Chapter 32 #2
I stood on blackened, exposed rock. The ocean was gone.
A cracked and barren landscape of choppy glass, like sand flash-burned and frozen by terrible heat, spread to the horizon.
Everything had an orange hue, and my shadow cast out before me, long and deep.
I turned in a slow circle, bile rising in my throat.
The city was gone. An empty landscape, mirroring the one now behind me, stretched toward distant hills.
It was dark and empty, devoid of any vegetation.
The sky was deep maroon on the horizon, as though the clouds were on fire.
“God.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked.
I should have been past being shocked, past the ability to be surprised by anything brought forth by another jump forward through time.
But a small, fallible part of me had hoped the Overmind’s budding vision of society would last, even over almost three thousand years.
“Fascinating,” Lyle’s voice said, so clear and present I started.
“Lyle? You okay?”
“Yes. I’m still here. In my entirety. Extraordinary.”
I closed my eyes, relieved he was still there. “Extraordinary? What do you mean?”
“I thought I might lose some of my newfound levels of consciousness on the transit forward. But even the new hyperspatial memory cores and processing units the Overmind designed for me have been carried forward.”
“That’s, ah. That’s good.”
“Yes. Very good.”
I looked across the blasted landscape. “What do you make of it?”
“The radiation levels and isotopic residues in the air indicate a high likelihood that an antimatter device was detonated above the city. According to my back-of-the-napkin calculations here, the levels would match a high-yield detonation taking place four hundred and eighty years ago.”
“Antimatter device. Like a bomb? This was artificial.”
“Looks that way. The signature left by the particulate matter in the air conforms strongly to an antimatter detonation, aerial burst. Large scale.”
“Yeah, it looks pretty large scale. Am I in danger?”
“Not from the radiation or toxicity in the atmosphere. Your new suit can easily compensate.”
“All right.” I looked back at the blackened seabed slouching downward and away from me. I decided to head toward where the city had once stood. “I guess let’s see what we can see. Can you, like, mark this spot on a map or something? Do you have a map?”
“Yes, I have a map, and yes, I can mark this spot. Why?”
“Just in case we want to come back here tomorrow morning. For the next jump.”
“Got it.”
I put my head down and trudged across the dead landscape.
There were a few small plants, sturdy greenish-brown bushes, but for the most part the entire area was a scorched ruin.
The sun rose as I walked, and the sky lightened a little, changing from a deep red to a dirty orange and yellow.
There were clouds, dark gray, but the sky between them remained that disturbing orange color. I asked Lyle about it.
“Particulate matter reflecting the sunlight. Another residual side effect of the antimatter burst.”
“Wow,” I muttered.
“The Overmind provided me with comprehensive scientific files. I can tell you more—”
“That’s okay. Not right now.”
I walked a few hundred yards and crested a small, jagged outcropping of rocks.
The city was not entirely gone. The bases of the spires and skyscrapers I remembered were still visible in some places, albeit collapsed and broken into heaps of rubble.
A dense layer of dirt and sand covered much of the remains, creating a gray desert with the skeletal ribs of old towers jutting up from the otherwise smooth landscape.
There was movement.
I crouched, ducking behind the outcropping. “Did you see that?”
“I did. Put your eyes above the edge of this small rise. I’ll use the suit to augment your vision.”
I levered myself up enough to peek over the serrated edge of the outcropping. The view before me reeled in, magnifying with startling speed. I jerked in reflex, and the image blurred and jumped.
“Dad, try to hold still,” Lyle said. “The magnification is extremely high. The image stabilization can only compensate so much.”
“Right. Sorry.” I held as still as I could, and the image resolved.
People moved about between the wrecked foundations of skyscrapers.
They were bundled in tattered clothing and walked slowly, deliberately.
Canvas and tarps formed crude tents and lean-tos off the rubble.
“Can you zoom in any more?” The image pulled in further until I could’ve been standing only a few paces from the group. “God.”
Every person I could see was deformed. Many had severely hunched backs.
One person had a single enlarged arm, while the limb on the other side looked painfully tiny.
Others shuffled along as though their knees were glued together.
One man had what looked like extra appendages, fleshy limbs flopping uselessly at his side.
And the faces.
