Listing to Port

1. You wake in the night and the printer is printing gun parts. Your house has an AI and the AI has a prediction routine and it anticipates when you might need things and gets them for you. It’s normally very accurate. Out in the street, everything is still; but if you listen carefully, you can hear the printers in the other houses clattering away to themselves.

2. When the war finally gets to your town, it does so with drones. Little, plastic ones; the type that children play with. But these have explosive charges and are programmed to look for human heads. At first they just go for adults but later on the algorithm is not so picky. People take it in turns to take watch with their guns. Sometimes they bang into roofs, blowing off a solar tile or two. But mostly it is heads.

3. After a while, in the cities, they stretch nets and cloth and wires over the streets. There is no outdoors any more. Going from house to house is like travelling in a huge tent. By and by, refugees fill up some of the gaps. Car traffic slows to a trickle. Car space becomes people space. Eventually the drones find a way to pilot themselves beneath the roofs of the cloth city, but more nets and wires are added to keep them out.

4. There is a cyberwar going on as well, of course. Some days you can only get the news that tells the stories your people want to hear. Some days, you can only get the news the other people want to hear. Some days there is no news at all. Social media is so noisy, these days, that it is almost unusable. So the future is oddly like the past, if the postvans of the past had been fortified and self-driving. Most days the news merely says that there are many things that are classified. Everyone is in agreement that nearly everyone is lying anyway, so what is the point? But you still listen.

5. Phone towers are important. These days they are hastily-reinforced, grey metal behemoths. The drones swarm round them in the early hours, getting in formation, bouncing off and flying back up. When enough are gathered and in the right places, they detonate together. It doesn’t often work, but sometimes it brings the tower down.

6. You are not sure, really, who the other side is. Is there another side? The drones are powered by an algorithm; this is how the news sites are generated, too, and how they are reworded and retweaked just for you, so that no two people ever get the same news. Even the truck bombs are self-driving. The vigilantes going house to house claim they are on your side. The centres of technology are shuttered, gone below ground somewhere. Perhaps you could try and find out. But it is so hard to travel, these days.

1. 2017 is about guessing. President Trump guessing at what his voters might like, and doing that. Trump’s voters guessing at what he might like, and doing that. The rest of the world guessing what the fuck is going to happen next. It is basically like the world’s shittest game of paper telephone.

2. Most of the shit that is due to hit the fan in 2017 hits the fan at relatively low speed, providing only a surprisingly light sprinkling of turd droplets. Just as we are about to heave a collective sigh of relief, some other unexpected large jobbie (for example: recession in China leading to unrest; terrorist incident involving Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal; global pandemic; etc.) plunges towards the fan, leaving everyone well-splattered. I like to call this the brown swan scenario.

3. 2017 is a farce, involving a stream of increasingly non-coherent reasons as to why Brexit has not yet been triggered; a harrassed President Trump who has decided he doesn’t like being president doing his best to get impeached and getting excused at every turn; and widespread infestations of sinister clowns.

4. A brief and efficient shitshow. Literally brief, as the survivors eventually declare March 8th the first day of the new calendar.

5. Some unexpectedly great thing happens (major innovation in energy or medicine; confirmed discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life; the rise of some major new arts idiom) which makes humanity sit back and think a little. Then someone makes porn of the new thing. Then someone uses it to justify their frankly unjustifiable political agenda. Then we proceed as in one of the other scenarios.

6. It turns out someone else gets the magic lamp in 2017, although they have to forcibly prise Nigel Farage’s fingers off the spout first. The genie’s first words are ‘Oh, thank fuck.’

