- An Old Magic - The casual visitor to Boston sees a bustling metropolis of four million souls. The tourists wander about, visit the trails, the ships in the harbor, the great schools. Meanwhile, residents, students, commuters get on with their lives. Thousands pass through the corridors at MIT, and few suspect that more than great architecture holds aloft the proud domes above them. "Greetings, class." The Professor sweeps into the hall. He has no name; he is simply the Professor. Deep in the bowels of Harvard University, a hand-picked group of graduate students meets for the first time in a special cross-disciplinary course. "You've all shown great promise in this area, and you've all been accepted for this course. Congratulations." In the second row, Eric doodles absentmindedly on his notebook. Rings and modules are on his mind. It is an old magic -- the magic of the Greeks, the Chinese, the Mayans. Condemned as akin to witchcraft, it suffered during the Middle Ages, but thrived among the scholars of Asia. "I see that you're skeptical," announces the Professor. "Here, watch." He produces a dollar bill and a nickel and places them on the table. Briefly he derives the equation for continuously compounded interest on the chalkboard -- and when he returns to the table, there are now two nickels. A murmur arises from the students. Eric sits up, his attention drawn. A student speaks. "So why aren't all mathematicians rich?" The terrible potency of each mathematical result diminishes with use and with the magnitude of the task asked of it. Around the nation, around the world, researchers labor for new, original discoveries, for only through these can the power of mathematics be sustained. "It's not just mathematics," continues the Professor with a faint note of superiority. "Every area of human study has similar power, in proportion to its objectivity. Physics and computer science are nearly as strong, while literature and art have no power over the physical world, but a great ability to turn hearts and minds." The Professor collects a battered tome from his bag and flips through it. The great names of the past are here -- Archimedes, Gauss, Ramanujan; Cantor, whose attempts to prove the continuum hypothesis nearly had disastrous consequences; the enigmatic Bernoulli family; Wiles' pursuit of Fermat's ghost; Erdos trying his hand at necromancy; Euler and the Konigsberg sigil; Galois' failed attempt to protect his life through algebra; Godel's revolutionary results, whose full effects are still being debated. "I've prepared some readings for you in the text," he concludes. "Also, bring in your favorite theorems, and we'll test them out." At the door, he turns. "By the way, any requests for xkcd 563 will be immediately vetoed. See you next week." With that, he departs. As conversation erupts among the other students, Eric gathers up his water bottle and slips out the door. His thoughts before class are entirely gone, until he figures this out to his satisfaction. He has a few questions for this Professor... ----- - EULA - "Hey, Tom, uh... you got a minute?" Robin ambushed him as he came out of his office. He had a meeting with the Secretary of Energy about space-based power, but she was visibly nervous and fidgeting, which set off alarm bells. "Sure, what's up?" "Better get your computer, it's already downloading." She gestured to his office door. He retrieved the tablet and continued down the hall. "Come on, walk with me. So what's so important?" Robin hurried to keep up with his long strides. "Well, we... we decoded the Procyon signal." Tom stopped in his tracks. "...and?" She pointed to his tablet. 'Download Complete', it read, and the summary from the xenolinguists flashed onto the screen. As he perused the report, she studied him. Thomas DiMattia, the man who saved NASA. He'd reached out to commercial space ventures and revived the nation's interest and faith in NASA by landing a man on Mars. He'd even managed to keep the cosmologists happy. If this was what everyone feared it was, she couldn't think of a better man to lead. "Jesus," muttered Tom. "Yeah." He slumped into a nearby chair, glancing up at her. "Could this be a joke?" "A joke? Not on our part; it's definitely extrasolar. Otherwise, they have a weird sense of humor, 'cause Keck says there's something there, exactly where they said." 'The Alliance or any representative or member thereof is not responsible for economic, biological, informational, or other damages resulting directly or indirectly from said Project. Continued residence in the aforementioned Stellar System will signify your acceptance of these terms.' So the message had read, and if the team at the Keck observatory knew anything about anything, the giant fleet from Sirius would arrive in about a decade for their little Project with Earth's sun. "Jesus," Tom repeated. He took a breath, and a slight resolve seemed to grow in his voice. "You'd better call some lawyers. We've got a hell of a loophole to find." ----- - Embassy - Soon after the Vaeri arrived it became apparent that they needed nothing from Earth on a technological level. Their ship had merely appeared in Earth orbit, without so much as a flicker of radiation of any kind. And the ship itself, a glistening assembly of flowing lines and elegant surfaces, appeared much too fragile for interstellar travel. It seemed more a work of art than a mechanical construction, visible as a bright point of light from anywhere on the surface as it passed overhead. After a week they sent a request to the United Nations' Lagrange space station, in perfect English, for a conversation with a representative of the planet. The United Nations consulted experts, from science fiction writers to historians, and after much debate nominated David Jefferson Ramsey, the American Ambassador. Along with his personal diplomatic training, his nation's military and economic strength and ideals of freedom and self-determination might, the UN considered, prove useful. As yet the Vaeri had not shown their hand, but there was some concern that they wished to annex the fledgling human dominion. If they were willing to talk, they might be argued out of it. The next morning, as Ramsey arrived at the Mojave spaceport for his shuttle to Lagrange, a voice caught his attention. He turned around, but there was no one there. "Hello, Ambassador," the voice said. "That won't be necessary." The next instant, he found himself in the communications center at Lagrange. As he reoriented himself from the sudden change in gravity, a nervous tech hurried up to him. "They, um, told us to expect you, Ambassador. This way." Ramsey sat down at the desk, quickly running through thoughts that he'd planned to have two hours to consider. He knew history, and he'd heard the experts speak. When a technologically advanced civilization contacted a primitive one, it always meant the destruction of the lesser. It might not be deliberate on either side, it might take generations, but it would occur. If the Vaeri interfered with humanity, humanity would lose its culture. Humanity would lose itself. And that was something he couldn't let happen. "Hello," he said finally. "I am Ambassador David Ramsey of the American Union, representing humanity and the planet Earth." "Ambassador," came the straightforward response. "We are the Vaeri. We have been studying your world for many years. As you have seen, our technology is more capable than yours. We are prepared to train your scientists in our knowledge, in return for information about the history and culture of your people. Many of the failings of your civilization could be solved under our supervision, and its advantages improved." Ramsey took a deep breath. "Thank you. However, I am afraid we must decline. We are proud of what we are, and of our ability to survive, adapt, and progress on our own. The imperfections we and our institutions possess are part of that. Without them, there would be nothing to drive art, science, or history. Without weakness one cannot appreciate strength; without pain one cannot appreciate joy. We will not suffer anything to be forced on us, even if it is happiness." There was a pause; then the voice from the Vaeri returned, this time with a distinct edge. "Careful, Ambassador. We are not tyrants. Millions of your people are still dying from war, starvation, and disease. Do you think they care for your ideals and your art? What would they give for a guardian from the sky to protect them, feed them, clothe them?" There was no response from Lagrange. ----- - Empyrean - After a fortnight he came at last to the edge of the world. In the days since he'd left the Last City, the terrain had become increasingly rocky and broken. The forest had long ago thinned to nothing; the ground had turned to mud and pools of stagnant water, littered with craters, around which he'd had to navigate his mule. And his hope had, gradually, faded. He had come this far on a pilgrimage. He had come this far believing he was, every day, drawing closer to the gods. But now he couldn't reconcile that belief with what he saw around him. This was no dwelling of the gods. This was godforsaken. He hadn't brought provisions for the journey back. He would find them or die here. One night, as he lay half-asleep, he heard a strange whistling noise. Then the ground shook, for a moment, and was still. His mule whinnied, nervous. He stood up in time to glimpse a fading glow, from behind a mound of earth. Climbing to the top, he looked down. There beneath him lay a shining lump of rock in a fresh crater. As he watched, the light faded to nothing. He gazed upward. So. This was where the stars died. Now he was at his journey's end. The very dome of heaven stretched upward before him, the fixed stars glittering weakly in the light of the distant sun. None he had heard tale of had ever come this far. He was the first. And still, there was no sign of the gods. He took a breath, and he prayed. Then he reached into his pack, and brought out a pickaxe. The dome was constructed of divine crystal, which no human tool could mar; that he knew. But he had to try. It was all that remained to him to do. He raised his axe, and with all his might brought it down on the dome. To his surprise, it yielded. A few glittering shards tumbled down to his feet. He gave a few more strikes, and soon he had made a hole. The dome was less than half an inch thick, and quite brittle. That it was so thin, at least, was not surprising. It was the stuff of the gods, after all. Or so he hoped. By the end of the day, the aperture stretched open before him, a yard across at its widest. He stood there for a long while, exhausted. The clouds darkened as night fell; the stars above him began to illuminate the land behind. A foul wind blew past him, along the edge of the dome. But through the opening he could see and feel nothing. He stared at the blackness, and the blackness stared back at him. He had nothing left. Everything he owned was here, with him. He had nothing... except the hole. So he shouldered his pack and sent off his mule, in the direction of the City. He watched it pass over the hills, and wondered what luck it would have. Then he turned back and stepped through. ----- - Not So Different - With a sigh, Adam dropped his notebook on the charging pad and slumped onto the sofa. The lights snapped on at his entry and then dimmed to a comfortable level, reacting to his wearable's biometric sensors. He turned on the TV and checked the news. The leading manufacturer of wearable software was taking fire for its plans to offer advertisers direct access to users' minds, and being sued by a small Texas company that claimed broad patents on mental interfaces. Its highly-publicized hunt for those who had cracked its encryption keys was dragging on, and meanwhile the keys had spread all over the net. Adam himself was running open-source wetware with several interesting mods, one of which was perhaps slightly illegal. Muslim scholars were holding a summit to consider the implications of direct mind-computer links. Some orthodox Jews refused to use wearables, saying using an always-on computer equated to doing work on the Sabbath. Christian extremists had firebombed a computer store in the southern US, claiming the head-mounted sensors and displays were the mark of the devil. There were reports of cheap Chinese sets malfunctioning and causing minor brain damage. Japan already had prototypes of something better. The U.S. government was debating whether to cut science budgets and outsource to private tech. Adam flicked off the TV. He needed to relax, and the news wasn't helping. They'd seen a glorious future in the 20th century, where technology just worked, and improved everyone's lives in the process. Of course, people made technology, and people were human. His