To Dream of Better Worlds
by Grigory Lukin
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
The space station at the end of history maintained its lonely vigil over the dead, blue planet. Inside, the last two humans quarreled.
“Manuel, you can’t go down there! You don’t know what you’ll find, you don’t know if that—if whatever it was that killed them all is still there,” the short, young woman said, trying and failing to block the escape pod. She clutched a small tablet, its screen full of scientific data.
“So what? We just stay here? Study whatever records are left on their satellites?” The young man with bushy eyebrows glared at her. “There could still be people on the surface. Survivors. Someone. Anyone.”
“We’ve been in cryo-sleep for 500 years. We don’t know what they’ve done to themselves. You literally have no idea what you’d be walking into.”
Manuel gently pushed her aside. “You’ve always been a quitter, Sophia. Computer, activate the escape pod. Authorization: Manuel Sanders.”
“Confirmed,” the toneless, robotic voice said. The heavy door unfolded.
“Manuel, please, wait, don’t go. Don’t leave me all by myself.” Her colleague stepped through the door.
“Goodbye, Sophia.” He turned toward the escape pod’s control panel.
“Wait! We can—we can send them dreams back through time.”
Manuel paused with his hand in the air, his finger an inch away from the “Close pod doors” button. “What? What does that even mean?”
Sophia spoke fast as she typed something on her tablet. “Dreams can be changed during the REM cycle using transcranial magnetic stimulation—look, here, there were papers on it back when… back in our time.”
“So?”
“Before we signed up for this stupid time jump, they were already experimenting with sending data back in time on the quantum level and with opening microscopic wormholes.”
Manuel didn’t say anything, but he stepped out of the escape pod, reaching for the tablet. “So you’re saying…”
“Some satellites are still in orbit. We can access their databanks and see if they found a way to open wormholes through time. One tiny wormhole, that’s all it’d take. We could send a dream—send a warning—to the right minds in history, and none of this would happen.” Sophia gestured at the viewport, at the dead and silent planet below.
Manuel looked up from the tablet, from the intricate diagrams and the dense paragraphs of academic jargon, and for the first time since they awakened, there was a small smile on his face. “So if this works, we could save the world? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly,” Sophia said, and her smile matched his own.
“Did you ever think it would end like this?” he asked, adjusting yet another 3D-printed motherboard to the clunky apparatus. “Pass me that screwdriver, please.”
She shook her head as she handed him the tool. “What? Humanity? I guess. I mean… that was always a danger. I just thought that in the future, people would be wiser, you know. More self-restraint, better diplomacy. I didn’t expect to wake up to this.”
“Me neither.” He double-checked the blueprints one more time. Such a deceptively simple design… “I knew this was a one-way ticket, being a human time capsule and all, but I always thought there would be—I don’t know, something? Not a parade, necessarily, but a welcoming committee. Settlements on Mars or in Jupiter’s orbit. Something. Anything, really.”
They worked in silence for a while, triple-checking each step, each connection between the intricately linked components.
Sophia brushed her long, dark hair out her eyes. “Do you ever wonder why they didn’t shoot us down when that final war began? We were right here, orbiting, defenseless, like a sitting duck.”
Manuel shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t want to waste their ammo—or lasers, or whatever it was they had. Or maybe they felt sorry for us. Or maybe…” He paused and looked away.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe they just forgot about us.”
“When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”
Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus
“So, did it work? Tell me it worked!” Manuel’s voice was high and fast and giddy as he paced back and forth. When Sophia didn’t reply right away, he said, “Computer, scan the planet for signs of life: electromagnetic activity, bonfires, planes, hot air balloons—anything.”
“Understood. Scanning.”
Manuel paced ever faster while Sophia’s face stayed glued to the computer screen, reading something with all her attention. Her eyes slowly widened.
“Preliminary scan complete. No life signs detected.”
“How?” Manuel shouted. “Just… how? We did everything right: found writers from the early industrial era, fed them dream suggestions—what went wrong?”
“You should see this,” Sophia said, speaking for the first time since they activated the tachyon transcranial magnetic stimulator. She stepped away from the computer. Her hands shook.
“What are you talking about? What am I supposed to…” His voice dropped as he scrolled through the nearest satellite’s databanks. “We accelerated the war? How is that even possible?”
“I had to double-check, but… the dreams we sent them inspired bestselling books. Mary Shelley wrote about a reanimated creature stitched together from body parts. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about a doctor who discovered an elixir that could turn him into a monster.”
“How could any of that make things worse? We warned them about the dangers of technology. That should’ve slowed the progress, not accelerated it.”
Sophia avoided his eyes as she answered. “We warned them, alright. But their books actually ended up inspiring scientists to push further, to see if they could create human hybrids, if they could tamper with biochemistry to make soldiers more aggressive.”
“So after we sent those dreams…”
“The final war used the biotechnology inspired by those novels. By the dreams we sent. The world ended 23 years earlier than it was supposed to.” Her voice quivered as her eyes filled with tears.
Manuel buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook as he sobbed. When he finally looked up, his eyes were red. “But there must be something we can do… another dream, another key person picked from history. We’ll try again. We have to try again.”
“While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”
Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time
“Tell me that worked. Please, just tell me that worked,” Manuel begged as he leaned over Sophia’s shoulder, the two of them speedreading through pages upon pages of new history.
Outside the viewport, the quiet, lonely planet remained silent, though it was no longer blue, nor were there spots of green upon its surface. Instead, the main color was brown. Gray swirls enveloped the dead oceans. The dark and angry pockmarks of huge craters covered most of the visible land. No radio signals bounced merrily through the atmosphere. No planes or spaceships crossed the empty sky. No one remained.
