In the center of the room, a stone pillar rises to waist level. On the circular platform, a single harddrive spinning speeds which suck in its own noises. Modified with Off‐Worlder crystal technologies, this harddrive backs up the data of all the other drives combined. And that only begins to scratch the surface of its storage capacity. Jefferson rests a palm on the black shell, feels its low, pulsing coolness. “When the Dream was shut down and the Cloud collapsed, we piped it all right through here and it held things up just long enough.”
Sally’s voice comes clear from the adjacent room. “Well, congratulations.”
Jefferson flips a switch on the back of the harddrive and its lights go dark. He picks up the device, holds it gently in his hands. “Storage enough for all the brains of every human who ever lived or died.”
“You the one going to die today,” Sally tells him. “That’s what you always said, Tom.”
Jefferson steps back into the study, places the harddrive on a small end table.
“It was a computer told you and so it must be true?”
“Actually, it was Central Programming that told me. It’s not really a computer.” Jefferson rests a hand on the desk, as if holding up his arm would be a needless waste of energy. His fingers touch a twig he found on his final walk around the plantation, broken into bits to make the shape of the Big Dipper—the walk and the twig. His last morning walk.
“You might have been an awful mess these last weeks,” Sally says. “But you look fine now.” She shivers. “Keeping you alive with that thing? Unnatural. I think if it’s going to happen, let it happen. If it’s not, then let it don’t.” She turns away, dusting a shelf of antique smartdevices, humming her own song now, something deeper, improvised, as beautiful as any Bach.
Jefferson watches her, listens, watches. “I remember the first time I saw you,” he says. “A woman had dropped a crystal glass. I could tell it was crystal, Sally, because I could hear it keep on breaking, breaking smaller and smaller into sharp spears of dust. I looked up and you walked in and the room really gasped at it. It was strange, too. Like music that was just then invented. First time ever heard. My life had been over since the day your sister died, and then there she was, walking right back in.”
Sally shakes her head. “Wish I knew, sometimes, Tom, if it was me you’ve loved all this time, or her.”
Jefferson has slipped back again into his Bach. He lets a couple notes drag into the room, forgotten‐sounding and dull. He checks that list only he can see. Then he’s glancing at that harddrive, there on the end table. “It will have to be destroyed, Sally. As will all my artifacts from the Off‐Worlders. Crimes against humanity if history finds out,” and he rolls his eyes. “To talk with another species about something more substantial than who is urinating on whom else’s feces. Why is it the stupidest dogs always bark the loudest?”
“Them dogs ain’t like you,” she tells him. “Digging through those old harddrives all hours of the night. ABC,” she says, “you always be consuming. Them dogs got mixed up in consuming as much information as you, wouldn’t be dogs no more, just be normal humans, I suppose.”
“That would be nice, but still they’re dogs. And so this will have to go into the brick oven. Burned up and gone.”
She takes the harddrive out with her and so it’s Jefferson, all alone. He checks another item off that list, then sits down and flicks his iris. A hologram takes shape from the bank of soft displays stretched above his desk, the amorphous torso with hundreds of curving tentacles. “The so‐called Millipus.” He lowers his eye to the eyepiece of a microscope. In the slide, tissue samples taken from the saving of New Orleans. Wires untangle from the microscope’s base, snaking back to smartpads he’s modified into bio‐monitors. Using this data, Jefferson has constructed what he likes to think is a pretty exact 3D rendering of the monster.
“Working on that Millipus guts,” Sally says, coming back into the room. She closes the door behind her. “Your last day on Earth, maybe you want to relax a bit.”
He compares data‐imaging models with scans that hover over the smartpad screens. “Seven hundred nineteen tentacles,” he says. “Far short of a thousand.” He hyper‐slides down some tunnel lined with animal classification vocabulary. “Cetni‐septa‐nana‐septapus.” He thinks. “Centiceptipus.” He winks at Sally. “This is relaxing.”
“You know more about that Millipus’s guts than you know about anything else these days.”
He looks at her. “I can think of some other tissues samples I know just as well.”
“If that’s a dirty thought, Tom, then that’s a dirty thought.” Sally comes to the hologram of the monster. She places a hand on the skin. Her fingers crackle as they pass through. “They been saying what happened was The Death came across.”
“Have you been sneaking onto 3net again?”
“But they been talking about it in the house, too. And all along the row. That those Off‐Worlders didn’t cure nothing. Just brought The Death across and let it loose in the ocean. Maybe thinking it would never bother no one again. And that’s where it’s been this whole time.”
Jefferson smiles at her. Then back into the microscope.
“Some of them slaves thought maybe that Millipus was going to come and set them free.”
“I doubt it had much in the way of intent, Sally, virtuous or not. Poor thing, really. Brain the size of a lima bean.”
The hologram tentacles writhe in slow motion. Sally rakes her fingers through them.
