THE ANTIMATTER OF DEATH Read online

  E A SOLARIS

  THE ANTIMATTER

  OF DEATH

  A SHORT SCIENCE FICTION THRILLER

  COPYRIGHT

  First Published Worldwide 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by EA Solaris

  All rights reserved.

  ASIN: B076ZQP9PP

  No portion of this book may be copied, stored, distributed, transmitted, reproduced in any form or otherwise be made available without written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  All characters and events in the publication are purely fictitious, and any resemblance to real organizations or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Proofreading by Savannah Tate

  Cover by EA Solaris from Shutterstock images

  For permissions, message me on Twitter (@thebiofuturist) or find more contact details on my website here.

  DEDICATION

  For all fellow space travelers out there

  who have wondered about

  the hidden forces behind our existence.

  LIES OF THE MOON

  Wearing my heart

  inside out

  over the skins

  of the night

  I dare to bloom

  I drink them all,

  the pale lies

  of the moon

  — E A SOLARIS —

  You hack people. I hack time.

  —WHITEROSE, MR. ROBOT—

  CONTENTS

  ONE (001)

  TWO (010)

  THREE (011)

  FOUR (100)

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  ONE (001)

  As the plane glides through black skies illuminated by the ghostly shells of stars, the universe’s mouth is just about to reach for my heart and devour everything I love.

  All the stars are dead. Woven from and into the universe’s fabric, their atomized dust is nonetheless breathing in us. Like colliding, pulsating masses, we’re strung together on predetermined trajectories. But sometimes the extraordinary––the terrifying––happens and we escape our orbit.

  The Boeing blunders through minor turbulence, jolting me awake just as a roar indicates the landing gear is being extended. It’s been a long flight from Tokyo.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be landing shortly in San Francisco!” says the pilot’s buzzing voice over the intercom. He asks us to revert our seats to the upright position and is continuing with the usual reminders when someone softly taps my shoulder. I turn, slightly startled.

  The woman in the window seat to my left extends a photograph to me. She’s wearing hipster glasses that suit her nicely. “You lost this while you were sleeping,” she says with a smile.

  From the picture the warmth of my brother’s eyes gaze back at me. His face is framed by carefree curls that burst off in all directions. He’s blowing out a candle on a birthday cookie, thirty-ish. We’re genetic copies and we look like it. The similarities don’t run all the way through, though. I wear my hair in a man-bun––I like things orderly, as one might expect from a researcher of the second law of thermodynamics. Everything has a predefined order; we just have to find it. How does my brother look now, I wonder? Tragedy changes us, especially when it hits as unexpectedly as a knife in the dark.

  I hesitate before recovering the photo with my gloved hand. Not everyone needs to see what's underneath since that one gruesome night in the lab. Anyways, I wouldn’t want to scare her.

  “Thank you.” Relieved, I hold it instinctively against my chest, like a lost and found treasure. She couldn’t know the dark truth in her words.

  "Someone close?” she asks, laughing, then adds, "Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry. I just couldn't help but notice the similarity."

  “No need to apologize. Indeed––twins. I’m visiting.”

  I may be too late already. Behind my eyes, the pain I’ve been trying to banish drips back into my consciousness. While I was sleepwalking through life something horrific happened to him, unnoticed. I look at my gloved hand. What’s under there is the least I deserve.

  A grunt in my ear makes me turn to my right. A snoring mountain of a guy on the aisle seat has slumped his head onto my shoulder. Glorious middle seats. A stewardess passes by and flashes a smile at me.

  The next thing I hear is her short scream at a jolt of sudden turbulence, then a glitch flashes up on the stowed screen in front of me and everything is swallowed by absolute darkness.

  I open my eyes, woken by the pilot’s announcement.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be landing shortly in San Francisco. Or as the locals call it, The Living City!”

  What? This feels like a loop, just with infinitesimally small changes.

  A tap on my shoulder.

  “Umm, you lost this.” The woman sitting next to me hands me a photograph. Thick, old-school glasses—wrong choice. She strikes me as oddly familiar, like a remote acquaintance. She looks just as disoriented as me and glances around quickly, then shrugs.

  “Thank you,” I mutter and smile, taking the photo and slipping it into my pocket.

  “Family?" she asks, then adds, "Forgive me, I don't mean…"

  I chuckle and interrupt softly, “…to pry? Yes, it’s my twin brother, Richard.”

  She nods and laughs briefly; I laugh along with her.

  After a beat of hesitation she asks, “Your brother Richard, he isn’t…couldn’t possibly be the Richard Noire?”

  I nod in surprise—how could she know? Her eyes glow and she taps the cover of the TIME magazine she’s holding. Oh. He’s on it.

  “Is the story any good?”

  “A story about a rising biotechnology genius pioneering breakthroughs and his ever-elusive brother? I’d say it’s pretty dazzling!” she giggles. Her eyes flicker deep into my own.

