The horn bellowed; everyone surged and waved. In the ripple of hands, he saw his daughter lift her face. The horn bellowed again; the crowd around him pushed and shouted, the frantic swell crushing him into the railing. Of course, there was no way to know what future he’d opened by leaving her here; but there was also no way to know what future he’d averted. What he knew was that Ayumi’s sights, like Mitsuru’s, had always been set farther than his own—how could he refuse her this growth? He thought about his eldest, how tentatively he’d proclaimed his interest in the surgical science, fearful of hurting his father’s feelings—which, naturally, were hurt, but not enough to blind Masayuki to the possibilities; he knew his son would go on to do good in the world. He thought about his youngest, an active infant who’d opened his eyes to stare at him moments after his birth. Perhaps someday this child too would leave them. All week, he’d wished his wife were here, with her clear-eyed ability to dowse where he could not, feeling with her own heart for answers beyond his purview. But maybe the times called upon one to place one’s trust in one’s fellow man and bet on mankind’s collective potential. After all, the world was bound to get better, he told himself; he was already looking forward to his next return to California. In the meanwhile, there were always letters; in fact, he’d write the first one aboard this ship.
Craning over the railing, he looked across the widening strip of water cleaving the ship from the pier. Hands open, the crowd was yearning toward them, but where was Ayumi? He scanned the diminishing faces, his chest squeezing, then sprouting, as at last he caught sight of the running speck now calling to him, arms aloft, a kernel of new life he hoped would grow and bear fruit, a burgeoning cornucopia that would go on to nourish and shelter all his unknown descendants in ways that perhaps he, an unextraordinary man born with one foot in the old world, may fail to.
SEVEN
THE GARDEN, AKA THEOREM
FOR THE
SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES
“So the world’s deconstructing,” Erin said. It was day three of their senior year of high school. He and Anja were sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria. “War’s breaking out on all planes of existence. We’re, like, the last human generation still holding out any chance of survival. What do we need to do?”
Anja, looking up from her phone to read Erin’s lips, tapped her pen against the notepad she favored. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Erin loved this about her, the tick of her brain pulsing through her body, tapping out a syncopated rhythm as she raced her thoughts to their possible ends. He adored her. Probably had from the moment he saw her three years earlier, her beetle-shaped headphones clamped to her ears, long blunt hair, straight as her back, dropping anchor in what he, a month into freshman year, had come to think of as his seat, two rows from the back. He’d strode over, plucked the headphones off her head, and was walloped, his homeroom watching. Worse, though, had been the distress on her face, her hands fluttering to cover her naked ears.
She flipped her pen, wrote, Planet’s salvageable? Humans are salvageable?
He nodded, and nodded again.
Flip, tap. Flip. Cause of World Event?
He thought for a moment. “Anthropocene.”
You mean Neoliberal Self-Destruction?
“Call it whatever.”
Anja narrowed her eyes, her pupils pulling into pinpoints before releasing their javelins of light. Her dad, a drinker, loved to hold forth on America’s dream of Empire, crudely laid bare over a decade ago by the triumph of the yellow-haired duck. Remember, kids, he’d say. That Duck wasn’t some random nightmare; he was The Neoliberal who didn’t bother with civil liberties.
“Okay, okay. Point taken,” Erin said. Close to the end of the 2020s, it was clear where the world was headed. Cemented by the long-ago wars of the 1930s and ’40s, the United States still had leverage, with its vast market and military umbrella, but along with the Russians and Chinese, it was now just one of three empires competing with varying degrees of subtlety to divide up the world, indenturing the poor and incentivizing countries rich in resources but stingy with cooperation. As the empires rubbed up against each other, physical wars, increasingly fought by drones and AI, still erupted in convenient third-party territories, but the bigger war was largely invisible, taking place in the underlayers of a cyberspace trolled by rogue entities targeting networks and individuals who thoughtlessly uploaded their lives. As their history teacher, an Iraq War veteran with a silvery beard, often said, a stylus pinched between his prosthetic fingers: The enemy is everywhere; where’s the real war?
