Faster Now

A nowt stole my girlfriend practically right out of my arms.

It happened in public, in front of about fifty thousand people. But I don't mean to make too much of it. The humiliation and indignation wasn't much greater than what any baseline citizen feels when a nowt scores a good job or some other prize that would, in different circumstances, have gone to the average guy. Us basals have all gotten plenty used to that feeling.

I had taken Emma to Dodger Stadium that hot August day, to see the Dodgers play the Port-au-Prince Creoles. Emma and I were just getting serious, talking about moving in together, maybe into one of those new waterfront arcologies in Century City. I had a decent job with the state's Invasive Plant Commandos. Plenty of employment security. Currently we were hellbent on extirpating mutant kangaroo thorn, six-foot-high tangled barricades with poisonous prickers that seemed to spring up overnight. Emma taught several phys-ed-type MOOCs under the USC umbrella, such as "Introduction to Zero-Gravity Isometrics" and "Tantric Yoga for Cyborg Halflings." Between us, we had enough income to qualify for a three-room condo with a lovely view of the waves lapping at the pillars of ultra-elevated, quake-reinforced Route 405.

Emma might not have gotten a bargain with me, but I'd won the lottery with her. True, I was pretty buff from my intensely physical job, but certainly not movie avatar handsome. "Craggy" was the best I could do. Emma, however, was gorgeous and, if not an intellectual along the lines of Secretary of State Malia Obama, certainly possessed of a charming and vibrant personality.

So I really wanted to show her a good time at the game. Emma loved all sports, but particularly baseball. I had sprung for two tickets at $485 apiece. They were way out behind the left-field wall, but that was the best I could do. Prices had skyrocketed with the Dodgers heading for a pennant. One good thing about the seats: we were primed to catch any home run ball that entered the stands. I'd even brought along my old childhood glove, made of vat-grown oryx hide.

There we were, in our stilskin vests against the heat, drinking overpriced beer, eating nutria hotdogs and Pad Thai kettlecorn, yelling at the bottom of the fifth, with Hatsuto Ramirez coming up to bat, when I noticed a guy casually ambling through the stands toward our row, in no hurry, whistling a tune.

He was dressed just like anyone else: hemp-cloth cargo shorts, Young&United henley shirt, smart Tevas. But I could tell instantly he was a nowt. How, I don't know. How does anyone recognize a now-tweaker? Some luminous, numinous aura of self-assurance clung to the guy, a kind of lithe and easy way of moving, as if the universe obligingly cleaved before and rezipped behind him.

Being near a nowt always made me apprehensive, so I tried to ignore him. I wondered why he wasn't up in one of the luxury suites where his kind generally congregated. Emma was so focused on the game she hadn't seen him yet. The announcer relayed the ump's call of a strike on Ramirez.

Incredibly, the nowt had actually entered our row and was sidling elegantly passed the knees of all the seated fans as if those knees were buttered, heading directly toward us.

The crack of bat against ball sounded.

The nowt, only a mildly handsome guy, stood before us. He bowed low and elegantly to Emma, said, "For you, beautiful," then, without unlocking his gaze from Emma's astonished eyes, stuck his arm up behind his back just in time to catch the home run ball that Ramirez had belted our way. I could hear by the way it socked his flesh it must have stung, but he never even flinched.

Of course the crowd went wild. The next thing I knew, Emma and the stranger had been caught by the Kiss Cam and were displayed bigger than life on screens around the stadium. The crowd bellowed for a kiss. The nowt obliged by sweeping Emma up.

When he released her, she seemed stunned. So was I.

"Allow me to introduce myself. Boffo Blinkoff. May I have the pleasure of your company in my skybox?"

Before I could even close my gaping mouth, Emma and Boffo were ascending the stairs. He tossed and caught the home run ball in several fancy ways as they walked. The whole kidnapping—from my sighting of Boffo Blinkoff, to his catching the ball, to Kiss Cam fame, to seeing him lead Emma off—had taken approximately ninety seconds. I never saw her again.

