The Future, Imperfect: Short Stories Read online

  Contents

  

  The Future, Imperfect: Short Stories

  Latency Time

  A Handful of Dust

  Shadow Memory

  Exit Without Saving

  Killfile

  The Other Side of Silence

  About the Author

  Excerpt from "Looking Through Lace"

  The Future, Imperfect

  Short Stories

  Ruth Nestvold

  Copyright 2001, 2004, 2006, 2012 by Ruth Nestvold

  Cover design: Britta Mack

  First Ebook Edition 2012

  Credits:

  "Latency Time," first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, 2001.

  "Shadow Memory," first published in Marsdust, 2004.

  "The Other Side of Silence," first published in Futurismic 2006.

  "A Handful of Dust," first published in Forgotten Worlds 2006.

  "Exit Without Saving," first published in Futurismic, August 2006.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote passages in critical articles or in a review. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Latency Time

  "You don't remember anything else from the first epidemic?" Alis asked the old woman, and Mihailo translated it into the local dialect. The woman shook her head.

  Alis got up from the shaky chair and extended her hand to their hostess. "Hvala, Gospodja Milovanović."

  "Molim, Gospodja Petrovich," Mrs. Milovanović said, smiling and taking Alis's hand in two thin, dry ones. She then broke out into a string of vowels and consonants that unfortunately meant nothing to Alis. Her company, Bioco, had sent her here because she at least knew a little Serbo-Croatian, but it wasn't doing her much good here in Montenegro. The dialects they spoke in the small towns were far beyond her capabilities, even beyond the capabilities of the translation program she had installed in her AI before leaving Seattle. It left her dependent on her guide and human translator Mihailo.

  "She says she's sorry she can't help you more," Mihailo murmured with the slight accent she found so charming. He raised his eyebrows and continued, looking at her with a smile. "But she says she knows you will save them."

  Alis barely refrained from shaking her head in disbelief. "The people here know the decision isn't mine to make, don't they?"

  The warmth of unvoiced laughter still had not left Mihailo's eyes. "But you are a Petrović."

  "Petrović," the old woman repeated, nodding, and squeezed Alis's hand.

  "You can tell her I'll do what I can," Alis said, her lips pursed. From what she had seen of the region, it would be worth the time and energy Bioco would need to clean it up. Several decades ago, Bioco built its reputation on neurochemiologic products, but now they had expanded to one of the biggest biotech companies in the world, with their fingers in all kinds of profit-making pies. For their part in the Montenegro operation, they'd get a healthy cut in the profits from the resort Merriot-Intercontinental wanted to build on the shores of Lake Skadar to the south. The clean-up would benefit everyone in the area, however, not only those near the lake.

  She waited until Mihailo finished speaking and drew her hand out of Mrs. Milovanović's grasp. "Dovidjenja," she said and turned for the door. Mihailo murmured a few more soft words to the gray-haired woman and followed.

  Outside, the sun was brighter than was probably healthy. Bioco wouldn't like that. But Alis did. You didn't often get that intense quality of light in Seattle — which was one of the reasons the Puget Sound area had weathered the environmental upheavals of the twenty-first century better than many other regions.

  She lifted her wrist and spoke into her mobile AI unit. "Sophie, make a note to check ultraviolet radiation levels at the next opportunity."

  Mihailo fell into step next to her and she gave him a distracted smile, which involuntarily became wider and more sincere. Her guide was an attractive man, and he had a way of looking at her that made her toes curl, his eyelids drooping suggestively over dark brown eyes.

  Professional, that was the ticket. "It's strange the survivors of the first epidemic all remember so little."

  Mihailo shrugged. "It was decades ago. Many are old. And much has happened since then."

  "All the more reason to look into it now."

  "But it is not a part of your job for Bioco, is it?"

  Alis shook her head. "They don't even know. All they want are samples and a report on the area."

  Mihailo took her elbow and steered her away from their e-car. "Let me show you something, Ali."

  Alis laughed. "You are always showing me something!" Yes, he was very happy to show her every treasure of history or scenery he could find. But he never seemed happy to take her to survivors of the epidemics. Perhaps he was afraid she'd find something that had a bearing on the extent of the pollution in the area, something that would keep Bioco from providing their assemblers and enzymes to clean up his home.

  He led her into the town center of Pljevlja, halting in front of an astonishingly beautiful house, deserted now. Despite the destruction of the roof and the corner of one wall, it was an impressive sight, the front wall covered in calligraphic inscriptions, still discernable.

  "Turkish," Mihailo said.

  "What a shame that it hasn't been repaired," Alis murmured. The wonders Mihailo found for her no longer surprised her. He was selling his country, after all — trying to persuade the representative of a big corporation that it was worth saving. While she understood his motives, she wondered how he would like it once Montenegro was turned into a Disneyland attraction.

  Mihailo led her down another street, heading for a minaret visible in distance. They turned a corner, and there was the mosque, untouched by the ravages of war and decay she saw everywhere else around her.

