Without remains on which to base an investigation, it was theoretically true that the proposed extinction of the human race (or near extinction, as she continued to be human and alive, to the best of her self-understanding) was unproven. More to the point, if a hundred years had passed, perhaps in that hundred years, humankind simply left the planet.
Frankly, a century wasn’t long enough for that to be very likely, not for the kind of technological advancements that would have been necessary to relocate a significant portion of the species off-world. Also, there would have surely been terrestrial evidence of that momentous leap forward. Her only discovery that remotely met such criteria was the Noot bars.
That didn’t seem like enough.
“While you were away,” she said to herself, “we invented interstellar travel and this gelatinous rectangle. Sorry about the taste.”
Ananda was staring at a whiteboard in one of the conference rooms in the electronics building. She had been spending most of her time there because it was the only part of the campus she’d been able to power.
That became especially important during the snowstorm.
None of the buildings had heat, and a fire was largely out of the question, both because of a dearth of material available to burn and an active concern that if she tried, she’d burn down the campus. Yet heat was obviously a concern, with the impending winter cold. Plus, Ananda was still wearing her Monday clothes, after about three weeks. (Or, a hundred years and three weeks.) And they were clothes meant to be adequate for springtime, not winter.
She considered visiting her apartment for a change of clothing until it occurred to her that after a hundred years, it probably wasn’t her apartment any longer. That got her to wondering if she’d been reported as missing and if there had been a funeral for her. Did all her belongings go to Luke and Jakob? Thinking of her husband and son—and indeed the entire train of thought that led there—left her unbearably sad.
It might have been a sane decision to go scrounging for clothes in one of the nearby stores, or one of the thousands of apartments in the area, but Kendall Square had essentially nothing in the way of clothing shops, and the risk/reward of making that much noise to break into an apartment that might have clothes was too great for her to seriously consider.
Still, clothes worn for that long were bound to develop a stench, and even if she couldn’t smell it herself, the wolves surely could. So she washed them every couple of days, with dishwasher detergent, and wrapped herself up in a blanket until they were dry.
So, without winter clothes or any way of safely using fire for warmth, during the storm, she stayed where there was power. The electricity kept the space heaters on.
The storm lasted two days, and for the entire time it dumped snow on the campus, Ananda confined herself to a three-room space with adjoining doors that was closed off from the hallway. A lot of her time was spent on the radio, listening for other signs of life. Paul was still silent—with the snow, she just assumed the worst. The coywolves continued to lodge protests about the radio, but they had proven incapable of getting through the door, so she opted to ignore them.
Her perseverance was not rewarded. Despite several instances when she thought she might have heard something humanlike over the air, it never panned out.
If there was anyone else alive out there, they weren’t using a radio.
The rest of Ananda’s time was spent staring at the whiteboard, trying to work out (1) what she definitely knew, (2) what she didn’t know but could figure out, and (3) what she didn’t know and probably could not figure out.
The observation about the batteries was a key one.
Batteries had a shelf life after which they were no longer of any use. The shelf life of an unused battery undoubtedly varied from battery to battery, and, for instance, if it was alkaline or lithium or something else, but a longer-lasting-and-yet-dead battery might provide her with an “at least” threshold.
It was already clear that whatever had happened to all of the people, it hadn’t happened recently. It also hadn’t happened on the Tuesday that Ananda thought she was waking up to, because there was clear evidence of non-recent anthropogenic change in the area: The downed building and army blockade, the sulfur dioxide injected into the atmosphere, and the Noot bars were all good examples of this. In short, whatever happened was neither recent nor too far in the past.
Thus, if she knew that the shelf life of the car battery Paul complained about was thirty years, then she could say with some measure of confidence that what happened to everyone happened at least thirty years ago.
It was a start.
2
One of the items in the don’t know, can probably figure out category was What happened between the Monday when all was normal in Ananda’s life and the day everyone died and/or vanished?
There would be records. Granted, most of those records would have been archived for posterity on computers, but generally, notes were kept on scratch paper. Or at least they had been when Ananda performed sundry acts of science; possibly, her colleagues advanced entirely to paper-free handheld devices in the intervening years. She doubted it, but it was possible.
Those records, if they existed, were sitting in offices throughout the MIT campus. That was the good news. The bad news was, there was no telling which offices contained anything useful or how to recognize something as being useful. Ananda’s own notes, when she took them, were basically informative only to her . . . and pretty much unreadable to anyone else. She suspected it was the same for everyone.
But it was worth trying. If she collected all the notes in one place and took the time to go through them, she might be able to figure out what some of them meant.
This was how she discovered that the world still had people as of 2039; that was the year they broke the two-degree barrier.
