“What about the space suits?” Erin asked now.
Mortimer rotated the map toward him. “These popped up about an hour ago, but otherwise no changes,” he said, pointing out the new pairs of white space-suited avatars with the now familiar double-arrowed red triangle emblazoned on their chests. A couple of weeks back, they’d spotted the first pair in a nearby street, their identical look prompting them to speculate whether they were twins—or soulmates? Illicit lovers? Since then, replicas of the pair had proliferated in alarming succession around the globe. Mortimer had begun flagging them, but so far they’d done little except multiply and mill about. Erin had run a logo search, but there had been no matches, at least not in any existing database. The team hadn’t known what to do. Were they Russian bots? Or some kind of Trojan horse—maybe ransomware? The insignia reminded everyone of the recycling symbol enforced on every product, except for the color, emergency red, and the direction of the arrows, double-pointed, like a process that could go both ways. So maybe they’re a biohazard crew, someone had suggested; biohazard containment was a rapidly expanding industry. Or maybe they’re here to combat a pandemic we don’t yet know about, someone else had said.
“Are they still logging weather patterns?” Erin asked now.
“Half are,” Mortimer said. “But what does that tell us? That they’re legitimate participants? Look at them.” He pinch-zoomed out to show the thousands of flags covering the globe like scales. “They look like Stormtroopers.”
The proliferating insignia was ominous, each iteration like an insistent sign whose significance they ought to be grasping but were not. Users had begun contacting them too, their concerns still friendly rather than alarmed (What’s with the patrols? Adding surveillance or something? ☺), but the disquiet was there.
“If this is a threat,” Erin said now, “we better hope it’s someone like Titan, not a government—or terrorist.”
Mortimer didn’t reply. Instead, Erin heard his physical phone in his apartment ping. He lifted his VR headset. A text message from Mortimer: re titan. talk later. outside G. “G” being The Garden. Smart, Erin texted back, a dose of dread flooding his pulse. Back in The Garden, Mortimer headed for the elevators. “We’ll keep tabs on the wind. Gale’s hoping for seventy, eighty miles an hour to test their windbreaker prototype.”
Hoping, Erin thought. Even in the physical world, the question wasn’t if there would be storm winds but what category. “We’ll see everyone tomorrow,” he said to the closing elevator.
* * *
—
ONE ADVANTAGE of being the smartest kid in school had been, for Erin, security: that certainty of being special, like he was meant for something, a destined life. Anja, gifted at a completely different level, could’ve taken that from him—or, worse, brought out that Darwinian edge he hated in himself: a hard, wily pugnacity that bared itself like a set of overwhite teeth whenever he felt threatened. But Anja didn’t do either, and that was probably what he missed most when she was gone: the feeling of being two against the rest in an overpopulated planet going to shit. Where they diverged was how they thought they should fight the dissolution. It was their one active fault line.
“Do you think The Garden’s a bad idea?” Erin had asked halfway into their senior year. They were preparing to present their progress to their teachers.
Anja had shrugged. At this point humans have one way forward: Climate Control, she wrote.
“Okay, but you know people are going to use it for world domination, not human preservation, right?”
If you think people are going to weaponize G, Anja wrote, That’s so BCE. Before Crisis Era.
“Anja, if a crystal ball told us Earth would collapse in fifty years, do you think people would make clouds to water crops or use The Garden to control resources?”
Anja, shaking her pen, unbuckled her backpack, a beat-up roll-top she carried everywhere. He knew she was stalling. Lately, she’d begun calibrating her responses, taking her sweet time to process whatever she felt she had to before putting pen to paper. Erin couldn’t tell if it was a sudden trust thing or some weird need to baby his feelings, but it drove him crazy. Everything about her drove him crazy—her mixed signals, their nebulous relationship, and the way she made him second-guess not just her words and gestures but his own. Just the day before, while walking to clear their heads, they’d stopped at the grassy playground where his sister liked to sit with her friends. Mai wasn’t there, but they’d stood for a while, watching the chirruping kids, Anja’s arm slung around his neck. The first time she’d done this, he’d brought his arm around her waist, but it had felt wrong. Now he kept his hands in his pockets, trying not to focus on the warm lean of her weight. As heat migrated across them, collecting exactly where he didn’t want it to, he hastily turned to update her on the news they’d been following—another cyberattack by the untraceable hacker that had been targeting the federal government, this time replacing the names of the politicians on Congress’s website with those of their biggest donors—when she touched her lips to his, briefly but softly. By the time he realized what had happened, she was licking her lips analytically, and that was it. They’d walked back, debating the attacker’s identity (Anonymous? Or that new one, Bakteria?) and the merits of such an attack (did consciousness-raising work anymore?), the moment—or was it non-moment?—gone, swept from her mind and dumped into his.
Anja uncapped a new pen. No risk, no future. If we don’t make G, someone else will. Is that more scary or not.
The question was rhetorical, but these days he’d been oppressed by a vision: an infernal Earth where all nine circles of hell had overlapped, producing one endless refugee camp while the powers that be competed for climate control, the prevailing state lording it over the muck of the whole human species. In no way did he want to contribute to that.
