Forever Magazine Issue 12, page 1
part #12 of Forever Magazine Series
Issue 12
© Wyrm Publishing, 2016
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com
Table of Contents
Introduction
by Neil Clarke
On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers
a novella by Nick Wolven
A Few Words with Nick Wolven
When the Old Gods Die
a novelette by Mike Resnick
Search Engine
a novelette by Mary Rosenblum
About the Artist and Authors
Introduction
Neil Clarke
Welcome to the twelfth issue of Forever Magazine!
As we start the new year, Forever completes it’s first. I’ve enjoyed the journey and since we’ve now passed our first year goal, I can continue to do so. A big thank you to everyone that has subscribed, purchased, or reviewed the magazine. I’ll need to bring a lot more of you on-board to reach the 2016 goals, but I look forward to the challenge. If you’d like to help, please tell friends or write reviews, particularly at our Amazon and B&N subscription pages.
At this point, our resources don’t permit many changes to the format. We’ll continue to publish one novella and two short stories/novelettes, but I will be loosening up the restrictions on original publication date a bit. Science fiction has a rich history and I’m giving myself the more freedom to explore that here. Forever is not becoming a retro-zine. It just feels silly to have restricted myself in that manner. You could call this a minor course correction. The basic feel of the magazine will remain relatively unchanged.
That said, this issue features stories that span three decades and are published ten years apart: 1995, 2005, and 2015. It felt like the right way to kick off the new year.
Until next month . . .
-Neil
On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers
Nick Wolven
“Let the night teach us what we are, and the day what we should be.”
—Thomas Tryon
1: Wolves in the Bullpen
When Gabriel showed up for his nightshift, the other traders were already at their desks. They hunkered low over takeout sandwiches, meatball subs crushed in tinfoil, bleeding sauce. They looked like the kinds of beasts who have hackles to raise. They looked like wolves.
The sun was setting over downtown Manhattan.
Popovski came sauntering down the rows of desks. Popovski was the head of the fund, but Popovski never looked wolfish. Popovski looked chickenish, mostly because of how he held his elbows: up and out, like saucy little wings.
“We-ell!” called Poposki with his familiar lilt. ”Ga-briel! Last one back in the office. You know what that means. I have a special mission for you.”
Trader heads popped from the cubicles. There were a lot of cubicles, and even more traders. Kappalytics was a big fund with a small office. Popovski insisted on renting prime real estate. He said he liked his view of the New York skyline. He said he liked to see the city switch on and off.
Gabriel followed Popovski to one of the high windows. Just now, the city was switching on, going electric as the sun left town. Their two reflected faces faintly lightened the darkening sky.
“I hate the nightshift,” Gabriel said. “And I especially hate special missions on the nightshift.”
Popovski squeezed his shoulder. Gabriel had worked hard all day, unwinding the fund’s big Serbian screwup. But this didn’t count, or anyway, didn’t count extra. At Kappalytics, there were no bonus points for work well done. Gabriel knew the rules.
“You know the rules,” said Popovski. “Last one back from dinner gets the dirty work. If you don’t like it, eat at your desk.”
Gabriel had been eating at his desk for ten years. He’d gone out to dinner tonight only because Marisol insisted. ”Seven dayshifts a week, and seven nightshifts,” Marisol had said. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this. I know the stakes. I know the economics. But can’t we ever just take an evening off?”
Gabriel put a hand in his pocket and fingered his wake-up pill. It felt at once hard and delicate, a tiny egg ready to hatch.
“So what’s the dirty work, tonight?”
“Oh, it’s that damn AI.” Popovski led Gabriel to the terminal in the corner. ”It’s been playing for weeks in the mark-to-Markov exchanges. Now it’s gone completely bozo. Look at this behavior!”
The terminal displayed a multicolored probability tree, rainbow branches in a 3D display. Branches grew and vanished as Gabriel watched, pruned by a cybernetic hand.
“Penrose is predicting something big,” said Popovski. “He’s going long-term. Don’t ask me to explain it. Look at that time series! This is posi-tute-ly longitudinal. We’re talking years. We’re talking global. We’re talking complexity beyond human understanding.”
