Chapter 33
We caught fish in a lake a few hundred miles south of the cave.
Lyle used force fields to sweep the fish from the water and cleave their heads off.
He analyzed them, declared them safe for my consumption, and told me how to construct a pyramidal structure of branches and twigs for a fire.
Lyle started the fire with a microburst of directed energy, and I sat on a fallen log and watched the fish cook on my makeshift spit.
He could have cooked them with the suit, but he told me the open-air fire would make the fish taste better.
And, even if I only admitted it to myself, it was satisfying to build something, however small.
I made the spit with my own hands, I put the fish on it, and I turned them over the fire. It felt good. Solid and real.
The sun rose, sliding yellow across the silver lake, and wind rustled the boughs of the evergreens at my back. It was as though the war the Overmind talked about never happened. Or as though humanity itself never happened.
I ate with a silver fork and knife Lyle extruded from the suit, the fish held aloft on an invisible plate Lyle created with force fields. I tried to enjoy the simple flavor. The tangible sensations of eating.
“What now, Dad?” Lyle asked when I finished. The fish bones hovered out over the edge of the lake and fell in with soft splashes. I put the fork and knife on my forearm, and they melted away.
“I don’t know. I think I’d finally like to go home.”
“Home?”
“Madison. Home for me. Where—when we were all still together. You, me, your mother.”
“All right.” I could tell he wasn’t sure about the idea.
“How long will it take?”
“About eight hours. If we stay within the atmosphere.”
I pushed myself off the log. “Let’s go, then.”
My feet left the ground with that disconcerting lack of sensation.
I rocketed, whisper quiet, into the high atmosphere, Lyle turning and angling us east. The ground flashed by, mountains, plains, rivers, and lakes, all giving way to the rocky moonscape of the former ocean floor and, eventually, the remaining water of the ocean.
“Are you comfortable, Dad? Would you like me to give you something so you can sleep?”
“I’m good, bud. Thank you.”
I did my best to relax into the sensation of flying again, but was gripped by the uneasy feeling that I may have made a mistake in waking the Overmind.
I tried not to think, tried to just be present, but my stomach rolled and twisted, and thought came anyway.
I wanted someone to talk to. A part of me wanted my friends in that moment.
Severine and Sophie. That old, profound connection, or at least a connection that feels so ocean-deep as a teenager.
But more even than Severine and Sophie, I wished Amy was there.
I wished I could speak to her. I had Lyle’s voice, and I was eternally grateful he was there, but he now operated in realms and spaces beyond me.
I thought of Amy. The hours we spent in bed, talking late into the night. About life, about work, about Lyle.
We could have talked about this. She would have understood.
I drifted. More memories spun around me.
Amy, back in college when we’d first met, her hair long, down to her lower back.
The things that made her laugh, like when I tripped on a curb and broke a potted plant for sale on a stand at the downtown farmer’s market at the Capitol Square.
I had to pay for the shards, a pile of dirt, and a flower. A flower I’d promptly given to her.
“Dad.”
I opened my eyes with a start. “Yeah, bud?”
“We’ve arrived in what used to be Madison,” Lyle said.
We floated in the air a few feet above a forest of tall trees.
Branches swayed in an easterly wind. I looked around, disoriented.
The landscape around me was mostly flat, with a few low rolling hills, their presence given away by the crests in the wavelike formation of trees.
There were clearings, here and there. And a short distance away, on a small hill, what looked like the ancient, collapsed remains of a marble or granite building.
“Is that where our house would have been?”
“Yes.”
“Put me down?”
Lyle complied, swinging me over the hilltop.
I stepped onto mossy earth and gazed around.
The sun was almost down, disappearing behind the trees to my left.
Before me, the scattered and uneven remains of a marble building stood like a broken monument to a different era, covered in moss and vines.
Someone had built a larger structure where our home had been, sometime in what was now the deep past. And even that structure had been destroyed. Fifty-seven hundred years had passed.
Overhead, the sky had transitioned from red to a mottled purple.
“Did a bomb do this?”
“No. At least, not an antimatter or thermonuclear device. The particulate matter in the air is consistent with a high-yield strike to a location southeast of here.”
“Chicago.”
