Chapter 29
We stood together on the hill where she’d taken me the day before. We looked out over the lights of the city, framed against the darkness of the Pacific. Behind us, over the hilltop, the sky began to glow purple and orange.
The headache pulsed behind my eyes.
“Minutes now,” Anjari said.
“Do you think the—do you think Lyle will come with me?” I focused on my breathing, as I had all the way from the hotel. In and out. In and out. I patted the pocket at my thigh, making sure the tablet was still there.
“I hope so.”
Lyle was silent in my ear, as though he was biding his time.
Could an artificial, computerized version of my son bide his time?
I went to touch the curving earpiece again but forced my hand down. The earpiece felt cold and heavy somehow, even though I knew it was lightweight and perfectly customized for the specific shape of my head.
I didn’t want to hear the voice in my ear again. Lyle’s voice, come from the grave.
At the same time, I had to hear it again. Lyle’s voice. Come from the grave. Back to me.
I shivered. Breathed. In and out, in and out.
Anjari watched me. Moving impulsively, she hugged me.
I wrapped my arms around her in reflex. She gave me a single squeeze and stood back.
“I do not know what you will travel into. But your legacy and story will continue, of this I am sure. And our time, humanity’s renewed strength as we pulled ourselves out of the dark, will endure, and we will prosper.
We have accomplished so much. I can only imagine the beauty you will experience next, the wonder. ”
“I hope so.”
“I will not forget you, Scott Treder.”
“Thank you, Anjari. For everything.”
The weight of the earpiece was alien behind my left ear. Lyle, or the voice of Lyle, was silent.
Anjari smiled. And the world
slipped
and I stumbled as the ground shifted underneath my feet.
Anjari was gone. The sky, which had been clear, was covered in roiling clouds, dark and churning.
Gray flakes drifted and swirled. In the distance, through haze and darkness, was the outline of skyscrapers and towers.
There were no lights, and the silhouettes of the buildings looked wrong. Incomplete.
I breathed in, tentatively, and a few of the large flakes entered my mouth.
Ash.
I spit, coughing, and pulled the survival suit hood over my face. The touchpad on my forearm lit under my fingers, and I set the suit to adjust its internal atmosphere. The burnt taste and smell disappeared as the suit filtered the air for me.
“Lyle?”
“Yes,” the voice said in my ear. “I’m here. All of me. The quantum matrix into which your friend and her researchers placed me traveled in its entirety forward with you.”
I let out a long, shaking breath. “That’s great.”
“I’ve come with you, Dad. I’m the first being other than you to make a jump forward in time.”
I shut my eyes. Took another breath. Opened my eyes again. I touched the earpiece. My stomach clenched. I had a hard time parsing what I was feeling. “Lyle—I can’t believe…”
“We’ll talk, Dad. But first we need to get you someplace safe.”
I looked around, trying to see. Trying to comprehend.
There was little behind me but the scorched earth of the low mountain.
The few remaining trees were skeletal sections of burnt wood.
The ground was covered in an inch of gray ash.
I didn’t know what to do. The image of the dazzling city, so full of life, was still right there in my mind’s eye.
Now it was gone, in what for me was less than a heartbeat.
It was overwhelming. Things kept happening, hammering at me, one after another.
I didn’t want to keep pressing forward. I needed time to catch my breath. I wanted to stop, to sink to my knees and lie there until I transited again.
There was a weight on my side, pulling gently down on the cargo pants pocket. The tablet. It had traveled with me. The Word of the Traveler, as written by my son.
Lyle.
Lyle, whose voice was now with me as well.
Whatever it was, this thing in my ear. A part of my son?
A bit of himself that he, in his endless brilliance, had managed to send with me?
Or just a clever simulation, not much more advanced than Iron Maiden, programmed with the right responses to sound like the ghost of my son?
Lyle, who had told me to keep pressing forward. See this to the end.
“Dad?” the digital ghost of my son asked.
I cleared my throat. “Where’s safe?”
“I don’t know. But you should find shelter. We don’t know what’s happened here, or if whoever or whatever did it could still be around.”
