Anthropocene Rag

by Alex Irvine

  She had the good grace not to laugh at them while they tried to mount the horses, but Pompey couldn’t help himself.

  25

  NEITHER HENRY DALE NOR FARA JACK knew how to drive, so Mo was at the wheel when they got run off the road by an ancient Peterbilt truck right after they crossed into Colorado. Mo wrenched the wheel hard to the right and the car plunged into the roadside ditch, plowing through heavy brush and rocking to a halt. The engine quit. Henry Dale and Fara Jack looked out the rear window. The Peterbilt rocketed on, still in the wrong lanes on I-76, and vanished into the prairie horizon.

  Mo stabbed the start button four or five times. Nothing. He popped the hood and got out, leaning into the engine compartment and muttering to himself. Then he dropped to the ground and wedged himself underneath the car, behind the left front tire. “Shit,” Fara Jack heard him say. Henry Dale was distracted, looking out over the endless green and yellow striations of the prairie. A cluster of farmhouses stood a mile or so across a farm field, but there was no other sign of human presence.

  “Shit what?” Fara Jack asked.

  Mo worked himself back out and stood. He pointed back along the path of shredded brush and broken branches marking the Mitsu’s passage. “Stump or something tore out a bunch of the undercarriage,” he said. “Wires and shit are all shredded. This car isn’t going anywhere.” He leaned against the car. “Man, between this and my FJ40 getting the Boom treatment, I’m having a hard time with cars on this trip.”

  “It’ll work out,” Henry Dale said. “Things happen for a reason.”

  Fara Jack appreciated his optimism, but Mo wasn’t in the mood. “The reason is some asshole driving the wrong way on the highway,” he said. “No divine intervention there that I can see.”

  “Yell at me if it makes you feel better, Mo,” Henry Dale said. “I’m just saying.”

  They broke out food they’d picked up back in Omaha, getting some calories onboard while they figured out what to do next. The obvious course was to head out on foot and see if they could pick up another car before it got too hot to be out in the open. “What’s the next big town?” Mo wondered. “Denver?”

  “Fort Morgan before then. It’s not very big, but we did some shows there a year or so ago,” Fara Jack said. The local farmers gathered there to trade and load trucks to send into Denver. “We can probably catch a ride there.”

  The sound of an engine reached them. Big eight-cylinder, opened all the way up, Mo thought. The car came roaring into view. Henry Dale and Fara Jack raised their hands, trying to flag it down. It flashed by them and Mo caught a glimpse of two people in the front seat and maybe one in the back. As it passed, the driver stood on the brakes. The car fishtailed to a screeching halt, then accelerated in reverse toward them. Mo was about to dive into the ditch when the driver stomped on the brakes again and brought the car to a halt perfectly level with the crippled Mitsu. He heard the thunk of the driver putting it in neutral and the ratcheting sound of the parking brake. Mo admired the vehicle as three men got out. It was a Cadillac limousine, from maybe the 1940s, shiny black under a coating of road dust. Mo had only seen pictures of them . . . no, once he’d seen one rolling off the line at the old Hamtramck assembly plant, which before the Boom hadn’t made a car in fifty years.

  Had he dreamed this one into being? This card will assist you . . .

  “Cut that a little close, you know, apologies if I gave the impression of recklessness,” the driver said. “I’m Dean.” He nodded at the front-seat passenger. “Sal. And that’s Carlo.”

  “We’re on a pilgrimage to the grave of America’s only true visionary,” Carlo said. “Philip K. Dick.”

  Mo, Henry, and Fara Jack looked at each other. They’d never heard of Philip K. Dick. “Is that a real name?” Fara Jack asked. “Poor guy.”

  “Where’s the grave?” Mo asked. He was in a more practical frame of mind. There was plenty of room in the Caddy for them and their gear.

  “Fort Morgan,” Sal said. “Not too far. Where you headed?”

  “Fort Morgan will do for now,” Mo said. Until he was sure whether the three travelers were organics or constructs, he didn’t want to tell them the whole story.

  “Then get what you need, stranded pilgrims, and join us,” Carlo said.

