Future Science Fiction Digest Issue 3: Future Science Fiction Digest, #3

Future Science Fiction Digest, Issue 3

Edited by Alex Shvartsman Laura Resnick Will McIntosh Edward M Lerner Karen Osborne Wulf Moon Oleg Divov Lü Momo Amanda Helms Emily Randall Elena Pavlova Vajra Chandrasekera

Contents

Foreword

Cratered

Super-Duper Moongirl and the Amazing Moon Dawdler

Going Boldly - An Interview with DC Fontana

Astrobody for Sale or Rent

Americans on the Moon

The Satellites of Damocles

Love, Death, and Printed Burgers

Warden’s Dilemma

Love in the Time of Con Crud

Foot Ball

Waking in the Cold and the Dark

Apologia

Foreword

Alex Shvartsman

We start our third installment of the digest with a month-long celebration of the 50 th anniversary of the moon landing. I've selected four moon-related stories that are as different from each other in style, voice, and theme as can be. Of especial interest is Oleg Divov's Americans on the Moon, not only because we don't often get to experience the Russian perspective on the space race, but also because Divov writes the story from the point of view of an American military commander, and some familiar historical figures show up in this alternate version of the 1980s.

Another major theme of the issue is stories told from the perspective of AI characters. As with the moon stories, these AI characters run the gamut from adorable to murderous, from doubtful to supremely self-assured. Headlined by Edward M. Lerner's novelette The Satellites of Damocles, these tales range from near-future, to far-flung, to post-apocalyptic.

And, just in time for Worldcon, we present a time travel story that brings the reader back to the 2017 Worldcon in Finland.

Like all issues of Future SF, there's a strong focus on translation and international fiction. This time we bring you offerings from Russia, Bulgaria, China, and Sri Lanka.

Finally, there's an insightful interview—conducted by Joshua Sky—with D.C. Fontana, who doesn't mince words regarding her feelings about Gene Roddenberry, and whether she thinks Deep Space Nine was a rip-off of Babylon 5.

Happy reading!

Cratered

Karen Osborne

The fireplace stuck out from the lunar surface like a middle finger directed at my future.

From a distance, it looked just like the fireplace at my house in Pasadena, all limestone and granite, sparkling in the sun. The stone was covered in black ash, as if it had burned, like things could burn here on the fucking Moon. In the fireplace, dusted in lunar regolith kicked up by bootprints that we didn’t make, lay a kicked-over arrangement of charred wood—as if someone had decided that Mare Crisium was a great place to play Little House on the Prairie.

Please say you’re seeing this, I said.

Arjun smirked. What, Kate? The fireplace? Or the dancing giraffes?

I scowled. Arjun was our small survey team’s other geologist. He cracked extremely bad jokes when he was nervous, but right now I was in no mood for humor. It was after dinner and my oxygen tank was already barking at me for being irresponsible. We’d overstayed our welcome at the A5 survey site and taken the shortcut near Dorsa Tetyaev in our latest attempt to slake our employer’s unending thirst for rare-earth minerals. The long Moon’s night was coming, but two weeks of complete darkness didn’t exactly mean Lunatech was going to be lenient with our quotas.

It was amazing how a mission I thought I would love would end up as such a boring mess—just rocks, more rocks, sometimes scandium or yttrium or helium-3, but mostly more fucking rocks.

Arjun fished out his camera. We didn't bring an augmented reality set, right? We're really seeing this?

We're really seeing this.

How the hell are we really seeing this? Do we have time to stop here and figure it out?

I checked my oxygen tank. Figure it out? All I wanted was to go back to Pasadena. Not that I could. Three minutes before we eat into the buffer zone. We'll have to come back tomorrow.

Should we tell Harper?

Tell her what, that we've been on the Moon so long we’re hallucinating?

Arjun craned his neck, and the sunlight reflected off his helmet, bright enough to make me blink. You know, this looks like something from my mom's place, he said.

Doesn't look very Indian, I responded.

As if you know what Indian looks like. He snorted back a laugh.

I checked my footing and bounced off the rover. "I could, if we had AR out here."

