by Brian Nelson
Eric considered Khamko’s suggestion with sudden intensity. The old man, of course, didn’t realize what he was saying, but to Eric it was an amazing idea. Think of it. Use the most advanced military technology in the world to protect the oldest culture in the world. What would that look like? He had been so engrossed in this life, so alive in its purity, that he had never thought to meld the two worlds together.
But yes, it could be done. The travesty at the waterhole could have been averted with surveillance swarms, and the water itself could have easily been protected from poisoning by another swarm. The tools of the poacher’s trade—whether they be rifles, barrels of cyanide, or Toyota Hiluxes—could be put out of commission by other swarms, perhaps as soon as they entered the Sān’s domain.
“Yes,” he said, thinking the idea through. “I think I can help you. In fact, I may be able to help protect your way of life in many ways.”
Khamko’s smile filled his face. “Thank you, my son. It warms me to hear you say that. I don’t want to lose you.” The two men embraced.
“Now we have to get you home. Tomorrow we will come to one of our most sacred water holes. We can spend the night there, then we’ll leave the rest of the tribe. If we walk for two days, we’ll reach a settlement. My friend Kagumbo lives there. He has a car and can take you to Windhoek and the US embassy.”
That night Eric lay awake thinking about his conversation with Khamko, how they needed him, how he could protect them, and how his time here had changed him. He tried to look at the whole experience, from the raid on the mining camp until now.
The concept of simplicity seemed important to understanding the magic of the place. The Sān lived in small groups, without technology, in constant touch with nature, nurturing and caring for each other. It was the way humans had been designed to live by millions of years of evolution. Yet it was completely at odds with the world he had come from, a place where technology was integrated into every facet of life and revered. Technology. All his life he’d been a believer, an early adopter, and had faith in technology’s abilities to solve problems. He had never questioned it before. Why? Because it was the only world he’d know. But now, for the first time, he was beginning to doubt. Perhaps the answer was not moving forward.
Perhaps the answer lay in looking back.
Forced Evolution, he thought. It was an ironic term in a way, when one considered the path humanity was on. Human evolution was measured on a scale of millennium, but technology was now evolving on a scale measured in minutes or even seconds. Which meant we were creating a world that was completely incompatible with our own design. We could never keep up. As a result, it was becoming harder and harder to feel human.
And what was the proposed solution? More technology, more automation, more AI, more complexity. We were going to fix ourselves by integrating ourselves with technology. We would force our own evolution. We would all become smarter, enhanced, transhuman, like the Inventor. At first glance, it sounded enticing, so much power. However, Eric suspected it would not turn out as planned.
He thought of the raid. He had been so confident of success. How could they fail? Navy SEALS outfitted with the most powerful military technology in the world. Yet in the end, their technology had made little difference because the situation had become so complex. It had all unraveled because of one or two unpredictable variables. Variables that were very human—like Xiao-ping’s refusal to abandon his friend.
And what would they ask him to do when he returned home? Make more technology to address those variables. But he knew the problem would just get more and more complex. Would there ever be an end to it? Of course not. They didn’t call it an arms race for nothing.
But the idea that Khamko had given him was different: use technology to set up an ecosystem that allowed humans to live as they were designed. Create rules that had to be obeyed. In that way technology could create a harmony between man and nature. It could exist on the outside. Unseen. That was something that had never occurred to him before.
Chapter Forty-Six
Odyssey
December 12, 2026
Washington, DC
Jane didn’t know how the Inventor might answer her, but she had to consider the possibility that he might respond in Li-Fi, too. So in her apartment she pieced together a simple receiver using a 4x4 solar panel wired to a laptop. She had to create a computer program that could edit out the spaces between dots and dashes in the Morse code, but it didn’t take long.
As soon as she was done, a great weariness came over her, as if her body realized it could finally rest. She had been awake for more than twenty-six hours. She stumbled to her bedroom and collapsed on the bed, not even bothering to change her clothes. She tried to keep her eyes open, but it was impossible. The only thing to do was to surrender—and she did, sinking quickly into blackness.
She dreamed of Eric. There was no sound in the dream, but she could see him. He was sitting by a campfire, smiling and laughing, talking to someone on the other side of the light. He was bare-chested, and his skin was aglow from the light of the fire. Beside him was a young boy with kinky hair, his eyes drowsy with sleep. The boy lay down and put his head in Eric’s lap. Eric absently caressed the boy’s hair, while he continued to chat with whoever was there.
Jane felt a deep ache and longing but also relief. Happiness. He was alive. She finally knew. Eric turned and looked directly at her. His smile vanished, as if he sensed her eyes on him.
Jane wanted to hold on to that connection, to remain there, but she was pulled away and transported back to America.
She found herself standing in a dark hallway before a white door. As she walked forward, it opened to allow her in. She stepped into a child’s room, the walls painted in yellow, blue, and pink pastels and adorned with posters of horses.
