Engines of Life: Tales of Evolution

By Andy West

Six piercing novellas and novelettes of philosophical science fiction, lovingly crafted by a prize-winning author to provoke and arouse.

A sentient anti-meme sends emails to fight its rival in 'Meme'.

A stranded starship crew engineers the development of a primitive alien race in 'Rescue Stories', runner-up in the BSFA 50th anniversary short fiction competition.

Draw aside the social memeplex veils of man-made climate change in the controversial 'Truth', featured on the most viewed website on climate change: 'Watts up with That'.

Using hypnosis Professor Merrill probes the 'proto-Sapiens' language buried in us all. Yet mining the primitive words unlooses savagery, which kidnaps Merrill into grisly Ritual in 'Mano Mart'.

Awaking with amnesia in a sealed, spooky museum, Guy Green seeks identity and escape. He finds a curious alien, a disgusting 'Curator', and an appalling future. (Winner of University of Central Lancashire's SF competition prize)

Ofermynd meant only to examine the primitive creatures competing fiercely upon 7th century Earth, not reveal himself. Hearing God's word, Emperor Heraclius declares Holy War in 'Empirical Purple'.

"From the lazy notions of trans-humanists, the confirmation bias and strangling of free debate that corrupts climate change science, to the one, deep, language that unites us all, West takes unerring aim at his targets and channels his passion to deliver winning stories every time."

• Language: English
• Publisher: GreyhartPress
• Release date: Jul 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301617647

Andy West

I don't even remember learning to read, it seemed like I always could. From the beginning I was always very interested in books; but factual books as much as fiction. Physics, the big picture of the Universe, this was an early love, and Carl Sagan an inspiring hero, which all led to a degree in that subject. But Evolution has been my most passionate intellectual hobby during later decades (I was born in 1958 by the way). Most of my stories tend to have an underpinning of evolutionary mechanisms, from the 'big engines of history' to the tricksy workings of individual memes. How evolution applies to, and operates within, sentient societies, is the juicy core of the fruit for me. Though I've lightened up on a couple lately, it has been said by some that many of my stories are not for the faint hearted, though they leave a lasting impression : ) I'm a member of the most excellent Northampton Science Fiction Writer's group; see our webpage here (with big thanks to Mark West): http://northamptonsfwritersgroup.blogspot.com/ Some publication details: My novella 'Meme' was serialised across four issues of the webzine 'Bewildering Stories', also featuring in the editor's choice edition issued April 07. SF shorts are: 'Impasse' in the (print) themed anthology 'Dislocations' from Newcon Press (August 07), 'Rescue Stories' in a special edition of Focus, a magazine of the British Science Fiction Association (March 09), 'Mano Mart' in 'Shoes, Ships and Cadavers' from Newcon Press (October 10), 'Empirical Purple' in the 'Matters Most Extraordinary' (on-line) anthology (March 11), 'The Curator', which won the University of Central Lancashire's SF competition prize and will be published as an interactive ebook later in 2011, and a story inside 'Fables from the Fountain', a linked-theme anthology published in April 2011 by NewCon Press and featuring a stellar cast of award-winning authors, of which Neil Gaiman, Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross, and Liz Williams are merely a sample. Andy West – April 2011

Book preview

Engines of Life 

---

Tales 

of 

Evolution 

ANDY WEST 

Copyright Andy West 2013 

Published by Greyhart Press at Smashwords 

ENGINES of LIFE: tales of evolution

This collection copyright © Andy West 2013

Cover image (DNA figure) copyright © Lonely — Shutterstock.com

Cover image (abstract swirl) copyright © Emelyanov — Shutterstock.com

Cover design & book layout by Tim C. Taylor

Published by Greyhart Press

All rights reserved

~ ~ ~

Also available in paperback (ISBN: 978-1-909636-03-3)

Greyhart Press

www.greyhartpress.com

~ ~ ~

The Curator © 2011 by Andy West.

Empirical Purple © 2011 by Andy West. First Published in ‘Matters Most Extraordinary’

Truth © 2012 by Andy West. First Published on ‘Watts Up With That: the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change’.

Rescue Stories © 2009 by Andy West. First published in BSFA ‘Vector’ magazine.

