Cosmogramma

Courttia Newland

Description

In his sharply crafted, unnerving first collection of speculative fiction shorts, Courttia Newland envisages an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora. Robots used as human proxies in a war become driven by all-too-human desires; Kill Parties roam the streets of a post-apocalyptic world; a matriarchal race of mer creatures depends on inter-breeding 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.

Sujets

• Short story
• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786897107
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Also by Courttia Newland


Novels
The Scholar
Society Within
Snakeskin
The Dying Wish
The Gospel According to Cane
A River Called Time
Short story collections
Music for the Off-Key: Twelve Macabre Short Stories
A Book of Blues

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books
Copyright Courttia Newland, 2021
The right of Courttia Newland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 709 1 eISBN 978 1 78689 710 7
For Brook Stephenson, who gave the inspiration.
And FlyLo, who gave the music.
In some far off place
Many light years in space
I ll wait for you.
Where human feet have never trod,
Where human eyes have never seen.
I ll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you.
Sun Ra
CONTENTS
Percipi
Cirrostratus
Scarecrow
Cosmogramma
Buck
Control
You Meets You
Seed
Dark Matters
Nocturne
Nommo
The Sankofa Principle
Link
The Difference Between Me and You
Utoma
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
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 rumour 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 towards 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 leant 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 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. Green-screen desktop computers, carry-alls with video streaming, 1,000 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 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 home schooling. The Buddy could dive to 100 metres, climb to 50,000 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 realised 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, sat 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 realisation. Millhauser got to his feet, placed a hand on his doppelg nger 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% 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 stencilled everywhere: a numerical infestation on walls and street lights, road signs, pavements and kerbs, bollards, billboards, even some vehicles. Three paired numbers. A date, we soon realised. 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