  I look away. No one knows the truth yet––that my brother, whose discoveries have saved countless lives, is dying of cancer. One so rare and aggressive his own empire is powerless against it.

  The grisly sensation of moist breath on my neck makes me turn my head. The guy to my right has let his head flop down onto my shoulder. A string of saliva hangs from his mouth. Middle seats! I tap nervously for the tissue in my right chest pocket, but there’s no pocket. It’s on the left. Strange.

  A stewardess passes, followed by another, whispering in sharp, quick tones. Her nervous glance skims along the rows, right through us. There are dark circles under her eyes.

  “What’s up with those pretty birds? It’s like they don’t like flying!” The loud voice of someone laughing at their own joke rams into my ear like a truck. Snorebag has woken. “Why choose a life in the sky then, eh?”

  He winks at me and nudges my ribs. Ugh. I don’t like him.

  “What’s this?” His face changes as he leans forward, eyes widening until they’re as big as a frogs. He’s staring at my hand, the one I usually cover. It’s naked. Where’s my glove?

  My chrome prosthesis is exposed. It’s brain-controlled, fit to my exact biometric measurements. Right now it’s twitching nervously. Before I can react, he rubs the chrome with his fingers, as if to see if it’s real.

  “Some kind of freak, are you, eh?” he shouts.

  Heads turn toward me. With all the dignity I can muster I pluck the little tissue from my chest pocket and quickly polish off his greasy stains. I snap the tech in front of his face as if I were squeezing his throat and it makes a subtle but powerful mechanical sound.

  He bl
anches. “I’m s–s–sorry, dude, couldn’t help but—it’s just how I’m wired,” he whimpers.

  “Well,” I say, “this is just how I’m wired. Literally.”

  “…anyways, she seems to like it,” he whispers. When I turn my head, I catch the woman still gazing at me.

  We’re interrupted by the captain’s shaking voice.

  “Dear passengers, we’ve encountered a slight…turbulence during the flight.” He clears his throat, hesitates. "There's...our engineers seem to suggest…as absurd as this may sound, we have reason to believe that we've traversed a kind of rare temporary...wrinkle...in the local space-time topology, a…umm….there’s no other explanation but a—uh—traversable wormhole…”

  The woman and I turn our heads to each other in disbelief.

  He lets us know we’ll receive further briefing on the ground and instructs us to follow the dedicated personnel through arrival, then adds: "We have the usual bits of fog over the city today, but it will clear up in time for a sunny afternoon. The perfect weather to begin a new life––day!”

  At that the concerned expressions on people's faces thaw and we shake out relieved laughter. Ah, original, I almost fell for it! Traversable wormholes…Even if temporary ones, with quantum-entangled mouths, these beasts only exist as ghosts in mathematical formulae no one can ever agree on.

  Even as I chuckle, though, something about the nervousness and earnestness of his voice lingers eerily in the back of my mind.

  A soft rumble later we've landed.

  Still smiling and shaking my head, I shuffle through the airport with the small throng of passengers who disembarked with me. I stuff the TIME magazine into my bag. My seat neighbor insisted that I keep it when we bid each other farewell.

  My glance falls on a traveler whose intensely-colored eyes are blinking rapidly. He’s gesturing into thin air, talking fast––as if in a meeting––and scrolling though some kind of a menu projected into the air, but I can’t see anything. Unusual. Staring at him over my shoulder, I almost stumble as I’m hustled away with the others like a herd of lost travelers. Strangely enough, our queue for immigration is cordoned off from the others.

  When it’s my turn the immigration officer scoffs at my passport, muttering something about “another one of those”, types in the number, and prints something. She discards my passport into a shredder that makes a shrieking sound.

  Ignoring my flabbergasted expression, she hands me a sort of biometric sticker, says it goes on the back of my neck. “Your passport has expired. This is your new one. It’s ultra-adhesive, but you’d still better not lose it,” she warns, dropping a heavy envelope with my name onto the desk. She takes a deep breath and starts giving instructions—where to go, what forms to fill in—but my brain turns the words to sludge and a confused drowsiness envelops my mind. I need to see Richard immediately, before he slips away. How late am I? This wormhole story isn’t funny anymore.

  Following an instinct, I just grab the envelope and bolt for the exit.

  “Wait!” she shouts after me, “you can’t just––it’s too dangerous––!”

  But it’s too late to stop me. Before I know it I’m through customs and the gliding doors slide shut behind me, irreversibly. In front of me me lies a strange new world––one in which, somehow, I have to find the one person I've come all this way to see.

  Minutes later, panting, I disembark from the underground shuttle at Embarcadero. It reminded me remotely of BART, but passengers were strapped into their seats and we were moving gently but freaking fast. Interactive holograms flashed up and swirled around to announce stops, connections, and sights, some of which I’ve never heard of before.