We edged around the site, two ungainly, overly careful lunar tumbleweeds halting and stumbling and leaving footprints that no wind would ever wash away, as clear as the craters and the dorsae and the mare and the Apollo site. Above us was a logy Earthrise, and if you squinted, you could almost catch the ash curling in the atmosphere over what was left of Los Angeles.

I had just convinced myself that we were looking at some sort of prank by the last survey team when I found the damning details in stone: the initials R&K carved into the lintel, chipped off with a pocketknife, as jagged as the day I made them.

In Pasadena.

Riley & Kate.

I didn't tell Arjun about what the initials meant. I didn’t even mention it. He'd think I was finally going crazy. What other explanation could there be? That someone from Lunatech wandered into the radiation zone, packed up my dead girlfriend’s chimney, and recreated it here above the mare?

They already thought I was enough of a problem.

I stumbled into the airlock behind Arjun, samples from the formation shoved into my utility pocket. Our mission lead, Harper, was waiting with her face mashed against the airlock window. Arjun and I jostled each other like siblings in a mudroom for two minutes until the airlock filled with atmospheric mix and the door hissed open, revealing the cramped storage room—all muffled steel and white plastic, every single space taken up by drawers and cabinets and medical storage.

Harper's mouth twisted downwards as we walked in, her Manchester accent deeper than normal. You're way over schedule. Both of you are better than this, she said, tapping her watch.

I fought an angry, baffled knot in my throat the size of a walnut and tried to lighten up the atmosphere. Sorry, Mom.

It didn't work. Harper went red-faced. I'm not your mom. I'm your boss. And I don't need to remind you that you could die out there, just like the members of the first Mare Crisium mission. What if you didn’t come back?

Arjun mumbled an apology under his breath and bounced over to his suit cabinet. He toggled the release on his chestplate, then started to strip down to his underwear. Sweat had formed a salty, jagged crag on his black t-shirt.

I was less interested than he was in defusing the situation. I released my own chestplate and dragged off my gloves. Look, Boss. You keep on saying that Lunatech wants results. We got you results. The A5 site looks promising. Fairly scandium-rich, with enough from the lanthanide series for three or four trips for Curtis and Tran.

Samples? Harper said.

In the bag.

Harper rubbed her eyes. She looked exhausted. "Okay. Look, Kate. I know not being able to go back to Earth after the bomb was rough on you. I know I've been rough on you. I know we have to live without AR here, and that stinks, too. She choked down something tough, something bitter. But we all lost people. You can’t use the way you feel as a crutch to screw up out there."

I pulled on my Lunatech sweater. The synthetic fabric felt like steel wool, but at least it was warm. That’s not what’s going on, I said.

Harper sighed. All right. Dinner in five.

You go on. I'm going to put some hours in down the hall.

Harper paused. If you insist. Come on, Arjun. Curtis and Tran heated up nutraloaf for dinner.

Yay, muttered Arjun, the ceiling lights catching the grey in his close-cropped black hair.

The tight ball in my throat yawned open, and sudden, shaking heat spread across my shoulders. I felt resentful and terrible and embarrassed, and ugh, why I was crying? Arjun opened his mouth to say something, but I slammed my locker and turned my back to the door. He swallowed whatever it was he was going to say, and when I turned around to apologize, he and Harper were already gone.

The lights blazed bright in the common room down the hall. It was the laughter that stopped me short: lazy, end-of-the-day, family-room laughter. It was Curtis complaining about the nutraloaf, Tran saying she'd deal the next round of rummy, like they didn't feel the crush of Earth at war wailing above them, like they had been able to look away when California was nuked and Riley with it.

Like Lunatech had actually given them time off or cared that we’d watched it all happen from dead, dusty Mare Crisium.

The lab was dark and quiet and far more my speed. I flipped on the lights and laid out the samples we'd taken that afternoon. They looked ashen and dull, exactly like regolith—far different from the mica-bright, hard granite I thought I'd chipped off in the hot sunlight. I listened to the mass spectrometer whir and whine and wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater.

Screw tears. Crying was wasting water.