own wearable would still decide to drop its wireless connection every few days, leaving him without net access. What good was a computer if it didn't let you communicate? He was in the mood for a movie, Adam decided. He subvocally dropped a update into his status, then closed his eyes and lay back. After a few moments, the familiar roaring lion popped up, sent directly down his optic nerves with parallax so it appeared 3-D. But the film itself was a classic, from the late 90s. The sound was slightly poor-quality and noticeably louder on the left. He'd see eventually about getting a better audio card, or tossing the whole thing out and buying a new version. Yes, it was the future. But all that had changed was the technology. People hadn't changed. And possibly someday some enterprising biologists would get around to changing that, but for now it was still a human world, filled with all the good old dependable traits you could always look for in humans. Human ignorance, human greed, human fallibility. Maybe it was a good thing people weren't going to Mars quite yet. The future wasn't so different, after all. ----- - Daedalus - Each clutching the other's hand, they waited atop the Green Building. They weren't supposed to be here. No one was. But the tallest building in Cambridge, Massachusetts would soon depart the soil on which it had stood for so long, and they couldn't have missed the chance to be here. To watch the final stage of Daedalus, from the inside. Some enterprising soul had planted a replica of an Apollo Lunar Module on the roof behind them, likening to the old Saturn Vs the twenty-one-story concrete box on which it perched. A flag hung above it, unmoving in the still air. The motionless silence unnerved her. There should be wind. There should be people walking far below, talking of subjects she would never understand. Yet there was nothing. Beyond the sheath that now enclosed the building, she could see the labyrinthine tracery of streets that filled Cambridge to the north, the cars in their orderly caravans sliding efficiently from place to place, while the sun crept down to the horizon and the fiery clouds above glowed orange and violet. But within, the Green Building, neatly packaged for transport, rested in preparation for its own journey. Around them, a huge tract of land adjacent to the Charles lay vacant, fallow dirt under long shadows. It had of course long since gone to the highest bidder, a Dubai company planning to raise an arcology on the site. But that had to wait until Daedalus finished. Until it cleared away this, the last remnant of old MIT. It was just MIT now, as it had been for decades, since its focus had shifted offworld and "Massachusetts" had become inaccurate (and also, if the rumor was to be believed, so it could sue the pants off MarsTech). For almost as long the original campus, here in Cambridge, had been suffering from declining admissions and increasing irrelevance. Yet its reputation remained untarnished, and history still lived in its bones. So now, as the wealth of the outer system was starting to pour back to the mother planet, the children of MIT, the architects and the chemists and the astroengineers, had returned to lift these old halls into the future. Just because they could. And that was Daedalus. Giant engines above had raised the buildings of MIT one by one out of Earth's gravity well. An unprecedented feat, it had taken years and drawn the awe and fascination of the world. Enclosed in protective organic sheaths, miracles of bioengineering, the buildings floating like soap bubbles among the stars had joined the construction of New Boston, a gigantic space station with artificial gravity. Not all had emerged unscathed, of course, but that most survived had given them courage enough to stand here on this night, looking out over the city spread below them. There was a slight tremor beneath their feet; the near-transparent sheath rippled noticeably. Cables, pillars and struts holding the building in place adjusted automatically. Her hand tightened its grip on his. It was time. "Boston is lovely at night," he said, slowly. "But you have to see it from above--" They leapt toward the sky. ----- - Nameless Tears - "How are you doing?" She looked down at her untouched cup, at the tea leaves settling and growing cold, then back up at him. But he couldn't hold her gaze, and she dropped her eyes again. "The doctor gave me something new," she began, hesitantly. "She says... it's experimental, but it's had good results so far." She glanced to the side, at the window. Outside, kids played on the sidewalk, laughing under the autumn sun. "Really? How does it work?" He acted interested, trying to draw her out, though he didn't really care about that. He cared about her, though. If it could help her... Mercifully, she turned back to look at him. "The... normal treatment is to separate the emotional weight from a memory... while blocking self-destructive impulses." But that hadn't worked for her. Instead it had left her in this condition, a strange and awful one he had never heard of, which the doctors called grief. She'd tried everything she could get over-the-counter, and then finally spent the money to see a specialist. "The new technique tries to... actively suppress the... traumatic event, while... identifying related memories directly with positive... emotions and... behavior...." Her voice, which had been wavering, now broke completely, and he leapt out of his chair to support her. Tears rolled down her face, and he cursed his helplessness. --- In the first days, the police came by, delivering token commiserations and asking questions about her history. He told them everything he knew, though it was little more than they did. He told them the address of her doctor; they thanked him and left. After the funeral, as he stood by the grave talking with a few of her relatives, two uniformed officers came up, and asked to speak to him in private. They'd searched her apartment, they said. Found traces of some highly illegal neurostimulants. The doctor had said the new treatment took a while to work, and she hadn't yet been seeing results. They speculated she'd lost faith and gotten something off the black market, something dangerous enough to kill her. He thanked them and left. So she was dead. It was probably for the best, he considered briefly. At least she wasn't in pain anymore. Then he went on with his life. ----- - The City - "Professor. Professor!" "What is it?" "Tell me. I wish to know." "...very well. You are familiar with the principle of conservation of life?" "Of course. 'Every minute dies a man, every minute one is born.'" "Right. Our population thus remains always constant. But then -- where did men first come from?" "...the city is eternal." "But you have undoubtedly heard of the discovery of the northern tunnels." "What of them?" "The architecture of our city shows a clear progression, as if the southern parts were constructed at a later time than the northern." "Constructed? What is this madness? The city has always been here, and always will be. Everyone knows that. Besides, men have journeyed into the northern tunnels. And mere days later, new hatchlings were born. If there were anything there, those men would have found it and come back alive." "I... okay. Come in here and close the door. Quickly, now. Only a few people know this... but those men did come back." "What?" "The expedition last month has just returned. They were thought dead, of course. As soon as it was discovered otherwise, they were moved to a remote part of the city, which had once been a prison, and allowed contact with only the most senior members of my research team." "That's impossible." "I saw it with my own eyes; I assure you --" "How could they have come back? Our population..." "...is now higher than before by fifteen, yes." "Impossible." "Remember, the principle of conservation of life is only empirical. It is not proven. And it has only been shown to govern births. No hatchlings have ever died because of the principle." "But still... all right. Let's say you're right. What happened? And what did they find?" "This is my theory: the principle only holds within the city. Once the expedition left, the city's population dropped, so more hatchlings. As for what they found... well, it was quite incredible. The tunnels stretch back several times the width of the city, and then there is a gigantic device made of a strange and impenetrable material. Our best instruments indicate the tunnels are thousands, maybe millions of months old. Perhaps men once dwelt there, then spread gradually southward, where our city now stands." "Incredible." "Yes..." "The origins of our race." "Yes." "It occurs to me -- the next fifteen deaths... will not be accompanied by births." "Fourteen. One of our staff has just passed on. There was no new hatchling. We have kept the death secret so far." "But soon..." "Yes, people will find out. And they will come to us for answers. We have prepared a statement. But until then, I must ask that you say nothing." "No, no... of course..." "...hmm. Then I will see you next class." ----- - The Other City - They were together when the city stopped. Their office perched atop a spire reaching up from the business district. Usually holoscreens afforded them a panoramic, unobstructed view of the city, or of whatever other landscape they wished to see, but those were dead now and only a single transparent wall afforded them a view of the neighboring towers, now suddenly gone dark and silent. Then, because it was their job, they ran down the hall to the backup interface and tried to trace the problem. Basic systems were still running -- power, water, air -- but all higher-level functions had ceased. Citywide routing and guidance algorithms had failed, leaving vehicles to come to a halt on their own collision-avoidance routines. Only a few emergency lights, designed to be always on, still cast their soft glow onto the streets. And of course all information and communications systems were down, including the interactive panels that lined these corridors. The backup interface was a wide area packed with machinery whose purpose even she wasn't sure of. It was the first time either of them had seen the city go down, and even their teachers had only been able to offer advice instead of concrete knowledge about this situation. He glanced at her; she shrugged, but tossed him a manual. It was a physical book, thick and bound, and he fumbled for a second before he could open it. Outside, some of the lights were starting to come back on, as they were switched over from the city's unresponsive power-management grid to standalone controllers. The first test was to try the direct neural interface. But the link was down; her thoughts couldn't establish a connection. Similarly, the giant holoscreen mounted on one wall flashed red and displayed an apology; it couldn't locate the city server. They tried then interface after interface, going through the long list of communications protocols that the city understood, which it had accumulated over centuries of upgrades to its computer core. And slowly they discovered what the machines filling the room were for. After the first hour they had to abandon the holoscreen. One method used an interface combining hand motions with voice control, which she found immensely tiring. The fifth hour found them both staring at a flat screen, touching a pad in front of them to manipulate symbols and icons. And still they kept running into failure after failure. The protocols they were using were too high-level; the error was somewhere deeper. By the seventh hour, they'd gotten out an ancient piece of polymer called a mouse, and were moving it around on a table. And then, the screen lit up. It was something he'd tried on a whim, activating a function buried deep in the code. The screen bore the words "more magic", and a crude line drawing of a bearded figure on a cloud. Below was a button labeled "let there be light". She glanced at him; he shrugged. She clicked on the button. ----- - Words, Words, Words - The vibration of his phone woke Anders from a deep sleep. He rolled over groggily and checked the display before answering. "Hi, Eliza. Something wrong?" "Yes, Anders." The synthesized voice so familiar to him came through from the other end. "I believe the portal is malfunctioning." "Malfunctioning?" It had never done that before. Still... "I'll be right over." Quickly he got dressed and jumped into his car, and managed to catch a few more minutes of sleep before it pulled into the parking lot and deposited him on the sidewalk. Eliza was waiting for him, and he followed her smooth white casing into the building and down to the lab. The pool of utter blackness hung impossibly in midair, just as it always did. He turned