Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  “As diminished as our childhoods were, they were the last real ones,” John says. “I feel that too. But every generation thinks theirs is going to be the last.”

  “Sooner or later, someone’s going to be right.”

  John thinks about the wolf he met in Yellowstone, the one both spy and camera. He says, “Why modify the wolves at all? Why not make the exact wolf you scanned?”

  Eury gives him a withering glance. “Because wild wolves are dead, John. They couldn’t survive. We made ones who could. Different tolerances for temperature, more efficient metabolisms, lower mortality rates in breeding. Every variable is adjustable, even if the consequences are difficult to predict.” She raises a hand to cut off his objections. “And yes, the complications of reassembling an entire biosphere—while also modifying its individual parts—are staggering. But we’re running simulations, applying machine learning, thinking ahead. I’ll say it again: Pinatubo is our grace period. In the time it gives us, we’ll finish the transition from fossil fuels to a sustainable energy culture, humanely draw the population down to an appropriate size, then determine where and how people can most productively live. Some people might live in places like the VACs, most others in highly designed and centrally planned megalopolises. The rest of the country could be left uninhabited, like the Sacrifice Zone. Over time, we’ll terraform unused landscapes into new green zones, places where humans can grow crops and graze livestock, where we can reintroduce a sustainable wild world to live alongside humanity.”

  Is this what John had dreamed of when he was blowing up dams, when he was destroying fences and gas stations? Still on his knees, he runs a hand across the gray tile, finds a patch of fur loosed from one wolf or the other. A talisman, a reminder that everything he sees might not be real, not if real means not of human manufacture. He says, “It’s a hell of a boardroom pitch, Eury. I almost believe you can do it.”

  “We are doing it, John. We could do it together.” Eury trains her gaze on John, pinning him in place, about to ask whatever it is she plans to ask.

  “Why did you bring me here?” he asks, unable to wait for her to speak. “You must’ve known I didn’t come back to help you.”

  “Didn’t you?” Eury arches an eyebrow, taunting him. “That’s news to me.”

  I came here to stop you. I came here to plant a bomb.

  “You have everything figured out,” he says. “So why do you need me?”

  “Because maybe there is something only you can do,” she says, standing. She reaches out a hand, pulls him to his feet. “Pinatubo, John. I want you to finish it.”

  Outside the Loom, back in the blank openness of the forty-eighth floor, John agrees. Eury issues a series of commands to the Tower’s AI, summoning a mobile fabrication drone to build a lab and living quarters nearby, plus furniture and appliances and whatever else John needs, all arranged in a configuration Eury’s chosen: a replica of the lab John once occupied in Earthtrust’s first offices, in the Columbus industrial park where Eury started the company.

  “This will take a couple hours,” she says, “but then you should get to work. Stratospheric aerosol scattering isn’t a complicated technology but it has its nuances. Determining the size and reflectivity of the particles, the ideal density of cover; predicting exactly what might happen at different levels of dispersion. How much you cool the earth, how fast. We’ve modeled those out pretty well and pretty confidently. The tricky part is the delivery vehicle: How do you get enough particles into the stratosphere, and how do you keep replenishing the supply? We’ve explored airplanes and zeppelins, rocket volleys, low-orbit space stations, what’s left of commercial air travel. All too expensive, too easy to disrupt or abandon.”

  John watches the fabricator work, unnerved by the emerging outline of his old lab, a place he’d thought he’d escaped forever. “What’s the solution, then?”

  “It’s you. It’s always been you.” Eury kneels to bury her face in Ghost’s furry neck, then its twin’s, the two wolves already inseparable packmates. “More specifically, your bees. We remade them into miniature injectors, individually capable of aerosol manufacture and release, as well as perpetual self-repair and self-propagation. Set and forget geoengineering.”

  “Set and forget? What if you get it wrong?”

