by Matt Bell
By the end he would’ve given anything for a bee sting, would have gladly allowed himself to be stung to death if it meant real bees could go on in his place.
Nanobees assigned and his lab assembled, John continues solving the problem Eury assigned him before she left the Farm. Once he understands how the Pinatubo swarms differ from his bees, it’s simple enough to adjust some parameters, to tune the self-preservation protocol, to program self-sufficiencies and redundancies the bees had never needed. The nanobees were already capable of swarm thought, their hive minds coordinating to make higher-level decisions, but the Pinatubo bots also need to self-replicate; still, the technology to design printers to print other printers is old now, the materials the nanoswarms will need reasonably abundant.
The launch control chamber waits at the top of the Tower’s needle, on the other side of Eury’s penthouse, protected by layers of biometric security: a handprint sensor, an optical scanner, and a DNA prick, in addition to the usual pebble-based locks. Whatever parameters are set there at launch will quickly spread to the rest of the swarms, then become permanent. Because the swarms must not be allowed to be tampered with, and because anything that can be hacked will be, the safest option is to ensure their instructions can’t be adjusted after launch, no matter what happens. Instead John programs precise drawdown triggers, instructions the nanoswarms will continually revert to, no matter what other modifications are made: when atmospheric carbon dioxide falls beneath a certain level, the nanoswarms will slow the sulfate injections until the white sky blues again, returning the world to a more natural state.
As if there’ll be anything natural at all by then.
He builds in new firewalls to further prevent the swarms from taking revised orders but balks at removing the backdoor he left in the nanobees, a backdoor the Pinatubo swarms have inherited, unseen by Eury’s engineers. He should delete it, but the assurance of its existence is too great a temptation: if Cal and the others fail to halt the launch, then this might be one more way to stop Pinatubo. Still, it’ll be only marginally useful. Activating the backdoor requires close proximity, so once the hive mind is established in the stratosphere, it’ll already be too late to stop its orders.
Eury left him with the best projections from her climate engineers, all their estimates of the level of aerosol scattering needed to create a sufficiently dense coverage of sulfates to cool the global temperature by the necessary amount, which to Eury means simply maintaining the current status quo, without letting temperatures climb any higher. Blocking enough solar radiation to dramatically undo the two-and-a-half-degree rise in global temperatures isn’t necessary, according to Eury, because civilization has already restructured itself to life at current levels. But what she means is that two point five degrees Celsius has already delivered a sufficient shock to the global system to allow Earthtrust to take over the global food chain, to bend world politics to Eury’s desires. If conditions improve too much, what might happen to the control she says is necessary to save everyone else? Best for Earthtrust if the world needs the company to run it a little longer.
The work is interesting, just challenging enough to stretch John’s mind in new directions. In a single day and one long night, he’s solved the problems Eury suggested had been plaguing her scientists for months. But he knows how talented the best Earthtrust researchers are, had worked alongside some of them for years before he quit: there wasn’t anything he could do that they couldn’t.
What if Eury hadn’t needed his help, only his complicity? Now he is implicated in whatever happened next. Now he is as responsible as she is.
It’s two or three hours past midnight when John finishes. Pouring himself another bitter cup of coffee he doesn’t need, he allows himself a moment of unreasonable pride. At noon, he’ll meet the others, the five of them gathering for the first time since returning to the Farm; he knows he should sleep, knows he won’t. Instead, he recalls the nanobees he sent flying through air vents and wiring conduits, eager to start assembling their findings into a map of the Tower. One by one, the bees report in, their memory banks full, their micro-batteries nearly depleted: without outside sunlight, there’s no way for their miniature solar cells to charge; without being assigned a swarm, they can’t download their data anywhere but his palm.
The bots finish downloading, one after the other. Once John has their data, he crushes each false insect between two fingers, the quiet crunch of their metallic exoskeletons giving way not so different from what he remembered of the crackling of real insect carapaces, like the many hundreds he unavoidably crushed beneath his boots in the grieving last weeks of the bees.