Anja resumed her tapping, the plastic rhythm quickening to a drum roll. She stopped, wrote, Did we get approved???
Erin grinned and held up their permission form. The principal’s swooping signature had joined those of their English, biology, and computer science teachers. “We’re on,” he said, his own nerves leaping now, her neural rhythm jumping the synaptic gap between them. He took her pen. E+A Project #1, aka The Garden.
* * *
—
IN MANY ways, that project, their joint high school senior “thesis,” as they’d ostentatiously called it, had been an ambitious bust, “ambitious” being the key word and maybe why their principal had approved it. Anja had done much of the coding while he refined the concept, the two of them camping out in his basement after school, Erin cranking his mother Luna’s vintage goth band CDs, Anja occasionally surfacing to sweet-talk his sister Mai whenever she thumped on the door, her ninth-grade sensibilities affronted by Robert Smith’s unearthly wails. It was rewarding work. While the project had to satisfy the agreed-upon requirements of AP English, AP Biology, Environmental Science, and Programming, they got to build a computer program inspired by Mozak, a Web-based citizen-science “game” created in the early 2010s to aid medicine. Anyone with Internet could participate in Mozak; all you had to do was look at images of neurons spidering across your screen and identify shapes, the idea being that humans were still more adept than a computer at complex pattern recognition. The data then helped scientists create 3-D images of neurons. It was brilliant. When he and Anja first stumbled across it over summer break, they’d played it obsessively. Then they’d moved on, but the idea had burrowed into their brains, eventually effervescing out of their many conversational rabbit holes like a rich, fermented substance. How, they wondered, could they tap its potential? Could they, for example, build a climatological Mozak to tackle their most urgent crisis driving all wars, fueling all economies, pushing humanity ever closer to extinction?
You mean a crowdsourced weather pattern recognition program? Anja had written. Like make weather predictable further and further in advance?
Erin nodded. “All we’ll need is a virtual replica of our world. Superimpose a weather model. Then invite people to ID weather patterns. Like when pressure drops this much in the morning, it means snow in the afternoon, or whatever.”
Then we add more layers. Space model. Ocean model. Pollen. Pollution. Etc.
“Eventually, we’ll have an Earth model, a complete real-time replica of our planet. Progress it forward a decade or two, and voilà: it’ll predict the future. We’ll be rich!” Erin said.
We can do so much more, Anja wrote.
“Fine, we’ll save the world. After we get rich.”
Sometimes you’re so small, E. Think Species. Think Climate Control.
“And that’s how we attract the wrath of the gods,” he’d said, laughing. “Didn’t you learn anything in English?” But the idea, luminous with destiny, stuck, and they’d spent the rest of the summer drafting a proposal, detailing the steps they’d take, the teachers they’d consult. The final product would be a Web-based virtual reality program that would utilize humanity’s collective effort to track Earth’s changing climate and its effects on the human species, while participants recruited to identify weather patterns would also, eventually, be invited to design survival to
ols—new habitats, new gear, new farming methods—in response to the planet’s changing environment. In maturity, they’d concluded, The Garden would be more than a game; it would be a tool capable of not only predicting Earth’s weather but crowdsourcing solutions to the climate crisis in real time.
* * *
—
THE PROJECT, obviously wax-winged, had been preposterous, but no one had denied it had spark and engine, and in daydreams, Erin still believed they might have pulled it off—if Anja had stayed to graduate from high school. Instead, she’d left him with a buggy pre-alpha app and a “thesis” paper, written solo, describing what could’ve been. And it had hijacked the next seven years of his life. Now, midway into the 2030s, he had a full-blown virtual reality weather prediction program with the kind of real-world application they’d envisioned.
