Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

“When ice melts, the glass don’t spill over.”

  Bev had leaned against him in the porch swing, comforted by his disbelief, while he told her about a column he read when they were in college, by that brainy woman who answered people’s letters. Someone wrote in and asked the woman if you were to fill a glass with ice cubes, then run tap water right up to the rim of the glass, what would happen when the ice melted? And the brainy woman’s reply had been something about melting ice cubes displacing the same amount of water as the frozen ice.

  It’s not my fault, Bev thought now. It’s his fault, not mine. His.

  She wasn’t the fool. It was him. He was.

  But that wasn’t fair. Gordy hadn’t taken the news seriously, but at the time, nobody had. They’d been on the porch, listening to the radio while the neighborhood noisily settled in for the night. Benjamin had been scrambling around in the front yard, kicking dried-out pinecones around like footballs.

  “You remember the oddest things,” Bev had said, and Gordy had laughed. There had been plenty of laughter in those days. Those days, that’s how Bev thought of them. As in: those days when life was good. Those days when there were still people around. When the sun blazed and they called it a nice summer day, not an ice-melter like everyone did now. Those days. When Gordy was still around.

  But Gordy had been wrong. The brainy woman had been wrong. The radio warning all those years ago, when Benji was small, had been wrong. Fifty years, they’d said. In fifty years, the coastlines will be different. Your homes will be underwater. Fifty years.

  They’d listened to the talk shows afterward, the pundits arguing that nobody knew what the next ten years would look like, much less the next fifty. It’s all a farce, they argued. It’s a campaign strategy. A ploy. Fifty years—ha!

  It had happened in five.

  Gordy went and died before it got serious, and on summer evenings, when the skies went purple and orange, Bev and Benjamin and sometimes Ezze, even, would wander down to the seawall with the rest of the town, and they’d all stand on the wall and look down at the water level. When they couldn’t see the high-water mark, somebody would motor out in a rubber boat and spray a new line of paint on the wall.

  Soon enough, someone could just lean over the rail and spray that new line. The water kept rising. When it was a few inches from the top of the wall, people started leaving town. In a month’s time, the village had emptied.

  Ezze scooped up her cane and went heavily down the porch steps. Benji tugged on Bev’s hand. He held it tightly as they walked, following the older woman as she puffed along. Bev barely registered his grip until it was too tight, and she yelped.

  “Sorry, Mama,” he said.

  She saw Gordy in Benji’s eyes. They weren’t a child’s eyes anymore. Benji was nearly thirteen, and already his eyes were narrow slots. He and Gordy both had a Clint Eastwood squint, and she could see the boy’s jawline, his cheekbones, sharpening. His hair was already drawing back on his head, though. She didn’t dare break his heart by telling him now, but he’d lose most of it by twenty, probably, just like his father.

  The thought that he might not see twenty was a block of ice in her gut.

  “I knowed about it when Pippa came home with a crab shell in her mouth,” Ezze said, huffing as she waddled ahead. “Came right on home with it. No place else she could’ve gotten it. Had to have washed up over the wall. Fresh, too. She’d pulled half the meat out, but I swear the thing was still twitching.”

  The street was gritty under their feet. Bev padded along in her flip-flops, and as Ezze fell silent, Bev’s shoes pock-pocked like tennis balls. There was a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time. Used to be a court down by the high school, and on quiet days, you could hear the distant sound of rackets pocking the balls, back and forth, back and forth. The sharp shriek of tennis shoes on the clay, too. People grunting and shouting excitedly.

  Quiet town.

  “I saw your Rascal,” Benji said. “I tried to fix it, but . . .”

  He trailed off.

  “Your Rascal?” Bev asked.

  Ezze stopped for a moment, breathing heavily. “Yeah,” she admitted, bending over a bit, leaning on the cane. “I rode down there on it with Pippa to see for myself. Battery died right up at the wall. There were some boys putting down sandbags, and they tried to help me with it, but it’s just dead. One of them walked me back home. Nice kid. I don’t know whose kid. Not many left, you know.”

