the only bright colors in a washed-out world of slate-grey cloud and gun-dark sea. Images of men and women flickered on the benches, an audience for Nature’s show. I saw Katriona standing at the top of the cliff, raising her arms as if calling down the storm. Other figures sat frozen like reproachful ghosts, tethered to their wooden anchors, waiting for the storm to fade. Did they relish the brief moment of pseudo-life? Did they talk among themselves? Or did they resent their evanescent existence, at the mercy of any hikers and hackers wandering by?

I felt I should not intrude. I returned to my trek, slogging on as the day eroded into night. My augmented eyes harvested stray photons from lights in distant houses and the occasional car gliding along inland roads. To my right, the sea throbbed with the pale glitter of bioluminescent pollution. The waves sounded loud in the darkness, their crashes like a secret heartbeat of the world.

The pounding rain churned the path into mud. My mouth curved into a fierce grin. Of course, conditions were nowhere near as intense as the extremes of the simulator. But this was
real
. The sight of all the dead people behind me, chained to their memorials, made me feel sharply alive. Each raindrop on my face was another instant to be cherished. I wanted the night never to end. I wanted to be both here and gone, to stand on the colony world under its red, red sun.

I hurried, as if I could stride across the stars and get there sooner. I trod on an old tree branch that proved to be soggy and rotten. My foot slid off the path. I lurched violently, skidding a few yards sideways and down, until I arrested my fall by grabbing onto a nearby rock. The muscles in my left arm sent pangs of protest at the sharp wrench. Carefully I swung myself round, my feet groping for toe-holds. Soon I steadied myself. Hanging fifty feet above the sea, I must have only imagined that I felt spray whipping up from the waves. It must have been the rain, caught by the wind and sheeting from all angles.