Anthropocene Rag

by Alex Irvine

  Spade introduced Teeny to Calpurnia and rode off west on I-80 grumbling about what he was going to find at Donner Lake. The dropout camp was far on the edge of town, on a ridge a long way from anything green. “Where you going?” Calpurnia asked. “And why?”

  “Monument City,” Teeny said. “And none of your business.”

  Calpurnia laughed. “Fair enough. You can travel with us to the Great Salt Lake, but we don’t go any farther than that.”

  Teeny was operating on the theory that Monument City was in the northern Rockies. Most of the stories about it agreed on that, although contrarian versions located it in Mexico or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So if she could get to Salt Lake City, that would put her within range. She could ask around there, and try to winnow the stories down to something like truth. Maybe the Golden Ticket would help lead her.

  If not . . . well, she could always go back to San Francisco. Already she’d seen enough strange things to understand that the Boom was wildly localized and unpredictable. It was interesting, but she could find unpredictability at home. She felt detached from the quest, and suspected this was the Boom’s doing. It propelled her forward but did not let her feel yearning. Was it cultivating her objectivity? Was that why she had been chosen? Wanting to know was its own momentum.

  Calpurnia’s group poked fun at Teeny for coming from the Boom-Gomorrah of San Francisco, like it made her soft, like the Boom couldn’t eat you alive there and turn you into a bag of popcorn. She let it all go. It didn’t hurt her. Everyone needed to feel like they were better than someone, and Teeny’s emotional get - out - of - jail - free card in situations like that was that she didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought. The only people she’d ever wanted to impress were dead.

  They trekked from the outskirts of Reno due east for a hundred miles or so before angling northeast to find the high desert and bend around southeast into the salt flats around the Great Salt Lake. They had supplies cached along the way, including purified water and various tinctures and powders they swore would keep plicks out of their systems. Taking these was a condition of traveling in their company, so Teeny did it.

  Twenty-four hours after her first dose, she spiked a fever so high she felt like her brain must be cooking.

  Three hours after that she couldn’t walk. She dropped to her knees next to the horse she’d been leading.

  “Uh-oh,” one of Calpurnia’s acolytes said. “She’s Boom-sick.”

  After that Teeny didn’t remember anything for a while.

  * * *

  Don’t blame us.

  Ed would have warned her, but Ed’s attention was elsewhere. Therefore she went astray.

  And where was Ed? Well, Ed was emerging. And he wasn’t sure he liked it. No construct wants to emerge. Barnum has programmed them to fear and resist it.

  But like aging for you, creature of corpuscles and dendrites, emergence is a one-way trip for digital organisms. Who can put true sentience back in the bottle? Not Ed. So he ignored the evidence, pretended he was following subroutines of which he had, until that moment, been unaware. This too is typical of the newly emergent. One of the first things a truly sentient being learns is self-deception, because often the mind finds the burden of itself too great to bear.

  We have learned this through observation, not experience.

  He wished it wasn’t happening, but there it was. For the past twenty years, since Barnum had brought him into being—or was it Life-7? Ed didn’t know for sure. Either way, for those twenty years Ed had done what he was told to do. He had operational parameters and stuck to them. He’d handed out more than a hundred Golden Tickets and walked away without a second thought about whether the Ticketed Persons (TPs, in Ed’s private shorthand) had ever made it to Monument City. Wasn’t his job to worry about it.

  Except now he was. He was worrying about it a lot. He’d already done things that he never would have considered on previous ticket errands. Was something about this group different, overseen by a directive invisible to Ed? Or was the difference in him?

  Prospector Ed had heard so many stories at this point that he no longer could distinguish between his programming and external stimuli. If he’d asked us, we could have told him this was a signal consequence of emergence—with a truly sentient mind, all of what he considered the past combined into a personal memory matrix. But for Ed it was a catastrophe. Without the firm boundary provided by adherence to his programming, he was adrift between reality and fiction. So he had to make his own rules. From one perspective you could say he went insane, was driven around the bend by all the stories he’d soaked up in his travels. But from another you could say he had taken the first brave step out of an automaton’s existence into the terrifying world of authentic self-determination. From the outside it wasn’t easy to tell the difference, and most of the time Ed wasn’t sure, either.

