by Matt Bell
If Cal were there, she’d say, You made the world better. But not everyone makes it to the promised land. Sometimes those who lead die on the last cliff, looking down into the new Eden.
Noor presses a button, sealing the blast doors on as many floors as she can. Either John’s inside the penthouse or he’s not. There’s nothing more she can do to help.
They wait, but the rush never comes. Noor stands, looks out past Mai toward the empty corridor, a space seconds before filled with gunfire. For a moment, the nexus goes quiet, the only sounds Mai’s grunting breathing, the loud beeping of the distressed consoles at Noor’s fingertips.
Then a drone gunship appears outside the nexus’s outer glass wall, hovering momentarily before it unloads its machine guns, all the electronics inside the nexus breaking apart into sparking explosions, Mai and Noor breaking too, bursting out of their skin, spraying blood and bone into the air, all they were made impossible to sort apart amid the flames.
Sixty minutes to go. In a livestream broadcast worldwide, an inaudible explosion pops at the base of the Hoover Dam, just left of center. Twenty seconds later, a crack appears from the smoking crater, jaggedly climbing up the dam’s facade until the concrete gives way. What’s left of Lake Mead plummets through, forming a temporary waterfall reuniting the Colorado River with itself. Soon lights begin to brown out in Arizona’s and Nevada’s last inhabited areas. Every air conditioner reliant on Hoover Dam electricity hums discordantly, slowing to a last stop.
In the next minutes, the Oroville Dam explodes. Then the Dworshak. Then Glen Canyon. Then all the rest, dam after dam after dam blowing. The attacks unfold until every western waterway is loosed of human constraint, until whatever water remains can return to wilder courses, forever free.
Clouds of concrete dust, blood splatter, smatters of metal flake, Cal and Julie climb through it all, firing their weapons in precise bursts, both women dirty, fatigued, still determined. By the thirtieth floor, the fighting grows more sporadic but also heavier: the soldiers farther up are better organized and better armed. Around the fortieth, someone fires two tear gas canisters at the landing Cal and Julie have occupied, the gas chasing them upward; they return fire on the move, shooting through the pungent yellow smoke, hearing groans as their bullets find unseen targets. They’ve been soldiering all their adult lives; some of the people they’re fighting today could be their old comrades, making the best of the bad situation that is the world. That doesn’t mean Cal can cry off, doesn’t mean Julie won’t do what has to be done. You don’t always choose your battles, you don’t always get to pick the right side, and if you fight long enough you learn that being on the right side is too often a temporary condition. Everything might change at any moment, everything except the promises you made, the contracts you signed, the pledges you made to serve and to fight.
By the time Cal and Julie reach the fiftieth floor, they need the elevators to be reactivated, or else they’ll have to climb the entire needle to reach John and the clone he’s hopefully printed. Because whatever else happens, Cal needs to be there at the end, to tell John what has to be done.
Fuck Eury Mirov, Cal will say. Fuck everyone like her. They do not care about us. She’ll say, Isn’t this place proof? This Farm, where the only way to enter is to give up your citizenship, to volunteer to be Eury’s subject? Where you can be saved from the world the Eury Mirovs made only if you enter another of their traps, another hierarchy of power and subjugation? Where the purpose isn’t to feed you and house you but to make some better future, where there’ll be all the plants and animals Eury’s world took from you?
She’ll say, You and I were each given one body, one life, to do with as we want. One body needing healthy food, clean water, safe shelter. The essentials of life, none of which are guaranteed anymore even if you work every minute you’re breathing. There’s not enough effort left in the world to earn what used to be everyone’s birthright.
Every Volunteer has one body they have to beg Eury Mirov for the right to keep alive. All she asks in return is their freedom, their citizenship, their sovereignty, and their agency. All Eury Mirov asks, all every Eury Mirov asks, is everything.