Meme © 2007 by Andy West. First published by Bewildering Stories.

Internet chain letter quotation taken from WikiQuotes (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bob_Moorehead ) under Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-alike license quoting 'Paradox of our Times' - Dr Bob Moorehead, Words Aptly Spoken (1995).

Quotation on paper chain letters taken from a paper by Daniel W. VanArsdale and used with author’s permission.

http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html

Mano Mart © 2010 by Andy West. First published in Shoes, Ships & Cadavers: Tales from North Londonshire by NewCon Press.

~ ~ ~

CONTENTS

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The Curator

Empirical Purple

Truth

Rescue Stories

Meme

Mano Mart

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The Curator

NOTHING ENDURES BUT CHANGE.

— Heraclitus (535-475BC), Greek philosopher.

The acknowledged founder of Process Philosophy.

THE ART OF PROGRESS IS TO PRESERVE ORDER

AMID CHANGE,

AND CHANGE AMID ORDER.

LIFE REFUSES TO BE EMBALMED ALIVE.

— Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), English mathematician, logician and philosopher. A modern champion of Process Philosophy. From ‘Process and Reality’.

ODDLY, HE KNEW IMMEDIATELY and with great conviction when he awoke, that he owned nothing. Even his name seemed unfamiliar to him, though quite certainly it was Guy Green. Then the second thing he knew came to him. He was uncomfortable; apparently lying in the path of a constant draft. A shiver ran through him.

He opened his eyes and sat up.

A long corridor stretched mathematically away from him, its shrinking perspective regularly punctuated by identical windows and doors. It was shabby and old-fashioned: uneven plaster walls under ageing cream paint, a woodblock floor skimmed with layers of grime and polishing wax, a smell of school. But he couldn’t recall what school he went to, even though he was surely still young enough to attend.

Unnerved to find a matching view and no sign of life down the opposite way too, he hurriedly stood up. He didn’t appear to be stiff or in pain, which meant it was pretty unlikely he’d been in an accident. He was wearing grey overalls and black plastic sandals. They didn’t belong to him.

The windows were high up and looked to be steel-framed. They admitted a flat, inactive light; as though the sun was anaemic or as if the rays had struggled through dozens of dirty panes already. The quality wasn’t right for dawn or dusk. He supposed it was day but heavily overcast outside. White globes hanging from the ceiling emitted nothing.

His thought suddenly slipped towards panic, stretching and tearing mental restraints created by his single minute of logic and assumptions thus far. What was he doing here? Where in fact was here? Who exactly was he?

His past was vague. Not wholly unremembered, but as though he’d read about it in an uninspiring paperback years ago, so now all the detail was frustratingly blurred. Perhaps he was the victim of an accident, which had induced a type of amnesia. Or, more chillingly, maybe he suffered from some rare medical condition that involved a permanent loss of memory. Could this place, this oddly quiet place, be a hospital or a care-home?

He got a grip on himself and decided to find someone, though simultaneously felt he ought to be much more frightened. How odd. Perhaps soon he would be.

His foot touched something. It was a clean white pillow, a depression still visible from where his head had been. The corridor remained blank and silent, keeping its secrets. He picked up the pillow, so that he’d own something, then set off in the direction he happened to be facing.

~ ~ ~

It wasn’t a place of healing. He was forced to admit that rows of ancient artefacts under glass, towering shelves of musty books, yellowing skeletons and poised animals and golden-framed moments of the distant past captured in dark oils, amounted to a museum. A neglected museum, in fact. Though air-conditioning breathed ceaselessly, none of the rooms appeared to have alarm devices and a layer of fine dust on the cabinets suggested a prolonged absence of visitors, not to mention cleaners.

Perhaps that was why he couldn’t find a single soul, though he’d searched in vain through wood-panelled galleries under the sagacious gaze of illustrious folk long dead; past striking persons of stone pointing forever this way or that within wide, pillared halls; up grand staircases of pink marble and down constrained, circular ones of wrought iron. Even in cosy staff-rooms that seemed to beg for occupation.

