Meet Me in the Future: Stories

CONTENTS

An Introduction: Meet Me in The Future

by Kameron Hurley

Elephants and Corpses

When We Fall

The Red Secretary

The Sinners and the Sea

The Women of Our Occupation

The Fisherman and the Pig

Garda

The Plague Givers

Tumbledown

Warped Passages

Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!

Enyo-Enyo

The Corpse Archives

The War of Heroes

The Light Brigade

The Improbable War

About the Author

AN INTRODUCTION:

MEET ME IN THE FUTURE

YOU’RE HERE. I’M HERE.

So.

Let’s talk about the future.

Not the future I’m currently writing this from, the future of the gasping, maniacal dystopic state disseminating propaganda to us via pocket computers that stream nightmares into our eyes. That’s the future somebody else wrote. It’s the future that’s already here.

Let’s talk about another future. The one that comes after this one.

Those are the futures I want to write about. And yes, from here in the present there are multiple possible versions of that future. Some are gooey, icky, sticky futures that are messy and hopeful and maudlin all at the same time. Some are snapshots of a future that comes after one like the one I’m in. Some are explorations of how things could be far worse. But most of all—these are stories about how things could be really different.

I’m not a natural short fiction writer. My heart will always belong to novels. They give me room to stretch and breathe. But the juicy bite-sized pieces of fiction between these pages have taught me how to stop dithering around and get to the heart of what a tale is about instead of meandering along through the weeds until something amazing happens. I don’t have as much time to screw up when I’m writing short fiction.

Maybe that keeps me coming back.

My agent suggested that when I tell you all why I wrote each of these stories, I should be completely honest with you. Yes, certainly, writing is fun. But I also wrote these stories for money. Writers need to eat. I expect I’ll be working a day job until I die, a long tradition among authors. Most of us just don’t talk about it. I still get up before six nearly every morning to plonk out a few words (like these!) before heading off to make more words for big brands and corporations. By the time those day-job words get through the grinder of the creative process and client review, they are often unrecognizable.

But we all gotta eat.

Expenses pile up: vet bills, home maintenance, my liquor habit. The money that comes in tends to go right back out immediately. I feel like I’m constantly hustling. I know I’m not alone. Here in Fury Road America, we also need to afford health insurance and medication. Much of the money I made on these stories went toward helping me pay for my meds and my extreme healthcare deductible. Every story keeps me from the death-through-lack-of-vital-meds Thunderdome a little longer.

My fight with my own malignant, malfunctioning body and experience running the rat maze of the United States healthcare system has bled into my work in interesting ways. It creeps in even when I’m not immediately aware of it. Stories like The Corpse Archives or even Elephants and Corpses show a keen interest in exploring the body itself in all of its gory mushiness. The body-hopping mercenary Nev, who appears in both Elephants and Corpses and The Fisherman and the Pig, gets to explore a good many bodies throughout his adventures. Some imperfect, some ill-fitting. I’ve spent a long time in a body that has gained and lost a hundred pounds at a go several times. It spent a year eating itself. Now it’s slowly poisoning me over decades, ensuring I have about fifteen years less than I would have otherwise. Nev’s quiet life as a body mercenary fishing up corpses to live in often feels sublime in comparison.

My struggles with my own body led me to write Tumbledown, too, the story of a paraplegic on a hostile planet tasked with an Iditarod-like serum run her peers think is suicide. I spend a lot of time thinking about how those of us who aren’t the Aryan ideal continue to be underestimated, sidelined, and maligned, and how it’s fear of becoming as we are that fuels so much hatred against us. We are more than the sum of our bodies. The struggle with our bodies can give us a unique strength, an insight into the meaty body and our temporal limitations. My obsession with bodies and their problems has certainly given me a unique perspective on the world. I don’t see logic and reason and clean, cool lines; I don’t see sterile metal spaceships. I see messy, bloody bodies, mutations, minds bathed in chemicals, renegade DNA, bacterial wars, and organic spaceships with regenerating skins and mushy interiors.

