“I wasn’t going to hurt you. Sylene. Please!” He kneels, his hands stretched out. “Bea’s gone. Everything’s gone. Kate, my wife, my child. It’s impossible to find her!” His cheeks are slicked with wetness, his saliva tear-thickened. “Everything’s lost! I don’t know what to do! What you have is all I’ve got. Don’t take this away from me. Please don’t leave me! I know you’re not Kate. I know you’re . . . Sylene. And if you’re pregnant, you’re pregnant, but please don’t leave me alone!”
Tom cries for a long time. He cries until he cannot see and he is deaf to everything but the noise; crying is what he becomes. When, with time, he calms and his face feels clear, he remembers where he is and sees that Sylene is still there too. “Eat this,” she says, giving him a biscuit. She’s been waiting. “And here’s some water.” She passes him a bottle and he drinks from it, deeply, the tears still fizzing his nose. She didn’t leave him. “Eat.” He does, his shaking hands guiding the biscuit with difficulty to his mouth. “Now come on,” Sylene says, hauling him to his unsteady feet, “let’s find a place to stop.”
Tom lies still, not sleeping, but looking at the clouds and listening to the water churn and roll. They are camped in the middle of a wide pasture with a gauze of waterways. They have set the two tents up on opposite sides of a stream; it’s impossible to cross it silently. It used to be that he’d stream a vista like this to give him peace. Savers, they’d called them, so the brain didn’t get locked, something to give you pause now and then and some virtual space to breathe. They were the official solution to early, concerning signs of potential addiction to the Feed. People personalized them: down-time views based on their favorite cities or ents. They often slept with them on. His had been of nature. Old-time “photos” and vids of the real world, from before the Water Wars, when he imagined things had been simpler. And here he is inside one now: a real-life vista, the world back to simple once more. But so incredibly complicated.
He hears a light splash and a crunch of rock on rock, then another splash, and another, and more. He rolls his head and sees Sylene, arms out for balance as the water rolls around her shins. Sylene in Kate’s body. Kate crossing the stream toward him—
“Can I come over?”
The water gushes around her legs. He doesn’t have the energy to reply. He just stares at her and feels the cold depth of the earth on the side of his face. The huge mass of the planet, and his tiny head beside it.
Sylene wades across and stands, not too close, but nearer to him than distant. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I don’t know what to say.”
Tom looks at the tent behind her on the other side, at the mountains around them, at the trees, nearly bare. Their bark is darkened by the moisture in the air. The vista is huge. It’s cold. A large crow works at a nearby branch. This place, so quiet, so desolate; it all feels so alone.
“I can’t imagine how you feel,” Sylene says. “What would you like to know?”
“How long has it been?”
“Weeks. Since before the Pharmacist. Just before Claire’s camp. When did you know?”
His eyes barely flicker. “I suspected,” he whispers, “at the Pharmacist’s. I didn’t want to know. Kate always said I was blinded by hope. I called it my strength.” He snorts a humorless laugh. “Was it you at the facility?”
Sylene makes a face and shakes her head. “We were on a hill, in a wood, with a bit of water below. You made me a hot drink. I’d never tasted anything like it. I’d never seen grass. I’d never felt water before like that pond. Not synthetic. You talked about your father and about us finding Bea. You said I have a sister called Martha. Where is she? What happened to her?”
Tom feels sick.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Sylene admits, and sits on the ground, still not quite next to him. For a long time the only sounds are the water and the crow, cracking at the bark and cawing.
Tom’s hands shake with whatever courses through his veins. “So who are you?”
“My name is Sylene Charles.”
“That’s not what I meant. What happened to Kate when you . . . ?”
“Honestly?”
Just the tone of her voice makes his eyes hot, makes him want to pause time, rewind it, undo everything. But he can’t. He sees her shrug through his tear smears and turns to look away.
“We had no way of knowing what would happen to the host. I don’t think we really believed it could work. But there’s . . .” A hand lifts to the side of her head and points. “I can’t feel her here. There’s not enough room.”