And while every Volunteer sacrifices to keep their one body alive, to keep whole and safe the bodies of their loved ones, their families? Eury Mirov gets to have as many bodies as she wants—at least one new body already, if John’s managed to print the clone he promised—and surely more will follow. Bodies as hungry and thirsty as yours. Bodies taking up space, bodies devouring resources, eating the crops and drinking the water. Bodies breathing the air, bodies pissing and shitting and wasting into the ground. The footprint of a human multiplied endlessly so Eury Mirov can live as many lives as she wants, now and in the future.
If Eury Mirov has found a way to live forever, we must not let her.
And if we cannot stop her, we must force her to take the rest of us along.
As Cal and Julie exit the staircase into the fiftieth-floor administration offices, the lights go out; when the ambush begins, they fight in the dark, the blackness punctured by bright flowers of gunfire, the stench of tear gas, the animal grunting of the injured and dying, more armored security officers, a secretary cowering behind a reception desk, a slew of useless men in expensive suits. After the fighting ends, they discover the prize they’ve won is an unpowered elevator, the car stuck five floors up, blocking access to the shaft.
On to the last narrow staircase then, nestled inside the needle’s slim wall.
In the penthouse, John watches E-5 open Eury’s locks one at a time—the glow of the handprint scanner, the prick of the DNA lock, the optical scan laser flicking back and forth across her face, E-5 saying open to unlatch the voice seal—and only now does he consider the mistake they’ve made, all these people torching the VAC fields and orchards, releasing the modified livestock and the bioprinted endangered species. It’s Eury’s mistake too: Why didn’t she tell the world about Orpheus, why didn’t she explain in time to stop this destruction? Wouldn’t it have been a blow against the nihilism of the age, against the belief of so many that everything good was passing away, that nothing could be done to save the world they’d known and loved? What if she’d given the world the option to sacrifice even more, to offer up their present for a better future, even if everyone living now would never see it?
Human beings were not gods. They couldn’t make a living world out of nothing. The future Pinatubo promised could only be made from the past, from the present Eury Mirov and Earthtrust were growing now, all over the world. You grew corn, you fed a cow, the cow died, you fed the cow to people—unless, with Orpheus, you recycled the cow, stored what it’d made from corn and water and sunlight for later, when conditions would be better.
If Pinatubo saved the future, then Orpheus could re-create the Garden, could reboot evolution from where it’d last failed, give the big apes and the ponderosa pines equal chance to succeed. That was the hope Eury offered.
But now John and Cal and the furious Volunteers are sealing all their fates. What could possibly happen afterward but more ruin? A starving populace, surrounded by wasted biomass. A dead animal could be scraped into the recycler vats, but the burned trees would be gone, their carbon added to the atmosphere instead of stored for after Pinatubo launched.
John understands the Volunteers’ anger at the world they’ve inherited, the world they’ve been forced to inhabit. He’d been angry before too. He is angry now, although for years his anger had only seethed, rarely escaping. This is the one bomb John has planted that still hasn’t detonated: the anger swelling in his chest, a pressure building inside the heavy cage of himself.
If you have to call the resisters something, call them Volunteers. Never terrorists, never freedom fighters. Let the Volunteer revolutionaries’ existence be indistinguishable from the photogenic families eagerly presented in Earthtrust propaganda; make mention of their cause fade into the deluge of everyone praising or denouncing Earthtrust online or in t
he media, in the halls of what governments are left. All over the world, Earthtrust uses this same English word to denote the refugees forced into its Farms, those beneficiaries of a choice everyone knows is no choice; if Earthtrust was a country delocalized and distributed across continents and cultures and languages, then all these Volunteers are its disenfranchised heirs, stripped of their rights but ready to take back what they’ve lost, all the dignities and rights they shouldn’t have had to give up.