Short fiction has also taught me a great deal of discipline. It’s taught me to build stories not just around shit that happens or gooey organic ships but to center them on the emotional experiences of the characters and how they are affected by the world around them. I built the entirety of When We Fall on the story another writer told me about the profound emotional connection they shared with a rescue worker after a house fell on them. My writing brain shifted into overdrive during that conversation. I returned to that life-changing moment again and again: this emotional connection in the face of death. This moment where everything changes. How could I capture that in a speculative story? I returned to my organic ships. I created a heroine often lost and forgotten, one who had to make the choice to let someone go, to be abandoned again, in order to find the love she truly sought.

I’ve had my fair share of facing down death, too, and it’s a theme that comes up often. Dying, nearly dying, trying not to die, thinking about dying and mortality. When you have a chronic illness, you spend a lot of time thinking about mortality, and what comes after you. Who will remember you when you’re gone?

The story Our Faces, Radiant Sisters! Our Faces Full of Light! was written on commission for Tor.com’s flash fiction series about women who keep going long after they’ve been told to stop. Women who endure. The women who continue again and again to fight monsters, despite knowing that it’s usually a zero-sum game. feels a lot more like real life to me than slaying a dragon and being done with it. The dragons have babies. The dragons get radicalized. There are always more monsters. And more heroes.

The fight between the past and the future is ongoing.

These themes come up again in The Improbable War, another piece commissioned by Popular Science magazine for a series about—of all things!—love. I find it amusing that when asked to write a story about love, I wrote a story about war and memory and sacrifice and some kind of strange wall made of dead people who are a probability machine. Don’t ask me how it works! This is fiction, people.

We will talk more about war in a minute, but it turns out that another story with War in the title isn’t really about war at all, either. I sat with the first few pages of The War of Heroes for years, trying to figure out what came next. What was the point of the story? It was during a re-watch of old Star Trek episodes that I realized it was a story about how civilization might be defined in various cultures. What if the Enterprise was boldly going out into the universe sowing violence in order to determine sentience? How would our heroine deal with that? What was her sacrifice? What could she save? Would she be remembered? What would a world look like without war?

Yes, I write a lot about war. My grandparents met in World War II. My grandfather was an American GI and my grandmother was living in Nancy, France, under Nazi occupation. I grew up with terrifying stories of Nazis storming into homes, shooting people on the street, airplane dogfights over the town, and my greatgrandfather’s interrogation by the SS. I remember these stories now only in hazy snatches. My grandmother often told the story of the SS coming into her home, trying to find incriminating evidence that her father was part of the French resistance. But when they opened the drawer where he usually kept his gun, the gun was not there. When they turned on the radio thinking they would find it tuned to the banned BBC, they found only static. They still took him away, but my grandmother was adamant that the reason he survived his interrogation was because of these near-misses.

Both my grandparents are dead, and by the time I started exploring these stories in my fiction, I had no one to check them against. Perhaps that was best. It meant I used those stories as inspiration for a number of pieces about war and resistance, stories like The Women of Our Occupation, which features a scene very like the one where the SS entered my grandmother’s house, and asks what happens when the conquerors become the conquered. That theme in particular is one I think about a lot here in my immediate present.

War rarely has clear good guys and bad guys. The muddy gray mire of war, and who writes the history of it, fascinates me. In The Red Secretary, I wanted to see what a world looked like where war was cyclical, almost religious, with one terrible rule: all of those who participated in violent conflict, no matter which side triumphed, had to be killed afterward. No one who had committed violence, they reasoned, could participate in building a truly peaceful society. Garda also explores the aftermath of a great war—how those involved recover (or not), and how societies continue to buckle and seethe with the aftereffects of such violence. I live in a country deeply scarred by its own past of war and genocide and slavery. We think these wounds heal, but in truth, they only fester, the thinnest layer of new skin masking the injury, but the pus and rot continue to bubble beneath. The rot spills out continually, often when you least expect it . . . just when you think you’re starting to get better.

