Frostlands

by John Feffer

  “You must leave,” Karyn says. “We must leave. I’m rather sad, of course, since I haven’t finished my graphic novel and I’d prefer—”

  “Shut up and put me down!” I command her.

  And she does stop. But not because I have commanded her to do so.

  We both watch a new spectacle unfold above us. As if strings attaching them to the sky had been cut, the mantas begin to fall with a great crashing sound of metal hitting metal. Once they filled the sky above Arcadia; now they are lying in the field beyond the cistern, stacked a half-dozen high everywhere, and this time they do not disappear into dew. The inner perimeter stops shimmering and giving off heat. With soft pops, new gold-rimmed hexagons begin to appear in the breaches and the perimeter wall becomes whole again.

  It’s as if someone has pulled the plug on the entire operation. It obviously wasn’t my doing. Anuradha said that she no longer could influence her employers. Which leaves only one other person.

  “Thank you, Benjamin,” I say quietly.

  Chapter Twenty

  They have collected everything on the list I gave them. Now they’re finishing up a final task they assigned themselves. I enter the library with the backpack that holds all my worldly possessions, hurriedly swept together, to find Rupert and Karyn sitting at a table in the empty main room. Karyn is drawing and Rupert watching. A thick stack of completed pages lies next to Karyn’s elbow.

  Rupert looks up as I approach, but she continues to draw.

  “Hello, Rachel,” Rupert says. “See what Karyn is doing.”

  I look over her shoulder. She’s drawing the main room of the library, including remarkably faithful representations of Rupert and her at the table. As I watch, she employs the unerring skill of a photorealist to draw me entering the room.

  “But you never even looked up!” I exclaim.

  As she adds the final touches—the wrinkles on my face, the crosshatching on the backpack—she says, “I don’t have to. I have eyes in the back of my head.”

  Rupert helpfully indicates the studs in her ears, which I now understand to be functional, not decorative.

  With a flourish, Karyn signs this last page and hands the folio to Rupert.

  “It is complete,” he says and flips through the pages, showing me different scenes. “Look. The battle. Karyn’s capture. The rebellion and the split. The initial attacks back in 2032. And see, Rachel, here you are, right there at the beginning.”

  It’s a picture of Anuradha and me, side by side, at the official opening ceremony for Arcadia. I hadn’t even decided at that point whether to join. I was only there to see my friend, to hear her creation story. She’d been persuasive indeed. On that very day, I made my life-changing decision. I turn away so that my tears don’t destroy Karyn’s work.

  “Should we take it with us, Rachel?” Rupert asks.

  I shake my head. “Let’s leave it here. In the library.”

  “Then we are ready to go,” he says, glancing over at the knapsacks. One contains the dried food I will eat, another the necessary survival tools—micropanels, a desalination kit, the medical supplies I might need. The third contains the essential components of my lab necessary to reproduce my research results.

  Arcadia has a half-dozen hovercars. Because of a shortage of spare parts, only two are kept in working order. Zoltan is giving us one of them. Since we will not likely return, it’s an act of great generosity. The hovercar has enough of a charge to get us pretty close to where we need to go. At this time of year, there will be practically no sunlight at that latitude to recharge the cells. We’ll probably have to hike the last fifty miles or more, to the coordinates of one of the largest methane deposits.

  We don’t know how long the grace period will last. Zoltan thinks that CRISPR International’s global network might be up and running again in as little as forty-eight hours. The Movement has scored only a glancing blow.

  I’m not worried about Arcadia. As long as I’m no longer here, CRISPR won’t keep trying to break in to destroy my research. They’ll be focused on one thing above all: finding and stopping me.

  In the next hour, Anuradha will go before the community and confess everything. I’m glad I won’t be here. I doubt she will be punished or confined. Like Karyn, she no longer maintains any connection to her employer. She has nothing left but Arcadia. She is an astronaut marooned on her planet. Perhaps they’ll simply change her status from sleeper to Capture. Or perhaps they will send her into exile at the Farm, if it will have her.

  The whole concept of Arcadia has changed for me, now that it turns out we were conceived as an ark, an instrument of salvation for the chosen remnant of humanity, the inner circle of the world’s most powerful corporation.

  What was going through my former husband’s mind when he sent those messages to our children? Was he warning me of the serpent in our midst? More likely, he simply wanted to tell me that I was as wedded to illusions as he was. Julian couldn’t have known about my research and its potential impact. He wasn’t trying to save Arcadia or the world. Maybe he just wanted to get in one last jab at his ex-wife. On such small things does the fate of the world turn.

  “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish person who builds his house on sand,” Matthew said. “The rain comes down, the streams rise. The winds blow and beat against that house, and it falls with a great crash.”

  We built Arcadia on sand, and I no longer want any part of it. I don’t know if it can ever rid itself of this original sin.