Lunatech had offered me the survey post because of my research into rare-earth minerals, but it had been Riley that convinced me to take it—just after Christmas, standing in the moonlight in front of my parents' house with her freezing white hands pressed against my cheeks, the snowflakes falling fat and beautiful on her lips and eyelashes. And there had been the save-the-world aspect to Lunatech's offer, too, even if when I thought of the world I thought only of Riley.

But that had been Michigan and this was the Moon, and in between, terrorists had nuked California.

The spectrometer beeped.

Basalt, the monitor said. Anorthocite. Dunite.

I smacked it. That's not right, you stupid—

Hey! Arjun, his voice hard-edged, appeared beside me with a memory card balled in his fist. He was already in his pajamas. It's not like we can just pop up to the store and replace that thing.

I pointed to the results. "What we saw this afternoon was granite and sandstone and Portland cement, not more stupid moon rocks. I'm being gaslit by a mass spectrometer."

Arjun peered at the machine, an unopened juice pouch clutched in his right hand like an afterthought. I shoved the samples back into the machine and started it up again, resisting the urge to tap out an impatient tattoo on the nearby table. Without augmented reality feeding real-time results at the top of my vision, I'd have to wait until the stupid thing was done. I’m sure plenty of science was done before AR, but I can’t imagine it was fun.

Arjun, too, had his eyes on the still-blank monitor. It's a weird formation, to be sure, and the moon's a geologic vomitorium, but my mother’s hearth in Kumartuli was made of local stone.

I cut him off. He was making no sense. Did you look at the photos yet?

He opened his left hand and dropped a memory card into my palm. It was warm and slightly wet. I winced. I thought we could do that together. And I brought you some juice, since you skipped dinner.

Did Harper put you up to that? The moment the words came out, I regretted them.

Arjun flinched, then put the cup on the table next to the spectrometer. I get it, Kate. This is hard on all of us. And I understand that everybody mourns in different ways. But you don't have to pull away like this, and you certainly can’t keep on treating us the way you are. It's a small base, and there's no AR to make things easier, and we all have to get along. He sighed. "You know, we could even be friends, if you just tried."

I felt my face flush. He saw it, too. You can't understand.

Try me, he said.

India wasn't even involved.

We don’t have any choice in that, he said. Nature is nature.

I nodded. He was right, of course, like he so often was. The wind was the wind, and it would carry the radiation that killed the West Coast into the stratosphere, across the ocean, into the bread and water and intercellular space of every human being alive. I bit my bottom lip to keep myself from sticking my foot in my mouth again. My shoulders felt tight. My chest burned.

Maybe I was being unfair.

I just don't know what to do, I said. I'm up here, and everything else ... is down there.

He sighed, then reached forward, tapping the memory card in my palm with one finger.

Take a look, and then come to dinner. It's really good nutraloaf and Tran's having a bad night at rummy, he said.

Tran always has a bad night at rummy, I wanted to say, but I plugged the memory card into the computer instead.

The pictures depicted nothing but the same damned thing we saw every day: rocks. Regolith. The empty, shattered surface. No mica-bright granite, no impossible initials. No fireplace, no room where Riley and I had spent hours reading books and sharing dreams and planning our life together. My heart clenched. I opened my mouth to yell at Arjun for screwing up, but the criticism died on my tongue.

Our footprints lay exactly where I thought they'd be, circling the place where the fireplace should have stood.

The camera had recorded no structure at all.

"We did see a fireplace, right?" I said.

He nodded. Clear as day.

I was just making a joke about hallucinations.

I don’t know. We’ve been out here long enough. He sighed, then plunked a straw next to the cup. We’ll go by tomorrow. Get an explanation. Come on down the hall?

I almost said yes. Instead, I looked away. I can’t.

He shrugged, then retreated down the hall, to the laughter and the light. I took the cup and stabbed the straw through the lid with entirely too much force, spraying myself. It was strawberry mango, my favorite flavor. The small kindness made me want to follow him—to seek warmth and company from my co-workers for my aching animal heart. When my feet moved, though, they deposited me right in the solitude of my cubby as they always did, and I drifted off to the sound of Curtis chuckling over his latest win.