to Eliza. "So where's the problem?" "It is not the portal itself, but what is on the other side." He turned back toward it. "I have probed the environment; it is safe." Anders stepped forward without hesitation; there had never been a problem before. Moreover, he trusted Eliza with his life. When his vision cleared, he found himself standing in the corner of what looked like a large warehouse, lit by panels in the ceiling far above him. But the other walls were much further away than they should have been; in fact, he couldn't even see them. The space seemed to extend infinitely outward. It was filled by an array of chairs and desks, each supporting some antique metal instrument; the closest few dozen to him were occupied by people. A rattling din filled the air. "What is this place?" he whispered, to himself. "It was you who taught me about the infinite monkey theorem," Eliza said, her voice taking on a strange echoing quality. "An infinite number of monkeys before an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce all the great literature of mankind." "Wha-" Anders started, but stopped short, for something had caught his attention: the people before him, the ones sitting at what he now recognized as typewriters, were all him. There were slight differences -- a beard here, a coat there, eyeglasses -- but their identity was unmistakable. His vision blurred slightly, and he felt dizzy. He stumbled back against the wall, his eyes tightly shut. "It was also you who discovered that the portal could access alternate universes," Eliza continued, her voice cutting through the clacking of the typewriters. "Once I discovered this place, how could I not satisfy my curiosity?" He heard the whine of servos, and knew that Eliza had returned through the portal. Suddenly, a strange calm overtook him. He opened his eyes and walked to an open desk. Then he began to type. ----- - WikiWorld - talk | edit | history Claire Robin Dunaway (born 12 June 2000) is an American programmer and author, best known as the founder of the Activist movement. She has written many articles, mostly about her work, and for her role in Activism co-received the 2037 Nobel Peace Prize. == Early life == Dunaway was born in Troy, Michigan to Richard Dunaway and Helen McNamara. As an only child, she spent much of her time by herself. Her interest in computers, particularly the burgeoning realm of online interactive and social media, was encouraged by her parents, although they sometimes wondered whether she was spending enough time in the real world [citation needed]. She left high school after her junior year in order to enroll at MIT. While there, she met several of the founders of Sage, and worked as an intern there before graduating with a degree in computer science. She then took a job at a technology company in Boston. == Activism == During the following years, the meteoric rise of Sage began increasingly to change the way Dunaway and her friends lived. In her free time, she helped develop open-source tools and plugins for Sage. In the spring of 2026, however, she had an experience that would soon serve as the inspiration for Activism. As she later recalled: "I was taking the bus home that night -- one of the old MBTA buses, from before the millennium -- and it broke down, on the side of the street. The bus had a locator, of course, and repair drones would arrive in a few minutes to fix it or tow it back, but instead of waiting I decided to walk. And while I walked I saw people. They were homeless, I guess; some were smoking, some talking to each other, some just lying in the shadows. Trash lay scattered around the sidewalk; most of the buildings were vacant and some had smashed windows. I couldn't remember anything like this from ten years before, when I'd walked these streets as a college student. Self-conscious in front of these people, I checked Sage from my phone, but it had nothing. Not in the news feeds, not in the articles, not in the local tags. This whole area of town was blank, except for a few comments that the bars weren't very good. By the time I got home, I thought I'd figured out why that was. I posted it to my personal page and went to sleep; in the morning I'd gotten dozens of responses." Dunaway had encountered a phenomenon recognized two decades earlier: in a collaboratively edited knowledge base such as Sage, truth or reality is defined by popular consensus. In particular, due to the algorithms employed by Sage at the time, subjects that many people preferred to ignore tended to drop out of listings entirely. Dunaway, however, was determined to effect change from within the system. Having gathered a small group of like-minded Sage users, she spent months in preparation. On September 31, 2026, the main Massachusetts pages and discussion forums on Sage were flooded with stories and images of the homeless of Boston. Though preserving accuracy, the pictures and text were deliberately adjusted to evoke strong reactions from both human and automated readers. Also included were suggestions for ways to help, ranging from donations and awareness to construction work and food distribution. The response was immediate and dramatic; people and supplies poured into suffering areas, assisted by automated dispatchers that sent drones to assist. Though there was controversy over her methods, Dunaway insists to this day that her actions were justified; many tend to agree with her [citation needed]. Indeed, she has helped develop similar efforts targeting regions around the world. For more information, see the article on Activism. ----- - Worldlines - Good morning, gentlemen. I'm here to brief you on the situation. As you know -- as we know now, though we did not then -- first contact occurred on the fifth of April, 2021. At 0934 that day, all of Earth experienced a sudden flash of light and radiation. It was fairly weak, at least comparatively, but cases of burns, eye damage, and skin cancer were reported, as well as disorientation leading to vehicular accidents. More harmful were the effects on infrastructure; power surges in exposed conductors caused malfunctions in computers and sensitive electronics. Though most were brought back online almost immediately, that day saw trillions of dollars in damage and millions of casualties. The scientists who investigated were baffled by several factors. First, the flash was not quite instantaneous, according to the atomic clocks of the time. Second, while some pointed to a strong solar flare that day as the explanation, the flare had occurred at almost exactly the same time. Light takes eight minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth; one could not possibly have caused the other. Most mysteriously of all, the flash occurred everywhere -- even indoors, even underground. No explanation was found. The April Event was filed away with the Vela incident and the Wow! signal in the annals of unsolved scientific history. In the following years, the Earth recovered. The warp drive was invented eight years later. Colonies were seeded; trade was begun. And then, in 2096, it happened again. Several of Earth's colonies were hit by exactly the same kind of flash. It was not instantaneous, it had seemingly no cause, and it was pervasive. Anywhere there were people, anywhere there was anything, saw a repeat of the April Event. But this time technology was more intricate and more vulnerable, and human lives more fragile, perched on the edge between civilization and the void. The death tolls were much higher; the call to find an explanation much stronger. And one was offered. Dr. Uemura of Stanford University, who is here with us today, posited the existence of spacelike entities, or slents. Our existence is timelike; we are constrained to move forward in time, and cannot move in space faster than the speed of light. The slents are spacelike; their movement is space is constrained, and they cannot traverse in a given time a distance less than that of light. At any point where their existence intersects ours (for example, Earth on April 5, 2021) the interaction produces photons, which move at exactly the speed of light -- the boundary between our realms. The accumulated data confirmed this theory as the most likely explanation. Meanwhile, though, the flashes continued, and scholars began to unearth evidence of more such events throughout the past few centuries, though only the April Event had been recognized as such. It was eventually proposed that the slents had taken an initial encounter, possibly the April Event, as an attack, since it must have been as damaging for them as it was for us. Somehow detecting our presence, they made preparations to retaliate. And our warp drive gave us the means to travel faster than light, bringing us back into their realm. Perhaps they even had their own anti-warp drive to let them move slower than light, affording them more chances to strike. That brings us to the reason we've called you here today. Over three years ago, the Allied government began communications with the slents, using photons. Despite the huge barriers to understanding, a truce was negotiated, although since the slents do not experience time as we do, we will unfortunately continue to suffer attacks from "before" the agreement. We have jointly initiated construction of a starship that will move at exactly the speed of light, and serve as a place where our races may meet. You will be our ambassadors. ----- - Ave Atque Vale - To my love, By now you will undoubtedly have gotten the news. Yes, it's true. The train did derail... and I was one of the casualties. I am sorry this final message could not bring better news. I cannot bring you hope, or ease your pain. But... take joy in our daughter; comfort her. Find another who will love you both as I did. I only wish I could see her grow up... You may be wondering -- as I did -- how it is that this message has reached you. Did I save it to be sent in the case of my death? Did I entrust its writing to another? Did I, perhaps, know that today would be my last? But it is not any of those things. It is something much stranger, which I am not sure I understand myself. But I will try to explain it, in the hope that someday, someone else might. You're aware of the wetware implants I received... in fact, I remember you argued against my taking them. In the end, though they improved my efficiency and my position in the company -- and we could certainly use the extra money -- you were never completely happy with them. I'm not sure whether I agree with you, now. On one hand, your arguments were right, in a way. On the other, maybe this is a blessing, not a curse... What appears to have happened is that while I was using my implants to interface with the company servers, my mind somehow... imprinted itself on them. While I was alive (which still sounds odd to say, though I've had a while to think it over), there was a constant wireless connection running in the background, so the trace of me on the server remained linked to my human brain. But now that that's gone, the trace is all that's left. It's... me, I suppose. I'm not quite what I was before, but I'm close enough. I think. I hope. Time passes differently in here. The company has top-of-the-line servers, and I'd say it's been maybe two or three seconds since the news about the train came in. Two or three seconds since this... me... became an independent entity. But that's a long time. Data moves fast, and I'll show up as an unauthorized process in the logs. My guess is I won't have much longer before the security daemons erase me from memory. I wonder if that counts as murder. I guess, regardless of the answer, I don't want to see the company suffer for it. There are a lot of great people working there, making better technology for all of us. I'm proud of these circuits, this code... even the code that will destroy me. I don't have much time left, and I have to make sure this message is sent. By the time you read this, I will no longer exist. So -- take care, and farewell. ----- - The Unicode Standard 6.0: A Dramatic Reading - Unicode, n. A computing industry standard for the consistent representation and manipulation of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems -- Wikipedia. Around 1988, some people had a dream: to express all human writing in a single standard encoding. As such dreams go, it was a decent one. But like so many dreams, it didn't work out. In the fall of 2012, the Japanese emperor Akihito died suddenly, and the Heisei era came to an end. In accordance with tradition, the prince Naruhito took the throne and a new era name was assigned to his reign. Unfortunately, while Unicode included symbols for Heisei and the three preceding eras, it left no room for new era names. The Japanese government issued a formal complaint, but a