The first story I created for subscribers to my Patreon—a service that allows fans to support original fiction for a buck a month—was, appropriately enough, also a war story. I was on a time-travel kick at the time, reading far too much short fiction about time-jumping. The Light Brigade was the result, the story of a time-hopping grunt who isn’t quite sure what side of the war they’re supposed to be on. That story eventually became the basis for a novel by the same name, which has a far more intricate plot that required legitimate math-based diagrams and Excel spreadsheets.

Hey, sometimes I do the science, people.

And of course, if you are at all familiar with my work, you have probably noticed that I write mostly about women, or nonbinary people—folks who are neither one nor the other; folks who create new genders for themselves outside the ones we see on TV. It turns out that there’s a whole long history of cultures with three or four or more genders. I leaned hard on those stories, and that history, when writing The Plague Givers. The Plague Givers explores what gender might look like somewhere else—with personal sacrifice, impossible decisions, and old mercenaries thinking about their mortality, too.

Many of us write to understand the present: how did we get here, how could we be better, what makes us who we are?

But as I said, I’m more interested in writing to explore how things could be really different. As beings with a limited lifespan and histories prone to being rewritten, simplified, erased, or simply forgotten, we believe the world we experienced as children to be the normal human experience. But what does it mean to be human during a particular time and place? My background as a historian has shown me that cultural taboos and morals shift depending on need, environment, and a host of other factors. If I were to take a human being from this time and place I’m writing from and deposit them onto another planet, how many generations until we would no longer recognize them? What would stay the same? What would become truly alien? Sinners on Solid Ground tackles this manipulation of the truth. It only takes about ten years—a single generation—to completely change the perceived truth of the world.

What’s the truth going to be a hundred, five hundred, and ten thousand years from now? Sappho said, Someone in some future time will think of us. But what will they know? Will the stories told about us bear any resemblance to our current reality, when many of us can’t even agree on what reality is these days?

I cast off into the stars in most of these tales, but Enyo-Enyo and Warped Passages have always felt the most traditionally science fiction to me. This is probably because they were each commissioned for science fiction anthologies. I felt I needed to up the spaceship quotient. I spent a very black December squeezing out Enyo-Enyo in one of my last desperate efforts to hit a deadline on time (I have since learned my mental health is more important than hitting deadlines). Its darkness, the infinite loop of time at the edge of the universe, characters bumping into one another in the future, the past, another future, some other present. . . . It probably says more about my state of mind at the time than my visions for the future. Like paintings, short stories are perfect snapshots of a moment in time for each of us. Some stories more so than others.

Some readers get upset when I don’t tell them definitively what a story of mine means. I hear this most about Enyo-Enyo, probably because it is such a claptrap mindfuck. The truth is that only half the reading experience is provided by the author. The other half? That comes from you, the reader.

Warped Passages is one of those stories I almost regret writing because it says too much. It acts as a bit of a prequel to a novel of mine, The Stars Are Legion, and answers more questions about the origin of the Legion than I’m comfortable with. Let’s pretend this is just one interpretation. One version of the truth. One story of the Legion told among families late at night, mumbled, then forgotten, to be replaced by some other myth in due course.

I believe there should remain some mystery in worlds both real and fictional. I’m not going to tell you exactly how we got to any one future in these stories. That’s for you to figure out. For you to create. . . . If that’s the future you want.

Creating work under the current political environment in my country is not easy. I often wish my grandmother were alive, so I could ask how she got up every morning when she was a teen, knowing her own government handed half her country over to the SS.

On good days, I like to think that her answer would be something like this: That every day she woke up, she reminded herself that it hadn’t always been like this. That this time would pass. That if she could endure, and resist, and believe and work toward a better future, she could live to see that future for herself.

That’s what keeps me going. Dreaming, writing, supporting, creating, but yes, most of all—believing that there is a better future on the other side of this one makes every keystroke worth it. I can see a different world on the other side—a trillion possible futures, all buckling and colliding and shifting beneath our feet. I hope, perhaps after reading a few of these stories, you can see all those possible futures, too. I hope you choose a good one.

Come meet me in that better future.

I’ll be waiting for you.