“So this chain of events.” Gabriel traced the trunk of the tree. “Penrose is sure these things’ll happen?”
“He better be,” Popovski said. “I already bet the farm.”
Penrose, the AI, was located underground in a vault in Thailand. Kappalytics only contracted for its services. Like all AI quants, Penrose surpassed human understanding. It gravitated toward crazily complex models, long-chain probabilities, million-factor sims. Extrapolations of unfathomable detail. Gabriel didn’t understand it. No humans did.
If all trading was an attempt to predict the future, AIs were fortunetellers of insane sophistication. They spat out countless recommendations: buy this, sell that. But they couldn’t express themselves in human terms. They were like child prodigies, Gabriel imagined, hypersmart, woefully inarticulate. No one really knew what their prognostications meant.
That never stopped Popovski. He bet on every tip the AIs handed out. Kappalytics was one of the heaviest robo-quant investors on the street.
“So you have no idea what this prediction means,” Gabriel said, “but you bet on it anyway?”
“What can I do?” Popovski’s chicken-arms flapped. “Penrose is ten million times as smart as me. But look at these numbers. We take a bath on this, we’ll drown. The whole city will drown. The proverbial seas will proverbially rise.” He kicked the terminal. ”I called in our math kids. They’re no good. Stanford PhD my ass. I called my snitch at Emporiki. He says they’re seeing the same thing. All across town, the bot-quants are going batty. And everyone’s signing up for the ride. It’s a worldwide stampede. It’s like some panicky Pascal’s Wager.”
“Meaning?” Gabriel said.
“Meaning this time is different, Gabe. Meaning if this bubble pops, you and I and every other asset-wrangler on this planet are going to fall to earth with a wet and splattery sound. Meaning the proverbial end of days just became a matter of high probability.”
Gabriel looked out the office windows. Manhattan’s high buildings had snuffed the sun. Gabriel could never get used to modern investing, this biz where people placed bets without knowing what they were betting on. But that was high-finance in a time of AI-modeling. No one saw the real-life forest for the probability trees.
“Maybe we should let this ride,” Gabriel said. “It being nightshift and all.”
“I hear you,” Popovski said. ”I want to take this cool and slow. I’m not making sudden moves. That’s where you come in, Gabe. I want you to do something special for me. I want you to go on a pilgrimage.”
“A pilgrimage? To where?”
Popovski’s head swiveled, intimating long marches, Siberian treks, the illimitable unknown.
“Uptown,” he said. “I want you to meet with Ribbeck.”
“Ribbeck!” Gabriel’s eyes felt like they were spinning. “But he never leaves the house.”
“Exactly.” Popovski’s index finger pinned the second button of Gabriel’s shirt. “That’s why you need to go there and see him. If any human knows what’s going on with the AI markets, it’s Ribbeck. He predicted the great sweetened beverages short of ‘27. He flew with the last Russian capital flight, before the algo-traders had even spread their wings. He has a second sight, a third sight, an n-to-the-n sight. He peers into the market and he reads its dreams.”
“But how will I get to him?” Gabriel said.
Popovski’s lips made a rubbery sound. “That’s your problem. I just rack the chips. RemoteID puts Ribbeck in his house on Seventy-third street. I want you working this old-school, Gabe. I want you getting face-time with the man.”
“But how will I convince him to let me in?”
“Oh,” and Popovski’s eyebrows got sly, “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with that.”
Gabriel leaned against the windows. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to lay his head on the low-pile carpet and sleep. How blessed, how undeservedly luxurious, to curl up like a baby, shut his eyes, and absent himself for seven hours from this world. He took his wake-up pill out of his pocket, rolling it in the crinkly wrapper between his finger and thumb. A snippet of language wriggled into his mind. Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep’ . . .
“Let me get this straight—”
A bong sounded from someone’s computer, throbbing like a grandfather clock. A trader shouted, “Eight o’clock! Nightshift, boys!”
Casters squeaked. Pneumatics creaked. Suddenly all the traders were on their chairs. The bullpen had become a wolf-pen, and the wolves were howling.