“Fine, but we need to build The Garden in a way that we have a future,” he said.
So we’re building a mirror world to see which futures to weed out. If we can show people, if they really see, they’ll want to avert the worst. Even rich people are still stuck on Earth.
“I just know people’ll capitalize on it, use it to spread doomsday shit and justify whatever.”
You sound like my dad. Every garden has a snake, E.
That night, in his basement, Erin embedded a self-destruct mechanism into The Garden that could be triggered by the simultaneous activation of a code, nuclear-weapon-style. He felt childish, but he wanted a way to remind them of their partnership at critical crossroads. He built a synchronized random code generator app for himself and Anja. When he showed her the next day, she gazed at the app, trying to—decode its meaning? decide what to do? And with heart-stopping clarity he realized that for him, more than anything altruistic or humanitarian, the thought that there could be a universe in which he might never have met her, where a boy named Erin and a girl named Anja might never have existed, or might never exist again, hollowed his heart, a yawning cavern with no one to spelunk it. The feeling was so visceral it flipped a switch, a primal mechanism coded deep in the brain to reject any notion of a universe in which the human species didn’t exist. Anja, though, was hardwired differently, and maybe this was what they’d understood as she dutifully installed his app on her phone.
* * *
—
LEANING AGAINST the virtual office window now, Erin half-expected to see the top of Mortimer’s head emerge from the entrance below. But nobody had added that flourish to the logout process, and the glossy glass revealed only a dusky panorama beaded with city lights scattered above chainlinks of street lamps warming some neighborhoods while bleaching others. He appreciated this detail, not just its faithfulness to the physical world, where floodlights (urban ecology and human circadian rhythm be damned) were becoming popular in response to metropolitan deterioration, but the way it reproduced the city’s political texture, i
ts zones of social divide. Fifteen years ahead of the physical world, The Garden was projecting a steady expansion of these floodlight zones as rubbled blocks and darkened quadrants multiplied, further splitting the moderate middle, expanding the left and emboldening the right, and generally increasing urban police presence and rural militias to keep up the order. Next week, they were incorporating an epidemic model; next month, space models tracking high-threat meteors and solar flares. In a year they’d begin to see patterns of human responses to the conglomeration of threats exposing the inherent porosity of human borders: national, biological, planetary. But The Garden wasn’t a crystal ball. And prophecies were used as much to cement outcomes as to avert them. The Garden merely showed a probable future, and it was here, in the open seam of the present—while it was still open—that Erin hoped to meet Anja again. He scanned the length of street below the office. No unusual movement.
He logged out to take his physical self for a run.
* * *
—
HIS NEIGHBORHOOD was busy for a weekday night, the warm LED glow from the converted gas lamps pleasantly slowing time, softening its blow. Affluent but mixed, and proud of its historicality, the neighborhood had preserved its original facades, the bricks and the moldings, the lush private courtyards, the pattering wedding-cake fountains still delighting plaster cherubs and city birds, enticing the occasional family to spread towels in the plush grass. Erin lived just outside this lambent orb, but his run took him through its center, past the original magazine building, and back to his street where ultramodern condos abutted the Section 8 complex, the defunct bus depot rusting against the state-of-the-art biotech facility that had recently replaced the flower exchange that once supplied the city’s florists. From his apartment, Erin could see the lit facility, crowned by rainbows of gray overpasses sheltering the city’s climate refugees rerouted from facilities like Angel Island 2, which, along with its historical original, had become submerged by rising sea levels. Jogging up eight floors, Erin unlocked his door, legs burning.
A message was waiting for him, the second in a day. Another Word file.
Time is a relative construct that starts and ends with the body. Your time is running out. But you have extra lives in The Garden. Make your move.
Erin stared. Was this a threat? Was Anja working for someone? Titan? It seemed unlikely; the cybertech behemoth was exactly the kind of company Anja would’ve made it her mission to subvert. But high school was a long time ago. On the other hand, what if this wasn’t Anja? The possibility, kept to a sibilation until now, hit him, volume turned up. If this wasn’t her, who was it?
He typed, Who are you? He typed, What do you want? He typed, What did you do to Anja? Behind him, the apartment expanded like a lung. The last time he’d been afraid in his own space was in childhood. He deleted the last question, saved the document, and closed it, heart thumping at the possibility of a reply.
* * *
—
HE’D GLIMPSED her, or thought he had, only once post-high-school, when The Garden first went live. Back then, the team was still dropping in daily to work together in their virtual office. He happened to look out the window and see the avatar: an iconic Robert Smith with a crown of ivy trellising its head. When the avatar saw him, it froze, eyes convincingly wide. Then it was gone, and Erin checked the log. No record of any avatar within a tenth of a mile around the building. He told no one. He’d been sure it was Anja.
