Fan Fiction

By johnnedwill

Leah pushed the button on the intercom, then stood back. The grey stone Edinburgh tenement towered above her, blocking out the afternoon sun and casting the street into premature twilight. There was a buzzing from the intercom speaker, and a distorted voice squawked out: "Yes?"

"Is that Mister Stross?" Leah leaned closer to the speaker grille, hoping that would make it easier for her to hear the response.

"Yes. Who is it?"

"Umm - my name's Leah Marks. I've come here to see you."

"Marks?" Even the bad quality of the intercom speaker couldn't hide the hesitancy in the reply. "I'm not sure - ."

"The contest!" Leah blurted out. "I'm the winner of the contest at the literary fair in - !"

"Ah." There was silence. As Leah waited nervously for some - any form of acknowledgement, she felt her mouth turn dry. Then the intercom squawked again. "I remember. You're early."

"I'm sorry. But it's cold out here, and i couldn't spend any longer in that coffee shop and - "

Some mechanism hidden in the tenement's door buzzed and clicked. "That's alright. Come on up. I'm in flat 3A."

"Flat 3A! Thank you!" Leah pushed the door open. On the other side was a narrow hallway, its brickwork painted white. At the end of the hallway, a narrow wooden staircase led upwards. If anything, it felt colder in here than it did in the street outside.

No lift. Leah groaned inwardly. I hope it isn't too far up those stairs.

Unfortunately, it was. By the time Leah reached the third floor, the muscles in her calves were a mass of agonised flesh. The walk up the hill from the station, then along the cobbles of the Royal Mile had been bad enough. She had thought that the wait in the coffee shop would have been enough to recover; but, as far as her legs were concerned, this was the last straw. As Leah waited for someone to come to the door of flat 3A, she rubbed her legs.

"Hang on!" The door opened, and a shaven-headed man peered out at her through a pair of oval glasses. "Miss Marks?"

Leah straightened up. "That's me. Hi. Hello. Sorry. I'm just a bit ... ow." She reached down to rub her calves again.

"Charles Stross. Never met a famous author before?" The man smiled at her.

"Actually, I met you at the fair that time. No, I'm just a bit sore. Edinburgh's a bit of a climb."

"Well, the old town is." The man stood to one side. "Come on in." Leah took up his invitation.

The apartment was cosily warm. Bookshelves lined the walls of the lounge. A pair of sofas had been arranged to form a sort of a conversation pit. Narrow windows looked out at the building on the other side of the street.

"So, Mister Stross, this is what a famous author's place looks like?"

"I'll tell you if I ever meet one," the shaven-headed man replied. "Did you say we've met before?"

"Yes. It was at the literary fair, at a panel on space opera. You answered a couple of my questions."

Mister Stross squinted at his visitor. "Were you the person who asked me about the Great Filter?"

"That's right!" Leah beamed, pleased that her contribution to the discussion has made an impression. "And then I won a prize in the raffle. To come and meet you."

"Well, if that's the case Miss Marks - "

"Call me Leah."

" - Leah, then would you like some tea?"

"Please, Mister Stross."

"If I can call you Leah, then you can call me Charles." Stross went into the apartment's kitchen. There was the sound of running water, followed by the click of a switch and the clatter of tea things being moved around. "How do you take it?"

"Milk please. No sugar."

Leah took advantage of her host's absence to look around the lounge. The shelves were full of books - none of written by Mister Stross. Instead, they were a collection of pharmaceutical manuals, computer programming textbooks and treatises on physics. Indeed, the only concession to Stross's fame as an author was a display of awards that looked like 1930s-style rocket ships.

"I only put those out for visitors."

Leah jumped. Stross was standing behind her, holding a tea tray laden with mugs, a teapot, a plate of assorted biscuits and a fruitcake.

"Now, shall I be mother?" The author gestured towards the pair of sofas.

"Thank you." Leah waited for her idol to sit down, then sat on the sofa opposite him.

Stross handed her a mug. "Help yourself to cake."

Leah took a chocolate digestive from the plate. "Thank you."

"Now - what would you like to talk about? Usually my fans come prepared. Questions about my books. Where I get my ideas from. That sort of thing." Stross sat back in his seat, visibly relaxing. "You'd be surprised the number of times a chat has turned into an interview on somebody's blog."

Leah swallowed the last crumbs from her biscuit. "I do have something I'd like to ask you."

"Oh?"

"It's not a question, though, It's more of a favour."

Charles frowned at her. "Miss Marks, I don't usually do favours for people I've only just met."

Leah reached into her satchel and pulled out a manila folder. "I'd like you to read something of mine."

"My agent doesn't like me doing that. He doesn't want me being sued by somebody over copyright."

"Oh." Leah tried to keep the disappointment out of her response. "Well, I thought that because it was a story based on one of yours, that you might give me some feedback."

"Fan fiction." Stross's response was flat, emotionless. "That doesn't make it any better. If anything, it makes things worse."

"I understand." Leah sighed, then had an idea. "What if you were to just give me some help with the science in it? See if I've got it right?"

"I'm not sure ... ."

"Please?"

Charles Stross closed his eyes, then took a deep breath. "Alright. I'll take a look. But - you have to promise me that you will not try to sue me if anything in your story ends up in one of mine."