  “I would suggest we not? One problem with any delivery system requiring constant human input or a static base is that someone could bomb your airfields, invade your facilities, disrupt your supply chain. We both know we’re headed for less geopolitical stability, not more. We need to fix the planet in a way that isn’t reliant on, say, what’s left of the United States sticking around, because it likely won’t. So we’ll inject a nanoswarm into the atmosphere from VACs around the globe. The swarm has to be capable of harvesting materials to produce the aerosol microparticles and placing them in the stratosphere at the correct altitudes, at appropriate densities. This means the swarm needs a decentralized AI hive mind, continuously re-formed from all available bots. The bots would also need to be able to self-replicate, fabricate new parts, and permutate their own designs as conditions change, as well as be totally secure, safe from interruption or interference.”

  “It’s a tall order,” John says. He objects but he’s already smiling. “Almost impossible.”

  “Almost, but not quite.”

  “No. If you’re right, and the basic design is already there, then if it works—”

  “If it works, then we’ll have time to refine Orpheus, on top of everything else. Restorative cloning via bioprinting, a worldwide terraforming effort, the reshaping of our cities around sustainable agriculture and energy. These efforts are already within our reach. All we need is more time.” Eury blinks, flicking her eyes through a menu or reading a message sent to her pebble. She stands, clicking her tongue to bring the wolves to attention. “But now I have to go.”

  “You’re leaving?” John says, surprised. “For how long?”

  “Just a few days. Meetings in Syracuse, then Brussels, maybe Asia.” Eury pauses as the fabricator drone assembling John’s office noisily slides free an extruded slab of tabletop. “There’s more than one way to save the world, John. I’d prefer the world want our help. But I don’t need its permission. One way or another, I’ll do what’s right. And soon. As soon as you make it work.”

  Eury leans in, kisses John’s bruised cheek. He reaches for her waist, but she stops his hand with hers, twists away. Then she’s gone, the two wolves following her to the elevator, leaving John alone with the fabricator. Watching the printer work, he flexes his fist, activating his pebble, then blinks through the series of command prompts that flash across his retinal display. Immediately his pebble begins to burn beneath his skin, its processor overworked by one of Noor’s riskiest worms, a program designed to decipher and copy one specific security key, a theft Noor had assured John was possible only at extremely close range.

  All it took was John’s hand on Eury’s hip, all it took was her hand pushing his away.

  C-433

  In the shadow of the glacial shelf, C wakes to a dusting of plant material on the bubble’s floor. He reaches up to explore his widening branches, finding more novelty, more change, but at first he can’t resolve the new softness he touches into anything he knows. Craning his neck, cramming his still left shoulder blade uncomfortably into view, he finds more buds have crowded around each leaf stem, each decorated with more leaves than the ones that came before; around each of the branchlets the bark thickens faster, tugging and scratching the surrounding flesh, the borders between bark and skin now lined with stiff purple blades. At the center of some of the leaf clusters, velvety pink blossoms unfurl to display whitish pistils, stamen tipped with dustings of yellow pollen.

  Flowers, he remembers, awed. He considers the purple blades lining the bark until a dozen different remainder voices tell him what it is he sees: grass. Something C thinks he has no memory of, but must have known, long ago, in one of his earliest lives.

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nbsp; The translucent photovoltaic bubble continues its zipping over lifeless broken ground, crossing frozen concrete and clay shattered by the dredging force of the glacier’s retreat, leaving behind new glacial kettles, solid lakes dotted with rocky ice; blankets of till scatter the bottom of moraines, everywhere there are fragments of stone and cement and steel, the edifices of a civilization reduced to pebbly incomprehensibility—and there’s the distant city, backdropped by the mountains beyond, the range in which Black Mountain must surely wait. But C barely sees this landscape, enraptured as he is with his study of his tree. How can he look away? Why would he ever take his eyes from the fresh attraction of the blossoms bursting their buds, the flowers unfurling, the bright insistence of their pollen-dusted stamen? A vision of new life—for what is a flower but a fruit in waiting, for what is a fruit but a demand for more?