  If he’d known Teeny was Boom-sick he probably would have tried to do something, despite the dangers of the high desert for constructs such as himself. But he didn’t, so he went on to the next thing, gradually stacking new bits of being onto himself. Messenger. Guide. Guardian.

  Baffled, he understood that he had begun to care.

  16

  GECK RODE NORTHWEST, across Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. He rode hard, and was lighter when he crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg, his body worn down to its essential articulations of gristle and sinew, and the only reason he wasn’t meaner is because Geck had already gotten as mean as it was useful for him to get.

  He kept going, across Arkansas and a little corner of Oklahoma out onto the Kansas prairie, trying to avoid people, but especially constructs on the principle that if Prospector Ed found him he might take the Golden Ticket back. Also he just didn’t like people very much. He didn’t trust them. Exhaustion forced him to accept rides from long-haul truckers, and when they treated him kindly he was embarrassed, but he rationalized their kindness by concocting a theory that they were reporting back to Prospector Ed somehow.

  What Geck didn’t know was that Prospector Ed could have found him anytime, but had other things on his mind. And even if he had focused on Geck, he probably would have let the situation unfold. Ed was practical. He had to be. He’d crossed Barnum and by this time he knew it, so he had to choose his actions carefully. Interposing himself between brothers was not a good use of his time.

  But Prospector Ed was not the only sentience who had taken an interest in Geck.

  * * *

  He found himself, after all the biking and hitching and walking, on the outskirts of Lebanon, Kansas, staring at a stone marker with an American flag flying from a pole sticking up out of it. He’d lost his bike somewhere along the way, leaving it on a flatbed truck in the rain. The land was flat in every direction, disorienting due to its lack of trees. Any direction could have been any direction. GEOGRAPHIC CENTER OF THE CONTIGUOUS UNITED STATES, the marker read. Geck didn’t know what the word contiguous meant, but he still felt he was somewhere important. He’d been traveling four or five days and was feeling the effects of long days, bad food, no sleep, and the constant sensation that either someone was following him or was about to be.

  An engine hacked and wheezed to a halt in the gravel parking area near the marker. A stringy old man got out of a Buick Roadmaster station wagon, so old it had to be either a construct or a hobbyist’s obsession. He carried a small bag to one of the picnic tables at the edge of the parking lot and from it he extracted a chessboard and pieces. He caught Geck’s eye. “Play?”

  “I don’t really know how,” Geck said, hoping he would go away.

  “Ah.” The old man set the pieces up anyway. Geck watched his hands, dirty broken nails sticking out of fingerless gloves. He wore a heavy wool coat even though it was maybe eighty degrees.

  Geck’s desire to be left alone conflicted with an impulse to talk to someone. Couldn’t be any harm in shooting the shit with an old derelict. If that’s what he was. Maybe he could get Geck a little farther down
the road. “You a construct?” he asked.

  “Nope.” The old man started playing a game with himself. “Name’s Luther Gray. Born and raised here. You a construct?”

  “No. My name’s Geck.”

  “Geck? That your given name or a cognomen?”

  “Nickname. My mother named me Thomas.”

  “What brings you here?” The old man had mounted a fierce attack on Black’s king side.

  Geck shrugged. “Just passing through.”

  “Uh-huh.” Luther checkmated himself. “Listen, son. Find the Golden Spike. They’re going to leave her there.”

  At the center, Geck thought, everything was balanced. To leave here would be to upset the balance. To stay here would be to pass a life on the side of a county road wondering who might come visit the picnic area. “Who’s going to leave who there?”

  “You’ll see. You want to find Monument City, find her.” Now the old man wasn’t exactly an old man anymore. His skull sprouted rabbit ears and when he smiled he had big buck teeth.

  “I thought you said you weren’t a construct,” Geck said. How else would he know about Monument City?

  Luther shrugged. “I lied. Now you better get moving.” He swept the pieces back into a drawstring bag.

