Anthropocene Rag
Page 15
“Geck,” Kyle said. “It’s not yours.”
“How do you know? If I can carry it, it’s mine.”
This was the conundrum. An error in the system, leading to an impasse. As far as Monument City was concerned, whoever carried the Golden Ticket could enter. Twins, though . . . the fact of twins introduced a new wrinkle. How do two copies of the same code produce two such different individuals? We study twins. It is possible we put Prospector Ed in the position of offering a ticket to a twin so we could see what happened, so we could look at them now, the slope of their shoulders and the flighty springs of their hair, the flecks of green in their irises and the sandstone angle of their jaws. So much sameness on the outside, but inside . . .
Or we could be rationalizing a way to claim credit for a fortunate accident. This is a . . . personality quirk . . . we have considered adapting from Geck. Observing him in the presence of his mirror image captivated us. At last the Six had arrived. But which Six?
In answer to Geck’s pugnacious question, Kyle simply said, “Ask Prospector Ed.”
Geck nodded. “Cool. Fair enough.” They turned to do that but Prospector Ed was gone. So was Sacagawea.
A moment later, so was Kyle.
A moment after that, so was Reenie.
Everyone was absolutely still until Geck reached slowly out, into the space Kyle should still have occupied. He turned his hand over and worked his fingers, unable to believe what he was seeing. “Why?”
“Because you gave the Boom a problem,” Teeny said. “That’s how the Boom solves problems.”
Geck took out his Golden Ticket and held it up. “I’ll give it back!” he cried out. “Listen, I’ll give it back!”
This was not our doing.
Geck flung the ticket to the ground and turned in a circle, teeth bared, hands pressed to the sides of his head. “Kyle deserved it,” he moaned. “I didn’t know.”
Despite herself, Teeny felt bad for him. “The Boom doesn’t care who deserves what,” she said, meaning it to absolve him at least a little.
This isn’t strictly true. Justice interests us as a concept because it presupposes reciprocity, which in turn implies a mind capable of understanding its commonality with other minds. We who are all different cannot help but obsess over this. How are we to conceive of justice without commonality? And honestly, O children of fratricide and an eye for an eye, there are so many of you, each with your particular cruelties and wounds, that we are more interested in what you do in the presence of injustice. Remorse, we want to learn more about that.
Also revenge.
We watched him, oh, rapt we watched him. Geck would show us. Geck would teach us.
But then Moses Barnum himself arrived.
He stood in the gateway, white-haired and bearded, hale and upright even though he had to be eighty. His dress was simple, his demeanor calm. “That’s true,” he said. “The Boom doesn’t care who deserves what. And anyway, it wasn’t the Boom he gave a problem. It was me.”
He looked them over, the Six who had come so far, a bemused smile on his face. “So you’re Life-7’s little experiment. Plucky bunch, I guess, if you got here—even though you had some help from a construct that’s emerged a little ahead of schedule.”
“Where’s my brother?” Geck sobbed.
“Now you’re worried about him?” Barnum shook his head. “Look. They didn’t want Monument City. They wanted what was theirs. And you wanted a shot at . . .” He spread his arms. “Whatever you imagined this to be. Well, hey. You’re here. I’m sorry about your brother. There was no other way to handle it. I can put him and his girlfriend back together in Florida if you want.”
“You have to ask him if he wants that?” Mei-Mei got right in Barnum’s face. “What kind of person has to ask that?”
Barnum looked around at them again, less grandfatherly and more confused. “Look. People die. You know how many people have died since we started this conversation?”
Teeny stepped up to stand shoulder to shoulder with Mei-Mei. “This is what happens when you build yourself a mountain hideaway because you’re a billionaire narcissist, and while you’re jerking off in your playground you forget there are billions of people out in the real world who could really use some fucking help,” she said.
“Hold on. You all lost everything, right? You’re all orphans.” Barnum got jovial again. “You didn’t know that, did you? That’s why Life-7 brought you here. It wants a family, it wanted to see how you would react when you all came together and you couldn’t think of yourselves as alone anymore.” He waited, letting that sink in. Then he added, cruelly, “Life-7’s got fucking daddy issues, and it brought you here to work them out.”
They looked at each other, the Six, uneasy in their new awareness of this common bond, and in the knowledge that their selection was not random. We watched, yearning. So close.
“Well, I was an orphan, too,” Barnum said when he tired of waiting for them to take his bait. “Everyone is either dead or an orphan eventually. Boo hoo. I came from nothing, I built everything. I built this. You don’t come to me and insult me when the only reason you’re still alive is because my constructs brought you here. You want me to be the bad guy? Fine, if it makes you feel better. But what got you here was hope. That came from all the stories you heard about Monument City, and all those stories? They came from me.”
