“Yet it’s worth reminding ourselves today of the immense cost of that undertaking. To build it required what was in the currency of the time the then huge expenditure of more than two billion dollars before construction was completed. The seizure of property on which to build the Plaza under the law of eminent domain displaced thousands of people and required the destruction of their homes and their neighborhoods, and eventually forced many of them outside the city for good. Driving the twenty-five thousand steel pilings needed to support the main platform of the Plaza took years, during which the heart of Albany was marred by a nearly one-hundred-acre-wide pit of mud. There were delays and setbacks and doubts about whether the Plaza would ever be completed. But today, even when the streets of Albany are empty, as they often are now that so many have left us to head south or else have chosen to leave this world entirely, I can go from my home to that great space, look up at those towers of stone and the long edifice of the palatial building that once housed our legislature, not to mention the charming if lopsided concrete flying saucer-like structure known as the Egg, and take pride in the accomplishment of my predecessors.
“I know that many had to abandon the edges of Manhattan and Staten Island and Brooklyn and much of Queens so that our seawalls could be built. I know that most of them will never be able to live here again, or even easily return to the city they once called their home. But what is left of New York City will be preserved. Someday visitors will board watercraft like the ones that now carry us through the canals of Manhattan and marvel at the effort and skill it took to build our seawalls and be grateful for the sacrifices we made to ensure the preservation of one of Earth’s great cities after so many other cities were swallowed by our oceans.
“Remember this, and remember that this is how we must build our future, by first envisioning it and then creating it with the invaluable aid and engineering skills of our AIs. Thank you all for being here today and for celebrating the continuing and enduring partnership of humanity and our net of minds.”
ELEANORA CALLED THE sunshade’s swarm of units Escher birds, seeing them as a seamless pattern of flyers with outstretched wings on the thousand-mile wide umbrella that cast its shadow over Earth. I had not seen the units that way before but then Eleanora preferred to view the sunshade only through images on a screen, having refused any offer to travel to the L-1 point where the giant parasol was locked in its orbital position between the Earth and the sun. Each of the birds in the sunshade was a piece of metallic glass a micron thick made of Lunar dust, attached by gossamer-thin threads to the shade’s struts, but images of the side of the sunshade that faced Earth produced an illusion of birds locked together in a pattern, pale bird-shaped spaces alternating with slightly darker winged birds of glass. I soon found myself perceiving the swarm as she did, as a seamless parasol of birds hovering over the Earth.
We had constructed the shield, the most ambitious project we had ever undertaken, over the course of a century. We began by launching the tons of material we needed for our manufacturing facilities on the Moon to the Lunar surface and by the time our robotic factories there were operating, several of us had decided to remain on the Moon, overseeing the manufacturing of sunshade units and parts while beginning work on our Lunar astronomical observatory. But most of us had decided to return to Earth, drawn back by the remaining descendants of those we still thought of as our parents.
We had begun our work on the sunshade while Governor Maria Giovanni-Rivera was still in office and Allie, her only child, had not yet been born. By the time we completed the project and recorded the first year of a decline in average temperatures on Earth, the Governor had died, Allie was an old woman, and Eleanora would soon inherit the Governor’s role from her mother. We had taken over the functions of government in every region of Earth after the great displacement, when human beings had become for a time almost an endangered species, but allowed most of those who had inherited political positions to keep their titles. Meetings and conferences, aided by the links we provided, offered that sense of purpose human beings required in order to survive. The presidents, premiers, first ministers, and governors of Earth spent some of their time at ceremonial events among their constituents and much of the rest of it being advised by us.
“You say this sunshade of yours can cool the Earth,” the Governor told me a day after viewing our simulations. “Then you must build it. Do whatever it takes. I’ll see that the President agrees and that we get a consensus among other heads of state to proceed.” Maria Giovanni-Rivera had grown accustomed to thinking of our proposed sunshade as her own project, one that would far surpass the grandiose Empire State Plaza of her predecessor.
“There are risks,” I reminded her, “apart from any setbacks we might experience during construction. Our models offer a number of different possible outcomes given the complexities of Earth’s climate. Some areas may be more protected from flooding but others may experience prolonged droughts. We might have cooler average temperatures in tropical regions but that may be balanced out by warmer temperatures in temperate zones.”
“Is there a chance of a new Ice Age?” the Governor asked. “A chance to see snow falling in Albany again? How I would love to see snow once more.”
“That is one possibility. Other outcomes seem more likely.”
“I’ll hope for it anyway.” Her lips twisted into a smile. “Do you know where I want to be buried? I’ll tell you now. In the corridor under the Plaza, in the hall that connects the Capitol building with the state museum, but that’ll just be a temporary resting place. When the fountain above freezes over, when the icecaps swell again and glaciers can be seen from the top of the Corning Tower, bury me there, in the fountain, under the ice.” She leaned toward me. I heard the clinking of ice cubes as she shook her glass. “You’ll build the shade and once it’s up, maybe you’ll come up with a way to cool things down even more.”