Some decades ago, neuroscientists discovered through various perceptual experiments that the moment of nowness we all carry in our heads—the supposed crystalline pinpoint of cognitive focus that moves inexorably down our personal timeline from one millisecond to the next—is actually a blobby composite of everything we have experienced in the past fifteen seconds.

Instead of being a tightly delimited laser dot of attention, normal consciousness is really more like a kludgy, slowly opening window that we keep picking up and laying down on the actual doings of the present, smearing the scene with encumbrances of the immediate past.

Naturally, when brain science got sophisticated enough, somebody decided to hack this. Thus were born the now-tweakers, or nowts.

Thanks to very expensive nanosurgery (ten million dollars is the basement rate) and a regular regimen of supportive drugs, nowts possess pinpoint consciousness: the very first humans to do so.

The consequent powers of this hack are astonishing. Freed of those draggy fifteen seconds, a nowt is short-term proleptic: they're able to anticipate the future to some definite degree, and act on their forecasts. Also, they can read people and situations more deeply and accurately than the rest of us. You know how poker players talk about "tells," the tics and mannerisms by which amateurs reveal themselves? Well, to a nowt, every person and the inanimate universe itself constantly radiates tells. The nowts lost the standard human defect of "inattentional blindness," that flaw of human perception whereby attention paid to one aspect of a situation blinds you to other things happening right under your nose.

As you might expect, the now-tweakers cut a hot swath through society and business and entertainment and the arts. They are effortless adepts and leaders at whatever they do. They really kill at stock trading. One field they never entered, however, is politics, which is probably just as well for the welfare of basal humanity. The one downside of nowt enhancement is borderline sociopathy; public service, with its sacrifices, really doesn't beckon such a personality.

The nowts have mostly succeeded in reining in those tendencies, although there have been a few spectacular cases. But it's not as if baseline humans can't be socipaths too. The nowts even give themselves goofy adopted names, like Boffo Blinkoff, to humanize themselves.

Rumors of the first nowt surgery on embryos, producing a generation of cuckoos, intermittently stirs public anxiety. But we baseline humans mostly go about our affairs as if we weren't already obsolescent.

The Viper Room had a big marquee layered with squishy synbio pixels advertising the fortieth anniversary of the club. I passed by the churning trendy crowd outside, and headed for Nowt So Queer, a few doors down.

The club boasted a mixed patronage of basals and nowts, the former basking in the glory of the latter, seeking hookups, patronage, or hot tips on various markets and trends. I had no interest in any of that, or in the strange nowt music either, which always seemed half a beat ahead. Instead, I went there as many nights as I could afford, hoping to see Emma again.

This night, instead, I found myself going home with a nowt.

She called herself Dulce Decorum. Angling sinuously up to me at the bar, she introduced herself and said, "Let me buy a drink for one of the Commandos protecting us from New Zealand mudsnails and other horrors."

I had showered off the grime of my occupation and wore civilian clothes. But some imperceptible array of scratches must have given her uncanny Holmesian nowt radar sufficient clues.

I'd always felt angsty around nowts. Apparently, that feeling did not extend to those buying me drinks. With her tight soft cap of implanted white pin-feathers, her animated, captivating, slightly scary expression, like that of a tiger on the prowl, and her body, barely concealed in a zizzing eelskin catsuit, Dulce Decorum struck me as highly desirable, nowt or not.

I confirmed my occupation to her, told her my name, and asked what she did.

"I stage LARPs. Did you ever play 'Alien Pillow Fight?' That was one of mine."

"I really don't enjoy that kinda thing—as a rule. I get enough action in my job."

She smiled. "Well, I'm working on a blistering one now. Did you realize that next year is the eightieth anniversary of the film Them!…?"

I felt stupid even for a basal. "I don't know it."

"Giant ants in LA? It's a classic! Oh, well, you've got to watch it some time."

A rowdy bunch of muscled and smart-inked baseline guys wearing wifebeaters and colorful board shorts were making evil noises across the room. I recognized them as Kiribati refugee gangbangers, the "Atoll Assholes," always ill-tempered from the sinking of their country and usually spoiling for a fight.

Dulce paid no apparent heed to the Kiribati guys. "Hey, brainstorm! We can stream Them! at my place. Finish your drink in the next five seconds, then bend down and tie your shoe."

