The Bedrock

by Shelbi Wescott

  But what was their moral responsibility to him now?

  They had none. And he had none for them.

  Desolation Valley was the name of the place where Ethan had a station. And he knew that if he made it there, he could look for others and get some help. If he failed, he’d find the beach, grab a boat, and leave. Kozo felt alone, but he didn’t feel stuck, and he set out on his solo walkabout with a deep reverence for the place. Dominica was foggy and layered with a thick sulfuric burp. He climbed and tumbled down the mountainous terrain.

  The rain started again, hitting Kozo full in the face with thick droplets that soaked him in an instant.

  He wandered blind and knew he had to find his way to a populated location, find an old map, and set out again with intention. The idea of hiking back the way he came made him mentally exhausted, but Kozo knew he could traverse it in a few hours and hit the former cities and villages with light to spare.

  It was strange, however, to traverse the land in isolation.

  In the ocean, Kozo was never alone.

  In the forest, he didn’t know if there was another human within 10 kilometers or who had once lived there. He wanted to know more about the original people and find out who gathered the bones for display? Without conversation, his senses alive with newness, Kozo was distracted.

  He had no experience navigating weeds and trees, dirt and mud. He jumped every time a bird called out or a lizard scampered.

  Lost in his own world, Kozo had no idea that he was being followed.

  The sign read: St. Patrick Parish. Population 8,000.

  Someone took a sharp object and scratched out the larger number and replaced it with a single number 2. Kozo thought that meant at least two of the original islanders must have survived the virus all those years ago.

  He slipped down the mountain and found his way back to the coast. Only this time he was on the eastern side. The sun now set behind the hills and the trees, not into the water, and he knew that meant he’d traversed the full width of the island: 16 kilometers, Ethan told him when he’d asked.

  Had it been a straight and boring path, perhaps he could’ve traversed it faster, but he’d made it anyway, bleeding and sore, cursing the itchy bites on his legs. He found himself facing a small village, long left to decay in the wind and sand and rising waters.

  The buildings boasted red metal roofs, some rusted, many bashed and cracked. Climate change wrecked an island like Dominica, Kozo realized—knowing that major storms blew through those cities as nature worked tirelessly to take back its land from human occupation.

  Kozo walked on the stone pathway carefully and with tiny steps. His feet were cut from the forest and he’d never walked along gravel and stone; his only association was making a dash across a section of the trash islands in his bare feet—which was strictly prohibited but often overlooked. He had a few friends slice up their feet on plastic or other sharp trash items clumped into place.

  He made his way down to a mossy area, where the grass and trees made a better bed for his feet, and he stomped through a small neighborhood of brightly colored houses. The desolation of the city made his heart cry out—houses, now empty, their windows cracked and gone, the wood showing signs of outward decay. A scampering insect with a long black body and drifting antennae, crawled out of a stack of old wood, unimpressed by a human.

  At the first structure, Kozo pushed open a door and looked inside. Mold grew up the walls and plants slipped through cracks and inside broken windows. The entire place smelled like dirt and ocean and bird shit. The floor was covered in layers of white and berry colored excrement, so when Kozo looked up he wasn’t surprised to see the dozens of birds resting on the rafters, staring at him warily.

  With great care, Kozo closed the door and stepped aside. As he wandered, he determined most of the houses earned the same fate. They weren’t in horrible shape but where humans moved out, the rest of nature moved in. He understood better what Jiji meant when she called humans an invasive species.

  Without them, nature reclaimed what once was hers.

  Kozo sat.

  He wanted to weep.

  He wanted to weep for the beauty, the alien atmosphere, the steady and noisy planet, and also for the loss.

  He could almost hear his grandmother’s voice speaking to him again, whispering about the land. “In ten-thousand years, man will be lost. Everything we built covered in sand and dirt. These boats will sink, the plastic will break down, and in time we will die and be lost to the water. If land is death, as it must be, then I say let me choose death at the end just to visit home…”

  Kozo’s jiji didn’t get her wish. Death came from her long before the cruise ships started their westerly tours or people talked of taking back some land—just a small amount would be fine—to rebuild their diverse nation of Trash Islands off the water. Now everyone was gone and he was on land without the people who’d ever known and loved him, and his desire to cry was then outweighed by the desire for revenge.

  The more he thought about Ethan and Ainsley leaving him in the forest, implying he was some threat, the more heated he became.

  He had been the captain of a ship.

  He had overcome a life on open water.

  They’d abandoned him out of pure self-interest…was that what the land had become?

  Kozo heard a soft buzzing, like the growing hum of a boat engine, but he couldn’t tell what direction the sound was coming from. He lifted his head and bobbed forward and back, hoping to pinpoint the location. But when he stood and walked away, the sound disappeared. He realized it was an insect. Darting in and around his body, a black and yellowed winged beast hovered and Kozo jumped, alarmed.

  A bee.

  He knew of them from books and lore. He knew bees made honey and honey lasted forever. Deep in the Trash Islands was too far for bees to travel; they were creatures of the land, and he’d never spotted one before.