“A-roo! Nightshift! A-roo! A-roo!”
“A-roo!” sang Popovski. ”Cock-a-doodl
2: Lunies and Goons
Gabriel Boateng hadn’t wanted to be a trader. In the spic-and-span concrete blocks of Ghana’s all-new national university, he’d studied first, atonal music, then sociometrics. He thought of numbers as symbols that meant real things: meant how sound sounded, how people lived. This metonymic mathematical bias, along with deep monetary needs, had finally inclined him to a high-finance life. In the torrential liquidity of a round-the-clock global exchange, numbers had awesome, near deified meaning. Numbers meant the big thinks. They meant life and death.
Alone in the hall outside the office, Gabriel leaned against the door. He was second-generation American, but the first generation of the wake-up-pill world. Had the African imperialists of his ancestry, he wondered, ever felt so gosh-darn tired? Those warlike Ashanti of the golden coast had marshaled vast militaries, they had conquered and enslaved, they had vied and colluded with British colonialists. But had they ever sweated through eight consecutive days and nights of marathon Victoria-Falls-volume trading with the cutthroat bondmongers of modern-day Japan? Had they ever stayed awake for one-hundred-and-seventeen nail-devouring hours in a multi-round firesale of decroded high-impact derivatives?
Had they ever been dispatched at the start of nightshift to traverse darkling Manhattan on a mission to ply modern banking’s most phone-shy guru for clues to a Markov-market meltdown?
Ribbeck. What could he have to say about this?
More to the point: how could Gabriel get to him?
Gabriel called Marisol.
“Babe, what’s up?” Marisol’s dark face, pretty but prematurely weary, loomed in Gabriel’s phonescreen. Racked terminals were her backdrop, the cluttered equipment of the dispatcher’s station. ”You know I can’t talk.” She adjusted her headset. ”Nightshift just began.”
“I know,” Gabriel said. “That’s what this is about. I need an escort, Mari. To go uptown.”
“Uptown? On the nightshift? Gabe, you crazy?”
“Some mystery mojo hit the AI modelers. Popovski wants me to try and meet with Ribbeck.”
“Ribbeck!” Marisol’s eyes widened. “Good luck getting in touch with him. Doesn’t he live in a coffin or something?”
“More like a bomb shelter,” Gabriel said. “You have any spare cops?”
Marisol whistled. ”I don’t know, babe. The hard right’s back in city office, cracking down on police details. Stop the cop shop, no hired guns, all that crap. I can send a contracted driver.”
“A merc-car? To take me through the Village? You’re kidding.”
“Hey, hey.” Marisol bobbed her head side-to-side. “Some of these mercs are on the level.”
“They’re all cultists. They’re vigilantes. And they drive like Frenchmen.”
“Gabe?” Marisol suddenly looked worried. “Are you sure you want to do this? Head uptown? On the nightshift? ‘Cause you can tell that plutocrat Popovski if anything happens to my Gaby-Baby, I’m showing up at that slave pen you call an office with a police-issue pain ray.”
A credible threat. Even police dispatchers these days got serious combat training.
“I can’t help it, Mari. It’s do the job or screw the job. It’s the rat race, round-the-clock.”
“Well, I’ve got no cops for you, but there’s no way I’m sending you out there alone. I see a merc-car in your area. I’m sending him over.”
Gabriel groaned.
“The cops don’t like the Village either,” Marisol said. ”Roll with this contract man, hon. I’ll sniff around and see what else I can rustle up. Much love.”
“Marisol—”
She’d hung up.
Gabriel took his wake-up pill in the elevator. Sleep no more . . . Macbeth does murder sleep . . . Murder, yes, that was the word. Taking these damn pills always made him feel like something mild and gentle was being kicked to death inside him. They should put that slogan on the packaging.
He closed his eyes. The effects of the pill, phasing in, felt deeply feverish, a tissue-deep squeezing, a hard thud back of his eyes.
