Mind Seed : A Science Fiction Anthology

By David Gullen and Gary Couzens

Nine classic and original science fiction stories from exceptional contemporary writers, including Shirley Jackson Award nominated Roseanne Rabinowitz and Aeon Award winner Nina Allen.

Nine stories that will take you to the worlds we may live in tomorrow, into deep space, and towards the far future of humanity.

Nine different explorations of what it is to be human.

This anthology is inspired by the work and writing of Denni Schnapp, Biologist, SF writer, and traveller.

All profits will go to Next Generation Nepal, an anti-child-trafficking charity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781291972993

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Mind Seed : A Science Fiction Anthology

Mind Seed

A Science Fiction Anthology

Edited by David Gullen and Gary Couzens

Copyright

First edition, published in the UK August 2014

Compilation copyright © 2014 David Gullen and Gary Couzens

Foreword copyright © 2014 John Howroyd

Cover Art copyright © 2014  Ian Stead

All stories original to this publication except::

Dark Child, by Ian Whates, originally published in Oddlands Magazine, March 2008

Bird Songs at Eventide, by Nina Allan, originally published in Interzone #199, August 2005. Also reprinted in her collection A Thread of Truth, Eibonvale Press, 2007)

The Three Brother Cities, by Deborah Walker, originally published in The Gruff Variations: Writing for Charity Anthology, Vol. 1, 2012

All rights reserved

Transmission, reproduction, transcription, distribution, storage or replication of this publication or any part therof in any language or dialect, ancient, modern, or yet to be,  in any form of notation, by physical, electric, electronic, electro-mechanical, or any other means, onto any media currently in common use or any media not yet in common or actual use, including but not limited to neuro-physical engram encoding, psychic, holographic, psycho-mechanical or encoded DNA and/or RNA, or metaphysical methods such as projecting into a common pool of universal consciousness thus rendering it available for involuntary collection by morphic resonance, or tachyon-burst transmission from some unspecified point in the future back to a time prior to the creation of this document, or any media in former use and now considered archaic or obsolete including but not limited to pictographs, hieroglyphs, morse-code, baked clay tablets, runes, ogham lines, chalk and slate, quipu, potato-cut, epic sagas in the written or verbal traditions, or any combination of the above or any other form, without prior written permission of the publisher and author(s) is expressly forbidden.  This does not mean you cannot read it out down the phone, scream noughts and ones out the window, or memorise it like some bloody Monty-Python sketch and chant it ad-infinitum whenever you get together with your mates and have a few drinks.  This clause applies recursively to itself, and all subsidiary recursions, to infinity and beyond.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-291-97299-3

Cover layout and interior design by David Gullen

Copy-editing by Gaie Sebold

T Party Books

http://www.t-party.org.uk

Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of Denni Schnapp

(24 November 1964 - 17 January 2013)

Acknowledgements

This collection would have been impossible without the generous support of the contributing writers, every one of whom donated their story to this anthology. Thank you.

Mind Seed is the T Party's third anthology and is published in its twentieth anniversary year. Denni Schnapp was a member of the group for eight of those twenty years. She was a writer of science fiction, hard SF, often dealing with biological themes. The stories in this anthology are from members of the T Party and others who knew Denni, as well as a story from Denni herself. They cover the themes that Denni tackled in her own work: exploration, interaction, the nature of intelligence, and communication with the unknown.

The editors would like to thank Denni's husband, John Howroyd, and the committee and members of the T Party for their support in the editing and production of this anthology. Our thanks also to Gaie Sebold, for proof-reading and copy-editing.

All profits go to Next Generation Nepal, an anti-child-trafficking charity Denni supported. (http://www.nextgenerationnepal.org )

David Gullen & Gary Couzens

June 2014

Introduction

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are

looking at the stars." ― Oscar Wilde.

Denni Schnapp was a scientist, traveller and writer, but, above all, she was the love of my life. We met in Oxford in January 1988 or so; she was studying zoology and I mathematics, both of us first year students. But she had not exactly taken a standard route to her studies and she was four years older than me.

She had left school in Germany aged 16 without the relevant qualifications to enter university. She had a brief stint as a carpentry apprentice, but decided this was not for her and went to work for her local zoo in Münster ending up in the dolphinarium as a trainer. Cetaceans had always been one of Denni's loves in life, and one of her most treasured possessions was a stuffed fabric dolphin she had received as a present from an aunt aged six or seven.

