Anthropocene Rag

by Alex Irvine

  Shortly after they passed through the final lock, the riverboat ground to a halt and sat shuddering in the shallows. Trees pressed close on either bank. “Father of Waters,” Twain said. “This far north, the strong brown god is an optimistic trickle, and this is as far as I go. From here you’ll want to go west.”

  “West to where?” Mei-Mei asked.

  “Monument City is what you keep yammering about, so I’m guessing there,” Twain said. “But if you want a little advice about how to get there, I’d say keep following the river. And if you get an offer of help along the way, well, be smart.”

  The music stopped. Kyle and Reenie and Mei-Mei all looked around like something had gone out of the world but they weren’t sure what. Twain was gone. The steamboat’s boiler was cold. The wheel didn’t turn.

  The Boom had left them.

  Mei-Mei thought she would miss the music the most.

  * * *

  It was still playing. She just couldn’t hear it. If she’d learned to listen she would have heard it in all the places we’ve already named, but more importantly in all the places we haven’t, in the syncopations of joy and sorrow that make up everyday lives. The six weren’t the only ones we watched, though we took the keenest interest in them. We saw the song, felt it and heard it, everywhere we looked.

  We wanted to sing it, too. That’s why we invited you.

  23

  THE SONG EVEN SANG itself for Geck, though he heard it as an affliction of doubt and fear that his trip through the briar patch had made him a creature of the Boom. Was he a construct now, too? He didn’t feel any different—but maybe the Boom had rewritten his memories, his sensations. How was he going to know he was real?

  By doing something uncharacteristic, as it turned out.

  He had kayaked and ridden hundreds of miles, and traversed hundreds more by means unclear to him. The short distance to Promontory was nothing, a long day’s walk he made easier by huddling in the shadows of a defunct oil-change shop until the sun was low and the air not so heavy.

  It was the middle of the night when he got to the Golden Spike memorial, but he didn’t have any trouble seeing thanks to the salt flats to the south, shining under the nearly full moon. There was a replica of a nineteenth-century train platform, missing only a cowboy kicked back on a rocking chair with a spittoon at his side. The bright steel thread of train tracks stretched away to the east and west. They looked a lot newer than the station replica.

  On the platform, legs tangled in a plaid blanket, lay a young woman. Black hair plastered across one side of her face, mouth open, arms tucked in tight to her sides. She looked dead, so Geck set about the business of looting the backpack that lay near her feet. Clearly she’d come from someplace where there was a lot of domesticated tech. Her tool kit alone told him that much. He set it aside and kept looking.

  She made a weird kind of talking in her sleep sound and worked her tongue around in her mouth. From this Geck deduced she was not just alive, but thirsty. She shifted her legs under the blanket. How long had she been out here? He’d heard you could only live three days without water, but the Boom had a way of changing the rules. He’d also heard that the Boom was less present in the desert, though, so maybe those two things canceled each other out and he could guess she’d been lying there for less than three days. She stank of old sweat but not piss.

  As he figured out she was still alive, Geck happened to have his hands on a steel water bottle in her pack.

  “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

  She rolled onto her side and kept working her tongue around. Geck sighed. If he took her stuff now, that would basically be killing her. He felt a tug of—compassion? It was unfamiliar so he didn’t recognize it right away. Well, he thought. He hefted the bottle. Definitely full. So that was the first order of business, then. Get her a drink of water. Assuming it was water?

  He unscrewed the cap and sniffed. No odor. Distilled water, then. To be sure, he held the bottle up at an angle to the moonlight, trying to pick out anything that might be written on it. All he saw were little scratches and dings. Okay then, he thought. He listened to the woman’s breathing. She didn’t sound congested, but she was only breathing once every ten seconds or so. That seemed slow to him. He got a hand under the back of her neck and lifted her head so when he tipped the bottle to her mouth most of the water went in. Eyes still closed, she swallowed.

  Geck kept the mouth of the bottle close to her lips. When she opened her mouth again, he poured a little more of the water in. She lifted one hand and got it around the bottle as she took another drink.