C-433
Dozens of beetles climb the bubble’s curved wall, dotting C’s view of the landscape with their scuttling blurs; when they fall away, their overturned carapaces and scrabbling legs mix with the crumbling blossoms blanketing the gyro-leveled floor. Dozens are already dead, but more emerge from the cracked ridges of C’s tree, the half of him made bark and branch and bole, while the rest of his flesh shivers and shakes and starves. His left eye roves beneath a mask of wood, seeing only darkness, his breath shallows as new bark crosses the meridian of his sternum, binding his torso, covering his navel; he can no longer turn his neck, his left cheek completely stilled by the same tendrils wrapping his spine, straightening his posture. Only one ear remains free, listening to O’s drone and the clacking beetles and the beacon’s steady beeping, while the other ear, buried beneath the bark, reports on life underground, under bark, the scrabbling of bugs tunneling into his woody flesh.
Now the free ear hears the beacon’s beeping accelerate, as the photovoltaic bubble zooms down the unseen crawler’s trench, climbing to the edge of the place C’s sought almost this entire life: a rocky valley containing the approach plane to Black Mountain, an expanse of massive black thorns partially covered in drifts of filthy snow, rising dozens of meters tall at angry angles, their every surface spiked, the thorns connected by tendrils of rough walls made of the same matte material, an unreflective synthetic rock made of hollandite, zirconolite, and perovskite, materials C doesn’t know he’s seen, named with words he doesn’t know he knows.
C’s good eye gazes despairingly from his half a face, his chest heaves with the sluggish pumping of his sap-blood, his shallow breathing. Arcing the bubble along the first row of thorns prodding the clotted white sky, he discovers the crawler he’s been following crashed against the thorns’ immovable warning. The crawler’s steel hull is shattered, its many portholes dark, its triangular starboard treads as twisted as his own distant crawler’s, all the damage the only evidence he needs to imagine a failed attempt to ram through the unbroken barriers.
His chest aching with the bark’s weight, C searches the irreal landscape ahead. The crashed crawler blocks the most viable way forward, but surely there must be a path the smaller bubble craft might take, however slim, however difficult. The longer C looks, the more the scene settles, until at last he sees a narrow path he might be able to navigate through the thorns, if he pushes the repulsors hard enough to lift the bubble over the lowest parts of the snow-caked walls.
With a strangled cry of relief, C urges the craft forward, crossing ice crusted in the shadow of the doomed crawler. O’s drone fills the darkness; the bubble’s sensors report mild changes in altitude as the craft climbs the first of the barriers, threading a narrow gap picked out by the light beam. The bubble advances slowly, the crawler’s shadow elongated by the time of day. A third of the way along its length, C realizes he should’ve waited to proceed until the hidden sun was directly above: now a warning light fires on the haptic console, the light beam and the repulsors and the heat and air pumps all straining the stressed batteries in the bubble’s belly.
To C’s left lies the snow-blotted surface of the thorns, the walls’ irregular shapes; to the right looms the riveted steel hull of the crawler, its many protuberances of piping and tubing and sensor arrays. Looking ahead, he follows the path of the bea
m, the light leading the way, the craft wavering and bumping over low walls not meant to stop progress, only to slow it. C understands this at a glance: he is inexperienced but not unintelligent. The more thoroughly Black Mountain was secured, the less safe its contents would have been: instead of a high fortress wall, there looms this warning of thorns, a sprawling black sculpture making passage difficult enough to dissuade the curious but not so impossible as to make them insist on trying.
It’s been days since the remainder spoke directly, the voices of all those who came before having slowly integrated into C-433. But the passage beneath the broken crawler prods the remainder to more distinct speech, awakening its old warnings, its cowardly commandments.
The Mountain holds nothing for you. If you bring the Mountain the tree, it’ll cut you free of the wood, steal your blossoms and beetles. What then?
It says, The Mountain is death, but the crawler might save us. Every room exactly as in ours, everything where we left it. A new recycler, a new Loom.
C considers the surface of the crawler, its frost-ridden hull already halfway past, obviously damaged and almost certainly lifeless, with no evidence anything inside is functional.
But the beacon works. But the beacon has worked all these years.
