Science Fiction

Ran got up from her seat and led me back to the cabin. Our cabin. As soon as the door was locked, she took off my collar.

How could I have forgotten that this was the very night Picasso and Apollinaire would be arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa?

If I’d not been the old-fashioned sort, choosing to wait before having my Audrey move in with me, unlike a lot of men, I wouldn’t have been so wrong-footed by her that night. I’d have watched her getting ready in our home, naturally, and questioned her about a few details of her accoutrement before we went out for the evening — and thus been somewhat prepared for her later behaviour.

Earth is a distant speck left behind in the vastness outside. A world on the furthest edge of my memory. A dream I sometimes think of in this eternal, lonely night. At times, I wonder if it’s not only a figment of my own imagination. Was there ever such a place? Were there ever blue skies and green trees and busy cities? Was there ever the sleepy village where I was born, with its crumbling church and cosy houses and the quaint pub where they celebrated my future mission a month before launching into space?

London lay drowned beneath an ocean. A deep, dark ocean navigated by monied corporate leviathans, the City quailing beneath. Pulled in their wake were the hackers, hook-ups and the vacant. Criss-crossing London, invisibly, was all this – information. People, things and sex, all matter and action alike reduced to drops of data. An unseen sea, one that had no end, of money, services, and the surveilled.

Christopher Eastman leans across the front passenger seat, framing himself in the window as he waves goodbye. Daniel, giddy in his straitjacket booster seat . . .

They’d been walking for three days when they saw the place. Isaac knew instantly that this was it. His father stopped, sucked in his breath, closed his eyes and waited…