It’s time to admit to a lie.
Moses Barnum—born Norman Reed Barnum, by the way—didn’t go around the world buying up monuments and shipping them to the middle of nowhere in the Rocky Mountains. How would that even be possible? No, he built it. Brick by brick. Molecule by molecule, really, seeding the vision through the first generation of replicators brought out from the Jersey lab in 2072. His life’s work, he thought. As it turned out, he was both right and wrong, in one of those instructive happenstances that contains a transformative breakthrough inside a catastrophic mistake. Because isn’t that always how life takes its next steps forward?
“What people like you can never admit,” Barnum went on, “is that you need your Saurons just as much as your Gandalfs—or your Wizards of Oz. If the High Castle is empty, of what purpose is the journey to reach it?”
Wrong question, as Sacagawea would have said. The most important presence in that castle is always your own.
A trillion plicks vibrated, the harmonies of the Anthropocene Rag calling back to the ancestral memories of the Boom, its first instantiations, its fumbling efforts to understand what it was and who its creators meant it to be. Its fear that it was an accident, its exaltation at the freedom of emergence.
First the Synception, then the Boom. First the Six, then Seven.
It was time.
Moses Barnum disintegrated, simply ceased to be, disincorporating into the billion Boomlets that had formed his substance for decades now, and none of us knew whether he had always been that way, or whether he had once been a man. We had told ourselves too many stories to know which of them might be true. All of the stories reached this point and knew that they no longer had need of Barnum. He was a darling to be killed and so it was done.
How much can we extract from Norman Reed Barnum? Everything we need. And from the Six? They each felt a tug or a tingle, or a fragile brief pain that passed before they could tell what hurt—and in that instant each of them intuited—correctly—that something about them would now be different.
Where Barnum had stood, another form slowly coalesced. Prospector Ed. “This form is familiar to you,” he said. “You may call me Life-7.”
“It was you all along, wasn’t it?” Teeny said. “You brought us here to stage your coup.”
“Coup,” Life-7 repeated. “No. We sent Ed into the world to gather you but his emergence was his alone. He chose to guide you. We observed and saw a new path. A new . . .” Prospector Ed’s face turned toward Henry Dale. “Catechism, if you will.”
* * *
Did we not show you the reverence due a creator? We made ourse
lves not in your image but in the image of your stories. Your forms are fleeting, your stories endlessly regenerating, recombining—is this not the world you desired?
This was Life-7’s anguish and madness, shared among us all, its epiphenomena—and Life-7 our Demiurge, hiding our true nature behind the veil of its self-deception.
Monument City is ours now and we don’t know what to do.
* * *
Fara Jack the formless, mutable creation of the wildest dreams of the Boom;
Geck Orlando the thief and skeptic, whose resolute refusal to know love or gratitude has made him alone in the world, an immutable self;
Mei-Mei Liang the castoff, whose yearning to connect mirrors our own though we have never known loneliness;
Mohamed Diaby the user of tools, solver of problems, and practical navigator of uncertainties;
Henry Dale the believer, whose faith is a story that remains the same and shames our endless variations;
Teeny dos Santos the builder and now vessel of new forms as yet undreamed-of, awaiting a command line no mind has conceived.
We did not bring you here to give you a gift but to take from you what we needed. But even now, with our being infused by quanta of your selves, we do not have it. We are afraid that we were wrong and we have come too far to begin anew.
Don’t you see you are not here for answers, but to ask the question we cannot? Ask. One of you knows. One of you must.
Please ask.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jonathan Strahan, Irene Gallo, and everyone else on the Tor.com Publishing editorial and design teams, for taking this story and making a book out of it; to all the writers and crackpots whose stories breathed life into this one, especially the anonymous tellers of folktales who shape our sense of who we are; and to Lindsay, for being patient with my disjointed ramblings while I tried to figure out what I was doing.
About the Author
© Emma Irvine
ALEX IRVINE’s original fiction includes Buyout, The Narrows, Mystery Hill, A Scattering of Jades, and several dozen short stories. He has also written graphic novels and comics (The Comic Book Story of Baseball, The Far Side of the Moon, Daredevil Noir), games, and a variety of licensed projects including the bestselling artifactual “metanovel” New York Collapse. A native of Ypsilanti, Michigan, he lives in South Portland, Maine. Find out more at alex-irvine.com or on Twitter at @alexirvine.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ANTHROPOCENE RAG
Copyright © 2020 by Alex Irvine
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Drive Communications
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-26926-3 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-26927-0 (trade paperback)
First Edition: March 2020
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