October 2018

Dayton, Ohio, USA

ELEPHANTS AND CORPSES

BODIES ARE ONLY BEAUTIFUL when they aren’t yours. It’s why Nev had fallen in love with bodies in the first place. When you spent time with the dead you could be anyone you wanted to be. They didn’t know any better. They didn’t want to have long conversations about it. They were vehicles. Transport. Tools. They were yours in a way that no living thing ever could be.

Nev stood at the end of the lower city’s smallest pier with Tera, his body manager, while she snuffled and snorted with some airborne contagion meant to make her smarter. She was learning to talk to the dead, she said, and you only picked up a skill like that if you went to some viral wizard who soaked your head in sputum and said a prayer to the great glowing wheel of God’s eye that rode the eastern horizon. Even now, the boiling mass of stars that made up the God’s eye nebula was so bright Nev could see it in broad daylight. It was getting closer, the priests all said. Going to gobble them up like some cancer.

Why Tera needed to talk to the dead when Nev did just fine with them as they were was a mystery. But it was her own body, her slice of the final take to spend, and he wasn’t going to argue about what she did with it.

You buying these bodies or not? said the old woman in the pirogue. She’d hooked the little boat to the snarling amber head of a long-mummified sea serpent fixed to the pier. In Nev’s fascination with the dead body, he’d forgotten about the live one trying to sell it to him.

Too rotten, Tera said.

Not if we prepare it by day’s end, Nev said. Just the big one, though. The kid, I can’t do anything with.

He pulled out a hexagonal coin stamped with the head of some long-dead upstart; a senator, maybe, or a juris priest. The old folks in charge called themselves all sorts of things over the years, but their money spent the same. He wondered for a minute if the bodies were related; kid and her secondary father, or kid and prime uncle. They were both beginning to turn, now, the bodies slightly bloated, overfull, but he could see the humanity, still; paintings in need of restoration.

Some body merc you are! the old woman said. Underpaying for prime flesh. This is good flesh, here. She rubbed her hands suggestively over the body’s nearly hairless pate.

Nev jabbed a finger at the empty pier behind him; she’d arrived with her bodies too late—the fish mongers had long since run out of stock, and the early risers had gone home. Isn’t exactly a crowd, is there? He pushed his coat out of the way, revealing the curved hilt of his scimitar.

She snarled at him. It was such a funny expression, Nev almost laughed. He flipped her the coin and told Tera to bring up the cart. Tera grumbled and snuffled about it, but within a few minutes the body was loaded. Tera took hold of the lead on their trumpeting miniature elephant, Falid, and they followed the slippery boardwalk of the humid lower city into the tiers of the workhouses and machinery shops of the first circle. While they walked, Falid gripped Nev’s hand with his trunk. Nev rubbed Falid’s head with his other hand. Falid had been with him longer than Tera; he’d found the little elephant partly skinned and left to rot in an irrigation ditch ten years before. He’d nursed him back to health on cabbage and mango slices, back when he could afford mangos.

Tera roped Falid to his metal stake in the cramped courtyard of the workshop. Nev fed Falid a wormy apple from the bin—the best they had right now—and helped Tera haul the body inside. They rolled it onto the great stone slab at the center of the lower level.

Nev shrugged off his light coat, set aside his scimitar, and tied on an apron. He needed to inspect and preserve the body before they stored it in the ice cellar. Behind him rose the instruments of his trade; jars of preserved organs, coagulated blood, and personal preservation and hydrating concoctions he’d learned to make from the Body Mercenary Guild before they’d chucked him out for not paying dues. Since the end of the war, business for body mercs had been bad, and the guild shed specialist mercenaries like him by the thousands. On a lucky day, he was hired on as a cheap party trick, or by a grieving spouse who wanted one last moment with a deceased lover. That skirted a little too closely to deceptive sexual congress for his moral compass. Killing people while wearing someone else’s skin was one thing: fucking while you pretended to be someone they knew was another.

Tera helped him strip the sodden coat and trousers from the body. What came out of the water around the pier was never savory, but this body seemed especially torn up. It was why he didn’t note the lack of external genitals, at first. Cocks got cut off or eaten up all the time, on floaters like this one. But the look on Tera’s face made him reconsider.