Jefferson brings himself up from the eyepiece. “So much that can’t be got in the wrong hands. This will have to go into the brick oven, too.” But when she moves to take it, Jefferson’s hand wraps itself ever so gently around her wrist. “Do it later, Sal.”
She sinks back into the room, lets her hand find rest on his shoulder. “You think you’re the only one got a piece of that monster? That it can’t find some other way to get loose than escaping from Thomas Jefferson’s library?” She pats him, then moves to the window.
Jefferson watches the sun tick her edges for a moment or two. “People seem to want to forget,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the Off‐Worlders, the whole human race would have died in that third outbreak.”
“Why they going to wait, then, until 80 percent of the world was already dead?”
Jefferson stands, joins her at the window. “Maybe saw it in a telescope from their planet, way on the other side of the galaxy. It was a race to get here in time, and the only way back was the oil we gave them. Most successful humanitarian intervention in the history of the Milky Way.”
“Or maybe they were behind the moon the whole time,” Sally says. “Just waiting so they could knock us down easier.”
“I suspect if the Off‐Worlders were going take over the Earth, they would have done so by now.”
“Maybe they already have, Tom. Millipus, The Death, the Cloud all falling in. Maybe those are its weapons and we down here just too stupid to see they giving us whipping after whipping.”
Jefferson is pulled back into the Revolution, just for a moment. It all plays before him like a feed in fast forward. Even the parts where there was no feed, when the Internet was illegal and The Death seemed like it was going to suck the whole continent into the Earth. He comes out dizzy the other side, wobbles, catches himself on the back of a chair. Turns in to her, right into her grabbing arms. “Sally,” he says.
“Tom!”
Slowly he begins to take back his weight. Then he’s himself again, standing all on his own with Sally a step away. Jefferson gazes at her, but she’s looking down, at something she’s holding in her hand. He looks there and her hands are empty. “Don’t be scared, Sally. People die. It’s what happens.”
“I can’t help but think of someday in the future when no one’s going to remember any of these things you spent so much time on.”
“But you’ll remember.”
“I’ll remember how much time you spent on them. Time you could have spent otherwise.”
He looks long at her. “Me too, Sally.”
“You too, what?”
“I wish, too. That I knew. If it’s been her I’ve loved, or you.”
Sally just waits there for him, not moving, getting herself ready for what his touch always does. He seems to have recovered from his spell. But she doesn’t know what to think, not with this smar‐tlife thing involved.
“If we could pick a spot,” he says, “anywhere in the world. Locate that one singular position in the schematics of the 3net code. Then why can’t we make that spot corpuscular? 3net, the Cloud, it can’t be made of nothing. There must be particles of some kind. If we made the Cloud of matter, can’t we change the type of matter that makes the Cloud?”
“Sounds like you talked yourself into another circle there, Tom.”
He smiles. “Yeah, that one needs a little work.” He takes her by the shoulders. Breathes once. Thinks, Well, more or less I’ve already told her. Then scolds himself for the half‐lie. Starts to speak but stops or can’t go on.
She keeps his eyes. “That smartlife thing, it’s starting to wear down?” And when he doesn’t answer, she reaches out and holds his face firm, forces his eyes into hers. “What are you thinking in there, Tom? Don’t like it when you’re all stepped back in one of your places.”
Finally Jefferson manages, “I think it’s time we gathered up the family.”
Sally looks disappointed or indifferent maybe. Jefferson watches her fade and then slip out, leaving dim the shapes of the study.
Jefferson had always meant to get down in that same old chair for his last minutes. His favorite place in the real to sit. But before he realizes it, he’s tucked himself into the alcove of the bed. So enclosed a place to die, he thinks, but he knows he won’t be getting up again and so decides to make the best of it. By the time the Monticello circle all comes filing in, he’s faded noticeably.
His daughter Martha is there, looking more like her mother than ever. Nick Trist and young Jefferson Randolph, the few grandchildren Martha has pried away for a summer at Monticello, that one twin with his burgered face. They all go still in silent anticipation. These are the people in the world who really know this man. And to really know Thomas Jefferson is to expect something you can’t imagine until it happens. Why would death be any different?
Sally is the one who breaks the silence. “You going to slip over there, Master, into that cloud? Then maybe we’ll see you again someday, you become corpuscular, like you said.”
There are a few odd looks, coming out of context as it does for all but her and her Tom. But then the focus returns to the bed and the sage passing there. Jefferson’s eyes are the only parts of him still moving, slowly searching the fading room for faces, a last comparison to the shapes and patterns he’s burned into his brain as they’ve changed and developed alongside time’s passing. Finds the last set of eyes and stays there, those lips parting one last time. “Sally—”
John Adams :: July 4th 1826
Thomas Jefferson is dead.”
John Adams looks up from his smartpad at his niece Louisa, seated behind the desk he never uses anymore.
“Just came through on the 3net feed, Uncle.”