I thought of the machines fighting their endless, recursive battle through the ruins of Fresno, and grunted.
“Ideally we find you food and water, too,” Lyle said. “And a safe place for you to make your next jump forward.”
Was that what I was reduced to now? Survival, scrounging for food, looking for the next safe place to jump as I clawed my way relentlessly further and further into the future?
I looked through the gray particulate haze to the uneven outlines of broken towers.
There could be survivors down there, amid the wreckage. They might even be friendly.
A part of me—the part that didn’t want to fold up on the ground, the part that had listened when Lyle told me to keep pushing forward—wanted to know what had happened.
What had upended the brilliant possibility, the shining future, that I’d seen in Anjari’s time.
“Is it riskier to stay here or go into the city?”
“There’s risk either way.”
“There’s more likely to be food and water in the city. And people, for better or for worse.”
“Yes. But be careful.”
“All right.” I heaved in a breath and started forward, making my way carefully down the hillside, toward the distant towers.
By the time I reached the base of the hillside the sun was up, but little light made it through the dense clouds. I took care where I placed my feet. If I slipped and broke an ankle, I’d be helpless.
I glimpsed something high up out of the corner of my eye. I turned, but whatever it was—a flash of black, something immense and mechanical—disappeared behind the clouds. The hairs rose along my neck and arms. “Did you see that?”
“I have limited access to the systems of your survival suit,” Lyle said. “The optics in the helmet did not pick up anything I could register. What did you see?”
“I don’t know. Something in the clouds. Big.”
Ash drifted from the sky and billowed up from the ground, driven by gusts of wind. I kicked up more as I trudged forward. The survival suit kept me comfortable, but the darkness and the feel of the ash under my boots was oppressive. Almost drowning. “What do you think happened here?”
“War.”
“Radiation?”
“The suit’s systems are limited. But it’s detecting some radiation spikes when you turn in certain directions. It’s not dangerous to you in the short term, although you wouldn’t want to stay here for months. Even weeks.”
Good thing I couldn’t stay for weeks even if I wanted to. “Spikes? From the city?”
“Primarily from the north and the east, toward the interior.”
“Nukes, you think?” Images from my youth flashed through my mind.
The Cold War and duck-and-cover had been my parents’ generation, but as kids we’d watched historical footage of the many atomic tests in history class, and we’d seen photographs of the aftermath of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I remembered, vividly, the black-and-white archival footage of an artificial town blown apart, buildings disintegrating under the blast wave and then ripped apart in the other direction by the vacuum effect.
I thought of the horrifying vision of the atmosphere igniting and fire sweeping across the globe in Oppenheimer. All the world as ash.
“Perhaps,” Lyle said.
I picked my way through bent and broken trees, skirting around a low valley that might have been a dry riverbed.
The forest gave way to collapsed husks of houses.
Some were charred black, although there were no smoldering or still-burning fires that I could see.
Other homes were smashed, hit by a giant wielding a baseball bat the size of a semitruck.
Debris slowed me, forced me to climb over piles of what had once been walls.
The damage was tremendous, but it didn’t look like the effects of a nuclear weapon.
Not that I was an expert.
Apart from the wind, there was no sound.
My footsteps, muffled as they were by the ash, were overly loud, each one reverberating among the broken homes around me.
Every shadow was poised to leap at me, but I trudged onward.
I hadn’t seen anyone. I could have stopped, but the homes were uniformly obliterated.
There was little in the way of cover, and no evidence of food or clean water.
I left the suburbs and entered the city proper.
The skyscrapers, once beautiful and intricately designed, were now blackened and chewed apart, distorted skeletons disappearing into the haze of falling ash and dark clouds.
I stayed as close to the ruined buildings as I could, away from the exposed center of the thoroughfares.
There was more in the way of shelter here.
Places I could stay for the rest of the day and night.
The idea held little appeal: huddled in the darkness under the jagged, cracked plains of broken concrete all night, listening for footsteps or tank treads or whatever might come along. Hungry, thirsty, and without answers.
I kept pushing forward. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for, but it felt important to at least try to see what had happened.