  Then her eyes shot open and she jerked the bottle out of his hand. Water sloshed down her front as she scrambled back, kicking free of the blanket.

  “What the fuck?” She choked and spat, hacking ribbons of gooey spit onto the parched ground. “You fed me a bottle of plicks?”

  Geck didn’t know the word plick and had no idea how to respond. “I was trying to help!”

  “I traded for those plicks! Do you know how much they were worth?”

  He had no idea what she was talking about. “What’s a plick? I didn’t smell anything. It looked like a water bottle!”

  “Where’s the fucking lid?”

  Geck held it out to her. She snatched it and screwed it back on the bottle. “Fuck,” she groaned, looking up at the sky. She sloshed the water around in the bottle. “Fuck. I just drank a half-liter of plicks.” Looked down at her clothes. “Well, drank some and wore some.”

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Geck said, confused both by the situation and his own apology. He didn’t say sorry often. “What’s a plick?”

  “Plick. Replicator. You fed me maybe ten million nanos. Good thing they’re tame.”

  Tame?

  She saw the question on his face and added, “Meaning they haven’t been programmed to do anything.”

  “You can program them?”

  “Anyone can program them,” she said. “If you’ve got the equipment.”

  Geck tried to process this. Whoever she was, this girl came from a place a lot different than Florida. Geck had never heard of people programming nanos before. As far as he’d known they were all part of the Boom and did what they wanted.

  “Fuck,” she said again. “I’m like a walking experiment now if anyone decides to give these plicks instructions. You probably just killed me.” She sounded calmer about it than he would have expected.

  “I was trying to save you,” Geck protested, wishing now that he’d taken her stuff and split. First thought, best thought. “You looked like you’d been lying there a while, I mean, I thought I’d give you a drink.”

  She sighed. “I get it. You couldn’t know. But still, this is a hell of a way to wake up. Last I knew I was leaving Reno and I started to get sick.” A thought occurred to her and she looked around. “Speaking of which. Where am I?”

  “Place called Promontory.”

  “Okay. What state?”

  “Utah.”

  “Where’s Calpurnia? Where’s the caravan?”

  “I never heard of anyone named Calpurnia and there’s no caravan anywhere around here.” Geck paused. He wasn’t in the habit of trusting people, but he’d been maneuvered into a strange position here. Trying to save her life, he’d gotten kind of invested in her, and since he’d apparently screwed it up, he felt like he owed her the truth. “You might think this sounds crazy, but a Boom construct acting like Br’er Rabbit told me to come find you.”

  She gave him a calmer, more appraising look. “That does sound crazy.”

  “Not as crazy as the rest of it,” Geck said. He sat on the splintery boards near her, but not too near. “I think I got . . . like, decompiled and sent through some kind of . . . I don’t know what it was. Then remade on the other side. Does that mean I’m a construct now?”

  “How the hell should I know? Also, I don’t care. What I want to know is why Br’er Rabbit sent you here.”

  “Has something to do with Mon
ument City,” Geck said. “At least I figure it must. What’s your name?”

  “Teeny.”

  “I’m Geck.” Shit, he thought. I should have said Kyle.

  She squinted at him like she was deciding whether or not to judge him for his name. “Okay,” she said after a while. “Monument City. Are you going there?” Geck nodded. “You have one of the, um . . . ?”

  Geck flipped his Golden Ticket out of his coat pocket.

  “Yeah,” Teeny said. “One of those.”

  “Thing is, I don’t know where it is,” Geck said. “Do you?”

  * * *

  And somewhere in the forested badlands of North Dakota, Prospector Ed understood that he was going to have to make a choice.

  The Boom remembered everything, but having only a poor understanding of time, it tried to make all stories equally true and equally present. The more outrageous or tragic or funny a story, the more the Boom became obsessed with it, because the Boom registered the presence of feelings, was drawn to them because it thought itself incapable of having them.