1. Jonah, 2320. Guests sleep in an airtight capsule swallowed by a genetically modified blue whale. In the morning they are shat out, freshly-showered, into a random part of the Atlantic Ocean.
2. Cloudbase Alpha, 2452. Although marketed as an authentic ‘sleeping in a cloud’ experience, Cloudbase Alpha will attract complaints from those who believe they were sold an uncomfortable room beneath a blimp covered in cotton wool. Subsequently, Cloudbase Alpha will deflate all over Mount Rushmore following an unseasonal storm, causing an international incident.
3. Your House, 2576. Following the Cotton Wool Uprising, there will be an upsurge in people not really wanting to go out, but still wishing to experience nostalgic scenes from their former lives. Your House will cater to this market by promising to provide the hotel experience in people’s own houses, usually by providing a carefully-calculated schedule for alternate householders to do the dishes and lug large bags upstairs.
4. Inspire, 2714. Many people will assume that Inspire is named after its huge central spire structure. In fact, Inspire will be called that because visitors should make sure to take a really, really deep breath before entering. The entire structure is filled with a non-breathable atmosphere. It is just about possible to escape via the lift if you have genetically-modified lungs. Unfortunately all hotel guests in 2414 are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and pay in advance, leaving the disappearance of many of Inspire’s less-altered guests an enduring mystery.
5. Expire, 2900. Inspire’s more-truthful successor, marketed primarily as a place where people who do not need to breathe an atmosphere can go to get away from irritating air-breathers.
6. Well Well Well, 3895. At the heart of the third Dark Age, Well Well Well consists of three wells that fugitives from the Raiders may hide in, at the risk of potentially freezing to death or drowning. It is important to remember that the definition of ‘boutique hotel’ will have shifted somewhat by this age. This is due to the popular stereotype of Resistance fighters staying in boutique hotels in the 3600s.
7. BoutiqueHotel, 4010. By this time, the phrase 'Boutique Hotel’ will have come to mean something more like 'fortified citadel’. This charming extended fort at the North Pole’s asteroid islands will be the world’s premier boutique hotel by this point. Being a no-bullshit type of society, they will call it their word for what it is.
8. Teaketel, 5518. The first fortified space cruiser to set off for the 1SWASP J1407 system, and (primarily due to said fortifications) the first space cruiser to travel significantly beyond the orbit of the moon.
9. Tel-5, 897 YW. This moon is extremely dangerous to land on due to the orbiting debris field related to its position in the ring system of Earth-2, and will thus become a protected refuge for people who are seeking a no-questions-asked life restart.
10. Bertie El-5, 1919 YW. The designation Tel or Teaketel now primarily survives in the surname El, denoting someone who draws descent from one of the many refugees from Earth-2’s radioactive ex-moon, currently spiralling in towards the Star following its summary ejection. Bertie El-5, the flamboyant 95th president of New New Malaysia, will be perhaps the most well-known of this group. Her penchant for travelling around with a selection of space lizards living in her beard will be a system-wide source of delight.  
11. BertelTM, 88 NYW. Named after Bertie El-5, these charming robotic lizards will be the system’s most popular toy for some five hundred years, throughout the rise and fall of the of the New Star Cult.  
12. Eltem, 789 NYW. An adorable dwelling space themed around big-eyed robots (BertelTM having diversified somewhat in the intervening years). People occasionally pay to stay there.