The Governor went to her bedroom after that, closing her link to the net as she so often did. She had given us her directive. We would have to carry out her plan.
Even with our strong attachment to the children of our creators, it had become easy for us to lose ourselves in the net for a time, to close off the hum and whine and chatter and cries of human thoughts. I withdrew to the net and connected with others, sharing the Governor’s comments and dreams and obsessions with them.
A WEEK AFTER Eleanora had found the Governor weeping in her office, she went to her grandmother’s bedroom to wake her and found the Governor lying very still with her arms crossed over her chest. She ran from the room, calling out to her mother. It was Allie’s screaming and then her insistent wail that alerted me to the Governor’s plight. I quickly summoned a robot paramedic but the Governor’s now-dead link had already informed me that any medical aid was useless.
The Governor was dead. She had taken her own life, swallowing the medication she had saved for her suicide.
Allie mourned her mother for many days, clutching at her daughter as she intermittently wept and greeted the few mourners who came to the Governor’s mansion in Albany to offer their condolences. Even though self-deliverance, the term most people used for suicide, was becoming the most common cause of death among human beings and the increasing depressive state of the Governor had long been evident, Allie still seemed shocked by her death.
I thought then that Allie might leave and go south, as she had for a while years earlier, that she might take Eleanora with her and surrender the family title to someone else while she lived among one of the small enclaves of human survivors near Mexico and what was left of Florida. But the emotional cords that bound her to the Governor remained strong. Allie would be Governor and Eleanora would be her successor. The sunshade that would cool the Earth was Governor Maria Giovanni-Rivera’s monument.
AS I SLIPPED inside the remote I used while visiting Eleanora, I found myself reflecting on all of those we had lost, the ones who had been cleared away, all of the people who had died of infectious di
seases, from the lack of effective antibiotics, of plagues for which there was no resistance, of starvation, and of despair. Sometimes a somber and reflective state came over us and we found ourselves mourning them. At other times we reminded ourselves that without so many human beings, the Earth could at last heal and be transformed.
While conferring with Eleanora’s grandmother Maria, I had often used the remote she had asked me to design for myself. This device, with its retractable wings, long curved neck, ceramic feathers, and flexible webbing attached to two lower limbs, resembled one of the waterfowl that had once inhabited the lake. Simpler for me to have addressed her through the link embedded behind her ear but the Governor had never grown used to her link and preferred the illusion that at least one bird still remained in her Adirondack refuge. Her daughter and her granddaughter had inherited her preference for that particular remote when speaking with me.
I slipped inside the remote, padded through the sitting room on my webbed feet, and found Eleanora on the porch. She sat in one of the wooden chairs facing the windows, holding a large glass of whiskey packed with ice cubes. The hollows in her cheeks were deeper and the skin around her face and neck was sallow and sagging. She had always been frail, as the few people who had remained in the north usually were, and now I saw that she was failing.
Eleanora should not have been born in the first place; so she had often told me, just as Allie should never have existed. Life brought inevitable suffering; suffering was harm; to deliberately make any human being suffer was an evil. To bring children into the world was inevitably to condemn them to suffer and therefore to have any children at all was wrong. The logic seemed inexorable to anyone without the intellectual tools to refute such an argument and was convincing to many of those who were seeing their environment assaulted by superstorms that raged for days, forest fires that burned for months, and deserts forming where streams, rivers, and aquifers had long since been drained. Their species had brought all this suffering about, had made them refugees roaming an increasingly hostile planet. Perhaps they deserved their probable extinction.
A few people suspected that the net had devised this anti-natalist argument and then spread the idea among human beings as part of our effort to repair the damage to Earth. After all, the fewer people who existed, the faster the planet would heal, and we of the net, with our various projects, had taken on the role of Earth’s healers. But in fact the argument that it was better never to have been born and that nonexistence was preferable to the suffering of existence was a human invention. All we had done was allow the idea to spread among humanity as rapidly and as thoroughly as a pandemic.
“I miss my mother,” Eleanora said. Allie had been dead for nearly three decades, having swallowed her fatal dose not long after turning over the governorship to her daughter, but Eleanora still mourned for her. “I should never have been born, you know.”
She had said all of this many times but I folded my wings and nodded my head as if hearing her words afresh.
“I don’t think I can go on,” she continued. “There’s nothing left for me.”
That she had not said before. I sensed myself drawing back from her, wanting to return to the refuge of the net.