Across the world, the Volunteers come together, fighting Earthtrust security and local militaries alike. In Indian Punjab, the Volunteers destroy an entire VAC, the first one lost today: its superorchards enflamed, its wheat and corn and rice burned and bulldozed and drained, its Tower struck by a succession of fertilizer bombs ferried in on solar-powered trucks, hitting the base of the Tower not all at once but in rapid sequence, creating a series of shock waves that shake the foundation apart. Other Volunteers drive livestock from their enclosures, setting free cattle bigger than any ever seen before in that country or any other, cattle never intended to be eaten in India, allowed for a time to inherit the local earth. Loudspeakers implore the Volunteers to stop the destruction of their VAC, their home—but what is a home owned by another, how can they be convinced any of this is theirs once they’ve been forced to give up their citizenship, their rights and property?
Despite the provocation of armored soldiers on the ground and the drones above, not every Volunteer resists violently. Not even most. In some VACs, former refugees sit down in the tramways or beneath the spreading branches of the supertrees or alongside the livestock they raised or in the opulent lobbies of the Towers, spaces meant for anyone but them. Even in Ohio, some sit and wait and refuse. Work stoppages arise in Texas and Iowa, in France and Germany, in Argentina and Australia and Japan. Separated by language and location, by propaganda and systems of control, the Volunteers in one VAC can’t know what the others are doing worldwide, but wherever they refuse to participate in the story Eury Mirov is telling, there they are united.
It isn’t always possible to know what other story might be better for everyone. But it must always be possible to refuse to be a bit character in the wrong story someone else is telling, to refuse to do your part to enact the last chapter of a tale so destructive it’s about to cost the world.
A refusal to take up arms against the living, a refusal to take up the implements of labor in service of any story of limitless production but only incremental progress: surely there will always be at least this choice, surely even at the end it will remain meaningful whenever someone makes it.
Cal and Julie exit the last staircase through a heavy door unlocked by Noor in the security room before it was retaken. Before Noor died, before Mai.
“Where are we?” asks Julie, swinging her light left to right, the vaulted room they’ve entered only dimly lit, metal shield-shades lowered over the tall angular windows to block out the late sun.
Cal passes her rifle’s light over the clear cube habitats set atop marble plinths, then lowers her weapon. They’re close now. “The atrium,” she says. “Eury’s personal trophy room.” The zoo of living lasts, which should lead them to another staircase, this one leading up to Eury’s office, then a hatch that only opens from above.
If John and E made it to the penthouse, the hatch will be unlocked.
If not, not.
Cal and Julie advance side by side, passing through the central row between silent habitats. With the lights off and the windows shaded, the habitats are quiet, their inhabitants sleeping or otherwise dormant—on one plinth’s plaque Cal reads galápagos turtle, on another she reads peak-backed tuatara—but when she passes her light over the surface of each habitat, the flashing glare makes a mirror: herself and Julie, reflected back. Once she thinks she sees something else in the reflection, moving behind her, but when she turns there are only more habitats, the ventilated first rows the only ones hosting anything living. The farther they go, the more they find only the dioramas of Eury’s taxidermied lasts: the coyote and the fox and the bobcat, the panther, the grizzly bear, arranged according to the dates each species came here to reside forever in Eury’s private collection.
“This is some creepy shit,” says Cal. At the sound of her voice something in the habitat beside her slams itself against the glass, the trapped animal’s voice screeching. Cal and Julie both stumble away, swinging their lights toward the habitat’s glass. Again the glare, then a face surfacing through the reflection: the blackish-red head of a female Andean condor, its monstrous skull bald and sharp beaked, its face encircled by a ruffle of white feathers, its impossible wings spreading their crippled spans as it hops forward on gnarled, arthritic claws.
This beautiful bird, a harpy caged; Cal lowers her rifle, moves through the beam of Julie’s light to put her hand against the glass. Seeing this bird taken captive is heartbreaking, but where else could it live? Its habitats vanished, covered over with air pollution sickening to raptors, to all the birds of prey already diminished by the poisons ingested by their prey, the polluted waste trapped in every carcass.
“Come on, Cal,” says Julie. “We’ve got to go.”
