by Matt Bell
As a child, he’d failed to commit to such magic. This time must be different.
Beside the orchard is the Worths’ barn, stained red with linseed oil and rust. Inside are Jasper’s tools, including a handsaw kept sharp as all Jasper’s saws always are. Chapman does the broken horn first, guesses its weakened shell will be the easier to cut. When the horn begins to flop away from the skull, he grips the hollow shape: with a tearing zip of ripping skin, it snaps free, leaving behind a bleeding wound, a raw circle of intense pain. Chapman moans lowly, he bites the meat of his hand to mute his voice. From the house, he hears the slamming of the cabin’s door, then Jasper’s heavy footfalls on the wooden porch, advancing cautiously toward the barn. Chapman’s second horn is whole, undamaged by age. He sets the saw against its base, he grinds his sharp teeth as the blade slips once, twice across the scalp; at last it finds its purchase, crosscut teeth digging into stubborn keratin. When Chapman snaps this second horn, he screams again—but when this pain recedes, the last of the flicker fades with it, helping him one more time as it goes, taking from him what he asked it to take.
Soon he will be only the man Chapman, living in this where, this when.
But not soon enough.
The unhorned faun bursts through the barn doors, knocking aside a stealthily approaching Jasper, the man stumbling, his rifle spilling from his grip. Blood streaming from his forehead, Chapman flinches from his friend’s visible fear; he raises his hands, retreating, trying to call out his own name even as pain and fear rob him of speech, his snoutish mouth instead pleading frightened nonsense as Jasper scrambles to his feet, as he raises his recovered musket.
This is gentle Jasper, brave Jasper, who many years ago went looking for the creatures who killed his goat, while all the while this other monster hid inside his home, safe beneath his roof. He aims his rifle but at the last second twitches the barrel upward, so that even at close range his bullet misses; Chapman doesn’t need a second warning. He flees from his friend, from this sweet family and their once welcoming home, the only human place he ever felt welcome, the one place in this State he helped make he’ll ever miss.
By the time Jasper realizes why he jerked his musket into the air, by the time he understands who it was he almost killed, his strange but beloved friend Chapman will already be many miles away, running as far west as his hooves will carry him, running until his hooves vanish and his legs for the last time become human legs.
Faunish days are ended but Chapman’s life goes on. Not forever but for some years. He will never return to the Worths, not in this life; he will wish until his dying day that there had been some way to become an honest member of that family he’d known and loved. Everywhere he wanders next, he wears a wide-brimmed felt hat, not to hide his face but to cover his scars; for the rest of his life, he goes shoeless everywhere, his feet toughened by now to rough leather; he carries a walking stick but his leathern bag is gone, left in the faraway orchard where Nathaniel is buried.
Halfway across Ohio or Indiana or on his way to points beyond, in a pleasant town whose name he never learns, Chapman hears new calls of Appleseed, Appleseed.
He turns, guilty and ashamed, afraid of being caught—but by whom? For what?
The speaker is some young farmer come into town for supplies, a man who recognizes Chapman from the folk tales sprung up around him. “Is that you, Appleseed?” the man asks, hat in hand, his earnest curiosity burning.
Chapman could say yes. Chapman could say no. Either would be true: he is and isn’t his legend. But if he says yes, the man might take him with him. If he says yes, the man might introduce him to his kin, might invite him to his table. The man’s wife might cut him a slice of apple pie, pour him a glass of apple cider, sharing the fruits of trees planted nearby by Chapman or Nathaniel, trees making the family’s land a farm, making their farm a home.
“Appleseed, is that you?” the man asks again, nervously jumbling the question’s order.
Lonely Chapman smiles. He accepts this story or else he doesn’t.
No matter what story he chooses, surely the man Chapman one day forgets enough to make himself believe he’s earned it.
John-X
This is the story you’ve forgotten, yours and mine, ours and hers.