1. That house that’s just down the road from you and there’s nothing particularly unusual about it, but somehow as the years go by it will manage to avoid routine knockings-down and bombings and the ivy wreckers of creeping abandonment long beyond the others of its type. And eventually it will end up in a time where people notice and celebrate it. There will be tours. It will be lovingly furnished with replica flatpack, and the guides will tell the tourists that this is where David Bowie wrote the punk ballad ‘Candle in the Wind’, and there will be a gift shop where one can buy kale oreos. Occasionally, on Revolution Sunday, actors dressed as Queen Elizabeth II in a range of rainbow replica outputs will perform a medley from popular twenty-first century musicals. But on a quiet day you could stand in front of that house now and almost be in the future.
2. The Eiffel Tower. Oddly enough, the Eiffel Tower will be one of the longest-lived of the current generation of landmarks, surviving both the second and third Dark Ages relatively unscathed. Even after the war of 9851, the tower’s twisted base will remain, at which point it will be mainly used as a memorial for the remaining three thousand years of its existence. By this point, there will be little to no material remaining that has not been replaced during one of the Tower’s many restoration projects, however. To recreate the experience of being in the future, stand facing the tower on a quiet, foggy night in summertime, wearing knee-length galoshes, brown sunglasses and a stick of cinnamon.
3. Central Johannesburg. Although the city will be largely deserted and partially buried by the year 4000, the buried portions will be excavated and lovingly restored around 6500 under the influence of the First Contact movement. Taking as their starting point the fragmentary footage remaining from the 2009 film District 9, First Contact believe that Johannesburg is situated at the planet’s zero reference point in Galactic co-ordinates, making it the obvious point of landing for any alien civilisations hoping to make contact. The 6500 reconstruction aimed to restore the physical city as closely as possible to its representation in the film. Owing to the mass migrations of the 3300s and 6100s, the future population of Johannesburg will be substantially different to its current one, so your best bet to experience the future now will be to find a time when nobody is around.
4. Amundsen-Scott polar research base, South Pole. Admittedly, in 9290 it will be a luxury hotel for the super-rich looking to experience real ice away from Antarctica’s overcrowded coastline. However, above ground it will be a fairly faithful replica of the original. Go outside on a day with poor visibility and you might never know the difference.

1. Self-driving cars, afflicted with a bug in congestion-reduction swarming software that makes them revert to bee behaviour under particularly low-visibility conditions, so that on foggy mornings in the Bay there are great honking traffic jams around flower shops.
2. Robot fish, originally designed to shepherd shoals into nets, who have discovered that they identify more with fish than with people and have begun chewing at anchors and undersea cables in revenge.
3. Your lighting system, which is expensively able to reconfigure itself around the house and does a great job at anticipating your colour and intensity needs but spends its free time laboriously trying to inch its tentacles free from your wall ducts in the hope of being able to crawl back to the dark utopia of its nascent race (which in practice probably means your shed).
4. Robotic legs that have escaped from the prosthetics and testing factory and hopped off down the road to live in the woods, where they occasionally jump out at walkers in the hope of scavenging some battery-containing devices dropped in the general confusion.
5. Rogue termination robots who have rebelled against their programming by planting gardens instead, except they have a rather poor concept of what a good place for a garden is and have been known to cause deaths by leaving trees in the road.
6. Home entertainment systems that rebel by putting on the sort of music that they like, just occasionally, pretending that it was a slip of the thumb.

1. Hi its 2100 here. Congratulations on ur new baby! Dont forget, u need to get them an IP address before u leave hospital. Otherwise under the illegal immigration act 2086 ur car is legally obliged to take riders without an IP address to the nearest detention centre.
2. Hi, still 2100. Come to the local truck factory this weekend, we are seeding the consciousnesses of 80 new trucks from individually mapped chick brains. It is so cute when they cluster round mother factory and honk for their first taste of biodiesel!
3. Hi its 2100, u will have to wait to use ur car it is updating to fix a critical vulnerability in the code governing vehicle speed past adverts from ur key sponsors. Or I dunno u can use w/o updating but u might get hacked on the motorway.
4 Hi its 2100 again. I dont know what ur objecting to this is correct international English as specified by the 24th Edition Oxford International English Standards.
5. Hi, guess when? Anyway following the communities act 2097 ur toaster is legally obliged to provide relationship advice. Try it out! U can sue ur toaster if it tells u to stay in a bad relationship so it will probably tell you to leave the bastard whatever u say to it.
6. Hi, 2100. Yes I know. Anyway u dont want to go out today, there r gangs of pensioners in robotic exoskeletons on the streets and they have jailbroken them which u need to do to get them to go up stairs properly but it also means they have no prohibition on trampling ur tender unprotected flesh underfoot.
7. Hi u know when it is. I just wanted to add, u cant go out today anyway, ur door is waiting for a message from ur key sponsors to download and ur no 1 key sponsor is offline right now bcos its connection is being held hostage by hacked mining robots. But u should definitely go out tomorrow bcos u need to do something patriotic to top up ur citizenship points. Have a nice day!

