transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Escape Pod, Episode 1042, More Tomorrow, by Premee Mohamed, Flashback Friday.

Speaker 2:
[00:30] Hi there, welcome to Escape Pod. I'm Mur Lafferty, your host and co-editor. Today's flashback is More Tomorrow by Premee Mohamed. Premee is formerly the social media manager and assistant editor here at Escape Pod, and is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. It's narrated for us by Dani Daly. Dani is a jack of many trades, master of none, but seeing as she loves the rogue life, that's okay with her. You can hear stories she's narrated on all four Escape Artists podcasts, Starship Sofa, Glittership, and Asimov's Science Fiction Podcast. This story originally ran in Automa Review in 2018, and then in Escape Pod, reprinting it in 2020. So get your tastiest Trilobites seasoning ready. It's story time.

Speaker 3:
[01:27] More Tomorrow by Premee Mohamed, read by Dani Daly. Day 5 Anyway, it turns out trilobites aren't very good eating, even if you haven't eaten in days. I had particularly high hopes for the fat-humped aesophids, thinking they would taste like shrimp. But everything I've caught so far is strictly armor and attitude. Plus they bite. Discovered this morning that if you just hoik a trilobite in the fire and assume terminal temperature, it crawls out and shakes itself off like a little tank. Complete decapitation required. Paper Idea Mechanisms of Apparent Trilobite Invincibility They're not strictly aquatic either. They come right up on land and look at you while you're eating their friends. Jesus. Also, cut my fingers to shit butchering the first one. To be honest, it was hard to tell who was butchering who. Whom? Easier going now, since I chipped an axe out of a piece of blue flint that I found a ways up the beach. Poor replacement for the one we lost, but it cracks the armor at least, and then you can roast them without explosions and shrapnel. Still have to cut them up to get the few calories worth of meat inside, though, which doesn't, incidentally, taste like shrimp. Their survival food. A couple more days, and I'm going after some of those big meaty arthropodias, though, the ones I can see gliding through the crystal clear water with little signs on their back saying, Eat me! I'm already tired of trilobite, though. Not yet tired of surviving. Note. Can I eat any of these algal mats? Different from seaweed at sushi restaurant, how exactly? Tomorrow, I'll probably hike up the hill and check out those whisk ferns that the mid-sized captorinidae keep nibbling, but not eating. Clearly it's non-toxic. Maybe it's medicinal. I could smush it into a poultice and put it on the cuts from those stupid trilobites. Maybe it won't kill me. Maybe it'll kill me sooner. Better than a dinocephalian getting me, I guess. More tomorrow. Day 6 My fingers won't stop bleeding, but the cuts on my cheeks have closed up, and they don't feel tender or hot. Hallelujah! I keep checking them in the shiny fragment from the temp box. No teenage snotball ever scrutinized her skin so assiduously. Sometimes I glance at what remains of the box, and the old temptation steals over me. I can fix it! Of course I can fix it! But come on, I'm a paleontologist. I deal with very old things, not very new things. Running gag. Oh, that must be why you get along so well with HAP. I mean, if you handed a computer engineer a busted calculator, ten bucks says he would simply hand it back to you. They don't make electronics to be fixed. They make them to work for a while, and then you buy a new one later, with university money. Anyway, literally, the dame who invented this thing couldn't fix it now. Maybe, just maybe, if I swam down and found the spare, because of course we took a spare, it's policy, like the working alone policy, to wit, don't do it ever. I could see how badly the seawater got in and maybe try to piece it back together. Splice it, I mean, a piece from here, a piece from there. But today is not that day. Have you seen those fucking fish? The jaws look like they could go right through my ankle. Hap should be back soon anyway from his collecting expedition. Let the record show that I did try to talk him out of it, though. We agreed someone should stay for the SNR team. To reiterate, he said, three days out, three days in. Six days ago. No sense wasting the time we've got here. And took about three quarters of the equipment we had left, including our only knife and most of our write-in-the-rain paper. And it rains almost every day. Our shelter wasn't great to begin with, cheap bastard university. And now it's almost better to sleep out in the open. Anyway, I'm going to write till the pen runs out of ink, or till I run out of paper, or till I get eaten. We'll see what lasts longest. Forgot to add, another option is I die of some disease from eating undersea bugs. Paper idea, toxic loading in late Devonian, early Permian survival