On the pure white bed was a sleeping girl in a dark blue dress. Her thick black hair was perfectly parted into two symmetrical French braids that ended on her shoulders in blue bows. Jane stepped closer. She’d never seen this girl before but something about her was familiar. The child lay perfectly still, perfectly symmetrical, her hands folded onto her pleated skirt as if in the repose of death. Jane felt herself drawing closer. For some reason, she needed to know if the girl was alive or dead. Then she saw the eyelids. They were twitching rapidly, flickering at a blistering rate, proof that her brain was bristling with activity.
Jane suddenly heard a woman’s voice and she retreated to the hallway, not wanting to be discovered. It was very dark, but here the voice was louder. Then she heard a man’s voice in reply, but it was too far away to make out what they were saying. She knew she was trespassing, yet she needed to know, so she moved toward the sound.
“The New Anarchists don’t realize they’re doing us a favor,” the man said. Jane tiptoed toward the distant light. “Congress and the president are scared. They’re desperate for better security and surveillance.”
She reached a doorway that opened into a kitchen. Everything was white. The floor, the cabinets, the ceiling, the appliances, so that it seemed like the people in the room were suspended in glue. The woman she recognized immediately. The man was wearing the three-button coat of an air force general.
“This is our chance to get them behind the Global Hologram project,” Rosario said.
“Exactly. If I can convince them our system can track down Finley and the other anarchists, they’ll give us all the support we want. Once they see how it will revolutionize surveillance, everyone will come to us—CIA, NSA, Homeland, even the FBI.”
“But I want more than that,” the woman said, “a lot more. As the system gets smarter, surveillance will become child’s play.”
“Don’t worry, I thought of that, too. We’ll expand to National Defense Planning, then individual mission control, and when it’s smart enough, Strategic Air Command.”
Suddenly Jane felt herself being lift
ed upward, up and out of her body. For a moment, she could see herself standing there peeking around the corner, most of her body in shadow. Up she rose through the ceiling. She was not in a house but a high-rise apartment, traveling up through the floors and catching glimpses of homes and the people inside. She emerged through the roof into the cloudy morning. Washington, DC, spread out around her. She saw the National Mall, the Washington Monument, morning traffic, an Airbus on final approach to Reagan.
Faster and faster she rose until she saw the Chesapeake Bay in the distance, then the Atlantic Ocean, then the gray-blue curve of the earth. She had no body, yet she had her senses. She felt the cold of the thinning atmosphere and heard the whistle of the wind. She broke through the clouds into dazzling sunlight, and for just a moment, marveled at the texture and beauty of the immense cottony blanket. It seemed only a second before the sky turned black and she was accelerating through space. Soon the earth was just a shining blue marble far behind her. How could this be? Somehow she had been reduced to something minuscule, her whole essence had been squeezed into a mere particle or wave that allowed her to move at fantastic speeds. She was sure this was no hologram or illusion; the essence of her was really traveling through space. Even though she felt no friction, she sensed she was still accelerating, and a moment later her senses were confirmed as she noticed that everything in front of her was tinted blue, while everything behind her was tinted red.
For minutes all she saw was the emptiness of space, and she began to suspect that something had gone wrong. She felt a sudden panic, fearing she would be trapped in space forever.
She tried to calm herself and fixated on a point of light directly in front of her. Just hold on. There’s a reason for this. To her amazement the light began to grow. It was still just a speck of light, but as she rushed toward it, it began to glow red and orange. When it was no bigger than a dime stuck to a black wall she recognized its red and orange striations. She gasped. Closer and closer she sped and the huge planet grew and grew. She found herself entranced by its long flowing bands and the swirling red spot. Larger and larger it loomed until it filled her entire field of vision, and still she raced closer.
Its raging storms churned the atmosphere with unimaginable power. The red spot spun counterclockwise like a huge vortex, sucking in all the white clouds that spiraled toward it. The jet stream in which the storm spun moved to the left, while the jet stream above it moved to the right. The countervailing forces seemed impossible to maintain, but she knew they had been rushing this way for millions of years.
She was entranced by its beauty. It was the most amazing thing that had ever filled her eyes, almost too vast to look at, too magnificent to describe. Too sacred for words.
And it kept getting bigger and bigger, swirling in red and white and orange, extending to infinity in every direction. Flashes of lightning bubbled from the surface, and occasionally a huge vertical strike would rip across the surface, stretching for thousands of miles. The sound of it somehow reaching her through the gulf of space, a roar that exceeded what the human ear could hear, yet she still heard it.
She felt tears of awe in her eyes, even though she had no eyes.
Still she raced closer, until it seemed she would enter the atmosphere. Until red was the only color in the universe. At last she seemed to alter course, skimming across the top of the atmosphere, then veering up and away. She realized she had been holding her breath and now remembered to breathe. In only a moment another body was rising up in front of her, an icy blue moon streaked with rusty bands. She rushed toward it until she was as high as an airplane, looking down at its strange topography.
Seconds later the moon and Jupiter were shrinking behind her as she sped farther away from the sun. Again, she saw the color spectrum change as she approached the speed of light.
She rushed on like this for many minutes until the sun was a distant flower in the bed of night. Then a moonlike object appeared off to her right. It was ashen gray and pocked with thousands upon thousands of crater strikes, lonely and alone at the edge of the solar system.
