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This was in August of 2019. A day-old newspaper reported civil wars in Somalia and Yemen. A gunman killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart. Jeffrey Epstein had taken a plea deal, promising to name names, promising to name the name.
Espie Droger dreams of war. What else can he dream of? There is nothing left. He has dreamed of world travel and expensive Scotch and lithe young women and sudden uncontrollable laughter. But his vitality has seeped from him like fluid from a dying tree. Espie is old. And Espie is tired.
The earliest videos went something like this: disembodied female voices singing strange intonations of the words “girl dinner” in a voice-over effect as the visuals of the video featured dozens of increasingly strange combinations of food. A handful of Cheez-It crackers, grapes, and a stick of string cheese with a line of sriracha along the top? Girl dinner.
The AI surgical bots that reconstruct Warren after the accident have no clearer a concept of human anatomy than AI has ever had. He emerges from anesthesia to discover, in stages, two extra fingers on his right hand, a tentacle emerging from the left side of his ribcage, and a third eye, gummed shut by mucus, in the back of his head. Also, one of his feet is backwards.
Today, the hydrocarbon clouds of Titan had rolled back over Kraken Mare, rendering the waves of the methane sea impossibly blue as they lapped at the shore, gradually eroding sharp spires of ice into rounded pebbles. Beatriu Cardona shivered despite the warmth of the rover’s interior as the vehicle plowed along the frigid shore, tanklike treads crushing the ice sand into chevron-shaped tracks.
The settlement was barely two weeks old, and so her own habitation husk had to serve as an ER room for the man who was carried in from the planet’s surface, screaming and blue-lipped with trauma shock. “What happened?” The doctor listened as the man’s coworker explained how he had been guiding a transportation eelcraft when something huge and obscure rose from the river, crushed him against the bank, and made off.
On the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system, the keepers of the tomb attended to the dead and the dying. They cleansed, prepared, and prayed over the bodies. They performed the last rites, paying intricate attention to the customs of each person’s native community. This was the most sacred of tasks. Carelessness or disrespect was not tolerated; just one mistake meant immediate dismissal.
No one can deny that the Apollo program of the early 1970s was an embarrassment to our nation: ill-conceived, hostile, and audacious. Not only did the astronauts fail to bring back the severed head of the Moon King, but every one of them fled within hours of having landed, urinating in their suits as they retreated. The assault on the lunar surface stopped short at the planting of a stiff and garish flag.
Today, like every other day, I wake up expecting to die before night comes. No, I’m not suicidal and I don’t have a death wish. I am just a Hunter. The life expectancy of the average Hunter in the Second Quadrant is ten years, and even that is if they are exceptionally lucky. There are too many ways to die in this line of work; so much that not even the few old-timers like myself and Jess can remember all the deaths we’ve experienced.
“Once upon a time,” outputted the algorithm, “there was an AI.
“It generated recipes and ingredient descriptions for an online grocery store. The website said that this recipe was not just a squash soup recipe, but it also was a good diet recipe / keto recipe / recipe for autumn nights / five ingredient recipe / easy beginner recipe / recipe to impress your date.
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