"What?"

"Too late for the drink now! Tie your blistering shoe!"

I obediently bent over, still confused, and a beer bottle soared through the space where my head had been, crashing into a wall of expensive liquor.

Dulce Decorum grabbed my hand and tugged.

"Follow my lead!"

No football player could have duplicated Dulce's moves. The way she wove us through the screaming mob of club patrons, it seemed as if we were the only people in the room. We dodged elbows, punches, kicks, tackles and flying bodies and were out on the street before the first cop siren had even sounded.

True to her word, Dulce showed me the old sci-fi film that very night.

Sex with a nowt was incredible. She seemed to anticipate everything I wanted before I even knew that I wanted it. After we were done, I was struck by a sudden bolt of sadness. If this was what Emma was experiencing with Boffo, there was no way she was ever coming back to me.

So I cast my lot fully with Dulce Decorum. We spent many, many happy hours together over the next few weeks. And then, one night, she asked me to sneak her into my work. Just out of curiosity, like.

My team of Invasive Species Commandos were currently dealing with a colony of GMO Chinese Mitten Crabs. These chitinous bastards, engineered big and meaty, had escaped from an aquaculture farm up the coast and established themselves in Malibu. Not only did they like to nip at surfers and bathers and beach walkers, but, being burrowers, they were undermining the whole ocean margin of the park. We had the difficult task of eradicating them without poisoning the landscape. Believe me, it was pure horrorshow crawling into their tunnels with mini-flamethrower in hand. Progress was excruciatingly slow. But in compensation, the crew had some superb impromptu dinners. Melted butter suited the charred crabmeat perfectly!

The colony had been fenced off from the public. Not that citizens needed much convincing to stay away.

Around midnight, a little drunk, I bypassed the security system with my phone, opened the gate and let Dulce in. In a stage whisper she said, "I just want to see where they live."

I led her to a burrow entrance. She kneeled down and crawled half in.

"Hey, don't! They're not too active at night, but you never know—"

Dulce emerged. She was zipping closed her Gucci waist-pack.

I was going to ask about the contents of the waist- pack, but Dulce kissed me hard. I succumbed, and that was the end of our night.

You can probably guess the ultimate outcome of that evening, if you've been following current events at all.

One day three months later, a big gang of LARPers showed up in Malibu outside the fence of the proscribed area. An excitable crowd of young and old, they were all dressed in 1950s fashions and carried an assortment of simple weapons. Dulce Decorum led the mob.

It was a Saturday, and me and my team were not at work.

Right on a schedule known only to Dulce, gigantic Chinese Mitten Crabs erupted from the soil. Big as Winnebagos, mean as bee-stung grizzlies, they'd been incubating ever since Dulce had introduced a nano-laced growth factor bait into their burrow. A bit of treachery I had unwittingly enabled.

The scuttling crabs took down the chainlink fence as if it were made of toothpicks. The LARPers, taken aback but still eager, began to engage them with rifles and axes and nunchuks and machetes. Several heads and many limbs were summarily snipped off. Dulce's personal head and limbs weren't among the casualties; she avoided every errant pincer with consummate stochastic grace.

By the time I arrived with the other first responders, the battle was pretty much over, with the giant crabs—there had been only seven in all, but it had seemed like ten times that number—twitching like the raw material of a luau.

Dulce had been identified as the organizer of the slaughter, and was already in handcuffs when I caught up with her. She turned a manic gaze on me and said, "It's only a short stint in the jug, lover! I can do it standing on my head. And when I get out, my rep is made! Wait for me!"

I kept my job by the skin of my teeth. The law took into account my ignorance of Dulce's schemes, and the humiliating fact that any basal stood little chance of outwitting a determined nowt.

Currently I don't have a girlfriend. I vacillate between trying for someone like Emma or someone like Dulce. A woman named Laura on my squad wants to hook up with me in a big way. We could go on together for a long time, squooshing bugs and raising a family.

But I hear through the grapevine that Dulce plans to LARP Godzilla when she gets out of jail next year.

This dispatch is part of Terraform, our new online home for future fiction.