A bit of a tremor in the old President’s hand is the only movement. His breathing has slowed to all but inaudible. “Central Programming,” he whispers. From where his easy chair has been placed, he can see out upon farmland that doesn’t stretch quite so far as it used to. They’re in the upstairs study on the east side of Peacefield, just a little country house in a field. Ever since March of 1801, home of Farmer John. This is how their lives have been organized these last years. Louisa runs the farm while John Adams sits propped in that easy chair or downstairs by the fire. He spends most of his time with his face buried in an old smartpad, reading through the classics for a third or fourth time, bouncing off to troll 3net, sending out emails and terrorizing messageboards, trying to wedge a place for himself in the epic of his lifespan. Louisa here, John Quincy off in Washington being President, but the rest of the family is gone, picked off over the years by various workings of the organic world.
“Thomas Jefferson dies on the Fourth of July.” Adams snaps up from his wander, leans forward, reaching for Louisa. “Give me your smartlife,” he says.
She rolls her eyes, stands, begins a long loop around the desk. “Use your own.”
“Mine’s in the bathroom.” Arms straight with fingers grabbing until she has her smartlife out and into his palm. Adams calms, bends his face toward it. Head coming back, blinking. “There,” he says. “There we go.”
“Thought you don’t like to use smartlife.”
“Well, I’d read a webpage if someone would put the news in one. How does it god damned!” He stops to poke a finger in his eye. “How do you work this goddamned thing? Wait. There. Okay.” His pupil dances. “Thomas Jefferson,” he reads, “passed away this afternoon at his mountaintop home.” He looks past the smartlife to where his niece stands above him with her arms looking frozen. “He was my oldest friend, you know, young Mr. Jefferson.”
“You haven’t spoken to him since the turn of the century.”
“We talk all the time.”
“On email”
“How do I check if Charles Carroll of Carrollton is still alive? Wait. There it is.” He sighs. “Nope. I’m not the last Signer left, not yet.”
“Uncle!”
“Goddamned thing!” John Adams is rubbing his closed eye. “Never, never work the way they’re supposed to…”
“Well, don’t use it, then, if you hate it so much.”
“Today is the day the curse is to come, you know, the day America is to be destroyed. If you believe the things witches and computer programs tell you.”
“Oh, Uncle, not the curse.” Louisa lowers herself onto the couch opposite, under the portrait of her Aunt Abigail.
“He told me this would happen, you know, that he would die today.”
She looks at him.
“Thomas had grown a little soft up here.” He presses his temple with one of those sausagey fingers. “He imagined he was communicating with some all‐knowing computer system.” Adams wobbles a little, back and forth between the room and 3net, never fully in either. All throughout the virtual corners of America’s newest incarnation of the Cloud, majorities have gathered to revel in the Age of Jefferson. Black bars line the frames of every feed. A contest to see which source can be in gravest visible mourning.
Adams digs though it all, scanning, moving on, scanning. He may play the part of the lost old man, swallowed by the present, but he can slide across 3net with the best of them. “The fifty‐year anniversary of the birth of the country, and Thomas Jefferson has hijacked another one. Bipartisan love fest for our nation’s third President, party chieftain, Signer and supposed author of the Declaration. Add it to all the lies they’ve been stacking on top of this Revolution since the day I started the whole thing.” Adams reads, scoffs. Reads some more. “They’ll have you believe Jefferson just wiggled his fingers and the Dream came out. Began in the morning, had it done by dinner. Really, the whole thing started when I uploaded my Thoughts.”
“Your thoughts? You uploaded them?”
“My Thoughts on Government, an annotated database of founda‐tional documents. Uploaded it to the old Internet and it went viral. Seeded every constitution this country’s produced since.” Adams shakes his head. “No one ever talks about that, though. How can you sell an operating system with this face on it?” Adams indicates his own owl‐like visage. “John Adams’s Dream America. Ha!”
Louisa says tiredly, “Everyone knows you’re the hero of independence.”
“Oh, just of independence? My presidency wasn’t monumental enough for you? Saved the country is all.”
“Saved the country from what?”
“From the Federalists.”
She rests the back of her skull on the cushioned back of the couch. “Uncle, you were a Federalist.”
“How, Uncle?”
“The real hero is one who is most unpopular.”
“Well, you’ve got them there.”
Adams breaks into a full belly laugh, or what passes for one from him these days, more like a reedy cackle.
Louisa is tapping her lips silently with the tip of a finger. “Is all that stuff that true, Uncle? The Society of Cincinnati, the High Federalist plot?”
Adams smiles coyly. His face changes a bit as he moves through different channels of thought. Which Adams you get depends on which Adams is looking at which Adams—the vast linear parallaxes of the true Founding Father.
He leans as far back as the chair can go, his eyes toward something higher, a plane above the things which gravity has dictated placement in this room. “Just lucky to have been alive for it. We got to remake the world, to define the age.”
Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America Page 27