Leah raised her right hand in the Girl Guide salute. "I promise."

"Alright. Let me have a look."

Leah handed over the folder. Stross took a sheaf of paper out from the folded cardboard and started to leaf through it. Leah sat in silence as the author read through her story. It took him fifteen minutes - a quarter of an hour of agonising silence. Then he put the sheaf of paper onto the table in front of him. "It doesn't work."

"I'm sorry?" Leah blinked in surprise.

"It doesn't work," Stross repeated. "Your FTL drive. Physics doesn't work that way. Not in real life, and not in my stories either."

"So, can you tell me what does work?" Leah looked hopefully at him.

Charles thought for a minute. "How much do you know about the principles of general relativity?"

Leah shook her head. "Not a lot. Only what I've read on Wikipedia."

"That's not helpful. Perhaps I could give you a demonstration? That might be a good start."

"A demonstration?" Leah stared at her host.

Stross gave her a mischievous grin. "Yes. A demonstration."

"You have a spaceship?"

"Why not come and see for yourself." Stross stood up and headed for the door next to the kitchen. "I mean it."

Leah followed her host into a bedroom. She was enough of a fan to know that Stross was married, but she had not expected that she would get to see his bedroom. "Are you sure? What'll your wife say if she finds out I've been in here?"

Stross paused, his hand on the handle of a white-painted louvred door. "Feorag won't mind. It's not like we're going to get up to anything funny."

"Oh." Leah did not feel reassured by his reply.

"Now, what do you think?" Charles flung open the louvred door, revealing a cupboard full of clothes.

"It looks like a wardrobe."

Charles smiled. "Exactly. That's what we usually use this as. A wardrobe. There's not a lot of space in these old tenement blocks. But." He closed the door, then opened it again. Instead of the clothes hanging neatly from metal rails and the shoes lined up on racks, Leah saw a crescent Earth suspended in a black sky above a dusty grey plain.

She gasped.

"It is quite a view," Charles said. He stepped through the cupboard door.

Leah didn't remember following him through, but she must have done. When she became aware of her surroundings again, she was standing on a metallic platform about five metres in diameter. Two sun loungers and a colourful beach umbrella had been arranged next to each other on the platform. A book and a pair of reading glasses lay on the floor between the loungers. "How - ?" she began.

"Wormholes."

"Leah stepped forward to take a better look at her surroundings. Something transparent stopped at the edge of the platform.

"And transparent aluminium," Stross added.

Leah turned to stare at the author. She could see behind him an ordinary doorframe, suspended in space and leading back to the Edinburgh flat. "When you said you would give me a demonstration, I wasn't expecting something like this."

Stross returned Leah's stare. "As I was saying, FTL travel is impossible. I don't allow it in my stories any more. The problem is that any form of FTL travel has a number of fatal flaws. First, they require impossibly huge amounts of energy, as well as quantities of handwavium and unobtainium. But, even if you could get hold of those, there is a real show-stopper. Any FTL drive that can exist under physics as we currently know it is effectively a time machine. And the universe hates time machines."

Leah felt the need to sit down. She pulled over one of the sun loungers and lowered herself onto it. "And time travel is impossible?"

"Most definitely impossible." Charles sat down on the other sun lounger. "If you had done more than just look at Wikipedia, then I could be a bit more technical. But for now you will just have to accept that any use of a time machine would cause the universe as we know it to cease to exist. In fact, it would mean that our universe would never have existed. So, because the universe is still here, time machines can't work."

"What about your wormhole?" Leah gestured towards the door back to Edinburgh. "Doesn't that cause any trouble?"

"Not in any way that matters."

A thought occurred to Leah. "But you can't just create a wormhole, can you? I mean, I remember what you wrote about them in the Eschaton books, and Accelerando and Glasshouse. They need a lot of energy. Negative energy."

"When you have access to a particle accelerator that can generate the equivalent of the Big Bang, a lot of things become possible."

"And you have one of those?"

"I have access to one. Yes. There are some perks to being a member of a Type Two Kardashev society."

"And I take it that this wormhole isn't FTL either?"

Charles laughed and shook his head. "No. Wormholes work at just slightly less than the speed of light. Not much less, but enough to make a difference. Of course, due to time dilation wormhole travellers do accrue a time debt. So long as the universe doesn't object, nobody worries."

Leah settled back on the sun lounger and stared up at the blue and white crescent of the Earth and let Stross's words flow around her without fully understanding them ... .

When Feorag returned to the flat, she noticed the bedroom wardrobe door was open. She stepped through and into the bubble on the lunar surface. "How did your session with that prizewinner go?"

Charles looked up from the novel he was reading in the Earthlight. "Leah Marks? She's been and gone. I might have given her a severe case of culture shock, but I'm sure she'll recover."

"You didn't?" Feorag glared at her husband. "You bloody did! You idiot! What if she tells somebody about what happened today? We could be in big trouble."

Charles Stross shrugged. "She won't. I mean, I think she's one of the sensible ones. Quite a promising attitude. She won't talk."

Feorag resisted the urge to slap her husband's face. "But what if she does talk?"

Charles smiled. "Don't worry. Everyone knows she writes fan fiction."