At his desk in his recently rented one-bedroom, Erin opened his laptop and raised his hands for the blue eye to scan his face and fingerprints. It was a split-second procedure, but the irony was never lost on him: he, the human subject, held up by his electronic tool.
“Messages?” he said.
No messages. And unlike the previous day (and the day before that, on and off for almost two months now), his machine appeared uninfiltrated. No animated serpent coiling up a bookish Tree of Knowledge. No winged Lucifer flashing his feathered trench coat.
“Last installed file?”
A window bloomed: his document folder. And there she was, though “she” was a dangerous designation, like naming a phantom, a cipher. He examined the new file: a seemingly benign Word document. Not that it mattered; “she” respected no walls. He clicked it open.
The world is deconstructing. You’re the last human generation with any chance of survival. There is a Garden in the desert of time. You alone know the coordinates. Enter your move.
The words, an echo from long ago rendered in the language of twentieth-century adventure games, prickled his scalp. Was his intruder soliciting a response? He stared at the cursor, its anticipatory blink almost human. He typed, Anja? His nerves leapt; his fingers fluttered above the Enter key before pressing down, connecting the circuit.
The cursor skipped, blinked, then continued to blink: a regular Word file, not a Trojan horse. Exhaling, he deleted his keystrokes and clicked the green icon on his desktop.
* * *
—
NOTHING HAD changed in The Garden since he’d last logged out. The virtual planet was still pockmarked; storms were still pirouetting around the globe, whipping wrecking balls of wind, rain, ice, and snow, bursting pipes, drowning subway lines, disconnecting entire neighborhoods, winding back quadrants of civilization a century or more. Along fault lines, earthquakes rocked, buckling buildings, upending roads, heaving waves that redrew the coastlines. Everywhere temperatures thrashed and sea levels rose, shrinking beaches and exhausting marine life, submerging chains of islands, further spreading toxic material seeping from abandoned military bases no longer frozen by icecaps or quarantined on solitary atolls. Inland, rivers dried up and deserts expanded, denuding jungles and sparking fires that devastated towns, habitats, ecosystems, leaving the sun to irradiate the earth like a microwave. Erin zoomed into his last saved location: a bench outside a dog park in a city neighborhood, an exact virtual replica of the bench outside a dog park in his own real-life neighborhood—except progressed fifteen years into the future.
He felt the twinge every time he opened this world he’d envisioned with Anja. Anja would deem it lacking—the blunt details, the stutter in the rendering—but this was the best he could do, with investors coming and going, the fluctuating funds making a committed team difficult to retain. Just establishing the fundamentals—which weather models to use (ongoing dilemma); how far to progress the world (fifteen years); and to what end (disaster preparedness; damage minimization; maybe, ultimately, climate control)—had been a titanic milestone. Now The Garden was live, had been for a year, and was beginning to produce results: breakthrough accuracy in weather prediction and an ever more complete virtual replica of the world, all of it expanding the program’s usefulness, magnetizing all kinds of people and, increasingly, companies—just as they’d anticipated.
Snapping on his VR headset, Erin entered The Garden and was immediately surrounded by the sound of snuffling dogs in the dog park, the yapping blur, rendered from his avatar’s POV, bounding and coiling, their low growls quivering at the edge of play and aggression. He couldn’t remember who had worked on these details—Fernandez? Parker? Liu?—but they’d done a good job. He stood, appreciating the drag of his shadow as it slid off the bench, and rounded the fence to the sidewalk. Traffic had increased in recent months as more users participated in the project, but at the moment the cars were stopped at a light, and he crossed toward an old ornate magazine building that had so far withstood the wind, rain, snow, and corresponding floods that had condemned several surrounding blocks—a worrisome trend that had also begun to manifest in the physical world, where worsening weather conditions were crumbling the oldest neighborhoods around the globe.
