Coming Soon Enough: Six Tales of Technology’s Future Read online

  Not as pithy as she could have been, but not terrible for being on the fly. Aniyah turned back to the screen and studied it with a slight smile, hoping it didn’t look too forced. In her peripheral vision, she watched Dude until he lowered the camera.

  Letting out a sigh, she turned to him. “Please, God, tell me that you didn’t catch my cursing.”

  He shrugged with a wink and a grin. “Totes did. But don’t worry, I’ll keep you looking professional.”

  Aniyah sat in the hall outside the boardroom with her tablet unrolled and balanced on her knees. A man walked down the hall and raised his chin a little in greeting. “You can show me your science anytime.”

  Aniyah compressed her lips and sighed. She would murder Dude when she saw him again. Keep her looking professional…right.

  But—at least going viral had guaranteed that the board had seen the numbers. And becoming a meme meant that there was enough social pressure that they couldn’t ignore her. She was willing to take some embarrassment if it got the job done. Aniyah gripped the edges of her tablet and rehearsed the pitch in her head.

  The door to the boardroom opened and a highly polished white woman appeared in the door. Lydia Pinkham, the only woman on the board, had her fading red hair twisted up into a tight bun atop her head. “Miss Ramsey?”

  Standing, Aniyah tucked her tablet under her arm and followed Pinkham into the room.

  Hillam was sitting at the conference table with the two other members of the board, whom Aniyah recognized from her research as George Carstens and Ignazio Casillas. There were also two men she did not know who had the feel of lawyers, with suits that were casket-sharp. Pinkham indicated an empty seat across the table from the board. Aniyah settled into it and put on her best professional smile.

  “Thank you for meeting with me today.” She took a breath and forced herself to meet Lennox Hillam’s gaze. God, it burned, but it had to be done. “My apologies for the video and what I said on it. I was—”

  Hillam held up his hand to stop her. “What the hell were you thinking? Going to the press like that, when the microturbines are far from being approved.”

  “Again, you have my apologies. I had invited the reporter to document the trial installation and—”

  “Is that what you call insulting me?”

  Aniyah leaned the full weight of her brain on her mouth and tried desperately to keep it locked. She could not afford to lose her temper. With her jaw clenched around the word “asshole,” Aniyah breathed in through her nose. She exhaled carefully and dipped her head. “I should not have said ‘Suck it.’ ”

  “Damn right.”

  Pinkham raised a manicured finger. “Now, Lennox—”

  “Especially when your trial was a total failure.”

  Aniyah stared at Hillam for a full second before realizing that his face was turning red because she’d already spoken. The echo of her “What the hell?” was still fading from the room. Screw it. He clearly was never going to agree to the microturbines on general principle. “That microturbine was returning numbers that were exactly in line with the computer modeling.”

  “You can stop bluffing now, sweetheart. I have access to the same data you do.” He toggled his phone and an enlarged screen of the energy app sprang up on the boardroom display. “These are the numbers you’re so proud of?”

  The image showed an output significantly lower than it should have been. Crazy low. Like the machine was running in a drought. “That’s not right.”

  “Maybe if you were an actual engineer—”

  “No.” Aniyah stood, shaking her head. “No. Those numbers are from a different turbine.”

  Hillam pointed to the geotag in the upper right corner of the app screen. He tapped it and brought the location up on a satellite image. “You’re trying to tell me that’s not where you installed this? Your video makes the location damn clear.”

  Aniyah tapped her own tablet, and the intelligent system started to bring up her own copy of the energy app. She canceled it with a shake of her head and pulled up the video Dude had posted instead. She skipped the “suck it” frames and paused Dude’s vid at the point when she had shown the screen to the camera. “Look.”

  The other board members sat forward, squinting at the screen. Hillam rolled his eyes. “What’s that supposed to prove?”

  “You can see the energy app graph so the output that day is running at 96 percent of its capacity.”

  He shrugged. “So it dropped.”

  “You can also see the serial number in the upper left corner, which makes it clear that I installed a different turbine than the one you’re showing us.” Aniyah’s knees were shaking with anger. She flexed her feet inside her shoes and grimaced. “So, what I’d like to know, as an actual engineer, is why the hell you’re showing faked data.”

  The high red color of Hillam’s cheeks drained into a sickly green. He swallowed and stared at the screen. “That’s…um …I’m—”

  Aniyah looked at the numbers again. “If, say, a second microturbine was installed in the streambed below the waterfall, it would have a power output like this.”

  Lydia Pinkham shook her head and turned to Aniyah. “So—will you show us those numbers again? I think the board will be very, very interested to see your data.” She shot Hillam a hard look. “Very interested in seeing all your data.”

  “Absolutely.” She toggled her tablet to pull up the presentation she’d prepared in the first place.

  “Thank you, Dr. Ramsey.”

  It was a small thing, but the sound of her title made Aniyah nearly turn to Hillam and do a victory dance. The board would pay attention. From there, the numbers would do the rest.

  Science. The language of her people.

