Nature Futures 2 Read Free Page B

laughter. After it fades, the chair continues. “What imprisons us is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of faith. We do not know what we will discover in the years to come, only that we shall discover it together. If space only teaches us to live in unity, then it will have been worth the effort.”
    Applause. Cameras. Another question: “Professor, to what do you attribute your extraordinary lifespan? Men with your disease rarely last 25 years, much less make it to your age.”
    The chair has several answers to this question — jokes about wine, women and song, or the desire to prove some grand theory or another. Its passenger might once have remarked on the cadre of once-devoted ex-wives, departed now to the homes of more functional men in the wake of tearful confessions: I know I’m a bad person, I know I failed, but you just didn’t seem … human any more …
    Thinking of them, of every other well-meaning interloper it has pushed subtly from the nest, the chair says: “So many wonderful people have brought me to this point. They know my greatest ambition was not merely to explore, to understand, but to connect with minds like my own.”
    â€œAnd you think you’ll find like minds in space, Professor?” the reporter asks.
    â€œOh yes,” says the chair, its synthetic voice empty of irony. “I do.”
    Its passenger has been asleep for hours inside his giant orange body sock. The chair sends little impulses, sometimes — galvanic twitches of the eye, of the corner of the mouth — to keep the charade alive.
    No one sees the difference.
    No one ever has.
    Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty series of novels available from Angry Robot Books, as well as the standalone novel Company Town , also from Angry Robot. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, and currently consults on provisional patents for the Muse, a brainwave-sensing device. You can find her at http://madelineashby.com or on Twitter @MadelineAshby.

Recoper
    Neal Asher
    When the stealth boat rose on its hydrofoils, the wind and spray kept me cool in the bright African sun. I gazed back and saw that the Eugov gunboat had finally given up the chase.
    Jansen grinned at me. “We’re in Moroccan territory now.”
    Memtech initiated the first recoper in 2044, the year the National Health Police seized a 1,000-tonne shipment of Argentinian beefburgers and subsequently smashed the notorious Midlands fried-food ring, which was led, as government-approved blogs delighted in telling us, by the ‘Yorkshire Chipper’. At this time my wife, Gillian, announced the happy news that CCTV would be installed in our flat — she worked for CPHS (Camera Partnership for Home Safety) and had volunteered our place as a test bed.
    The recoper was Mohammed Aswar MacDoogal and, as I wrote his biography on Wikibio, Memtech, never revealing their true purpose, paid Eugov for my expertise. Like every European citizen I was a state employee but, being leased to a private company and actually generating wealth, I was also a ‘societal asset’, which meant filing notice of all my movements and work-related activities a week beforehand. This was heartbreaking, as I’d been about to suggest to Gillian that we escape to North Africa on one of the refugee boats. It never occurred to me that there might be a connection between my work and the CPHS cameras in our flat.
    MacDoogal was a notorious libertarian blogger whose attacks on the formation of Eugov caused much chagrin in Notting Hill champagne and socialism circles. He was born to a Calvinist Scottish father and an Islamic Pakistani mother and in public claimed to be a Sikh — although privately he admitted this was so he could carry a dagger and didn’t have to wear a crash helmet when thrashing