Twelve Tomorrows - Visionary stories of the near future inspired by today's technologies Read online

  Wiping her mouth with the back of one hand, she glances up-down across my face, making a visible choice. Answering with a faint smile.

  “Yeah, the deGornays are farky-impressive. A breakthrough in fractalart.”

  Gazing at me without suspicion, she’s bare-eyed—a pair of simple digi-spectacles hang unused from her neck. Clear augment-lenses glinting in sunlight, here at the edge of Freedom Park. But the key feature is this: She’s not wearing them. Not at the moment. I have a chance.

  “There’s nobody better’n deGornay,” I counter, trying the match the with-it tone of her subgeneration. Navigating with a few tooth clicks and blink commands, I’ve already used my own specs to sift-search, grabbing a conversational tip about neomod art.

  “But I really like Tasselhoff. She’s farknotic.”

  “You-say?” The girl notches an eyebrow, perhaps suspecting my use of a spec-prompt. I worry she’s about to lift her own pair ... but no. She continues to stare-bare, cocking her head in mock defiance.

  “You do realize Tasselhoff cheats? She ai-tunes the cadence of her artwork to sync with the viewer’s neural wave! Some say it’s not even legal.”

  Bright, educated and opinionated. I am drawn.

  Several blurs pass nearby, then a visible couple. The man, garbed in penguinlike attire, sidles in to use the drinking fountain. So many people—it gives me an idea.

  “But Tasselhoff does offer a unique ... say, it’s awful crowded here. Are you walking somewhere? I was strolling by the park.”

  Ambiguous. Whichever way she’s heading, that’s my direction too.

  Brief hesitation. Her hand touches the digi-spectacles. I keep smiling. Please don’t. Please don’t.

  The hand drops. Eyes remain bare-brave, open to the world and just the world.

  She nods. “Sure. I can take the long way. I’m Jayann.”

  “Sigismund,” I answer. We shake in the new, quasi-roman fashion, more sanitary, hands not contacting hands but lightly squeezing each others’ wrists.

  “Sigismund. Really?”

  “Cannot tell a lie.” I laugh and so does she, unaware how literal I’m being.

  I can lie. But it’s not allowed.

  She doesn’t notice what happens next, but I do. As we both turn to leave the museum steps, I glimpse the penguin-garbed man staring at me through his pair of specs. He frowns. Appears to mumble something ...

  ... before he and his wife become blurs.

  Walking together now, Jayann and I are chatting and flirting amiably. Our path skirts the edge of Freedom Park. We stay to the right as joggers pound along, most of them visible but some blurred into vague clouds of color—Collision-Avoidance Yellow. I hear them all, of course—barefoot or shod, blurred or un-blurred—pounding along the trail, panting away.

  I offer a comparison of deGornay to Kavanaugh, deliberately naive, so she’ll lecture for a while as we skirt a realm of leafy lanes. Specs don’t work in there. No augmentations at all. That’s why it’s Freedom Park. Few would expect to find a cursed creature like me right here at the edge of what—for me—is dangerous ground. And that’s why I come.

  To my left the nearby street and city roar with stimulus, both real and virtual, every building overlaid with meta-data or uber-info. I can tune my specs to an extent. Omit adverts, for example. But my tools are limited, even primitive. Half the buildings are just solid blocks of prison gray to me.

  My walls.

  No matter, I’m concentrating on what Jayann says. Her enthusiasm is catching. Even endearing. Mostly listening, I only have to comment now and then.

  I hear voices and glance back, stepping aside for two hurrying adults—one of them a clot of vagueness, the other unedited and brave. Visible as a lanky-dark young man. My specs even reveal his name and public profile.

  Wow. Just like in better times, before the change. Before I lost the power that everyone around me takes for granted.

  Godlike omniscience.

  “Well, I have get back to work,” Jayann says. “I’ll shortcut through here.” She indicates a tree-lined path, clearly inviting me to come along.

  “What do you do?” I ask, diverting the subject. I take two steps, following her. Already there’s a drop in visual resolution. I daren’t go much farther.

  “I work in sales. But studying art history so I can teach. You?”

