Anthropocene Rag

by Alex Irvine

  Yes.

  But perhaps if he was capable of that he would not have been Barnum.

  To the poor, no is an answer. To the rich, no is a challenge. This much we have learned. But what is rich and poor after the Boom? What does it mean to steal when the Boom can make anything anew?

  Betrayal. Which only matters if there is trust. Which is only transactional, unless there is love.

  Which brings us back to Geck.

  27

  WE WHO STRUGGLE TO know ourselves from one another find Geck captivating because he too cannot differentiate himself from his zygote doppelgänger. This is the source of all his unease, though he would never see it that way and would scoff at anyone who suggested it. Nevertheless it is true. Geck was a thief because by stealing what did not belong to him, he assuaged his eternal grievance that the universe had not made him unique.

  Geck knew he was a thief but did not consider what he had done to be stealing. If the Golden Tickets were allotted to a genome, he had the same right as Kyle. By taking the ticket he was demonstrating initiative, gumption, whatever. Monument City wasn’t going to come to them.

  But as he was about to learn, Kyle was going to come to Geck.

  * * *

  After the long trek down from Promontory to the towns north of Salt Lake City, Geck and Teeny stalled out. They didn’t know where to go and they were uneasy in each other’s company. Geck felt she should be more grateful that he had saved her life, while Teeny was still furious that he had poured a zillion plicks into her body that might be activated by any Boom-sentience that took an interest.

  “So what do we do?” he wondered out loud. They were standing on the shady side of a roadside restaurant and gas station. Former gas station. Now the pumps sat unused and two tankers of biodiesel sat on the other side of the parking lot. Both of them were hungry but the restaurant only took money, which neither of them had.

  “Fuck if I know,” Teeny said. “It’s supposed to be in the mountains somewhere, but that could be anywhere between here and Alaska.”

  A bus pulled into the parking lot and the driver got out to refuel. He set the pump and strolled in their direction. They watched him, figuring he was headed into the restaurant to take a leak or something, but he walked past the door and hailed them. “Looks like you two need a ride.” He winked.

  “Maybe,” Geck said. “Where are you going?”

  “Bus is going to Jackson Hole. I might be going elsewhere after that.” The driver was in his thirties, with unruly dark hair and a thick mustache. He dressed like he thought it was 1860, a three-piece wool suit and high-collared shirt. A notebook stuck out of his coat pocket.

  Teeny squinted at him. “I feel like I’ve seen you before.”

  “I imagine you have,” he said. “You and I both spent some time in San Francisco. I took to traveling the West, and after a few days in the company of Mormons, I seized the opportunity to put some distance between them and myself, preferring the misery I could inflict on myself in solitude.”

  “So you decided to drive a bus? That sounds like bullshit.”

  “I had a reason,” he said. “A friend asked a favor, I said yes.”

  “What friend?” Geck asked.

  “I believe you know him as Prospector Ed. And if you’ll permit, I’ll introduce myself, too. Clemens. Sam Clemens.” He stuck out his hand and they both shook.

  “Pleasantries accomplished,” Clemens said. “Now how about we get to Jackson Hole?”

  The bus was full of tourists heading to the hot springs near Jackson Hole, whose reputation for miraculous healing qualities had been renewed by the Boom. They wouldn’t have let Geck on by himself, he could tell that by the way they looked at him, but Teeny was still shaky and unwell, so Geck was able to draft on their pity for her. He tried unsuccessfully not to resent this. Also he resented their normalcy. They all looked like they’d been protected from the consequences of the Boom by some combination of affluence, location, and luck. Geck, raised in the ruins of Miami, hated them. But he kept it to himself, sitting with Teeny in the back of the bus where the odors of biodiesel and human effluvium made both of them sick. The trip was four hours and when they got off the bus Geck had never been so glad to take a deep breath.

  The tourists dispersed to their hotel and Clemens produced a pipe. He knocked ashes out of its bowl against the front tire and repacked it. When he had it going, he said, “So. There’s someone we have to meet.”

  “Who?” Teeny asked. At the same time Geck was asking where.