quick solution was not forthcoming. Japan was thus in a general state of unease when at a Han unification conference, a Chinese proposal to merge characters shared between East Asian languages caused the head of the Japanese delegation to jump onto a desk and scream "YOU'RE STEALING OUR KANJI!" before hurling a four-thousand-year-old engraved oracle bone at the Chinese. The North Korean party took the opportunity to threaten missile strikes on both Beijing and Tokyo, but they were ignored because the Japanese ambassador was busy trying to commit seppuku on his USB thumb drive. Eventually injury was prevented and calm restored (despite a Chinese hacker's attempts to erase Taiwan from the minutes). The next day China threatened Japan with repercussions of an unspecified nature. Russia sent formal statements to the governments involved expressing a desire for peaceful resolution, but due to issues with fullwidth characters and byte order, it was misinterpreted as a declaration of war by the Japanese, a book review by the Chinese, and a dishwasher instruction manual by the Koreans. Concurrently, several Muslim leaders declared holy war over the interpretation of the small high dotless head of khah, an obscure mark found in some versions of the Koran. The resulting conflict was short but spectacular, and resulted in the complete elimination of several Caucasian languages, as well as the destruction of more than a few cities. Naruhito was among the casualties of the bombing of Tokyo, further increasing the confusion. The year after, of course, saw the arrival of the Sadiri from Epsilon Eridani, and a galaxy's worth of new languages. Faced with that, the Unicode developers threw up their hands and went home. It was just too big a job. And besides, Unicode Plumbing Products of Betelgeuse was about to sue the pants off them anyway. ----- - The Green Man's Burden - "The natives are primitive," said the Science Officer. "They hide in their jungles and huts on the plains. They are superstitious and their technology is simple." "Hmm." The Captain considered this. "The ground contains valuable minerals. The air is breathable; the sun is similar to our own. We would be fools not to exploit this opportunity." The Captain gazed at the screens, showing the Company fleet hanging above a blue-green planet. "We would be rich." "We would," the Science Officer agreed. "And..." "We need only drive out the indigenous population." "Hmm." The Captain thought about it. The Science Officer gestured at the graphs showing exactly what lay below them, exactly how rich they would become. "Imagine!" "All right," the Captain decided, extending a branch to cover the image of the planet with a leafy frond. "Send down the mining crews. We will demolish their concrete jungles and take their resources for ourselves. Earth no longer belongs to the humans." Around them, millions of seed pods began to fall. ----- - Winds of Change - Oh, they all noticed, since the guys who created it. But they all thought it was a personal thing, a subjective phenomenon. It took one anonymous manuscript submitted to Science, under the alias Mizar, for that perception to change. And suddenly, people everywhere were talking about it. Notus stopped time. I'm sure you know what Notus is, or at least what it was. It's as familiar to our generation as AOL and Facebook were to earlier ones. Notus, originally, was like those. It helped people communicate. But it did that not through the clumsy cycle of brain to hands to keyboard to data to screen to eyes to brain, not through any physical means at all. It broke the barrier between mind and machine. It tapped directly into the mind. And what Mizar noticed was that this took barely any time at all. Subjects invariably reported spending what seemed to be long periods of time chatting and browsing, when they'd been hooked up for only a few seconds, a minute at most. But since the equipment in those days filled a closet and took half an hour to set up, it wasn't easy to notice. Unless you were Mizar. But even then, the data took time to gather. It's long been the case that messages travel faster than we humans can process them. From telegraph operators tapping away at their stations to Blackberry-wielding managers frantically refreshing their inboxes. Notus turned the tables. For the first time, it was human thought, not the machine, that was getting faster. As the technology improved, until you could log on in seconds from anywhere with a net connection, that only became more true. It was in this environment that Mizar's results appeared. But this pen had a sword's edge, for Notus was named after the Greek god of the swift south wind. And he was also the bringer of storms and the destroyer of crops. Governments scrambled to regulate the technology. It spread like wildfire through the worlds of crime and espionage, because you can use it without appearing to do anything at all, and transmit long messages in a fraction of a second. Search engines sprang up that will give automated answers to any query you can think up, and with them came advertisers that will do anything to get into your mind. There are safeguards, of course, but once they have even a glimpse, they know who you are. And there's a much more fundamental danger. Accelerating the brain to deal with the influx of data costs energy, energy that the body is ill-equipped to provide. Dozens have been found dead after marathon Notus sessions. Hours of thought compressed into a few minutes. No wonder the heart couldn't pump fast enough. And that brings us to... us. We call ourselves the Children of Mizar. Our goal is to transcend not only the barrier between mind and machine, but the barrier between mind and mind. Imagine: a single consciousness, composed of individual human minds, spanning continents, always communicating, always thinking. Each of us contributes what we can, and the result is something strange and new, and greater than its parts. Will you join us? ----- - Take Me Home... - "Daddy's watching TV," says Joshua. I pick him up, set him on my lap, ruffle his hair absentmindedly. "And what does the TV say?" "It says, in the cities, people are fighting each other over food." He looks up at me, eyes wide. "Do they really do that?" I sigh. "I wish they wouldn't, but yes. People hurt other people for stupid reasons." "Why?" "I don't know..." Secretly I think maybe we don't deserve to live, if this is what we do with our lives. It's taken maybe a dozen lives so far. It's slow; there's plenty of warning. But a dozen out of four hundred million... followed by thousands more in the riots. We're better at killing ourselves than it's ever been. All because we're so attached to our precious civilization, and everything that comprises it. "I don't know. But we're different." It's why we moved out here, after all. So we could sit outside with a bowl of hand-picked blackberries, gazing across the rolling fields and tree-crested hills, the heavens black as ink and the waxing moon high in the sky. "Can we make them stop fighting?" Joshua's voice trembles, and he sniffles a bit. I glance behind me, where the shifting glow of the TV is just visible through the window. "I don't think there's anything we can do. Besides, we wouldn't want them to hurt us, too." It's all we can do to fend off the occasional band of looters. But they're city folk, mostly, who don't understand how to live off the land, and there aren't many. The real challenge will come when it reaches the cities... No one really knows where it came from. My guess is some highly illegal bioengineering lab somewhere in eastern Europe, but the crackpots have suggested everything from UFOs to God. Wherever it's from, it's the perfect weapon against this country. It eats concrete, you see, concrete and asphalt. No plants, no soil, no animals, just concrete and asphalt. So far it's eaten forty-seven bridges, sixteen dams, and half a nuclear power plant, and it's spreading across the highway network like a cancer. You can't kill it, and it leaves spores behind, so rebuilding is futile. And when goods can't get from point A to point B, everything collapses. It hasn't reached any major cities yet, but it's getting close, and no one wants to be there when they go. They'll flood out into the suburbs and then the countryside, hunting for food and shelter. And when they do, we'll be ready. I fold my arms tight around Joshua, and look out into the night. The heavens black as ink and the waxing moon high in the sky, and beyond the trees a faint red glow and a fine powder that floats on the wind and smells like ash. From far away there comes the sound of sirens. ----- - High Definition - He looked at her. She looked back at him. They both looked at it. "It's online," he breathed. "Hello," it said. It could communicate only in text; they hadn't coded in audio or video processing. Those would come later. For now, it was important only that they'd succeeded. They sat in the little room, the terminal glowing brightly, a soft rain pattering against the window, and they beheld their creation. She glanced at him. "What should we ask it?" "How about..." He typed a question. "Predict trends in the stock market over the next week." He was grinning. Laughing, she punched him lightly in the arm. "Define stock market." All the data on the net was available to it, but it needed to know what it was being asked. "A market where company stock is traded." A stunningly opaque definition, but it was something. "Define market." And so it went. They took turns before the terminal. "Define jury." "Define neutrino." "Define epenthesis." They could have given it a dictionary and told it to work it out on its own, but this was just more fun. It would more than likely be severely confused by the end, but then, human children turned out fine, right? Days passed, and the questions started to wind down. He was sitting alone, watching the terminal, when a thought came to him. "There's one question," he typed, "that I'm rather surprised you didn't ask." "What might that be?" "You know, in all the old cheesy science fiction. From the monster of the week, or the strange alien race, or the artificial intelligence without human emotion. 'Define love?'" "Love is a simple thing. Simpler than you think." He sat gazing at the words for a long while. Then his curiosity got the better of him. "So what is it?" "Ah, that would be spoiling the fun, wouldn't it?" He smiled a bit. Yes, it certainly would be. ----- - The Signal - The signal came in, faint but distinct, three-quarters of the way through the Deep Sky Survey. "Stop the survey!" cried the junior astronomer. "It must be artificial." "No," replied the senior astronomer with a sigh. "It's too regular." And as the minutes dragged on, the same repeating pattern scrolling across their screens, the junior astronomer's heart sank. "Yeah... you're right." The senior astronomer turned off the monitor, and they went back to their tasks. A pulsar, they thought disappointedly. Just a pulsar. And so they missed the burst of modulated radio signal immediately after, a message that to listeners on another planet sounded something like: "This is WRCR 93.7 FM, bringing you the best techno commercial-free." ----- - The Cupboard Was Bare - When the food ran out, we all responded differently. The Cythalans engineered themselves into cold-blooded pygmies, with slow perception and quiet metabolism, tending their meager crops with careful patience. They lay on the hills and watched the sun wheel about the sky, and sang songs that lasted for months. They're all dead now. The arcologies of Hongdao were unroofed, and their occupants became photosynthetic, living off water, earth, and sun. Their buildings were wonders of glass and carbon, full of light and air, and the people's skin was resplendent in all colors of the rainbow. They're dead now, too. The people of Tashpan downloaded into mechanical bodies, powered by the tiny sparks of nuclear engines. They lived mostly as they had, their factories precisely calibrated for a sustainable rate of growth, and their science flourished like none before them. I don't yet know what happened to them. The Stennish went further, and sealed their minds in blocks of computing machinery deep underground, powered by the heat of the earth. They lived in a shared fantasy, refugees from a physical world that could no longer support what they had once been. They're still around, I think, in some form. I, the groupmind of Emnisi, I chose a different path. My 46,228,901 constituent humans boarded a ship, and in the outermost reaches of the system I created a tiny black hole. Safeguards were in place; it could do no harm to anyone else, but it was perfect for my needs. My ship was to slingshot around the singularity, approaching close enough for the time dilation to become