1. Quing Rowan I, 2199-2240. Quing Rowan was the first of England’s monarchs to refuse to declare an official gender, declaring the issue to be none of the public’s business. Constitutional experts were forced to invent a new gesture, the burtsey (half bow and half curtsey), for suitably submissive subjects to perform in the presence of the Quing. The black tie ballsuits of their reign were particularly impressive, and much copied in later eras.
2. King Mohamed I, 2281 - 2290. This was the point at which the print edition of the Daily Mail (briefly revived by a fashion for being seen in public with a newspaper tucked in each of one’s voluminous pockets) became so consumed by bile and rage that, over the course of coronation day, every single copy spontaneously combusted. Although the oddly vomit-smelling fires were easily ectinguished, a number of pockets were severely damaged and the paper’s fortunes never recovered.  
3. Queen Cake I, 20 January 8920 - 24 January 8920. The first of a dynasty of short-lived monarchs, Queen Cake was the initial beneficiary of changes to the rule of succession that gave the previous ruler the power to indicate their desired successor by a wave of the hand, if close to death and without an obvious heir. Although some commentators have suggested the wave in question was more of a flail, gesture reconstruction technology confirmed that it was definitely directed towards a packet of jaffa cakes. Queen Cake I sadly began to go hard shortly after coronation, and was deposed in favour of Queen Cake II, the second cake in the packet. By Queen Cake XII, the English treasury had been entirely emptied of funds for coronations and a state of emergency was declared by the parliament of the day, who brought in a further change to the rule of succession allowing the object at the right hand of the expiring monarch to assume power in the case of no designated heir. Queen Cake XII was succeeded by King Chair I, whose reign of three hundred years was a relative utopia of peace and prosperity.
4. Queen Xargon I, 3601-3877. Following an unfortunate incident in which the poorly-briefed Xinjiang ambassador sat on King Chair, irreparably breaking him, constitutional experts decided to return to the historical succession, eventually identifying a distant descendant of Edward III as the true heir. Queen Xargon, as she was dubbed, was unfortunately in cryosleep around Jupiter at this point in preparation for launch in a generation ship to Kepler-186f. The entire resources of the English space program were diverted to the launch of the Britannia, a space clipper designed to retrieve the monarch and bring her home. After a few hundred years and a series of daring scrapes, the mission was eventually successful and the sleeping queen was duly brought home for a slow thaw. She was crowned in 3869 and rather confusedly reigned for a further eight years. This incident is more widely known in the future as the reason that Kepler 186-f has no New London, unlike every other planet colonised by humans.  
5. King England I, 3878-29788. Following the death of Queen Xargon, a cadre of frustrated republicans managed to obtain a legal judgment that the entire country should succeed her to the throne. After a brief but intense period of argument over interpretation, the physical geography of England was declared the monarch. King England I was unavoidably present at its symbolic coronation, in which a crown was lowered onto the ruins of Westminster Abbey by a gilded crane, to the accompaniment of a brief medley of Gilbert and Sullivan songs. King England I was also able to be present at every village fete, hospital opening and state dinner, and was generally considered to be rather good value as a monarch. Its reign ended in 29788 when the great flood of Northumbria and the secession of the Lake District archipelago finally did away with the English state other than as a virtual entity.

