Tag: culture

She was taller than me. Prettier and with better muscle tone. Shinier hair and perfect skin and teeth. Which was odd because she claimed she was me — from the future.

“Mmmmf!” I said.

“Sorry about the gag. Let me loosen it.”

“What the hell!? You’re here to kill me — won’t that kill you, too?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, it didn’t. I’m here, aren’t I?”

I scoffed. “I might not be a time-travelling assassin supermodel —”

“Yet,” she interjected with a smile.

“— but even I know that’s impossible. It’s a time whatchamacallit … a paradox!”

Read more science fiction from Nature Futures

She leant forward with a gleam in her eyes like I was 101 puppies, and she was in the market for a winter coat. “Yes, exactly! I need a paradox, a large one. Killing myself is the biggest event I can put into motion at such short notice.”

I struggled against the plastic straps that bound my hands behind my kitchen-table chair. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Sorry, I don’t have the time to explain the general theory of paradoxity or walk you through my calculations.”

“Calculations about what?” I asked — as long as I kept her talking, she wasn’t murdering me.

“About how much energy the death will release. Don’t worry — it will have been enough.”

“Energy for what?”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Let me make it simple: what’s the biggest paradox you’ve heard of?”

“I don’t know — everything I say is a lie?”

“No, that just means you don’t understand set theory. The greatest one is existence itself: why is there something instead of nothing? It gave rise to everything, and — together with other, smaller paradoxes — keeps everything going.

“Uh huh,” I said, humouring my future self.

“But those bastards from the CCCCCC — the Chronological Continuum Consistency Coordinated Consortium Confederacy — are obsessed with timescape integrity. They’ve pushed my team back everywhen, undoing our efforts to make the timeline a better place to live in. They will even make sure World War Three — which we’d managed to avoid, you’re welcome — will begin right on time next Tuesday. I need to finish them once and for all. They’re out of control. They’ll go too far back; undo the Paradox of Life itself —”

“Life’s a paradox?”

“Duh!” — I hadn’t realized how obnoxious it is when I do that — “Why else would dumb, entropic matter organize itself into something that can laugh, love and fart?”

I looked around and saw an old family picture. “Why kill me? Wouldn’t killing somebody like … not mum or dad, um … would grandma Georgina work? We never liked her.”

“No, we didn’t. Remember the haircut incident in third grade?” She chuckled softly. “But no, sorry, it must be me, or it won’t have enough juice. A tight timeloop like this should release ten-to-the-twelfth-power chronojoules. The CCCCCC bastards will never see it coming!”

I grasped for something, anything to distract her. “Aren’t you supposed to be older? Why do you look better than me?”

She looked down at her body. “It’s a back-echo of the energy release. It rearranges nearby systems into their optimal state. And this,” she waved at herself, “is more optimal than, well, that.” She pointed at me.

“Thanks so much for taking the time to insult me before killing me.”

“No problem.” She looked at some glowing numbers on her wrist. “This will have been fun but time has run out of time — we have to do this now.”

She pulled out a knife and slipped behind me.

“Stop!” I said, but she didn’t. I felt something shift and fell forward. There was a flash of something much brighter than ordinary light could ever be.

My hands weren’t tied behind me any more. I leapt up, trying to remember the three weeks of taekwondo I’d taken back in high school — and hoping she didn’t. I turned and saw a hotter version of myself lying on the floor with a gash on the side of her throat. Blood was spreading out on the white carpet my ex-boyfriend had picked out. Good, I never liked it, or him — wait, why was I still breathing?

I looked down — my body had changed. I looked like her now. I felt the energy and knowledge move through me. I knew what I had to do — fight those bastards from the CCCCCC and win.

There was just one thing I didn’t understand. I knelt beside her. “This doesn’t make any sense. I thought you had to kill me?”

She looked up with a small, weak smile. I leant in to hear her say, “If it made sense, it wouldn’t be a paradox, would it?”

Cadence noticed the warfighter on her way to school. He was still there later, sitting in the tiny fenced park, as she walked back home along Sixth Avenue. There was a pigeon watching him, which the police had thought at one time was a good way to disguise a camera. She stopped and sat on the other bench.

