Collapse by Nancy Kress (XPrize, 20171) was a recent group read choice of the Science Fiction Book Club FB group (they’ve just gone private so you’ll need to join to see the comments in that link), and the story is set in a future where a 2017 Flight 008, from Tokyo to San Francisco, passes through a wrinkle in space-time and lands in 2037. (Kress’s piece is one a number that share this initial premise.)
The story sees Matthew McAllister, the occupant of seat 12C, experience the first glimmerings of future shock as odd looking airport security staff move through the cabin in their fuchsia uniforms retinally scanning the passengers. The next morning, matters are worse:
By mid-morning, it was major news: The Flight From the Past. Lost for twenty years, no wreckage ever found. Interviews with the “miracle survivors,” bewildered or furious or terrified, frequently all three. Tearful reunions, mothers staring in disbelief at grown sons last seen as toddlers. Then the harder reunions: husbands facing wives now married to someone else, people whose elderly parents had died.
I’m the lucky one, McAllister thought, not without irony. He had no wife, children, parents, girlfriend; he’d always preferred it that way. He’d escaped the swarms of newspeople, government officials, and scientists tormenting the other Flight 008 passengers. He had cash in his briefcase from the currency exchange in Tokyo. He had hefty bank and brokerage accounts, and without instructions to the contrary, those went on forever. He had—
He had hysteria rising in his throat like bubbles of carbonation. He forced it down. Control. It was what would get him through, what had always gotten him through. He could do this.
McAllister then takes the maglev to Sacramento and spends the journey observing the changed world, the holo-TVs in the train, building roofs covered by green-white material he later learns is climate cooler, VR parlours, etc., but the thing that shocks him more than anything is a field of cucumbers. This plot element reappears at the end of the story (and also as section headings which give a time line of the exponential price rise of Dill Pickles: “2027: 40-Ounce jar of whole dill pickles, $7.99”)
The rest of the piece sees McAllister unable to access his apartment or funds (he is thrown out of the bank as an imposter), and when he tracks down his cousin, the beneficiary of his estate, he finds that he has died and the money has gone to a hostile wife. McAllister’s next move is a journey to see an old acquaintance called Erik, a cucumber farmer, and there we get a climactic SFnal data dump where we learn (a) McAllister was in Japan to sell a pollinating drone that was intended as a cure for Colony Collapse Disorder in bees and (b) that his device is been superseded by tiny FCO pollinating robots that no-one operates (FCO=fast, cheap, and out of control).
The story ends with McAllister staying the night and contemplating his future.
This is an interesting and readable enough piece, but it’s more futurology than story, and it fizzles out at the end.
** (Average). 3,350 words.
1. There have been at least a couple of these X-Prize digital anthologies. Another that I’m aware of is 2019’s Current Futures: A Sci-fi Ocean Anthology, edited by Ann VanderMeer. ●