Cosmogramma

by Courttia Newland

Genres: African American; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

An exquisite collection of speculative fiction stories depicting an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora.

In his sharply crafted, unnerving first collection of speculative short stories, Courttia Newland envisages an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora.

Robots driven by all-too-human urges set out to colonize space; Kill Parties roam the streets of a postapocalyptic world; a matriarchal race of mer creatures depends on interbreeding with mortals to survive; mysterious seeds appear in cities across the world, growing into the likeness of people in their vicinity.

Through transfigured bodies and impossible encounters, Newland brings a sharp, fresh eye to age-old themes of the human capacity for greed, ambition, and self-destruction, but ultimately of our strength and resilience.

Publisher: Random House Audio

Sample

PERCIPI

We saw it after dinner, nationwide on a weeknight. Between the celebrity dance competition and hit US soap The Lanes. Everybody had been buzzing for months, the rumor mills were in overdrive, so when the media promised the Buddy 3000 would be unveiled that very evening, the whole town was talking. We all wanted to see what came next, and we made sure we were in front of the VS when the first ads aired.

They said the Buddy was the best of its kind, a new generation. That science had made the final leap and harnessed creation’s power, there was nothing that couldn’t be grasped, the future was limitless. They were mostly Seneca supporters of course, and usually the ones who stood to gain. Employees, the CEO, the mayor. Others said Mankind was heading for the fall, that playing God would only lead to death and destruction, but no one listened to them. They were the poor or the religious, which in our town pretty much amounted to the same thing. There were leaflets printed on flimsy paper you could see your hand through, proclaiming Man’s inhumanity, the final days. There were panel discussions and news items and petitions, but nothing was going to stop Seneca from launching the Buddy; we must have known that.

We sat in the almost dark for some reason, the flicker of VS light crossing our faces while we waited. The screen went blank for a long time after the dance show finished, but we could still see because the eyes of our long-suffering 1250i were bright enough to bathe the room in a soft, golden glow, as though we’d been submerged in honey. They stood between the sofa and wall, facing the screen like the rest of us, silent apart from the hum of their workings. We ignored them, consumed by our wait for the most part, though we could feel it even then, the uncomfortable way in which we turned our backs betraying our collective guilt.

Brightness from the VS, blinding light. Celestial music. We covered our eyes. When the light grew piercing enough to feel on the back of our hands it faded and was replaced by the Seneca logo. We nudged each other, lowered arms. The logo was superimposed onto an image of green grass, a cliff edge, blue skies, and white clouds. There was a figure: a man standing by the edge of the cliff, arms by his sides, looking out to sea. The camera, which had approached rapidly from high above and behind the man, swooped just above the perfect grass, zoomed toward him, and, when it got close, circled, rose, and hovered to face him.

Piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones, tousled blond hair, and a cleft chin. Tall and slim, beige slacks, blue shirt, sensible brown shoes. The man was tanned and unsmiling, rugged and good-looking, ignoring the camera and even us, the viewers watching nationwide, to look up into the sky at some distant place he perhaps hoped to travel one day. We held our breath.

Welcome, a female voice-over said, to the world of Seneca, the world of the future, now. Welcome to the Buddy 3000.

We couldn’t believe it. We leaned forward in our seats, jumped from the sofa, crowded the viewscreen. The man placed both hands on his hips, raised his chin. The celestial music reached a crescendo. We gasped, laughed, doubted.

A head-and-shoulders shot of Daniel Millhauser, Seneca president. We relaxed. That couldn’t have been the Buddy, we reasoned, what a terrible ad. Very confusing.

Gazing into viewscreens the world over, some strained to hear what the president was saying over loud voices of denial. Someone turned the volume up. Millhauser was sitting in an austere leather chair talking to a camera. He seemed matter-of-fact, as though he were explaining the company’s financial position in the global economy via stocks and shares. He spoke of the company’s past innovations as if we didn’t know them, as if we lived on the Outer Limits; its humble beginnings as a manufacturer of calculators and digital watches; his great-grandfather Arthur Millhauser assembling circuit boards by hand until he made enough to buy his first shop; subsequent Millhausers handing the business over like a relay baton. Greenscreen desktop computers, carry-alls with video streaming, one thousand gigs of memory in your hand. The Seneca robotics division creating machines that rolled and served, machines that crawled like spiders and served, machines that eventually walked, haltingly at first, and were unable to climb stairs, but soon even that innovation was past memory. The Seneca Communications Robot, a crowning glory; the 500, 1000, 1250, 1500, 2000. SCRs provided as standard with every house sold, more affluent families buying another; one to take care of the kids, one for them.