situations. Forgot also to add, to be honest, they would not taste so terrible if I had some salt, so tomorrow I might set up an evaporation still. Actually, nacho cheese seasoning would be better. Part of me thinks I should be opening up their little gizzards to see what they've been eating down there. But part of me thinks why bother. Because they taste like rancid amphipods and fermented worm. Nacho cheese seasoning. The orange powder. That would help. Trilodoritos. Dorotrilos. Cool Ranch Triloritos. If I manage to bring some back alive, they're going to be the next big thing. Day 8. Hap isn't back. But I'm not what you'd call panicking yet. Not completely. When you estimate three days based on any measure of the world we used to live in, not accounting for the rain, the unfamiliar terrain, stopping to draw, write, and collect specimens, et cetera, your estimate is bound to be off. Because this isn't that world. He'll be okay though. There is potable water. And adequate if unpleasant food. The other thing that would be really good, sashimi togarashi. Big dusky orange sprinkle of it. Mm, yeah. Now that I'm using the flint axe, my finger's healed up. So it's easier to write about things that aren't seasoning. I mean, which is clearly of prime importance right now. I lost the first bunches of pages, days, so I'll quickly recap here, even though neither of us are likely to forget it. To it. Set up in the chamber's lab, room 12C, for planned five-day field visit. Did correctly activate shielding, would swear in a court of law that the light was green. Activated primary temporochronicular adjuster, which had been calibrated to our weights and equipment, monitor clearly indicated within acceptable range. Did not, we'll also probably have to swear to this in a court of law, notice that the shielding light had turned red until this point of time. Anyway, the upshot is, arrived in unknown, but may be correct, location, and unknown, but may be 300-ish million years prior to activation of Tempbox, as planned. However, damage to shielding resulted in Ducharme Vortex, Type 3, a physical and chronological material at proposed landing site. Mostly sand, water, fish, one very large ammonite, abundant tempere and crinobisons. At this time, myself, plus Dr. Hapler, plus all equipment, plus spare box, were immersed in ocean, and we swam back to beach having only recovered a small number of items. Primary box, destroyed by ammonite. Not sure I need to re-record that I pissed myself during the vortex. Oh, wait, I just did. I can scratch that out later. Look at me using a pen like an undergrad. I miss my tablet. Also, socks, forks, golf carts, sunscreen, neon signs that blink and say, all day breakfast. And the year 2029 in general. Also, guns. But projectile weapons of any kind would do. I regularly wash in the pond behind the bluff, as well as in the ocean, to reduce my scent. But there are still a disconcerting number of Peliocosaurs who stop, ostentatiously sniff the air, then stare at me before lumbering on. I have no way of killing them before they kill me. And I'm so paranoid, I've scattered the area around camp with shells, which sound like broken porcelain when stepped on. But I don't need defense. I need offense. I think I shall invent the spear while Hap is gone. An argument could be made for my inventing, perhaps, instead, the tent. But there's nothing to repurpose right now, except the scraps of carbon fiber panels from our busted shelter. At least it's warm out, small blessings, et cetera. It is not precisely that I want to be brave right now, but I want to do brave things. I want to be remembered as doing brave things. That's all. Or, at the very least, if I fuck up history, I want it to be in a way where I miraculously return and somebody buys me a shake and some eggs benedict. Day 9 Science, my eternal mistress, has not let me down. Grovel in wonder, all ye things without opposable thumbs. See what superior evolution can do. Managed to rip and braid kelp to form a rope. Used a squid for bait. The line took five or six hours. I tried twisting, but it wouldn't hold. This is what I get for dropping out of Eagle Scouts to join the quiz team. Whereas actually catching the fish took less than a minute. It bit almost through the line, of course. But because I had reflexively jerked backwards, it flew right out of the water before the line snapped. Maybe 12 pounds, pale green and black. Some kind of placoderm. I've included a drawing of it in the back of the book dated day nine, so I can ID it when I get back, including jaw morphology detail. Was so damn proud, reached for my pocket to text Hap and froze. Hand in the damp khaki. Anyway, now that I have rope, maybe I can wreak some kind of cooking sling. Lack of wood on this beach is maddening. All I can burn are these gangling ferns and pseudo ferns, and hardly enough at that. I'm responsible for deforesting half an acre already, just getting fuel for