This week, Futures is very pleased to bring you Claimed, the first published story by S J Rosenstein. By day she works as a research scientist, by night you can catch up with her thoughts on her blog. Here, she reveals what inspired her tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Claimed

We’ve all had that moment when you come across something you can’t quite believe — learning how big the Universe really is, meeting someone so incredible you want to spend the rest of your life with them, catching your first glimpse of Donald Trump’s hair. Of course, sometimes these things are unbelievable because they’re not real. But other times, the initial shock is overcome by a creeping feeling of unease. If you accept this idea, it means rethinking everything.

And what better vector to pass on an idea than a parasite? I’ve been fascinated by the potential for parasites to control their hosts ever since I was introduced to Leucochloridium paradoxum by David Attenborough’s Trials of Life. The distended, pulsating eyestalks were horrifying, but what was worse to see the snail slowly climb up and up a stalk of grass until it became prey.  As for humans, our immune system seems to be optimised to reject parasites. Yet many people still live with them, and there’s evidence that their presence may change our behaviour.

So if we were invaded by aliens I like to think that the shiny spaceships and exotic appearance would just be a distraction. The real invasion would be going on quietly, behind the scenes, changing us into something new. And if I spotted it, I would definitely flee to Hawaii, and celebrate the apocalypse with a Piña Colada.

This week’s Futures story is the touching tale Age progression by Susana Martinez-Conde. Susana very kindly made some time to explain what inspired the piece — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Age progression

I discovered Victorian post-mortem photography around the time that I lost my second and third pregnancies. I learned that family pictures of that age were not constrained to the living, but could include the body of a dead child — for whom no other portraits might exist — surrounded by parents and siblings. Nineteenth-century daguerreotypists would go to the homes of the deceased and stage the corpses — often aided by hidden props — so that they looked alive. The illusion could be surprisingly successful.

I was fascinated to find out that post-mortem portraiture did not end with the Victorian era, but it remains extant today. Volunteer painters and photographers sometimes visit hospitals to portray stillborn babies, as well as infants who live for just a short while after birth. Such depictions can be precious to grieving parents.

In recent years, age-progression techniques — originally developed to help identify missing children long after they’ve vanished — have also comforted bereaved parents, by showing them how their children would look had they lived to become teens or young adults. Do the age-progressed photographs help parents get closure, or prevent them from moving on?

Grief is complicated, so there is no simple answer.

My own losses happened relatively early in pregnancy, so I did not get to see what my babies might have looked like. But I still wonder every now and again.

In Age progression, virtual technology helps fill the gaps in a mother’s imagination. Whether she is better or worse off for it … that’s for the reader to decide.

This week, Futures returns to the theme of robot intelligence with Jeremy Szal’s story System reboot. Jeremy first appeared in Futures earlier this year with his story Daega’s test. You can usually find him on his blog page or on Twitter. Here he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing System reboot

This piece came about as more of an experiment than anything. I wanted to try something outside of the usual fare, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I wanted to write a story where the experimentation was justified — that wasn’t just trying to look smart.  I wanted something that made sense on a thematic level.

And then, as one naturally does, I thought about robots. More specifically, machines. All machines have programs. The computer I’m writing this on has thousands of them, segmented off into more tiny little fragments that make up the program that’s a component of the system. All tiny building blocks making up giant building blocks that form a tower.

So why not with a robot? Sure, a robot could be constructed out of a singular program, but that would leave it at a very basic level, equivalent to the ones we see handling items on conveyor belts in factories. The more higher-level programs a machine possesses, the more complicated actions it can perform. The rather short-sighted scientists in this story decide to build a robot that’s not only fashioned out of thousands of programs, but capable of producing more at will. As you might expect, this doesn’t quite go as expected, and as the programs accelerate beyond their control the robot is able to pick out what’s going on. Eventually it’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of the human scientists.

Although this wasn’t the reason why I wrote this story in the first place, I sat back and considered this. As our technology increases, so do the things we are capable of achieving. But in doing so, do we risk technology superseding us or jumping out of our grasp? What if we create something so advanced it starts to wonder why it has to listen to us little humans?

And when that happens, we’d better hope the robots are feeling merciful.

This week Futures is pleased to welcome back to its pages S R Algernon, with his story One slow step for man. The story finds him thinking small — very small — and celebrates the incredibly hardy tardigrade. His previous tales have focused on slightly larger subjects, including uses for phlogiston, interplanetary war, Marley’s ghost, the future of the human race, rebellion, time travel and the real nature of Hell. Here, he explains the origins of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing One slow step for man

The idea for One slow step for man arose from a problem that I encountered when writing other stories, namely that humans are fragile and they weigh a lot compared with many other organisms. So, I thought if we could create a sapient organism that was smaller, lighter and hardier, it would make interstellar missions more feasible. The idea itself struck me as exciting, but it didn’t have much of a narrative arc by itself. So, I added a little character drama to pit the emissaries of this new species against the humans that they would eventually outpace. I thought it was important to end on a partially conciliatory note, because I imagine that there will be enough room in the Galaxy for many Earth-derived organisms and machines, once we finally do branch out beyond our native system.

This month’s Futures story in Nature Physics is On the nature of reality by Yaroslav Barsukov. Here he explains the origins of his tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing On the nature of reality

What is the most frightening thing? Many would say it’s death, the idea that a brain, an infinitely complex tangle of neural pathways, can dissolve into nothing. But I think the potential for horror is much greater if we look at our beginnings.

Superstring theory explains the observable phenomena by saying that there are really ten dimensions; in addition to the familiar ones of space and time, six extra dimensions exist that are ‘rolled up’ in a compact manifold. The configuration of this manifold determines the laws of physics.

However, once we say there are ten dimensions, for me the next question is: how so? Why ten and not six or nine? Obviously the answer that ‘otherwise the strings couldn’t vibrate in a consistent way’ is a circular argument; one is effectively saying our Universe exists in ten dimensions because that many are needed for our Universe to exist. The statement about the manifold is information in itself — and every information has to be defined somewhere, on some meta-level. Even if we step down from the complexity of string theory, there are multiple properties of reality that still require definition — causality itself being one example.

Somewhere it needs to be specified that our Universe exists in ten dimensions, and that there is causality and the flow of time.

You can’t infinitely stack meta-levels on top of each other (see the Homunculus argument). The only meta-level should be self-consistent; it wouldn’t need another, deeper layer to describe itself, and, mapped to our concepts, it would have no beginning and no end in time. And here we tread very close to the Bible … The alternative is more Lovecraftian to me than anything August Derleth — or Lovecraft himself — might have written. We could imagine that the meta-level doesn’t exist at all, which implies that the properties of the observable world aren’t defined anywhere, and thus the Universe came out of nothing.

Yet nothing will always produce nothing.

Obviously the boundaries of a flash piece are too constricting to tackle these concepts; you have to scale down. But I think the black cubes of the story can serve as a neat little metaphor for an ‘undefined’ reality. If a device similar to the one described existed, it would quite possibly invoke in people nothing but a sense of cosmic horror — and yet for many, a Universe without the meta-level is totally acceptable.

I don’t know why. And this frightens me, too.