In this story, the world didn’t end only once. The world I was born into ended when the sky turned white; afterward, another began. This new world ended too, exactly on schedule twenty-five years later, when the endless snowfalls started, when the rivers and lakes and even much of the oceans froze solid, when suddenly everywhere we traveled there was more snow every day, ice where there hadn’t been ice in thousands of years. All over the world new glaciers began their rapid accumulation, their great weight pulverizing the land, buckling the earth’s crust, reshaping the continents, sending them drifting in new directions at new speeds.
It all happened so fast. Before Pinatubo, the world had spent fifty years preparing for drought. We gave ourselves twenty-five years to prepare for ice instead, but it wasn’t enough.
And so the world I knew ended then ended again.
But ours wasn’t even the first end of the world. Not if end of the world means cataclysm, not if cataclysm means a violence after which nothing is the same. The industrial revolution was a cataclysm. Before that, the colonization of the Americas, of Africa, the genocides and environmental devastation that followed. Then, later, the invention and weaponization of the internet, the coming of big data and inescapable surveillance.
Not every cataclysm was immediately global; they were never so quick as we imagined.
You and me and the one you call E, what we’ve become and what we’ve made—her weird dwarves, your tree and your grass and your insects—we’re all that’s left, as far as we know, at least on this continent. The last gasps of the human, rememberers of the world humans knew.
It’s not much. It’s more than there might’ve been, if we’d done nothing.
The first time E printed me—back when she was only Eury, back when it was me in a hospital bed instead of you, me without legs for the first time—she asked me, Do you still want to save the world?
Taking my hand, she said, Then promise you’ll stay through its end.
I promised. I owed her. She’d designed one end of the world. I’d forced another. Together, we fought to prepare for what would happen next, but nothing we did was enough. As Pinatubo progressed, governments collapsed, new orders emerged, prevailed for a time, collapsed again. Other players tried to force other outcomes. There were mass migrations, civilians fleeing new wars erupting on every continent. The weather grew entirely unpredictable, with the reduction of ultraviolet radiation and the worldwide snowfall setting off cascades of irreversible insect death, whole ecosystems crumbling as plants became unable to propagate without pollinators or human intervention, aid we were too busy to provide. The catastrophic extinctions of the early twenty-first century were nothing compared with what followed: once enough plant cover died, the end of the animals didn’t take long. It wasn’t any better under the ocean, where insufficient sun meant a lack of phytoplankton to feed the bottom of the food chain.
The end of the world. I keep saying it like it was one moment, but the end went on and on.
I keep saying the world ended, but the world will always be here.
In place of world, I should say story.
Our story ended, but no story has ever ended so definitively another could not be told.
Humanity’s lasted a quarter of a million years, our civilization’s a mere ten thousand. Not long, in geological time. But when we went, we took so much else with us.
Whatever life flourishes next—maybe this new tree you’ve brought back with you—I can only imagine it stands a better chance without us.
We had twenty-five years to find a solution. If every government had worked together, if Earthtrust and every other megacorp had done the same, if people everywhere had been united instead of divided, maybe we could’ve be
en prepared by the time the long winter began. But mostly Eury and I and everyone like us kept making the same mistakes, wanting to rule the world instead of living in it. There were systemic problems—unchecked capitalism, unregulated extractive industries, the fossil fuel economy—but the solutions to those problems weren’t solvable at the scale of Pinatubo. We kept trying to fix the entire planet at once instead of tending to the many individual places where people might live well, where nonhuman life had once flourished. What we needed wasn’t the flipping of one global switch but instead a million small efforts, emplaced in localities, rooted in the specific land and water and air of the particular places where people lived. If we’d used Earthtrust’s technologies and the land it had seized to empower people to rebuild places they knew and loved, how might our story have ended differently? We could’ve taken down the fences, undone private property in favor of public ownership and shared commons, could’ve used the sovereignty Eury had wrested from governments all over the globe to give people the chance to discover new ways of dwelling, instead of trying to preserve the one way of life almost everyone was by then living, a way that had already failed.
