Unremembered Future

By Ian D K Kelly

A surreal near-time science fiction with plenty of thought, humour, political analysis, sex, and an exploration of human memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9781446166451

Book preview

Chapter 1

Stockholm

2028

"Translation On.

"The shock of hearing for the first time that you have won a second Nobel prize is not one that should be often repeated. Those of you who have the opportunity of speaking with our husband tonight would do well not to keep mentioning this second award to him – a man can bear only so much astonishment. He thus becomes only the sixth of a highly select pantheon: Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen, Frederick Sanger and Immanuel Velikovsky, and this fact alone – if any foil were needed – heightens the tragedy of Owen Bradfield’s being un­able to make this speech of surprised, grateful and humbled thanks and acceptance himself.

Our husband once remarked that amongst the series of causes of what has come to be known as the Bradfield Revolution was the physically attractive young lady who – seemingly just a few years ago, and in a context I’m sure you will remember – expressed an interest in car-building. And, indeed, it was Owen’s research into the burst of linguistic energy occasioned by this, that ultimately gave rise to the work here acknowledged by the Peace Prize.

The reporter from The Irish Times muttered to another bored news­paperman beside him Sure, she may never have been west of Liverpool in her life, but the Kerry accent is transmitted genetically: can you not hear it? His soft softly sibilant ‘t’s were a welcome intrusion to those around him.

"You will also remember that the award of the Literature Prize of sixteen years ago was unusual, in that the work recognized was a computer program, and not a traditional work of literature.  Elegant as this program was, no-one – not even Owen – could have predicted the extent of its utility when coupled with the new cellular memory and the dictionaries being compiled by Edinburgh and M.I.T. I do not claim to know just how the U.T.D. works, and Owen never had the time to explain it to me; I am just grateful that it does work – even for so simple a task as translating what I am saying now – and so, clearly, are you.

Some years ago we succeeded in eradicating from natural occurrence on the Earth the disease smallpox, whose infective death terrified mankind for millennia.

(Her son wrote the script, you know. Get away! No, really! I think it must be his revenge.)

"More recently we have attacked malaria and typhoid, both of which seem set to be officially pronounced extinguished at the forthcoming WHO conference in Vladivostok. But we have not yet attempted to tackle the infections which are mankind’s greatest scourge, which have killed, and are still killing, more people than any other simply avoidable cause. I refer, of course, to those plagues our husband mentioned in his first Nobel Prize speech – Patriotism and Nationalism. We infect our children with these, oblivious of those lessons History so clearly teaches us, that these are the source of death for many, and impoverishment for all. We persist in this magnificence of misanthropy, ignoring the fact that these are virulent cancers men suffer from and die from, even those who are not themselves directly infected.

"We cannot go on like this; for if we do, it will be to our inevitable destruction. Our husband’s work is just one more contribution towards bridging those artificial divisions which incidental language differences have been allowed to create, and you have recognized the important first fruits of that contribution with this Peace Prize.

"I have been told that Owen will be remembered as a great benefactor to mankind: I suppose that may be so. But we, his family, will also remember him as a loving husband to us all, a kind father, a sympathetic, gentle friend and a stalwart champion. But now, alas, his shrunken reflection is all that we have left: bewildered, lost and unhappy. This prize will be applied partly to further the research Owen started, and partly to make his own last days more comfortable.

"Thank You.

Translation off.

Faye stepped back from the podium, frowning slightly in the television lights, and turned towards the steps from the platform. She disappeared into the blackness beyond camera-range and blinked to get back her vision in the comparative darkness. A hand guided her down the last step, and a soberly-suited poly-lingual usher pointed her way back through the applause to her seat at the end of the row between Tuesday, and Owen’s wheelchair.

The next citation was being read in a sonorous voice as she regained her place.

Where have you been? Owen whispered.

To the little girl’s room, she whispered back.

There was somebody just like you up there, he said.

خداحافظ

傳

Chapter 1

Biography

68–

Owen Bradfield was not a particularly remarkable child. As befitted one born in the swinging sixties, he was cheerful and extravert, and in keeping with the gloom and depression of his scholastic seventies, did reasonably well at his school-work. His sole singular characteristic was his loathing for every kind of physical sport: the only exercise he took was the exercise of cunning and ingenuity to avoid the weekly half-day of compulsory football or cricket. Over-weight? Well, yes, he was for quite a while; but that gradually corrected itself with no effort on his part, so that by the time he was eighteen he looked nearly as slim, athletic and healthy as his less devious peers who had habitually to pull the grass roller over the two-mile cross-country course.

82–

For three terms the physics teacher was a short, blunt northerner who rammed home the relentless logic and objectivity without which science cannot be pursued nor understood. How do you know it is caused by electricity, boy, he would demand, and not by the aether, the shampoo you are using or Caesar’s ghost? One day he had reversed the labels on the end of a bar magnet, and then let the boys waste most of an afternoon collecting nonsense results. None of them spotted it, and the scorn that Fizz Ferkin (The Gherkin) poured upon their bowed heads at the end of the lesson turned three-quarters of the class off physics for ever. The others recited their catechism every night before sleep: Believe nothing without verification; Do a control; Make an independent check. Amen. Owen was one of the twenty-five percent.