At the building’s entrance, he glanced at the blackened vent on the wall. Erin himself had added that detail, reproducing the scorch mark left there by the electrical fire that had almost destroyed the actual building in the physical world in the late 1800s. The mark added no practical, or even aesthetic, value to The Garden, but it was a piece of history, a record of something lived. Erin had never cared for dioramas and living museums, never worshipped at the altar of authenticity obsessed with hyperreal preservation; what he wanted was to conserve the evidence of humanity, which The Garden, as populous as it was (a million active avatars at any given moment), seemed devoid of the longer he was here. More than anything, it was this—the progressive erasure and dismissal of history—that foretold for him humanity’s eventual disappearance. Just fifteen years behind The Garden, the physical world was already beginning to empty itself of human presence, leaving carapaces of civilization in varying stages of extinction. Most corporate buildings were dead, fluorescent offices having reached near obsolescence in a world gone online, with the few remaining factories, largely automated, overseen by fewer and fewer people. The only structures that lit up any more were residences and small commercial buildings like this one, its occasional vacancies quickly filled by boutique companies that valued its high ceilings and tall windows in a location outside, but accessible to, the darkening museum of downtown.
Erin, who passed the actual magazine building on his daily jog in the physical world, had made the virtual building his team’s virtual office. The first time they’d all assembled there in avatar form, he’d been struck by how many of them had created recognizably enhanced versions of themselves—a trend consistent in The Garden at large, where there was the occasional mythical creature or anime-inspired character or something wholly other, but the majority were straight-up humanoids. As the world digitized, people seemed increasingly invested in their human identity, though investment in the species as a whole remained consistently low. Back in high school, he and Anja had spent hours recreating themselves from photographs they thought most accurately captured them. Now, seven years older, Erin had considered aging his avatar, but he had reasons to keep himself recognizably embalmed at seventeen.
At the building’s virtual glass doors, he punched in a passcode and crossed the lobby to a bank of gold mailboxes. This was a nostalgic touch, but every so often he’d find a virtual letter or a postcard, and it would remind him that it was also this pleasure that kept people in The Garden, not just their planetary concerns. He pressed the elevator button and punched in a second code. The doors slid closed, and the elevator dinged to the seventh floor.
The office was quiet, the sweep of windows a liquidy obsidian reflecting a row of worktables, their bare wood surfaces lonesome for the storyboards and architectural drafts they’d once been designed for. At one, Mortimer,
The Garden’s co-developer, was hunched over an antique-looking map. A former college roommate, he was the only person who knew something of The Garden’s origin story. Mortimer swiveled his half-robot, half-human face toward him.
“How’s Gale?” Erin asked, surveying the weather panel taking up one wall of the virtual office. Off the coasts of North America, the sky was beginning to spin cotton candy, waves beginning to peak and roughen. If Gale Inc. proceeded as planned, it would be the fourth lab to virtually test its climate technology since The Garden introduced the Test Your Tech feature several weeks ago. From inception, the feature had been a win-win solution, giving them a revenue source while companies like Gale gained access to a no-risk testing ground for their beta programs. Unsurprisingly, suitors looking to buy The Garden also began approaching them, pleasing their investors but dividing the team. How much control were they willing to cede? One consensus was that nobody wanted to negotiate with their biggest, most aggressive suitor, Titan, a cybertech engineering company with ties to the military, who wanted them to cede everything. Then, five days ago, they received a threat. Titan had learned the location of their virtual office—known only to the team—and dispatched a representative: an avatar with rimless glasses who keyed in random passcodes until it tripped the alarm. Mortimer arrived first and, as in a B-movie, was greeted with a handshake and a message: a gentlemanly suggestion that the team accept Titan’s offer and take the money while they still could. Erin called an emergency meeting; the team scoured the system but found nothing. How had Titan located their office? Eventually, someone suggested a leaker in their midst, and the office had gone still. Erin’s mind leapt to his laptop “visitor,” who never left digital crumbs Erin wasn’t meant to find, and it jangled all the bells in his nerves. But he’d said nothing.
Inheritors Page 20
