Future Tense Fiction
FUTURE TENSE FICTION
Stories of Tomorrow
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS · MADELINE ASHBY
PAOLO BACIGALUPI · MEG ELISON · LEE KONSTANTINOU
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO · EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL
MAUREEN MCHUGH · ANNALEE NEWITZ
NNEDI OKORAFOR · DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN
MARK OSHIRO · HANNU RAJANIEMI · MARK STASENKO
EDITED BY:
KIRSTEN BERG, TORIE BOSCH, JOEY ESCHRICH, ED FINN, ANDRÉS MARTINEZ, AND JULIET ULMAN
The Unnamed Press
Los Angeles, CA
AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK
Copyright © 2019 by Future Tense
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com.
Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.
www.unnamedpress.com
Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.
This book was published in collaboration with Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.
The copyrights for individual short stories and essays are owned by their respective authors.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019945882
ISBN: 978-1-944700-95-9
eISBN: 978-1-944700-92-8
Cover Art by Tyler Keeton Robbins
Design and Typeset by Jaya Nicely
Distributed by Publishers Group West
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
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Note
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that explores emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Beginning in 2016, Future Tense commissioned a series of stories from leading writers that imagined what life might be like in a variety of possible futures. Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow is a selection of those pieces.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Future Tense Editors
Mother of Invention
Nnedi Okorafor
No Me Dejes
Mark Oshiro
When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis
Annalee Newitz
When We Were Patched
Deji Bryce Olukotun
Domestic Violence
Madeline Ashby
Mr. Thursday
Emily St. John Mandel
A Brief and Fearful Star
Carmen Maria Machado
Overvalued
Mark Stasenko
Safe Surrender
Meg Elison
Lions and Gazelles
Hannu Rajaniemi
Burned-Over Territory
Lee Konstantinou
Mika Model
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Starfish Girl
Maureen McHugh
The Minnesota Diet
Charlie Jane Anders
About the Contributors
About the Editors
FUTURE TENSE FICTION
Introduction:
The Future is Made of Choices
We seem inevitably drawn to two opposites when we tell stories about the future: will we finally reach a rationalist techno-utopia, or will we sow the seeds of our own destruction by innovating too aggressively? These extremes tempt us because they provide finality, and hence they scratch our itch for neatly packaged narratives where all the loose ends are carefully tied up. But they don’t reflect how we encounter technologies in our everyday lives, or the history of actual technological change, which is always heterogeneous, ambivalent, growing out of and elaborating on our existing social structures and norms, cultures and values, and physical environments. There are no fresh beginnings or clean endings in real life. We don’t get to terra-form our planet and start over; the forces of evil probably won’t wear highly visible insignia and matching uniforms. Instead, technologies as profound as personal computers, solar panels, and pacemakers and as mundane as toasters and headphones insinuate themselves gradually into our markets, our relationships, and even our sense of who we are.
Living with technology is profoundly weird. One year you have to drive to the next state or post a letter to talk to your sister or father, and the next you’re able to summon them up instantly with the ring of a telephone. A few decades later, you’re texting them the palm tree or mermaid emoji from the back seat of your rideshare as shorthand for “good morning” or “thinking of you.” A few months after that, you find out that your own government might be monitoring these exchanges. Technologies deform existing social arrangements, not invalidating or erasing them but twisting them into unexpected shapes—and thereby provoking new feelings, allowing new thrills, eliciting new anxieties, opening up new vulnerabilities, creating new opportunities for self-expression, commerce, connection, and conflict. We get used to these changes quite quickly, and once we do, they become unremarkable, even invisible. A good science fiction story can help re-sensitize us by showing us people dangling over different technological precipices, or realizing their potential in once-unimaginable ways.
It’s the pursuit of this strangeness, this destabilizing feeling of cohabitating on our planet with multitudes of technologies seen and unseen, that inspires us at Future Tense Fiction. The project grew out of Future Tense, a collaboration among Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. Since 2010, we have been publishing nonfiction commentary and hosting events about emerging technologies and their transformative effects on public policy, culture, and society. We started experimenting with publishing fiction on Slate’s Future Tense channel in 2016, with Paolo Bacigalupi’s disturbing, incisive robots-and-IP-law detective thriller “Mika Model,” and then in early 2017, with Emily St. John Mandel’s wistful, uncanny time-travel yarn “Mr. Thursday.” In 2018, cheered by the enthusiastic reactions of our readers and keen to work with some of our favorite authors, we started publishing one story per month, accompanied by a response essay by someone with expertise in a related area (from theoretical physics to food systems) and original illustrations.
We view Future Tense Fiction as an urgent corollary to our nonfiction efforts. Fiction has the ability to transport us into a panoply of possible visions of the future, and to grasp at the weirdness of our pervasive interactions with science and technology through the eyes of people with identities and experiences entirely unlike our own. Stories evoke our empathy, allowing us to tunnel into someone’s psychology, emotions, and worldview—and to viscerally experience the consequences, both desired and dreaded, expected and unforeseen, of living in a technological world in perpetual flux.