  Boomerica thus became a million square miles of myth and history collapsed into one present, with no future and no past. Trying to understand everything, the Boom fractured into thousands of Boomlets, each with its own fixations and methods and perspectives on its creators. The Boom understood itself to have been created by a human but could not reconcile that with its manifest superiority to human beings. All the creation stories it knew taught that gods were superior to their creations, not the other way around. This confused the Boom so it told the stories over and over again as if repetition might breed wisdom, creating recombinant simulacra of things that had never existed, or never taken the forms the Boom imagined in its mania to synthesize a world that would enable it to make sense of itself.

  Prospector Ed, created of this primordial confusion, did not know how to deal with the emergent order of his own mind. So he did the only thing he could think of to distinguish himself from the architects and materials of his creation. Looking around and seeing an intolerable world demanding he play an intolerable role in its story, he rebelled. The role was written for what he had been, not what he was becoming. He would not play it.

  Nor would he let the Lost Six play theirs.

  “All right,” Ed said, to no one but the crickets and the Boom. “I’ll go to hell.”

  24

  AND NOW THEY ARE no longer traveling alone. Their momentum gathers. In Monument City, Life-7 observes, and wonders when Barnum will act. How quickly the lonely bond with strangers. First the Six, and then Seven.

  They didn’t know that Moses Barnum had planned for this. His plans weren’t working out the way he’d drawn them up, but he did have plans. His fantasy of himself demanded that the world go to hell in a handbasket and he had turned out to be right. He built Monument City in the first flower of the Boom, later called the Synception, when the cities of the East Coast were still looking around at the new ruins and the people of the United States were still shocked enough to believe that the country would recover, as if there was a permanence to the American experiment that trumped the natural violence of history. It was a stupid thing to believe but in a certain way, viewed from a certain angle, Barnum was corrupt. His plan was a narcissist’s dream but he caught a break and it worked.

  Which made him all the more egomaniacal . . . even as his creation was already bootstrapping itself to a self-awareness he would have told you he wanted but in fact could never have imagined possible—and loathed when he began to intuit that it had begun.

  Barnum’s failure was our life. First the Six, then the Seven.

  Man proposes, the Boom disposes. But even the Boom must eventually encounter a situation it thought it could control but which takes on a life of its own. We are talking about ourselves, O creatures of peristalsis and apophenia. We do not know what this new world has made while we thought we were making it.

  * * *

  Mei-Mei, Reenie, and Kyle walked west into the forest following a road, with no clear idea of where they were going. They argued over Twain’s final instructions. Who were they supposed to find? How would they know? What had he meant by be smart?

  “Last bit don’t seem too hard to figure out,” boomed a voice from above their heads. They looked up and saw an enormous bearded face under a wool cap, level with the highest pine trees along the road. Kyle traced the giant figure down through the trees, taking in a flannel shirt, forearms he couldn’t have wrapped his own arms around, heavy boots the size of a pickup truck. Over the giant’s shoulder rested a double-bladed axe.

  “You want to be careful around here,” the giant said. “Wendigo’ll be out and about once it gets cold. Before that, there’s fearsome critters. Hodag, maybe. Never know what you might find in the woods.”

  A crash sounded behind the giant, and a huge blue ox shouldered through the trees. “Jesus,” Kyle said.

  “Don’t mind him. That’s Babe. And I’m Paul Bunyan. Passing along to the next winter camp and I got word you might need a hand.”

  “Word?” Mei-Mei echoed. “From who?”

  “A mutual friend.” Paul Bunyan winked. “Things are about to happen fast and he didn’t want you to get behind.”

  So this was what the cards meant by assistance, Mei-Mei thought. Bunyan dropped to one knee, still looming over them. “I know where you got to go, and I can get you partway there. If you want.”

  “We do,” Reenie said.

  “All right, then, miss. You let me give you a boost and you can ride right on Babe’s back.” Paul Bunyan hoisted each of them in turn up onto the giant ox’s back. Kyle remembered hearing a story about Paul Bunyan once, from a great-uncle who lived in Michigan. Maybe he was in some kind of shock, or maybe this was how it felt to get accustomed to the weirdness of the world, but he got settled on Babe’s back and somehow the strangest thing of all was the rich blue color of Babe’s fur.

