REACH out and TOUCH SOMEONE the Start of Something New

FUTURES SCIENCE FICTION REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE The start of something new.

BY VAL NOLAN runaway error. We can never engineer away Such assemblies grant us dreams of unex- the throb of human loneliness. pected beauty but, if we are to survive, we ne wonders when we stopped being Thus we drift so close to one another that must become repulsive once again. We must truly human. Was it when we first we can touch each other, but even that is not detach from each other or submit to gravity’s hardened ourselves against vacuum enough to share the art or maths or poems relentless pressures. The new stars blooming Oor X-rays or other radiations? Or perhaps in our heads. So we twine together. Floating in the sky confirm as much. Where once lay when we remade ourselves to swirling clouds of dancers and photosynthesize starlight? Or delights, now there are young later again, those furnaces extin- suns burning in the night. A wave guished, when mouths and lungs of concern shivers through us all. like hungry ramscoops began to It takes thousands of rotations, as suck down lean interstellar hydro- our responses must be considered.

gen? Gigayears of engineering Calculations must be made. But in JACEY BY ILLUSTRATION and artificial evolution have since the wake of the new stars’ hot light given us the ability to metabolize come the charred and distorted dark matter, then dark energy, bodies flung outwards from their and that further quickened our birth. Locked in deranged post- expansion. The Universe is full mortem grins, their shocked of people now. Literally full of faces arrive in violent collisions people, flying free in the dark- with our own immeasurable ness. A true interstellar species at gaggles. These impacts destabilize long last. our discs. They upend our equi- In the process, we fed on all the librium. We have dithered for moons and planets in our path, too long and a chain reaction of we hoovered up the asteroids and collapse, destabilization and col- comets and all the rogue objects. lapse ensues … Self-propagation Eventually, we consumed the indeed. stars themselves. All those in our Some on the edges of our Galaxy and in the galaxies that conclaves flee but the major- collided with us. We are the ulti- ity are gravitationally bound to mate self-replicators. We have the whole. Together forever and turned the Universe into count- impossible to disentangle. Just as less copies of ourselves in defiance we wanted. And so we begin our of its brutal lifelessness. Our exponential through space in knots of limbs and bundles collapse in turn. Our radius decreasing. Our growth fills every volume of local space. Yes, of bodies. First binary pairs. Then greater temperature climbing. The hydrogen with we can still consume ices and gases and cos- and greater mergers. Complicated polycules which we have replaced our ancient blood mic rays from the interstellar medium but, of desire or convenience that in time prove beginning to agitate, eventually to boil. We for the most part, we now draw our energies irresistible even to the loners, drawing in become stringier again. Contorting. Stretch- from deep levels of reality unimagined by the unwilling. Eventually, trillions of bod- ing further. Ageing in new and unusual our chimpanzee parents. ies spinning together. Great nebulae of flesh ways. Facing death for the first time since Yet in appearance we remain not unlike so vast that their farthest edges seem to fade any of our number can recall. Our groupings those ancestors. I suppose that is sentiment away into distant spectra. distort and recombine and distort again. I on our part. A fad lasting aeons. Although In this way we have transcended metal reach out my arm to grasp that of the person we are perhaps lankier. Stretched out. We poverty together. We have weathered quan- nearest to me. Then another joins us. Then weave between the stellar husks less like pri- tum fluctuations and bubble nucleation. The another and another and another. We will mates than like the sea creatures that pre- only thing we cannot overcome is gravity. go together, turning and tumbling towards ceded even them. We have bigger heads and Good old basic gravity. Stubborn and prodi- the final moments. Falling inwards. Making wider hands than any who have come before, gious minds interrogate its secrets, but to do patterns on each other’s palms. Offering the and we reach out with these as we pass each so they must unite in ever closer, ever denser handshapes for hope and fear. For pride and other by. We call to each other in gestural congress. Accretions of knowledge daring a sadness. But not regret. Never regret. For we pidgins because although we may be opti- response from the very force its participants will give back to the Universe. We will see mal, we shall never be completely infinite. seek to overthrow. Complex judgements fresh races flourish by our coming light. We We cannot fill a Universe entirely, nor can flickering like electrical discharge across will shine anew. ■ we ever really hope to overcome the empty the rotating discs of bodies. Institutions of space between us. meticulous gesticulation carrying out their Val Nolan lectures on creative writing at NATURE.COM Like those tin-can von discourse across millions and millions of Aberystwyth University. His fiction has Follow Futures: Neumanns of old, we years. Minds running hot on inspiration appeared in Interzone, The Year’s Best @NatureFutures are a self-propagating and hypothesis. Luminous eyes like count- Science Fiction and been shortlisted for the go.nature.com/mtoodm system hobbled by a less suns in radiant galaxies of thought. Theodore Sturgeon Award.