Funny, Tera said, sucking her teeth. She had a giant skewer in one hand, ready to stab the corpse to start pumping in the fluids that reduced the bloat. She pulled up the tattered tunic—also cut in a men’s style, like the trousers—and clucked over what appeared to be a bound chest.

Woman going about as a man? Nev said. Dressing up as a man was an odd thing for a woman to do in this city, when men couldn’t even own property. Tera owned Nev’s workshop, when people asked. Nev had actually bought it under an old name some years before; he told the city people it was his sister’s name, but of course it was his real one, from many bodies back. He and Tera had been going about their business here for nearly five years, since the end of the war, when body mercenaries weren’t as in demand and old grunts like Tera got kicked out into a depressed civilian world that wanted no reminder of war. When he met her, she’d been working at a government school as a janitor. Not that Nev’s decision regarding the body he wore was any saner.

You think she’s from the third sex quarter? Nev said. Or is it a straight disguise?

Maybe she floated down from there, Tera said, but her brow was still furrowed. Priests go about in funny clothes sometimes, she said. Religious thing.

What are you thinking?

I’m thinking how much you hate going about in women’s bodies, Tera said.

I like women well enough, Nev said, I just don’t have the spirit of one.

And a pity that is.

She cost money. I might need her. What I prefer and what I need aren’t always the same thing. Let’s clean her up and put her in the cellar with the others.

A body mercenary without a good stash of bodies was a dead body mercenary. He knew it as well as anyone. He’d found himself bleeding out alone in a field without a crop of bodies to jump to before, and he didn’t want to do it again. Every body merc’s worst nightmare: death with no possibility of rebirth.

Tera cut off the breast binding. When she yanked off the bandages, Nev saw a great red tattoo at the center of the woman’s chest. It was a stylized version of the God’s eye nebula, one he saw on the foreheads of priests gathering up flocks in the street for prayer, pushing and shoving and shouting for worshippers among the four hundred other religious temples, cults, and sects who had people out doing the same.

Tera gave a little hiss when she saw the tattoo, and made a warding gesture over her left breast. Mother’s tits.

What?

Wrap her up and—

The door rattled.

Nev reached for his scimitar. He slipped on the wet floor and caught himself on the slab just as the door burst open.

A woman dressed in violet and black lunged forward. She wielded a shimmering straight sword with crimson tassels, like something a general on the field would carry.

Grab the body, the woman said. Her eyes were hard and black. There were two armed women behind her, and a spotty boy about twelve with a crossbow.

Nev held up his hands. Sometimes his tongue was faster than his reflexes, and with the face he had on this particular form, it had been known to work wonders. I’m happy to sell it to you. Paid a warthing for it, though. I’d appreciate—

Kill these other two, she said.

Now, that’s not— Nev began, but the women were advancing. He really did hate it when he couldn’t talk his way out. Killing was work, and he didn’t like doing work he wasn’t paid for.

He backed up against the far wall with Tera as the gang came at them. Tera, too, was unarmed. She shifted into a brawler’s stance. He was all right at unarmed combat, but surviving it required a fairer fight than this one. Four trained fighters with weapons against two without only ended in the unarmed’s favor in carnival theater and quarter-warthing stories.

Nev looked for a weapon in reach—a hack saw, a fluid needle, anything—and came up empty. His scimitar was halfway across the room.

If they wanted the body, then, he’d give it to them.

He whistled at Tera. She glanced over at him, grimaced. Tightened her fists.

Nev pulled the utility dagger at his belt and sliced his own forearm from wrist to elbow. Blood gushed. He said a little prayer to God’s eye, more out of tradition than necessity, and abandoned his mortally wounded body.

There was a blink of darkness. Softness at the edges of his consciousness.

Then a burst of awareness.

Nev came awake inside the body on the slab. He couldn’t breathe. He rolled off the slab and hit the floor hard. Vomited bloody water, a small fish, something that looked like a cork. His limbs were sluggish. His bowels let loose, covering the floor in bloody shit, piss, and something ranker, darker: death.

He gripped the edge of the slab and pulled himself up. His limbs felt like sodden bread. Putting on a new, dead skin of the wrong gender often resulted in a profound dysphoria, long-term. But he didn’t intend to stay here long.

