The Death of Richard Dawkins
I’m not a fan of the typical content on Steve Yegge’s blog, but recently he posted something a little different: a science fiction short story. It’s actually quite good; I hope he writes more. Here’s a sample:
He slowed at the barrier. He wanted to maintain his endurance pace of thirty kilometers per hour, but this was also his first Chronathlon. The brochure had not been comfortingly specific about the algorithm they used for choosing new locations. Mitch, his race monitor, had assured him that he would always materialize outdoors, and that he would not wind up at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, nor at the top of Kanchenjunga. But that left a lot of open ground. Twenty kilos in El Azizia would be an annoying obstacle.
He passed through the barrier and his feet found reddish tundra. The air was freezing. He felt vents closing in the folds of his running clothes. Lovely. He knew his way around the planet well enough, but tundra was tundra. He could be anywhere from Siberia to Greenland. He resumed his endurance pace and let his mind wander.
Rosies. Poseys. Ashes. The Singularity. The Rivers. Head Bill. Head Branson. COMA. Those damned intriguing Externals… his mind paged idly through the changes of the past millennium. Most had been gradual, some frighteningly sudden. The world was almost unimaginably different from the world in which he’d grown up, and yet humanity remained more or less the same as ever: a bunch of bloody idiots.
