This week’s Futures story is ‘Dumpster diving’ by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. Alvaro is co-author with Robert Silverberg of When the Blue Shift Comes, and first appeared in Futures with ‘Coffee in end times’, which he co-wrote with Alex Shvartsman. His Futures story ‘Waste knot, want knot’ appeared earlier this year in Nature Physics. You can read more about Alvaro’s work at his website. Here he kindly takes us behind the scenes of this week’s Futures story:

 The story behind the story

‘Dumpster diving’ is my attempt to come up with a new twist on an old theme, that of the Sleeper Awakes (the SF Encyclopedia says interesting things about it). Part of the fun for the reader with these stories, I think, is to realize that what may initially seem a utopia is quite the contrary, and this was a reversal I wanted to incorporate. I also remembered the clever and disturbing conceit of Will McIntosh’s Hugo-winning story ‘Bridesicle’ (2009), and thought it might be fun to push my protagonist’s fate into even darker territory. I’d been reading some short shorts (flash stories, in today’s lingo) by Fredric Brown, a master of the form, and that reading inspired the shape of my story. I have the feeling that if Brown were alive today he’d be featured regularly in the pages of Nature, and I’m pleased to work in a tradition he helped to define and perfect some 70 years ago.

Today, I have mostly left a trail of used paper (neatly slotted into the recycling bin), a plastic cup and a cardboard container that was earlier filled with brown gloop that had somehow convinced me it was lunch. Surrounding me are a computer, sundry dictionaries and reference books, a collection of pens (various colours), a phone, some plastic bags and a metal box containing the periodic table with the individual elements in fridge-magnet form.

Should all of this be frozen in time to be rummaged through by future scholars, the best they might make of me is an untidy creature governed by rules for rituals, with multiple limbs for writing, suspicious taste in food and the most bizarre hand in Scrabble ever (though if you do find a way to play unununium (Uuu) on a triple you can score 333 without breaking a sweat). It is unlikely that the detritus from my life would significantly shift scholarly thinking on how to describe the world. But as a member of the Homo sapiens club, it seems I am making a minor contribution to something that could change geological time.

The assignation of geological time is a somewhat esoteric art that tends impinge on the general consciousness only because it encapsulates a time long ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and ice ages swept the face of the globe. The names given to the various divisions within the time scale are in equal measure enticing and confusing. There are A-list celebrities, of course — step forward the Jurrasic — and there are those that might struggle to get an invite to the party (the Kimmeridgian anyone?). And there are those whose fame rests, in part, on a misunderstanding: the creatures in Doctor Who called Silurians get their name from the Silurian Period of some 416–440 million years ago, although there are strong arguments that in fact they would have lived during the Eocene Epoch a mere 35–56 million years ago and so should be called Eocenes ( I defy anyone to face Madame Vastra and actually make that argument…).

The reason geological time is exercising my brain — and those of many others this week — is a meeting that kicks off in Berlin today. It is the gathering of the Anthropocene Working Group, a team of scientists and humanists who are trying to determine whether the world has crossed (or is about to cross) the boundary into a new epoch.

Currently, we reside in the Holocene, which began about 11,700 years ago. (Those of you who are keeping tabs on the whole structure might like to know that the Holocene Epoch is part of the Quaternary Period, which is part of the Cenozoic Era, which is part of the Phanerozoic Eon — there will be questions later.) But the meeting is debating whether the Holocene is over and the Anthropocene has begun.

At stake is the question of definition. The geological time scale gets its name because it is, well, defined by geology. Each subdivision relates to observable stratigraphy — and those wondrous names are derived from the geological locations that play host to the defining geology (the Jurassic gets its name not from a spurious theme park but the Jura mountains in the Alps). And that’s one of the things that makes the idea of the Anthropocene so intriguing: the hubris of naming an epoch after ourselves and the suggestion that the actions of the human race have wrought definable changes that merit a new division in geological time.

That has led people to start asking about the markers we will leave behind. What would aliens of the future landing on Earth be able to discover about us? Formally, it will probably be a rise in pollutants captured in layers of rock, but the idea of an alien gazing across Earth’s surface millions of years from now begs the question of what other clues we might leave. What equivalents of cave paintings and fossilized bones will signify the rise and fall of the human race?

I suppose that the more of something there was to start off with and the more widely it was used, the more likely some of it will survive to be found later — so for archaeologists, coins are more readily found than crowns and sceptres. Based on that, will the human race leave a legacy of toasters, mobile phones and body piercings?

Perhaps, in between fending off attacks from the giant insects that are now masters of the planet, an itinerant alien will be lucky enough to find preserved some technology that is still functional. Once it gets the mp3 file to play, a look of bemusement will cross its face as it tries to decipher the meaning of Everything I Do I Do It For You by Bryan Adams (mind you, if it just turns the volume up it might resolve the problem with the giant ants).

Some readers who grew up watching 1970s TV in the UK will remember an advert in which robotic aliens laughed incessantly at foolish humans peeling and boiling potatoes in order to make mash, when the advanced aliens could make it instantly from a packet. I can’t help thinking that the stars will echo with similar pan-galactic derision when what is left of our civilization comes to light and it becomes clear that twenty-first-century Earth was one huge religious cult that venerated graven images of cats doing unspeakably cute things.

Beating classic opening lines such as “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …” and “It is a truth universally acknowledged …” is, at least in my household, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” (I was a strange child.)

But that delightful image from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis — cunningly adapted by Futures author Anatoly Belilovsky in his story Gifts of the Magi — has just had a rewrite. And the change is recasting the story — quite literally.

At a point where science fiction transforms into science fact, playwright and director Oriza Hirata has reworked Metamorphosis for the stage and cast a robot as the central character. This is not the first time I’ve heard of a robot taking up acting: Kamelion (voiced by Gerald Flood) was notorious for its role in two Doctor Who stories during Peter Davison’s era, although it was probably more notorious for, um, not working very well. But things have moved on somewhat since the early 1980s, and although we are still some way from an android King Lear, the video footage of Repliee S1 suggests that Hirata has gone some way to achieving his goal of creating “a situation in which a robot could move an audience”.

Hirata has actually been working with robotic actors (no jokes about soap operas, please) for the past five years in the guise of the Robot Theater Project at Osaka University. Collaborating with roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who is also behind Repliee S1, Hirata has staged several short plays in Japanese. This latest production goes one step further, pitching the robot as the lead and the performance in French with Japanese subtitles.

Acting alongside Repliee S1 in La Métamorphose Version Androïde is award-winning actress Irène Jacob. The play opens in Japan before transferring to Hungary and then heads for the Autumn Festival in Normandy on 12 November.

This android vision of the future hints finally at robots edging their way into the creative arts — an idea captured neatly by Greg Bear in his Futures story RAM shift phase 2. Whether it will mean that we can look forward to a reworking of Hamlet for daleks (“Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?” “He has been exterminated”) or La Traviata performed by a slew of R2D2 clones (“Bleeping marvellous” — The RoboTimes) remains to be seen. Mind you, I’m not sure I’d want to audition a room full of robots for Waiting For Godot. But one thing we can be certain of, Repliee S1 is unlikely to forget its lines, miss its cues or corpse. For all you thespians out there, the future may very well be digital, in more ways than one …