“There aren’t any birds,” she said. “You know that, right?”

He was an 800-year-old 30-year-old man and he sat huddled in a large coat with the cheap sheen of post-consumer polyethylene, under which he wore a side-ventilated floral tactical shirt and adaptive camo cargo pants with sagging, empty pockets. She supposed the creases were from being repeatedly flash frozen.

“Why’s the sky grey but it never rains?” he asked.

“Salts.”

“Don’t bullshit me, kid.”

“To keep the sunlight out.”

“That’s fantastic. Thanks for taking care of the place while I was gone.”

“Where’d you fight?”

“Proxima.”

“Where else?”

“Eridani. Lacaille.”

“How old are you?”

“Let’s not do the math.”

“Why’d you come back?”

“The sunsets.”

“Seriously.”

“Come on, give me a break, kid,” he said, getting unsteadily to his feet. “I’ve had a long century.”

She followed him to a coffee kiosk across the street and read the peeling posters on a movie theatre that had closed during a run of Mild Red Pier before she was even born. He paid the machine with a plastic pendant he wore on a bright green spiral wristband, which she was sure also stopped being a thing before she was born. He cracked the lid and sniffed the coffee, then made a face, but he didn’t look back, and she watched as he wandered down the sidewalk and turned a corner, shuffling towards the river.

*****

“He’s from the Cincinnatus,” her father told her. “They returned a month ago. The numina are very interested in him. Few come back these days, and those that do don’t last long.”

“Why?”

“They kill themselves, sweet.”

She looked him up with her headset and found his service record in the National Archives. He was born in analogue New York and enlisted at a time of 77% unemployment, one of thousands to leave behind family and friends to climb into a hydrogel-filled cold tube and accelerate out into the darkness at a fraction of the speed of light. The relationship between temperature and viscosity, she was told, was a mechanism for inertial suspension in Einsteinian space travel, by which time her mind had already started to wander. She heard something about the survival rates back then being only marginally higher than the odds of finding work on the streets of any American city.

*****

She looked for the warfighter in the park the following day, but found only the pigeon perched on a streetlight, head cocked as it scanned passing faces. She threw her apple at the filthy bot, missed, and heard it smack the asphalt of the basketball court.

He was over on the pier, pitching pea gravel out into the clear, shallow Hudson.

Read more science fiction from Nature Futures

“What does a Proximan look like?”

“They’re not called that.”

“What are they called?”

“It translates as something like step-accretion. We called them steppers.”

“What do they look like?”

“Something that comes out the ass end of another stepper.”

“Why did we fight them?”

“Incompatible world views.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“Out there, it’s not about who gets more land, or access to water, or political representation. It’s about the survival of thinking people, period. We’re the only living things out there with a concept of self. Or we were. It’s just one hive mind after another. What does that tell you about the Universe?”

“What?”

“What.”

“What does that tell you about the Universe?” she repeated.

“It tells me I’m sitting out here on the short branch of a very large tree, kid.”

“I have a concept of self.”

“Oh yeah? Did they copy that over from last year’s model?”

“I don’t get a new body every year. I had one as a baby, then this one, and in a few years I’ll be a full adult. Adults get upgraded only every 25 years. It used to be longer, but they make these ones in the maquiladoras.”

“What do you think happens when you’re upgraded?”

“They move my brain from one body to another.”

“Not your brain. Your mind. And they don’t move it, they copy it. And then they put a bullet in the old one.”

“They don’t use bullets.”

“You don’t have a concept of self if everything you think and feel is a mirror image of something else. You have a copy of a concept of self.”

“What’s a mirror?”

“Jesus. Reflective glass. A copy. A duplicate.”

“I’m not a duplicate. There’s only one.”

“Not hanging onto the original doesn’t make a copy any less a copy. People don’t go to the MOMA to see a photograph of Starry Night.”

“What’s a MOMA?” she asked impatiently.

“Go up Sixth to 53rd and hang a right. It’s a peri-peri takeout now.”