  Kozo’s fear dissipated and curiosity took over. He watched and watched and then with one focused swipe, he knocked the bee from the air and watched it tumble to the ground, incapacitated. But when it hit the ground, the bee landed with a crack, and burst a seam of metal down the middle, exposing a bright network hidden in its torso.

  Kozo bent down.

  He picked up the remaining pieces of the bee and scattered them in his palm and poked his finger inside the mechanical detritus. It was a machine built and run by man, not an insect. Even though it was tiny and barely operational, Kozo knew what the bee contained because he’d seen a few wash up on the Trash Islands. He rubbed the small glass button, half the size of the nail on his pinky, and knew instantly it was a camera.

  Kozo dropped the bee to the ground and bent down to use his elbow to smash the glass camera into pieces.

  Someone, from somewhere, watched him.

  He wasn’t alone after all.

  Kozo scanned the horizon of the St. Patrick Parish and listened intently for the sounds of more bees—more buzzing. Sure enough, he spotted a similar operation hovering a few meters away and when he made a move to go after it, the mechanical sphere soared skyward in a singular-upward trajectory. In its place, another robotic bee dropped down behind him. It too pulled upward into the sky when Kozo spun to get a closer look.

  Now aware he was in danger, Kozo took off at full speed toward the beach. With luck and knowledge of the water, he knew he could hide out and find a boat, get off the island completely. What did he know of land anyway? With a compass and some time, he could find his way…

  ...although without the Trash Islands, where would he go?

  The vegetation around the sandy beach was thick and cumbersome with disuse over the past two decades, and Kozo crashed his way through the stalks of grass and mossy vines that blocked his path. When he erupted on the coastline, out of breath and out of options, Kozo saw an anchored fishing boat. The bottom was barnacled but intact, and he bowed to the boat and thanked its owner for its care and attention. You did this and did not
know if it was worth anything, but to me, it’s everything. He reached the side and scrambled up to the deck, slipping on the slickness of its abandoned floor. All the surfaces were thick and wet, and when Kozo lifted the anchor and examined the controls, he knew there was no way it was going to start.

  A buzz. A bee. There, on the bow. Kozo knew it hovered out of reach, but as he lunged anyway it darted this way and that, stalking him from several positions. Too late it dawned on Kozo that maybe Ethan was right—they’d been discovered, Dominica was compromised. He’d caused it and now he was going to die.

  Ethan implied that Kozo was to blame—acting as a beacon, calling the enemy to their shores. So be it.

  He kicked the steering wheel and sat in the driver seat, pumping the pedal with no effect. He stopped paying attention to the drone bees, gathering now, like it was some game to find him there on the water. He hung his head and that’s when he saw it.

  Tucked into the hull out of sight, a little worn-torn, but intact kayak. Bright blue and an oar hooked to the side, Kozo leapt up and tugged the small contraption free. He’d ridden kayaks around the Trash Islands his entire life, navigating the space between masses with ease.

  He lugged the tube into the water and dropped it into the shallow shore off the coast and dropped himself into the small seat. Wet and full of adrenaline, Kozo unhooked the oar and dipped it into the crystal blue water. He didn’t know the bee’s range, but he was certain to test it—so he dipped his oar and sluiced through the water with determined ease, sailing away and up and over waves, leaving the machines in his wake.

  It was a surreal moment—how could something like that exist in the world? But he didn’t have too much time to ponder; survival was at stake.

  Kozo knew about nights on the ocean. He knew he was kayaking into the unknown without a guide, with only the stars and the sun and the determination in his soul to save him from the unknown enemies on his tail.

  And the waves grew and the bees charged.

  It was an endeavor he might not survive.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Inside the Augmented Reality Pods,

  Kymberlin Island

  Thea

  The True History of New York.

  That was what Lesedi said the AR simulation was titled as they disembarked and hovered in a protective shield, rendering the outside reality from directly interacting with their suits. Inside the bubble, they wandered unseen, and they watched New York burn. The entire financial district erupted into flames; every ounce of vegetation that covered the land burned eagerly.

  Thea had never seen anything so intense or so expansive, and her mouth dropped open as they made their way through the inferno.

  New York, an icon of its time, made a beautiful sacrifice to the new.

  All the buildings crumbled. Stone structures still stood then fell with time, imploding into dust. And after the former world was reduced to ash and smoke, Lesedi led them back to the edge of the land.

  Rising waters covered Manhattan, washing away evidence of its former civilization, and where the new shoreline crashed into land, nothing remained but empty space.

  A blank canvas of opportunity for rebirth.

  “Here,” Lesedi said and she pointed outward. “This is where the New World begins.”

  “Is it a game?”

  “No.”

  Thea turned. Lesedi didn’t follow and continued to stare outward. A wind in the AR room whipped her hair, but it felt real—it all felt real. It was real. Her grandfather wanted it that way.

  “Is it real life?”

  Engineers were known to create fully immerse simulations prior to building structures—if Lesedi had been part of that crew, it was the same as having access to the future. They were walking in what was to become.

  At this question, Lesedi nodded.