We made our mistakes not once but over and over. Together, Eury and I kept Earthtrust’s farms going, but eventually we chose to reserve the biomass we produced for the future, even if it meant more people would starve in the now; afterward our facilities became targets for rival corporations, unsteady governments, would-be revolutionaries. Earthtrust fractured: dissent in the ranks rose, exacerbated by the difficulties of coordinating the company’s efforts at scale. Eury and I retreated beneath the Mountain, but as long as we had other bodies on the outside—and as long as our satellite network held—we could bounce our consciousnesses rung to rung, body to body, still trying to lead in person. But inhabiting our outside rungs required risks we eventually decided we couldn’t afford: one of E’s bodies was taken hostage by a security team gone rogue, then held for ransom; one of mine had its rung hacked with a virus designed to wipe out the servers here when I flickered back.
After I isolated the virus and destroyed the infected body, I decided to stop leaving the Mountain. Instead of going out, I developed the crawlers, mobile laboratories equipped with Looms, each a self-sustaining community ready to repopulate the world. The bubblecraft came later: we built dozens but only a few ever worked. By the time they did, our geoengineering had rendered solar power so ineffective we mothballed the bubbles as tech for the next age, for its new sunshine; meanwhile the crawlers could run on fossil fuels, while we waited for the sun to regain its strength. The irony wasn’t lost on us, as we built a nuclear reactor beneath the Mountain, as we stashed the reserve of oil we knew we’d need while we waited for the sky to change back to blue.
The sky is still white, E says, so we know the nanoswarms remain active, even though we no longer have any way to communicate with them. But if you crossed the country on solar alone, that means they’ve started to draw down the sulfate layer. Your journey wouldn’t have been possible when I was last awake. Wherever you crashed your crawler, you were until recently truly stuck. And maybe that’s why you deleted us from your memories: What was the point of remembering this place, if you thought you’d never return, never see Eury again?
Or maybe you didn’t delete us. Maybe it’s just that the world where your memories were made no longer existed. As that reality went, maybe the knowledge needed to live in it faded too. Your centuries of nothing but icy flatness, of loneliness sprawling in every direction? Maybe there’s so little left of who you were when you were me because that world didn’t need who’d been in ours.
Eury tried to leave once too. She’d designed a city-sized generation ship, one ready to print colonists from onboard biomass once the ship’s computer found a suitable home. Built in low-earth orbit, it was to be supplied by tanker vessels capable of rising through the nanoswarm cloud, but right before we began sending up stock, there was an accident or an attack: the spaceport was always a target for terrorists who wanted us earthbound, who wanted us to save the only home we’d been given. Whatever happened, the tankers exploded on the launchpad, the fires engulfing the command center, buckling the on-site array of biomass tanks.
After that loss, we couldn’t bear to risk so much again, even if there’d been time to rebuild the spaceport. The ship’s still up there, though. During the clearest nights spent in your bubble, you might’ve looked up and seen its central spire, the ark’s habitat rings spinning perpetually. Even now it’s the brightest star in the sky, one of the few whose light is capable of penetrating the nanoswarm layer, a dully burning reminder of a second chance we’ll never reach.
In the end, the terrorists got what they wanted. Earth would be our only home. We would thrive here or nowhere. We continued our extraction up until the moment we sealed the Mountain, almost twenty-five years to the day after Pinatubo. We brought with us the biomass of every tree the VACs could grow, every field of soy and corn, every uneaten head of livestock. Dronedozers scraped the freezing ground, collecting topsoil to be sifted for its grubs and beetles and worms, its rotten roots and collapsed fungal networks. We tried not to leave anything, but always there was so much waste, so much we couldn’t harvest before it was too late.
At the same time, we set about collecting as much of humanity as we could. Before Pinatubo, Earthtrust had built VACs in dozens of countries, where its first Volunteers became farmers, ranchers, and manual laborers; now some would become terranauts and time travelers, sacrificing their bodies in one time so they might be reborn in another. But we couldn’t force anyone to participate, because we never discovered a way to scan without destruction: to Volunteer, you had to choose to die; all we could offer in return was the promise you’d live again in a better world. In time, we’d terraform our planet into the world of our grandparents, their grandparents’ parents. We’d put back the plants they’d grown, the animals they’d loved. This time around we’d be better stewards of the garden we’d been given.