my pathetic fire. There are, worryingly, a lot of bones though, that have been making good substitutes for support struts and skewers, et cetera. But it's not the same. It takes forever to saw through one, and breaking them sends pieces everywhere like a Christmas cracker. Later. Hungry man placoderm dinner is very, very good. Flesh is greasy and juicy like mackerel. Why? Those haven't evolved yet. Paper idea. Emergence of fish flavors during speciation. If I catch a dozen more, I could get a good sample size. Except it is dawning on me that maybe I will never write another paper again. Will I? Where is the SNR team anyway? They know where we planned to go. And there is still, last I checked, one more temp box in the world. Although, the shielding was likely destroyed in 12C. And there aren't many other access points. Plus, who knows what else happened in the lab just as we were sent. Who knows what changed? Maybe they don't have our coordinates anymore. Maybe another eight, nine days till they show. Let us hope it takes me more than that to get eaten by a Pelicosaur. Like the big Demetrodon I can see prowling in packs of four and five. Their feet slap-slapping on the sand, tails clinking through my perimeter of shells. Listen, though, that spare, I can still see it. I'm telling you that despite the tide and the sand, I can still see it. I'm going to try to grab it as soon as Hap comes back. Not doing it alone. Day 11. Camp is in pieces. Stupid. My fault. Mia culpa. Left remains of dinner near remains of fire. And a good lot of monsters came in the middle of the night to scavenge. Sleeping bags soaked. Malled. Raining now. Fire no help. Can't keep it going under my bone and kelp shelter. Reminder, if I get back. Bone and kelp is the name of my new hipster pop-up store. Guess what I will sell?

Speaker 1:
[16:55] Science.

Speaker 3:
[16:58] Anyway, thought the rain would drive them off, but can see they're moving shapes through the water. Circling. The circle's steadily smaller. Some, very big, activating some ancient terror feedback routine in my lizard brain. How big did we think carnivorous synapses got here based on the fossil record? Wish I could look it up, but I'm thinking of that 2023 paper by El-Kadib et al. with the map. I have not gotten around to inventing Spear. Day 14. Please stop touching me when I sleep, Trilobugs. Day 16. Sonny and Hot. Haven't slept for days. Collected a pile of stones to keep near camp while I dry everything on top of the shelter. Watching it steam is pretty gratifying, though it's funny that I should feel so much less protected with no clothes or boots on. Like a t-shirt and cargo pants is any protection against the monsters at still pace, licking their teeth, waddling urgently away from my stones. What do they eat when they're not trying to eat me? Each other? Fish? Their short, mean teeth look like they could bite through any of those armored buggers. Should have insisted on a Kevlar suit or chainmail like we were saying. That nano-ceramic stuff from the chambers lab would have been terrific, if prohibitive. You know, there goes our funding for the next two years. But we could have rented, not bought, just one. Taken turns. The whole point of them being lightweight is that you can use them either driving or on land. Plus, Hap is around my size. Refusing to say was. Not yet. Not just yet. Update Two gorgonopsids fighting, or maybe humping, not twenty yards from camp, gathered my stuff and bolted for the fern forest, where at least I can hear things blundering behind me. Thing is, I can't bail completely. I need to get to the spare box and see if I can get anything from it. And to do that, I need a plan. And to do that, I need to be here on the beach. And to calm down. Holy scrotes, calm down. Calm down. Calm down. Back home. Oh, shit. I just realized I should have brought some rocks with me. Shit. I remember walking around campus late at night and being like, no one is going to mug me. No one is going to jump me. And then I'd hear a noise and panic. Stiffen. Gather my keys in my fist. Tough city, they tell you. Be ready to fight. But nothing ever happened. Here, I guarantee you, something is going to happen. Okay, listen. I'm going to get the box tomorrow. I'll go without sleep to make a plan. Yeah, it would be better if Happ was back. But if he doesn't come, I can't wait any longer. Already, I can only see the barest corner of the thing, despite the clear, warm water. Just thinking, I could never afford a tropical vacation back home. But look at me now, splashing, and sunbathing, and enjoying the local wildlife. Okay, plan. Day 17. you, Devonian. Day 18. To clarify, attacked by Demetrodon, I'm not too bitten up. Much, but maybe blood poisoning later. I don't know. Though covered in bruises and scrapes from falling while getting away, I don't know. I don't know. Fast for their size. Must remember that. Still no hab, obviously. Their teeth are