The lobby was full of security guards. Every company in the building had its own force, liveried in distinctive blue. Cobalt, cornflower, Persian, navy. They gathered in groups behind aramid fiber barricades, German armaments oiled and agleam. Squad captains bawled over the helmeted heads.
“All right, boys! Nightshift! Check your bogarts, bugbears, and bogeymen at the door! Holster those projectile weapons; we’re electric-only till dawn! Pause before you fire and repent after you kill! It’s a half moon, a mad world, a hell of a town!”
No kidding. By three AM, Gabriel knew, they’d mostly be shooting each other.
A bright orange car was parked by the building. Gabriel studied it through the glass doors. Sometimes scurrilous entities posed as hired escorts. You got in a merc-car and found yourself on a five-borough joyride, drag racing motorcycle gangs for hooker money on four landmasses. This car looked at least semi-legit. Gabriel jogged down the basalt steps.
“Uptooooown!” sang the driver, pushing open the passenger door. A beefy man with a British smile, he wore a yellow escort vest trimmed with reflectors that twinkled in the dwindling day. “Traveling during the nightshift, is it? You, my friend, must be the irresponsible type. I admire that in a passenger.”
“Just get me where I’m going,” Gabriel said, climbing in.
“Well, well, what are we, now?” The driver winked. “Finance? I love a financial man. You lot are the ones got us into this, you know, with your fourteen hour days. If it weren’t for your example, we’d all still be sleeping.” He punched the auto-drive controls with a fat red thumb. ”Time to make good on the investment, eh?”
The car set off, whirring through the downtown streets. Things were quiet right now, but that wouldn’t last. Gabriel felt his wake-up pill pushing into the second stage, a nervous hyperclarity of chems and nanotech. The tops of the skyscrapers burned candle-like in day’s last rays.
“You know, I’ve a bit of a theory about the nightshift,” the driver said, reclining and resting his hands on a burgeoning belly.
“That so?” Gabriel prepared to tune out. Everyone had a theory about the nightshift. Theories about the nightshift were as common as screenplay ideas.
“Mm-hm.” The driver nodded: the profound, slow nod of the crank. ”Way I see it, man was never meant to sleep. Not by night, anyway. Sleeping by night, living by day, that only came with recorded history. But if you go back, oh, ten thousand years or so, I believe all men used to be nocturnal.”
There was something uncanny in the man’s voice, Gabriel thought. Loaded, lockjawed, overcontrolled.
“How do you figure?”
“Well, think about it.” The driver mashed more buttons, making the car chirp and kick. “What evidence’ve we got, that people slept through the night back then? This was thousands of years ago, mate. How can we even know? Monkeys are nocturnal. Apes are nocturnal.”
“Are they?”
“Now, now, don’t be pedantic. What we do know is this: those old Cro-Magnon chaps, they had a sense of magic. Spirits, symbols, rituals, statues. A sort of, what would you say? A fever. The fever of—but what would your lot call it? Old-time religion.” The driver paused, tongue fondling his mustache. ”Bit like now, I’d say.”
A soft sound emanated from the car speakers, the loudening bump of a tribal drum. But no, not drums, exactly. A pulse, electronic, granular units of compacted sound, growing steadily more basso, more booming.
“They didn’t have wake-up pills back then,” Gabriel said. Was it his imagination, or was the car going faster? And they were going downtown, the wrong way.
“Maybe they didn’t need wake-up pills,” the driver said softly. ”Maybe we don’t need ‘em, either. Ever try staying up a few nights without your pills? Tell you, friend, it’s like nightshift, but a thousand times better. Puts you in touch with something. Lets you talk to the spirits that be.”
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Gabriel twisted in his seat.
The driver jabbed the dashboard. The windows went dark. ”Diurnality,” the driver said. ”Now that’s the aberration. Ten thousand years of sleeping through the night, and look what we got for it. Rationality. Sobriety. Descartes, the Enlightenment. Locke, Hume, all those sober types. Lot of rubbish, I say. Clearheaded and alert, that’s what we all wanted to be. Creatures of the sun. So bloody alert, we just about wrecked the planet. Tell me, is that how things were meant to be?”