  If a fruit were to grow from the barkspots’ flowers, then its seeds could grow independently of C’s body, outliving this cycle of his existence. Despite this promise, C worries. He’s ignorant of so much, the relevant memories of the remainder often wordless, imageless, thoughts reduced to bare hunches, barely understood: the blossoms need pollinators, without whose help they might die on their buds without producing the fruit C now desperately craves.

  By evening a new pain appears, a deeper itching, lodged not in his insensate barkskin but beneath it, in deeper layers of his skin, or else the muscles beneath. He digs his claws at the bark, avoiding anywhere leaf stems grow; when that fails, he takes the orange-handled knife and saws through to the mess below, cutting around the flowers, poking through the bloody sap to discover a bolus of cysts nestled within the bony wooden mess of his shoulder, near where the barkspot first appeared.

  The cysts are different from the buds, but different how? C lacks any helpful experience. They rise up beneath the bark, create pockets of pressure and pain; frustrated, C stomps in unsteady circles around the claustrophobic bubble until the craft reaches the city limits. Ice and snow, frozen brown clay, black asphalt broken and buckled, high roads collapsed off toppled supports, gray concrete made irregular boulders—the ruins here are more intact than those of the Below, but their intactness makes passage difficult, the cityscape not glacier-crushed, only left in a state of confused abandonment.

  At C’s direction, the bubble flits around and between and over every obstacle, penetrating the city by its widest arteries, the cold-buckled but not vanished roads often tens of meters wide. It takes C some time to recognize the wrecked hulks tossed alongside the road as other conveyances: wheeled vehicles piled high, wrenched metal and cracked glass and faded rubber, drifts of steel pushed before passing ice or unimaginable winds, cracked against concrete spiked by twisted rusted metal he remembers to call rebar, surrounded by shattered stucco.

  The bubble passes beneath a sign reading welcome to fabulous las vegas, the language recognizable but the sentiment unintelligible. C-433 is less curious about the world than many of his predecessors, but still, he has to resist the urge to exit the bubble, to explore the fallen-down structures he passes. He detours wherever the road is blocked by the collapsing mismatched architecture: he wonders at a towering green-robed figure, its neck broken, one arm raised to a shattered elbow, whatever object the missing lifted hand once held fallen among other rubble; he mistakes other half-nude statues for frozen bodies, likewise missing heads and limbs, their robed waists terminating in no torsos, none of the bodies hooved like his, none of the bodies horned. Columns of stone separate broken panes of colored glass, sparkling shards harmless to the floating bubble, the craft gliding over bent green signs offering incomprehensible directions, routes north and south to other boulevards and avenues half blocked by fallen poles caught suspended on their wires, dangling dead cables.

  Wherever C looks he sees faded painted words, words whose meanings he can only guess at, caesars and bellagio, paris and new york. The bubble moves unsteadily, its repulsors lifting it automatically over low obstacles, C piloting it manually around more complex obstructions. On one sign he sees a beast walking on four legs, its head maned, its back bearing two feathered wings: a creature made of other creatures, not so different from him. He thinks he’s never seen a fountain before but then there are fountains everywhere, filled in with snow, including one surrounded by statues of stilt-legged pink birds, some species likely unnamed in the Ohio litany he memorized; he passes below a mural depicting four robed figures, one floating haloed above the kneeling others, all four faces scratched out, bullet holes riddling their bodies. What do all these figures represent? Are they invitations or warnings?

  Maybe it’s better not to know. Whatever this city believed, it wasn’t enough to save it.

  C retreats several kilometers, searching side streets for a route around a toppled filthy-white spire that blocks the road, its long-ago impact having cracked a rift in the concrete too deep for the bubble to cross. Everywhere he goes he finds debris he can’t always name: punched-through screens, discarded conveyances, half-decayed fabric in a hundred colors, the decay arrested by the cold that killed everything else, although he finds no bodies in the streets, no bones secured in tattered winter clothes.

  It’s impossible for C to guess how many people once lived here. Staring out the curved wall of the bubble, he tries to imagine how many other cities there must have once been, how many buildings holding innumerable bodies, each body capable of housing as many lives as his. All gone, all gone, everywhere except Black Mountain.

