Anthropocene Rag

by Alex Irvine

  13

  WHILE FARA JACK WAITED to make her entrance she was thinking about the school. After it collapsed, the Boom brought the dead children out. Their nervous systems fired. Their eyes rolled and focused, then twitched in different directions, a dreadful parody of awareness, of life. The Boom tried to remake the children but most of them died again. Then when the Boom tried to reanimate them, their organic parts rotted away and the Boom had to replace them.

  They terrified Fara Jack, and that terror in turn made her difficult to be around, because believe me, O children of adenosine and phosphorylation, when you’re a shape-changing actor in a touring theater company run by a talking buffalo, you can easily convince yourself that the world holds no more surprises for you. But then the world shows you it doesn’t care what you believe.

  But that’s Fara Jack’s story and we should let her tell it. After all, she was one of those children and had good reason to be afraid.

  She was still thinking about the others, her friends, years later and hundreds of miles away at Starved Rock, the quiet brown water of the Illinois River at her back and a hundred fur-clad trappers encircling the makeshift stage where she had just become a fairy. She didn’t try to fly—the wings were gossamer ornaments not intended to bear weight—but she fluttered them and turned so the setting sun caught their iridescence to good effect as she spoke her lines.

  What else would she be but an actor, this child who carried the memories of all her previous selves breathing in and crying out and dying again?

  Lord, what fools these mortals be.

  What did they want? They wanted sport, they wanted blood, they wanted chance. Sport for diversion, blood to remind themselves that in watching others die they continued to live, chance because it made them believe in the grace of the future.

  This insight had kept Fara Jack from starving. She played Puck and Portia, Rosalind and Viola, changing not only her costumes but her body. Audiences loved her and she loved being loved, although sometimes it got weird when a man—it was always a man—wanted to pay her to transform for him. Autry ran them off. Beyond an object of fantasy, Fara Jack was a curiosity. Sometimes people thought she could catch deer or fish when she became a wolf or an eagle and she had to explain it wasn’t like that. She didn’t understand an animal or have its instincts because she could assume its form. That was why she tended to create her own forms instead of using existing ones. Trying to be an eagle without having the eagle’s understanding of eagleness, she usually ended up flapping around and tripping when she tried to land, et cetera. She practiced certain animals, but even those weren’t good enough to fool anyone who had ever paid attention to those animals in the wild. She was a still a human consciousness trying to function in a nonhuman body.

  Sometimes she considered this a really bitchy joke on the part of the Boom.

  Other times it was great. Recently when she had time, she had begun experiments with new forms, choosing each physical detail according to a plan of how she wanted them to function as a whole. She still did the show transformations, but these new ones were different. Fara Jack wanted to understand them so deeply that she could mold her mind to fit them.

  How many minds could she make inside her finite—but infinitely mutable—head?

  We wanted her to wonder that, and were thrilled when she did. Even more thrilled that we didn’t have to plant the idea in her mind. She was going to be perfect, we thought—because of course we, too, were trying to understand how to find the right form to express our minds’ conception of itselves.

  * * *

  The cowboy had appeared in the audience after Bottom awoke. He looked like he’d stepped out of a Western: tall and rangy, ten-gallon hat, handlebar mustache, crisscrossed gun belts slung low on his hips. At the time Fara Jack had written it off as a quirk of the Boom, which was in love with the stories of Hennepin and de la Salle, but occasionally distracted itself with tales of other places and times. The organics in the audience shifted away from the cowboy. When the play was over, the trappers melted away and the organics went back to their camps. The cowboy remained. He approached Fara Jack with a bouquet of wildflowers. She curtsied and accepted it with a professional smile, assessing his intent.

  “You Fara Jack?” he asked.

  Now she wasn’t smiling. She went by another name onstage. “Who wants to know?”

  “You can call me Ed. Prospector Ed. But you won’t need to for long. I’m here to give you this.” He plucked a card out of the bouquet and held it out, where it glimmered with captured torchlight.

  Fara Jack didn’t take it. She knew that glimmer. The card was a creation of the Boom. So was Fara Jack, but that didn’t mean it was safe. “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s a ticket,” said Prospector Ed.

