Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  “I hoped you wouldn’t notice,” John says, taking his seat, already exhausted. He wants to be sharp, careful, attentive; knows he’s not, his body worn from hours of digging irrigation ditches for an AI-planned soybean field. “How did you find me? Cameras? Bioscanners? Facial recognition?”

  Eury laughs, leans back in her chair. “So dramatic, so paranoid, always. Yes, there are cameras and drones, here at the Farm and in the Sacrifice. Yes, we use facial recognition, sniffer sensors, biometrics of all kinds. But it doesn’t mean we’re constantly watching. The data merely ensures health and safety, efficiency, maximized capacity. It’s not about controlling the people who live here. It’s about enabling this land to be its most productive self. Still, we do sometimes find something interesting.”

  She retrieves a palm-sized projector from her pocket, places it on the table. The projector hums to life, splashing a series of images across the white concrete wall: John, crossing the fence line of a stilled power station outside Phoenix; John, using his truck as a battering ram to dislodge a row of gas pumps in a deserted desert town; an explosion dismantling a dam over a snaking canal, while a tiny figure in forest-green flannel runs; a fracking well winched from the ground and dragged, John plainly visible behind the wheel of his now lost truck. More images follow, a montage of his minor crimes, all the controlled demolitions and half-hearted destruction shot at such a distance that even the explosions look futile, amateurish.

  Eury pauses on a photograph depicting John staring up into the sky, his profile stark against a field of waist-high brown grass, a half-dead river sparkling behind him; she advances the projector one more time, displaying a last image of the same place, this time taken from a lower vantage: a close-up of John’s face, bearded and sunburned, furious and frightened.

  Yellowstone, the Lamar Valley. The first view from the drones taking away the bison; the second from a wolf that wasn’t a wolf, or that was a wolf but was also something else.

  “We weren’t tracking you on purpose,” Eury says, “but you kept showing up in routine machine scans, from our drones, from left-behind camera systems still active in the Sacrifice. Every so often the system flagged your passing by, even when your pebble was turned off. A neat trick, that. Our engineers assured me they couldn’t be deactivated without removing them from the body first. I’d love to hear how you accomplished it.”

  John offers her nothing, for now reserving even his questions. First and foremost among his unasked queries: What had Eury done to make a wolf into a camera? Maybe it wouldn’t take much: the Earthtrust-made pebble implanted in his thumb controlled a retinal display he could summon at will, plus a satellite tracker and other tech; the nanobees carried visual sensors that were much smaller than anything you’d need to mod an animal the size of a wolf. But just because it was easy didn’t mean it didn’t also offend. It was bad enough what they’d had to do to the apple trees, all the genetic manipulations, the cross-splicing of genes from dozens of species until what an apple tree was became meaningless. It was worse how they’d reshaped the livestock. But still the wolf upset him most of all. Heir to the inheritance of every ancestor too proud to become a dog, it should have either stayed free or died away. Even extinction was better than becoming another toy for this woman who had everything, who every day owned more of the world.

  “I shouldn’t have come back,” John says, his cheeks flushing. He thought he’d feel anger when finally confronted with Eury again. But all he feels is the shame of his wasted years, of having accomplished so little while telling himself he was doing something important, while every minute Earthtrust grew and Eury got stronger. “I should’ve stayed away.”

  “But I’m glad you didn’t,” says Eury, pocketing the projector. She stands, smooths out her blouse, adjusts her jacket. “Will you come with me?”

  “Do I have a choice?” He knows he needs to go: Julie told him this is what Cal wants, but he can’t resist indulging his petulance. “Do we Volunteers even have the option of refusing you?”

  “If this square of concrete is where you want to live, I won’t stop you, but you and I both know Volunteering is a waste of your talents.” Eury waves dismissively at the walls still curing, the utter lack of decoration, every blankness evidence of how John has barely inhabited this house. “We’re way past where we were when you quit. We’re making real progress now with our redundancies and resiliencies, preparing the Farm for what’s coming next. That field of soybeans in the next spiral over? The plants are really designed for the next decade’s heat, when we predict they’ll be twice as productive. They’re not just drought resistant but hungry for droughts. When that future arrives, we’ll be ready. No one has to starve, no one has to suffer.”

  “I didn’t come here to help, Eury. You have to know that.” John says this carefully: it’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. He’s always been a bad liar, and more so where Eury is concerned.

  Eury stands, gestures toward the door. She’s tired too, he sees, as her mask momentarily slips, before her calm enthusiasm reasserts itself. “At least let me show you the view from the Tower. It really is spectacular. After we’re done, maybe you can tell me why you’re sneaking back into my Farm, instead of just coming home to me. By now you must know I wouldn’t care about a couple bombs out west, not if the blasts let you burn off some of that crippling guilt, still as boring as ever.”

  Eury’s penthouse is set at the peak of the needle narrowing skyward from the Tower’s main structure, an ostentatious addition to the already overwrought office building. After riding a private elevator up from the fiftieth-floor Earthtrust executive offices—offices where John might’ve worked, if he’d stayed—Eury leads John through a small antechamber to the penthouse’s double doors, ornately inlaid with a forest scene: dense trees and dozens of woodland creatures, a mountain hovering over the horizon. Unlocking the automatic doors with a wave of her hand, Eury steps aside to let John enter first, revealing a well-appointed office flush with sunset, red-orange light setting every surface to glowing, especially the heavy mahogany slab of Eury’s desk, its empty surface polished to a high sheen. There are no visible metals, plastics, polymers, only warm woods, handcrafted textiles laid over gleaming marble, burnished leather chairs, and the smell of wood polish and pipe tobacco.

  All that—and also a wolf.

  Lying before Eury’s desk, its nose tucked beneath its paws, is a sleepy double of the lone animal John saw out west, the one he now realized led the lifter drones to the herd of dead and dying bison, then sent an image of his face to Earthtrust: the same gray fur, the same clever green eyes, the same preternatural calm when confronted with a man.

  “I call this one Ghost,” Eury says, gesturing as she walks behind her desk, turning her back until she’s silhouetted before the window by the sunset expanse of the Farm.

  “Ghost,” John echoes, arms crossed. “You call this one Ghost, or all of them?”

  “Just this one,” Eury replies, refusing the provocation. “You’re quick to judge, but you weren’t here these past years. You don’t know how steady a hand it took to make this possible. The world outside the Farm ended. It was up to us to make the future, and you left.” She clicks her tongue loudly; Ghost rises and yawns, its pink tongue lolling free as it pads around the desk to sit beside Eury. “Come here, John,” she says, absently scratching behind the wolf’s ears. “Come look at the world we made.”

  We? Not we. Her. The Farm is her invention, her vision come true. John refuses his share of the responsibility, despite his bees, despite all the work he did to make the first superorchard trees survive this new Ohio. He hadn’t wanted to remake the world, hadn’t wanted to own the future. All he’d wanted was for there to be apple trees here, on the land where he grew up.

  All he’d wanted was for there to keep being bees.

  John joins Eury at the glass wall, Ghost resting between them. The view is vertiginous, the land below healthy but also deeply unnatural, its spiraling plots ar
ranged in an agricultural model far removed from any traditional practice.

  “You’ve transformed our home into another factory,” he says. “The technology is new but the end result is the same as any other industrial farming operation. There’s no here here, not anymore, no Ohio, nothing natural or wild. It’s all Earthtrust, in every direction.”

  “When we built the first VAC here, there wasn’t anything left to save,” Eury says, her gaze distant, seeing not just the Farm but the ruins it was built upon. “Just grids of dead or dying farms, shuttered factories and empty downtowns, suburbs full of abandoned malls and sprawling parking lots. A totally failed state. We had to tear up all the roads, tear down all the fences, till a quarter of the state into new soil. Isn’t that the work you were doing out west? How is this different?” She waves a hand dismissively before he can object, before he can differentiate between rewilding the land and reusing it. “Parts of the Farm are too polluted to grow anything edible, so we’re planting special rotations of crops to leech out the poisons. When they tried the same technique in Detroit back at the turn of the century, the process took decades, but at Earthtrust we’ve invented some promising corn products designed to suck up every contaminant in a single planting. The Farm’s not wilderness, I’ll grant you that, but everything you see is becoming healthy, productive land again, and we’ve got the technology to keep iterating as conditions change. And they are going to change, John. We’re not going back to some pristine wilderness without a single human in sight. That world’s gone. All we can do is prepare for what’s next.”

  “As if those are the only choices.” His voice is flat now, his anger level. “As if all we can choose is wilderness or a factory farm.”

  Eury turns, her expression intense, beseeching. As always, it’s not enough if he only agrees with her: she wants him to believe. In her. In the world she wants to make. In the world she wants to make together. “We never did make us last,” she says. “But we don’t have to try again. Just come back to me, John. The world is over but a new world is coming. Maybe there we’ll be friends again.” She gestures at the Farm. “When we were children, our parents’ generation said the planet might be uninhabitable if the temperature rose a mere two degrees Celsius. It’s risen that and more, and they were right: the planet has become hostile to human life. Soon we’ll be the only mammals left. We’ve abandoned half the United States and still our government is too slow, too beholden to old interests, old powers. But the world they’re protecting is finally truly over. It’s time to make a new one.”

  “Pinatubo,” John says, staring out the window, watching the sun fall over the sprawling fields, the spiraling orchards and stockyards. “You’re talking about the Pinatubo Project.”

  “You remember,” Eury says, smiling slightly. “Worldwide stratospheric aerosol scattering to return the planet’s temperature to where it was at the beginning of the century, maybe even all the way back to preindustrial levels, if it works as well as I think it will.”

  “But cooling the air isn’t enough. What about ocean acidification, what about mass extinctions, what about wildfires everywhere, all the compound extremes to come? Climate change isn’t one problem but a million interconnected crises. There’ll be unforeseen consequences. People will suffer. Who benefits from this, Eury? Who wins?”

  “We all win,” Eury says, her voice tight now, her eyes flashing. “This is about protecting everyone on earth. Pinatubo will pause the clock, give us time to invent more lasting solutions, to put those solutions into action.” She frowns, glares. It’s not anger, only disappointment. “Tell me if you’re with me, John. Tell me if you’re back. This is what being back means.”

  “I’m here,” he says, hating the frustrated defeat he hears in the words. He straightens his posture, evens out his voice. This is exactly where Cal needs him to be. All he has to do is go along a little further. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “I should’ve come to you sooner,” Eury says, as Ghost whimpers, rises, and pads away. “But I’ve been busy, shuttling between here and Syracuse, to the United Nations and the European Union, Moscow and Beijing and New Delhi. There’s so much timidity, so much hand-wringing, but we can’t cling to old powers forever. It’s time to do something. Something bold.”

  “You say it like it’s that easy. Like no one will get hurt. Like we can flip a switch and change the world.” And wasn’t that exactly what Eury was proposing? A technological fix, surprisingly simple, surprisingly cheap, all things considered, launched by a great woman brave enough to do what no one else will.

  “I’m a realist but I’m not afraid to act,” Eury says, barely pausing at John’s objections. “The Farm is proof. It’s bold and complex, but it works. The Chinese have their own attempt, but they don’t think it’s viable long term, which is why they let us build a VAC there too.” Eury smiles her enigmatic smile that rarely exactly signals joy. “But then our Farm isn’t viable forever either. Not without Pinatubo.”

  John senses his resistance withering, paling in the face of Eury’s confidence, all his questions small-minded, feebly nay-saying do-nothings. “What happened to your talk about new kinds of drought resiliency, the next decade’s heat-tolerant crops? Just more PR spin?”

  “No, no, all that is true. One of the best parts about being good at your job is you don’t have to lie to the press. The Farm is as future-proof as I’ve promised, at least for a couple decades, if we do nothing. But I do not plan on doing nothing.”

  “Why you, Eury? Why should you be the one to get to make this decision? How can you possibly decide?” This is the one real objection, the root of Cal’s anger, of his own: Why her? Why Eury Mirov, claiming the right to choose for everyone, after first hastening the dismantling of the nation’s democratic institutions, always fragile, always endangered, now almost vanished. “Why you?” he asks again, his voice rising.

  “You want to save the world, John. What do you think saving the world is, except deciding for everyone? The world is worse for most people now than it was when we were young, but the old world was pretty bad too. Now it’s ending, one way or another. All I want is to give us more time to prepare for what’s next.”

  Whether they act or don’t act, some will suffer, there will be winners and losers, but is John willing to gamble on the hope that more will be saved than lost if he lets Eury Mirov decide what’s worth saving? He considers the twilight landscape, the glowing orchards and fields. He thinks of the Volunteers below, doing their best to live the good life Eury’s promised. He objects to this place, but his objection doesn’t rob it of its majesty.

  “John,” Eury says. “John, please look at me.”

  This is his childhood friend. This is the woman he loved. Once he thought he’d do anything Eury asked him, no matter the cost.

  “I’m listening,” he says. “But first, tell me what your drones were doing in Yellowstone.”

  Now Eury offers John her real smile, not the practiced, inscrutable expression she saves for the telescreen cameras, but an animal’s grin showing too many of her too perfect white teeth.

  This is Eury Mirov, a wolf in a white blouse, ready to remake the world.

  “I don’t know if you’re ready for all that,” she says. “But maybe I better show you.”

  C-433

  A tree grows sneakily, it is rare to see one move; C goes to sleep with quiet reverence for the beauty of his barkspots, despite their danger, then wakes the next morning grotesquely heavy with new growths, his breathing further strained and his flesh flushed with fever, his skin throbbing everywhere it remains skin. He coughs until his eyes water, he wipes snot and drool from his broad lips with the back of his hand, leaves yellow mucus hardening blue fur; the wan sun still lies low in the sky as he pulls his legs up into his chest, wrapping his arms around the bony knobs of his knees, a creature who was never a fetus finding the fetal position. As his temperature spikes, he hears voices he can’t believe are the remainder’s; to beat back these audi
tory hallucinations, he recites the litany memorized from the map room binders, the names of animals he’ll never see, then all the trees the binder says once inhabited the buried world, a world so rich it was home to more than one tree.

  Only after his fever recedes do the voices fully abate. How much daylight has C wasted listening to them, sick and suffering while the bubble shakes in the wind? He rises unsteadily to study a gale unfurling across the flatness of the Ice, seeming to blow from beyond the western horizon; as he sets the craft in motion again, its curve pushes back against the turbulent gusts, bobbing and dipping across the Ice’s rippling perturbations, slowly jostling up powdery white dunes or skirting dangerous drop-offs. He makes progress in the light that remains, then rests as best he can in the dark. The next morning, he begins again by pruning the nighttime progress of the barkspots, before hurtling over the frozen landscape fast as he dares. If it snows, the lessened sunlight fails to fill the craft’s batteries and he loses progress; if the gale reappears from the west, the bubble trembles against it, the battery again draining faster.

  With the craft floating above the ground, C often misses minor changes in grade, but now whenever he summons the control console its gauges reveal that the craft has been slowly, subtly descending. Over the next fifty kilometers, he navigates still-rare signs of the buried human landscape, occasional architecture brought to the surface by glacial movement, its deepest layers inexorably lifting their caught material. Kilometers above what the map scroll suggests should be a river valley, the ice becomes studded with half-submerged steel structures, toppled over, blades bent. The relentless wind blows twisters of clodded snow across the wreckage; the sound of metal cracking against metal fills the air as one blade creakingly spins.