Always we refused to admit the deeper truth: there was no garden to go back to. No matter how exact we made our copy, the world would never again take exactly the same root.
There was so much loss, so much destruction. But nothing we did stopped life from happening. Nothing we could do ever will. Surely life waits frozen in the ice, surely it squirms from the steam vents at the bottom of the ocean, crawls from the depths of caves and hunts the deep aquifers.
We act or don’t act. But even if we do nothing, there will be more life.
You’re proof of that, C. So is this creature you became, your black tree and your purple grass, the bees you keep calling beetles, that maybe are beetles now—why not? What does it matter anymore what I’d call anything?
The important thing is this: you’ve brought us a new addition to creation, grown from human soil.
E will try to take it from you. I want you to set it free.
Underground, innumerable generations of ourselves came and went, over years, decades, whole centuries. Eury had learned how to back up the mind, how to make sure everything we learned each life cycle could be stored in the rung and passed on. Our knowledge increased, our memories compounded with all a person can learn in two lifetimes, in five, in ten, in fifty or one hundred. Some lives were mere weeks long, both of us succumbing to more frequent accidents as Black Mountain became more difficult to maintain: when the glaciers started their passage across the country, crushing the surface of the earth to gravel, their weight caused an age of constant seismic activity, tectonic slippages and plate fractures.
We got lucky: the Mountain buckled but it didn’t break.
Eury had developed the Loom herself, most of its workings detailed only in her thoughts, but the rung was an Earthtrust invention, refined by teams who kept the usual documentation, lab notebooks and meeting minutes and slide presentations. One lifetime, I did nothing but study their ephemera: How did the Loom work in concert with the rungs? And what did the song Eury recorded ha
ve to do with it? How did its keening drone make it possible for us to keep transferring consciousness body to body, rung to rung? Earthtrust’s best researchers never figured it out, but Eury showed me where it came from, or said she did. This was years after we’d sealed ourselves into the Mountain. By then there was nothing left of the person Eury said had been suspended in recycling fluid for decades. The fluid was cloudy, fouled. All that I saw in it were floating scraps of what might have been skin, stubs of what might have been teeth or bone. I remember how she screamed to see it. It’d been a long time since she’d entered that dusty room. I thought she’d been about to tell me a story, but after she stopped screaming she refused to explain. Whatever I saw in that microphone-studded tube wasn’t what she’d been expecting to show me.
The first time Eury printed me, she left me as I’d been scanned, my bomb-blasted legs ending at the knees, printed with clean caps of skin completely unlike the gnarled scar tissue they would’ve grown if I’d lived without being forced into the recycler. Sometimes later I had legs, sometimes not. I wasn’t sure which version of me was more real, the one that walked or the one that rolled. By then the Loom’s keening was impossible to shake. It gets stuck, doesn’t it, looping inside the mind? The brain’s architecture wasn’t made for the lives we’ve led; some of our memories are hundreds of years old, the leftovers of different lives lived in different bodies, hard to remember.
Eury was thirty-eight when she was scanned. Ten years into every cycle, she went through menopause again, the clock of her body reliable even in its deprivations. A dozen times, fifty times, a hundred. We both lived through the fullness of cancer only once, bearing the chemotherapies and the radiation treatments before dying anyway. To save biomass, we knew anything bearable should be borne, but we were not saints. When we suffered, we healed our suffering the most reliable way we knew: we started over. Every time we rebooted ourselves we made the future smaller. But the world above was still frozen solid beneath a white sky. It was easy to believe we’d find a solution before the time came to enact it. It was easy to tell ourselves the future we planned to make for everyone else depended on our own survival. And so we reset ourselves in the only bodies we had, bodies thirty-eight and forty years old each time they were born, bodies immediately beginning again to age and to fail.