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I nod, tired as hell. "I figured that."
"You're catching on."
"About time," I say.
"He said that too."
"And the whole 'balance' thing-"
"What do
you think?"
Pure bullshit is what I'm thinking.
"You got it," he says, reading my mind because, well, angels can do that.
Twenty-four hours later I'm back in Siena, shaved and showered, and she doesn't seem surprised to see me. She's been grieving-that's obvious. Red eyes. Perfect hair tussled, a mess. She's been debriefed by the angel-that I can tell-and I don't know whether she's got a problem with The Plan or not, or even whether there is a Plan. The angel may have been lying about that too. But when she says quietly, "Hello, Anthony," and gives me a shy smile, I
know-and my heart starts flapping like that idiot bird.
Undead Again by Ken MacLeod
Ken MacLeod's most recent novels are The Execution Cha
This story, about a vampire who chooses cryonic preservation in the hope of a cure, first appeared in the science journal Nature, as part of their Futures series of short-short stories. MacLeod says that it was originally inspired by thinking about viruses that spread through changes they make in the host's behavior.
It's 2045 and I'm still a vampire. Damn.
The chap from Alcor UK is droning through his orientation lecture. New age of enlightenment, new industrial revolution, many changes, take some time to adjust, blah blah blah. I'm only half-listening, being too busy shifting my foot to keep it out of the beam of direct sunlight millimetering across the floor, and trying not to look at his neck.
I feel like saying:
I've only been dead forty years, for Chr-
For crying out loud. I saw the
first age of enlightenment. I worked nights right through the original Industrial Revolution. I remember being naive enough to get excited about mesmerism, galvanism, spiritualism, socialism, Roentgen rays, rationalism, radium, Mendelism, Marconi, relativity, feminism, the Russian Revolution, the Bomb, nightclubs, feminism (again), Apollo 11, socialism (again), the fall of Saigon and the fall of the Wall.
The last dodgy nostrum I fell for was cryonics.
So don't give me this future shock shit, sunshine. The most disconcerting thing I've come across so far in 2045 is the latest ladies' fashion: the old sleeveless minidress. The ozone hole has been fixed, and folk are frolicking in the sun. I hug myself with bare arms, and slide the castored chair back another inch.
Under the heel of my left wrist, I feel the thud of my regenerated heart. It beats time to the artery visible under the ta
It always does.
By 1995 we thought we had a handle on the thing. It's a virus. In all respects but one, it's benign: it prevents aging, and stimulates regeneration of any tissue damage short of, well, a stake through the heart. But it has a very low infectivity, so it takes a lot of mingling of fluids to spread. Natural selection has worked that one hard. Hence the unfortunate impulses. And by 1995, I can tell you, I was getting pretty sick of them. I cashed in my six Scottish Widows life insurance policies (let's draw a veil over how I acquired them), signed up for cryonic preservation in the event of my death, and after a discreet ten years, met an unfortunate and bloody end at the hand of the coven senior, Kelvin.
"You'll thank me later," he said, just before he pushed home the point.
"See you in the future," I croaked.
The last thing I saw was his grin. That, and the pavement below the spiked railings beside the steps of my flat. A tragic accident. The coroner, I just learned, blamed it on the long skirt. Vampires, always the fashion victims.
I leave the orientation room, hang around until dusk under the pretext of catching up with the news, and go out and find a vintage clothes shop. I walk out in Victorian widow's weeds. They fit so well I suspect they were once mine.
"It didn't work," I tell Kelvin.
He sips his bloody mary and looks defensive.
"It did in a way," he says. "There are no viruses in your blood."
That word again. I look away. We're in some kind of goth club, which covers for the mode but doesn't improve my mood.
"So why do I still feel… hungry?"
"Have a
tapas," he says. "But seriously… the way we figure it, the virus has to have transcribed itself into our DNA. So the nanotech cell-repair just replicates it without a second thought."
"So we're stuck with it," I say. "Living in the dark and every so often
– "
"Not quite," he says. "Now it's been established that cryonics really does work, there's been a whole new interest in a very old idea…"
The coffin lid opens. Kelvin's looking down, as I expect. The real shock is the light, full-spectrum and warm. It feels like something my skin has missed for centuries. I sit up, naked, and bask for a moment.
The overhead lights reproduce the spectrum of Alpha Centauri, which is where we're going. The whole coven is here, all thirteen of them, happier and better fed than I've ever seen them. It's taken us a lot of pla
"Welcome back," says Kevin. He grins around at the coven.
"Let's thaw one out for her," he says. "She must be hungry."
As far as I can see stretch rows and rows of cryonic coffins containing interstellar colonists in what they euphemistically call cold sleep. Thousands of them.
Enough to keep us going until we reach that kinder sun.
Peking Man by Robert J. Sawyer
Robert J. Sawyer is the author of twenty novels, including Hominids, which won the Hugo Award, The Terminal Experiment, which won the Nebula Award, and Mindscan, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He has also won ten Aurora Awards, three Seiun Awards, and is the only three-time wi
Sawyer's novel Flashforward is currently being adapted for television and is scheduled to air on ABC this fall. His latest novel project is the WWW trilogy, consisting of Wake, Watch, and Wonder. The first volume, Wake, was recently serialized in the pages of Analog and was released in hardcover in April.
Although Sawyer is best known for his science fiction, he's written a number of works that deal with fantastic themes, such as this story, which won the Aurora Award and first appeared in the anthology Dark Destiny III. But, as you might guess from the title, this one doesn't see Sawyer straying too far from his science fiction roots…
The lid was attached to the wooden crate with eighteen nails. The return address, in blue ink on the blond wood, said, "Sender: Dept. of Anatomy, P.U.M.C., Peking, China." The destination address, in larger letters, was: