by Matt Bell
Some of the other passengers ooh and aah each time the robot alights on Eury’s hand, but not John. The bees, after all, were his idea; the superorchards doubly so. In their earliest meetings with investors, Eury had begged him to talk about the apple trees he wanted to grow, the first part of the Farm they’d envisioned. Everything else she’d built since had, in one way or another, started with his trees and his bees, with the first time he showed her an awkward prototype crawling across the back of his hand, its carbon-fiber legs drunkenly summitting the hairy spines of his knuckles.
The train scrolls on, its tube tunnel suspended over cracked surface roads full of abandoned vehicles. The conductor makes no announcements, but eventually John recognizes the Iowa he once knew in the red barns and white farmhouses planted alongside wasted fields, wind-tilted cornstalks evidence of last harvests so poor they weren’t even worth plowing under, combines left beached along the roadside, dust scoured and rusted. This American emergency—the coasts quaked and drowned, the center burned up and blown away—John knows this wasn’t the world anyone wanted. A sullen midwestern dystopia, with only Earthtrust coming to save us.
He walks stiffly toward the train’s sparsely populated last car, where he can sit alone and watch the curve of the train’s tube snaking back across the countryside. Eury’s voice speaks on, listing Earthtrust’s many future achievements as if they’ve been accomplished, their promised world already manifested. The city-sized macrofarms of corn and wheat and soybean on which all can live; the skyscrapers of vertical chicken coops cleaned daily by drone handlers, their eggs gathered by Volunteers working alongside the robots; the many square kilometers of meat and dairy barns where Volunteers will spend their lives caring for genetically perfect pigs and cattle, reconnecting each Volunteer with an agrarian past thought lost, now rescued. A promise of the imagined past, packaged in an imagined future.
“This is how we save our country,” says Eury. “This is how we save our world.” Images flash by of other VACs worldwide, established throughout the unsteady European Union, in warring Russia and Ukraine, even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the desert has been reirrigated and revitalized, made greener than it has been in millennia; in China and India, where whole tracts of wasted ground have been rejuvenated into endless wetlands of rice; in Japan, where rising sea-level and a series of tsunamis and earthquakes caused an economic collapse Earthtrust was quick to exploit.
“It’s not only this planet we were meant to inhabit, to settle, to improve,” John hears Eury say. “There are worlds other than this one, and Earthtrust wants to take you there: the next frontier, destined to be settled by the bravest of Volunteers.” As Eury’s CGI future appears on-screen, the same vision comes into view outside: dust rises from a massive construction yard outside what was once Des Moines, one of the biggest projects John has ever seen, Earthtrust’s bridge to an extraplanetary future, rising from Iowa’s failed corn.
The spaceport isn’t complete. It might be decades before any ship leaves it, if ever. But John has heard Eury’s vision for this spaceport and for the colony ship she says will enable humanity to settle deep space. Mars, she told him once, is too limited a vision. We go to the stars.
Since childhood, Eury had dreamed aloud, and while some of her dreams had indeed become real, many more were gossamer things, chatter destined to excite boardrooms and investor rounds but never meant to materialize—like Pinatubo, another dream John had once thought impossible, now apparently closer than ever.
Pinatubo, named for a volcano that erupted decades ago in the Philippines, whose violent explosion launched twenty million tons of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere. For the next two years, those aerosols had blanketed the globe, temporarily dropping temperatures worldwide by half a degree Celsius. “It didn’t last,” Eury had explained during a late-night conversation in the first apartment she and John had shared, “because a volcanic eruption eventually ends. But with the right technology, we could maintain the same cooling effect indefinitely.”
The concept wasn’t new, but that hadn’t stopped Eury from branding it, making it hers. John squeezes his right hand into a fist, waits for the rainbow of lights to scroll above his pebble. All his friends alive, all hopefully on their way to the Farm, Earthtrust’s original prototype for the VAC, where now Cal believes Eury plans to geoengineer the stratosphere. Years ago, even before the Sacrifice and the Secession, she’d pitched Pinatubo to the floundering American government, then to the European Union, to Beijing and Moscow, to anyone who’d grant her an audience. She’d wanted, in those more idealistic days, for the world to choose this together.
But after the global economic collapse, the wars everywhere abroad and the Secession and the Sacrifice at home, the worsening climate disaster, and the collapse of the worldwide food supply? Maybe now Eury didn’t need anyone’s permission, for anything. She did business in every country, and her security forces administered failing and failed states worldwide; she controlled more than enough land to build whatever she wanted wherever she needed. Now the world’s governments couldn’t risk standing up to Eury Mirov, to Earthtrust.
The journey almost over, John returns to the front, pushes through the other Volunteers crowding forward. The view outside is all fast-moving streaks of a landscape baking in the sun, at least until the old Ohio border—a border marked not with a welcome sign but with drone-surveilled chain-link and unmanned solar farms—whereupon the train enters the greenest lands left on the continent, the first realization of Earthtrust’s earliest promises.
This is the Farm, with its bustling Volunteer neighborhoods, its rich fields and orchards, its stockyards and vertical coops. At its center rises the Tower, a gleaming structure John once watched Eury sketch on her personal tablet, sitting at their kitchen table: the Tower’s use had changed in the years since—Eury hadn’t known then what Earthtrust would become—but the structure looks strikingly similar to that first image, her dream lasting as the waking world around it disintegrated.
The Tower’s black skin gleams in the ceaseless noon sun, its entire surface coated with photovoltaic paint. Four twenty-story-tall legs float the main structure off the ground, creating an atrium underneath where much of Earthtrust’s first superorchard grove continues to grow, fed by a cunning system of mirrors moving sunlight into the shaded trees in a mimicry of the sun’s transit. The main structure rises fifty sloping stories, then narrows to a needle-shaped spire spiking higher toward the sky. At the top waits Eury Mirov’s penthouse, the office where even now she might be surveying her domain, including the land where John and Eury grew up, the farms where generations of their families lived.
Since the beginning, John had wanted to go back to the Garden, to remake the world as it might’ve been before the doom of everything natural, everything pristine, everything wild and free. But that wasn’t exactly what Pinatubo promised.
Eury wanted to save the world too, but she’d never wanted to return to the Garden. Eury wanted to save the world only if she could also choose the future that came after, if she could be the one to decide what the human future should be.
C-433
Being born is no easy task, no matter the method, and the Loom is an especially cruel mother, fleshless and cold, brutally efficient. The first days of C-433’s life are hounded by lingering hurts, and not only in the thick black scab crusted where the rung’s port was screwed into his spine or in the unscratchable itching rawness where the exiting breathing tube tore his throat; his printed bones burn in their stiff sockets, his extruded muscles are sore despite having never been exerted. Despite his many pains, the pitiless, pragmatic remainder pressures him to put aside his aches for another excursion out onto the Ice: if all he does is stay inside the crawler and eat, there won’t be enough biomass to regenerate his body; plus there’s the winch to retrieve, from where it was abandoned by injured C-432. If the unsteady crevasse ledge collapses, taking the winch with it, then so goes C’s best method for descending into the Below
.
Not yet, C thinks—and then he says it aloud too: “Not yet.” It’s only when he hears his own voice that he feels in conversation, his thoughts needing to be made voluble to separate them out from the remainder’s, that second person made of many persons.
You are not the first to think this, the remainder complains, as C returns to the galley for another globby meal of nutrient paste, the paste tasting like paste, provoking memories of only more paste. His is a world stripped of simile, everything itself, only a little less so than before. Whenever he wakes in the chamber full of rotting blankets, he moves his clawed hands over himself, cataloging the body that is not exactly the same one C-432 or any other was gifted by the Loom: only three of his front teeth are enamel, two less than in C-432’s mouth; his horns are spiraled slightly tighter to his head, hiding how much shorter they are; his blue fur is ever thinner, so that C-433 will shiver more than C-432, who shivered more than C-431.
Despite these latest diminishments, the remainder expects C-433 to be as industrious as C-432, as incurious about the crawler. It wants him outside, on the Ice. The remainder tells him he should be healed and rested, but still his tight muscles tire easily, still his rung port scab leaks yellow pus, gummily trickling down the back of his neck. The remainder demands he retrieve the winch, but C doesn’t see how he can—even dragging himself along on the irregular handholds breaking up the hallway walls, he can’t walk from one end of the crawler to the other without wheezing. The morning of his seventh day, he vomits the previous evening’s nutrient paste, the lumpy gruel gray and tasteless both ways. At the remainder’s command, he cleans the mess from the floor and carries it in his paws through the crawler’s hallways to the recycler chamber, where it whirls down the drain in gray-pink streaks.
The same drain C-432 melted down, not so long ago.
C stumble-walks the crawler’s halls, the remainder’s angry cacophony of voices a maddening companion, debating itself inside his skull. Perhaps there’s something wrong with C-433. Perhaps they’d be better off recycling him and starting over. But the winch, left outside and possibly doomed by the shifting surface of the Ice; but the dwindling biomass, a supply too strained to print a better body.
Recycling is a lossy process, the remainder complains, this sick creature won’t make a wholer one. They need C-433 to become the scavenger they were, to spend his life as they spent theirs, extracting the world Below, bringing back enough past to buy more future, but only C-433 has agency over their shared body. On his tenth day, he realizes the remainder can be made to retreat simply by entering any room where O’s voice spills from the speakers. He moves chamber to chamber, pressing intercom buttons to free the trapped song, filling the crawler with its noise, the same wrenching drones repeating until C’s blue hackles raise, until his jawbone warns it might vibrate into splinters beneath the rhythmic gnashing of his teeth. Being born is no easy task, childhood no easier, and despite being born into an adult body, C-433 is in many ways a child, forced to rely on the remainder’s dribbled instructions, offering an unearned familiarity with the crawler’s machines. But once his mind is set free by O’s gut-clenching dirge, he discovers the remainder hasn’t told him everything.