She got this out of an early excavation of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.
Since the department was quite large—all of the MIT departments were—she concentrated first on the climate science labs. It seemed a reasonable place to begin, given the red sunsets.
She didn’t expect to find answers to the big question; surely no matter how bad things had gotten with the environment, climate change couldn’t be responsible for this particular mass extinction of the human race. But maybe if she knew where things had left off prior to the extinction event, she’d have a better handle on what to expect from the weather going forward. There had already been a severe hailstorm and a massive blizzard, and if she had the time of year right, it wasn’t even winter yet.
The climate lab had a gigantic, entirely outdated printer that recorded data from a weather satellite week by week. The paper had spilled over from the bin and onto the floor long ago. That the climate science department (of all departments!) employed this outdated, wasteful dead-tree technology to keep (now-deceased) members of the human race up to date on how quickly they’re killing the planet was a delicious bit of irony.
The previously printed sheets—the ones not amassed on the floor—were stacked neatly at a desk on the other side of the room and marked up with a pen. The last date on the last sheet on the table was from 2039.
The numbers circled on that last sheet—by some long-dead climate specialist—along with the notes in the margin, indicated these numbers meant that the two-degree barrier had been crossed.
Ananda wasn’t an expert in climatology, but she knew enough to be scared. For the sake of present-day energy needs, the human race was—or had been—heading into a future of extreme privation. That the same human race did end up ceasing to exist, but for an entirely different (unknown) reason, was another great irony. Likewise, that extinction probably meant the conditions now weren’t as bad as they could have been.
Probably.
She was living in the future, but only a tiny part of it. She had no way to assess the global changes, but as bad as the storms were, the local weath
er wasn’t living up to worst-case scenario expectations so far. Conditions might be a good deal worse elsewhere.
One thing she’d come to appreciate over the past few weeks, alone in a future that had forgotten about the human race, was that without an energy source, the planet was entirely too hostile. At the same time, the aggressive acquisition of energy was what may have made it so hostile in the first place.
This was the third great irony.
3
The weird object at the construction site was currently in the don’t know and probably can’t figure out category, along with Ananda’s hundred-year leap forward. It wasn’t a fair category for either of them; that column really existed for the items she couldn’t even get her mind around when working on how to figure them out. Once she did, she supposed she’d have to rename the category.
She wasn’t sure she should even go near the object. There was ample evidence a lot of people had decided that that was a bad idea before they died and/or left the planet (or whatever). It could be radioactive; there was equipment at the scene to measure radiation, so she could use that to check . . . except it required electricity and she didn’t have a power cord that long.
To even begin to understand the device, she needed a better idea of what it did, if indeed it did anything at all. The kid she saw the first night who had been hitting it with a stick seemed to have some information in that regard, but he never came back and she hadn’t gone looking for him.
Ananda settled on observing the object from afar, a practice she took up before the blizzard, suspended briefly during it, and resumed as soon as the storm was over. This involved making it to the roof of the computer science building, which was next to the one she’d claimed as her own. It was taller and had a better angle on the site, and she had a telescope.
The hope was that by checking on the anomalous object at different times of day and night, she might see it do something that would provide an insight as to its function.
On a couple of occasions—both late at night, when such a performance was more visible—the odd light show that first drew her attention to the scene occurred again. On neither occasion did it last for long; both events lasted perhaps a half an hour each.
It didn’t tell her anything new. The second time, she thought she saw a figure standing nearby, but that was probably a trick of the shadows. No one was hitting it with a stick again, certainly.
Eventually, Ananda had to admit that the only way to gain greater knowledge about the device was to get close enough to examine it. She’d already seen a human get that close and not die instantly, which was her minimum safety requirement. She’d also seen plenty of wildlife walking around near the device, and while deer and whatnot didn’t have any kind of built-in radiation detectors, it clearly passed their okay/not okay threshold.
There was even a way to reach the scene with hardly any risk: the tunnels.
In addition to the aboveground corridors linking most of the MIT buildings, there was a more comprehensive set of underground tunnels that connected very nearly the entire campus. Conveniently, getting to them meant passing through a door and going down a flight of stairs—and the wolves couldn’t open doors.
She’d been using the tunnels only sparingly, because there was no light down there and her mammalian brain was trained to fear darkness. The last time she went down, for instance, she became convinced there was someone there with her.
Confirming that this was a misinterpretation of available stimuli would have taken a lot more work than what she did, which was to exit the tunnel immediately. But it surely was the case that she’d been alone and only imagined the whole thing.
She knew she could take the tunnels from the building she was in all the way to the Ford Building, which was across the street from the anomaly, and when she tried it, it worked fine. It landed her close to her destination, unmolested by any wolf, and she knew it would work at all hours.
