Chapter 35
The Consciousness stood next to me in the garden the next morning. Together we watched the sunrise. Leaves stirred in the wind around us, brushing against my clothes. I spread my fingers and let the nearest flower petals drift against them, stroking my skin.
“I would like to stay here.” Despite the augmentations, the headache had returned, my painful little canary, but it was lessened now. A warning, rather than a spike of agony.
“I know,” she said.
We’d spent the day before touring gardens of every type and form all over the world.
Time and effort from those like the Consciousness and her progenitors had repaired so much.
They had long since rebuilt the world, such that the devastations from the times I’d seen in the past were less than memories.
They were historical artifacts, curiosities.
We ate lunch on the island I’d known as Japan, and spent a long time watching a man arrange, with immense patience, rocks and tiny, carefully pruned plants in a garden spread around a gushing waterfall.
We traveled to the Grand Canyon and watched a woman paint the lines and textures of the rock in exquisite, spectacular detail, every movement of her brush careful and considered.
We sat with a group meditating to the wind as it moved through the bamboo trees of southern China.
We saw a group of men and women building a wooden boat by hand on the beaches of Hawaii.
We listened to the slender greenish avatar of an AI recite its own layered poetry to an audience of men and women and avatars in a beautiful granite amphitheater on a mountaintop in India. Lyle translated for me.
“Is this the world now?” I asked the Consciousness at one point. “Is this life?”
“Is there anything more?”
I didn’t have an answer.
We stayed up most of the night talking after coming back to the little house in Colorado.
We drank sweet, malted alcohol. I could dispel the drunken feeling at will if I wanted.
We talked of my life, of history, and what I’d seen.
Of who I had been and who I was now. The Consciousness knew me better than Lyle, than Amy.
She knew my entire personal history after copying my consciousness and she had felt—in her way—all the moments that had brought me to this point.
She knew me better than I knew myself, and I felt heard as I never had before.
She listened until I fell asleep at the table.
She carried me to a soft bed as if I was a child.
I woke to her gentle touch as she roused me in the morning. It was nearly time.
We stood together in the fading darkness, watching the sun come up.
“Where will you go from here?” I asked.
“Onward.”
“Toward transcendence?”
She smiled and looked toward the rising sun. “The Central Overmind’s concept.” She said it without judgment. A statement of fact. “Maybe, although perhaps not in the way it imagined. We are not on a quest to defeat the end of the universe.”
“What quest are you on?”
“The same quest you’re on.” She patted my hand, a grandmotherly gesture. “To live.” With that she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “Goodbye, Scott Treder. And good luck, with whatever you find on your journey.”
She stepped back.
And the world slipped.
My boots sank into snow. I’d jumped again, regardless of the augmentations the Consciousness had gifted me.
I let out a long breath and looked around.
A cold, dark, and empty white landscape of snow stretched before me. I turned, slowly, and saw the dim outline of the Rocky Mountains against the dark sky beyond. “Lyle?”
“I’m here, Dad. I’m not receiving a response on any communication frequency.”
Large flakes of snow drifted in swirling spirals.
“Is it winter?”
“No. The Northern Hemisphere should be angled toward the Sun now. This is late spring.”
I gazed around, drinking in the new details, glad of the protection and warmth of the force fields Lyle wrapped around me. “So, this is, what?”
“An ice age.”
“And nothing from the Consciousness?”
“No. No signals whatsoever.”
I thought about that for a moment. About the Consciousness’s obvious power, her strength of will, her effective and peaceful dominion of the solar system.
And now there were no signs she had ever been there.
I decided to follow her advice, and that of Vorsch, and Lyle.
I decided to live. “Let’s go see what we can see. ”
Lyle took me up. The ground receded, and we passed through the clouds. A soft gray cotton-ball cloudscape stretched outward in all directions.
“Do you see any orbitals?”
“No,” Lyle said. “Wait. Yes.” A light green circle appeared before me, hovering on a distant, blurry spot above us. “It’s powered down. There’s no heat I can detect, residual or otherwise.”
“Abandoned?”
“Looks like it.”