  "The Hussein Pasha Mosque," Mihailo said.

  Alis approached the arched doorway. "It's so exotic. Like the Arabian Nights."

  "Too exotic. Once three worlds met and meshed here."

  They entered the dim interior of the former mosque, now a museum. Alis shook her head. "A myth, Misha. That has always been a myth."

  Intricate designs in gold and blue covered the walls. "No," Mihailo said. "People can get along very well if those in power do not use their differences for their own purposes." He abruptly turned and left the mosque.

  Alis followed him, wondering — not for the first time — what his agenda was.

  * * * *

  That evening, she called her fiancé Philip from her hotel room in Podgorica. It had been a long day. From Pljevlja, they drove through the breathtaking canyon of the Tara river, stopping in villages along the way to take soil, water and plant samples. Pollutant levels were high, but not so high that it would make the proposed project economically unfeasible for Bioco and its partners. Alis felt good. She liked it when her company's patented assemblers and enzymes could be used for a worthy purpose; they'd make this beautiful spot safe to live again. She couldn't help a twinge, though, when she thought what the cost might be.

  Philip's secretary put her through to his office right away, and he appeared on the screen, immaculate as always, his blond hair sleek and his suit without a wrinkle.

  "Hello, dear," he said wit
h a smile. "How are things in the backwaters of Europe?"

  "Wonderful. I didn't care for Belgrade all that much, but Montenegro is quaint and breathtaking and full of history. It will be perfect for the resort project. Tourists can have everything here — Italian, Oriental, Roman, you name it."

  "And the lake?"

  "We didn't make it there today. That's scheduled for tomorrow. It's only about half an hour from here."

  "Any chance we can manage a virtual meeting any time in the next few days?" Philip asked with an intentionally lecherous grin.

  Alis chuckled and shook her head. "Backwater was the right word. Belgrade is as good as it gets. The inability to bury ethnic conflicts put them back decades, and the problems since then have made rebuilding next to impossible."

  "Hey, don't complain. If not for that war, we might never have met."

  "I might never have been born, you mean."

  "So how does it feel, going back to the roots?"

  "Strange. Because of my name, people act as if I'm some kind of savior. I doubt if I'm even related to the Petrović they all idolize. But they seem to think I have their best interests at heart."

  "It's probably simpler than that, Ali. They're hoping you'll save them from environmental disaster and their own mistakes. They would have treated you the same way if your name was Smith."

  "I don't think so. I've been talking to a lot of villagers, looking into what happened in the first epidemic—"

  "Why are you doing that?" Philip interrupted her.

  Alis stared at his image in the screen. Why did his voice suddenly sound so irritated? "I thought it would be a good opportunity. The epidemic in Montenegro was such a fluke — no one has ever been able to figure it out. It preceded the first pandemic by more than ten years."

  "That's impossible to solve now," Philip said with a show of nonchalance that seemed oddly unnatural. "We really don't need to know about it."

  "I'm just curious." She shrugged, hoping her imitation of nonchalance was better than his. "I did my MA thesis on the environmental causes of the pandemics, after all."

  "Stick with the job at hand, Ali. Bioco might not be very happy to find out you're using a business trip for private research."

  Alis nodded, wondering why Philip was so worried about what she did in her spare time as long as she got the job for Bioco done. She would look into the epidemic as much as she pleased. Certainly, she didn't have to know about it, but it was a riddle, and Alis had never turned down a chance at solving a riddle in her life.

  She concluded her call to her fiancé, more determined than ever to continue her research on the side. All she had to do here was take samples and vids and write a report and make a recommendation. And as long as the results from her samples weren't too far off the map, she already knew what her recommendation would be.

  Alis detached her mobile AI from the wristband unit and slid it into the slot on her desktop machine. "Sophie, how well have the adjustments to your translation program been progressing?"

  "I can understand a little now," the AI said. "But I would need more input before I could translate for you."

  Alis tapped the table with her forefinger, biting her lower lip. "Could you go over the interviews I had with the villagers again? I'm not sure if I can trust Mihailo. Perhaps if you analyze the files, you can find out if there's something suspicious about his translations."

  "But my source of information for the local dialect is Mihailo."

  "Still. Maybe you can find something that doesn't quite fit."

  "What am I looking for?"

  "I don't know. Words he translates differently from one interview to the next. Or different words that he translates the same. Some kind of inconsistency."

  "That might be a result of dialectical differences."

  "Just do it, Sophie, okay?"

  "Certainly."

  While Sophie was working, Alis went out to the balcony of her hotel room, leaned on the railing, and looked out over the Morača River. Directly across the water was the old city and "Podgorica Castle," the ruins of a Turkish fort situated where the Ribnica fed into the Morača. Once, such a promising ruin would have been rebuilt and flooded with spotlights on a summer night. There was no reason for that now, because there were next to no tourists to impress. Most people avoided the health hazard that was Europe, unless they had the newest medical technology at their disposal. Or were Europeans themselves. Or thought they were invincible. That kind would always be around.