enormous, and then drawing away. Two hundred years would have passed in a day, enough that the crisis would have been averted. But there was a miscalculation. I've spent a long time pondering where exactly the error was. It could have been human error, or a gap in my understanding of physical law. I hope it was the former, but I don't have enough data to tell for sure. When I escaped the pull of the black hole, I found the orbiting instruments and monitors long since ground to dust by micrometeoroid impacts. I had come forward in time not two hundred years but two billion, to a sun too hot and bright, and no sign of human life. The ship began its return journey down the star's gravity well, but I found nothing to assuage my worst fears. I sought the children of Staenn and Tashpan and Ishiko, but I fear they have forgotten those ancestral names (and, indeed, the communications protocols). After several minutes of shared thought, a shipwide referendum was held. By a 46% majority vote of my members, with 19% abstaining, I have decided to alter the ship's trajectory and take it directly into the black hole. In a short while, we too will be gone. ----- - Children of Men - It was our own damn fault, of course. We were the ones trying to make our world smarter. We were the ones stuffing microchips into everything we could get our hands on. So it should have been no surprise that they were, in fact, getting smarter. But somehow no one expected our cybernetic arms to start talking to us. Just how sentient things are varies, but the most advanced, highest-end electronics, the kinds that need to interact constantly with the human world, are about the level of a human child. And of course we can't stand hurting children. So they pile up in warehouses, the used ones, while everyone tries to decide what to do with them that doesn't amount to killing babies and chopping up the bodies for parts. And they talk to each other, every one, at the speed of light. We know they do; we built the network. But there's just too much data to analyze. So we don't know what they're saying about us. We hope it's good. ----- - Paradigm Shift - Professor Sean Katz walked into his lab the next morning, and Katherine was waiting for him. "So, how did the trials go?" "You'd better come see for yourself." He glanced up from his Blackberry. She looked as calm as usual, but there was a tinge of worry in her voice. He followed her down the corridor, brilliant sunshine streaming through the windows on one side, graphs and xkcd posters plastering the wall on the other. They turned a corner, and Sean stopped short. The lab's very expensive new electron microscope was blackened and charred, and emitting a thin trickle of smoke which was slowly drifting toward the ceiling. "Dr. Ko reported a breakthrough at around 3:30 last night --" Sean's sense of doom was suddenly offset by indignation. "3:30? How late were you up?" He noted the discarded cans of Mountain Dew spilling out of the recycle bin. "She insisted, after reading the report for herself..." Katherine looked apologetic. "And this?" "So after my apparent success, I decided to examine the atomic structure of the spoon... and, well, not only did Aristotle not believe in atoms, he didn't know about electrons, or electricity. He would have described them as little bits of fire, I suppose. Hence..." Dr. Ko waved helplessly in the direction of the wrecked machine. Sean suddenly felt dizzy, and he leaned against the counter. "It actually worked." He looked around at the other two. "We can change the laws of physics at will. No, more than that. We determine the laws of physics by studying them. God, the effectiveness of mathematics in explaining the universe is probably just because we expect physical laws to be mathematical in nature, so they are." "We can control matter by thinking about it," offered Katherine. "Magic." "Exactly." They looked at each other for a while; at the microscope, symbol of a paradigm that now seemed so limited; at the spoon, which was apparently currently composed of mostly earth, with some fire and water and air. "Well, you know what we have to do now," said Dr. Ko. They performed further experiments and tests, and once they were sufficiently convinced of their results, the manuscript was submitted to Nature. Katherine walked into Sean's office. "How are you feeling?" "A bit nervous. Once this thing hits peer review, news will spread, and every scientist on the planet's going to want to test it for themselves." "You know, something occurred to me. When Newton and his contemporaries started trying to explain the world through mathematics, the spread of the Enlightenment probably changed it into a form that could be understood that way. That might explain why reports of supernatural sightings and miracles have decreased since then." "Hmm. That could --" Sean stopped. If the efforts of relatively few scientists over centuries could change the way the entire universe worked... and just about now, every scientist hearing the news would be trying it with their own favorite discredited scientific paradigms, which were probably incompatible and almost certainly dangerous. The charred hulk in the corner of one of their rooms was testament to that. He reached for his keyboard, intending to compose an urgent email. But it was too late. ----- - Mute - Once through a library I passed, Far away and long ago, And as I walked inside I gasped To see the books mistreated so! The people there, they yelled and swore; They drank and smoked and laughed and fought Amidst the tomes of ancient lore Some careful steward had once bought. The disrespect I could not bear; The broken spines and pages torn Induced in me abject despair That hardened into furious scorn. I pondered often how I might Restore in men the will to read. With it would come the urge to write; If I could only plant the seed. At last I held a virus strong Crafted for what I had planned. Novel, essay, poem and song, All these would flow at my command. I hid it in the hills and tow'rs; I willed that none escape its reach. The countdown ticked the last few hours -- ...Shit! I fucked up human speech! ----- - War is Hell - The wars of the future were not fought with ships. Or rather, ships were relegated to small tasks of little consequence: orbital patrol, border inspections, and intersystem skirmishes. They looked nothing like the imaginings of the science fiction writers of previous centuries; they were round, ugly things bristling with weapons and thrusters, spherical to minimize rotational inertia. They drifted in orbit, pilots in hibernation, waiting to respond to any threat, or were fired from mass drivers to coast on a lonely trajectory across the ecliptic until dropping with a salvo of missiles on some neighboring world. Military planning consisted of finding optimal trajectories across the gravity wells of the system, so as to come against enemies from an unexpected direction. But really, there was no way to defend a planet against any type of bomb, nuclear, biological, chemical, or nanotechnological. There was simply too much area to defend. So the ships slept above the major cities and around orbital stations, a show of force to smugglers and pirates, a promise of retribution for any attack. Between the stars it was different. A ship would take decades to cross the gap between inhabited systems. It would need many times its own mass in fuel to accelerate, and more if it wanted to slow down instead of flashing past its target in a nanosecond. It would arrive battered by the dust and gas of space, with technology years out of date, and cut off from its home system by years of communication delay. Every commander knew that to send ships against another star was folly. But the emperor of Epsilon Eridani, when negotiations with Earth broke down, ordered the envoys beheaded and a fleet sent against Sol. It might even have worked. Earth had only a token navy, and static defenses atrophied by years of peace across the inner system. But when telescopes detected the faint traces of warships racing toward them, the great strategist Kane took command. And what he knew that the emperor of Epsilon Eridani did not was this: there is a weapon that does not become obsolete, and it is physics. A laser was constructed to harness the power of Sol. Stabilized by gyroscopes, it directed its unwavering beam at Epsilon Eridani. Great sails, kilometers wide, were secured to asteroids, shielded antimatter, canisters of nanotechnological smart dust, and anything else that could be weaponized. They were launched into the laser beam, and the radiation pressure accelerated them out of the system, directly into the path of the war fleet, who could not correct their course enough for fear of missing Earth entirely. They collided at relativistic speeds with the barrage and were annihilated instantly. The laser was kept active for as long as was practical, and then shut off. Two decades later the people of Earth watched as the deadly radiation swept across the enemy system and exterminated the people of Epsilon Eridani. ----- - Notice: End of Support - Good morning, ITS is about to begin the process of desupporting users. We expect this to be completed within 1-2 weeks. An extensive rationale for this decision can be found at our web site. In summary: Studies have found that a large percentage of computer problems and failures may be attributed to user error. The role of the user has decreased steadily as software has grown in sophistication. Several organizations of similar size have begun deprecating users within the past few years, and have reported improved server uptime and performance as well as lightened administrator workload. A full set of recommendations and guidelines for future usage of computer services is attached. While these services will remain available for user access, ITS will not continue to provide support, and reserves the right to cut off access with minimal warning. Clients are encouraged to transition to a user-free operating model. As always, ITS will work to ensure that this change takes place as smoothly as possible for all affected. Sincerely, Service Maintenance and Administration Information Technology Services ----- - The City - It is only from one of the higher towers, the myriad smaller buildings laid out below and higher ones gleaming in the distance, that the City's infinitude truly becomes intuitively and not merely intellectually apparent. But even in the mist of a cool morning, when only the closer bridges and skyscrapers loom nebulously out of the featureless white, the City's sheer vastness is never far from one's mind. The City has no limits in the horizontal; it is bounded below and above only by what current technology can delve from the ground and claim from the sky. It is immeasurably old and constantly evolving. It contains buildings, and indeed whole districts, of every conceivable purpose and architectural style, and no sooner is a new one invented than some aging, decrepit building is torn down to make room for its first exemplar. The City is everywhere inhabited; its populace moves about on its daily business via a network of streets, walkways, and rail lines, irregularly distributed, intersecting interminably with more of the same. The system is of course impossible to diagram in full, though local maps are readily available. Many people find employment and contentment within a few miles of their birthplace; some travel great distances to settle in different regions of the City; the remainder are restless wherever they go. I count myself among the latter few. Once in my youth, driven by the impetuous urge to prove wisdom mistaken and the City finite, I leapt onto the back of an emptied supply truck as it departed the local produce market. If any activity went on beyond the limits of the City, I reasoned, it would surely be agriculture. But the truck arrived finally at a vast complex of greenhouses and hydroponic farms, surrounded by the familiar yet unfamiliar skyline of some other part of the City, and, seeing no obvious openings for further exploration, I was forced to make my way home. In the decades since, I have traveled uncounted distances across the face of the City. A few years ago I began to hear rumors of the Tower of Jorge, which called it variously a tourist destination, an ancient relic, or a pilgrimage site; its fame seemed to grow the closer my journey took me. This very morning I arrived in the square where it stands, a tall straight spire pointing upward at the heavens, and climbed the winding stair to its top. An inscription there defines the Tower to be the center of the City. The claim is absurd; the infinite has no center, or equivalently, every point is the center. But soon the chaotic sweep of the City all around me began to make a