I floated for a few minutes, a tiny human speck above the gray ocean of rolling clouds. “Is there anywhere warm left on Earth?”
“Possibly near the equator.”
“Let’s go there.”
The clouds blurred below us as we shot forward. They dissipated, revealing a rolling landscape of white snow and the occasional blue glint of ice.
“The glaciers have returned,” Lyle said.
“Yeah?”
“I did some quick calculations. Per historical records of past glacial maximal advance, we should overtake them as we approach the equatorial regions.”
Sure enough, as we passed over what would have been central Mexico, the white and blue turned to mottled tan and gray before giving way to pale green and darker brown.
The plants were short and sturdy. As we flew overhead, I spotted deer or antelope grazing in a field, and what could have been a fox, but no humans.
“Dad,” Lyle said. “A city.”
I saw the outline of skyscrapers. “Any electronic activity or communications?”
“No.”
We flew closer and the enormity of the city was evident. It spread for miles in all directions. And it was completely dark. Silent. The sun shone on the vines and creepers and other plants taking over the city. The buildings were intact. Just abandoned.
“Do you want to fly into it, or bypass?”
“Take us through,” I whispered.
We dove down and flew through the empty cityscape.
The buildings, once elaborate and wonderful structures of metal and concrete and glass, now sagged with age, crumbling from the relentless press of plants and water working through every small crack.
We startled a group of birds roosting on a rooftop, and they flew away, squawking.
Huge black boars meandered along the tree- and vine-covered remains of a broad boulevard.
A family, little piglets trotting after the adults.
“There’s no one here.”
“No.”
“Let’s keep going.”
We flew on, leaving the abandoned city behind. We passed over water, slow-moving waves glinting in the sunlight below, and back over land again. A forest spread below us, huge and green and unbroken for miles.
“Where are we?”
“The northern part of what was Venezuela.”
“And still no communications?”
“Not yet. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
We continued, the sun rising in the sky.
“We’re at the equator,” Lyle said. He slowed us to a stop, and we hovered in midair above a rolling landscape of trees. Most were evergreens, dotted here and there with the occasional broad-leaved coniferous tree.
“Shouldn’t there be jungle here?”
“The climate is temperate now. The ice age will have affected average yearly temperatures worldwide.” We gazed across the green landscape. “Dad? What do you want to do?”
The treetops hundreds of feet below us rustled in the wind. “Find me a beach.”
Lyle took me to the Pacific, on the coast of what had been Ecuador. He set me on soft white sand. “Does this look good?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“What are you going to do?”
I looked around. Palm trees swayed. The sun shone, and I felt heat rising from the sand, a counterpoint to the cool air Lyle allowed through the force fields.
I spotted a piece of driftwood. I sat in the sand and put my back to the gray wood.
“Do you have a copy of the Word of the Traveler in your memory?”
Lyle was silent for a heartbeat. “Yes.”
“And a way for me to read it?”
“With your new augmentations I could place the information directly into your brain.”
“I would rather read it for myself.”
“Are you sure? You don’t—there’s no reason for you to.
You don’t have to read it to make me happy.
” There was a catch in his voice. A thread of caution.
It reminded me of moments when he was small, when he’d create something—a drawing, a handwritten story—and hand it to me, often feigning disinterest in my reaction.
He was gifted, but still a little boy, still looking for his father’s approval.
It made my heart ache to hear even an echo of that in his voice now. “I’m not.”
“Okay. Give me a moment.”
The sand before me rippled as invisible force fields manipulated it.
A block of sand rose into the air. Its surface shuddered and writhed, then flattened into smooth white glass, the material folding into itself and solidifying.
The thin panel floated over toward me. I plucked it from the air. “Very impressive.”
“Thanks. You should see me mix a drink.”
The white surface of the glass panel shimmered and resolved itself into words, appearing as they wrote themselves in rapid sequence down the panel.
“You can touch the right lower corner to turn the page,” Lyle said. “Touch the lower left corner to turn back.”
“Nice.”
“Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Thanks, bud.” I settled back to read, letting the sound of the surf wash over me.