C-433 has been alive for only a short while, and yet in the rung are lifetimes stacked on top of lifetimes, each remembering whatever could be lived between his emergence from the Loom and his return to the recycler, lives now indistinctly intertwined, each too much like another, their individual strands impossible to separate. He cannot help but bend before the remainder’s aggregate pressure: he imagines stopping here, dressing in cloak and goggles and glove—only one glove needed, since his left fist is no longer a hand but a wooden gnarl—and heading out into the snow, the trunk leg dragging a furrow behind him. Limping along the crawler’s underside, he would search for a hatch whose seal he might pry free from the rust and the ice. Digging his claws at the cracked rubber seams, finding purchase in slim crevices filled with powdery silt, pulling at the hatch with his one good arm until the door opens. Wandering the crawler’s dark hallways, veins of cold scrawling the walls like roots of ice, C not knowing if the solar panels are intact, if their deployment mechanisms can be unstuck. The remainder remembering: how C’s crawler was kept functional by never letting its power dwindle or shutting off the heat pumps, by clearing its solar panels of debris in all but the worst weather. The remainder had known how to use the failing fabricators in the crawler’s bowels to make new panels or heat couplers, how to replace the miles of tubing and wiring the crawler required, easy enough for as long as enough feedstock remained.
But every time a broken part got recycled, a little more was lost. Another lossy process never meant to last so long.
The remainder doesn’t care for C’s objections. The remainder does not want to be a tree, a flowering freak made a home for beetles. It wants to be a blue-furred creature with two good-enough hooves; it wants to be a creature of sharp claws and spiraling horns, lone survivor of a world in which everything else has died.
But C-433 is not the prime version of himself, only the runtish last of his lineage, the smallest C ever printed. One of his horns is plastic; the other, brittle keratin, chipping now where the encroaching tree pushes against it. One hoof a fabricated slab, heavier than the organic other, the imbalance having given his gait an uneven limp even before his leg was stiffened by bark.
The crawler tempts but C resists. It promises a safety he no longer wants, that C-433 never accepted. Even if this crawler’s Loom works, even if it could rebuild him, it would rebuild him not as himself but as someone less. It’s only the tree—its bark and branches and buds, its grasses and its flowers and its beetles—that might make him more.
C-433 knows so little. But even he knows better than to want to be less ever again.
C drives the bubble out of the crawler’s shadow and into the afternoon sunlight, navigating the forest of frozen thorns. “I am not afraid,” he says aloud, but the urge to turn back isn’t so easily dispelled. The shadows of the towering spikes fall across the bubble, black, angular, forbidding, dangerous; C pilots, O sings, the beetles crawl quickly around the bubble, dispersing the heady bouquet of pollen into the stuck air. In many places the thorns crowd the bubble and drive it sideways, but C continues his careful passage, looping in ever-elongated arcs, looking for the easiest places to cross the low walls and the drifts. Hours pass like this, his progress slow and methodical but always eventually forward. Finally the thorns begin to shrink, the walls between spreading out and then vanishing, until the path once more smooths into rolling snowdrifts, prompting a confident half-smile to cross C’s face, creasing the half of his face capable of smiling.
Just before sunset, C enters a narrow valley between the mountain’s first slopes, an icy reach inset with columnar structures made of the same polished black synroc as the thorns: dozens of monoliths arrayed in a regular grid of diagonal rows, easily navigable. O’s voice ebbs and flows, coming at C’s lonely prompting, going at his frustrated irritation; as the bubble approaches the first monoliths, its song gets louder, the keening banshee dirge climbing to a new and more terrible register.
Distracted, C summons the command console, fingers the haptic button marked mute—but nothing happens. The drone C hears sounds similar to O’s, but it’s not coming from inside the bubble. It’s coming from outside, from many directions, from the monoliths, from all the monoliths at once. Whatever O’s song is, this is the same droning amplified and condensed, weaponized as a sonic wall, a black bruise of noise buckling C’s courage, testing his will. His teeth grind, his free eye waters and twitches, his exposed skin burns, and then the bark burns too, the tree’s flowers folding their petals, the beetles crawling back into the cracks from which they emerged.