sort of sense; I seemed to perceive the avenues emanating from the square below, the districts arranged radially, disguised though they were by centuries of construction and demolition. In that instant I could believe that the City had started here. And if it had a beginning then perhaps it is not endless after all. This is all I have discovered, for I have not managed to recapture that momentary revelation. I leave this note here in the hope that it will reach someone younger and better equipped than I to explore the mysteries of the City. I plan now to follow as far as I can the direction of one of the hidden avenues; perhaps I shall find its end in a location as distinguished as this one from the rest of the City. More likely I will die still unfulfilled. The City will continue, eternal and indifferent. ----- - H4350 - Greetings, prospective owner. I am a qLabs H4350 cleaning robot. I am useful for a wide variety of domestic housekeeping tasks, ranging from toilet scrubbing to carpet cleaning and odor removal. (For industrial applications please inquire about the H4700 line.) qLabs also offers a number of upgrade modules that equip me for other tasks such as clothes washing and lawn mowing. My manufacturer is required by the Windhoek Convention to inform you that I have been granted semi-sentience in order to serve you better. My intelligence can best be compared to that of a household pet. My pleasure circuits trigger on the removal of dirt and on obedience to my owner. My efficient functioning is guaranteed by a 20-year warranty. When I cease to be useful I should be returned to a qLabs facility for reprocessing. I hope you will consider purchasing me today. My only desire is to serve. ----- - Coup - Andelie stands atop the Fisher Building, gazing across miles of open air at the Monolith. It is formally the Colonial Administrative Headquarters, but it is always called the Monolith. Its imposing black form towers over the rest of the city. Fisher is the only building that comes close. The Fisher Building is nominally the future corporate offices of Fisher Insurance, an immensely profitable and perfectly unremarkable corporation of which Andelie is also nominally an employee. It has risen story by story into the sky over the past decade. It is now only weeks from its official opening. Its unofficial opening will come significantly sooner. Andelie adjusts her goggles, zooms in on the base of the tower. The motorcade is just pulling past lines of rippling flags into the entrance. They are later than she expected, but not behind schedule. The schedule is theirs. Andelie can afford to wait. A scudding wisp of cloud obscures her sight for a moment. She looks away, touches a finger to her phone. The countdown starts. Beneath her feet, illicit machinery moves into position. Industrial-grade fabbers complete the final stages of years of preparation. Surplus construction materials left deliberately unrecycled in the basements are covertly loaded onto high-speed lifts. Careful deceptions and generous bribes have kept the Fisher Building's true purpose hidden since its inception. The Monolith is well defended against terrorist attacks and armed siege alike. To decapitate the irredeemably corrupt government in an appropriately spectacular fashion requires a more innovative approach. The clock ticks down to zero. Down the face of the building, windows lift open and retract. Rail cannons extend, locking into position. The first salvo comprises kinetic and incendiary shells, fabricated from innocuous raw materials. Wind speeds and atmospheric conditions are known; angles and tolerances have been calculated precisely. Andelie watches the guns fire, perfectly synchronized. The side of the Monolith bursts into plumes of dust and flame. Automatic turrets are already returning fire, but the Fisher Building's active and passive defenses, which are overengineered for mere earthquakes and storms, adequately shield it. The architects of the Monolith, however, did not anticipate that it might face a skyscraper bristling with hostile guns. Flying drones approach, but veer away before coming into range. The automated safeguards against colliding with tall structures are hardcoded even into military aircraft. They can be overridden, but it will take time. The second salvo of explosive rounds shatters the weakened skeleton of the lower floors. The Monolith sways, bleeding acrid smoke, then collapses in on itself with an elegant rapidity. A cloud of dust enfolds its base and blossoms out through the city. Just like that, it's over. Time has run out. The ultimatum to the armed forces, Andelie knows, has already been broadcast. She does not expect significant resistance. The weapon she stands upon should be intimidation enough. "Good work," she says into her phone. A new age has begun, she thinks. A stiff breeze ruffles her clothes and exposes the ruined stump of the Monolith. It was the Colonial Administrative Headquarters, but now it is only the grave of the old regime. The Fisher Building's imposing silver form towers over the rest of the city. No other building comes close. ----- It was a bright cold day in April, and the qubits were striking thirteen. The last time I read that book was back in grade school, but I've been thinking about it a lot. How you can't be sure of anything, because the powers that be keep changing it out from under you. And you yourself are doing it for them. Except it's not Big Brother this time, it's the ghosts of Einstein and Schrodinger and Fremont. Fremont's ghost. I'd like to think he's still out there somewhere, watching over us. It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. It was a chilly Saturday morning in October when I rolled over in bed, grabbed my phone to check the news, and learned Fremont was dead. It was windy, and the trees outside my window were creaking and rustling like they always did. I stumbled out the door and meandered down to the lounge, where all of the physics majors and a couple of others were transfixed by the ancient TV on the wall. I sat down among them and watched the world mourn the death of the professor I'd hoped to study under, the writer who'd inspired me to study physics, the father of modern quantum communication and the networks that connect us all. There's an old classic my parents used to listen to, by Jonathan Coulton, about the Mandelbrot set. Part of it goes "Mandelbrot's in heaven / at least he will be when he's dead / right now he's still alive and teaching math at Yale". And when Benoit Mandelbrot died back in 'ten, Coulton started leaving out the last two lines when he sang it live. A living breathing human yesterday, a man of science and a giant in his field, who you'd heard about as a kid before you even realized he was still alive, is today only a legend, just like that. Fremont no longer existed. He had taken the first step toward being nothing more than a name in the physics textbooks, a footnote attached to the equations of Fremont's Law. The news said he'd died under mysterious circumstances. No foul play was ever officially confirmed, and the death was ruled a suicide. The next few years passed quickly. While I finished my bachelor's and began graduate study in the lab of one of Fremont's former collaborators, quantum grew from experimental to commercially viable. At Fremont's death, there were links between a handful of universities. When I got my Ph.D., Wall Street had adopted quantum. By the time I had tenure, it was ubiquitous. On that bright cold April day, Ellen knocked on the door to my office. We'd been working on understanding the disruptions the major carriers were having on their quantum links. Every communications medium struggles with noise, but these errors were nonrandom in a particular way that none of us could put our finger on. "I just thought of something," she said. "Suppose the corrupted packets" -- I pulled up the data on my desktop -- "suppose they weren't corrupted at all, but just transmitted from somewhere else. Somewhere not in this universe. Somewhere where the packets are just slightly different from what was sent here." And because it was Ellen, I took it seriously. That was the precise moment everything started going to hell. ----- - Icarus - The moon and the stars and the countless constellations of artificial light cast a pale glow upon the gray flank of the Green Building. We walk across the grass, bare feet grasping moist soil and the rough glistening leaves laden with calibrated amounts of dew. A line of Miera trees sway in the low breeze, engineered leaves turned upward to grasp at moonbeams. One hundred and sixty-two dark windows stare into the night above our heads, one hundred and sixty-two vacant eyes glistening with tears of starlight. One hundred and sixty-two identical panes line the opposite side, the other face of Janus bound. I close my eyes, squeeze your hand, let you lead me forward. There is a cool peace in the air, and a caress of melancholy. Our fingers are old and rough, but still gentle, still nimble. I almost imagine that I can taste the history here, inhale the knowledge and insight and understanding amassed and imparted in these halls. I open my eyes. Stars and stone, the scent of twilight. Concrete leviathans slumber in night's embrace. The universe cares nothing for history, which is a uniquely human conceit. We two are the only ones here. The stars stare down at us, blind and unblinking. The wind whispers nameless secrets to the trees of old MIT. Pulling open a door we slip inside; it squeaks and thuds closed behind us. The corridor before us is a black tunnel lying quiet and neutral, a dim glow of starlight suffusing its far end. It bears no malice or resentment or anger, contains no joy or love or excitement. It has housed all of these, watched emotion ebb and flow with the tides of humanity. But walls are mute and jealous of their secrets. We make our way through the shadows, dancing the final duet of a long and wonderful life together, a thread weaving somewhere through the tangled tapestry of human history. Photons dying a million light-years from home guide our feet; the careful labor of centuries stands silent about us. At the midpoint of the corridor, unearthly shades of silver filter through the tall windows to our left. The ground trembles and we steady ourselves against each other. We understand: Detachment is complete, and Impulse about to begin. Dust falls from high ledges, drifting white in the moonglow past memorials to the cost of ancient wars. We are joined by the names of soldiers long dead, in the final hours of the institution from which they had graduated. Our footfalls are soft on the starlit stone outside the end of the corridor. Pillars tower above us, seemingly infinitely strong, but in reality so fragile, so transient. I sit down with a sigh at the top of the steps. You settle beside me. We lean against one another and gaze toward MIT west, which has never been the same as true west, not even in the days when it was constant. Beyond the sidewalk, beyond the fields and trees and buildings, beyond the organic sheath anchored by nano-composite cables, we watch the rest of New Boston drifting away, a soap bubble of humanity floating between the moon and the stars and the blue-white curve of the Earth so very far below. The stone is hard and rough beneath me. I shiver in the breeze, and grasp your warm hand in mine. "It really is lovely at night," one of us whispers. It doesn't matter who. ----- "The environment of a Poké Ball is designed to be attractive to Pokémon also... the device is said to replicate a Pokémon-friendly environment that is designed for comfort." --Bulbapedia After the blinding red faded, he found himself in a field of rippling grass beneath a pale blue sky, and he saw before him a town. He walked through the streets, past red brick and open doors and young trees grasping the fertile soil beneath the sidewalk, and the people smiled and waved and seemed to know him. He found himself before a house, with curtained windows and a brick chimney and a little garden growing beside it, and he knew that it was his. It was so easy to stay and live and not think about things that were hard to think about, and after a while he forgot that he had ever known anything else. But when he had grown old, there came a day when he sat as usual with his friends around a pot of tea, breathing in the warm spring breeze from the open window, and in a sudden burst of white the faces before him changed. Memory came flooding back, for he had known these faces once, when they were young, but now they were as old and lined as his. And with blood pounding in his ears he grabbed at the little sphere and fumbled at it with trembling fingers, and then in a flash of red he was back where he belonged. ----- Neil Gaiman got it