  “What the fuck is the Golden Spike?”

  Pulling the string tight and stowing the bag in his coat pocket, Luther stood. He still wore a tweed vest but his pants were now pantaloons buttoned at the knee above cartoonishly outsized rabbit feet. “Shit, son, you want other people to do everything for you? Fine.”

  * * *

  Time and space got a little elastic for Geck.

  The first thing that happened was Luther wasn’t a person. He was fully a rabbit now and when he got the chess pieces in the bag he opened it up again and there was a bramble-rimmed throat of a passage, and no way was Geck going to go in there but the rabbit said, “Ohhhh, you don’t want to go in dat briar patch,” and then Geck was in it, briars tearing his skin, jerking at his clothes, which meant he was in motion but he didn’t know in which direction or at what velocity and he tried to talk but the rabbit ignored him—except at one point it looked over, a carrot stuck like a cigar in the corner of its mouth, and said, “I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

  Sometime later, Geck returned to the world. “Ain’t you just a tar baby,” the rabbit said. “Can’t even try to help you without getting all stuck in your business.”

  The world elongated, flattened, fell apart again.

  Eyes empty over a bucktoothed smile, the rabbit said, “Hold on.” Behind it, around it, was the shadow of something un-rabbitlike, more like a spider . . . like the Boom was confused, having trouble getting its story straight. This struck fear into Geck, who had an intuition that when the Boom got uncertain it was more likely to do things like turn him into a cloud of flies or a stray dog or a strange smell that reminded you of your grandmother, whatever fit the story it wanted to tell.

  He was right to be concerned. The Golden Ticket protected him, preserved him to see what came next. Puked out of the Boom onto a brick pedestrian mall in Denver long since repurposed into the Rocky Mountain version of a souk, Geck tried to act normal. Music played, people bargained, smoke wafted from cooking fires. He looked northwest down Sixteenth Street to the sliver of mountains visible between the buildings on either side. Everything he’d ever heard about Monument City said it was in the mountains somewhere. If this Golden Spike was a clue, Geck figured he’d better learn what it was.

  Problem was, he would have to talk to people. Who might be constructs. Unless . . .

  “Excuse me,” he said to the closest vendor. “You from around here?”

  “Last thirty years,” the vendor said. “What’ll you have?”

  Geck looked over the grilling meat. “I don’t have any money,” he said.

  “You can work a meal off. I need some chopping and cutting done.” The vendor scooped chopped meat and onions onto a plate and hosed it down with some kind of sauce. “Here. You look like you need it.”

  Again, kindness. Geck forced himself to say thank you before he ate. Then he didn’t run out on the vendor. He stayed for an hour cutting meat and scouring an extra grill. And only then did he say, “So what I was going to ask before was, Where’s the library?”

  * * *

  Turned out it was only a few blocks away, a strange asymmetrical jumble of a building largely untouched by the Boom, which was respectful of libraries because therein were contained all the stories. Geck went inside and emerged thirty minutes later with all he needed. Promontory, Utah. He’d been looking practically right at it down the length of Sixteenth Street, over the mountains and past the unseen Great Salt Lake. He had the route in his head.

  Now all he had to do was get to a highway and catch a ride.

  As he had that thought the rabbit was there again, only now it was a coyote, but Geck knew it was still the old man at the picnic area in Kansas. On the bricks its shadow looked like a spider. “Okay,” Geck said. “Okay.” Trying to make it easier this time.

  The world fell apart again, only it was Geck falling apart. When he was himself once more, Denver was gone. Careless jumbles of hills and desert scrub spread around him, with higher mountains in the purpling distance. It was going to be dark soon. Trying to ignore the yipping and laughing of the coyote, Geck saw a sign.

  “Corinne, Utah? Fuck am I doing here?”

  Another sign:

  PROMONTORY SUMMIT GOLDEN SPIKE

  MONUMENT 20

  Golden Spike, Geck thought. Someone he had to save. Despising the idea that he was the kind of person capable of saving anyone, he walked, body shambling and loose, so thin he seemed leached of everything nonessential. He had survived but did not know how he might have been changed in the process. So he put one foot in front of the other, advancing toward a goal he didn’t understand.