She didn’t go any closer to the object the first couple of times, staying at the fence and working up the courage to go nearer.
But when she finally did go in, it happened on the same day she learned that she was not alone in the world.
4
The object was about thirty inches tall; it came up to about the height of Ananda’s hip.
It had no handle, no opening. It was white, with rounded sides that had no seams. The top cap was rounded as well, like a bowl turned upside down.
From a distance, she had thought it was metallic, but that seemed less certain the closer to it she got. Metal-like, perhaps, but there was a softness to it that implied it was composed of some other material. What other material was an open question.
She moved closer.
The rounded cap on top extended slightly past the edge of the cylinder beneath. When she got down on her knees and looked up at the underside of the lip, she saw what looked like a vent.
“Are you there to take something in . . . or to let something out?” she asked.
In need of a probe other than her finger to examine the opening further, she scrounged about until she found a loose twig. With the end of it, she was able to confirm that there was indeed an opening and it went all the way around the cylinder. Interesting, certainly, but not very informative.
She put the twig down, sat on the ground, and spent several minutes studying the surface of the object.
It wasn’t soft, she realized. It was fuzzy. Not hairy: indistinct. It seemed as if the object hadn’t entirely decided if it was really there.
The side also wasn’t perfectly smooth. There were pockmarks on the half facing away from the street. They seemed to be scattered randomly and looked more like damage than a utilitarian feature.
She got to her feet and took another look at the top cap. The kid had been hitting it with a piece of rebar. She remembered at least five or six blows. Yet the cap had almost no damage on it; just a couple of dents. The light show from that first evening was also absent.
She wondered what would happen if she hit it herself.
From an experimental standpoint, the idea had merit. She could learn how soft the surface was, and whether striking it caused the lights to appear. The former might provide further insight into what the object was made of, and the latter might lead to a better understanding of its function. That assumed the lights were a component of its function, which seemed a safe assumption. From a safety-in-the-workplace perspective, it made about as much sense as taste-testing radium.
What the hell, she thought. The world already ended. How much worse can things get?
She disproved one hypothesis before she even began: After she found the rebar the kid had been using, but before she’d struck the object, the light show manifested above her head.
“Oh, hello,” she said.
It looked like a swarm of . . . Well, it was difficult to say. Angry fireflies without form, or sparks from a welder. They circled above the object and dove at it. Colliding with the object caused neither thing any obvious harm, and when they dove at her they also seemed to cause no harm. In fact, there was a complete absence of sensation altogether; it seemed as if they passed through her a couple of times, yet it didn’t tickle, pinch, or even hurt. In fact, had she been blindfolded, she would not have been able to pinpoint the moment when this interaction was even happening.
She decided that this was actually an excellent argument that what she was witnessing was purely optical and otherwise not real. It could be, in other words, that her eyes were seeing something that wasn’t there.
The second test was a lot more interesting. Hoisting the rebar over her shoulder—it was quite a lot heavier than it looked—she walked up to the object, raised the metal rod over her head, and slammed it down on top of the dome cap.
The force from the impact vibrated along the rebar, into her hands and right down her arm, causing pain at every joint along the way. She let out a cry of surprise and dropped the rod on the ground, where it couldn’t hurt her
anymore.
She shook her hands for a few seconds until the numbness subsided, as the light swarm spun around her head like cartoon stars signifying a concussion.
A reexamination of the cap revealed something fascinating. The two possible outcomes—or so she thought—were (1) she would have created a third dent, or (2) she wouldn’t have hit it hard enough to damage it.
Yet there was now only one dent. She hadn’t damaged the object; somehow, she’d repaired it.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
The lights appeared to agree with her.
She retrieved the rebar and tried it again, wincing with the impact, but also better prepared for it. When she was done, there were no dents at all.
Ananda lifted the metal bar to try it again, thinking the weird but somehow logical thought that now that it was repaired maybe she could put new dents in it, when someone behind her spoke.
“Greetings!” a man shouted.
She dropped the rebar and spun around.
There was a guy on a horse being led by a woman holding a bow. All three of them—the horse included—looked like they had been having a Very Long Day.
The woman in particular: She looked cold, worn out, and dirty, and was wearing some entertainingly out-of-place yoga pants. Her hair was up in a ponytail, and her eyes were sharp. She looked quite capable of violence.
The man on the horse did not. He looked sallow and tired. His face betrayed some pain. He was, she realized, not riding the horse. Not exactly. He was attached to it.
She’d never seen two more beautiful people in her entire life.
“Oh my God!” Ananda said. “Oh my God, oh my God.”
The Apocalypse Seven Page 22