Her life was about to change by a subtle series of circumstance. There was a planned trip to Africa to travel from Cairo to Cape Town which Denni signed up to go on. There was a lorry which was driven down to Cairo for the trip and there the group would meet for the adventures to follow: what could possibly go wrong? Well, just about everything and by the time Denni had reached Central Africa the group completely disintegrated, but Denni was going to finish her trip and she hitch hiked the rest of the way to Cape Town. The stories of her travels are numerous.

But for this story the important thing is she met a teacher from a certain, somewhat infamous, school in Copenhagen. Upon her return from Africa she enrolled to study for the Danish university entrance examinations and set off for Copenhagen. There are many stories here but it is probably best not to say too much about swimming pools, wind turbines and the school trip to India where Denni and a friend left the group to go and study the Ganges river dolphin (Platanista gangetica). She passed her examinations with flying colours and was admitted to Århus University on their foundation programme.

Things got a little tricky with the Danish authorities towards the nd of her first year. After a certain amount of wrangling, the position became clear: she could not stay in Denmark if she was not going to work. She had worked part time during her A-level equivalents and through the foundation year, but the pressure was building and she wanted to spend more time on her studies. She decided to up sticks and give Britain a try. She applied through the British university clearing scheme and at the top of the form it stated she could apply to either Cambridge or Oxford but not both -- she chose Oxford. They wrote back to her saying that Oxford did not do clearing and would she like to change her choice, she replied she had already had an interview and been offered a place.

Our time together in Oxford was truly wonderful, and by the end of the second year we were married in Christ Church Cathedral by special license. Denni's mother was unable to come due to health reasons, and so we jumped on a plane and flew to her ― in full wedding kit. At Heathrow, people thought we were part of a film set and we were upgraded to first class, but the main thing was the surprise Denni's Mum had when we arrived. We had a two week honeymoon in Curaçao followed by the Oxford University Venezuela River Dolphin Expedition 1989. There was an initial month of logistics where everything fell apart and Denni relocated the expedition to the Rio Apure, which completely saved the day. It ended up as just the two of us in a 10m wooden dug-out canoe with a 6hp engine conducting the fieldwork over the remaining two months, the results of which were accepted as an academic paper which we co-authored.

Following Oxford, Denni had a brief stint as an accountant, but decided this was not for her and went to work as a researcher studying great crested newts (Tritusus cristatus) in a disused brick factory in Peterbourgh. She then did a Masters in Aquatic Resource Management at King's College, London, which got her a PhD place in St Andrews studying the immune systems of the common shore crab (Carcinus maenus). Perhaps her main result was to isolate a 6.5 kDa anti-bacterial peptide (about 30 amino acids) which is the first described in the journal Crustacia. By today's methods, she did things the hard way with purification columns, HPLC machines and protein sequencing: back then this kind of work took a great deal of effort. To top it all off the lab was always short of money and Denni prepared everything from scratch, washed and sterilised the lab disposables for re-use, and ingratiated herself with those labs which had the bigger equipment she needed.

Following her PhD, Denni had a number of postdoctoral positions at various university labs. The main focus of her research was the innate immune system found in many animal phyla including Chordata (to which we as humans belong). She learnt many techniques during these years, from microbiology to electron microscopy. But she always relied on the skills she had learnt from her PhD days to tweak the protocols to the circumstances at hand.

However, Denni always found lab work quite stressful: she always imagined herself conducting field work in the middle of some far off sea. She started to suffer from depression, and she was prescribed an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) by her GP. Perhaps because of an underlying bipolar affective disorder, Denni had an adverse reaction to this SSRI and this completely destabilised her mood. Suicidal ideation set in, and she lost not only her job but also her career which had been so very promising. These were very dark days indeed. It took about two years for our lives to stabilise, and suffice it to say that Denni never really worked again.

She started to heal herself through a number of activities; and in particular, writing science fiction. There were many layers to her stories. On the surface was the science and she tackled such topics as: information, intelligence, self awareness, consciousness, self-organising criticality, ecology, biological networks. It all had to be plausible and she spent as much time on checking the science as she did in developing the story and writing the characters. She was also a story teller: of human nature, virtue and dilemma. How would technological developments affect us as humans, both individually and socially? How would we (as intelligent, social beings) relate, interact, and opine to such things? Her stories were of travel and journey, interaction and transformation, of strong characters and their weaknesses. But at the core, they were stories about Denni.