Sophia looked up at her colleague and took his hands into her own. She had no energy left to cry, not after all these weeks of research, preparation, and fine-tuning the device.
She shook her head. “The final war happened even sooner now. We accelerated it by 37 years.”
“But how? We gave their top scientists everything they needed to make life better.”
“They misused it. They misused it all. Mendeleev discovered the periodic table years ahead of schedule, but that just led to more chemical weapons during World War I. Bohr’s dream about the atomic structure helped develop the nuclear bomb. We sent targeted dreams to Ramanujan and his mother, but his mathematical proofs were used to train killing machines.”
“Did anything change for the better? Did we make any difference at all?”
Sophia scrolled a bit more. “Banting discovered insulin decades ahead of time, so there’s that. We’ve helped countless diabetics.” She forced a smile.
Manuel’s right eye twitched as he stepped to the control panel. “So we helped a few million people, and then we killed billions of them decades ahead of time?”
“Look at it this way: if those billions were already fated to die, but if we saved millions of people from miserable deaths—wait, what are you doing?”
“I’m ending this,” Manuel said as his fingers flew across the keyboard. “All this precision work, all this finesse—it’s a waste of time. We have the technology, so let’s just use it. Blast a full vision of the final war to an entire generation, and if that doesn’t convince them, then we’ll keep going until it works.”
“Manuel, no! You can’t—” Sophia didn’t finish her sentence as Manuel shoved her with all his strength. She hit the back of her head against the solid metal wall. She slumped onto the floor, her vision blurry. “Please don’t,” she whispered. “You can’t do this.”
“I can and I will,” he replied. “Watch and learn.”
He ceremoniously lowered his hand toward the keyboard.
He pressed Enter.
He disappeared.
“Encephalitis lethargica was a mysterious epidemic disease of the 1920s and 1930s that was better known as the ‘sleepy’ or ‘sleeping’ sickness. […] Headache and malaise were the first symptoms, followed by somnolence, often associated with delirium, from which the patient could be easily awakened. This state could rapidly lead to death or could persist for long periods, either progressing to coma or ending with recovery. […] a possible total mortality of 500,000 cases during the entire epidemic period, which lasted until about 1940.”
Ravindra Kumar Garg DM, Encephalitis lethargica
Sophia awoke slowly, gradually, painfully. It was difficult to think, to concentrate, to focus. The back of her head was covered in dried blood, her hair a solid mass she didn’t dare to untangle lest the bleeding should start again.
The lights were too bright. The noisy chirping of the consoles—were they always so loud?—grated on her nerves. It took what felt like an eternity to adjust every environmental setting, and to adjust to them in turn.
Days later, when she felt a tiny bit better, she downloaded the new history logs from a derelict satellite in the dead planet’s orbit. In this new timeline, the final war happened three months earlier. Squinting against the harsh, flickering light of the screen, taking as many breaks as she needed to, she explored the genealogical databases until her suspicions were confirmed.
This new plague, this pandemic that hadn’t been part of any history books she’d grown up with, took the life of one Gabriel Sanders—Manuel’s director ancestor.
Sophia stared at that scanned newspaper obituary and tried to plot the course of the events on a scrap of paper, but the concussion kept her from making any sense of what had happened. Without Gabriel, there would’ve been no Manuel, but without Manuel’s impulsive, reckless dream invasion, Gabriel wouldn’t have died. Her friend erased himself from history with a single gesture, and yet history kept the strange sleeping sickness he unleashed.
It didn’t make any sense. And yet it had to make some sense, somehow.
Not for the first time, she wondered if maybe, just maybe, someone was still alive on the surface of the silent planet below. The Inuits, or maybe the Bushmen, or the Aboriginals deep in Australia… they were great at surviving and adapting, weren’t they? Was there any chance at all that they, at least, had survived? Maybe she could fly down and find them, and give them all the technology she could carry, and give humanity a jumpstart, and maybe in time their descendants would resettle the entire planet, and maybe…
But no. She shook her head, dispelling that mad fantasy. The orbital scan readouts were clear: nothing left was alive. No complex lifeform larger than a cockroach. She couldn’t succumb to that daydreaming—not now, not ever. There was work to be done.
She took a deep breath, clenched her fists, bit her lip.
“Computer, jettison the escape pod. Authorization: Sophia Webb.”
“Confirmed,” the emotionless, robotic voice said.
There was the dull clank of separation and the mild shift in gravity as her sole chance of escape detached itself. She traced its trajectory into the remnants of Earth’s atmosphere until it became just one more shooting star, the bright flames of reentry enveloping its metal hull.
She shut her eyes. Allowed herself one single, final tear, one last moment of weakness. There was work to be done.
The space station at the end of history maintained its lonely vigil over the dead, brown planet. Inside, the last human sat hunched over the console. Dirty, unkempt, emaciated, her project taking higher priority than anything else, now or forevermore.
Her fingers danced across the keyboard, adjusting this and that, sending subtle dreams and hints and premonitions across all of human history, obsessively checking the databanks of the nearest abandoned satellite, her sole companion, for any signs of positive changes.
The space station at the end of history stayed silent, and the dreamweaver labored.
| SPECIAL EXHIBIT 2: Return to “Lake Fame“ | Begin Coming Soon to a Civilization Near You, Gallery Four: Dystopian States of Being Post and read the next attraction, “The Basement“ |