Now Millhauser was explaining just what made the Buddy so special: the ergonomic design. Here, the company president allowed a wry smile. More human than humankind, he said. Greater intellectual capacity, thanks to the SNS-8748, a patented chip designed to collate and articulate cultural differences so the Buddy could function anywhere from New York to Papua New Guinea. Stronger than its predecessors, safer, more efficient, longer battery life, shorter charge time, the ability to self-repair. Easy to assemble, and there was the option to have the Buddy custom built by a tech for more credits. A child lock so the young couldn’t order Buddy to do harm, even so much as swear. Additional teaching modules sold as downloadable content, thousands of subjects for the family that preferred homeschooling. The Buddy could dive to one hundred meters, climb to fifty thousand feet, and was already in service above our heads, on space stations and satellites and dry-dock launch platforms.

While Millhauser pitched his miracle product to our households, we listened. We swallowed every word as the camera tracked ever so slowly to the right, imperceptibly at first, until we realized the Seneca president’s head was leaving the shot. We second-guessed ourselves: it was the shot leaving Millhauser. The camera kept tracking, first revealing nothing but a window overlooking clear green grass, a blue sky; the cliff, it was the same cliff! Then the edge of a large, tidy desk, pads and pens, a Manchester United coffee mug, the corner of a wafer-thin viewscreen, a nameplate—Daniel Millhauser, President—and finally Millhauser, sitting behind the desk with his hands clasped, the quiet trickster wearing a distant smile.

And we jumped. Across the nation, probably the world over, we jumped at the realization. Millhauser got to his feet, placed a hand on his doppelgänger’s shoulder. He smiled at the Buddy and the Buddy smiled at him, though it was impossible to tell one from the other, and then, even though they both looked pretty jovial, it was difficult to tell what the joke was, or who had told it.

They looked straight into camera, spoke as one: The Buddy 3000. The world of the future, now.

The Seneca logo, the Buddy 3000 logo, a black screen with details in white, the price, specifications, small print that outlined monthly repayments of 15 percent APR. Ten seconds or less and the information was gone. Dark screen. Opening credits of The Lanes.

Uproar in front rooms of houses, on the streets, across towns and cities. The hit US soap discarded like a used battery. The next morning there were queues a block long outside Seneca showrooms all over the world, but no Buddies on sale. There were TV interviews and chat show appearances by Seneca CEO Ravindra Mehta, more handsome and skilled in PR than his reclusive president. There were web trailers and mall openings with men on stilts dressed in Buddy suits, a public appearance with the prime minister, yet still no sign of a single Buddy. Speculation was rife. Mehta waved his hands a great deal, smiled with perfect white teeth, and spoke of fine-tuning.

***

One day we woke, emerging from the warm cocoons of our homes to leave for work, or school, and they were stenciled everywhere: a numerical infestation on walls and streetlights, road signs, sidewalks and curbs, bollards, billboards, even some vehicles. Three paired numbers. A date, we soon realized. 12.10.84.

There was outrage in government circles over what was essentially vandalism. Seneca claimed no responsibility for the appearance of the numbers. Mehta went on live television to rubbish claims of an international graffiti campaign while confirming that yes, this was the official launch date. It must have leaked somehow, he smiled. We nodded, disbelieving, accepting his lies. We expected no better and that was the issue: it became easy to ignore what they did, to pretend their deceptions didn’t matter.

In our town the Buddy was all anyone could speak about—it must have been the same everywhere. It seemed to relate to any given subject. The battle for Montes Pyrenaeus, still raging, the dubious economy, the huge cost and fallout, both literal and figurative, of interstellar travel. The rising temperature of Earth, unemployment, immigration. We debated and disagreed and our raised voices filled the night in coffee shops, bars and restaurants, in pool halls, after-hours clubs and back alleys, during the daytime in factories and playgrounds and public spaces where people of all ages gathered in excitement, faces bright with the promise of a new era.