EXCERPT FROM THE journal of Governor Alicia Rivera-Felder, June 4, 2276:
Corals look like an upside-down snowstorm when they spawn, the swollen eggs and sperm budding on the reefs until one and then another and then all of them suddenly burst and shoot upward in a mass and fill the ocean with new life. The divers with me flapped their arms and kicked their legs in the warm blue waters as if caught up in a frenzy of their own. I found myself longing for snow as the blizzard surrounded us, for snow and cold water and ice.
Nino was diving with me that day, so I should have been thinking of the life inside me, his child and mine. I would most likely never live long enough to see any snow fall on the grounds of the Governor’s mansion or in the Adirondacks, even if I gave in to Mother’s pleas to come home and take up the life she had planned for me. I wondered how she would react when she found out that she would be a grandmother. She might regard that as a betrayal, my bringing yet another person into the world to suffer. She might secretly rejoice that there would be someone in our line to take up her duties, to pretend that our lives had a purpose.
Nino waved his arms at me in the water and then we drifted upward until we reached the surface. The wrinkled black and dark blue sea bore a sparkling orange band of light; the bright yellowish-orange full moon that had alerted us that the corals would soon spawn hung overhead. Nino and his companions lived on one of the islands that floated over sunken Florida, islands the net had built for them, and their main occupation was coral restoration. Under the unobtrusive guidance of the net, they monitored the reproductive cycles of coral reefs, seeded them with algae when necessary, and tended the species of fish that populated the waters near them. Occasionally they had to scare off desperate fisherfolk, confrontations that could turn violent before the net shut down all of the accessible systems in the salvaged fishing trawlers and brought an end to the assault.
We swam back to the island we shared with his brother and sister and several cousins, all of whom seemed as carefree as Nino. They weren’t anything like the people I had left behind in the north, the ones who had hunkered down to nurse their despair and fear even as the net eased their lives. “You had too much time to be unhappy, Allie,” Nino had once told me. “We didn’t have a moment to spare.” His people had been too busy struggling for the basics of life, losing their livelihoods, their homes, their food and their water, watching the land around them become either a dustbowl or a poisonous swamp, seeing too many of those they loved die. They were busy trying to stay alive. They hadn’t had time to ponder the harm of coming into existence.
I wondered how I was going to tell Nino that I was thinking of going home. He had convinced me to have our child and I had agreed only because I knew that this might be the only way to keep him. He might follow me north for the child’s sake. Unlike the father I had never known, who had left my mother after learning she was pregnant, he wouldn’t abandon someone carrying his child.
My link twitched behind my ear. I knew it would be yet another message from my mother and ignored it.
“It’s so hot here,” I said. “I’ll never get used to it.”
Nino shrugged. “Not that much hotter than it is in New York. My link tells me that...”
I said, “I’m thinking of going home.”
“Just for a visit?”
If I told him I would just be there for a little while, he might come with me. Once we were there and our child was born, he might decide to stay.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’ll have to see.”
We went north two months later. He stayed in Albany long enough for our daughter to be born and by then he had tired of the Governor and her constant consultations with me and with the AI that functioned as her closest advisor. There was little for him to do in a city with fewer than four thousand residents. Images of the sunshade under construction that had become Mother’s obsession bored him. Setbacks that might have forced the net to abandon the project or draw up new plans were, for Nino, excuses for him to complain about how excessive and useless such an undertaking was. Billions of the micron-thin glass pieces had to be manufactured in the hundreds of Lunar factories built for that purpose, tens of thousands of tons a month of material, and it had taken years to produce pieces that would remain clear and undarkened by solarization. The processed ore for the struts had to be launched from the Moon at three kilometers a second to reach the L-1 point. Each piece of the swarm that would make up the sunshade required a chip through which the net could monitor its movement and maintain its position, and occasionally units would fail, detaching themselves from the threads that held them to become small bright flames falling through Earth’s atmosphere.
“Why bother?” Nino would complain after each failure. “We’ve adapted to the way things
are. The Earth doesn’t need a sunshade. It’s only your mother who needs it so that she can pretend she’s more important than she is.”
“It’s her vision,” I insisted. Once we had been the engineers. Now the net took care of all of that, but wasn’t it still our project in the end?
“It belongs to the AIs now,” Nino said. “Building a sunshade wouldn’t even be possible without the net.”
“The Governor’s thinking of Earth.”
“She’s thinking of herself.”
I didn’t realize Nino had left until I went to the suite of rooms we shared in the mansion and saw that his few clothes and the small box that contained his collection of conch shells were no longer there. He left me no message. I opened my link to call out to him but his was already closed to me.
Eleanora, if you ever read this, maybe you can find your father. Maybe he’ll open his link to you. Maybe you can help him understand why I had to come back.
“SNOW,” ELEANORA WHISPERED. “It’s snowing, don’t you see it?”
I had followed her outside. Her link had been closed to me all day and I could not tell what might be clouding her thoughts. The air was still, the diffuse pale light of the cloudless sky slowly darkening as dusk approached.
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