  As I hurry up the stairs from the underground, still out of breath and dizzy, I’ve never dreamed, for better or worse, of anything like what awaits me on the surface. A massive and bizarrely futuristic skyline—an entirely new San Francisco—rears in front of me. I can’t believe it. It’s as if Tokyo’s gritty neon in the fabric of my mind is melting away to reveal this luminous, towering…

  I stagger, dumbfounded. Despite the glow of it, the sight is a shock. Cold sweat breaks out on my skin and even under all the brightness, it’s suddenly freezing. The pilot. This isn’t a prank. This is a new time.

  Solar mini-blimps that look like passenger ships float through the sky above the city that’s a blend of pulsing urban forest, lush skygardens and advanced high-tech. A passenger drone is taking off vertically and others are swooshing by. Before my eyes nature and technology beat in vivid harmony. I notice a prominently-visible glass skyscraper with the logo HeliXtower, twisted like a DNA double-helix.

  “Excuse me!” A man in solar-punk-looking clothes almost bumps into me, beaming. “Have to hyper into New York; I’m late for my UBI group lunch!” He jumps onto a cablecar that swings by from around the corner. Wait––I have to look twice; it’s a hovering cablecar!

  I stare after him as the hover-car’s bell fades. Did he mean…the Hyperloop? And universal basic income? My head throbs; I scratch it, baffled.

  A strange butterfly swirls above me in chaotic circles. It’s as if the laws of the universe are being bent at will to spawn new creations every second.

  I hail a random flying taxi, dropping my phone into a small e-recycling bin before I step aboard. It’s dead, useless.

  Inside, the rearview mirror adjusts automatically and I spot a pair of intense green eyes, intricate like a maze of hidden depths.

  “Hello, I’m Stella,” says a female voice, husky but smooth. Before I can respond she goes on. “I’m legally obliged to inform you. I’m not human. I’m an android empathy figure. Created to emote in a human manner.” Her voice and pronunciation are entirely human indeed; only her speech pattern is a bit choppy. She turns around to greet me wearing a snappy red blazer and artful necklace. Her half-long dark hair is parted asymmetrically and shaved short on one side of her head. A badass look.

  A fleeting sense of danger flashes over me as my silly reptilian brain makes an association with an old Terminator movie I saw, but a second later my attention shifts to something else: I’m still out of breath from my brief run. Peculiar.

  The android looks into my eyes and a hint of warmth exudes from her. “It means I’m your buddy. For this journey. How was. Your journey?”

  She must have noticed my shell of exhaustion and assumed—correctly—that I’ve traveled far. Splendid. I’m being out-empathied by a machine! The absurdity makes me shudder and chuckle at the same time. "Uh, my journey? Just…delayed…a lot.”

  The glitch in the plane. A new passport on my neck. Wake up.

  I spot a transparent electronic gadget in the seat pocket and when I unfold it, it switches on and starts streaming the news.

  “A journey into another world, really,” I mumble, captivated by the news that blinks past on the screen. The driver-pilot—Stella—laughs. I must appear like a helpless tourist.

  Swipe. Local News. Swipe. Fashion. Oh, here’s Stella’s hairstyle. Swipe. Otherwise it all looks bewildering, like science fiction.

  Science and Technology. Ah. Perhaps I can find something familiar here.

  Genome-hacking CRISPR-boxes are coming to your home.

  I’m stunned. Health insurers will distribute the boxes of ChaosGene Labs according to a personalized prescription to cure genetic diseases. Wow.

  I yelp in surprise when a holographic advert with a face emerges in front of me, telling me he notices my interest in the technology section.

  “Check out the discounts on these last-edition wearables! They’re made from next-gen algae fibers and the last batch of recycled microplastics cleared from the oceans. They’re so damn fashionable, and even produce wireless electricity from the flow of your positive thoughts with this neural implantable––”

  “No thanks,” I mutter. The ad-bot waves politely, but as he disappears I can see he’s disappointed. I suddenly find myself coughing. Must be something in the air. I notice a slight beard stub
ble. I usually shave. Reduces entropy.

  Stella turns around to me. Reaching back, she hands me transparent glasses, explaining that they’re for the journey. “Most people are really into implantables. For seamless augmented reality vision in their eyes. Various augments. Are on the bioware market here. But. You seem more like. A tourist.”

  Bioware? Like the guy at the airport?

  I hesitate, then reach for it with my bionic hand. “Indeed. I’m not from here.” Nor from this time.

  As I reach for the glasses our hands touch briefly. I jolt. It's hand...her android hand is warm! My high-tech hand is cold. She seems more alive than me.

  “Apologies. Didn’t mean. To scare you,” she winks.

  I shake my head vigorously and gargle a laugh.

  Biohackers in Shibuya, where I’d run off to hiding in the infinite folds of a new reality, put together the most advanced high-tech in the fabrication of my bionic backup hand. Even touching her hand so briefly a moment ago, through my prosthesis’ sensory network I could feel its astonishing elasticity, the immaculate proportions, the body-warm grip—everything was perfect. Strong for a female certainly, but she does seems exceptionally energetic.