At the front end of the crawler, just before the gutted and recycled cockpit, C finds a heavy hatch he can’t force himself to remember: whatever the remainder knows, it isn’t sharing. The hatch is sealed with a handwheel, stuck with rust and disuse. C strains at its mechanism, his hooves scrabbling on the cold steel floor until the wheel turns over. With a heave, he forces the door open and steps across the threshold. His breath catches in his sore throat as he enters a room unlike any other he’s found: the room’s dusty but intact, not ransacked or scavenged. At its center is a conference table of white plastic, yellowed with age; the walls are covered with maps depicting the landscape before it was covered with ice. A half-dozen chairs are pushed in neatly around the table, except for the one at the head, tipped over on its side.
C circles the table, a new feeling bubbling his upset stomach: anticipation, replacing the dread of being sent out on the Ice, of being bullied into recycling himself. He rights the fallen chair, pushes it back into its place, then circles the room before trying to make sense of the binders on the table. He reads and reads until his new eyes tire; without context, he struggles to connect the passages he scans at random, each next binder stuffed with more maps and charts, hyperdetailed instructions and nested protocols.
C replaces a book, reconsiders the room. O’s voice hasn’t followed him inside, the song’s droning stuck in the hallway. The remainder is similarly quiet, reduced to a simmering murmur. There’s something else different about this space, beyond its intactness: the map room, as C-433 comes to call it, is entirely analog. There’s no speaker embedded near the door, no screens on any of the walls, no machinery at all. There are only the charts and the maps and the books, all printed on slippery sheaves of plastic, their pages tear-proof, stain resistant, meant to last.
No books, no maps, the remainder says, its anger rising. The bubble. The Ice. The winch.
“No,” C says stubbornly, picking up the next binder, its black cover blank except for its title: orpheus protocol. And beneath that, in smaller text: biosphere restoration procedure: do not attempt without measured viability probability above ninety percent.
Inside the binder, he discovers blueprints of the crawler’s interior: rooms labeled as genetic testing laboratories, stocked with lists of equipment and supplies; bunk rooms, galleys, and storerooms filled with synthetic clothing for a variety of possible climates. Here the cavernous hangar is filled with other vehicles, plus a pair of the hovering bubblecrafts, even though now there’s only the one, and in the lower levels of the crawler—areas inaccessible from the level C has occupied since emerging from the Loom—he sees a series of steel storage tanks, reservoirs holding the Loom’s stockpile of biomass, a stockpile he knows he’s nearly depleted.
In another binder, C finds a personnel build order, by which the crawler’s crew was meant to be printed by the Loom: the project’s commander would be printed first, to employ the crawler’s sensor array to determine the viability probability of the outside world. If the viability readings checked out, then the commander would summon the rest of the crawler’s crew: pilots, scientists, engineers—a team brought to life in order of importance to the Orpheus Protocol.
“You might be reading this a hundred years after the project began,” the binder states.
You might be reading it a thousand years later.
You might have read this page many times by now, in many different years.
You may be disoriented, frightened, overwhelmed.
You must become brave, determined, devoted to doing what is right, even if it’s hard.
By your efforts and the efforts of others like you, the earth will be reseeded and rebuilt.
C looks up, his heart racing. It’s been many cycles since anyone has entered this room. Mostly the recombinant C never did. For most of his four hundred and thirty-two cycles, he’s chosen survival over this mystery. But surely whatever happened here wasn’t what these binders suggest should have. Surely some error’s been made, surely mistake after mistake must have been made for events to have gone as badly as C’s lonely existence suggests they have.
You are not the first to think this, the remainder has told C-433 repeatedly, filling his head with its dismissals. But when C speaks next, when he says, “What could I do to fix this place?”—then the remainder remains silent, all four hundred and thirty-two cycles of it.
“What could I do to fix this place?” he says once more, louder, more urgently, more earnestly, for the first time wondering something honestly unexpected, something no recent remainder has dared.
In the silence that follows, he looks at the binder again, traces the words with the tip of a claw: what is right, even if it’s hard.
Chapman
Roaming alone through uncut forests, frustrated Ch
apman kneels in the deep shade to dig the loam with his clawed hands, working the moist life of the humus between his fingers, every handful of dirt riven with beetles, maggots, worms, bits of decomposing plant matter, seeds, and shells slipping between his fingers. He scrapes at the raw earth with his hooves, the earth only seemingly solid, seemingly permanent, its every inch telling a story of passing sunlight and rain, of birth and growth and death, of ice and snow and heat and drought, the earth itself never static, always being shaped by weather and erosion, by the tectonic shifting of the earth’s plates, by the tremblings of earthquakes in distant parts of the continent, by the slowly sloshing movement of cold water captured in cavernous aquifers, buried deep between drowned pillars of ancient stone.
How much slow focus it takes to read such a story! Still bereft of his brother’s constant conversation, lonely Chapman has nothing but time and attention. Pausing at a meadow’s edge, he turns a hand, watches a flea crawl harmlessly through the fur along the back of his wrist. Surrounding him and the flea is the uncut forest, an organism made of many kinds of life, many kinds of nonlife too, some visible only once his attention lingers, once he learns the names other men have gifted these pieces of the world. Oak and maple and pine. Deer and elk and moose. The gray wolf, the common coyote. Blue jays, cardinals, robins, ravens, and crows. All their barks and yips and birdsong, carried along on airs scented by bloom and branch.