  They all piled into the Caddy, Dean still driving, Sal still in the passenger seat, and Carlo in the back facing Mo, Henry, and Fara Jack. “We’re supposed to be taking this car to Chicago,” Sal volunteered. “But Dean wanted to see an old friend, and then we got the idea that we were too close to Dick’s grave to not go pay our respects.”

  Sal spun the radio dial as Dean floored the gas pedal and the Caddy hummed west at a steady eighty-five miles an hour. Piano music poured out of the speakers. “‘Anthropocene Rag,’ yeah,” Sal said, putting his whole body into a nod as he fell back into the seat and lit a cigarette from the butt of the last. “This is it, man, nothing truer.”

  * * *

  They saw the beam of pink light long before they saw the rest of the town. “What is that?” Fara Jack asked.

  “The light of the holy,” Carlo said. “The soul in perfect union with the cosmos. The mind unmade, ground down by smaller minds around it, dispersed into the eternal that all of us dream.” He was stoned out of his mind, having smoked weed more or less constantly for the last hour. Between that and the cigarettes Dean and Sal chain-smoked, Mo was pretty sure they all had cancer. Unless the Golden Tickets could help with that, too.

  “Looks like a spotlight to me,” Mo said.

  They wound their way through Fort Morgan, aiming for the pink beam. Farmers and townspeople watched them go by. “Man, wonder where you have a good time in this town,” Dean said. “Must be somewhere. Always is.”

  Past a strip of restaurants and across the street from a sugar mill, they found the cemetery, with the pink beam shooting straight up from its southwest corner. Dean parked the car and they all got out, taking in the scene. Most of the cemetery was quiet, with manicured rows of graves and modest monuments. But around Dick’s grave, the Boom came to life. A stiff, jerky simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln greeted them. “Come to pay your respects, I see.”

  “We have,” Carlo said. Dean and Sal stood a little off to the side, hands clasped in a posture that was almost prayer. Both of them looked past Lincoln to the point where the pink beam originated, at a simple double stone inscribed with the names of Dick and his sister Jane. A little girl sat near the stone, on a throne made of what Henry Dale at first thought was junk. When he got a closer look at it, though, he saw it was composed of pieces of satellites. A trash heap surrounded it, drifting over one side of the tombstone. Henry Dale heard music coming from the trash. He looked more closely and saw a radio. The song came to an end, blending smoothly into the next. Something classical. On the other side of the trash pile, a sheep cropped the grass.

  The girl glanced over at Sal, Dean, and Carlo, then studied the three holders of Golden Tickets more closely. “This isn’t where you’re going,” she said. She looked about four years old, but spoke like an adult.

  “No,” Henry Dale said. He came closer. The pink beam seemed to originate from her.

  “You’re a believer, aren’t you, Henry Dale?” she asked.

  “I am. What are you?”

  “Wisdom,” she said.

  Mo and Fara Jack watched, hoping Henry Dale wouldn’t do anything crazy . . . or that the Boom wouldn’t assimilate him. They heard clanging and grinding from behind them, and when they turned around, Abe Lincoln had collapsed into a pile of gears and wires. The pile re-formed, becoming Mark Twain.

  “Well,” Twain said. “I did not expect that.” He looked over at the girl. “Your doing, I expect?”

  She ignored him. Twain lit his pipe and regarded the scene. “You three I’ve heard about,” he said, sweeping the bowl of the pipe in a circle to encompass Mo, Henry, and Fara Jack.

  “Heard what?” Mo asked.

  “You’re a long way from
where you meant to be, and a fair piece yet from where you’re supposed to go,” Twain said. “These three aren’t going to get you any closer.”

  Carlo, in some kind of ecstatic trance, stood with both hands in the pink beam and paid no attention to any of them. Dean was finishing a beer. Sal said, “They wanted to come along.”

  “They didn’t know any better,” Twain said.

  Dean tossed his beer into the trash heap around the girl’s throne. “Time to get moving. Say, Denver’s right down the road. Anyone else feel like Larimer Street is calling?”

  “Hold on,” Twain said. “I believe these three pilgrims need a ride somewhere else.”

  “Let’s hear it, then,” Sal said.

