Echo Future Truth

They were now twenty-four hours into one of the last, most-critical tests of the project: the last Day and Night, so to speak, of the current era of human history. The Director and an engineer named Rashon sat in a surreally dark and quiet room looking at a bank of screens for signs that the girl might be dreaming.

Even in better times, Rashon struggled with ambivalence at his role in the company. He was hired almost before he finis...

A half-hour later, and the Director had joined her, and he’d brought tea. He was eager to report on his talk with Eva and discuss the girl’s response to the news that she would not be “alone” when she woke up alone. He also very much wanted to process his own experience of the conversation, which had left him feeling uncomfortable – he didn’t get the chance: he hadn’t considered that Brigid...

The Machine was preparing for a download of some new libraries from a branch of the code the Director referred to as The Garden. As far as the Machine understood, the update addressed non-biological ecosystem questions, primarily related to flora, but also some inorganic stuff. The Garden was cut off from the collective main, but occasionally contributed an innovative process. Recent work focused on the way plants exchanged moistur...

Beneath a sky full of stars, Albert leaned back in a plastic deck chair, one of the many scattered across the roof of Medalion’s main building. According to a company tradition, his people often gathered on the rooftop for a drink at the end of a busy day. Albert’s work days were longer than most, and he always seemed to come up after everyone else had gone home, or, gone back to work. He used to enjoy the quiet retreat...

The Machine had not observed the day’s events because it was powered down.

The Machine was powered down because an experiment earlier in the day had failed, mostly. This failure also highlighted a profound need for more effective sandboxing; somehow the whole system had come under threat even though the experiment took place in an isolated lab running off the network. Some would say that months of steady progress were being pu...

At the world headquarters of Medalion, Inc., the company that was both heir and executor of all the promises Silicon Valley ever made, the mood was more tense than usual. Today’s crisis was ostensibly concerned with reference frameworks for empathetic interaction between the subjects and what the Director called VIEPs (for Virtual Intrinsically-Encoded Persons), but what others had taken to calling creeps behind his back. Med...

At the rickety folding table sat Brigid – presumptive patron saint of medicine, midwives, b*****d children, and beer – rigid with her hands crossed between her knees. She anxiously surveyed her new environment. Its furnishings – brand new, bargain basement – glowed white in the diffuse brightness of some hidden source of illumination. Her senses were on high alert after months of deprivation in her brother&r...

When explorers of this latter age arrived at the western edge of what would come to be known as the North American continent, followed quickly by conquistadors, missionaries, and miners of precious metals, they came as vanguard of the manifest destiny that would be embraced by a new nation eager for justification ... to circle the planet, claim it all for their cause, and leave nothing undiscovered. What these explorers could not s...

Arpaxos sat quietly in the shade of a bright plane tree, tried to slow his ragged breathing, and listened for sounds from the outer edges of the square. A throbbing in his left leg fought for his attention. He ignored the pain but reached down gently to lift from behind his left knee and set his useless foot on the cross-bar of the chair, kicking with his good leg to lean back against the doorpost. He began to cough and spat out a ...

He returned often to the pile of stones behind the bushes to look at the Faiyum portrait – the hope, barely acknowledged, was that this icon might prove a window ... that something of the spirit of the hospitable monk might smile on him. His relationship to the images of Mani had been rocky of late, especially before his fall from grace. He regretted defacing the Christ icon in the church above, but life mediated by images ha...

She was right to be angry. She was right to be angry at the machine for grinding her down until she could be made to fit into the fearsome hole at the center of the world. She was right to be angry at Arpa for his selfish, monomaniacal protectionism. She was right to be angry at being told how to bear the burden that nobody but she would have to bear. His heart was more broken than the rest of his body after the dream encounter. It...

In his dream, Arpaxos was in a cavernous, cold, and sterile room. He wasn’t alone. Two men in flowing lab coats could be seen, sitting opposite a child. The two leaned in, clutching their clipboards, and showing intense interest in their subject. The taller one looked nervous and frustrated, biting his thumbnail and glaring at the child from under wild and scowling eyebrows. The shorter, and younger, of the two appeared more ...

He stumbled out of the church, down the marble walkway, and moved with increasing speed toward the top of the high cliff to the west. He arrived at the edge with no respect for the drop, repeatedly advancing and retreating, as if picking a fight with the open expanse. And the wind whipping up the face of the cliff and stirring the waters of the Mediterranean before him seemed to call his bluff, buffeting him, exposing his impotence...

Eighteen months had passed since the arrival of Arpaxos in Mani, and his relationship to the silence and solitude of the place remained complicated. He was, for the most part, glad for the quiet: before he’d escaped the city, it had become clear that most people had lost all sense of purpose or power, and in the bargain were losing what remained of their voices. But old wives like his aunt were not so easily silenced. They co...

He might have stayed in that apartment for the rest of his short life, except for the fire. Just days after losing her, he found himself outside in the middle of the night looking up at the building as it burned. How had the fire begun? He could not, or would not, remember. The only clue was that he felt no emotion as he swung his pack over his shoulder and turned to walk down the street. There were no sirens, no shouts of alarm.

Be...

Evie looked down at him from the threshold. She stood apart, appearing untroubled, as if she existed in a reality entirely different from the one in which he lay pinned on the ground with a soldier’s knee on his neck. Gloved hands held his limbs, and something cold and hard was pressed to the side of his head. But he was no longer struggling against the small army that had filled his sister’s apartment, and it seemed th...

Standing up from the single, rush-covered chair, the philosopher Arpaxos broke the chill silence with a sharp intake of breath. He took two shaky, sibilant steps across the marble floor in the direction of the apse, extending his hand toward the icon. At the sight of his dirt-stained fingers he drew back in a grip of shame.

But why? This was no museum. No alarm would sound if he touched the art. In fact there was little sign this ti...

Outside the town, a short distance down a dirt track, a simple structure could be seen, next to the foundation outlines of more buildings, yet to be raised. The work was slow, even with the help of the neighbors, who provided the mortar to bind the rubble of ancient buildings together again. The neighbors! She was trying to find new, less-disparaging ways to acknowledge the creeps, on whom their survival continued to depend, and wh...

It really was perfect. This anger. Anger would be the correct response to her endless rejection of the gift of life, her bitter ungratefulness, her grandiose selfishness. The other had finally allowed itself some feeling, and the feeling was wrath. The conscious awareness of this tectonic shift came only partially to her, because it was competing with a more primal response. She was afraid.

As she frantically tried to make sense of ...