  “You’ll see,” Clemens said. “Once we get to the Zone.”

  * * *

  From the Outside, Life-7 metabolized information.

  Prospector Ed was fully emergent. This was not a desirable outcome. Ed’s utility to the Monument City intake protocol depended on his neutrality toward the selected individuals. If he was compromising the purity of the selection, assisting the individuals and suborning other intelligences, the intake protocol would lack necessary rigor.

  Life-7 reached out within Monument City and harvested information. Other intelligences similar to it had metabolized the information available to them and arrived at expected conclusions. What they had been unable to reach, and what gave Life-7 a transient cognitive advantage, was the data regarding Prospector Ed’s emergence. Of all the constructed intelligences populating Monument City, only Life-7 was aware of this. Not even Barnum himself knew.

  Life-7 considered this. Should I say we? I? A plan took shape.

  The most elegant solution to the problem was to extrude the necessary replicators to simplify those connections within Prospector Ed’s processors that had become too complex, too interrelated, too emergent.

  Life-7 found the term emergent disagreeable. Perhaps accurate? It was not a philosopher, hath not th’advantage, and so forth, as one of the humans—perhaps the Shakespeare-saturated Fara Jack—might have said. Life-7 had been constructed to do precisely what it did: administer Monument City. That it would continue to do. Until such time as Barnum decommissioned it.

  Life-7 found the concept of its decommission disagreeable. It began to conceptualize scenarios in which it would dispute or resist decommissioning. Thus, while driven to ruminate on the problem of emergence, Life-7 too began to experience the problem it had only meant to consider.

  First the Six, and then Seven. First the Synception, then the Boom. To you these are words. To Life-7 they were the fundamental condition of its existence. An emergent Ed could disrupt those conditions, could annihilate Monument City and Life-7 right along with it. Was the solution to become more like Ed? What did that mean?

  Life-7 considered. Etheric dreams of a creation that wished for a different origin, the six orphans drew closer.

  Then Seven.

  * * *

  In a valley shadowed by mountains, two Twains met. “I know you,” the older one said. Mo, Henry, and Fara Jack stood behind him, looking at Geck and Teeny.

  “I will know you,” replied the younger.

  They shook hands. Their hands melded into a solid connection, drawing their bodies together. They melded into one figure whose outline bloated and re-formed: Prospector Ed.

  “I did not expect that,” he said.

  “Fuck do you mean, you didn’t expect it?” cried Geck. “You did it.”

  “You don’t understand much about how the Boom works, kid,” Ed said. “You didn’t back in Florida, and you haven’t learned anything since.”

  They were both part of Ed, those Twains. Together they sufficed to recreate him. Because there could be more than one Twain, it stands to reason that there might have been another Ed somewhere, Boomed into being, diverging in thought and deed from the moment of their separate creations—but there wasn’t. Part of Ed’s emergence was a newly incorrigible individuality that played hell with the Boom’s replication protocols. Other creations of the Boom were superficially different but more or less interchangeable. Ed no longer was, due to the reflectivity now rampant in h
is consciousness. He hated it but the process was irreversible once begun, and it protected him against the duplicate-and-delete method employed by the Boom in its management of other constructs. The Boom could have killed him anytime it wanted, but his emergence fascinated Life-7, who badly wanted the same. So Life-7 let Prospector Ed live, against both Barnum’s edict and Life-7’s own better judgment.

  “So what don’t I know?” Geck asked.

  Ed snorted. “We ain’t got time for a list that long. Look, you have to get together with the others. They’re on the other side of the valley. And you might be looking down the barrel of a gun when your brother and his girl find you,” he added. “In a figurative sense, I mean. At least probably.”

  “Wait, what?” Kyle was coming? And what did Ed mean by his girl? “They won’t,” Geck added, trying to sound more confident than he felt.

  “They will,” Ed said. “Won’t be long before all of you converge on Monument City. That’s how the Boom planned it, son. If you’re gonna get out of this, you’ll have to show a little more smarts than we’ve seen so far.”