*****

Cadence stayed at home the rest of the week studying for her middle-SAT, and when she returned to the pier the warfighter was gone. She watched the narrowband video that showed first landfall on Proxima Centauri b, but the faces were all unfamiliar and the video quality was poor, so she filed it away for later with her unwatched TV shows and the footage from her childhood pets.

She spent the summer on Long Island, and when she returned to school in the fourth quarter she crossed through Washington Square and ambled back down Sixth Avenue. The warfighter was there again in the park. Instead of a pigeon, the numina had deployed a pair of scruffy alleycats, which would provide better stereo.

She sat down on the other bench, but he didn’t recognize her, and after a moment she looked away.

“Why’s the sky grey but it never rains?” asked the two-month-old 800-year-old man.

“Probably smog,” she whispered, and went home.

Vision Impairment

Michael Crossland UCL Press (2024)

On a typical day in his clinic, London-based optometrist Michael Crossland assesses both young children and centenarians with low vision. Severe vision impairment affects 350 million people around the world, many of whom in poorer countries lack access to any eye care. His fascinating, sometimes moving, account — mixing ophthalmology with the stories of his patients and many others — reveals that life with vision impairment can be “just as rich and rewarding as life with 20/20 vision”.

Literary Theory for Robots

Dennis Yi Tenen W. W. Norton (2024)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rooted in the humanities, argues Dennis Yi Tenen, a comparative-literature professor and former Microsoft engineer. Chatbots are trained using electronic versions of tools such as “dictionaries, style guides, schemas, story plotters [and] thesauruses” that were historically part of the collective activity of writing. Indeed, a statistical model called the Markov chain, crucial to AI, arose from an analysis of vowel distribution in poems by Alexander Pushkin. Tenen’s cogitation is a witty, if challenging, read.

The Last of Its Kind

Gísli Pálsson Princeton Univ. Press (2024)

Living species could never become extinct, thought naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Charles Darwin disagreed, saying extinction was a natural process. Then ornithologists John Wolley and Alfred Newton began studying great auks, flightless birds living on remote islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. They visited Iceland in 1858 to see great auks, but instead met locals who described killing off the birds — revealing how humans could extinguish a species. Anthropologist Gísli Pálsson tells the engaging story of this “key intellectual leap”.

All Mapped Out

Mike Duggan Reaktion (2024)

Cultural geographer Mike Duggan works in partnership with the UK national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, to study everyday digital-mapping practices. Important as it is, digital mapping is not superseding analogue maps, he observes in his global history of cartography, which begins with Palaeolithic carvings. Sales of Ordnance Survey paper maps are rising, perhaps because of their convenience. “Although digital maps are improving constantly in accuracy and design, they do not always live up to those promises.”

The Neuroscience of Bach’s Music

Eric Altschuler Academic (2024)

Physician and neuroscientist Eric Altschuler regards J. S. Bach as the greatest composer ever, as do many others. Altschuler’s pioneering study — illustrated with numerous musical examples — aims to show how Bach-centred neuroscience “can help us better appreciate perceptual and cognitive affects in Bach” and create better performances of the composer’s work. It also teaches us how music perception is not localized to one region of the brain but occurs throughout it, and varies from person to person.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Tess and Gemma have been camped out on their tartan picnic blanket for days already and they plan on staying until the very end … of the concert or the world, whichever happens first. Smart money is on the latter. The way those lads are going at their bass lines and anthems up on stage, they’re in this until the lights go out for good.

Night is coming soon. The fireflies are out, blinking in electric blue. The Plutonian sunset is apocalyptic but pretty, with blood-red rays flooding the outdoor amphitheatre and the crowds gathered around it in scarlet hues.

“Good evening, ladies.”

“Drinks for the table … um, or blanket?”

The Tiernan boys stop by Tess and Gemma’s spot on their way back from the concession stands. Danny carries a pyramid of cups, filled to the brim with purple-dyed spirits. It’s a local drink, squeezed out from a native plant that their ancestors likened to something called agave, except this plant grows with fuchsia roots and a heart that has to be split open with an axe. No wonder, since it spent millennia buried in ice before the Great Thaw. The hangover feels like an anvil dipped in hot lightning.