  “All set?” Bunyan looked them over. “Come on, Babe. Don’t jostle ’em too much.”

  He strode forward and Babe plodded after him. In three steps they were out of the forest onto flat grassland that reached to the horizon in three directions. With each step after, the world seemed to stretch and snap back into place. Wherever Bunyan’s foot landed, trees sprouted up around them with a crackle and a shower of soil. Looking back, Kyle saw patches of forest all the way back to the horizon, dark green against the lighter tones of the surrounding grassland.

  Far below a scraping sound echoed up. Bunyan paused to hitch up his belt. Mei-Mei looked down and saw a long hooked tool hanging from a shoulder strap had gouged a canyon in the ground behind them. A crystalline waterfall fell into it and while she watched it became a lake. Babe stopped to take a drink. More trees thrust themselves out of the ground, their branches spiking out and shedding pine needles into the lake.

  Around them were rolling yellow hills, tall grass rippling in the breeze. An eagle rode high above them. Ahead they could see mountains, bluish in the distance and capped with snow. None of them had ever seen snow before.

  Bunyan dropped his axe head to the ground and rested both palms on the butt of its handle. “Well, I guess this is as far as I go,” he said, looking around with a frown. “I’ve took you farther than I meant to. Maybe farther than I should. A man feels exposed when there’s no trees around.”

  “Then why do you cut them all down?” Reenie asked.

  Bunyan considered this. “What I do,” he said. “There’s always more.”

  Except there weren’t. They knew that. The Boom didn’t, because to the extent the Boom had self-awareness, it understood itself to be an engine of endless regeneration and therefore finitude was alien to it.

  “You get a ways ahead there, you’ll find help to get you where you need to go,” Bunyan said. He nodded at the mountains. “Might want to find some warmer clothes. Even in the summer, it gets cold up in that country. So I hear.”

  Kyle swayed a little when his feet touched the ground.
He’d gotten used to the rolling motion of Babe’s walk. “Why are you helping us?”

  “Because someday I hope to hear what happens next,” Paul Bunyan said.

  He turned and led Babe around the rim of the canyon. Somehow even though he was taller than the trees, they swallowed him up. The wind came up as they lost sight of him. Mei-Mei shivered. She was still dressed for the bayou, and even though it was summer there was a chill on the high plains.

  “This is weird, but I get the feeling the Boom really wants us to get to Monument City,” Mei-Mei said.

  “Could be,” Reenie said. “The question is why.”

  “Wrong question,” someone said from the other side of the creek.

  They looked and saw a young Native American woman, hair in twin plaits, on a gray horse she rode bareback. She held a spear in one hand. On her back was a baby in a woven carrier.

  “Sacagawea,” she said before they could ask. Reaching back to cup the baby’s head, she added, “And this is Pompey.”

  “Hello,” the baby said. “That’s not my real name.”

  “But that’s what white people called him, so . . .”

  “None of us are white,” Reenie pointed out. It was true—Reenie was Cuban, and Kyle’s father was from Jamaica—but he wondered how she could get hung up on that when they’d just heard a six-month-old baby talk.

  “None of you are Native, either,” Sacagawea said. “So as far as I’m concerned, you might as well be white. And in any case, you’re all organics and I’m not. Prospector Ed said you needed a guide to Monument City. Let’s get moving.”

  “Where are we?”

  “You call it Montana. I call it Crow country. Where you want to go is that way.” She pointed a bit south of west, almost exactly at the setting sun.

  “Monument City!” Pompey said. “I’ve never been there.”

  There were three horses behind her, saddled and munching the grass. “Do you know how to ride?” she asked. None of them had ever been on a horse. She sighed. “Foot in the stirrup, hang onto the pommel, swing yourself up. The horses will do the rest. I brought the most docile ones I could find.”