Cumulus

by Rudi Dornemann

Night bled to day. The glare off all the chrome of the buildings and the cars shifted from reflected and redoubled neon to a blazing ultraviolet-edged glare. Still a day and a night to go.

She tinted her lenses down darker than the night had been. The road so flat, so straight, she was glad the car could do its own driving. It sang to her as it went, airfoils and antennae on its metal skin vibrating with the wind, an app in its wiring turning all the swooping downdrafts from the mile-high arcology towers and all the little traffic-spawned crosscurrent eddies into a choir of susurrant near-voices, howling and humming, a unique irreproducible unplannable chaos tune.

She had a vintage neoDAT running, told herself this would be the soundtrack for her summer. She resisted the urge to number the tapes as they filled, just tossed them in a paper bag. She put a title on the bag, “The Road to Stellavista.”

The app distracted the climate control; she could tell it was getting hotter. Mouth dry, she stretched on the passenger couch and didn’t think about what she was leaving, or how many of the lives in those towers were reflections of her own–how many were there in the metacity her age, her gender, with the same schooling, same tastes in work, furniture, clothes, music, friends, lovers… She had the time on the trip, she could have run the stats, worked out how unique she wasn’t.

She rolled over, restless. How many had wanted to get out? She knew the number of applicants for the colony to the nearest million. The others were finding other exits even now–immersion in family, community, intoxicants, viddies, all the distractions, destructions, constructions of life. She would have applied herself to her organitechture work, breeding new buildings. She didn’t know what she’d do in the desert where nothing would grow.

When she arrived at last, she saw a single cloud beyond the low reach of the apartments, beyond the sandflats, a curl of white dissolving in the heatshimmer a long way away, and she looked at it hard, a long time, thinking it might be the last one she saw for a few months, trying to think what it looked like, but metaphors failed her, and then was gone to blue. A sign, she decided, although she couldn’t say of what.

Do fish feel pain?

by David

“What if we’re just a recording? Or a simulation?” Donald skipped a disk of sandstone across the lake. It skipped five times before plunking in. A water strider dodged the stone and skated under the dock.

Denise squinted at her bobber. For a moment it had seemed to dip, but she had been distracted by Donald’s question. She looked at Donald, the sun dazzle on the water beyond him, and the trio of mallards by the far bank.

“Stop scaring the fish.” She sniffed the moist air, redolent of growth and decay. “This seems real to me. The water was cold when we swam this morning.”

Donald hitched around to face her. “No, see. What if you have a false memory of swimming, of being cold? Of course it seems real to us if we have programmed memories, and we’re no deeper than the simulation. We don’t know what we’re missing. Maybe the senses of real people are more acute than our own. Maybe the memories of real people are more vivid than ours.”

Denise laid the bamboo pole down on the dock and stood up. She put her foot on Donald’s lower back and shoved him into the water. When he came up sputtering she asked

“Cold enough for you?” Then she stepped back out of reach.

Donald spat water out of his mouth. “Doesn’t prove a thing. Maybe real cold feels much colder.”

“All these maybes and what ifs are fruitless. If we can’t tell the difference between reality and simulation then we should assume we are real. We’ll have more fun that way.” She reached a hand down to help him out of the water. She pulled him up, dripping, drew him close, then closer.

They didn’t even notice when the pole was pulled off the dock and slowly moved out towards the center of the lake.

.

“What if we’re just a recording? Or a simulation?”

End