Bulbous, tumorlike growths dotted their heads and necks, protruding from puffed cheeks and twisted mouths. Some bled from weeping sores and looked out through slits below heavy, malformed foreheads.
A line of people carried heavy-looking loads from the ruin of what had been a skyscraper, lugging bags made of crudely stitched cloth material.
I watched one man, his gait awkward and painful, hindered by the massive growth on his left leg, lift his burden and tip it into a metal container mounted on the frame and wheels of a trailer bed.
Water sloshed out of the bag, clearer than I had expected. They were gathering clean water.
“Lyle. What is this?”
“The severe physical defects we’re seeing are consistent with long-term, generational exposure to continuous high-level radiation.”
I stared, unable to look away. I remembered what I’d said in jest to Raven over breakfast that morning.
“Mutant zombies.” It was horrible. I had seen arguably worse visions of individuals twisted and scarred by radiation rendered in film and television, but this was real, directly before me.
Larger than life thanks to the extreme magnification.
I could not help but feel for these people.
Their pain with every labored step and motion.
Working hard, here in this devastated place, just to get water left behind in some cistern or reservoir. Preserved from a better time.
“Shall we move closer?” Lyle asked. “If they are communicating with one another, I might be able to translate what they’re saying.”
“No.” I thought about the walled village I’d landed in after Miri’s time, the way some had run screaming from me, and others had attacked me on sight. I didn’t want to inflict myself on these people. Cause them still more pain and fear at the sight of me. “Can you return my sight to normal?”
The image swept back in an instant.
“What do you want to do now?” Lyle asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Can I make a suggestion, then?”
“Please.”
“I’ve been trying to contact the Overmind since we arrived, without success.
No response yet across any spectrum. However, there is a residual signal buried in the background noise of the ultralow-frequency radio band.
My guess is the Overmind has been deactivated or destroyed, maybe in the same conflict in which the antimatter bomb went off.
However, the residual signal contains a message to us, ostensibly from the Overmind. ”
“Wait, what? What do you mean, to us?”
“The signal is addressed to Scott Treder and accompanying sentient intelligence Lyle Treder.”
I turned and sat against the outcropping. “What does it say?”
“The message asks us to come to a master node located at sixty-six degrees north by one hundred and thirty-two degrees east, to use twenty-first-century coordinates. The message contains more exact coordinates.”
“Where the hell is that?”
“It’s in a remote part of what we knew as Siberia, near Mostagakh, Respublika Sakha. Russia.”
“Okay. Fine. What’s a master node?”
“A master node is a human-accessible hardwired terminal access point to the Overmind.” Lyle said this like he was reading from a wiki entry. Still, it was moderately comprehensible to me.
“It wants us to access it directly.”
“That is what I surmise, yes.”
“But if it’s deactivated…?”
“We may be able to turn it back ‘on,’ so to speak.”
I looked at the devastation around me, at the fiery, unnatural sky overhead. “Assuming we want to do that, how can we possibly get to Russia within the next, what, twenty-three and a half hours?”
“The easiest route would be to fly.”
I coughed out a laugh. “Yeah, I would say so. Know a good travel agent in the vicinity?”
“The force fields and gravity-manipulative technology built into this suit make that rather unnecessary.”
I let that wash over me for a second. “I can fly?”
“Well, more precisely, I can fly you, by way of the suit. But, yes.”
“Ah … Right. How long will it take?”
“Let’s see. If we stick inside the atmosphere, approximate flight time will be six point four hours. We could reduce that by dropping into space and—”
“Let’s stay inside the atmosphere, okay? This is probably going to be terrifying enough as it is.”
“It’ll be perfectly safe. I ran six thousand simulations while we were talking to confirm.
This suit is incredible, like I said. The fields I can project will protect you from friction and the cold, and I can recycle your own breath to provide you oxygen almost indefinitely.
The gravity-manipulative technology is similar in principle to the aircars you rode in before.
It’ll be fast and smooth. Best time flying you’ve ever had.
Not even a hint of turbulence. No crying babies or people taking up the whole armrest between you.
It’ll be great. No free novelty bottle of vodka, though. Sorry.”
I shut my eyes and took a long breath. “Okay, let’s do it.”
“We’re on our way.”