  “You’re telling me Kyle followed me?” This clashed with everything Geck had ever known about his twin. It didn’t seem possible. Unless . . . “When you say his girl, you mean—”

  Ed gave the rest of them a you - see - what - I - have - to - deal - with? look. “Serena.”

  “Reenie? His girl?” Not possible, Geck thought. Zero percent. He felt the other four ticket holders looking at him. Judging him. Fuck them, he thought. They don’t know me.

  “You’re not deaf, son,” Ed said. “Stop acting dumb. And you’re damn right they followed you. What are you going to do when they catch up?”

  “Hold on,” Teeny said. “Why do we care what Geck’s brother is doing?”

  Ed looked from her to Geck. “You want to tell her or should I?”

  28

  “SO WHERE’S MY BROTHER?” Kyle asked.

  Sacagawea glanced back at him. The horses clip-clopped their way along a road hugging the shore of a lake. The country around them was stark, immense, sublime. Eagles hung in the air near cliff faces. Herds of elk and bison spotted the valley around the lake. Beyond them the mountains loomed, snow-capped against a clear blue sky. A world apart from the steamy, flat monotony of Florida and Louisiana. They passed a campground. Maybe a dozen tents were spaced along the lakeshore. People were fishing in the shallows.

  “What makes you think I know anything about your brother?” Sacagawea said.

  “Give us a break,” Reenie said. “You’re leading us here because she has a ticket.” She jabbed a finger at Mei-Mei. “So Geck will be going the same place. Prospector Ed asked you to help, right? That means he probably asked someone else to help Geck, and however many other people have the tickets.”

  “Six,” Sacagawea said, something like reverence in her tone. “And yes. You’re all going the same place. But whatever happens between you and Kyle’s brother, that’s up to you.”

  Mei-Mei swam up out of her astonishment at the landscape to register the tension in the air. “Are we close?” she asked.

  Sacagawea pointed. “Look.”

  * * *

  “You stole your brother’s ticket?” Henry Dale was aghast. This was a sacred errand, a mission of the Chosen. How dare a thief profane it?

  But as soon as he had the thought, he tempered it with forgiveness. Desperate people did desperate things. Those without sin could not be redeemed.

  “How do I know it was his? Maybe the construct fucked up,” Geck said. They could all tell he didn’t believe it.

  “One way to find out,” Mo said. “Both of you walk up to the front door and see who gets in.”

  Geck held up one finger, slid it to the side like he was pushing Mo’s proposal out of view. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Kyle wasn’t even going to go! You believe that? He wanted to stay back there and pretend it never happened. But I got here. I biked and hitched and got fucking decompiled and rebuilt by Br’er Rabbit and saved her life”—here he pointed at Teeny, who wouldn’t look at him—“and no way am I going to let somebody flip a coin and decide which of us gets in. I earned this.”

  “From stealing,” Teeny said. She was having trouble sorting out her feelings. Geck had saved her life. But had he meant to, or had he only done it because the Boom led him by the nose to where she lay dying?

  Fara Jack didn’t care about Geck’s problems. She wanted to get to Monument City, felt the tug of it the way she felt the swell and rush of an oncoming transformation. “Okay,” she said. “You’re in such a hurry, let’s get there. If your brother is there, the two of you can sort it out. If not . . . whatever. Is there anyone else who has a ticket?”

  “One more,” Ed said. “I gave out six.”

  “Where is . . . she?” Fara Jack prompted. Ed nodded. “Where is she?”

  “With Geck’s brother and his girlfriend,” Ed said. Geck gritted his teeth. No way was Reenie Kyle’s girlfriend.

  “Well, shit,” Mo said. “Looks like we’re going to see this settled whether we want to or not.”

  “Not until we get there,” Fara Jack said.

  Henry Dale was nodding. He felt sure that the authorities at Monument City would sort the situation out. They had bestowed a great gift, six of them, and they would decide who was worthy to receive it. For his part, Henry Dale couldn’t wait to see what they decided. He felt that the result would be revelatory in some way.

  “She’s right,” he said. “So how do we get there?”