  “How did you not tell me before?” Thea asked, her mouth dry as she navigated with tenderness inside the pathways her friend created. It was Lesedi’s coding that crafted this place into creation—the new and modern Manhattan envisioned with a specific future in mind.

  “You know I couldn’t,” Lesedi said.

  “What will they do when they find out you showed me?”

  “They won’t,” Lesedi said. “And it’s done. It’s built. It’s being built. The plans are all in place—”

  “You told me too late.”

  Lesedi winced, upset by the implication. “I’ve done all I could.”

  All her life, Thea listened to the voice of her grandfather discuss their plan for reentry into the land.

  They had everything they needed to sustain life inside the Islands for five hundred years—at which point, the earth would have mostly reclaimed its vastness. Evidence of wars lost beneath the surface, and as such, ancient history belonged to the victors. Back on land, they would create diverse cities with attention paid to retaining culture and nuance, and with a simple reset, the earth would once again be the utopia it had been before.

  But now Thea saw it was a lie.

  Her grandfather had no intention in leaving his legacies to the same fate as the peons on the Islands. He would stop at nothing to make sure when the dust settled, his descendants had power.

  The Islands were nice for a time, but they’d taken on the hue of their dissenters in the past few years. The luxury of living was forgotten and people longed for whatever they couldn’t have.

  Knowing this would happen didn’t help Huck prepare for it.

  So, he did the only thing he knew how: he controlled.

  If someone strayed too far away from the ideals, they went to Copia for rehabilitation. Soon, all those dissenters were secret dissenters. People went to Copia and never came back. Huck knew everything and watched everyone and understood exactly where the loyalties were drawn because he analyzed keywords in word assortments generated from mass conversations—he knew what the people wanted before they did.

  What was pristine and perfect was no longer good enough—if Huck wanted to maintain control, he needed to make a move. Blair and Thea knew this—they had known and prepared for it. And yet: they hadn’t known the end of an ideological monopoly was inevitable.

  At some point, in the past few years, her grandfather made up his mind about his fate and his succession.

  And Thea started to realize, with Lesedi at her side, that it might not involve her.

  Built across the island of Manhattan, stretching across the former blocks and encompassing a vast amount of space inside the former urban jungle, was a house.

  No, not a house.

  A sanctuary.

  It was beautiful and glass—built with resiliency and ease. Central Park, left to the saplings, grew up around the entirety of Huck’s new kingdom. It was a mansion to end all mansions—a city unto itself—a statement of power and control in a way man hadn’t obtained for generations. Quarter of a century after the city represented an endless cross-section of humanity; Huck reduced it to a monument to himself.

  His glass dome extended north across the island, incorporating what had been the entirety of lower Manhattan. And the rest of the land, burned, salvaged, rebuilt—was her grandfather’s vision for the Islands crafted back on land.

  Within his new space where sections of enterprise, isolated and unique, each boasting a thriving group of experts. It was a miniature version of Kymberlin and the rest of the Islands.

  Thea’s heart began to pound with growing understanding.

  Her grandfather was going to abandon his vision and jump ship back to the mainland. And no one was going to know.

  Walking through his crafted wonderland, Thea understood exactly whom he intended to take with him.

  “The Amira James Library for Digital Understanding.”

  Thea read it in her head and out loud. She ran her hand over the simulated metal and her gloved hands reflected the sensation.

  “The Amira James Library for Digital Understanding?” Thea said again.

  Lesedi made a face.


  “Explain—” Thea said to her friend, hopeful that she could offer the missing piece of the narrative to make the atrocity in front of her make some kind of sense. Inside her grandfather’s perfected palace, she found the mile-long building a disturbing discovery.

  It answered, without details, one of her more pressing questions. Well, good job, Grandpa, Thea thought. You did make it happen, didn’t you?

  “He needed labor,” Lesedi replied. After a beat, she buried her face in her hands.

  The sentence settled and Thea pondered the implications.

  Who needed labor? Her grandfather? Had he sold birthright and power, again, to those who could help him pay for his dreams? Thea thought of Maverick’s giant parties with their harsh penalties for people who dared to whisper about the mischief. And how did they all get caught, anyway?

  With Huck’s pervasive ears and Maverick’s ironclad contract, it seemed to be the perfect storm.

  Maybe Copia no longer meant death.

  Maybe it meant slavery.

  Now, assholes who cared about image and parties, who signed agreements and didn’t honor them, were the labor Huck used to build his home away from home. Thea didn’t need Lesedi to spell it out for her—she was there, walking around, inside the utopia he’d built. His second utopia.

  Like he’d earned the right to try again. And what kept ruining Huck’s dreams?

  Other people, Thea realized.

  “And the rest of us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Thea began to walk into the large media center designed for her cousin. The entitled whiner’s own personal home was one level above her work—just as Amira would’ve wanted it—a bustling hub of activity and industry and art. She was an extrovert after all. And the name—the name! Amira could have had everything she wanted—power and fortune and a life on land, but maybe the sacrifices were too much. She ran her hand over the pristine staircases and the windowed conference rooms with all the latest technologies.