The sound bashes against C’s refusal to retreat. By the time the bubble passes the first row of monoliths, his nose has begun to bleed from his one free nostril, the red slop dripping across his mouth and into the bark crossing the meridian of his chin, the accompanying pain blinding enough he almost misses the dense lines of glittering silver language that cover the monoliths, dozens of scripts orbiting the circular columns.
He wipes his face with the back of his blue-furred hand, then spins a tight circle around one of the monoliths. He reads logograms representing nothing he has ever seen, glyphs from regions unknown, words more like paintings than language, though he thinks he’s never seen a painting; he finds scripts made of characters he recognizes but whose words remain senseless, words similar but not similar enough to the only language he speaks, the language of the rung, of the crawler’s binders, of the bubble’s displays. His vision pulses, his temples burn; the drone from the monolith is a thudding violence, but he holds his course, circles one more time around until he finds the one language he speaks, only to be disappointed that the message seems not worth the effort or the pain, the same message the monoliths and the noise-wall and the thorns have already wordlessly communicated:
THIS COLUMN IS A MESSAGE, PART OF A SYSTEM OF MESSAGES. THE MESSAGES ARE ALL WARNINGS. NO ESTEEMED DEAD ARE BURIED HERE. NOTHING OF VALUE IS BURIED HERE. DO NOT PROCEED. RETURN TO WHERE YOU CAME. THE SOUND YOU HEAR IS A LAST WARNING. THE NEXT PART OF THE MESSAGE IS DEATH.
TURN BACK. TURN BACK. TURN BACK.
Disappointed, C pilots the bubble away, seeking a place inside the grid where he’ll be equidistant from a number of the monoliths. He wants to flee farther, but he’s misjudged how much daylight remains. The sun drops fast, taking with it any hope for recharging the bubble’s perilously depleted batteries; with the sun gone, C can’t safely retreat outside the field of monoliths. The bubble makes it only a couple hundred meters in the direction where C believes the entrance to Black Mountain waits—it must be close, if he can no longer see the mountain face through the snow swirling before the bubble’s headlamps. The wind blows, but even in the highest gusts the bubble barely rocks, its repulsors p
owerful enough on flat ground to keep it steady in a storm; the wind blows more and more violently but not loud enough to block the monoliths’ sound, their repetitive keening threatening to send C fully mad.
But then, a minor mercy: the singing monoliths turn out to be solar powered. They must’ve once had a continuous power source, some buried battery now degraded or else a generator long unfueled and unmaintained. In those years, the monoliths might’ve relied on the pale sun only for backup, but now, as the sun sets, so their harsh rendition of O’s song slows, its effectiveness failing as its sound distends; after dusk, a snowstorm arrives, further dampening the broadcast as column after column is blanketed by snow, the chorus of voices becoming fewer until there’s only a single voice, then none. A relieved moment of silence follows, before O’s voice rises inside the bubble, this time with a new melody utterly unlike the harsh keening that had accompanied C across the continent. This is what music once was, how it sounded at its best, in a world C cannot remember: a comfort, a beauty, a pleasure. His heart thuds, but not with fear, not with terror. With all the face he has left, he crooks his stiffened lips into an expression he has rarely known, something like joy. This is song as unfiltered sunlight, this is song as gentle rain, this is song as dank soil, this is everything a tree needs that the frozen earth no longer provides, with its bright white sky dulling the sun.
C’s body droops against the supportive trunk of his tree. He could be dreaming or hallucinating. With his woody neck making it difficult to turn his head more than a degree or two, he can barely lift his heavy left arm to see how its enlivened bark swells, flush with more moisture than could possibly be leeched from his parched flesh. It’s night outside the bubble, but under its dim interior light all the blossoms flare their petals, stretching their flowers, opening themselves to a sun they cannot see but instead hear, exposing pistil and stamen, loosing clouds of bright yellow pollen into the bubble’s cramped curves, its sweet smell carried aloft by recycled air. A moment later, dozens of C’s cysts pop open at once, his bark spilling forth new black-and-yellow beetles, their no-longer-translucent bodies climbing to the surface, their carapaces freshly moist, their hungry mouthparts clicking audibly in the near dark.