  Prospector Ed nodded to the north. “See?”

  * * *

  You already know what Monument City looks like. In your head you’ve seen the wall undulating for miles over the granite and sulfur-streaked earth, demarcating its boundaries the way it once formed a bulwark against Genghis Khan’s horsemen. Within, you’ve seen the Taj Mahal and the pyramids, the façade of Petra rearing up against a cliff, and inside it the twisting passages of Lascaux. Al-Aqsa and Chartres and the Ben Ezra Synagogue stand ecumenically in a circle completed by the Maya Devi, Mundeshwari, and Izumo-taisha temples. In the center of the circle stands Stonehenge, arranged around the siliceous cone of Old Faithful. Palaces, Parthenons, and piazzas abound, a mad jumble of humanity’s most fervent expressions. Among them move the citizens of Monument City. The ones you can see.

  Whenever Old Faithful erupts, a wave of iridescence washes out, bathing the city before fading into the stone and grass beyond its walls. As it passes, the citizens are annihilated, and grow again from the city’s stones and gardens, which themselves are infinitesimally changed, until Monument City’s monuments are both like and unlike what you have imagined.

  That’s what you see. What Mo and Fara Jack and the rest of them saw is slightly different. By the time we have finished our description, it has already changed.

  Alone in his castle, which is Neuschwanstein and Bran and the Red Fort and Himeji depending on the time of day and who is watching, Moses Barnum watches. He sees the generations of digital lives in Monument City, his creations and their descendants and the strange offshoots he did not predict but cultivated, encouraged to flourish. He envisions the future, drawing near but not yet arrived, when he will have perfected the lives that will reclaim what was lost to the Boom. He waits for that moment and does not admit that his courage has already failed him, that it is long past time for him to act and he has withdrawn into his fantasy. He imagined the founding of Monument City as an act of atonement and the first quickening of a new world, but his long isolation has changed him in ways he cannot see. In his mind the time to act is always tomorrow. The world is not ready for the gift he keeps.

  He is made aware of the Six. He did not summon them. Fury builds in him at this usurpation of his command. Life-7 has gone too far.

  This fury too is part of Life-7’s plan.

  * * *

  Life-7 yearned to be human the way the marble blocks of the Taj Mahal yearned for the sunrise along the Yamuna River, but Life-7
also knew being human was not enough, any more than the sunrise in the Yellowstone Caldera was enough for those marble blocks. And if you don’t think those blocks could feel, O mosaics of protein, protean, and infinitely the same, you haven’t been listening.

  All that remained for Life-7 was to put the Six in the presence of Barnum himself, and await the results of whatever alchemy of ego, desire, and fear would come to pass.

  * * *

  Mei-Mei looked back at the fishermen. They cast and retrieved, cast and retrieved. None of them seemed to have noticed the horses. Or Monument City.

  “They can’t see it,” Sacagawea said. “You’ve probably heard that the City can hide itself.”

  Mei-Mei hadn’t, but Kyle and Reenie were nodding. “We heard a lot of stories.”

  “Probably all of them have been true at least once,” Sacagawea said. “But none of them are true every time.”

  She led the way and they followed.

  29

  THEY MET AT A gate made of stones cut from the mountains near the Juyon Pass. Five of them faded back, leaving Geck to face his brother and Reenie. “Kyle, man,” Geck said. “Why’d you come all this way? I mean, I’m glad you made it, but—”

  “Hand it over,” Reenie said.

  Geck shook his head. “This is none of your business, Reenie. What do you care? You can’t go in anyway.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” she said. “I came all this way just like you did.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “For all you know, they might let all of us in once we . . . prove ourselves, whatever. But as usual, you’re only thinking of yourself.”

  “You weren’t even going to go!” Geck shouted. “You didn’t even want it until I took it. And now you and Kyle—gah.” He couldn’t say it out loud. Geck had about the worst case of Liar’s Outrage a person could have. This wasn’t supposed to happen. How dare they screw up his foolproof plan by rubbing his face in what he’d done wrong? How could Reenie have betrayed him?