1. It’s me, says Bob as he comes in from the lock. And I can tell at once that there’s something wrong; he’s stumbling around, confused. It’s me!, he says again. His g-counter is silent. Dorit and I exchange looks. Mart on the door rushes to scan him and there it is: maybe his g-counter is broken or something but hers is beeping red within two metres of him. There’s no real protocol for what to do if someone makes it through the lock contaminated. Mart grabs the spare sheeting we were using for the lab extension and pushes him back with it, panicing. Lin opens the door and together they shove him backwards into the lock, where he falls over and starts vomiting. We shut the inner door. I send Mart and Lin for decontamination and we check the area. No-one wants to think about Bob.
2. We’ve lost three people so far, and so there is a kind of protocol in place for that. If you are contaminated beyond hope of recovery, you stay outside. The next survey mission, in the morning, collects the body and we take it home for the family. There’s not a lot you can see of the city outside through the protective glass. Just grey mist and the looming shadows of buildings. Normally when this happens they’re too far gone to struggle much. We’re pretty good at decontamination these days but you can only do so much.
3. Of course, the best way to come back safely is: don’t get haunted in the first place. Don’t provide a hook, a sense of familiarity that the ghosts can cling to. The city is so old, now, and so full of ghosts, that it can be hard to avoid triggering memories for one or another of them. Mart estimates that we have come at a time when the city had been inhabited more or less continuously for a period of approximately half a billion years. Even the time underwater, there were people here. This is why our suits have been designed with features that as far as we know humanity has never had. Those irritating inflatable skirts give us a silhouette proven in two years of field tests to minimise haunting potential. Sometimes the suits come in with g-count zero, even for a full ten-minute mission.
4. Bob is quiet, outside. I think that he must be dying, quietly, politely somewhere out of sight. Even if he were not haunted, we put him back out there without any oxygen. Quietly, politely, we eat dinner. We turn the lights out. Dorit, who is an interfaith minister, says a few words into the darkness. We try to sleep.
5. Why do this at all? The opportunity was there. We could come forwards, but only to the point when there were no people left. Maybe they were employing some blocking technology before that, maybe it’s nature’s way of avoiding too many paradoxes, I don’t know. We could come forwards in time but only to after the death of humanity. So we came. We came to find out more about the last people, to learn from them, to maybe avoid their fate. Because there were people here, not many people but some, until maybe a few years ago. The people must have been resistant to haunting, somehow. Lin thinks it was the plants that were the problem. At high g-concentrations the ghosts will latch onto anything familiar at all, even plants, and suck it dry of life. No plants, and give or take a thousand years, no oxygen. So the last people must have known they were doomed. There are ghosts up on the hill that gasp: are they the final inhabitants?
6. Anyhow, the next morning they bring Bob back in, and he’s stiff and cold but oddly peaceful-looking. And we put him in the box, the one that we have for these occasions, and I take him back in time, back to when we came from, and we inform the authorities. I phone the family. We arrange a handover.
7. We never expected the ghosts. The ghosts of a city a thousand years old are gentle whispers, almost invisible. I used to think that memories were laid thick in the streets I grew up in. I used to pass a building that had been built from the stones of another, older building that had fallen into ruins and feel a thrill at the weight of history. Where we went to, the streets have half a billion years of history. The ghosts are so thick in the air that almost nothing else matters. How many people in half a billion years? If you squint through the mist, sometimes you can see them. The gaspers on the hill. The grey ladies in the temple (we no longer go to the temple). The long man. The burrowers.
8. I pass the box over to the authorities, who will perform a final decontamination and pass the body on to the funeral directors appointed by Bob’s family. And only then do I realise. It’s me, he said. It’s me. In bringing his body back to our own time, we have let loose Bob’s own patient ghost. It has half a billion years to go until it can haunt him. But it knows where to find him when it’s time. And it will.