Write clearly so that your meaning is plain to other people, Ferkin said, "speak clearly so that they can hear the force of your conviction; but above all, think clearly so that it may be a profit to them."

What is the opposite of inert, inane, disgruntled, disgusted?  Why do we not say unsad, unbrave? Does monotony go on to duotony, tritony, tetratony and polytony (or polyotony)? Is supertle the opposite of subtle? Polytheists collect all their gods into a pantheon: do monotheists consider their God as being in a monotheon?

86–

He scraped an entrance to an undistinguished new college of London University to read computer science (he reasoned this would lead to the least physical job he could imagine), and it was while he was there that he met Faye. She was one year his junior, and attached to the faculty of Theology, hoping (despite the traditional bar of gender) to become a priest. Owen did not meet her through the college’s Christian society: he had no interest in all that God-Worship: but he first encountered her when he was persuaded to deputize for the usual pianist who played for the ballroom-dancing society.

How can I tell you the really important things about his life, when he does not really exist? He is fictional and I am writing him into existence, creating him out of slips of paper. I could just as well create him by forging a birth certificate and passport: then at least some people could be made to believe that Owen Ronald Bradfield was real.

And how can I tell you the really important things about his life, when I am not sure that you understand by any given word what I mean by it? Perhaps we agree on simple words like table, chair, coal, wood, iron; but abstracts twist away from our grasp: new, usual, depression, healthy. Even harder abstracts are to come.

She was slim, prim, and poker-straight, her curly brown hair in ringlets to coat-hanger shoulders. Despite his own untrespassed virginity he was touched to amusement by her euphistic and carefully mannered speech which eschewed all vulgarity, leaving a chasm where vulgarity ought properly to be, and by her well-styled but over-sensible clothes which could have been designed specifically to mask and suppress the sexuality of the wearer. She danced with some grace, and to talk to was charmingly naïve. She had no regular partner, so Owen struck up conversation with her afterwards, and took her for a coffee in the college union bar.  This was allowable and perfectly proper as it was the natural concomitant of the chaste and polite social intercourse encouraged by the minor terpsichorean arts. What all that means is: Owen wondered vaguely if she was a good fuck, but shrugged off the idea, as he always did, not really knowing what it meant.

She, too, is not real. I am not real, thou art not real, he/she/it is not real. We are not real, you are not real, and all things decline reality. But look at the moon, not the pointing finger. This is perfect. That is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect. Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect. But both are fixed in an eternal action, that the wheel may turn and still be for ever still.

Shantih Shantih Shantih. AUM.

They tasted together the delights of the museums and art galleries. They flew a kite in the park in too little wind, and spent hours untangling the string; he took her to her first horror film, having heard this was a sure-fire way to get a girl to jump into your lap. She didn’t: after the initial shock, she found it merely silly, but they laughed together at the heroine’s aghast expressions, and the villains’ pastiche dialogue. With one bound they leaped from the cinema onto her last bus home (Hooray!), but having left her at her hall gates (Aah!), Owen had to walk the two miles back to his digs (Boo!).

Owen, being genial enough, accompanied her to the Monday Evening youth-group at her church to play badminton and drink endless cups of coffee whilst arguing about Transubstantiation, Salvation and Dialectical Immaterialism. But when he saw the rehearsals for the Christmas play the elder members of the Sunday School and their teachers were going to present, he had to creep away to a back room until it was all over. They had chosen three Young Conservatives with frightfully plummy accents as the three shepherds, and Gabriel had a lisp. A child... to set you fwee fwom sin.... wapped in swaddling cloves... Kwist Jesus. The Wakefield Mystery Cycle thereby caused Owen to bite his lip and go red in the face, coughing under the strain of not laughing out loud.

Aha! I see you expected another interjected italicized paragraph?  Well you’re not getting one.

Owen could not fathom why he was so drawn to Faye: perhaps it was that he looked into her eyes and for one instant saw himself reflected in her soul, a mirror of his own unadmitted fragility and loneliness. She left herself vulnerable to ridicule by her convictions: she lacked exposure to the vulgar realities of majority life, and behaved and spoke as if it would be easy for all to adopt the particularly narrow mores praised by the proper penny novelettes.  He was moved to protect her from the verbal attacks launched at her by her more worldly-wise contemporaries. He could see that the way to protect her was not to shield her artificially from either the attacks themselves nor the knowledge of the real problems they arose from, but as best he might to remove their immediate sting and also to inform her of the extent and the various degrees of poverty that existed in the outside world which she had never seen. She had not realized that poverty is more than lack of money: it is the lack of substance – the substance wherewith to fight physical deprivation, the mental attrition of soulless labour, crushing boredom, the vicious circle of ignorance, and the pained awareness of inequality from below.