  Benji said, “It’s still where you left it. There’s some seagull shit on it, but—”

  “Benjamin Howard Marsh,” Bev said sharply.

  “Never mind that,” Ezze said loudly. She pounded the rubber feet of her cane on the concrete. “Look.”

  They all looked down to see a thin ribbon of water. It cascaded between their feet, and they all watched in a hush as it passed them by, gathering up bits of leaves and fine gravel. The water kept going, making its way down the street until they couldn’t quite make out its leading edge. It was here now, Bev thought.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Ezze cried. She high-stepped around her cane as another rivulet ran through the yellowed grass on the shoulder of the road. And in the quiet then they could hear it: the water, its thousand narrow fingers, creeping through the dead lawns and over the bleached asphalt. They could see it, stream after stream of it moving across empty driveways, splitting around the stop sign post, and then the thousand fingers of it bled together until the water was a blue-gray sheet, rippling along beneath the darkening sky, claiming the land for its own.

  “Mama,” Benji said.

  The water spilled around their feet, thin but here.

  “Mama,” he said again, tugging Bev’s hand. She looked up at him, then at Ezze, whose stern features had folded into a new shape, a softer, more honest mask, a fearful one.

  “Mama, we gotta go,” Benjamin said.

  Such a fool, Bev thought to herself again.What would Gordy have done? But it didn’t matter what he would do now. It mattered what he had done then, and what he had done then was laugh, then die.

  We should’ve had a TV, she thought absurdly.

  She looked at Ezze. The fading sun caught the faint whiskers on Ezze’s cheeks, turning them into tiny glowing filaments. Benji stared at her, his narrow eyes still fierce with hope and promise, his skin rosy where it faced the sunset, and dusky purple on the opposite side, in shadow, as if he was already dead, and there was no way around it.

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JASON GURLEY is the author of Eleanor, The Man Who Ended the World, Deep Breath Hold Tight, and the bestselling novel Greatfall, among other books. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest, and can be found at jasongurley.com.

  THE DAY IT ALL ENDED

  CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

  Bruce Grinnord parked aslant in his usual spot and ran inside the DiZi Corp headquarters. Bruce didn’t check in with his team or even pause to glare at the beautiful young people having their toes stretched by robots while they sipped macrobiotic goji-berry shakes and tried to imagine ways to make the next generation of gadgets cooler-looking and less useful. Instead, he sprinted for the executive suite. He took the stairs two or three at a time, until he was so breathless he feared he’d have a heart attack before he even finished throwing his career away.

  DiZi’s founder, Jethro Gruber—Barron’s Young Visionary of the Year five years running—had his office atop the central spire of the funhouse castle of DiZi’s offices, in a round glass turret. Looking down on the employee oxygen bar and the dozen gourmet cafeterias. If you didn’t have the key to the private elevator, the only way up was this spiral staircase, which climbed past a dozen Executive Playspaces, and any one of those people could cockblock you before you got to Jethro’s pad. But nobody seemed to notice Bruce charging up the stairs, fury twisting his round face, even when he nearly put his foot between the steps and fell into the Moroccan Spice Café.

  Bruce wanted to storm into Jethro’s office and shout
his resignation in Jethro’s trendy schoolmaster glasses. He wanted to enter the room already denouncing the waste, the stupidity of it all—but when he reached the top of the staircase, he was so out of breath, he could only wheeze, his guts wrung and cramped. He’d only been in Jethro’s office once before: an elegant goldfish bowl with one desk that changed shape (thanks to modular pieces that came out of the floor), a few chairs, and one dot of maroon rug at its center. Bruce stood there, massaging his dumb stomach and taking in the oppressive simplicity.

  So, Jethro spoke first, the creamy purr Bruce knew from a million company videos. “Hi, Bruce. You’re late.”

  “I’m . . . I’m what?”

  “You’re late,” Jethro said. “You were supposed to have your crisis of conscience three months ago.” He pulled out his Robo-Bop and displayed a personal calendar, which included one entry: “Bruce Has a Crisis of Conscience.” It was dated a few months earlier. “What kept you, man?”

  * * * *

  It started when Bruce took a wrong turn on the way to work. Actually, he drove to the wrong office—the driving equivalent of a Freudian slip.

