Table of contents for 1.4/Forever alone drone in Arc

Madeline Ashby @madelineashby is a science fiction writer and strategic foresight consultant living in Toronto. Her debut novel, vN: The First Machine Dynasty is available from Angry Robot Books. Her work has been published in Nature, Flurb, BoingBoing, Creators Project, The Tomorrow Project, Tor.com and io9.com. In the future we'll be watching each other, but in the same way we watch television now: while doing something else. Simon Barraclough @EssBarraclough is the author of the Forward-shortlisted Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt, 2008), Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins, 2010), Neptune Blue (Salt, 2011) and is editor of Psycho Poetica (Sidekick Books, 2012). In the future we'll be watching Masterchef Enceladus. Simon Ings @simonings edits Arc. In the gaps he writes about the scientists who worked under Stalin. His latest novel…

A quarter to eleven pm Pacific Time on 12 September 2012: my wallet has been stolen. I realise this because I have also lost the key to my hotel room, and the woman behind the black granite counter at the Intercontinental San Francisco has asked me for photo ID. And I have none. The wallet contains my passport, credit cards and, most importantly, my Canadian Permanent Residency card. The shiny new white one I got just for this trip. The single piece of photo ID that guarantees my right to return home to Toronto. In this moment, everything I have feared most for the past six years comes to pass. Six years ago I was 22. I was in love with a Canadian. We watched the same anime. We rescued…

When Voyager 2 blasted off on 20 August 1977, I was just about old enough to grasp what it was, and where it was going. I could read and recite the names of the nine planets; imperious Jupiter, Voyager 2's first port of call, was my favourite. But I was still young enough to write out its point of origin in the Long Address format beloved by generations of children getting their first intimations of their place in the cosmos: Cape Canaveral, Florida, the United States of America, the Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, SPACE. What neither I, nor any but the most optimistic of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's engineers, would have predicted back then, was just how far up that celestial hierarchy the probe would travel. At…

Back in the 1970s, when I like many other hippies began to backpack in the Sierra Nevada of California (the greatest backpacking mountains on Earth, but that's a topic for a different essay), backpacks often weighed fifty pounds, and when I took mine off at the end of a day's walk and flexed my shoulders, it sometimes felt like I was going to float off into the sky. So all along there were people thinking things could be different – in a word, lighter. And as the years have passed, my aging cohort has gotten too brittle to carry the old weights happily, while at the same time younger hikers have been attempting continent-crossing feats that have transformed backpacking from a hippie ramble into a postmodern extreme sport. These long-distance…

London. A Starbucks in the heart of the City. An odd meeting place for a faction of leftist demonstrators. But the independent tea house where these veterans of the Occupy movement had originally planned to congregate has been closed down, repossession notices plastered across its darkened windows. Perhaps the repossession is oblique retaliation for the attempt, exactly a year ago, to take back a small piece of the City. Protestors had pledged to set up camp in Paternoster Square, a small patch of land that serves as a courtyard to the London Stock Exchange, a stone's throw from St Paul's Cathedral. But they found it cordoned off, its perimeter secured by guards. Mitsubishi Estate Co., the square's owner, had taken out a court injunction that made uninvited entry a criminal…

It started on a rainy January day two years ago. An international group of hackers and activists met in a former fish factory by Reykjavik harbour, and began mapping the biggest threats to the free flow of information online, now and in the future. We worked day and night for two weeks, driven by an understanding that information is the prerequisite for enlightenment, that a people without information is a people without freedom. The last night, five of us sat in a hot, stinky hotel room, running off the final draft. Punchy with sleep deprivation and realising the importance of the document we had in front of us, we all suddenly broke into song: “First we got the bomb, and that was good, 'cause we love peace and motherhood,” we…