  Shadow Flock

  By Greg Egan

  1

  Natalie pointed down along the riverbank to a pair of sturdy-looking trees, a bald cypress and a southern live oak, about fifty meters away. “They might be worth checking out.” She set off through the scrub, her six students following.

  When they reached the trees, Natalie had Céline run a structural check, using the hand-held ground-penetrating radar to map the roots and the surrounding soil. The trees bore gray cobwebs of Spanish moss, but most of it was on the higher branches, out of harm’s way. Natalie had chosen the pair three months before, when she was planning the course; it was cheating, but the students wouldn’t have thanked her if they’d ended up spending a whole humid, mosquito-ridden day hunting for suitable pillars. In a real disaster you’d take whatever delays and hardship fate served up, but nobody was interested in that much verisimilitude in a training exercise.

  “Perfect,” Céline declared, smiling slightly, probably guessing that the result was due to something more than just a shrewd judgment made from a distance.

  Natalie asked Mike to send a drone with a surveying module across to the opposite bank. The quadrocopter required no supervision for such a simple task, but it was up to Mike to tell it which trees to target first, and the two best candidates—a pair of sturdy oaks—were impossible to miss. The way things were going, they stood a good chance of being back in New Orleans before sunset.

  With their four pillars chosen, it was time to settle on a construction strategy. They had three quads to work with, and more than enough cable, but the Tchefuncte River was about 130 meters wide here. A single spool of cable held a hundred meters, and that was as much weight as each backpack-size quad could carry.

  Josh raised his notepad to seek software advice, but Natalie stopped him. “Would it kill you to spend five minutes thinking?”

  “We’re going to need to do some kind of midair splice,” he said. “I just wanted to check what knots are available, and which would be strongest.”

  “Why splicing?” Natalie pressed him.

>   He raised his hands and held them a short distance apart. “Cable.” Then he increased the separation. “River.”

  Augusto said, “What about loops?” He hooked two fingers together and strained against the join. “Wouldn’t that be stronger?”

  Josh snorted. “And halve the effective length? We’d need three spools to bridge the gap then, and you’d still need to splice the second loop to the third.”

  “Not if we preform the middle loop ourselves,” Augusto replied. “Fuse the ends, here on the ground. That’s got to be better than any midair splice. Or easier to check, and easier to fix.”

  Natalie looked around the group for objections. “Everyone agree? Then we need to make a flight plan.”

  They assembled the steps from a library of maneuvers, then prepared the cable for the first crossing. The heat was becoming enervating, and Natalie had to fight the urge to sit in the shade and bark orders. Down in Haiti she’d never cared about being comfortable, but it was harder to stay motivated when all that was at stake were a few kids’ grades in one minor elective.

  “I think we’re ready,” Céline declared, a little nervous, a little excited.

  Natalie said, “Be my guest.”

  Céline tapped the screen of her notepad and the first quad whirred into life, rising up from the riverbank and tilting a little as it moved toward the cypress.

  With cable dangling, the drone made three vertical loops around the tree’s lowest branch, wrapping it in a short helix. Then it circumnavigated the trunk twice, once close in and then a second time in a long ellipse that left cable hanging slackly from the branch. The drone circled back, dropped beneath the branch, and flew straight through the loop. It repeated the maneuver and then headed away, keeping the spool clamped until it had pulled the knot tight.

  As the first drone moved out over the glistening water, the second one was already ahead of it, and the third was drawing close to the matching tree on the far side of the river. Natalie glanced at the students, gratified by the tension on their faces: Success here was not a fait accompli. Céline’s hand hovered above her notepad; if the drones struck an unforeseen problem—and failed to recover gracefully on their own—it would be her job to intervene manually.

  When the second drone had traveled some forty meters from the riverbank, it began ascending, unwinding cable as it went to leave a hanging streamer marking its trail. From this distance the shiny blue line of polymer was indistinguishable from the kind its companion was dispensing, but then the drone suddenly stopped climbing, clamped the spool, and accelerated downward. The single blue line revealed its double-stranded nature, spreading out into a heart-shaped loop. The first drone shot through the heart, then doubled back, hooking the two cables together. Then the second one pulled out of its dive and continued across the river. The pierced heart always struck Natalie as surreal—the kind of thing that serenading cartoon birds would form with streamers for Snow White in the woods.

  Harriet, usually the quietest of the group, uttered an involuntary, admiring expletive.

  The third drone had finished hitching itself to the tree on the opposite bank and was flying across the water for its own rendezvous. Natalie strained her eyes as the second drone went into reverse, again separating the paired cables so its companion could slip through and form the link. Then the second drone released the loop completely and headed back to the riverbank, its job done. The third went off to mimic the first, tying its loose end to the tree where it had started.