The attackers were yelling. The kid got down on his knees and started babbling a prayer to the Helix Sun god. Nev had his bearings now. He flailed his arms at them and roared, Catch me, then! but it came out a mush in the ruined mouth of the dead woman whose body he now occupied.

He waited until he saw Tera kick open the latch to the safe room and drag his bleeding former body into it. The one with such a pretty face. Then he turned and stumbled into the courtyard.

A dozen steps. He just needed to make it a dozen steps, until his spirit had full control of the body. Second wind, second wind—it was coming. Hopefully before he lost his head. If he didn’t get them out far enough, they’d just run back in and finish off Tera and what was left of his old body. He really liked that body. He didn’t want to lose it.

The gang scrambled after him. He felt a heavy thump and blaring pain in his left shoulder. The one with the ax had struck him. He stumbled forward. Falid trumpeted as he slipped past. He considered putting Falid between him and the attackers—maybe some better body merc would have—but his heart clenched at the idea. He loved that stupid elephant.

He felt hot blood on his shoulder. A good sign. It meant the blood was flowing again. Second wind, second wind . . .

Nev burst out of the courtyard and into the street. The piercing light of the setting suns blinded him. He gasped. His body filled with cramping, searing pain, like birth. He’d been reborn a thousand times in just this way; a mercenary who could never die, leaping from host to host as long as there were bodies on the battlefield. He could run and fight forever, right up until there were no more bodies he’d touched. He could fight until he was the last body on the field.

He pivoted, turned on his attackers. The burst of new life caused his skin to flake. He was going to be powerfully thirsty and hungry in a quarter hour. But that was more than enough time to do what needed doing.

Nev picked up speed. The body’s legs responded, stronger and fitter than they’d been for their former inhabitant. He coughed out one final wet muck of matter and took a deep, clear breath. He glanced back, ensured the gang was still chasing him, and turned down a side alley.

They barreled after him, all four of them, which told him they were amateurs more than anything else thus far. You didn’t all bumble into a blind alley after a mark unless you were very, very sure of yourselves.

He knew the alley well. Hairy chickens as tall as his knee hissed and scattered as he passed. He rounded the end of the alley and jumped—the leap across the sunken alley here was six feet. Not easy, but not impossible. The street had caved during the last rainstorm. Knowing to jump should have saved him.

But he came up short.

He missed the other side by inches. Threw his arms forward, tried to scramble for purchase.

Nev, the body that housed Nev, fell.

His legs snapped beneath him. Pain registered. Dull, still, with the nerves not yet fully restored. He cracked his head against broken paving stones at the bottom of the sinkhole. A black void sputtered across his vision.

Fuck.

Shit, the woman with the dark eyes said. She peered down at him; her mane of black hair had come loose, and with the double helix of the suns behind her, she looked like a massive lion. Finish killing it. Take it with us. Body’s barely fit for Corez now.

He’s a body merc, one of the others said, behind her. He’s just going to jump again.

Then go back and burn his house down, too.

The boy came up behind her, leveled a crossbow with a violet plume at the end, and shot Nev in the chest.

It took two more to kill him.

Dying hurt every time.

Nev gasped. Sputtered, wheezed, Where are we?

It was dead dark.

Lie flat, fool. We’re under the floor of the warehouse.

He gasped for air. Reached instinctively for his cut wrist. Tera had bound it with clean linen and salve that stank nearly as bad as the corpse they’d hauled from the pier.

They’re going to burn the workshop.

You’re lucky we aren’t burning in there too. You only lasted five minutes.

More than long enough, for some.

Easy to please, were they?

My favorite sort.

She snorted. Sneezed. Hacked something up and spit into the dusty space. They didn’t know what you were until you jumped. Seemed right surprised.

Wouldn’t be the first time we pulled a body that should have stayed buried.

Nev smelled smoke. His workshop, burning. If they didn’t leave soon it would catch the warehouse they were squatting under, too. Years they’d worked to build up that workshop. If he was lucky, some of the bodies on ice in the cellar might keep, but probably not. All those