serrated, sharp, and rooted in very thick gums, much like fine-tooth shark. So interesting. Wish, wish, wish had fallen so could have recorded afterwards. Not during. Everything hurts. I'm hungry. Can't even go get a trilobite for supper, because it took hours to get enough crappy plants to keep fire stoking overnight. Did clock the fucker in the face with a rock, though. And now it has just one eye. Fire burns high in the rich air. Good light. Later on need to make a ton more rope. Found an anchor point half buried in the sand. Unknown synapsid skull. Very solid and heavy. Can thread through orbitals or whatevs. Then chum way down the beach where there is that low point near the red coral. Current seems to be running that way. Plan to use a lot of sliced up squid and fish if I can catch some tonight. Needs to be fresh. Appealing. Not like me, who will hopefully not smell like anything. Therefore, minimal chemotaxis. Remember that Dinoflagellate article where they were like, These guys swim like a drunken undergrad following the smell of a hot dog cart. I don't want to be that hot dog cart. Just get in, get out. Note. Might need a harness or something for the box. Keep one hand free in case fish come back my way and are like, lunch? No, I am not lunch. Later. Napt a few hours by the fire. Woke up sore. But it's time to go. It's time to go. I have enough bait. Can I swim all the way down there? I don't know. One eye watching me from the bluff. Just far enough that I can tell it's the same one. Hap, if you get this, I hope you are okay. Please tell my family that I love them and that I fucking hate trilobites. Also, don't you dare use my funding if I don't make it. That money is mine. Go beg for your own. Later, later, survived, did not get box, More Tomorrow. Day 19. Took a day off, but I assume I'm still getting paid. And one eye came around again, refusing to be driven off by thrown rocks. It really is big. My first car was smaller than this thing. After I beat it around the head for a while, with one of the beach bones, I gave up and ran. And it ate all my leftovers and most of my sleeping bag. Thanks for destroying one of the few things left that actually impacts my survival, asshole. So much for my day off. I did manage to have a hot meal, though. More protein. I wonder if any of our freeze-dried food survived the storm. It's in one of those watertight pouches. And while I was down there, I did see a bunch of silvery-looking stuff, somewhat hassled by trilobites. Stop touching my stuff! Oh, yeah. The rescue attempt. Short version? I'm not a strong enough swimmer for the current. And the current is particularly significant right where we landed. I suspect that's why the box hasn't been completely covered yet, because it's just so aggressively full rinse cycle down there. Anyway, I got in, and even though the coast looked clear, I only managed a few rapid blinks before the current battered the breath out of me, and I had to resurface. Plus, my harness fell apart. More arguments for not dropping out of Eagle Scouts. Seems I can't make a knot to save my life. We never covered this in my PhD. Have to try again, though. No faith remains, none, that there's going to be a rescue. My bite wounds are turning red and puffy. Not trippy yet, or black, but just not right. And Hap still isn't back. Something must have happened to him. And he's got the first aid kit with the axonomycin powder that could knock an infection down. And there's that cockeyed monster following me, pacing. Day and night. Must be their usual strategy. Attack, wait till week, then go in for the kill when it's easiest, like a Komodo dragon. I can hear it out there even now, in the dark. Sometimes I lift a stone from my pile, and visibly heft it, hoping the monster is watching, and then pitch over arm as hard as I can. I haven't connected once. Drives it off for a while, though. If only there were a tree I could climb. Day 21. Oh, come on! One eye has been joined by a... mate? Unfair. I couldn't even get a date back home, and this thing has a hulking, scarred paramour with claws like bananas. Christ, I would kill for a banana right now. Actually, I would kill for carbs in general. Toast. I would kill my grandmother for a piece of toast. I can't wait any longer. I can't. I'm going to get that box, fix one of them, go back, and get help. Now, hear this, universe. I did not drag myself through the essays, interviews, training, exams, simulations, and interrogations just to crap out of this expedition now. I did not come so far to not be brave. Where, I want to know, would science be if there were not as few lightly gnawed, sun-burned explorers willing to spend university money on plunging into the unknown in search of knowledge? I have to get that box. And I'm going to. I made even more rope. I made a belt for ballast. My harness is strong enough to hold several kilograms of stones. I've been practicing holding my breath