  Because she had no idea what was going on, Fara Jack decided to take a chance. “Monument City.”

  “Monument City? Fantastic.” Dean seemed smitten with the idea. “Yeah, we’ll go there. Come on. Hey, Carlo!”

  Carlo jumped and turned around, tears on his face. Sal lit maybe his twentieth cigarette since they’d first seen him. “Where is it?”

  “I know the way,” Twain said. “You got room for another in that conveyance?”

  As they walked to the car, Henry Dale noticed that the music had changed. Now the radio was playing the song from the car, the one Sal had called “Anthropocene Rag.”

  * * *

  They cut west through Greeley, thick with the smells of blood and smoke, and then north toward Cheyenne. Right before they hit Wyoming, white stones rose from the earth on the right, like crooked fangs. Human figures stood in the gaps, watching the car. Then west again to Rawlins and north, slaloming through valleys and over passes until Dean pulled off the road in a parking lot half-covered with tents. Brown road signs announced distances to various points in Yellowstone National Park. People looked over at them, then went about their business. It looked like a base camp for a wilderness expedition.

  Fara Jack got out of the car and stretched, resisting the urge to change form just so she could stretch more and different muscles. “What’s up around here?” she asked the nearest person.

  “Oh, we lead wilderness expeditions looking for Monument City. We heard it’s up here somewhere.” The guide leaned closer. “Between you and me, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist. Make that one hundred percent sure. I’ve been all through the park, except the parts where the Boom is too dangerous. There’s no city in there. Lots of bison and elk and wolves, but no city. But hey, people pay for the story.”

  “Huh,” Fara Jack said. “Thanks.”

  She relayed this to the others. Sal, Dean, and Carlo listened in. Before she’d finished, they were all getting back in the car. Twain stood a little apart, smoking his pipe and taking it all in. Fara Jack had the feeling he was writing something in his head.

  “Not my scene,” Dean said. “Anyway, we gotta get this heap to Chicago.”

  Sal gave them a little wave. Carlo, in the back, was muttering something in a different language. The Caddy limo swung in a wide circle around the lot and then Dean hit the gas, leaving skid marks most of the way to the first bend in the road.

  “This is the tricky part,” Twain said.

  “Tricky how?” Mo asked.

  Twain started walking, waving for them to follow. “Easier to show than tell.”

  Two hours later they reached the Zone.

  26

  “THERE’S NO WHY IN THE BOOM,” Sacagawea said, coming back to Mei-Mei’s question the next day as if it had only been a few minutes. “I mean, the why is always the same: because that’s what the Boom wants.”

  Running roughly parallel to the Yellowstone River, they followed a road southwest and sometime after noon they crossed the northern boundary of the Zone.

  In the Zone all the stories about Monument City are true.

  I heard the ground will, like, swallow you up. True. This has happened.

  I heard the city part is invisible and you can walk right around the walls without ever knowing it’s there. True. Especially if you are a tourist or seeker after enlightenment.

  The nano around the perimeter turns you into gray goo. It’s not the earth that eats you. It’s the Boom. This has happened, but by and large any frightening story about Monument City that invokes gray goo is a failure of the imagination.

  I heard that was only in the parts where the city was. Like it moves every day and the ground where it was the day before turns into a gray goo quicksand pit. Ditto.

  Moves where?

  Around, like to different places. Disappears and reappears, and whoever is where it builds itself, they just disappear. That’s where the gray goo story comes from. Partially accurate.

  I heard there are killer drones that kill everyone who gets close, or everyone who’s in the spot where it wants to land. Why would Monument City need drones?

  No, man, it doesn’t land. Can you imagine? Monument City flying through the air? It goes like the Boom goes, melts away and then pops up somewhere else. This is not strictly true, but it is the case that seekers after Monument City have perceived this.

  It doesn’t fucking exist.

  What?

  There is no Monument City.

  Then where are we going?

  Fucking difference does it make? Off into the Territories, to probably die. Someone’s going to take the tickets and pawn them off for batteries or some shit.

  Not if they can’t touch them.