  They repeated the whole exercise three more times, giving the bridge two hand ropes and two deck supports before breaking for lunch. As Natalie was unwrapping the sandwiches she’d brought, a dark blur the size of her thumb buzzed past her face and alighted on her forearm. Instinctively, she moved to flick it off, but then she realized that it was not a living insect; it was a small Toshiba dragonfly, its four wings iridescent with photovoltaic coatings. Whether it was mapping the forest, monitoring wildlife, or just serving as a communications node, the last thing she’d want to do was damage it. The machine should not have landed on anything but vegetation, but no one’s programming was perfect. She watched it as it sat motionless in the patch of sunlight falling on her skin. Then it ascended suddenly and flew off out of sight.

  In the afternoon, the team gave their bridge a rudimentary woven deck. Each of the students took turns donning a life jacket and hard hat before walking across the swaying structure and back, whooping with a mixture of elation at their accomplishment and adrenaline as they confronted its fragility.

  “And now we have to take it apart,” Natalie announced, prepared for the predictable groans and pleas. “No arguments!” she said firmly. “Pretty as it is, it would only take a party of five or six hikers to break it, and if they ended up dashing their brains out in the shallows that would be enough to bankrupt the university and send us all to prison.”

  2

  As Natalie started up the stairs to her apartment she heard a distinctive trilling siren, then saw a red shimmer spilling down onto the landing ahead. The delivery quad came into view, and she moved to the left to let it pass, catching a welcome cool wash from its downdraft, a sensation weirdly intensified by the lime-green tint of the receding hazard lights.

  She tensed as she approached her floor, hoping she wouldn’t find Sam waiting for her. His one talent was smooth talking, and he could always find someone willing to buzz him into the building. Against her better judgment she’d let her brother wheedle her into sinking $10,000 into his latest business venture, but when it had proved to be as unprofitable as all the rest, rather than apologizing and going in search of paid work he’d started begging her to invest even more, in order to “tip the balance”—as if his struggling restaurant were a half-submerged Spanish galleon full of gold that needed only a few more flotation bladders to rise magnificently to the surface.

  Sam wasn’t lurking in the corridor, but there was a small package in front of her door. Natalie was puzzled and annoyed; she wasn’t expecting anything, and the drones were not supposed to leave their cargo on a doormat. She stooped down and picked up the parcel; it bore the logo of a local courier, but water had somehow got inside the plastic pocket that held the waybill, turning the portion with the sender’s address into gray mush. A gentle shake yielded the clinking slosh of melting ice.

  Inside, she put the parcel in the kitchen sink, went to the bathroom, and then came back and cut open the mailing box to reveal an insulating foam container. The lid bore the words “GUESS WHO?” written in black marker. Natalie couldn’t; she’d parted company with the last two men she’d dated on terms that made surprise gifts unlikely, let alone a peace offering of chilled crabmeat or whatever this was.

  She tugged the lid off and tipped the ice into the sink. A small, pink object stood out from the slush, but it wasn’t any part of a crab. Natalie stared for several seconds, unwilling to prod the thing into position for a better view, then fetched a pair of tongs to facilitate a more thorough inspection.

  It was the top part of a human finger. A little finger, severed at the joint. She walked away and paced the living room, trying to decode the meaning of the thing before she called the police. She could not believe that Alfonso—a moody musician who’d ditched her when she’d dared to leave one of his gigs at two in the morning, on a work night—would have the slightest interest in mutilating his own precious hands in the service of a psychotic prank. Digging back further she still came up blank. Rafael had smashed crockery once, in the heat of an argument, but by now she’d be surprised to elicit any stronger reaction from him than a rueful smile if they ran into each other on the street. The truth was, the prospect of the cops hauling any of these ex-lovers in for questioning mortified her almost as much as the macabre offering itself, because pointing the finger at any of them seemed preposterously self-aggrandizing. “Really?” she could hear the whole lineup
of unlikely suspects demanding, holding out their pristine mitts. “You thought you were worth that?”

  Natalie walked back to the kitchen doorway. Why was she assuming that the amputation had been voluntary? No one she knew would commit such an act—upon themselves or anyone else—but that didn’t mean she didn’t know the unwilling donor.

  She turned around and rushed to the bedroom, where she kept the bioassay attachment for her notepad. The only software she’d downloaded for it was for personal health and pregnancy testing, but it took only a minute to get the app she needed.

  There was no visible blood left inside the fingertip, but when she picked it up with the tongs it was full of meltwater that ought to be brimming with sloughed cells. She tipped a little of the water onto the assay chip and waited ten long minutes for the software to announce a result.

  Chance of fraternity: 95%

  Sam must have gone elsewhere for money, but it would have disappeared into the same bottomless pit as her own investment. And when his creditors had come for him with their bolt cutters, who else was he going to rope in to help him repay his debt but his sister?

  Natalie wanted to scream with anger, but she found herself weeping. Her brother was an infuriating, immature, self-deluding brat, but he didn’t deserve this. If she had to remortgage the apartment to get him out of these people’s clutches, so be it. She wasn’t going to abandon him.

  As she began trying to think through the logistics of dealing with the bank as quickly as possible—without explaining the true purpose of the loan—her phone rang.