  The plan I sketched out for Rupert and Karyn was for them to trek alone to the Arctic Circle and what remains of the polar ice cap. They were to start a carefully controlled process of ice-crystal formation. To program it for precise homeostatic growth. To provide the coordinates to Benjamin and Zoltan to shield the location from CRISPR. The mission, I thought, didn’t need an eighty-year-old woman to slow it down.

  But soon thereafter I changed my mind: I’m going with them. I’m not sure what I can add to Rupert’s analytical abilities or Karyn’s fine motor skills. Perhaps just an all-too-human sense of urgency and adventure. I’ll also be there just in case Karyn starts to hit her head or Rupert needs his monkey patched. They aren’t infallible, our AIs—but then, who is?

  At the end of my life, I will be going on the Arctic expedition of my dreams. The ice has given me so much over the fourscore span of my life. It’s time to give something back to the ice.

  This report is all I have to leave behind for my three children and two grandchildren. I want them to understand my decision. I want them to know that I’m taking them with me, not by way of VR technology but in the hopes for their future that I carry in my scarred, rundown heart.

  Rupert and Karyn have shouldered the bags and are watching me compose these final lines. I don’t know if we can save the world.

  But if I have to, I will die trying.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Transcript of conversation between Emmanuel Puig and Aurora West-Sackville, Brussels, December 31, 2051

  Emmanuel Puig: I know you’re busy, but thank you for agreeing to meet with me. Well, virtually.

  Aurora West-Sackville: I really don’t have much time.

  Emmanuel: I just wanted to know if you’d heard anything from your mother and her trip to… the frostlands.

  Aurora: Nothing.

  Emmanuel: And Arcadia?

  Aurora: They’re not saying anything.

  Emmanuel: I suppose we’ll just have to wait.

  Aurora: Yes.

  Emmanuel: I want to publish your mother’s manuscript. The one she sent to you and you sent to me. Well, the redacted version, anyway. We don’t want to reveal any of the—

  Aurora: You don’t have to ask my permission. It’s what she would have wanted.

  Emmanuel: I plan to publish your father’s manuscript, too, of course, but I’m still working on the annotations.

  Aurora: The work of an academic is never done.r />
  Emmanuel: And then…

  Aurora: Then what?

  Emmanuel: Actually, I was thinking of a trilogy.

  Aurora: Go ahead. Knock yourself out.

  Emmanuel: I’m sorry?

  Aurora: Oh, it’s just an old expression. It means do whatever you want to do.

  Emmanuel: I was thinking of something from your point of view.

  Aurora: I have nothing to add and I don’t have any time, so—

  Emmanuel: But you’ll at least think about it?

  Aurora: You’re serious.

  Emmanuel: I am always serious.

  Aurora: My father died last year. I have no idea if my mother is still alive. I don’t think of myself as a paranoid person, but I have good reason to believe that the most powerful corporation in the world considers my family public enemy number one. Oh, and meanwhile, the planet is being frog-marched toward apocalypse. And you want me to write a book?

  Emmanuel: A short one, perhaps.

  Aurora: A book!

  Emmanuel: Well, it’s what we do, isn’t it?

  Aurora: That’s the stupidest thing you’ve said so far.

  Emmanuel: I apologize.

  Aurora: We have to do more than just write books.

  Emmanuel: If we can.

  Aurora: I don’t know about you, but I plan to do something. I’m not just going to sit around and wait.

  Emmanuel: Good!

  Aurora: Even if it’s just a small thing, I’m going to do it. We can’t let ourselves wallow in dystopia.

  Emmanuel: I’m so happy to hear this!

  Aurora: Enough is enough!

  Emmanuel: Knock yourself out, Aurora!

  Aurora: That’s not exactly how you… Never mind. I have to go. We’re hosting a New Year’s Eve party.

  Emmanuel: Of course. Then we agree?

  Aurora: About what?

  Emmanuel: To do something, something together.

  Aurora: Together?

  Emmanuel: You will write the third book in the series and I will edit it?

  Aurora: Look, I really have to go…

  Emmanuel: We all want to know if your mother will be successful. Perhaps you can interview her when she gets back and—

  Aurora: You’re irrepressibly optimistic.

  Emmanuel: And I want to hear your story. The story of the next generation.

  Aurora: The guests will be arriving any minute. I have to focus on the here and now before I can think about future books.

  Emmanuel: Ah, but you will think about it. Thank you, Aurora, I look forward to our collaboration! I am very excited about the new year and our new project. For now, however, let us both go knock ourselves out.

  Acknowledgments

  This book owes its existence to Tom Engelhardt, who inspired me to write Splinterlands and encouraged me to continue the story in Frostlands. He continues to be an editor without parallel who did much to improve the text. A shoutout as well to Sarah Grey, a superb copyeditor, and the crew at Haymarket for their design and promotional skills. Finally, my wife Karin helped early on to make this a more interesting book: she remains my first reader, my dear reader, my ideal reader.

  About the Author

  John Feffer is a playwright and the author of several books, including Splinterlands and the novel Foamers. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Salon, and others. He is the director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.