  He was on the interstate at seven thirty, listening to a banjo solo that he hadn’t yet learned to play. Out his right window, every suburban courtyard had its own giant ThunderNet tower, just like the silver statue in Bruce’s own cul-de-sac—the sleek concave lines and jet-streamed base like a 1950s Googie space fantasy. To his left, almost every passing car had a Car-Dingo bolted to its hood, with its trademark sloping fins and whirling lights. And half the drivers were listening to music, or making Intimate Confessions on their Robo-Bops. Once on the freeway, Bruce could see much larger versions of the ThunderNet tower dotting the landscape, from shopping-mall roofs as well as empty fields. Plus everywhere he saw giant billboards for DiZi’s newest product, the Crado—empty-faced, multicultural babies splayed out in a milk-white, egg-shaped chair that monitored the baby’s air supply and temperature in some way that Bruce still couldn’t explain.

  Bruce was a VP of marketing at DiZi—shouldn’t he be able to find something good to say about even one of the company’s products?

  So, this one morning, Bruce got off the freeway a few exits too soon. Instead of driving to the DiZi offices, he went down a feeder road to a dingy strip mall that had offices instead of dry cleaners. This was the route Bruce had taken for years before he joined DiZi, and he felt as though he’d taken the wrong commute by mistake.

  Bruce’s old parking spot was open, and he could almost pretend time had rolled back, except that he’d lost some hair and gained some weight. He found himself pushing past the white balsawood-and-metal door with the cheap sign saying ECO GNOMIC and into the offices, and then he stopped. A roomful of total strangers perched on beanbags and folding chairs turned and stared, and Bruce had no explanation for who he was or why he was there. “Uh,” Bruce said.

  The Eco Gnomic offices looked like crap compared to DiZi’s majesty, but also compared to the last time he’d seen them. Take the giant Intervention Board that covered the main wall: When Bruce had worked there, it’d been covered with millions of multicolored tacks attached to scraps of incidents. This company is planning a major polluting project, so we mobilize culture-jammer flash mobs here and organize protesters at the public hearing there. Like a giant multidimensional chess game covering one wall, deploying patience and playfulness against the massive corporate engine. Now, though, the Intervention Board contained nothing but bad news, without much in the way of strategies. Arctic shelf disintegrating, floods, superstorms, droughts, the Gulf Stream stuttering, extinctions like dominos falling. The office furniture teetered on broken legs, and the same computers from five years ago whined and stammered. The young woman nearest Bruce couldn’t even afford a proper Mohawk—her hair grew back in patches on the sides of her head, and the stripe on top was wilting. None of these people seemed energized about saving the planet.

  Bruce was about to flee when his old boss, Gerry Donkins, showed up and said, “Bruce! Welcome back to the nonprofit sector, man.” Bruce and Gerry wound up spending an hour sitting on crates, drinking expired Yoo-hoo. “Yeah, Eco Gnomic is dying,” said Gerry, giant mustache twirling, “but so is the planet.”

  “I feel like I made a terrible mistake,” Bruce said. He looked at the board and couldn’t see any pattern to the arrangement of ill omens.

  “You did,” Gerry replied. “But it doesn’t make any difference, and you’ve been happy. You’ve been happy, right? We all thought you were happy. How is Marie, by the way?”

  “Marie left me two years ago,” Bruce said.

  “Oh,” Gerry said.

  “But on the plus side, I’ve been taking up the banjo.”

  “Anyway, no offense, but you wouldn’t have made a difference if you’d stayed with us. We probably passed the point of no return a while back.”

  Point of no return. It sounded sexual, or like letting go of a trapeze at the apex of its arc.

  “You did the smart thing,” said Gerry, “going to work for the flashiest consumer products company and enjoying the last little bit of the ride.”

  Bruce got back in his Prius and drove the rest of the way to work, past the rows of ThunderNet towers and the smoke from far-off forest fires. This felt like the last day of the human race, even though it was just another day on the steep slope. As Bruce reached the lavender glass citadel of DiZi’s offices, he started to go numb inside, like always. But instead, this time, a fury took him, and that’s when he charged inside and up the stairs to Jethro’s office, ready to shove his resignation down the CEO’s throat.