Tom picks at the grass. His arms are quivering, his whole torso shaking uncontrollably. From the cold? From the shock? His jaw judders. “Why are you doing this?” he pleads.
Sylene looks down and sighs. When she raises her face, her eyes catch the light of the gray autumnal air. “When you’re alone and desperate, you’ll do anything. It’s not our fault, Tom.” She appraises him. He can tell she is doing it; he can almost sense that she is deciding whether to stay silent or to lie, whether she should tell him the truth. There is a clarity to her eyes and clearly doubt, but also a frown of something else. A commonality in pain, perhaps, that she recognizes in him? Some form of connection? Who knows what’s happening in her head?
“We’re from here, Tom. Earth. This is our world too.” She sighs again. “We destroy it. You do. Did—from my point of view.” She studies the sky, the mountains far away and the clouds that coalesce above them. She holds her hands out, hovering her palms above the earth. She almost smiles. “It took some time from now. I don’t think you’d believe the destruction you cause.” She points to the distance. “Dry earth. Everywhere. All the life sucked away. All the metals, the chemicals, the oil, everything you could plunder: gone. Devoured. You consume it all. You leave us with nothing, without even hope. You killed your own children with your lack of balance.” Her hands are shaking, but not from cold. “We were alone. We had to save ourselves, to find a way to escape. But, Tom, do you realize how huge the universe is and how small we are? There is nowhere to escape to. The world got so hot the ground was burned from beneath our feet and we had nowhere to jump. How stupid is that? A billion people died in two weeks of starvation. The next two billion were killed in under a week. Then the big weapons were mobilized and the world fought for water again. Still consuming, of course, even during the final Resource War, still pretending that life could go on as normal. I think everyone thought that someone else would save us, that this couldn’t happen in a civilization like ours. But it did. Everyone was deluded. Everyone was culpable. Oh, we collected all the information, we weighed the evidence, and yes, we judged you. And you’re guilty. All of you.”
Sylene looks at Tom, at the views around them. She inhales very deeply.
“Sometimes I think this is a dream. That I didn’t make it back. That I died, and my body is there on that slab in the future I grew up in, and with these last few seconds of consciousness I’ve found a heaven that I never had the option to live. We had screens, you know? They showed images of how the earth used to be, and it was so beautiful. But then the screens stopped. The Feed stopped. We didn’t have enough power because not enough people survived. The sun cooked us. Killed us. Every living thing on the planet. You made the world a furnace, Tom, your generation and the next.”
Tom’s heart expands into the cold air, thumping harder the longer her silence runs. When she starts again, she talks quietly. “Thousands came back at first, charged with changing the past to stop the destruction of the planet. Our intentions were so good. If we stopped things back here when we could, if we changed the course of history, then perhaps we’d have a chance to survive in the future. But we didn’t hear from those who had returned and everything stayed the same where we were, so we assumed they must have died. Still more went back. All of us. Hundreds of thousands in the end, fired randomly back through time, knowing that only a fraction of us might make it. It was assured death to take the journey by the time my turn
had come, or so I thought. We had no choice. It was that or burn.”
“But how does this work? How are you doing it?”
Tom sees something glaze in Sylene’s eyes: a look that freezes, a pursing of the lips. She assesses him and goes to speak, but then she shakes her head. “That’s enough for now.”
“No, it’s not. Tell me.”
Sylene rocks back and looks the other way. Her face folds into a scowl and she shakes her head again. Tom staggers to stand. He can hear his voice change without his meaning it to, its sore roughness tightening as something builds in his chest like floodwater. He could break something huge with his hands right now.
“Tell me, Sylene!”
She looks at him straight. “It was you.” There is no emotion in her tone; she is giving him information. Plain fact. “You helped get us back here, Tom. You showed us how to do it.”