and swimming in the tide. There's a granite-lined cave about a mile away that might be okay for shielding. I can. And I will. Hap. See previous note. I don't know. Um, how to start. Personal health update. Bite wounds, mostly healed. No visible signs of infection. A miracle. Left some gnarly scars, though. Like the puckered kind you get from a steam berm. Coughing a lot. Supplies update. Thirteen packages of freeze-dried food. One one-and-a-half-liter canteen of cleanish water, half full. Five live trilobites in specimen sack. Weather update. Foggy. Well, let's just get it out of the way. Smoggy. In fact, almost sepia. Visibility close to zero. Occasional long streaks of light in the distance that could be missiles. Or worse. It's not too bad inside this bombed-out skyscraper. Although going up twenty flights of stairs nearly made me choke up a lung in the chemical haze. Guess I need to do more cardio. This isn't even the highest one. I'm surrounded by a forest of buildings so high their tops disappear into the mark. Going out foraging later. Or at least going to try to find somewhere to refill my canteen. Found an overturned tank earlier. But went back this afternoon and found a dead guy floating in it, his tear gas canisters emptying into the pool. I can get by for a while without food, but I'm paranoid about my water. A little paranoid also about date. Refurbished box seems to indicate today is the 14th, the day after we left. I am not prepared to say that whatever happened was our fault. And B was probably Hap. Not sure this journal will stand up in a court of law, though. I am definitely out of funding either way. Should have stayed where I was. Not at the end, but at beginning of things. Should have just made the best of it. At the start of the world. More Tomorrow.

Speaker 2:
[32:45] And that was More Tomorrow by Premee Mohamed. About this story, Premee said, This is meant to be an adventure story, but it's also a love letter to science and academia, in the sense that love hurts. May we all defeat our ocean currents and our stalking monsters with courage and hopefully arrive in a better future. One of my weaknesses as a writer is often wanting to set the scene a little too much. There's a certain chutzpah to starting a story well after the story starts, though. You're telling your reader, follow me, I'm in the middle of an adventure. You're going to have to keep up. I'm not waiting on you. Another author who used this style a lot was Jean Wolfe, and I see it now in Premee's writing as well. Premee starts this story on day five, whether you like it or not. We like Escape Pod stories to be fun and escapist, and if they're not fun or they end on a darker tone, we at least like A Sense of Satisfaction or Hope, and that's where the title of this story comes in. Going from a far, far past to a bombed out future and saying regretful things about how they should have made the best of things before can seem defeatist, except for those two words, More Tomorrow. Regardless of how shitty things are, the narrator will keep going and keep reporting, and sometimes hope just means getting up in the morning. It's amazing when a writer can turn the tone of a story by using just a few words. Premee is a master of this kind of wordplay. Her fast science-focused stream of consciousness can almost lose you in the rapid-fire information stream. Premee also writes more entertaining stream of consciousness than Faulkner did, but then she'll write something that makes you sit up and go, wait a minute. This was written for 2018 publication, and then we reprinted it in 2020, and considering what's been going on in the meantime, I find the words More Tomorrow to be especially comforting. Escape Pod is 100 percent audience-supported, and we count on your donations to keep the lights on and the servers humming. Head over to escapeartists.net/supportdashea to see all the available donation and subscription options, including Patreon, PayPal, Ko-fi, and Twitch. The thing that helps us the most, and the thing that will get you the best perks, is the Patreon link, by the way. You can also support us for free by rating or reviewing us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. Tell a friend. Whether you've been a dedicated fan of Escape Pod for years or just started following the cast, thanks for tuning in. Escape Pod is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Node Derivatives license. All other rights are reserved by our authors. Our music is by permission of Daikaiju. Learn more about them at daikaiju.org. That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from Richard Forti. Trilobites survived for a total of 300 million years, almost the whole duration of the Paleozoic era. Who are we Johnny-come-latelys to label them as either primitive or unsuccessful? Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week with more free science fiction. Stay safe, stay kind, and have fun.