Midnight, Water City
Page 26
The statue takes shape, and it’s as grand as promised. Thousands of feet tall. Big enough to stomp the hell out of the Statue of Liberty, Christ the Redeemer, and Spring Temple Buddha. Made up of enough water to quench the thirst of the billions watching this manmade geyser. Of course, the thing is, it doesn’t really look like her. It looks more like the love child of Amaterasu and the Colossus of Rhodes, her finger pointing up at Ascalon’s Scar. I never saw Akira point at anything except in that one dream, where two of her pointed at the girl in the red sweater in the painting. But the water continues to stream, dug deep from the core of the tallest mountain in the world. A forgotten goddess breathing life into an imperfectly remembered one. The crowd breaks down in tears.
“Let’s go,” Sabrina says. “We can beat the air traffic out of here.”
I nod and stare at her for a minute. Sabrina and I have been getting along well this last year. Maybe we finally figured out the difference between trying to make someone happy and trying to make someone be happy.
Before we go, the inscription at its base flashes in huge letters in the sky:
Science is the process of transforming imagination into truth.
—Akira Kimura
Ain’t that the truth. Just like religion before it. And after it.
We slip through the crammed crowd and head for the SEAL. Space junks whiz by overhead in celebratory formation.
I spent most of my life believing that history was where you found truth. That you could just revisit a past thing again and again until you discovered it. Akira and Ascalon thought they could see more—the present and future. But the present is just a flash we remember later. And sometimes it’s best to spend the present walking forward, because even if we stay completely still to look, the moment is over, and we’re already behind.
Do I still wonder on occasion why Akira left me her iE? Sure, but I keep moving forward, like we all do every day. Wake and slip into clean foam fits. Check our iEs. Drone in food delivery. Step into vac tubes or fly up in hovers. Message. Game. Scroll through the feed. Spend time in an AMP chamber. How many of us really know the science behind all this? Almost none. We were never riper to succumb to a global magic trick.
But I choose to leave all that wondering behind. I’ve got a new mantra. Procedure. Walk forward and thrive without judgment, without mirrors. And most importantly, be thankful for every fleeting thing you’ve got in this near-apocalypse garbed in a riot of color.