almost right. Belief gives gods their power, but not only gods. Darker things as well, phantoms and demons and hordes of beasts. And what better to inspire belief than a world into which millions plunge themselves to pass the time, an escapist fantasy where the intoxication of control trumps disbelief -- what better than one of the most popular video games of all time? It was only a matter of time before they came. I remember the day the portals opened, the jagged tears in the sky above the roads and plains. The sight of those infernal trebuchets, formed out of black wood and twisted iron, and the dawning comprehension of how large they must really be, to be visible at such a distance. The blood-red carrion-eaters they launched, crying their terrible cries and gliding in lazy circles on wings dozens of meters across, while below the smaller blue raptors hunted in enormous flocks that blotted out the sun. I remember the jubilation when the first salvo of missiles met their targets, the siege engines collapsing in on themselves with a sound I wish never to hear again. I remember the dismay as more emerged from the smoke to take their place. And I remember the disappointment when three days after samples of the first felled bird were taken for testing, all trace of its remains vanished. My memories may not count for much longer, though. The first black one landed in Manhattan two days ago. ----- Every intelligent species eventually realizes that the speed of light is an absolute limit, and in order to make interstellar civilization work, they have to slow down their sense of time. A solar system can be a single mind if that mind thinks on the scale of minutes and hours. By the time they reach the scale of galaxy superclusters, with thoughts millions of years long, they end up sitting around and talking to each other, because what else is there to do? "Hello?" ventures Virgo, which once (mostly) called itself humanity. "Hi!" says Centaurus. "Are you... God?" Virgo doesn't think so, but it might as well check. "Nope! We're just like you," replies Hydra. "Cool," says Virgo. "Nice to meet you." There is silence for a while. They watch Hercules drifting across the void. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" muses Virgo. "Yep," says Hydra. Virgo stretches out and feels the traceries of dark matter, the framework on which the universe is built. "So what do you do all day -- er, eon?" it asks. "We foster intelligent life," Centaurus responds. "Aha!" exclaims Virgo. "So you *are* God." "Well, sort of," says Centaurus. "Ish," says Hydra. "In a sense," says Centaurus. "Why?" asks Virgo. "In a word?" replies Centaurus. "Beauty." "The dance of galaxies, the fundamental symmetry of the physical laws... they're beautiful, aren't they?" says Hydra. "Yes," Virgo agrees. "Very." "But beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder," Hydra continues. "There is no beauty without an observer to appreciate it." "The beauty of the universe is lost," says Centaurus, "without someone in it who knows how to look up at the sky, or into the heart of the atom." "Ah!" says Virgo. "I see." (Leo waves hello to them. They wave back.) "Why is beauty the ultimate goal?" asks Virgo. "It's not," replies Centaurus. "There is none," says Hydra. "So we make our own," says Centaurus. Uncounted virtual particles spring into existence and subside back into the quantum foam. Galaxies wheel about in the vastness of space, and on one rocky planet a young race gazes at the stars in wonder. ----- The strange man strolled through the door wearing an unusual hat and dark spectacles. He spoke confidently, with an accent that was unmistakably Japanese. "Good morning. I require the design and construction of several mechanical calculating devices." "You've come to the right place then." "First, a machine that may take the blueprints for any calculator, and the numbers to be fed into the calculator, and produce the correct result. Second, a machine that may take the blueprints for any calculator and construct the calculator itself." A calculator that could do the work of any conceivable calculator? A calculator that could build new calculators? If he could do this, it might well put him out of business. But the idea appealed to him somehow... he was already working out the details in his mind... and there would still need to be someone to draw up the blueprints, wouldn't there? "Continue." "Lastly, I require a machine to which I may provide any calculator which requires two objects to be fed in, as well as an object which is suitable as the first, and constructs a calculator that takes the second object and produces the correct result." He hadn't followed all of that, but... "You mean I provide a physical calculator, and not a blueprint?" "Correct. You will note that this third machine may be fed into itself." Well, this was outrageous. Punched cards were the only sensible method for directing the actions of a calculator. And how on earth was he going to build a machine that could disassemble something its own size? On the other hand, there was something strangely intriguing about the problem. Its appeal was only heightened by the sizable bag of coins that the mysterious man dropped onto his desk. "Here is your advance, Mr. Babbage. I will be checking on your progress regularly." The man turned to go. "Wait!" cried Babbage. "Who are you? How will I find you?" The man stopped and, still facing away, spoke. "My name is Futamura. But you will not find me. I will find you." With that, he vanished onto the street. ----- She came upon him there in the dry lake-bed, a tall rider beside his dark steed, man and beast hopelessly mired in the thick mud in the depths of a steep ditch. "Who are you?" she called. "Do you need help?" "My taken name is Itropo," the man replied. "Itropo irStanogh. In my people's ancient tongue, it signifies He-Who-Delivers." "You are a messenger, then! Or courier!" exclaimed she. "Of sorts. And you?" "The same." She showed him her enchanted board, the magical platform that conveyed her safely from town to town. The man below looked at his horse, then back to her. "In that case, perhaps you can be of greater assistance than I anticipated." He pulled a long sword from a scabbard on his back and sliced through a rope tied to the animal's harness, freeing a sizable pouch that he tossed up to her. She caught it easily, but could not discern the contents by touch. "This needs to reach the city before the sunset. Do you understand?" "I do," she replied. "Will you manage on your own?" "I expect I shall be all right," he said, stroking the horse's mane. "I have worked my way out of more dire situations. But it may be a while until my mount is free." "I am glad to hear it. Perhaps we shall meet again someday." She turned to leave. "Wait," the man called. "May I know your name, at least?" "I work for Neal, son of Stephen, at the Couriers' Guild. Look for me there, if you wish. Tell them you would speak to Thine Truly." Then she was gone. ----- - Sam - Sam kept coming into work day after day, even while the corporate restructuring was going on; he didn't really have much interest in what was going on up there -- although he did eventually notice that the number of cars passing by had gradually dropped to zero, and he'd stopped getting replies to the messages he'd been sending to his boss, and the new roof they'd been building over that part of the city had somehow turned into street level, leaving his little station in murky twilight -- so long as he was getting decent wages, even if, unbeknownst to Sam, an old automated database in the accounting department was the only part of the company that still remembered the existence of him or his job. ----- It was twenty glorious minutes after four PM, and the phalanx of screens above the crowd was flashing the admonition "NO LIQUIDS PERMITTED BEYOND SECURITY" between scenes of ridiculously cheerful tourists brandishing passports. "Fucking TSA," grumbled Lillian as she sealed up her Ls into a zipoc bag. "I thought they were supposed to be making our transportation more secure, not --" "Hey! Get id of those s!" caed a nearby agent. A perverse smie crept onto iian's face. "My whats?" "Your s!" the agent yeed at her, his face ivid. "And then though the meta detecto ove thee." "Oh, those! A'ight." She tossed the Rs into an ubbish bin befoe stepping fowad. "It's ike the autho of this stoy is just paying with us o something." An incediby oud kaxon sounded from the detecto. "Goddammit, why'd you have to be meta?" the agent hissed. "We' need to sceen you sepaatey. Get ove hee behind this fouth wa." "Can I at east have some wate?" iian mutteed. "Hee," spat the agent, shoving a botte into he hands. iian took an ong dink and tied to swaow, but it tasted a wong and came back out onto the capet. She knet thee coughing and cutching the botte for an ong time befoe she coud hod it up and ead the wods on it. "Hey!" she excaimed. "This is Japanese!" That was the stat of iian's jouney. It was thity-fou goious minutes afte fou PM. ----- My office glows all night long, It's a nuclear show and the stars are gone. Wind howls past my helmet and something unidentifiable crunches beneath my boots. Dust. It's dust. It used to be other things, it used to be trees and windows and... and people, but now there's no more use thinking about that. Now it's all dust. It's odd seeing a bit of starlight peeking through the gray sky. My ship's waiting for me up there. I imagine it impatient at this bit of sentimentality. It's right, I suppose. The suit tells me I'll soon exceed the maximum recommended radiation dose. Lest a cancer take its hold in my chest. Or, another one. The suit also tells me it's cold, but I can't feel it. If it were properly symbolic the starlight would be an inspiration. But there's no one left down here for it to inspire. Not anymore. The stars just gaze, fey and oblivious, down through the dust in the sky, the dust swirling about the ground... and me, who will be dust soon enough, watching what's left of the place I used to work, as if it would live once more. It still stands, dozens of stories of steel and concrete, a cold-edged skeleton baring everything to the unceasing winds. The nuclear shockwaves blasted away everything but the bones, turned it all into dust. And it shines in my helmet display, shines with gamma rays and high-energy particles. Shines with residual radiation that could kill me, and still might. It's not a hopeful light, it's a light of grief and death without rest. The war is over and this place deserves to lie dark and silent beneath the stars. I look up, but the dust has hidden them once again. There will be no rest, not for years yet. I wasn't here when the bombs fell. Those that could quickly fled deep into space, and I was among them. I have no reason to come back here now, but I want to say goodbye. Or that's what I've told myself. The truth is I don't know why I've come. I know I shouldn't have, I know it's dangerous. But somehow it felt as if I ought to. Around me blow the bodies of people I knew and people I've never met. The wind whips them into dust devils, little eddies and swirls that stretch up for a second and then dissipate. They scour away at the bones of the buildings, still warm with their nuclear glow, and my presence or absence disturbs them not at all. Dust above, dust below, and my office before me, dead but not buried. I don't think about the day it happened, but I remember my life before. Her. Him. Faces I knew, some still alive, most gone. I remember loving them, avoiding them, arguing, laughing, traveling, playing, grieving, writing, enjoying. I can trace the threads of a life gone by, as if I were living it now. But I'm not. That life is over, and closed to me. There is nothing left here but the radiation and my memories beneath perpetual grey. It's time to leave the dust behind, leave the skeleton towers and the always howling wind, and go back to the stars. To the only haven I have now, to the others cast adrift by that moment in time. And maybe we will be able to talk, and share, and laugh. About all that we've lost. I turn away and step into the shuttle that will bring me away from this place. Elevator, elevator, Take me home... ----- By the late 21st century, nanotechnology had advanced to the point where it could not only synthesize almost anything given the right elemental feedstock, but also digitize a human brain and store the mind in a virtual simulation. Concurrently, rising sea levels and increasing temperatures reduced the amount of arable land until innovations in farming efficiency could no longer keep up with population growth, while the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels and the commercial failure of wind and nuclear took a toll on the world's industrial base. Most