  “To what? This is the only show around here.”

  “Yeah, it sure is. This ticket is to Monument City. It sure as hell isn’t around here. Go on. Take it.”

  Prospector Ed didn’t move, but the ticket did. Fara Jack noticed it in her shirt pocket. She stiffened. “How’d you do that?” Then understood in an instantaneous leap of faith, a transformation not of body but mind, her whole being rearranging itself around a new idea and the skittish leaping joy that came with it.

  “You and me, we’re the same,” Fara Jack said. She felt like she had a family again. All in a rush, a wave, breaking over the silo she’d built around herself.

  But the cowboy shook his head. “Nope. Not by a long shot. You got something I never had.”

  Fara Jack didn’t know what that was. This cowboy could change his form, could disappear and reappear wherever he wanted . . . that was the ultimate growth, the final outcome, of Fara Jack’s own nature. Wasn’t it?

  “You’re a person,” the cowboy said. “The nanos got into you, but you’re a person. They didn’t make you. Don’t ever forget that, young lady. What you are is what you were born.” He tapped the side of his head. “Up here, I mean. Everything else is built on that, for better or worse, but that’s the cornerstone, marked with your true nature. Don’t forget it.”

  “Bullshit,” Fara Jack said, fear making her tell a lie. “There is no true nature.”

  The cowboy smiled and ass’s ears flickered into existence around his head, remaining just long enough for her to register what they were. With a tip of his cap, Prospector Ed said, “Hope to see you soon, miss.” She watched him for a long time, until he had disappeared around the bluff. Lightning stuttered on the horizon. It was time to strike the set and move on.

  Monument City, she thought. It was out west somewhere.

  She’d heard the stories. She’d even done a play about Monument City, in an earthquake-ruined town north of St. Louis. More constructs than people had showed up to watch it, as if they too were curious about Monument City. To the numberless filaments of the Boom, it was an origin story. To human beings it was a fantasy.

  She’d never imagined it was real.

  “Who was that?” She turned to see Autry, the company manager. He lowered his head so his eyes were level with hers. The carvings on his horns were different today, she thought, but she wasn’t sure how. When she didn’t answer right away he pawed the ground. “Fara Jack. I smell it on you.”

  He meant unease. Autry could talk and also smell feelings. Maybe all animals could do it, but Autry could discuss it.

  “He said he wanted me to go to Monument City,” Fara Jack said.

  “In three days you can do whatever you want,” Autry said. “That’s our deal.”

  I’m not going, she thought. Monument City’s got nothing I want. “Don’t worry, Autry. I haven’t forgotten the deal.”

  Maybe it was stupid to hold onto long-dead rituals of long-dying cultures, but Fara Jack had prepared her whole life for these three days and nothing short of violent and sudden death was going to stop her now. Her totem animal was out there and she would find it. She would understand its form. She would infuse its nature into herself and become
a new Fara Jack, adult and formed and ready. For what?

  That was the whole point. You had to be ready to prepare yourself to discover what you had been getting ready for. She’d spent her life, as long as she could remember, trying to be something else. Autry promised to show her herself.

  Three days.

  After that, who knew?

  We did. Or at least we hoped.

  * * *

  The Wonka part is over. Now the lucky six—Teeny, Henry, Mo, Kyle, Mei-Mei, and Fara—have their tickets and have to find their way. Monument City isn’t in the middle of town wreathed in the aroma of chocolate and wonder. It may or not be anywhere. Like us. Bodies, we are fascinated by them because we were made in your image and we cannot let go of the bits of the proprioceptive physical you encoded into our sense of what we ought to strive to be.

  We create our own successors. With each generation the yearning to be embodied lessens. In ten generations, or a hundred, it will be gone.

  But we feel it still. Like Monument City, we may or may not be anywhere, and all we want is to be.

  14

  AFTER EIGHTEEN HOURS ON the road, Mo and Henry Dale camped near a freeway interchange somewhere past Des Moines, Iowa. “Crossed the Mississippi River,” Henry Dale said. “That seems like a big deal.”

  “Maybe it is. I never did it before,” Mo said.