Cal takes her hand away from the glass, then puts it back. The condor no longer agitated, its face barely visible in the glare, its gaze deadly calm. And then the condor isn’t looking at Cal anymore but at something else, rushing from behind her.
Cal spins to see a charging gray wolf pounce on Julie, Julie bellowing in surprise as she fires her rifle uselessly toward the ceiling, the bullets ricocheting back from a dozen angles. Cal yells Julie’s name as she trains her own weapon on the animal, her breath slowing as she aims, her finger still evenly squeezing the trigger when the second wolf leaps from the room’s dark recesses, its jaws opening to bare exactly the same teeth as the ones tearing into Julie’s throat.
A three-bullet burst lifts the first wolf off Julie, too late; the second wolf knocks Cal to the unforgiving floor, her leg twisting, her weight pinning the bent limb beneath her. Her rifle falls, spinning away as the wolf’s jaws snap at her face, its breath hot on the armored forearm she raises in defense. The wolf latches on, its teeth crushing the armor, sliding easily through the shirt beneath. Skin tears, bones break, there’s blood and a scream, a scream Cal knows is hers but manages to divorce herself from enough to draw her printed knife from its belt sheath. A serrated blade of printed plastic, strong as steel: she reaches between the wolf’s paws and puts the knife into its belly, pulls smoothly upward until the blade strikes the breastbone.
The rush of blood, the hot weight of loosed entrails dropping from the wolf’s guts; Cal’s a soldier, the instinct to gag happens only somewhere deep within her, some closed space where it can’t move her body to action. She reverses her grip quickly, runs the knife back down the wolf, cutting against the first cut until the animal’s jaws open, releasing her shattered wrist.
Cal pushes the dying wolf off her, then rolls over to check on Julie, who’s already gone. The wolf gasps and gurgles, tongue limp in its panting mouth; it scratches its claws at the polished floor, tries in vain to stand, drags itself a bloody meter. A feebleness asserts itself. After its movements slow, Cal, who wanted only to save every living thing, kneels beside the wolf to pull her knife free, then to pet its heaving flank through its final heaves.
At Cal’s touch, the wolf twists its head back toward her until she catches its gaze—a look, she thinks, that’s not quite as inhuman as it should be. A ridiculous thought. After the wolf breathes its last—after its species once again becomes temporarily extinct—Cal reshoulders her backpack, leaves her rifle behind. She won’t be able to use it with a broken wrist, will have to rely on the handgun holstered at her waist. She draws the pistol, holds it against her hip until her hand stops shaking, trying not to think about Julie dead, about the bodies of the two wolves flanking hers.
Cal’s come so far, has only a little ways left to go: the staircase to Eury’s penthouse office is no more than
a dozen more meters away, at the far side of this mausoleum. She drags her injured leg, the knee already swelling; she tries her best to balance on this unsteady limb she knows won’t finish bruising before the end comes.
Somewhere behind her, the female condor screeches farewell, its voice the last utterance of the last living animal Cal will ever hear.
Chapman
Can Chapman know this will be the last year he and Nathaniel will plant together? Surely he senses the time draws near. Surely it’s long been obvious theirs is a futile enterprise, one with no hope for remuneration or reward. Now all of Ohio is lost to them, the State settled and civilized everywhere and in no need of apple planters, except to populate the stories of the idle. The only lands they can plant are so far west of the Worth household Chapman knows they must soon decide to stay with the Worths forever or else forsake returning.
But he can’t make this decision for Nathaniel.
Nathaniel, who barely speaks to him anymore.
Nathaniel, who spends his last winter slurring sentences, coughing up rosy phlegm.
As the snow melts, Chapman prepares their gear without a word. He divides their tools into two piles, one much smaller than the other. They’ve ruined innumerable hoes over the years, broken many gimlets and hatchets and knife blades. The only tool that’s lasted the entirety of their apple planter careers is Chapman’s leathern bag, its skin so pitted and scratched and worn it’s impossible to believe it was ever an animal’s. It’s the one possession he treasures above all others, almost the only home he’s had.