Her words roll in his head like clouds—clouds made from wood and iron and flint and ancient hazed-out glass. He can’t hear anything. His vision is obscured, as though a gauze is there between him and the world, but the sound of the stream crashes like it’s gushing into a ravine and his breath is slight and high as his heart shakes itself to bits.
He kneels in the stream and douses his head. Cold water to clear it. Freezing water to solidify his thoughts so he can slow this down and process things and think.
Tom’s hands shake, barely able to grasp the mug Sylene holds out for him. The water level rollicks as she lets it go. His eyes spasm so much, his whole head is twitching. Kate. Ben. Danny. Bea. His parents. Anyone. Please. No one to help him. Alone.
“Would you like some food?”
He rubs his wet hair back from his brow. Pulls his legs up and holds them tightly. “N-no. Tell me, Sylene, wh-what happened,” he demands through tightly clenched teeth. His face is twitching. Feed reflexes, or because he’s freezing? What difference does it make? he thinks, as he squeezes his eyes shut and tenses his face until everything shakes and then he gasps it all away.
“When I grew up, we lived in earthscrapers, massive cans drilled miles and miles deep, with walls so hot we couldn’t touch them and air recycled a hundred thousand times. We still had the Feed, for a while at least. It was everything, Tom. It made us whole. It unified humanity because everything we had was shared.” She strokes her face, brushing over her eyes, her fingers delicately tracing the shape of her eyelids, and she smiles. “Everything was common knowledge. Including history. The birth of humanity, democracy, religion, the microchip. Communism, consumerism, we knew it all, the evolution of society. How our world had come to be. What would have become the future for you is ancient history for me. I absorbed it all as a child. Vids of your father at the launches of the Feed. Grabs of you as a boy, as an adult when you ran the company yourself. It was all old history for me. Big stories, becoming myths, but the Feed froze the facts and truth in time. Like when you became a whistle-blower on your father.”
She puts her hands together and thinks. She chooses her words precisely. “Look, we’ve changed things. By coming back in time, we have evidently disrupted the world’s progress, as we originally intended to. This is not what the history pools told us happened. But it didn’t change our future. Where we were. We didn’t see any changes there. So we’ve created something parallel here, we must have. A different universe? Just a different bubble of reality around our own? I have no idea. Does it really matter? But now, this,” she says, looking around. “This isn’t how history went for us. There was no—what did you call it?—Collapse. In my world, in our history, that didn’t happen. None of what is going on for you now happened for us then. For us, in a few years’ time, society was still intact. The large corporations continued to cannibalize the earth. Animals were killed. Buildings were built. The temperature soared. The world warmed and yet still there was no restraint. You never strived for balance. Just growth. The Feed expanded too. The next big thing was travel. It granted everyone in the world who could afford it near-instantaneous travel, throwing your thoughts from place to place. You created synthetic hosts, and they didn’t come cheap. And the energy you needed to power it . . . Everything you did, consumed. Oh, the energy even to store your mundles and your thoughtlessly taken millions of grabs! The Feed wasn’t the worst company in the world, but it was just another one that damaged things. And you became a whistle-blower on it. You shattered consumer confidence in the company because you revealed to the public that their Feeds could be hacked.”
Tom watches her, examines her face for traces of lies or indications of truth. This face he knows so well. Kate’s face. Her eyes. It sounds just like her: her tone as she describes these corporations and their negative effects on the world. They’d had this discussion about consumerism and morality; they’d had it so many times. At home, in restaurants—he has flash-burst memories of Kate’s ire and her righteous determination to save the world as she shouted him down with hot tears of frustration and concern, as she sprayed another poll on “What Would You Sacrifice?”—her small attempt to change the world. And she was right, it seems—she was right.