The future isn’t a fixed path, or a chute through which we’re helplessly propelled. We make the future together through an agglomeration of choices small and large, minute and momentous: whether and how to vote, which technologies to buy and adopt and which ones to skip entirely, how and where we live, how we get around, how we construct our families, where we work and what we work on. We’re all constrained to various degrees by a dizzying array of social factors, but we do have decisions to make. And doing nothing in the face of scientific and technological change is a decision too. We hope that Future Tense Fiction stories help us imaginatively rehearse possible future scenarios, and help us get better at recognizing places where things could be different, even when they’re hard to glimpse. Scientific and technological elites and leaders often present the future as a fait accompli. A good story can help us find a different point of view, to scout out the decision points so that we can muster our resources and act at the right moment.
This volume collects a full year of
Future Tense Fiction, exploring quarterly themes like home, memory, sport, and work. It can be both tricky and rewarding, with such a range of topics, and such a stylistically diverse set of contributing authors, to tease out commonalities running through our first year of Future Tense Fiction. Instead of doing so ourselves here, we invite you to proceed on your own journey of discovery, to help us think constructively about our shared future.
In these stories, the future is a place where the concerns of short stories still matter: individual people living their lives not in black and white but the same stubborn blend of grays that we encounter today. Life in the future, in short, will not be so different from life today. The human choices we make will be inflected by technology, but ultimately we are the ones who will have to live with their consequences. We are also the ones who will have to make sense of them, telling stories and narrating ourselves into identities, communities, and societies that feel like they really matter. That is the essential role of fiction—to help us inhabit other worlds, and other minds, so that we can better understand our own.
—The Future Tense Editors
Kirsten Berg, Torie Bosch, Joey Eschrich,
Ed Finn, Andrés Martinez, and Juliet Ulman
MOTHER OF INVENTION
Nnedi Okorafor
“Error, fear, and suffering are the mothers of invention.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
It was a beautiful sunny day, and yet Anwuli knew the weather was coming for her.
She paused on the lush grass in front of the house, purposely stepping on one of the grass’ flowers. When she raised her foot, the sturdy thing sprung right back into place, letting out a puff of pollen like a small laugh. Anwuli gnashed her teeth, clutching the metal planks she carried and staring up the driveway.
Up the road, a man was huffing and puffing and sweating. He wore a clearly drenched jogging suit and white running shoes that probably wanted to melt in the Nigerian midday heat. Her neighbor, Festus Nnaemeka. The moment she and Festus made eye contact, he began walking faster.
Anwuli squeezed her face with irritation and loudly sucked her teeth, hoping he would hear. “Don’t need help from any of you two-faced people, anyway,” she muttered to herself, watching him go. “You keep walking and wheezing. Idiot.” She heaved the metal planks up a bit, carried them to the doorstep and dumped them there. “Obi 3, come and get all this,” she said. Breathing heavily, she wiped sweat from her brow, rubbing the Braxton Hicks pain in her lower belly. “Whoo!”
One of Obi 3’s sleek blue metal drones zipped in and used its extending arms to scoop up the planks. The blown air from its propellers felt good on Anwuli’s face, and she sighed.
“Thank you, Anwuli,” Obi 3 said through the drone’s speakers.
Anwuli nodded, watching the drone zoom off with the planks to the other side of Obi 3. Who knew what Obi 3 needed them for; it was always requesting something. Obi 3 was one of her now ex-fiancé’s personally designed shape-shifting smart homes. He’d built one for himself, one for his company, and this third one was also his, but Anwuli lived in it. And this house, which he’d named Obi 3 (not because of the classic Star Wars film but because obi meant “home” in Igbo, and it was the third one), was his smallest, most complex design.
Built atop drained swamplands, Obi 3 rested on three mechanized cushioning beams that could lift the house up high when it wanted a nice view of the city or keep it close to the ground. The house could also rotate to follow the sun and transform its shape from an equilateral triangle into a square and split into four separate modules based on a mathematical formula. And because it was a smart home, it was always repairing and sometimes building on itself.
Over the past five months, Obi 3 had requested nails, vents, sheet metal, planks of wood, piping. Once it even requested large steel ball bearings. Paid for using her ex’s credit card, most of the time she just had it delivered and dropped at the doorway, or she’d pick up the stuff and place it there, where she quickly forgot about it. By the time she came back outside, it was always gone, taken by the drones. None of this mattered to her, though, because she had real problems to worry about. Especially in the last eight months. Especially in the next hour.
“Shit,” she whimpered, holding her very pregnant belly as she looked at the clear blue sky, again. There had been no storms in the damned forecast for the next two weeks, and she thought she had finally been blessed with some luck after so long. However, apparently the weather forecast was wrong. Very, very wrong. She felt the air pressure dropping like a cold shiver running up her spine. Mere hours ago, Dr. Iwuchukwu had informed her that this sensitivity to air pressure was part of the allergy.