  “Used to teach. Now I help a public service agency.”

  “Volunteer work? That’s farky and sweet.” She smiles. Though backing down the path, she’s starting to grow fuzzy. I’d better talk fast.

  “But I manage to come here—to the park and museum—every Tuesday, same time.”

  And there it is. Totally lame and stunningly old-fashioned, but maybe that will intrigue her.

  She grins.

  “Okay, Mister Mysterious Sigismund. Maybe I’ll bump into you again some Tuesday.”

  It’s all I could hope for. A chance.

  Then hope crashes. She grabs her specs.

  “Wait. Just to be sure, let me drop filters and give you my—”

  “Say, is that a bed of gladiolas? This early?” I ask, purposely stepping past Jayann, walking down the path, counting steps and memorizing it as best I can. The park’s e-interference grows more intense. Then, abruptly, my specs cut off completely. I’m blind. But it’s worth it if she follows. If that prevents her from looking at me through augmented reality.

  I keep walking, several more paces, toward the memorized flower bed. Bending over, I take off the now-useless ai-ware, pretending to look. Without specs, I’m even more blind. But I chatter on, as if able to see bare-eyed, hoping she followed me down here, where specs don’t work.

  “You know, they remind me of that deGornay—”

  “Bastard!”

  A pair of fists hammer my back, then a hard-driven foot slams into my knee from behind, sending me tumbling, crashing into the shrubbery. Pain mixes with humiliated disappointment. And even worse ...

  ... my specs are gone! I grope for them.

  “How dare you!” She continues screaming. “You ... you liar!”

  My left hand probes among the crumpled flowers, searching.

  “I ... I never lied, Jayann.”

  “What were you planning? To get all my info, my address, to break in and murder me?”

  “My crimes weren’t violent. Look them up. Please, Jayann ...”

  “Don’t you dare speak my name! What are you doing?”

  “My specs. Please help me find them. Without them ...”

  “You mean these?” A rustling sound. Turning toward it.

  “I can’t see without them.”

  “So I’ve heard,” her voice drips with irony and anger. “Instead of prison, take convicts and blind them. Let ’em only see what special specs deliver direct to the brain. So they can’t see anyone who chooses not to let a criminal see them.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You stole from me that right!”

  Against better judgment, I argue.

  “You could have looked ... with specs ... seen my warning marks ...”

  She howls incoherent fury. I envision her there on the path, clutching my specs, shaking them. “I ought to smash these!”

  “Please give them to me, Jayann ... and guide me back to the street. I’ll never bother you again, I swear ...”

  I try to sympathize with her sense of betrayal. But her rage seems extreme, for a social offense ... charming a young woman into talking to me, bare-eyed, for a while. Mea culpa, I would pay for it. But did I deserve a pounding with fists? Screamed threats?

  Making a best guess, I run. Gravel stays underfoot for eight good steps, then gives way to grass, so I correct, meeting path again ...

  ... before tripping over her outstretched leg and sprawling face-first. My chin stings and I spit dust. “Jayann ... I’m sorry!”

  “Not half as sorry as you’re—”

  I leap up, stagger forward again. There was a slope down from the street, I r
ecall. And now I hear joggers panting. Traffic sounds beyond. With that bearing, I run again.

  No more hope of getting my specs back or reporting for work. My sole thought is to reach the sidewalk, and then just sit down, pathetic and still. Word will reach my probation officer. Ellie will come get me. Lecture me. Berate me. Possibly impose punishment. Though it’s all recorded and I swear, I don’t think I committed any actual—

  Traffic noise is louder. Joggers curse as they weave around me. How I wish I could see even blurs.

  Someone plants a hand against my back and shoves. I hear brakes squeal.

  Lying in a hospital bed, I listen as Ellie explains about how lucky I am. What a fool I was. How close I came to breaking rules and lengthening my sentence. Or losing my life.

  “Would you prefer some awful prison cell? The savagery of prison life? At least now you can work. Pay taxes. Live among us.”

  That makes me laugh.

  “Among you. Right. Among the blurs.”

  She lets that bitter comment sit a while, then asks.