Then she saw something else. It was man-made: a cylinder with decreasingly narrow sections like an old-fashioned spyglass. At first she thought it was large, but then she realized it was small, no bigger than a water heater, smooth and metallic. It occurred to her that it must have been built with material taken from the dwarf planet she had just passed, assembled in space by nanosites.
Somehow, her essence was forced into it, then—snap—she was shot out the other side. She emerged from the cylinder into a completely different sky. Directly in front of her was a binary system. A white dwarf was pulling the essence of a huge orange star into it, creating a gorgeous swirling S shape with the two suns forming balls at the far ends. It was unlike anything she’d ever imagined and likely hundreds of millions of miles long. She stared in amazement, but too quickly she was sent into another cylinder. Snap. She emerged into another sky, this one filled with gaseous nebulas dotted by clusters of thousands of stars. Again, there was a nearby body (this time a lumpy comet) from which the material for the cylinders must have been made. She didn’t know if these were teleportation machines or could somehow manufacture wormholes, but she had somehow gone farther from earth than anyone had ever thought possible.
Snap. She came into a new sky, one that looked uniform, with a nearby star. She saw the next cylinder, but she did not enter it. Instead she was hurled toward a green-and-white planet orbiting the star. Within seconds, she was above the clouds then rushing toward a surface that was green and lush with vegetation. She saw emerald forests, and rivers and lakes. Indeed, the entire surface was covered in a riot of green.
As she descended, she passed beside dozens of layered cloud formations, then to her amazement one of the clouds abruptly turned toward her. She realized it was not a cloud, but a swarm of creatures camouflaged as a cloud. If they’re camouflaged, she thought, it must be for a reason. Not a moment later, a strange flying creature—like a huge tiger-striped dragonfly at least three feet long—swooped out of the sky and into the swarm, twisting and chasing it into the nearest cloud where it disappeared.
As she drew closer to the surface, she noticed a red hue to the rivers and lakes, as if some rusting metal was infused in them. Oddly, there were no exposed rock formations, no sand along the rivers, only shades of green on every piece of land. In fact, vines grew so thick on the riverbank they almost choked the river.
But this was not an earthlike forest for there was no wood. All the plants were confined to the ground on flexible stalks. She cruised over a large red lake. She was basking now in the wonder of her journey. Feeling the exhilaration of exploration. Knowing that this was real . . . and that only one other being from Earth had ever seen what she was seeing.
She heard several splashes, but each time she turned she only saw ripples in the water. She moved lower, perhaps a hundred feet from the surface, and made a wide circle near one edge of the lake. Clearly she was supposed to see something down there. There was a series of low hills or mounds that ran parallel to each other, the space between them creating a flat plaza that ended in one enormous hill. That’s when she understood. Her pulse quickened. The pattern was too symmetrical to be natural. There had once been a city here. She looked closer. Radiating out from this central space, she saw clear lines where the vegetation has thinner and struggling to grow—the remains of old roads.
She alighted at the end of the plaza at the base of the huge hill that rose up four hundred feet in front of her. Jane marveled at the scene: the ocean of green around her, the metallic red lake, and the strange ruins. As she moved, the leaves of the plants seemed to sense her presence and retracted into their stalks. Closer to the huge mound, she saw some sort of construction material that the vegetation was still struggling to cover, a mauve adobe flecked with a blue “rust.”
In the center of the temple the vegetation was different. It did no
t cling to the pink adobe, but hung in long vines, like a green waterfall. She realized they covered an entryway. That gave her the first inkling that the beings who had once lived here had been giants. Moving to the vines she could see into a dark tunnel. She peered into it, feeling small and insignificant. Along the columns that rose to an arch, were carvings of strange beasts with oblong heads like horses, but before she could look closer, she was pulled away again, drawn up through the air. In only a few seconds she was returned to the cylinder and sent off again.
She visited two more planets this way. Both held abundant life, but the civilizations that had once thrived there were gone. Perhaps the extinction had occurred a thousand years ago or a million, she couldn’t tell.
She arrived at the last planet. It was a colossal orange sphere, a hundred times bigger than Jupiter, with thousands of orbiting moons. She knew enough about physics to know that a planet that size could not sustain life because its gravity would be too great, instead it was the moons that had clearly once been filled with life. Even on her approach from space, she saw the marks of civilization on several of the moons. Huge urban clusters hundreds of miles across.
But unlike the three previous planets where vegetation and animal life still thrived, nothing lived on these moons. Their atmospheres had been blown away and with it the natural shield that protected them from the radiation and violence of space.
She raced over one of the moons and saw what had once been cities were now only dusty orange wreckage. Collapsed bridges and mounds of debris and twisted metal. In the larger cities, black impact craters were clustered together. Only a dozen buildings were still intact. These had a pleasing circular architecture, with domed roofs. But most was rubble and destruction that appeared truly ancient. Vast sand dunes covered much of it, and many impact craters were not part of the war that apparently annihilated the population, but from asteroids that fell millennia afterward.