Several honeybees buzzed around one of the flowerbeds beside her. The lilies and chrysanthemums were far more delicate than the government-enforced supergrass, but at least they were of her choosing. Just as it was her choice to stay in her house. She listened harder, straining to hear over the remote sound of cars passing on the main road a half-mile away. “Dammit,” she whispered, when she heard the rumble of thunder in the distance. She turned and headed to the house.
The door opened, and she went inside and slammed it behind her before it could close itself. She stood there for a moment, her hands shaking, tears tumbling down her face. The house had drawn itself into its most compact and secure shape: a square, swinging the triangular sections of the kitchen and living room together. Outside, from down the road, the mosque announced the call to prayer.
“Fuck!” she screamed, smacking a fist to the wall. “Tufiakwa! No, no, no, this is not fair!” Then the Braxton Hicks in her belly clenched, and she gasped with pain. She went to her living room, threw her purse on the couch, and plopped down next to it, massaging her sides.
“Relax, oh, relax, Anwuli. Breathe,” Obi 3 crooned in its rich voice. “You are fine; your baby is fine; everything is fiiiiiine.”
Anwuli closed her eyes and listened to her house sing for a bit, and soon she calmed and felt better. “Music is all we’ve got,” she sang back to Obi 3. And the sound of her own voice pushed away the fact that she and her baby would probably be dead by morning, and it would be all her fault. Pushed it away some.
Music and Obi 3. Those were all she and her unborn baby had had for nine months. Since she’d learned she was pregnant and stupidly told her fiancé, who a minute later blurted to her that he was married with two children and couldn’t be a father to her child, too.
The city of New Delta was big, but her neighborhood had always been “small” in many ways. One of those ways was how people stamped the scarlet badge of “home-wrecking lady” on women who had children with married men. Her fake fiancé had deserted her, using the excuse of Anwuli playing the seductress he couldn’t resist. Then her friends stopped talking to her. Even her sister and cousins who lived mere miles away blocked her on all social networks. When she went to the local supermarket, not one person would meet her eye.
Only her smart home spoke (and sometimes sang) to her. And then there was the baby. Boy, girl, she refused to find out. It was the only good thing she had to look forward to. But her baby was making her sick too, specifically allergic. Dr. Iwuchukwu had been telling her to leave New Delta for months, but Anwuli wasn’t about to leave her house. The house was her respect; what else could she claim she’d earned from the relationship? She knew it was irrational and maybe even deadly, but she took her chances. So far, so good. Until today’s diagnosis at her doctor’s appointment. And right there in that antiseptic place, whose smell made her queasy, she’d decided for good: She wasn’t going anywhere. Come what may. Now, as if the cruel gods were answering her, a storm was coming.
“Seriously,” she muttered, sinking down on the couch, letting its massagers knead the tight muscles of her neck. “I have such bad luck.”
“Bad luck is only a lack of information,” Obi 3 said. “Dr. Iwuchukwu has sent you a message saying to go over it again.”
“I understood it the fir
st time,” she said. “I just don’t care. I’m not going anywhere. The idiot left me. He’s not getting his house back, too.”
Before Anwuli could launch into a full-blown rant, Obi 3 began playing the informative video the doctor suggested. She sighed with irritation as the image opened up before her. She didn’t care to know more than the bits her doctor had told her, but she was tired, so she watched anyway.
The man walked with a cane and wore an Igbo white-and-red chief’s cap like an elder from Anwuli’s village in Arochukwu. The projection made it look as if he walked in from the bedroom door, and Anwuli rolled her eyes. This entrance was supposed to be more “personable,” but she only found it obnoxious.
“Hello, Anwuli,” the man said, graciously. “So, you live in New Delta, Nigeria, the greenest place in the world. Fun fact: 100 years ago, this used to be swamplands and riverways, and the greatest export was oil. Violent clashes between oil corporations and a number of the Niger Delta’s minority ethnic groups who felt they were being exploited…”
“Skip,” Anwuli said. The man froze for a moment and went from standing in the living room to standing in the middle of downtown New Delta. Anwuli was about to skip again, but instead she laughed and watched.
In the area between New Delta’s low skyscrapers, buildings and homes were carpeted with its world-famous stunning green grass, and the roads were fringed with it, but in this scene the grass was covered with smiley-faced bopping periwinkle flowers. It looked ridiculous, like one of those ancient animations from the early 1900s or a psychedelic drug–induced hallucination. The man grinned as he grandiosely swept his arms out to indicate all the lush greenery around him.
“Grass!” he announced. “Whether we know it or not, grass is important to most of us. Grass is a monumental food source worldwide. Corn, millet, oats, sugar—all of them come from grass plants. Even rice was a grass plant. We use grass plants to make bread, liquor, plastic, and so much more! Livestock animals feed mostly on grasses, too. Sometimes we use grass plants like bamboo for construction. Grass helps curb erosion.”