Yes –  Okay, Okay!  I’ll come clean. She is sort-of real, and so is he. Only God can create characters from nothing: certainly no novelist can. But they are not easy-real, exact analogues of particular historical persons. They are instead, as most fictional characters are, amalgams of persons and characteristics I have encountered. They are false identikits composed by a closed-eye-witness to a crime passionelle. If you must suspend your disbelief, remember that at the objective level I am lying to you. But then, Epimenides was a Cretan – for didactic purposes.

Terms came and went: exams were breasted and overcome with more exams to follow. During the shorter holidays they had met each other’s parents, staying overnight in dank spare rooms, being polite to strangers over breakfast, explaining how it didn’t really matter whether the fried eggs were runny or not. For the first two long vacations they each took what jobs they could find: once Faye found herself helping a rich eccentric catalogue his netsuke collection, but the best Owen could manage was as a temporary filing-clerk in the deadliest dull of all possible government departments – pensions administration. All the while they drifted closer to each other. After what was a long time in those years for their years, they kissed; at the gentlest of andantinos they explored further, always staying well within the precise boundaries of Faye’s careful ethics. Owen would have trespassed further, but he was not disposed to fight for a new experience. She too was a minor musician, and they played duets, four hands and one keyboard, and intertwined fingers even where the music did not ask for it. Thinking that she would do as well as any other, he proposed marriage to her one day. To his relief she accepted: he was spared the effort of having to court another. This also extended the permitted boundaries about one millimetre further, without giving any sight of the promised land.

As the end of the third academic year approached they discussed the idea of taking together the long holiday before they started work. They wanted to spend as little money as possible – they had little enough to start with, and the proposed marriage urged them to save (Owen had a first cousin once removed who had been engaged to the same girl for over thirty years: he did not fancy such a wait himself). It was very daring of an unmarried couple to share a tent so far from home, but they were entrusted, the eldest of their generation, full of sobriety, and betrothed.

They were the same as everyone else.

Full of sobriety, did I say? Ha! Before he met Faye, Owen was trying to seduce another girl at the university music society. After a rehearsal, they were in the kitchen, with the lights out. They were canoodling. One by one, Owen had stripped off her clothes, till now she was completely naked.  They whispered in each others ears. Little by little Owen persuaded her, coaxing, explaining, flattering, enticing; and slowly she came round. At first it was The answer’s No (and no question had been asked), which gradually shaded off to acquiescence in complete silence. Gently he caressed her and fondled and … The door began to open. She leapt up and slammed it. I didn’ know there was anybody in there, wot wiv the light out, muttered a disconsolate voice from outside. Steps shuffled away.

She was shaking what did he see? she whispered. Owen comforted her, and did his best to regain lost ground – but, alas, she insisted on putting both the light and her clothes back on, talking nonsense like My mother always says ‘God helps those who help themselves, but God help those that are caught helping themselves’. Garment by garment her nudity disappeared.

The highest mountain man will ever climb. He had been told this, and not yet ascended it.

When Owen’s final examinations were finished he had only to wait for the result, able to holiday without a thought to work: Faye, however, had still to preach a model sermon in a service of her own devising, with two examiners in the congregation. That had been booked for early the following Spring, and the only slowly relaxing tension of the need to study left Faye uncomfortable (when she thought about it) and vaguely expressive of procrastinative resolutions. Owen felt like champagne uncorked for the first week after his sudden academic amputation, and thereafter drifted into his usual melange of moods.

Owen’s degree was also undistinguished, though he did participate as a very minor team-member in one piece of research which was later to become significant. He was set the task of researching the literature into Finite-State Cellular Automata and Associative Memories. He had heard of both of these in the normal course of his education, but only as odd backwaters of brackish irrelevance to the mainstream of computer science, and he was surprised to learn of his professor’s research which brought them together.

Most computer memories are organized like a postal system – to communicate with anyone specific you have to have his address. An associative memory is like standing in the middle of the street and shouting a message for Ebenezer Smith, who shouts back. The research for which Owen had to find all the backing literature was extending the basic ideas and designs of Gains, Lee, Paull and Wright from the 1960s up to the stage of sixty four thousand postmen shouting loudly enough to be heard over a large city, and taking simultaneous replies.

The other topic opened up a fascinating zoo of mathematical life- forms, which under the very simplest rules of generation, sustenance and death, arranged themselves into reproducing and moving patterns that swirled around the conceptual surface allotted to them. It seemed that every computer science student for the last forty years had written a program to explore the initial behaviour of one such particular automaton obeying Conway’s rules – what Faye called bloody Life again when the stacks of output got too high in Owen’s bed-sit.

Professor Zimmermann constructed the largest and fastest Life-playing machine ever built, on a single slice of silicon, and extended by brute force this tiny fencepost in the frontier of knowledge. Glider Guns and Puffer Trains, Pinwheels, Blinkers, Lightweight Spaceships and Honey Farms became part of the department’s everyday conversation. Zimmerman was looking for a way to write self-extending computers onto smaller and smaller slices of rare crystals.

89–

Owen got, almost by default, a