It was our happiest time, we owed Seneca that much. They presented us with a dream made real, a figment of imagination made flesh and bone; the gift of idealism. We were elated at the chance to become something more than we were.

* * *

The months passed without notice. The ads intensified, while the posters and online spots became unavoidable. Seneca threw a huge launch event, screened for free on all channels, attended by the world’s biggest movie stars, models, singers, royalty, presidents, and prime ministers. Our town, like many others, threw a street party with images of the launch projected onto a whitewashed wall. Everyone came. We watched a live news report where BBC anchorwoman Leticia Daley took us deep into Seneca’s distribution center to witness thousands of human-sized boxes rolling along interlinked conveyor belts resembling miniature highways, some dystopian automotive future, before being loaded into HGVs by 2000s with the gaze of the blind. We commented on her hushed delivery, her unflinching gaze to camera, how the whites of her eyes matched the pallor of her skin, the loss of her flirtatious smile. Then it was back to the launch, the celebrities and music, back to CEO Ravi Mehta’s smile, and Leticia Daley was forgotten.

We imagined this scenario replayed in homes worldwide, that what we experienced was reflected a million times, like a Seneca warehouse constructed of mirrors as tall as a moon shuttle. Buddy boxes wheeled in through front doors by 2000s wearing specially designed khaki uniforms, families standing aside in awe, unable to keep excitement from their faces. The boxes drilled open, peeled like the husk of unworldly fruit to reveal a soft, translucent bubble. Inside the bubble, milk clouds floating above a sea of gray, a surface as fluid as water yet able to hold its ovoid shape; the mass trembling, even before the 2000s produced cutting blades from the ends of clawlike fingers. The medical workers among us could not fail to notice the ovoid resembled an amniotic sac. Some told our partners. Others kept their silence and simply watched the robots cleave into thick flesh, egg-white jelly easing free, the mass collapsing to reveal our Buddies, naked apart from the minimal underwear to protect their modesty. No one thought to ask why machines needed modesty.

And as simply as that, the new age dawned. The premier generation of Buddies went far beyond anything Seneca had promised, and within the first few weeks the machines were everywhere. Though it was difficult to distinguish them from afar, especially when they were at rest, you always knew an android when you saw them up close. It was something in their eyes, their facial expressions. There was no sincere emotion, no life, no feeling. It was like staring into the face of someone in a coma. They were warm to the touch, could laugh or cry, even bleed if their skins were cut, but they responded to the world as though they were weary beyond measure, had lived a thousand years and grown attached to nothing at all.

* * *

There were problems, of course. Much like any new technology, there were failures, accidents caused by human error. A batch of originals shipped to Melbourne developed a fault also found in Shanghai, Valencia, Cologne. The machines mysteriously shut down, and had to be recalled. Another batch shorted out and caught fire, leveling buildings in Bridgetown, Mumbai, and Orange County. The owners sued Seneca, winning a hefty sum, and those who were insured claimed replacements.

A machine was mistaken for a woman who’d had an affair with someone’s husband and was gunned down late one night walking through a park. The wife was arrested, later released without charge: though machines were forbidden from harming humans, there was no such law for humans harming machines. The wife went back to her husband, who resumed his affair within months. She followed him to a hotel on the outskirts of town, kicked down the door, and shot the husband and his girlfriend. She was given two consecutive life sentences.

For the most part, Buddy owners had no complaints. The originals were trustworthy and strong, highly intelligent but docile. Buddies saved humans from car accidents, repaired broken machinery, and stopped potential suicide victims from leaping in front of trains. Violent crime hit a sharp decline. Nationwide, productivity was said to have risen by 40 percent. Daniel Millhauser was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was rumored he’d used company profits to buy four hundred acres on Mare Frigoris, the Sea of Cold, thousands of miles north of the troubles. The media claimed he planned to build a Seneca base to help strengthen the strike for Mars. Millhauser wouldn’t grace them with an answer.

Affluent and middle-class consumers packed their varied SCRs into boxes, in some cases shipping them back to Seneca, or selling them to poorer families. We kept ours in the garage, just beyond the hood of our car, next to the lawnmower and a rusting tool cabinet, orange growth creeping through its hinges. Within a few weeks the soft, golden glow of the SCR’s eyes was no longer visible.