  “Why, with so little time left on your sentence ... why take such chances?”

  How to answer, except with a shrug. Was Robinson Crusoe ever lonelier than I feel, here in the big city, imprisoned by electronic disdain?

  Ellie takes silence as my answer. Then she tells me the final outcome of the fateful afternoon at Freedom Park.

  Months later, I see her at the steps of the museum. Jayann sits a few steps up from where we met. It’s winter and her garb is much less gay. Despite a thick sweater, I can tell she’s lost weight.

  I slip on my new specs. Super-farky, they supply a wealth of information. Godlike tsunamis of it. Nametags under every face that passes by, and more if I simply blink and ask for it. The basic right of any free citizen.

  Under her name, flaring red:

  CONVICTED FELON

  Attempted 3rd degree murder

  I am tempted to feel guilty. My thoughtless, desperate, well-intended flirtations led to this.

  But then, did anyone deserve what she tried to do that day in a fit of offended pride?

  As my own punishment chastened me—perhaps made me better—will she learn as well? Life can be harsh. Still, things are better now than long ago. There are second chances. There is second sight.

  She looks around, seeming (except for those virtual scarlet letters) like a regular, attractive young woman, taking in the sun and breeze, though with a melancholy sigh. Her spec-mediated gaze passes over me ...

  ... then onward. For, of course, to her, I’m just another blur.

  I turn, leaning on my cane, to leave. Only then, glancing at the calendar within my virtuality, I realize.

  It’s Tuesday. ■

  The Mighty Mi Tok of Beijing

  Brian W. Aldiss

  I was lucky. Just a junior surgeon and I had managed to rent a room right slap bang in a floor of the hospital where I worked, in the middle of Beijing. Okay, it was a touch sparse. Like no curtains, no bed. No window. But Lu Shei and I slept on a rug on the floor, both naked, her sweet little body cuddled against mine. This night, I thought I dreamed I am in a thick bowl of soup. I wake and what’s this? It smells awful. Lu Shei is shrieking. She plunges a hand to her backside, but this thick runny stuff seems to be spreading everywhere. Including over me.

  “Oh Oh, I have such shame!” Lu Shei cries. “My muck and filth spurt from my rear end. I can’t stop it! Oh my shame ...”

  I tell her I am flattered to have her beautiful liquid shit poured upon me. I liken it to over-heated chocolate.

  “What has happened to me? Am I dying? It’s all over you, dear Mi Tok, also over me. Both of us are victims of what my beastly bowel does to torment me. Do you call this modern living?”

  “We both came to live in this modern city. Are we not B(3) Middle people? Even your excrement would have proper market value if packaged properly.”

  We had been out for the evening previously, with friends, in the Waterfront sector Nine. I was just Mi Tok then, nothing mighty about me. But I spoke gently to her because she was distressed.

  “You recall I advised you not to eat that shellfish. It did not smell so good.”

  “It smells even worse now it has rushed through my body. I did not like the look of that waiter.”

  “It was not the waiter but the tiny sprat on the oval dish that did it. You recall that Confucius spoke ill of sprats.”

  “Don’t mention that old sod to me,” she said through her tears. “Confucius never even mentioned one turd. How can you ... How can you possibly ever love me again?”

  “Of course I can love you again, I imagine, very easily. Am I not a junior surgeon in a great hospital? Think rather of progress, not of turds. Your father was a peasant. My father was a robber. And with black teeth. Recall! Both of our hideous fathers were shot at dawn.”

  “Mine was shot at sunset,” she blubbered.

  She was trying to smear the mess from her lower body, crying heavily. “We must get to the shower up on the next floor,” I told Lu Shei.

  She bundled up the squelching rug, shrieking all the while, and flung it through the vent hole. No doubt it hit some unfortunate vehicle in the rushing traffic below. The shower room we shared was on the next floor and down the corridor. It was lit. The door did not lock for safety reasons. I dragged the poor sobbing girl in with me.

  Two men stood in the room, naked. Both were maybe in their thirties. They had playing some class-rock music. Each of them held in his fist the other man’s erection. The tips of these erections looked pink and swollen. I apologised for our disgusting appearance and general stink.