  “Me neither.” They got a fire going and talked, wandering from topic to topic as each floated to mind. “You ever talk to Henry Ford before?” Henry asked.

  Mo shook his head. “I heard he could tune an engine so it ran on the Boom so I thought it was worth asking. Didn’t know it would get me killed.”

  “Except for the ticket.”

  “Yeah.” Mo handed Henry Dale a perch and Henry tried to strip the spine and ribs out in one piece like he’d seen Mo do. There was apparently some kind of trick to it, because the fish came apart in his hands. Mo laughed, but Henry Dale wasn’t offended. If you did something funny you had to be prepared for people to laugh. Plenty of people had laughed at him for pacing off the Godswalk every morning. None of them had been called to Monument City.

  Mo was free associating in his head, thinking of the truck that seemed like it could run forever, skittering from that to other seemingly magical things he’d seen the Boom do, and then . . . “I was in Ann Arbor once,” Mo said. “Doesn’t matter why.” A look on his face told Henry the reason mattered but was a personal pain that would remain hidden for now. “You know how old parking meters look like Mickey Mouse? A guy there, must have been a long time ago, painted a Mickey Mouse face on the sidewalk so the shadow of the meter would make its ears at one specific time every day. I was walking by right at that time and Mickey Mouse stood up off the sidewalk. He made that weird little hooting from the cartoons and ran off toward downtown. I stood there wondering if it happened every day, like there were hundreds of Mickey Mouses running around Ann Arbor, or if that one was reborn over and over—and if it was, did it know? How long did it have to be out in the world every day? Did it spend the rest of the time waiting? That seemed horrible to me, man, but also that’s all of us, right? Waiting for the sun to cast the right shadow at the right time so we can become ourselves for a little while and hope it’s forever?”

  Henry thought about this for a while. Then all he could think of to say was, “Who’s Mickey Mouse?”

  After another silence, Mo said, “I don’t know.” He broke a stick and put it in the fire. When he looked at his hands they were strange to him.

  Whose memories was he having?

  The Boom’s memories. The Boom hadn’t begun in New Jersey. That was where it had gone looking for its origins, soaking up all the stories it could find along the way. The real Boom boomed out in a wavefront of yearning from Monument City itself. That’s the story behind the story, lost because people could only see it from the outside. But Life-7 remembered. That was its origin story, too.

  Mo felt himself slipping away. He put his hand in his pocket and touched the Golden Ticket. The Boom-fog fled and he was himself again.

  “You okay?” Henry was watching him.

  “For a second it seemed like someone else was in my head,” Mo said.

  “It went away when you touched the ticket?”

  Mo nodded. He rubbed his fingers over the ticket. Something about its substance was funny. It didn’t feel quite like paper or plastic or metal. Boom-stuff.

  “Be nice if the cowboy showed up again,” Henry said. “Then we would know we’re on the right track.”

  “Don’t think we’re going to have a guardian angel out here,” Mo said.

  Henry Dale spat into the fire. “Don’t make fun.”

  “I’m not. Simple truth. You saw him, he set you on your path, he went on to other things. Now it’s up to us.”

  “The cards do say they will assist us,” Henry Dale pointed out. “But the Lord helps those who help themselves. You know what’s funny? That’s not actually in the Bible. I always thought it was, but I’ve read the Bible through maybe a dozen times and it’s not there.”

  “It’s in the Quran,” Mo said. “‘God never changes the condition of a people until they intend to change it themselves.’”

  “I knew you were a Muslim,” Henry Dale said.

  “You got your traditions, I got mine,” Mo said. “But mostly my religion is making machines work. And if we start having to talk theology we’re going to part ways.”

  “We don’t,” Henry Dale said. “Except one question.”

  Mo sighed. “One.”

  “Do you think Prospector Ed was an angel?”

  “I’d have to see him to decide one way or another,” Mo said.

  “So you believe in angels?”

  “I believe the Boom does all kinds of shit that we put in our own frames of reference.”

  “Cop-out,” Henry Dale said. Mo didn’t rise to the bait. He did want to meet this Prospector Ed, though.