Erin had wasted a lot of time in high school searching for things to introduce to her; his only contribution was the band his mother still listened to then, earbuds buzzing, towel over her eyes. He and Anja had caught her at it one day their sophomore year when Luna canceled her seminar and was home early. Anja, transfixed, asked if he knew what his mom was listening to. Erin did know, and Anja had thrust her phone at him. By then Erin knew the beetle headphones welded to her ears were always playing music, but like all things related to her deafness, he’d been afraid to ask about it. Anja, huffing, snatched back her phone. Music = Vibration, she swiped. The revelation detonated his heart. He played her Pornography. She side-eyed him but absorbed the album, saved all eight tracks to her playlist, plus the band’s every iteration of “The Hanging Garden.” It became their soundtrack for the rest of high school, Robert Smith’s cackling voice—fall fall fall jump jump out of time—caroming through their skulls, sparking manic fireworks of adrenaline and endorphins that baked a kind of sonic palimpsest into The Garden.
You mean like a garden beneath The Garden? she’d written when he shared this observation.
“Something like that,” he’d replied. “Do you think Smith’s Hanging Garden is like Babylon’s gone bad? Like a dream that got lost and turned into its nightmare?”
She tapped her pen. E, everything mutates. But we can control G.
“But what if we can’t? We don’t have to be responsible.”
If we don’t try, we’ll be responsible too.
What Erin didn’t tell her was that he’d also started looping the song outside the basement, listening to the strangled words tunneling out of Robert Smith’s throat like a voice squeezed from far away as the drums hammered down, machine-like, driving nails into the acoustic coffin, closing up the human echo. It left an ache inside him that followed him back into The Garden, bruising the hours he spent there trying to reconcile his nightmare with Anja’s dream. “Sometimes I don’t know what we’re trying to save. I mean, what does an ideal human future even look like?” he said.
For the first time, Anja too had had no answer.
* * *
—
TWO PINGS startled him out of a nap. One a text message from Mortimer (gale on standby). The other a hideous dialog box flashing on his laptop screen.
The Garden has been breached.
The Garden has been breached.
Panic moved through him, his old nightmare mutating, annexing his brain: a weaponized Garden. He snapped on the VR headset and clicked the green orb.
But nothing had changed. No one had introduced a pandemic. No one was breaching their office building. Above, clouds were hurrying through the sky, stray gusts tousling the treetops. The dog park was empty, a few avatars bent like broken umbrellas against the wind. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor.
Everybody was there; Gale was on track to test its prototype, and the team was running preliminary checks. He’d forgotten this synergy, his team in full flow, though the warmth was gone, everyone wary of the hidden spigot, the traitorous leaker. Mortimer strode over.
“New activity?” Erin asked.
Mortimer held up the map. Around the globe, flags had amassed in the largest cities. He pinched the map’s surface. The flags dispersed, and the continents gave way to an arterial network of rivers and highways splotched with the green alveoli of the few state parks and refuges still under legal protection. Then the borders of their state appeared, and Mortimer focused on the tiny blue patch just outside their city perimeter. When the map entered streetview, Erin saw the familiar park reservoir less than two miles from them, surrounded by a ring of white avatars standing at attention, their red insignias in perfect alignment.
“It’s the same everywhere,” Mortimer said. “Every major park and garden.” He zoomed out until the avatars compacted into a circle of white dots that multiplied like white blood cells around other green and blue patches.
Erin’s physical phone pinged. def not titan. too weird, Mortimer’s text message read. Erin returned to The Garden. The spotted globe looked diseased. “Bakteria?” he asked, evoking the catchall spectral hacker group blamed for almost all major cyberattacks in the decade of its activity, including the recent raid on a renowned pharmacological research center. For all its notoriety, the group had remained elusive, leaving no traces in any cyberwreckage. Its signature was a total lack. “Zoom back in,” Erin said.
The avatars were still ringed around the reservoir, but they’d pivoted to face out like sentinels. They looked unarmed, but that meant little in The Garden, where new gadgets flourished without their knowledge and often didn’t announce themselves.
“Do we need rules for synchronized behavior?” Mortimer asked.
“We’re not a totalitarian state,” Erin said, slipping his gaze around the office. No one was looking at him. No one seemed tense or excited. But avatars were as expressive as Noh masks; they could reveal or hide anything.
Across the room, on the weather panel, the storm had engulfed the Northeast; soon Gale would enjoy optimal conditions for its tests, but more of the East Coast would go dark. His physical laptop pinged: a desktop notification. He lifted his headset. Another flashing pop-up:
E is for Erin
E is for Erin
Did you let her in, Erin?
At the bottom, a static image of a beat-up roll-top backpack.
* * *
—
ANJA DISAPPEARED three weeks before graduation. As usual, they’d been working together in his basement after school. His mom had made dinner, and Anja, as she often did, had eaten with them, filling her bowl twice. Then she’d grabbed her backpack, and he’d walked her to her house. It was a chilly night, a damp mist tarrying in the air, smearing the halos of porch lights. As usual, the sidewalk ended too quickly, and as she stepped into her driveway a flash of anguish propelled him to tug her backpack. Anja, stumbling, laughed, a rare husky, joyful hoot, and Erin, ridiculously happy, had turned, leaving her to traverse the few steps to her door.
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