John Gilbey returns to the Futures fold this week with his new story Geode. Regular readers will know John, as he has written several stories for Futures over the years (see below). When he’s not jotting down ideas for time travel, John can be found on Twitter. Here, he reveals how a chance discovery in his youth sowed the seed for his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Geode

More years ago than I care to remember, I had gainful employment with a university in the south of England. As a post-graduate research assistant in an environmental-sciences department, I was charged with sampling soil profiles across the moorlands of the region and performing various analyses on them to demonstrate the processes, both natural and human-led, that had influenced the development of the soil.

Monoliths were dug by hand from soil pits, and then described and dissected in the lab under conditions more suited to detailed work than a heather moorland where the rain was both heavy and horizontal. One day, I broke up a sample to reveal a piece of stone about 5 cm long and almost triangular in profile. It was outside the particle size range I was studying, but instead of discarding it, I put it in a small plastic box as an object of curiosity. Months later, an archaeologist wandered past and noticed it on a shelf above my bench. “It’s just a chunk of rock,” I told her. “Maybe not …” she replied and — holding the rock between her fingers in a way I hadn’t considered — used it to cleanly slice a sheet of paper from top to bottom, showing the stone-age blade for what it was. This, I now realize, is where the Geode story came from.

The location in the high, dry country of Utah came much later. On a train journey on the California Zephyr from Denver to San Francisco (which I highly recommend to anyone with an interest in geology and landscape), I stopped at Grand Junction, Colorado. To the north, an ancient, eroded set of cliffs — known locally as the ‘book cliffs’ on account of their resemblance to a shelf of tomes — loomed over the town, and I wondered what it would be like to do fieldwork on those arid, sun-beaten talus slopes. Moving the cliffs farther west into Utah merely made them more remote and isolated from points of reference.

Geode is a story of decision points, unknowns and unknowables. If the pickaxe had fallen a second earlier, or later, it would potentially have missed the geode — which might, perhaps, have then been discovered intact. But would a sphere that had withstood interstellar space and planetfall be so easily damaged? Well, perhaps it was designed to be partially destroyed by ‘deliberate’ damage, leaving only a subset of data available to potentially dangerous finders. It could divulge enough information to give the race retrieving it a second chance through limited time travel, but without enough scope to threaten other species and star systems.

Were the two visitors really prepared to shoot the younger man to prevent the geode being broken? Who knows? But perhaps, elsewhere in the multiverse, they did — branching away from the loop and spinning out another of the infinite set of potential futures.

Read more of John’s Futures stories

It never rains in VR | Finding a happy medium | Safety critical | Big Dave’s last stand | Meeting with Max | Permanent position | Commitment | Final protocol | Unfinished business | Corrective action | The last laboratory | Intervention | Visiting Bob | Communicant | Review of the year 2062 | Deep impressions | Infraction | Citadel

This week, Futures finds Beth Cato in a somewhat apocalyptic mood with her new story Excerpts from the 100-day food diary of Angela Meyer.  Beth is no stranger to Futures having previously written stories including Bread of life, Canopy of skulls, The human is late to feed the cat and Post-apocalyptic conversations with a sidewalk. She is author of the Clockwork Dagger steampunk fantasy and you can keep up to date with her work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals what inspired her latest story — as ever, it pays to read the story first. 

Writing Excerpts from the 100-day food diary of Angela Meyer

The end of the calendar year always features a clash of advertising: all the glorious food temptations of the holidays with cakes and confections and gluttonous delights, and the beginning of the diet ads that usher in the next year with extreme guilt and self-consciousness over those recent indulgences. This past year’s conclusion included an extra twist of dark political news. Every which way I looked, I saw decadent cookie/biscuit platters, ‘How to Lose Ten Pounds in a Week’, and headlines along the lines of ‘Here are the myriad ways in which we might die in 2017’.

That combination inspired my ‘Food diary’ story. The love/hate battle with food, and all of the psychological dilemmas behind that, are conflicts I know all too well. That made Angela’s fight to stay healthy amid the downfall of civilization feel all the more personal for me. I know her battle is not simply a physical one, with a focus on losing pounds. Much of the battle is mental, against her own body, and the temptations of the people and the advertising that surrounds her.

For Angela, the effort to maintain her food diary when she loses everything else is about keeping sane in a world gone mad. Her dilemma is one that I think many people can relate to … and it’s one that, I pray, stays confined to fiction, even as dark news continues to surround us.

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Gretchen Tessmer with her story First date with the Hive. Gretchen is an attorney and writer based in northern New York in the borderlands between the US and Canada. You can keep up to date with her activities by following her on Twitter. Here she reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing First date with the Hive

I’m intrigued by the notion that our brains are organic supercomputers and there’s a community server/shared network out there that we might access … if only we had the wi-fi password.

It would be cool, right?  And just think about all the time we’d save by no longer having to analyse the deeper meaning behind casual phrases such as “it’s nice to meet you” or “hope to see you never”.

Apologies for the cliffhanger at the end.  If it makes you feel any better, I’d like to think that my Wendy-girl will be able to access the master Andromedan server against all odds and save the day.  She certainly has a better shot than President What’s-His-Name.

Also, the number Dash is thinking of is 42.  As I’m sure you are aware, the answer to life, the Universe and everything is 42.

William Meikle makes a welcome return to Futures this week, with his story A life in the day of. Regular readers will know that in the past William has tackled a range of topics from problematic fungi to difficult data collection, taking in the dimming, education and the abuse of Twitter along the way. You can find out more about his work on his website or by following him on Twitter. For his latest story, William has once again entered the world of social media. Here he explains what inspired this return visit — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing A life in the day of

A life in the day of mostly came from observing the behaviour of people on social media, frantically checking their accounts in search of instant gratification in the form of likes, shares and messages, and the tech support guys in the background who keep all the balls juggling in the air to allow the chatter to spread.

My own background after leaving university was originally in IT, some years of it spent in tech support — stuck in dingy offices in cubicles or basements while the exciting business all took place upstairs — frantically trying to maintain both the computer systems and a semblance of a private life outside the grey walls.

We’ve all seen the parodies of IT people, the jokes about nerds and geeks, the stereotypes that get dragged out in TV and movies. Like all stereotypes, there are both lies and truths to be found on examining them. One of the truths is that ‘firefighting’ system problems in large businesses often takes place in blind panic, under great pressure from higher up in the business from people who don’t  understand the technical issues involved and just want things sorted.

Turning it off and on again isn’t often an option.

I wanted to write a wee story about how that pressure feels. But I needed something to hook it onto; geeks and nerds tend only to make interesting stories to other geeks and nerds.

I had a ‘what if …’ moment when I wondered what might happen if our first contact came, not through traditional radio channels or via an alien ship landing on the White House lawn, but from something curious as to what our current chatter across social media might be all about.

Then I wondered how such a contact might affect the poor corporate drone in that dark grey basement.

This, then is the story of a day in the life of a tech-support guy, the vagaries of IT networks, the weight of the daily grind, and how it blinds you to what is really right in front of your face.

Not bad for under 1,000 words.