Mind Seed is one such story: it's very her. It is a prequel to a novel which is set on a distant planet with a somewhat complex ecology. Here, the setting is on Earth and the story is of how this bigger journey began and addresses some of the requirements of interstellar colonisation. The central character, Zif, reflects many of Denni's traits; an outsider, never quite settled, always on the move. Bilak would perhaps have been based on me. But there is a little of Denni in all the characters: it is her eyes that have seen them.

On the 17 January 2013, Denni took her own life. This followed a long period of illness in which she was only diagnosed and treated for bipolar affective disorder in the last month. We cannot change the past, only the future. I think the message here is to put our troubles behind us and aim for the stars.

To the light of my life: long may your memory burn bright in the night!

John Howroyd

Sex and the Single Hive Mind - By Helen Callaghan

The kids call it Seething Green. It's some new thing, something bioegineered, that grows on living tissue and that they harvest and sell in five gram shotknocks. I sat through a dull infodump on the subject about three months ago at Met HQ, but to be honest, there are that many new drugs that I kind of tuned out, preferring instead to fiddle with my desktop, getting it to display pictures of my cats.

Boy, do I feel stupid now.

His name is Raoul (I know) and he's a low level dealer supplying spoiled city types with the designer high du jour. He's not even my case – I promised Mark that I'd do his shot at snoopery tonight, and this greasy fuckwipe got the jump on me – jabbed me with the sedative before the window closed on the surveillance car.

So really, it ought to be Mark lying here in a spreading pool of urine in a concrete basement, a prisoner in his own body, but capable of seeing and hearing everything. That guy always did have the Devil's own luck.

But I retract the thought immediately.

Comfy? asks Raoul, as I'm clearly not. He's holding my ID, then tosses it over his shoulder. I said, are you comfy, Detective Watson? Or shall I call you Susannah? His eyes are bloodshot, the pupils huge, and his breath stinks as he leans over me. He's not cleaned his teeth in forever, and I'm forced to stare at the yellow sludge gathering in their interstices in horrifying close-up, incapable of moving my head the fraction it would take to spare myself the view. He vanishes then, but I can hear his retreating steps, loud in the cold concrete space. I stare upwards at the ceiling, which is plain grey and frosted in one corner with cobwebs. A fat black spider sits in the center, a mere speck at this distance.

When Raoul returns, he's carrying a plastic box in one hand, like you'd keep fishing tackle in. Large square chunks, like cubes of algae, are visible through the cloudy sides. In the other hand he's carrying a surgical scalpel.

I realise, with horror, what is about to happen.

Fan of gardening, are you, love?

The surface of my eyes is dry, but tears leak out the sides anyway; wasted.

~

The next day Raoul comes and he's not alone. I think it's the next day. It might have been a week.

What the fuck? asks the newcomer, fascinated and leaning down towards me. Is she dead? He is a black silhouette against the white growing lights mounted above. He has a posh voice, and pampered skin with ruddy cheeks. Doubtless played rugby at a good school before he got the City job that's paid for that expensive suit.

Nah, says Raoul. She's paralysed. And the Green's taken good root. Look. He passes a hand over my abdomen, and I can feel tiny fronds of myself bending under it. Another week, and it'll be ready to harvest.

I feel sick, says the other man. A sudden spark of hope swells in me. Perhaps he will relent, call someone. Perhaps the police will come. Perhaps Mark will come and rescue me...

This was your idea. By the end of the month there will be two million quid here. Think on that.

I know. But does she have to stink so bad? He raises a manicured hand to his face. And the fucking flies...

Raoul shrugs over me. They'll be gone in a week or so. He pulls out a penknife. So, do you want some to take away with you?

~

I've got plenty of time to think, now that the Green has grown over every inch of my skin and I'm helpless and blind and almost but not quite deaf, which means I can hear the flies, just about. It all hurt a bit at first, but I think the thing that really got me was the hopelessness of it all. I can never recover now, but I could at least die and not have to face it anymore.

And who's going to feed my cats?

If only I hadn't taken Mark's shift.

I feel, unexpectedly,