“Bring it on,” Gemma says, bravely, scrambling up to her knees to claim the tip-top of Danny’s pyramid. Tess abstains.

“Are you sure?” Atticus tempts her further. But she’s stubborn about it, answering with the same conventional wisdom they’ve all heard a thousand times before: “That stuff will take years off your life.”

“Years off my life? Really, Tess?” Gemma replies with mild sarcasm, while spinning her twisty, psychedelic straw through ice.

Read more science fiction from Nature Futures

They descend into laughter at this, even Tess, because the idea that any of them have ‘years’ left is as absurd as, well, attending a music festival on the eve of humankind’s final demise.

But what else are they supposed to do? Sit at home with the doors locked, eyes shut and hands over their ears, waiting for the end to come? That’s just not how Homo sapiens roll. Or rock and roll, as the case may be.

Anyway, the species has had a good run. Literally, running and leap-frogging through the Solar System like Goldilocks leapt from bed to bed — too hot, too many poisonous gases, too hot again — all while the ageing Sun up there just kept growing rounder and redder. Tonight, it’s a ripe tomato in the sky, ready to burst. And so big that everyone in Persephone’s Meadow can see, by naked eye, the solar flares erupting off its surface.

Those powerful flares will scorch them all to ash by the next sunrise. But they have about an Earth week’s worth of night to enjoy before then, so that’s something.

“Get ready to be proper lost souls in the underworld,” Tess warns, nodding towards the dimming horizon. There’s daylight left but not much. In twilight, the red-giant Sun turns the blue-moss meadow that same shade of violet that fills Gemma’s cup.

“Let’s make some noise, Pluto!” the lead singer of the aptly named The Grateful Dead Suns calls out to his congregation.

Gemma sets her cup down on cyan grass, to give a rousing finger-whistle. The high-pitched trill echoes across the field, mixing with others. Applause and hollers come from all corners, drowning out the music briefly. Even Tess is caught up in it, clapping her hands together above her head, “Woo!”

The energy at Plutopalooza can’t be defeated. Not by dying Sun, eerie eventide or impending night. Not by anything.

They dance with the boys. They dance with each other. They sing until their throats are hoarse and jump around until their legs give out. The sisters finally collapse back onto their quilt, giggling like children, gazing up at distant stars, sharing Gemma’s dwindling drink while reminiscing about good times.

In the meantime, the Sun sets and the meadow goes black.

“We’re still with you!” Tess calls out, hands around her mouth, while Gemma strikes a lighter and lifts it high. A guitar riff answers out of the darkness. By flickering lighter-candle, the sisters exchange grins and whistles, and cheers break out all around them. The whole place clamours for another song. And then another.

They say the band played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as the Titanic sank. And if these descendants of the Last Earthers knew the song, maybe they’d play it too. Instead, The Grateful Dead Suns choose a familiar ballad that would’ve made their namesakes proud.

It’s a song of goodnights between friends and warm farewells, melancholy but hopeful. The band beckons and the crowd sings along, verse after verse, chorus after chorus. Those voices rise, filling the field, the atmosphere and spilling out over the edges of the dwarf planet, even after everything else goes silent.

The scout cruiser off the Alpha Centauri system isn’t expecting to find life out here. Given the state of this Sun, their astrobiologists wrote the whole system off as uninhabitable centuries ago. The captain thinks his navigator is crazy when she tells him they need to check out the source of this strange but wondrous noise coming — and it just keeps coming — from a little speck of rock out in the middle of nowhere.

So small, it could never be called a planet.

When the cruiser turns on its lights, twin bow lanterns flood Persephone’s Meadow with golden glow. The ship comes in from the direction of Pluto’s largest moon, which is a little too on-the-nose for those tipsy Plutopaloozians, still dancing their final night away.

“Charon’s ferry?” Tess expects, thinking it’s come out of myth to take them down to Hades. Forgetting, for a moment, that Hades is Pluto and Pluto is Hades. That’s her sister’s drink talking.

“Maybe,” Gemma concedes with a wise little smirk, optimistic about everything except their hangovers tomorrow. She gives a friendly wave to the newcomers, adding, “I think this ferry’s headed the other way.”