It was probably the odour of old books that reminded him of school. That and a hint of disinfectant, so there must have been cleaners once. But then had they actually used books at his school? Or was it computers? He remembered reading but not the medium. He remembered teachers’ voices though not their faces.

He pace increased with his concern. He built belief systems to explain his predicament, which each time the sea of silence soon washed away. Yet one theme kept recurring. It proposed that he was completely mad and the museum was in fact full of people. He just couldn’t see or hear them, because some past trauma was blocking their presence from his consciousness. He’d heard of such things, he thought, and the theory was strengthened after he caught several ghostly flickers at the edge of his vision, which didn’t resolve into anything when he looked around. He started to make sudden changes in direction, such that he might randomly bump into an unseen someone and thereby force his mind into recognising their existence.

When the already dim light started to fail, he found that switches on the walls worked, but they were all linked to short timers. As the evening progressed he marched through the museum in a bubble of illumination, intent on a quest that was becoming a purpose in itself. It gave him less time to think. It gave him hope. Though desperation practically oozed from his pores, he resolutely refused to acknowledge it.

But there were no maps in this most curious of places. He could find no external doors, nor did he have any idea how to get back to the original corridor where he’d awoken. He did find toilet facilities, which fortunately worked.

Hours later he admitted defeat, at least for the night. He made camp amid the colourful innocence of sixteenth century religious art. Adam and Eve watched over him. He still had his pillow, and ancient Persian tapestries from a neighbouring room served as blankets. When the timer clicked off and darkness descended, he plunged into sleep, thereby avoiding impossible questions and deranged thought.

He awoke with the new light, but it was just as thin as the day before, a kind of cold gruel of photons that ought to be a rich, warm soup. The quest continued, but became one for food as well. Insistent hunger forced him into thinking again, and once more he tried some random direction changes. This time he deliberately pointed his face up to the ceiling as well, hoping that spatial ignorance combined with pure chance might bypass any perceptual blockages in his brain.

He wondered anxiously whether he was more mad to try this strategy than resist it. But then joy and fright and physical shock all jolted him together, as in the middle of a corridor that certainly appeared empty when he’d entered it, he cannoned straight into someone.

They were both bowled over and Guy was knocked breathless. He peered past stars in his eyes at the stranger, who wasn’t ‘someone’ exactly but appeared to be a blue monkey dressed in a kind of spacesuit, although without a helmet. Bizarrely and involuntarily, his mind took the trouble of working out that the monkey must have come through an archway labelled ‘astronomy and SETI’, before becoming a merry-go-round of insane and irresolvable possibilities. Fear of the unknown rocked his already insecure foundations. His heart fluttered at the wall of his chest.

Are you curious? asked the monkey.

Curious about what? Guy managed to utter after a stunned pause. The act of speaking slowed the spinning inside his head. He supposed he was curious about the creature. Very curious.

He noted the monkey was more blue-grey than straight blue, and its snout was rather dog-like, giving it a baboonish look. But its wide, almond-shaped eyes gazed at him with obvious sentience, despite that he’d never before seen huge irises like glazed lemon-curd tarts with red pupils like dark cherries. The thing was incredible, impossible, but it sat before him.

"Are you the curious?" tried the monkey, more slowly.

Pardon?

Blue paws, well hands really, clapped furiously. Perhaps a sign of frustration, Guy speculated.

Are you the carer? it then attempted.

I’m not…

"No no… are you the curator?"

It dawned on Guy. A museum should have a curator.

No. I can’t find one, nor anyone else. I’ve looked all over.

~ ~ ~

It was difficult to navigate through the monkey’s gobbledegook, although Guy persevered until his head ached. He was desperate for contact, more desperate than he’d realised. Even a preternatural blue monkey was company.

They made some progress. It became clear they were communicating through a translation process, which unfortunately was not altogether culturally aligned. Guy, and he thought the monkey too, had no idea how this was accomplished. A faint halo of light also revealed some kind of high-technology shield around the creature. Guy tentatively felt its edges to verify, then tried to dredge up from his memories whether force-fields had been invented yet. The fact eluded him but he thought not, otherwise why would he think it so strange? Worry about his lost past and his mental state briefly resurfaced, but simian socialisation kept his mind occupied.