  Despite everything he’s seen, C still actually believes this: that at Black Mountain someone will be waiting to receive him.

  Off the Ice, less of his attention is required to pilot the craft. It should be easier and easier to give his attention to the world around him, but C is easily overwhelmed. Everywhere he goes there is some inanimate object whose name he can’t always divine: the words are in him but he can’t always rescue the language from himself. Other times the world names itself back with force, the remainder pressing upon him words he couldn’t have guessed he’d forgotten: a casino or a restaurant, a taxi or a limousine, a winged lion, a flamingo.

  After hours of slow travel across the rubble-strewn city, C gives up trying to make sense of what he sees. He listens to O’s song, he watches the blossoms waving on their stems, the stems shivering on the bark of his body, he worries about what will happen when the flowers start to die, how he’ll feel after they’re gone. These are the first true seasons of C-433’s life: flowers and not flowers—and then flowers again? He doesn’t know. His left arm grows immobile, his right leg is stiffer every day, his stance sags leftward under the weight of the tree. Now the bubble smells richly of pollen, there’s yellow dust and blue fur everywhere, the pollen shaken loose from the blossoms, the fur pushed from his skin thread by thread by the advancing bark. It’s harder than ever to breathe, harder to swallow gagging slugs of nutrient paste thinned nearly past taste, made watery enough he might choke its dwindling supply down his tightening gullet.

  C coughs, spits wet phlegm into his hands, wipes his hands on the furred side of his stomach. The city’s claustrophobia of ruin extends in every direction, as oppressive as the Ice ever was. He scratches at the places where beneath bark and skin he can feel the cysts growing, rising through his burning flesh; he closes his eyes against the incomprehensible world and lets the bubble make slow progress while he dreams a dream of blackness, blackness unending, blackness numbingly cold and utterly boundless, totally lifeless, totally inert, a world where nothing more would be asked, where he could be still, finished, complete.

  Hours later, C awakes not to the sound of O’s voice but to a steady rhythmic bleeping, an alarm previously unheard. Dark falls outside, but by the bubble’s light beam he sees a path cleared through the rubbled cliffs of frozen trash and broken buildings by the treaded passage of some enormous vehicle. Confused, he calls up the command console, studying the new indicator on its display, an alert reading only: beacon acquired.

  C mutes
the alert, then taps his right temple. When he left the crawler behind, he brought with him only its insufficient maps, old-world knowledge no longer matching the continent he’d crossed. Now, as the bubble automatically makes a wireless connection to this distant beacon, the augmented reality display before him shimmers and swims: topographical features realign, the map adjusting to the changes wrought by unknown years of glacial progress, of ceaseless snows and violent winds, all the other phenomena capable of remolding the landscape.

  When the new map is complete, a bright line appears in C’s vision, pointing two hundred fifty kilometers west: a line leading directly down the canyon of ruined city the bubble is already navigating, the tracks spanning the makeshift canyon now obviously exactly the width of a crawler like the one where he was born and born and born. Why hadn’t he realized it before now? Because he’d never seen his own crawler in motion. The promise of another’s beacon, the fresh snow falling gently over the ruined cityscape—together they activate a deep need, a want for companionship, for someone to share this sight: the falling snow is beautiful, beautiful even without anyone to tell C what beauty means. When he begins to cry, tears fall only from the side of his face untouched by bark. His body is so stiffened by the tree in him and on him that he can only stand and lean against himself, leaning on the tree, its trunk strong enough to hold him. He weeps against his tree, its weight supporting the fleshier side of his body—and as he weeps something moves inside him: the cysts push all at once against his trembling flesh, rising beneath the bark, then breaking through.

  What C thought were buried cysts are not cysts at all, but teratomas born of buried genetic material—not cysts but eggs. He wrenches his barked forearm up before his tear-streaked face, his joints moving slowly, the arm more branch than limb. Bloody sap leaks through minute cracks, and from those cracks climb first one then another then half a dozen translucent creatures each the size of a fingernail, made of parts naming themselves to C: carapace, mandible, antennae, wing.