  “My bottom is not working in true performance,” Lu Shei explained to the men, eyeing with some interest their mutually swollen joints.

  One of the men smiled in acceptance of her speech. “We assumed you had been rolling about in chocolate,” he said. “Perhaps a Hershey?” Hersheys were the new trendy chocolate bars to arrive in Beijing from the Oldeast. Such a flattering response! I dragged my weeping girl into the shower. Fortunately, the water supply worked at this hour. The warm water was able to cleanse our soiled anatomies.

  We dried ourselves on the mutual towel. She asked me where we could sleep out the rest of the night. I had no answer. The two men in the room said they were good friends and so slept together. So they had a spare rug which we were welcome to use. We had to wait until they finished what they were doing and then we followed them. The rug they kindly offered us was fine. Thanking them politely, we sank down and slept.

  Let me confirm what I said of Confucius in his mistrust of that treacherous creature, the sprat.

  Confucius said, “Hope to enjoy a natural death. If you may consume a sprat in a hall, you will never enter an inner room.” (Book XI of his Analects.)

  I was punctual at the hospital next morning, neatly dressed and finished down to the final nostril. Lu Shei worked as a secretary on the ground floor, Floor 5. I worked on the fifteenth floor. My work was always supervised by senior surgeons. On this day we studied a patient with a rotted growth low in his esophagus, close to the thyroid cartilage. He coughed and choked. The esophagus links the throat with the stomach. Food and drink are supposed to pass down here. But not in this case, because of the obstruction.

  The patient was a man of forty-eight years. Arrhythmia had set in. We operated with acupuncture anaesthetic. The shidus lady stood by. Her name was Grai Wi Ting, in charge of the wide-ranging shidus or repair unit. A pretty woman, born in Chengdu. Of course I attended to the operation, but could not entirely keep my mind from Lu Shei’s bowel upset.

  There were other patients, but at three of the afternoon we broke for half an hour’s rest and refreshment. “Xia jie?” enquired Grai Wi Ting quietly, peeling off her gloves as she passed me.

  I nodded. I loved her sense of humour as well as her way of making sexual enjoyment. ‘Xia jie’ in the old days meant ‘the world of mortals’. Wi Ting loved to be mortal.

  We
met secretly as usual in the shroud cupboard at the end of the corridor. Both of us removed our clothing from the lower part of our bodies. By this time, I was well-rehearsed, and had indeed learnt this technique more quickly than I had surgery.

  I simply stood close to her where she lay back on the shelf, her legs wide and trailing. I was steadying myself by the leading bar of the shelf. My erection was inserted in her awaiting yang—or yangyuchi—‘fishpond’ as she liked to call it. Mine was the fish—but not a sprat. She worked away with vigor, eyes closed. My duty was not to yield up an orgasm until she was ready for it. Then those nervous raptures occurred to us simultaneously, to our great benefit.

  My hope is that this account will not appear rude to any reader. After all, Wi Ting and I enjoyed this little recreation only twice in a week. It was performed courteously. Besides which excuse, I have been requested to shed some light on how I came upon my marvellous invention.

  “It seems a pity,” Wi Ting was saying, as she dried herself on the corner of a shroud, “that this fishpond of delight should also have to serve as the riverbed for streams of urine. The arrangement may be tolerable enough for peasants, but don’t you consider it somewhat demeaning for those of us in the better classes?”

  I remarked that the arrangement dated back to our ape ancestors and was ages old.

  “But we must live in a new age. I dislike conveying urine through my nice neat yangyuchi.”

  The thought had not occurred to me, But after that, and after the experience with Lu Shei, it took a hold on me.

  It was apparent to me, after my personal experiences and my hospital training, that there were strong and weak points in the human body, and that this handicap could be remedied.

  So I worked on diagrams and later on the bodies of deceased patients; and thus I devised my new scheme of anatomy. Better ducts should be designed than those unthinking evolution had developed. We are modern people and should have better physical arrangements than did the apes of old: and China should be the country where this great advance was achieved.