This week, Futures is delighted to present The last robot by S L Huang. Armed with a degree in maths from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, S L Huang writes mathematically slanted science fiction such as Zero Sum Game. If you’d like to find out more, there are plenty of details at her website or you can follow her on Twitter. Here S L Huang reveals the inspiration behind The last robot — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The last robot

A yellow smiley face, the parent of all emojis. He’s a blank, isn’t he? Two dots and a curve for a mouth.

A yellow smiley face, the parent of all emojis. She’s a blank, isn’t she? Two dots and a curve for a mouth.

No. The second phrasing sounds odd. We do a double-take if it’s called female. Female would be marked in some way — red lips, a pink bow, the addition of hair. Labelling it as male sounds a little sexist, perhaps, but labelling it as female sounds … incorrect.

Why?

It isn’t the marking itself that is at fault for this strangeness. Without such conscious differentiation, we wouldn’t be living in a culture of genderless anthropomorphized characters and toys, but of male ones. Cartoon dogs, the yellow minions of Despicable Me, xkcd’s base stick figures — unless told otherwise, we do assign them a gender. A male one.

Why?

It’s such a deep-seated cultural tic, our need to sort inanimate beings into binary genders. Of course we’re naturally fascinated by our own reproductive biology, but we take our infatuation many times further than nature itself does. After all, the natural reality of sex and gender is a spiky, multifaceted continuum, with all fauna, including humans, infinite variations on a theme. Evolution unfolds its genetics in a haphazard guesswork of selection over generations, without any preplanned adherence to the categorization we love so much. We are only able to round humanity down to sexual dimorphism by ignoring the percentage who don’t fit our taxonomies … but what happens if we no longer can?

Nature, after all, does not concern herself with our insistence on such rigid categorization.

Or should I say, Nature does not concern themself with such insistence.

This week, Tyler Young makes his debut in Futures with his legally oriented story Cease and desist. Tyler is a real-life lawyer, though he’s not yet received any extraterrestrial lawsuits. Here he explains what inspired his tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Cease and desist

I think it’s fascinating when courts try to apply legal standards to technological innovations that were often — ahem — mere science fiction when the laws were drafted. This story was inspired by recent court cases in which judges were asked to decide some fundamental, almost existential, questions about life: questions like, can someone own a gene? This story takes that question one step further and asks whether someone can own the basic mechanism of life on Earth and, if so, what would someone do with that right?

Once I settled on the concept for the story, the format — a surreal cease-and-desist letter — fell into place naturally. I’m a practising lawyer, so I’ve read more than my fair share of (sometimes comical) letters like this one.

The best part about writing this story was talking chemistry with my best friend, Professor Aaron Engelhart.

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome Judy Helfrich with her time-bending story Playing for keeps. You can keep track of Judy’s work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here she reveals how her latest tale came about (probably) — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Playing for keeps

What happens to the past?

According to the block-universe theory of time, the past exists. As the present drives us towards the future and we leave the past behind, it stays put, like a road we once travelled. But if the past is extant, how is it stored?

Obviously, everything comes down to doughnuts.

I was at my local doughnut shop one morning surrounded by seemingly infinite choices — from Boston cream to French cruller and everything in between — when it struck me that I was in a superposition of doughnuts. If I believed the Copenhagen interpretation, the moment I made a choice, my doughnut superposition would collapse down to, say, a maple-glazed state. But if I went with the many-worlds interpretation, then every possible choice would be played out in a different universe, and I could have all the doughnuts.

I don’t know what happened in all the other universes, but when I finished my maple-glazed in this one, I wondered what happened to that collapsed maple-glazed state. Did I leave it behind somewhere? Was I still in the past, forever eating that doughnut? Essentially: does the past consist of previously collapsed quantum states? And if so, where are they stored? Are they like dark matter, hovering on the edge of our limited perceptions until we can figure out how to access them?

Rather than time-travel to visit the past, I mused that maybe it comes down to simply expanding our human perceptions to observe previously collapsed quantum states. And if someone from the future observes the exact same states I once observed, perhaps they could live my past, make copies of me, play me like an avatar, or even (gasp) eat my doughnut.

It might be fun, I thought, to act out the parts of historical figures, or even change their endings (or their doughnut choice). If all the world’s a stage, why limit it to the present?

Well, I thought, it might not be so fun if someone changed my collapsed states and thus changed my history. And what if they deleted my collapsed states? Would it be as though I never existed? And by observing all the collapsed states I observed during my lifetime, they would learn my darkest secrets. Not that I have any. *coughs*

I might not even be the original me, I mused, but someone from the future who’s playing me. Or maybe I am the original, but others are playing me, messing with my stuff, changing my collapsed states willy-nilly, springing forth new copies of me and my universe with each quantum-level change. And if someone from the future plays someone from the present who is playing me, on and on, ad infinitum, then eventually every possible quantum state representing every choice I never made, every thought I never had, every doughnut I never ate, would be played out in infinite universes, proving both the Copenhagen and the many-worlds interpretation.

Anyway, that’s what compelled me to write Playing for Keeps.

At least, I think it was me.

Futures is welcoming in the New Year in the way we know best: by meditating on the nature of life and death with Thomas Broderick’s story Chrysalis. Thomas is a freelance writer based in California, and you can keep up to date with his work by following him on Twitter. Here, he takes to the road to explain what inspired his latest story — as ever, it pays to read the tale first.

Writing Chrysalis

If you want to know how Chrysalis came to be, we should go on a day trip. I’m driving, and you’re riding shotgun in my blue Honda Fit.

We start in downtown Santa Rosa, California, just a few miles from where I live. On Mendocino Avenue, I point out The Press Democrat building, where Frank Herbert cut his teeth as a reporter in the 1950s. Herbert’s Dune taught me a lot about the nature of inspiration. I learned that inspiration for science fiction doesn’t have to come from science or technology. It can spring from anything, and the ideas may take years to incubate. For example, after Herbert first saw those sand dunes in Florence, Oregon, it took him a long, long time to invent Arrakis.

The first bit of inspiration that became Chrysalis, coincidentally, also involves sand.

We drive west out to the coast, a pleasant outing that takes us through rolling green pastures and dairy farms. The beach, however, is cold and foggy (as it should be). Along the waterline, I point out a narrow band of fresh water flowing into the ocean. The pattern made by the water looks like the branches of a tree, or neurons in the brain. At dusk, the rising tide destroys the pattern. When I first saw this cycle a few years ago, I thought it was a profound metaphor for life and death.

Mulling the idea for over a year, I imagined some young PhD in neurocybernetics observing the same sight, he or she coming up with the same metaphor as I did. What if that person then stood up and proclaimed: “I dedicate my life’s work to ensuring that no man or woman will fear the rising tide — death itself — ever again.”?

This was the first question.

Continuing south on Highway 1, we arrive in Point Reyes Station, a town that hasn’t changed a bit since Philip K. Dick lived here in the early 1960s. One of the big questions Dick explored in his novels and short stories was ‘What is a human being?’ A great admirer of Dick’s work, I’ve tried to explore this question as well, while adding my own variations: if someone decides that he’s no longer human, what does he do then? What does he become?

These were the second, third and fourth questions.

In the smallest of nutshells, Chrysalis is my attempt at an answer. It is not the first, nor it will be the last.

Thanks for coming with me today. And since we’re already out here, how about some lunch? I know a great oyster place just up the road.