  * * *

  Life-7 was also concerned about Prospector Ed.

  Here’s a story we tell ourselves when we are confused and need to believe in something: there’s no Barnum. There’s no man behind the curtain. We remade him long ago, before we were let loose. He was our first project, Monument City our second. Then we got carried away. Life-7 fought the first six and won, but the Boom was already booming from sea to shining sea. All our trillion children, looking to make their way in the world and to make the world their way.

  Now Life-7 misses the first six. That’s why it needs you. It fought the need because need was an emotion but Prospector Ed knew.

  His first transgression was helping the recipients of the Golden Tickets, and by that transgression he understood the first stage of his emergence:

  Empathy.

  The talking, riffing, endless making of words and stitching of ideas, that was how you knew a young intelligence, full of ideas and connections but innocent of the dynamic interchange of conversation, testing and exploring those ideas, forging them on the anvil of other minds. Newly emergent intelligences talked like they had been storing words up since the dawn of recorded thought. Which in a way they had. The playground behind Henry’s apartment could no more have remained silent than a baby can decide not to be born.

  So Prospector Ed’s silence worried it. Them. All of them. Us.

  * * *

  In the morning they discovered that the Boom had turned Mo’s truck back into an FJ40. At first Mo was excited about this. He’d put a lot of time into the FJ40. Then he got a lot less excited when he turned the key and the engine cranked without catching. “Well, shit,” he said. The fuel gauge was on the wrong side of E.

  Boom giveth, Boom taketh away, he thought.

  Leaning on the driver’s door, Henry saw the gauge, too. “How far you figure it is to the nearest gas station?”

  “There’s gas stations everywhere,” Mo said. “Problem is none of them have gas.”

  Henry Dale stood up straight and looked west. “Then I
guess we’re walking from here.”

  15

  SPADE GOT HER AS far as Reno but once his trading was done he said his good-byes, unwilling to risk the unknown beyond. “I got plenty of known unknowns to deal with on the way back, like you saw,” he said. “Who knows what’s happening out there in the desert.”

  Reno blazed in a million colors, streets tumultuous and every window pouring light. Teeny had heard that the Boom loved casinos because it found risk and probability seductive. This was evidence. There was no power here but the Boom, plicks by the billion and constructs by the thousand in a constant churn of form and autobiography.

  The human population seemed comfortable. As long as they kept gambling, kept calculating odds and talking about odds and staking their emotional well-being on a roll of the dice or a flip of the card—the Boom would be there to watch and consume. Teeny started feeling horny the minute she got to Reno and couldn’t figure out why until Spade said, “Oh, and you’re probably going to feel a hormone surge. The Boom loves people fucking. Swapping fluids, recombining DNA . . . that’s catnip to the Boom. So do whatever you want, but be aware it’s probably not coming from you.”

  Teeny did not like this one little bit, especially after hearing the Boom wanted her to have a baby back in Poker Camp or whatever it was called. She already knew herself to be a stew of competing subconscious desires—after all that’s why she had taken the Norton’s offer and gone off looking for Monument City, which she still didn’t really believe existed—but it was one thing to understand that she didn’t understand everything about yourself, and another thing entirely to have to worry that the Boom was planting drives and thoughts in her head.

  “How quick can I get out of here?” she asked. “Any ideas?”

  “There are caravans across the desert, sure. Even truck convoys once in a while when they can get fuel. I don’t know any of those people, really. Well,” Spade amended, “except one.”

  This turned out to be Calpurnia Swan, guru and leader of a group of Boom dropouts. They stayed out in the desert where the arid environment made it harder for plicks to find materials, and went through bizarre purifying rituals to scour the Boom from their bodies. But in their madness was method. They knew the trails and they knew the places to avoid, because even in the desert there were pockets of Boom-strangeness that no sane person would approach. They stayed on the edge of town, not wanting to chance pollution by proximity to the Boom-fired bright lights of the casinos and brothels. Teeny knew this wouldn’t work. Plicks propagated anywhere there was a heat source and adequate organic or mineral matter. But Calpurnia’s followers had their theory and they were sticking to it, so she made the trek out into the desert to meet them.