  Alis gazed at the moon's reflection, distorted by the ripples on the water. The Balkan wars of the twenty-first century — which had flared up long after most of the world thought peace in the region established — had destroyed much of the infrastructure. Shortly thereafter an epidemic had struck, strangely enough in a mountainous region which had one of the highest rainfalls in this part of the world. Pollution levels were high, as they were throughout Europe, but it was hard to believe they had been high enough back then to nearly wipe out whole villages.

  The scarcity of water had helped cause the first catastrophic pandemic, the Syrian Flu that killed millions in the Mediterranean and Arabic and Worlds. The Water Wars between Turkey and Syria had worsened the fresh water crisis in the region, and widespread use of untreated sewage had furthered the development of a new strain of cholera; a mutated form which spread easily from one person to the next, not only through contaminated water itself. Thirty million people had died. And it was only the beginning.

  The international community hadn't paid much attention to the earlier epidemics in the Balkans when they occurred; a dramatic rise in the sea level had governments around the world too caught up in their own problems to care. The EU had sent task forces and set up committees, but they were more concerned with measures to stabilize the Euro after the third state bankruptcy in a decade.

  It wasn't until the pandemic hit that a few people remembered reports of an epidemic in Montenegro ten years before. Some experts thought it had been a precursor of the virulent epidemics which began to sweep the world in waves, but no one had proved anything conclusive.

  Alis doubted they were related. The Syrian Flu had originated in the Mediterranean, but there the resemblance ended. There was water here. Lots of water. And back then, it wouldn't have been as acid as it was now, or as polluted as the water in Syria.

  "Ali."

  Alis turned from her contemplation of the river to the balcony next to hers. Mihailo raised a bottle in her direction. "Care to join me?"

  The moonlight coated his dark curls in silver and she smiled. "What is it?"

  "Grk," he said. "Much more appealing than the name. A specialty from the islands in the Adriatic. Croatian. Like you."

  Alis laughed, silver as the tint of moonlight in Mihailo's hair or the visible ripple on the water. "Then how can I resist?"

  When she let herself out of her room, Mihailo stood in his door, waiting for her, two glasses in one hand and the bottle in the other. He waved her through to his balcony and followed.

  "Do you know anything about my country's history?" he asked as he poured her a glass of white wine.

  She shook her head. "Not much. Tito. Yugoslavia. The war. Flirting with the EU, a brief period of independence, then more wars. The epidemic. What you've told me since you started babysitting me." She smiled again and took a sip of the wine. It was dry and aromatic with a hint of pleasant bitterness.

  Mihailo put the bottle on the floor, leaned against the railing, and took a sip from his own glass. "So you don't know why people are so convinced you are a savior?"

  The sarcastic lilt in his voice was not lost on Alis, but she couldn't blame him. She found it pretty ridiculous herself. "No."

  "Petrović was the name of Danilo I, the prince-bishop in the eighteenth century who fought off the Turks and founded the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty."

  "How could a bishop found a dynasty?" Alis asked.

  "The succession went from uncle to nephew."

  "Well,
there are no Turks here to fight now."

  Mihailo smiled. "No, but there is a world to save."

  "And since my name is coincidentally Petrovich, I am supposed to save it."

  Mihailo nodded, and his eyes teased her over the rim of his glass.

  She looked at him directly, resisting the urge to respond to his Southern European flirtatiousness. "What do you want, Misha?"

  He shrugged. "What they all want. I want you to save my home."

  Alis leaned back against the balcony wall and took another sip of the unusual wine. It was probably loaded with trace metals, but she'd detox when she got back home, so she could afford it. She looked out over the city, serene in the moonlight. "Are you sure that's what you want?" she asked quietly. "The peace and quiet here is so soothing. So different than back home."

  "Peace," he repeated and turned, propping his elbows on the railing.

  "That's right, peace. Sure, we've seen a few ghost towns, but there's no separation between city and burbs here, no marauding bands of have-nots to protect yourself from. That's my home; that's what Seattle is like. If you leave the corporate zones, you either have to take a fast train or an armored car. The kind of car we've been driving wouldn't have a chance. I don't think I've ever felt so safe in my life."

  Mihailo looked at her over his shoulder, his expression inscrutable in the moonlight. "Would you still feel safe if you had to live here?"

  "I—" she began and stopped. She had just thought with relief of detoxing when she got home. Would she enjoy the glass of Grk as much if she didn't have that option?

  He turned his face towards the river, and she examined his profile, the high cheekbones, Roman nose and pursed lips. "You might not be safe in an unarmored car outside the city, but the water is safe to drink, isn't it?" he asked.

  Alis nodded, even though he wasn't looking at her.

  Mihailo indicated the river below them. "Nature is coming back after the dry years, but people still slowly poison themselves. They need the assemblers from Bioco, Alis." He stalked over to where she leaned against the wall and placed his free hand next to her head, palm flat on the stucco. "Do you know what the infant mortality rate is here?" he asked, gesturing with his glass of Grk.