Amid undecipherable chitter, the blue-coated sentient repeated several times that ‘metal ones’ had brought it, and ‘the curator would reveal knowledge,’ and ‘the metal ones were mirthful.’ It seemed to have been transported here against its will and clearly wanted to return home, wherever that was. Guy sympathised.

Apparently it was just as lost in the museum as him. More so in fact, for it had never encountered humans or their artefacts before.

"I must look just as weird to it," mused Guy.

Well, he certainly needed knowledge, and the curator ought to know a way out, so they had common cause to find this carer of the extensive museum’s vast accumulation of antique exhibits. With difficulty he conveyed this concept, though in truth he doubted there actually was a curator, or any staff.

Nothing made sense, but at least he was no longer alone.

~ ~ ~

The two lost souls formed a fragile relationship, built upon an acute mutual need for companionship and a tacit agreement about the huge array of potential questions not to ask, or at least not to ask just yet.

They exchanged names, but Taique-foon-Dess-Dinny, as near as Guy could make it, was quite a mouthful. So he settled on ‘Destiny’, despite this label from Victoriana being a girl’s name, while a flurry of awkward exchanges had established that they shared male characteristics, to a first approximation at least. Given that the Victorians had founded so many museums to satisfy their obsession with classification, the name seemed oddly at home in this crazy location.

There was less chitter and clapping. Guy spoke carefully and slowly and simply. Destiny had been plucked out of his ship, clearly from nowhere near Earth, but neither of them knew how to determine or describe a relative position in space. As to why or by whom, Destiny could only repeat that ‘metal ones’ had brought him.

They concentrated instead on immediate concerns. Destiny had been canny. He showed Guy an intricate map he’d started to sketch out. Guy berated himself for not making one too, but then hysteria rose up and wailed at the edges of his consciousness again, when the weird creature seemed to insist that over time the museum would subtly alter its maze-like corridors and spaces. He fervently hoped this was some kind of conceptual translation error, perhaps the corruption of an alien saying similar to ‘going around in circles’.

The discovery of brightly lit vending machines delivered Guy from terrible day-dreams about eating manuscript paper or chewing on disgusting old leather from the exhibits, or splitting open the yellowed bones of extinct species to see whether they still contained some desiccated marrow inside. No money was required and a wide range of food was available, turning out not only to be edible but in fact quite delicious and made from fresh ingredients too.

There must surely be staff to fill up the machines, said Guy hopefully.

Perhaps the contrivances fabricate everything from essential little balls, speculated Destiny.

…from base molecules, corrected the translator a moment later. It was aligning better and better all the time.

I’m not sure that’s possible.

Destiny gazed at him.

Not in my civilisation either. But what about the metal ones? They transferred me here in just seconds. Presumably wrapped me in this field. What else might lie within their skills?

Guy considered this possibility while demolishing a large chicken-salad sandwich, but it was just another imponderable.

Destiny sucked on tubes leading to his backpack. His widened eyes were still turned upon Guy, uncovering jaundiced moons stained as it seemed by dark central wounds of sorrow or pity. They finished their meal in silence.

Continuing their exploration, they came across a musty room filled with medieval tomes. Guy had seen these before and recalled an idea their presence had later prompted. Helped by Destiny he stacked up a large number of the illuminated volumes, making shaky stairs that climbed to one of the high windows that featured in several rooms.

The view was disappointing. Crushing in fact. No sky. No trees. No people. Nothing of any significance, except that nothing itself was significant. A blank, pale-grey nothing. But it didn’t swirl like fog or appear flat like a screen. After several minutes of staring, Guy convinced himself he could just make out vague shapes in the nothing, possibly geometrical. Destiny agreed, but the windows were stuck fast and the glass was toughened, so their investigation of the outside ended.

Guy sat on the lower books of the stack and tried to explain the immaculate beauty of trees and sky to his alien companion. He turned towards a bright flicker at the edge of his vision, but there was only empty space where the shimmering had been.

Destiny looked straight at the same point in mid-air.

I see too, he stated earnestly.

What?

The ghosts.

Guy wondered whether he really meant that, and shivered.