  * * * *

  “What do you mean?” Bruce said to Jethro, as his breath came back. “You were expecting me to come in here and resign?”

  “Something like that.” Jethro gestured for Bruce to sit in one of the plain white, absurdly comfortable teacup chairs. He sat cross-legged in the other one, like a yogi in his wide-sleeved linen shirt and camper pants. In person, he looked slightly chubbier and less classically handsome than all his iconic images, but the perfect hipster bowl haircut and sideburns, and those famous glasses, were instantly recognizable. “But like I said: late. The point is, you got here in the end.”

  “You didn’t engineer this. I’m not one of your gadgets. This is real. I really am fed up with making pointless toys when the world is about to choke on our filth. I’m done.”

  “It wouldn’t be worth anything if it wasn’t real, bro.” Jethro gave Bruce one of his conspiratorial/mischievous smiles that made Bruce want to smile back in spite of his soul-deep anger. “That’s why we hired you in the first place. You’re the canary in the coal mine. Here, look at the org chart.”

  Jethro made some hand motions, and one glass surface became a screen, which projected an org chart with a thousand names and job descriptions. And there, halfway down on the left, was Bruce’s name, with CANARY IN THE COAL MINE. And a picture of Bruce’s head on a cartoon bird’s body.

  “I thought my job title was junior executive VP for product management,” Bruce said, staring at his openmouthed face and those unfurled wings.

  Jethro shrugged. “Well, you just resigned, right? So, you don’t have a title anymore.” He made another gesture, and a bright-eyed young thing wheeled a minibar out of the elevator and offered Bruce beer, whiskey, hot sake, coffee, and Mexican Coke. Bruce felt rebellious, choosing a single-malt whiskey, until he realized he was doing what Jethro wanted. He took a swig and burned his throat and eyes.

  “So, you’re quitting; you should go ahead and tell me what you think of my company.” Jethro spread his hands and smiled.

  “Well.” Bruce drank more whiskey and then sputtered. “If you really want to know . . . Your products are pure evil. You build these sleek little pieces of shit that are designed with all this excess capacity and redundant systems. Have you ever looked at the schematics of the ThunderNet towers? It’s like you were trying to build something overly complex. And it’s the ultimate glorification
of form over function—you’ve been able to convince everybody with disposable income to buy your crap, because people love anything that’s ostentatiously pointless. I’ve had a Robo-Bop for years, and I still don’t understand what half the widgets and menu options are for. I don’t think anybody does. You use glamour and marketing to convince people they need to fill their lives with empty crap instead of paying attention to the world and realizing how fragile and beautiful it really is. You’re the devil.”

  The drinks fairy had started gawking halfway through this rant, then she seemed to decide it was against her pay grade to hear this. She retreated into the elevator and vanished around the time Bruce said he didn’t understand half the stuff his Robo-Bop did.

  Bruce had fantasized about telling Jethro off for years, and he enjoyed it so much, he had tears in his eyes by the end. Even knowing that Jethro had put this moment on his Robo-Bop calendar couldn’t spoil it.

  Jethro was nodding, as if Bruce had just about covered the bases. Then he made another esoteric gesture, and the glass wall became a screen again. It displayed a PowerPoint slide:

  DIZI CORP. PRODUCT STRATEGY

  + Beautiful Objects That Are Functionally Useless

  + Spare Capacity

  + Redundant Systems

  + Overproliferation of Identical But Superficially Different Products

  + Form Over Function

  + Mystifying Options and Confusing User Interface

  “You missed one, I think,” Jethro said. “The one about overproliferation. That’s where we convince people to buy three different products that are almost exactly the same but not quite.”

  “Wow.” Bruce looked at the slide, which had gold stars on it. “You really are completely evil.”

  “That’s what it looks like, huh?” Jethro actually laughed as he tapped on his Robo-Bop. “Tell you what. We’re having a strategy meeting at three, and we need our canary there. Come and tell the whole team what you told me.”