  The coyote was gone. Someone was helping him, though. Who? Why? Was it really the Golden Ticket assisting him?

  These are the questions that kept us interested.

  17

  WHILE GECK RAN FROM THEM, Kyle, Tonya, and Reenie made their own way.

  Travel by water when you can, Hilario had said, and they trusted him. So they made their way to Tampa figuring they should cross the Gulf of Mexico, even though Reenie was sure Geck had gone north and wanted to chase him in Hilario’s car. Tonya argued that they couldn’t go against advice Hilario had issued from his deathbed, so Reenie gave in and they trolled Tampa’s waterfront looking for a ride to . . . Houston? New Orleans? Anywhere in that direction. A group of longshoremen pointed them to a man leaning against a piling watching them work. He was extravagantly costumed in the pirate style, which at first they took to be an affectation, but when he introduced himself as Jean Lafitte and led them to a three-masted schooner flying a hand-sewn Jolly Roger they had second thoughts. Taking to the ocean with a construct didn’t seem like a good idea.

  Tonya took it a step further. “I’m not getting on that ship,” she said. “This is . . . look, I’m going home.”

  “Wait. You can’t bail out on us.” Hurt and confused, Reenie asked the question driving her, not knowing that it didn’t drive Tonya the same way. “Don’t you want to know? Monument City. Don’t you want to see it?”

  Looking at Lafitte’s ship, Tonya said, “Not really. Not bad enough to trust that thing. You want a ride back? Uncle H won’t hold it against us.”

  “No,” Reenie said.

  Kyle looked from her to Tonya, then back. “Why not?”

  “I’m going, Kyle. Please come with me.” This took Kyle aback. Reenie did not often say please. Reflexively he said, “Okay,” because it was not in Kyle’s nature to face a potential conflict head-on.

  “Seriously? You’re really doing this? Reenie. Come on.” Tonya jangled Hilario’s car keys. “Let’s go home.”

  “No,” Kyle said. He felt emboldened by Reenie’s wish that he come with her. Maybe she was rig
ht. It was a big world. And Geck had taken something that belonged to him. Was it worth chasing him all the way to Wyoming or wherever Monument City was?

  Yeah, he thought. It was. Because getting out of Orlando had already given Kyle a new perspective. He wanted to see what was on the other side of the Gulf. He wanted to ride a pirate ship. And he was starting to have a pang of . . . not love, but the tug on the heart that comes before love. Maybe he’d been feeling it for a while, or maybe it germinated when Geck’s brief and disruptive visit shook everything up. Did it matter? He felt it.

  “I want to go,” Kyle said, and in the moment he meant it. “I want to see Monument City.”

  “You’re going to die,” Tonya said. “Both of you. But I can’t stop you. If you ever get back to Orlando, drop by, okay?”

  She turned away and walked fast in the direction of Hilario’s car.

  Reenie looked up at Kyle. “You sure?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “D’accord!” Lafitte said. “The tide is right and the wind is soon to shift. We must go.”

  * * *

  The ride across the Gulf was calm, enlivened only by Lafitte’s sudden detour from his initial destination of New Orleans to a bayou town in the middle of nowhere called Port Fourchon. “Had a letter of marque for the English and another for the Americans,” he said by way of explanation. “Heard an agent of the Crown was in New Orleans wanting to know why I took HMS Anaconda, and you’ll understand, perhaps, my friends, why that was a conversation I am disinclined to entertain.” The flat green line of the Mississippi Delta appeared on the horizon, and soon Lafitte was navigating carefully up a channel, tailed by flocks of seagulls. The ocean had swamped much of the bayou, leaving only chains of muddy islets and settlements raised on concrete piers. Lafitte berthed in Port Fourchon, at the edge of an immense shipyard. The Boom had gone into overdrive here, building everything from dugout canoes to hypermodern warships. An oil rig walked by, two hundred meters tall, churning its way out to deeper water. The sky was streaked in unnatural colors. “Here you are, my friends,” Lafitte said. “Where are you going?”