That night he hugged his pillow and tried to think of his parents. Their memory was too intangible for real comfort and he hungered for a single vivid scene. However, he managed to fend off the panic at being so bereft of reference, grateful that at least Destiny had saved him from complete madness.

Guy drifted into wakefulness. The conversational tones of a voice seeped into him. A voice! Was he dreaming? He jerked up. No, he could still hear it echoing down the corridor. He roughly shook Destiny, then swiftly rose and hurried towards the sound of rescue. Less than a minute later he plunged through an open doorway into an opulent room and skidded to a halt on across a floor of black marble. A large control button on the wall before him glowed green. Black text on it read ‘Audio guide’. Destiny caught up with him.

A cold wave of disappointment left Guy weak at the knees. Just a machine! But then had someone pushed the button? Or did the thing come on by itself? Words from a stream of objective alto eventually penetrated his dazed understanding.

…restored and transferred here in its entirety. From this very room, Loth E. Latimer exercised his enormous influence upon the world. The power from his many holdings and his personal fortune, the largest ever amassed in human history, could make or break governments, breathe life into the most ambitious of scientific ventures or strangle whole social movements. As Loth always avoided having children…

The machine stuttered and squealed before settling down again.

"Reputable for a long initial span, occasionally even philanthropic, the Latimer empire transitioned over tumbling decades into a clinging web of extreme conservatism that some have called evil. Its entire purpose became the preservation of Loth E. Latimer himself; this eventually meant holding off any change whatsoever that might adversely affect his physical or mental well-being.

Historians have compared Loth to Canu… Canu… Canu… Canu… Canu… Canu… Canu… Canu… Canu… Canu…

Destiny punched the button and the green light went out.

Dysfunctional, he stated.

Broken, corrected Guy, with a sigh. The voice had been curiously gender ambiguous, he thought.

He looked around. Between the gleam of gold fixtures and numerous old masters like windows into past ages, subtle technology was set into the walls. No doubt the eyes and ears and levers of power for the ascendant Loth. There were no real windows.

Shallow stairs connecting split levels dipped slightly in the centre, as though countless feet had eroded the marble. Brass handrails were thin and bent out of true. Furniture of grey leather was incredibly worn and battered, making the place a little more friendly, but overall it was ostentatious and impersonal. A cold, hard habitation; perhaps for a cold, hard creature. And it rang warning bells in Guy’s mind.

Something’s wrong here, he said, as much to himself as to Destiny.

What greatness may a human life reach?

None at all, muttered Guy bitterly.

In your years, continued Destiny.

It may reach one hundred years, with luck.

If the time-words translate well, this is similar to the eldest of my own people. But I speculate that the dwelling was occupied for a whole sheaf of hundreds.

Guy’s suspicions concurred, but he struggled against them.

Visitors! Perhaps hordes of visitors wore down the steps.

Destiny pointed out an archway that once would have led to another room, but in this transferred and reconstructed temple of individualist power, it terminated at the museum’s blank outer wall. A step beneath the arch was just as worn as the others.

Neither occupation by descendents. Loth made no young ones, spoke the audio guide.

A chill insecurity lurched through Guy’s bowels and shimmied up his spine.

I’ve never even heard of Loth E. Latimer! How can he have lived at all, never mind have lived absurdly long. The smothering cotton wool of confusion and dizzy ether of panic started to overwhelm his reason. It doesn’t make sense! he wailed.

He felt a tingle on his shoulder. Destiny’s hand was upon him, surrounded by the mysterious field.

Friend, do not let your rationality bolt away in fear. Perhaps you’ve forgotten this renowned man, along with so much else, in which case he’ll appear when you discover yourself and old memories return.

Destiny’s pupils shrank to glistening rubies, which seemed to lure Guy into golden pools of eternal bliss. He was comforted.

And another fruit of my mind drops, one that challenges your sanity still less.

"Anything to show I’m not mad," gushed Guy helplessly.

"I was transported over big distance, perhaps very big. Yet query I was dragged through time also? And if so for me, consider that for you too? It seems likely this museum sits on your planet of trees and blue sky. But maybe we walk in your far future, and not in pal Guy’s present before Loth was pushed out of woman, or before his name loomed large at least."

The theory seemed ridiculous to Guy. But it made him feel