It became commonplace to hear the high whine of inner mechanisms, to see Buddies accompanying their humans on the streets, in parks and shopping malls, in tow like faithful dogs, stepping with a jerky, knee-high, marionette tread that would have been painful for us. Even those who protested against the androids fell into silence when they saw them, stopped waving placards and chanting. There was something in the way the machines regarded the demonstrations that made it all seem wrong: they showed no emotion, and yet maybe there was a flicker of something, an awareness that they were being spoken of, categorized—that they were outside the boundaries of what it meant to be us.

* * *

Our tenuous peace was shattered by news of a moon base bomb attack. Yet we breathed easier: things had been going too well for too long. One hundred and twenty-seven killed, thirty-one injured, much-needed supplies and arms raided. A relatively small band of workers, recent descendants of the first lunar miners, had protested against unfair working conditions and absconded to the moon’s dark side five years ago. For the last twenty-four months, led by a woman the authorities knew as Mika Cole, miners had attacked coalition government interests, from the mines, to supply ships, to the communications networks, though it was unclear which particular government they were fighting against, or what their demands might be.

The base on Crater Goclenius had been the home and workplace of Terraformers, those charged with transforming the harsh landscape from white rocks and dust into something more uniform, suitable for human habitation. They had been protected by two marine platoons that lived on the base. Many of the miners had been marine-trained too, long before they were contracted to the moon, and taught their sons and daughters well. The fact that Mika Cole and her followers had survived five years of constant darkness spoke volumes about their resourcefulness. Even though the media wouldn’t admit it, that also made them all the more feared.

We could see it coming. Some debated the morality. Others said it would never happen. Three weeks of silence from Seneca and the coalition governments, of nothing but media images of survivors wrapped in bloody rags being transported to Earth, of the shattered and bomb-blasted moon base X-2100, a spider-shaped construction with a vast hole in its abdomen, leaking valuable air into space. A plume like the exhaled breath of a whale, continuous white steam. Mika Cole’s ID photo, black pitted eyes and blond hair, the six-figure price on her head. The pinched, furious expression of a coalition delegate reading the damage report as if it were a eulogy, which, for many, it was. Live reports from the permanent boundary between night and day, Leticia Daley in a bulky space suit, even more somber than the delegate before her, exposing the world below to the thin line no one had ever dared to cross before the miners, a stark exchange between the established and the unfathomable.

The silence from Seneca was ended by a hurried, almost embarrassed announcement. The launch date for 2nd Generation Buddies had been brought forward: the latest, much-improved versions were to be enlisted to fight lunar terrorism, sent to the moon to test their capabilities against trained human soldiers. They would be rocketed three days and approximately 239,000 miles to perform a job most believed they were built for. Those first seeds of our skepticism were sown on furrowed ground.

Night after night for the next eighteen months, we came home to harrowing pictures on our viewscreens, of death and other atrocities. At first the casualties were all human, the victims all terrorists, we were told. Maimed, blackened limbs like chargrilled meat. Cauterized stumps, gouged and missing eyes, flesh torn to reveal the glistening inner workings of the body. The War Buddies, as they had become unofficially known on Earth, were instructed to recover the dead and injured alike. Sometimes it was as difficult to tell one from the other as it was to tell an android from twenty feet. POWs were displayed like flesh-and-blood trophies, while a baby-faced marine sergeant gave an emotionless progress report. The enemy was a worthy opponent, he said, and yet they are falling. The Buddies were fighting alongside humans and doing a commendable job.

We sent children to their rooms, watched the screens through our fingers. We sat forward like we had when it all started, disgusted. Soon we realized, as the nights went on to become weeks and months, that the cameras were catching glimpses of strange casualties and injuries we were unaccustomed to. The first was on a news report that showed a shot of a woman on a gurney, clutching below her knee. The camera moved on, bumped some unseen object, inadvertently dropped and filmed the severed leg. Jagged black meat, the result of a bomb it seemed; the foot deleted, sagging tendons, muscles and pumping blood, gleaming metal protruding from the midst of all that flesh.

What stayed with us—what people repeated after seeing that one accidental image that would herald the most monumental change in world history since humans migrated from Africa—was the look on the android’s face. The way she regarded her missing foot, with disbelief and horrified regret. Her screams of pain. We hadn’t imagined machines felt anything—in fact, ...