“Probably. Or whatever Chicago and Milwaukee became when they merged. It would have been a prime target during an extended war. Millions of people, nexus of transportation and commerce, all that.”
I shut my eyes, trying not to imagine the twenty or thirty million people who must have been wiped out in the blink of an eye when some nut dropped an antimatter bomb on the city. “So, what happened here?”
“The visual evidence is consistent with abandonment. I can’t tell you much more than that without conducting a full archeological dig.”
“All right.” I detached from the answer to my own question. I walked forward, moving through the greenish-brown landscape and around sections of broken marble the size of railway cars.
I walked for hours. The land might have been roughly the same, but the Madison I’d known was gone.
Even the lakes, such a part of the city’s culture, were little more than forested depressions in the land.
I could have asked Lyle for directions, but I didn’t.
I could have stopped—part of me wanted to—but I kept pushing forward.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but whatever it was, I didn’t find it.
Night fell. Animals rustled in the underbrush, the sounds mingling with my footfalls on the grass and the wind in the trees.
It wasn’t home. Home was somewhere far behind me.
“Lyle?”
“What is it, Dad?”
“You had kids, didn’t you?” It was a question I had kept bottled up for some time. Now, here, in the darkness among the remains of where I had last felt normal, it finally felt like the time to ask.
“One. Xavier.”
“What was he like?”
Lyle took a moment to respond. “He was clever. Not like me. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but Xavier lacked my mind for math, for science. He was more like his mother. Street smart but not book smart. He was a manipulator.”
“Manipulator?”
“Of people. Charming, but cold. When I was old enough, when I had enough distance, I realized he showed all the signs of sociopathy. I failed him, just as I failed you, only not in the same way.”
“You didn’t fail me,” I said, but Lyle wasn’t listening.
“We fought constantly. I thought he’d grow out of it, but he never did. And he never forgave me for ‘corrupting’ Jennifer.”
“Miri called him the Unbeliever.”
“Appropriate enough. He thought the Word was a pyramid scheme I created to make money. He didn’t even believe his own grandmother when she tried to tell him the truth. He thought I’d gotten to her, too. Infected or confused her with my complicated lies.”
I trudged into a gully, startling some small animals. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a very long time ago. Especially now, I suppose. He died too young.”
“What happened?”
“He shot himself.”
I closed my eyes. “Shit.”
“He had a hard time with life. Failed marriages, one after another, like me. I think, though, it was Jennifer’s decision to step out of his shadow, to cut off communication with him and come find me and follow the Word, that made him decide there wasn’t anything left in life for him.
I know he felt I had taken all he had from him, including his daughter.
He left me a note. He never was one to mince words. ”
“Lyle…”
“I should have done more to help him. It’s a terrible thing to outlive your own children. As you well know.”
“I do know.” I walked, at a loss for more to say.
“That was rather darker than I intended,” Lyle said.
“It’s okay.”
“My life wasn’t all depression and darkness. I want you to know that.”
“I’m glad. And I’m glad you’re here now.”
“After a fashion.”
I stepped over a fallen tree, shifting aside protruding limbs. “Is it better? This new suit and bracelet, I mean. Better than the earpiece Anjari gave me?”
“It’s much better. Far faster, far clearer.”
“But is it more comfortable?”
“Oh. I see. Not really. It’s still odd. Cold.
I remember having a body, having eyes and ears.
But it’s easier, I suppose, now that I can affect things, manipulate the environment, with the suit’s various functions and powers.
I am the suit, now. Integrated. It’s not bad.
But I was smart to prevent the possibility of madness when I designed the consciousness emulation algorithms.”
“You think it might have driven you mad?”
“It’s possible, had I allowed that aspect of my mind to be simulated.
After all, what I am experiencing now is starkly different from how the human brain evolved to perceive the world.
Millions of years of adaptation and survival shaped us in specific ways, including a dependence on certain senses.
Removing all that, plunging a human consciousness into this abyss …
I could see that consciousness going insane, were it allowed to do so. ”
“That’s a rather disturbing thought.”
“Good thing I thought about it long before I jumped in.”
“I guess so.”
“No worries, Dad. I’m not going insane in here.”