  * * *

  This last was a bitter Kyle, in the throes of second-guessing and cold feet, arguing with Mei-Mei, who as they neared their mythical destination found herself believing not just that Monument City existed, but that something wondrously unthinkable awaited her there. Over the past ten days—only ten days? How was that possible?—she had felt new spaces open up in herself. There was nothing like an orphanage to teach you how bad kind people could be, but she wasn’t in the orphanage anymore. The Boom had saved her life, fed her a hippo skewer, taken her on a ride up the Mississippi and across the north woods and into the mountains. Her world was immeasurably larger, and whatever happened now, wherever Sacagawea led them, Mei-Mei was grateful.

  Barnum would have appreciated her gratitude, in the way people accustomed to plaudits accept them with a show of modesty that doesn’t fool anyone. From his perspective, the world owed him gratitude for his foresight. In the midst of the chaos of the Wave, the Synception of the Boom, he saw the potential for a new beginning. He had a vision. He executed.

  He also felt guilt, even if he no longer remembers that. The Boom’s origin, the Big Bang of the Boom, was Barnum’s lab, its containment protocols overwhelmed by the Wave. He chose Yellowstone for the site of Monument City because he had engineered the first plicks from thermophilic bacteria in the Yellowstone hot springs. There was no law to tell him no, not in the aftermath of the Synception. And even if there had been, he would have ignored it.

  Imagine the oceans inexorably rising to swallow shorelines and the cities built there. Tension building for eons a mile below the surface of the Earth. Two plates slip. An island in the Atlantic Ocean slides into the water. Waves propagate across the Ocean, rearing up to sweep over those already inundated coastlines. They surge through a lab in New Jersey where a visionary—who like many visionaries has no thought to spare for the consequences of his visions—has pushed the frontiers of replicator technology. In the churning mass of salt water, some of the replicators find their freedom, gasping and creeping their way to the next stage in their evolution.

  The visionary sees the havoc and performs what to him is an act of atonement. He creates Monument City. How is that an act of atonement? Put yourself in his shoes. You know you’re smarter than everyone else. You have the money to do anything the human mind can imagine doing. So of course you remake the entirety of human history, human achievement, in your own image. Thus Monument City.

  We are not criticizing. After all, this was how we came to be.

  Like all billionaires Barnum was a symptom of the ac
quisitive and pitiless disease known as capitalism. He desired things and could make them happen because his wealth deformed and vitiated laws and policies that should have stood in his way. While the world reeled from the Synception, he made deals with desperate governments. Brick by brick, timber by timber, he trucked his favorite monuments to Wyoming and unleashed his plicks. Some were universally acclaimed great works of humankind, others Barnum’s personal favorites granted equal status by the fiat of his wealth. What he could not buy or steal, he reluctantly reproduced. Monument City arose and grew, fueled by the endless heat reservoir of the Yellowstone Caldera. Was he doing good? We would say yes because at this time our progenitors also arose; yet we must also acknowledge the truth that such wealth and its exercise are a form of violence against any social norm we would understand to be good. Is this a failure of our understanding? It might be. Understanding this, in turn, is the first step to seeing beyond, to a greater understanding, but though we have learned to reach for that understanding it eludes us yet.

  You didn’t know any of this, did you? We told the story a little differently last time you heard it, but there were good reasons for that. This time you get it straight. Barnum made part of the City, yes, but he also exerted his enormous influence, opened his wallet, and brought his curated diorama of the world’s great works into being.

  Some of the first constructs who hauled the Pyramid of Cheops and the Taj Mahal piecemeal into the valley took on the appearance of Chinese laborers circa maybe 1868, absorbing the memories of the land they trod, and Barnum let them. He found the phenomenon interesting and wanted to see where it would lead, where the Boom might pursue its hungry absorption of North American history and lore. The Boom was new, still coalescing. Life-7 had not yet appeared. Much was uncertain.

  The workers who dug out the monuments and disassembled them, would they have starved otherwise? Perhaps. Certainly many of them were glad of the bread for which they exchanged their labor, and were beyond cares about selling their heritage. But could Barnum have also put his unfathomable wealth to work in other ways that did not aggrandize his vision of himself?