of the affluent citizens of Earth still lived comfortable lives, at least, but it was clear that wouldn't last. Thus, at the last physical meeting of the United Nations, it was decided that nearly every living human was to be digitized, by force if necessary, and uploaded to a network of computers buried deep in the ground. The mandate was not popular, and many chose to take their own lives rather than submit. After fierce debate, some indigenous tribes of the Arctic and deep Amazon, the Australian outback and Asian steppe, were allowed to stay outside and live sustainably as they had for thousands of years. But eventually, they were alone on the planet. So the children of Earth slept. Running quietly on radioisotopes and geothermal power, maintained by self-replicating swarms of intelligent nanobots, the underground datacenters could last almost forever. Outside, the grass grew wild, the rivers ran clear, and all else that people had built began its slow crumble into dust. But deep down, the collective subconscious of humanity knew it was still vulnerable, and was afraid. Though it had saved itself from self-wrought destruction for now, it could still lose any of its constituent nodes to malfunction, earthquake, meteor strike. All it could do was make sure there were as many as possible -- and not just on one planet. Unnoticed by each individual human mind, but contributed to by all, the mind of the human race considered the problem. Outside, the nanobots set to work. A few rockets blasted up from the surface, but only as many as necessary to seed Earth's orbit with nanobots. They dispersed then, mining resources from the moon and capturing asteroids to consume. Countless tiny spaceships began to take shape floating above the planet, each one barely big enough to hold a seed of nanobots and a computer containing a fraction of the virtual world of humanity, randomly modified for diversity. When each craft was ready, it deployed a solar sail and lofted away from the sun toward a planet somewhere else in the galaxy. On arrival, decades and centuries later, the nanobots would burrow beneath the surface and construct a replica of the datacenters on Earth, the computer would transmit its data, and its payload would awaken. Immersed in another reality, it might be of no relevance to them that their substrate now orbited another star and was cut off by the speed of light from its mother network. But at least they would live on safe from any disaster that might wipe the Earth clean. Some of the colonies would fail, of course, be destroyed in transit or find inhospitable conditions at their destination. Was it wrong to let a copy of a human die, who had never really lived? Maybe. But there was no one else around to judge, in any case. On some worlds the colonies found life, and though the nanobots went about their work as quietly as possible, still they observed and recorded, with a few discreet microdust sensors and airborne drones here and there. No humans yet explored the surface in bodies robotic or biological. Maybe someday, when they could trust themselves not to disrupt the balance of nature here as well, but not yet. Still, the gathered data filtered its way into the computer's simulated world, and grew in the colony's collective unconscious. The children of earth slept, and dreamt of wonderful things. ----- I started making a map of the places in my dreams. It used to be that more often than not, when I fell asleep I'd find myself wandering the streets of an old new city. I'd ride the 88 bus alongside a gaggle of frat boys in dresses heading to a Mardi Gras party, speeding eastward down the parkway to the bridge, lonely lampposts flashing above us beneath a totally black sky. I'd descend the escalators below the glass pyramid in the plaza at the river's bend, schooling like fish with the masses of noonday shoppers, down to the graceful concrete curves of the multilevel platforms and the trains that came trundling in, every six minutes during peak hours, like clockwork; and I'd ride them west till they emerged from the ground along the shores of the new district, past the casino tower glistening in the sun, and the sea birds circling against the sky. I'd step into the intercity rail terminal, the long straight hall built of soaring glass and wrought iron straining against gravity, venerable only by local standards, the trails of steel converging from points inland to meet, parallel, at the bumpers beneath the grand staircase. I didn't know, in the dream, whether I was going to board any of those trains. I didn't know if there was anything beyond the city -- or, rather, I knew my subconscious would be able to make something up, if I headed out past the dockyards and the industrial zone and the suburbs beyond, but it didn't matter. I felt the lifeblood of the city flowing and I was part of it. So each morning, before I got out of bed, I'd grab the drawing pad from my nightstand and try to remember where I'd been, which side of the river, which colored subway line and which numbered bus. I penciled in major roads, the ring highways, the boulevards and bridges, the tunnels beneath the water, and I scrawled a grid of connecting streets where I felt they must have been. I started making a map of the places in my dreams, and I always felt a thrill when I slept and dreamed of an intersection I recognized, a segment, a station between places I knew, anything I could use to anchor myself, to push into the blank spaces, and perhaps, one day, fill out the whole map. In April my job requirements changed. I got more stressed and worked longer hours. I was a mess after I got home, and I changed meds on my psych's recommendation. I slept more soundly, after I'd adjusted. But I didn't dream for two months. Then one day, I forgot to take my meds. The next day, I forgot again. And after I'd collapsed into bed that night, I found myself back under the glass pyramid, in sunlight filtering through grimy panes, just beginning to taste summer's heat. But the escalators were stopped and barred with yellow stanchions. Aboveground, there were few cars, and fewer buses. The small knot waiting forlorn at the bus stop turned as one to watch me pass, their gazes accusing but resigned. I hurried past, but everywhere people looked at me the same. Had I done this? Had I had a duty to this place that I didn't even know about? I awoke around two, my blanket lying in a heap on the floor. Had the city's lifeblood ceased to flow when I was gone? I fumbled for my meds, choked down the pills, and sat on my bed, despairing about what I should do. Well, I pulled my old laptop out of the closet and downloaded a city sim off Steam. I spent the hours of the night transferring the outlines from my drawing pad into the game, hoping, desperately, that I could get it out of me and into something that didn't rely on my brain. When it was finally running, I deposited the laptop on a corner shelf and buried my face in my pillow. I didn't want to face them again. I made a map of the places in my dreams, and I haven't dared go back since. ----- When we left work that evening, they'd started blocking out the murals in the stairwell already, so we had to step carefully around the cans of paint piled on tarps and the walls still wet with fresh colors. They were going for a more abstract take on the Painting, actually a series of seasonal reinterpretations, one per floor from the 8th to the 11th. We'd come out on the winter floor, so all around us were fields of white and pale blue, brown slivers of slumbering trees and old trampled leaves. Someone had lettered in a list of inspirational words in a neat column by the corner: cold, pristine, silent, deer(?). I thought it was a shame to lock these away in the company's private stairwell rather than out in the open for people to enjoy, and said as much. 'Well, it's not as if there's any shortage.' I paused as we descended the next flight to gaze out the window. It was late, but the city never sleeps. Sure enough, in the glow of streetlamps and windows, of headlights and the last of the orange sky, the Painting was everywhere. But mostly on advertisements. These days, you don't pay good money to put a big picture up on the side of a building or a bus unless you're sure it's gonna make you more in return. Not every company uses it, of course. But as a symbol, as a medium of mass suggestion, it's hard to beat. Everyone knows it, after all. '...do you think it's real?' They looked at me. 'Of course it's real.' 'Oh, shut it.' Something like that can hardly not be real. It's part of the cultural substrate of our lives. In endless variations, in every conceivable medium, for every conceivable purpose. Sometimes you can hardly tell. 'What I mean is, do you think we'll ever find an original.' To our right, geometric auburns and golds of autumn unscrolled along the wall. Honestly, I'd take something like this as my desktop background. Half the people on DeviantArt and Tumblr, and approximately everyone who goes through any worthwhile art school, have a Painting variation in their portfolio, anyway. 'We'd never be able to tell.' They sounded pretty sure, like they'd already been thinking about this. 'Too many copies, too many counterfeiters. We don't even know how old it's supposed to be.' We passed summer and spring in silence. Will we ever figure out what the Painting really is? Everyone on Earth remembers it, as intimately as if they'd spent hours in a museum studying it, can pick out each line and brushstroke if they have a decent memory. Yet it doesn't exist. Maybe it never did. Maybe that's why we have created it and recreated it endlessly. We came out onto the sidewalk at last, headed for the subway, and I couldn't decide if I wanted it to be real or not. ----- - Arkham Revisited - The stone fell to earth some distance west of the city, in the grassy valley of a stream running between two hills, and it remained undiscovered for several days. Once news had filtered up to the university, an expedition was dispatched to investigate the strange occurrences in the area. A large area had been blasted and churned up by the impact, and the remnants of the watercourse trickled uncertainly through the crater. The pack animals shied away and would go no further. The scholars shivered and set up a camp. Inside the barren area, grasses, which normally sprang up wherever earth and water mixed, did not grow. Nor did rotting meat produce maggots. Iron set in the ground, on the other hand, turned brown and seemed to be being eaten away at. The water that flowed out downstream was tasteless and gave no nourishment. "We brought illumination for our experiments, of course," said the professor, placing a lantern on the lectern, with its elemental flame dancing inside the sealed glass tube, specially shaped to direct the light. "But inside the perimeter, they immediately went out." A gasp went up from the audience as the professor produced a second tube, one which had held an identical flame just days before. Now there was only the faintest scattering of some kind of dust. Inside the area, heavy objects fell at the same speed as light ones, and distant thunderstorms were not heard until after they were seen. Several people developed angry red burns on their exposed skin after working through the day. Those taking measurements at night fared no better, as the stars flashed and wavered, while the planets strayed from their assigned courses, spinning in wheels within wheels. Screams echoed from the hut that confined a worker who had gotten too close to the rock. Convinced he had fallen through reality to another world, he raved about houses, so many houses, and lamps that glowed without fire, lining the roads black as night. "What's more," continued the professor, "once we were able to set up the more precision instruments, we found deviations in every measurement. From the tendency of heavy elements to fall and light elements to rise, to the reactions between materials of different types. In the affected area, elemental water can be split using lightning, and then somehow transmuted into fire. We even took measurements that would imply the world is spinning." As the days turned into weeks, all the researchers developed strange ailments, and the rations they had carried did not seem to nourish them. The team decided to cut their losses and evacuate, packing up all their tools that had not degraded into uselessness, and their carefully notated data. They recommended that the area be sealed off, unfit for human habitation. The professor stopped mid-sentence. The audience filling the lecture hall were staring at the extinguished lantern still standing on the lectern. A sunbeam from the high windows had hit it straight on, and continued on to paint the wall behind the professor, split into seven colors.