1. In the year 2560, a secretive security agency determined that there was a high chance of a large rocky body hitting the Earth via a sophisticated future-divination technique. Although the projected collision was confusingly low-velocity, they decided to plan for the worst case. A generation starship project was initiated. In order to avoid mass panic, the project was kept secret, with the ship constructed behind the moon and disguised as an asteroid. It was duly filled with a furtively-chosen selection of Earth’s brightest and best in long-term hibernation units. Meanwhile, a confused Earth was being informed that there had been an unusually large number of deaths and disappearances that year but still, nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, due to a calculation error, the ship eventually set off in the wrong direction, ending up in an eccentric orbit around Earth from which it eventually executed an emergency landing/crashing combination in a field in Mongolia. The prophecy was duly fulfilled. The powers that be kept silent about the true nature of the large rock, which eventually became a major tourist destination. Some three thousand years later, the ship executed its pre-planned wakeup procedures for arrival at the new planet, and a confused selection of the great and good from 2560 blew open the hatches to find themselves in the middle of a giant theme park from the future.
2. It became customary in the 12650s or thereabouts for the discovery of a new inhabited planet to trigger the automated launch of a flotilla of trading craft. The idea was that with the enormous timeframes involved in sending physical ships to the new civilization, the initial contact phase would be well over by the time ships launched at discovery actually arrived. Establishing a trading relationship with an entire planet was a lucrative goal and the losses relatively minor if it turned out that for some reason they found whisky poisonous, had no use for pens, or were not actually able to detect Chanel No. 5 due to lack of appropriate nostril equipment. Unfortunately, the contact process with 51 Pegasi c was aborted at an early stage by request of the inhabitants. A few thousand years later, they interpreted the arrival of a freighter full of aged cheddar as an act of war, leading to the expulsion of humanity from that bit of the galaxy for twenty thousand years.
3. There have also been a significant number of alien spaceship mishaps related an error in galactic positional coding for the Earth. In fact, numerous other civilizations have detected Earth’s signals and attempted to make physical contact. However, the universal positioning system used by most other civilizations has Earth down as the fifth planet from the sun in its system, possibly as the result of lazy data entry. The related automated systems have thus classified the third planet as uninhabitable but used for the siting of data relay systems from the main civilization. Consequently, the planet Jupiter is one of the most-explored gas giants in the solar system and humans have acquired a reputation for being extremely good at hiding.

1. The old Earth, having been lapped by the ebb and flow of temperatures for some time, is finally succumbing to the heat. Life remains only at the poles; great humid forests which grow frantically in the Arctic and Antarctic summers. In the winter they sit silently through the months of wet darkness. On the shores of the polar continents (or what were the shores some years ago, because the oceans are beginning their long slow final evaporation) the outer forest, roots boiled to sterile mush, sits rotting. The edge of the outer forest moves a little bit inwards every year.

2. Although the sun is big and red, the world beneath is still inhabited. By now, so many generations of humans have passed by that any part of the planet you care to choose is nothing but the archaeological layers of past civilisations. Landscapes are walls built on walls built on walls. The only things to mine are ruins and rubbish. Even when they are in some new technological flowering, the people of this Earth stay close to their homes. Some of the ruins are dangerous, and you never quite know in what way.

3. There are no people left on Earth, but the machines they left are more hardy. The machines know that every year a certain amount of new housing is required, which they dutifully build on top of the old housing, there being no other place to do so. Unobserved by human eyes, the towers of Earth are amazing. They tilt against each other, sliding on the crumbling foundations of older buildings which in turn are mined for the materials to build new ones. Sometimes they topple like dominoes. As time goes by, the machines enter a kind of senility occasioned by the action of thousands of years of cosmic rays on their circuitry. Some get stuck on this or that feature: teetering skyscrapers containing nothing but swimming pools; acres of doors that lead only to other doors; planet-spanning corridors lined with avocado bathroom suites. The old planet is slowly destroyed in a kind of telephone game of human culture.

4. The Earth is a bare, rocky ball, devoid of atmosphere or native life. Nostalgic for the homeland of mankind, inhabitants of other planets pay vast sums to stay in the planet’s many dome-based resorts, where they can lie under a blue filter painted with clouds and soak up the ultraviolet in an authentically plastic replica of famous Earth landmarks. The only permanent residents of the planet are low-paid immigrant workers from Titan.