He jolts as Sylene puts a hand on his arm. He throws it off and scuffles backward along the earth. Sylene stays where she is, waiting until he settles. “You revealed in a post on Kate’s pool that people’s Feeds could be hacked. Through SaveYou, Tom. It was still a young program then, sending out people’s memory states as BackUps. But the door opened both ways. You could go in through the program too, into people’s Feeds and effectively into their brains. Potentially, as you revealed to everyone, it was the perfect identity theft. Within weeks the breach had been fixed and no one had been hacked. Everyone still had the Feed, the product was safe; in fact it was better than ever. You were still famous, though, Tom, in my time. There was a vote of no confidence in your father. He had tried to hide it; you came clean. People trusted you. You saved the world. All the enabled, you protected them before anyone could abuse this breach, you fought the company on their behalf and won. You exposed your father as careless at best and negligent at worst. Who was better placed then to run it?”
“But . . .” Tom’s head is swimming. He squeezes his eyes shut to keep track of his thoughts. “You’ve hacked us now, before the breach was closed?”
Sylene looks at the ground. “Yes. With the benefit of hindsight, we had history on our side. We knew the Feed was vulnerable at this time and that we could, in theory, colonize your minds through SaveYou. But we didn’t know until we tried. Our world was on fire. We were about to become extinct. You’d try anything in that situation, believe me.”
“But going backward in time’s not possible.”
“Not with people, no. Or with mass of any kind. But with thoughts, which are stored on matter but aren’t actually matter themselves . . . Your father inspired the technology: if there’s a transmitter and a receiver, a beacon to draw us in, and hosts like yourselves to tether to. The hosts don’t have to be synthetic . . .”
Tom laughs, like a vibration, like his body just needs something to do and this is all it has.
Sylene is crying now, though, and his laughter makes it worse. “We broadcast our thoughts out blindly. We had no control, no way to aim for any particular person, no assurance that it would even work. We must have lost a quarter of a million people before it worked. But some made it back. I know that now. Some people made it back, because look: we’ve changed the world. We have saved the future. The planet is going to be fine. So SaveYou must have helped us be received.”
His laughter gone, Tom muses silently for a while. “So you’re not Chinese? Or from Iran?”
Sylene closes her eyes. “No, Tom, we’re not Chinese or from Iran.”
“And you did this to survive?”
“We did it to change the future. We did it to save the world. We couldn’t choose who we inhabited, but we had hopes for who we might hit by chance. Whose actions we could change. Politicians and key people, heads of corporations, who history showed had harmed the p
lanet. If we couldn’t inhabit them and literally change their minds, the idea was we would kill them; get close, if we had inhabited someone they trusted, and take them out of play. President Taylor was killed, right?”
“Yes,” Tom says, remembering suddenly where he had been: the restaurant, that kid with the tattoos, the shockingly bare billboards, and how they’d sprinted home, PresidentTaylor1’s assassination clogging every stream. The curfew that started that night became a state of emergency without end. That moment had started all this. Kate pregnant with Bea—and suddenly Tom’s memories open up like a portal through time. He is exactly back there briefly, he inhabits it, it exists again, and then with a gulping whoosh he’s in the here and now and crying, his whole being defined by a sense of absolute loss.
“Well, he had a chance to stop it!” Sylene’s voice is hard with hatred. She spits the words from her mouth like dirt. “Five global summits and none of them delivered on their promises. Pledges made in public and deals done behind closed doors. History is transparent, Tom. He promised to fetter the oil companies and didn’t. He swore to make the Feed and all the other tech companies hit energy consumption targets on their storage towers. Every vid, every grab, cost the earth. The very real footprint of information stored. It’s all archived. And who was responsible. We could read it all. He damned the world to die because it was expedient at the time. But not just him. We targeted everyone like him to try to save the world. The greedy. The selfish. The charming charlatans. History made them plain to see, and what’s one misguided, thoughtless life to save a billion, or a trillion, or more? This”—she gestures around at the world, at the here and now—“this wasn’t supposed to happen! We wanted to slow things down, to make key, simple changes to stop you from destroying the planet. At worst we wanted to evacuate the few of us survivors back, now, so humanity would survive. But we didn’t want to destroy it all. This wasn’t the plan at all.”
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