I dreamed of Riley: brown-haired and smiling and surrounded by Christmas lights and flurries of snow. I dreamed the lights dimmed, the flurries turned to ashes, the skies went as black as the soil around her feet, that the Shackleton Crater swallowed her in the deep, black ice they'd discovered there, that her bones shattered into powder, scattering over the everdark stone. I dreamed of my work at Caltech, of bombs obliterating Pasadena, of ghosts in my throat, of being buried alive on Mare Crisium, regolith salty between my teeth.

At breakfast, I shoveled a protein bar into my mouth as Harper read the daily assignments. Tran sucked down black coffee, her eyes grey with fatigue, her mouth twisted into a sour curve. She always stayed up far too late, using her comm time to talk to family in the Vancouver refugee camps. Curtis had already finished his breakfast and was idly shuffling the worn deck of cards he kept next to a picture of his ex-wife. The only one looking at Harper was Arjun, who seemed bright-eyed and ready to go.

My mind wandered back to the photos he’d taken—their spectacular, peculiar emptiness, the bootprints that clearly weren’t ours, the endless grey sea beyond. Earth brushing the horizon, teasing horror and hope.

There was a very simple explanation to what we'd seen—we’d encountered an augmented reality program, just like the ones I used in my work at Caltech, like stores and restaurants used all over the world to personalize user experiences. But AR needed routers and receivers and was prohibited up here on the lunar frontier, ripped out of every suit and rover and system and brain sent outside Armstrong Haven, in case a member of the survey team might misjudge a navpoint, choose the wrong footing, fall straight off a dorsa and die screaming at the bottom of a thousand-foot crater.

In Lunatech’s central colonies, the rich twirled in their luxury apartments, AR braingear twisting their white walls and plastic chairs into Italianate mansions or mid-century penthouses or Miami beach condos. Out here, though, we had to make do with bad jokes and gin rummy simply because our monkey brains couldn’t judge the proper size of a rock when denied the right reference points.

Harper's voice cut through my reverie. Kate. You're not even listening to me.

I was, I lied through my last mouthful.

The CEO has moved up the schedule on the AR installations in the Whitman wing, so our own schedule is changing. You and Arjun will head back to A5, extract at least 200 grams of scandium and get it on the rocket before nightfall. Be careful, and don’t stay out too long.

The number burnt in my chest like a rubber band around my aorta. I can't do that. It's not possible, I said.

Curtis can do it, said Harper.

He’s a miner, I said. I’m a geologist.

Curtis stopped chewing. We’ve already been scheduled for five hundred grams of lanthanides up near B2, he said. There’s no way we’d make it to A5 in time.

I grabbed the table and leaned forward, staring at Harper. And you shouldn’t have to. Boss, I said the vein was promising, not that I could load up a shipment without a full, proper survey of the area. Asking us to rush this is to sacrifice all thoughts of safety, and last time I checked, none of us had replaceable parts.

Harper's fingers tightened on her chair. I know the schedule's bruising, but there’s a new resident shuttle arriving at Aldrin the Tuesday after next, and you need to do your best.

Maybe we shouldn't, I said.

There was silence at the table.

Shouldn't build out Aldrin? Harper said. "Or shouldn't do our best? What are you going to do, Kate? Quit? Are you going to walk home?"

She pointed towards the airlock.

Tran sighed, rubbing her eyes. There are tricks, Kate, we can show you how to preload the—

I cleared my throat to cut her off. Let the one-percenters play cards for a week or two. It’s not like they’re going anywhere.

They were all staring at me now.

And why are they doing any of it, anyway? Have you ever thought about what's going to happen when we've built their augmented utopia, the war doesn’t end, and all the rich people rapture up here and leave the Earth to die?

Tran looked away, clearly uncomfortable. I know I should have stopped, but the words burst out of my mouth like they’d been dammed up behind my tonsils ever since California fried. Maybe they had. "Have you thought about how the environment down there is collapsing and they haven't changed one word of their business plan? We could be doing so much more. Lunatech could be saving people. On Earth. Where it matters. And you're sending me out to get samples, so they can build AR routers for rich people that couldn’t give a shit."

Harper licked her lips. When she spoke, her voice sounded like someone had worked it over with sandpaper.

Even if we wanted to do something more, she said, quietly, "even if we did, what do you think would happen? We're all very small cogs, in a very large machine, with very big tires. We have