Free Nature Futures 2 by Colin Sullivan Page B

Empire, Smithik Transport ships explore the skies.
    *   *   *
    â€œThere it is,” Smithik shouts. A grey wall rises out of the Reef, which covers what was once the land of South America. And above the Stone Table rises The Tower.
    I follow the bulk of the structure. It is too much. It is a mountain in the distance that tapers off into a needle that pierces the clouds. And keeps going.
    â€œThis is what the Reef was for,” Smithik yells into my ear. His eyes gleam.
    *   *   *
    Over some strong Blue Mountain coffee, back inside where it was warm, Smithik tells me: “Pre-Reef scientists had a theory called panspermia: they believed life on Earth was caused by small organisms aboard comets thrown from collisions in other solar systems crashed down to seed life here, and maybe elsewhere.
    â€œSo a follow up infection, that’s not so hard to believe, yeah?”
    I nodded and kept notes. I’d been paid to document his first trip to actually step onto Stone Table since Smithik’s adventurers had found it and reported back.
    *   *   *
    We land on the massive Reef-grown artificial stone structure and moor the airship. The joint Japanese and Hawaiian expedition group, and the Icelandic scientists who’d beaten them there, greet us.
    Pictures are taken with the excited scientists and the man who had funded the first expedition to Stone Table, found when Caribbean telescopes had spotted the slowly self-assembling tower to space.
    â€œWe can’t say if the Reef is designed to create The Tower, programmed by some distant intelligence,” the scientists tell Smithik as I scribble. “It could just be the way the Reef reproduces, creating a way to fling its spores back into space.”
    â€œBut the Stone Table, and the grooves in The Tower, they’ll allow us to climb it with a machine into space? Doesn’t that prove it’s made for intelligence?” Smithik asks.
    â€œSometimes nature builds something something else can use. Maybe it’s hoping we’ll spread Reef spore as we use this to get into space.”
    â€œAs if we were bees,” Smithik nods.
    *   *   *
    Late in the night I stand with Smithik at the base of The Tower, looking up at the night sky.
    â€œPre-Reef men once walked on the Moon,” he says.
    â€œAnd you think we’ll go back?”
    â€œWhether we’re part of some galactic ecosystem that the Reef is just a spore of, or whether something designed it, the more we explore out there the more we’ll understand what happened down here.”
    *   *   *
    The great adventurer died that night. But his spirit lives on in the Smithik Ascender, a plan by the international scientists to build a steam-powered climber that will ascend The Tower to space.
    What we will find, no one knows.
    Tobias Buckell was born in the Caribbean but now lives in Ohio. His novels and more than 50 short stories have been translated into 17 languages and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com .

A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss
    Steve Carper
    On its slowest day, Hong Kong International Airport fed tens of thousands of bodies into the jets bearing the insignia of 60 different airlines. Today, the bodies jostled one another in lines that boiled and roiled and dissolved and reformed as loved ones gave one another parting kisses. Then kissed friends, children, strangers, staff, crew, baggage handlers, taxi drivers and police, who kept threatening them with their clubs. The flu had arrived and they were the first wave out of the infected area.
    Flu .
    In Chinese and English the word jumped at them, from newspaper headlines to the captioning of CNN International and SkyNet to the announcement tickers above every bank of screens. They were heading across the