Chapter 36
On the thirtieth day, the Midwest was a desert.
I walked over sand dunes and trudged along dry riverbeds under a cloudless sky.
That night, in a limestone cave, I carved a drawing of a woman’s face into the rock wall using a razor-thin force field.
I set out to make Amy, but it ended up as no particular person, an unidentifiable combination of Severine and Sophie and Amy and Hayward and Miri and my grandmother and the Consciousness, all wrapped into one.
I gave up when I couldn’t get the hair right.
I never could draw well. I could never make the drawing match the picture I saw in my mind.
The thirty-first day brought pouring rain.
When the world had slipped, I was still in the cave, and I had to swim out of what was now a lake.
Lyle widened the cave walls for me with precise slashes of narrowed force fields that left trails of swirling bubbles.
When I reached the surface, the rain was coming down so hard I could see only a few feet in any direction, even with my augmented vision.
I had Lyle fly us above the rolling storm clouds.
In the clear sky above, the clouds churned and frothed, flaring every few seconds with lightning.
“No signals?”
“No signals.”
On day thirty-two, the Midwest was dry and temperate again, much like I remembered from my own time, but the sky was a spectacular red, especially during sunrise and sunset.
Lyle guessed a large volcano had erupted within the last thousand years, perhaps the supervolcano under Yellowstone.
The ash and silica content caused the unique color.
I walked through a dense forest somewhere in the middle of what had been Minnesota, and I couldn’t help but imagine myself back as a youth, exploring the woods behind my grandparents’ house.
Literally ages ago, though not nearly so long for me.
“Can AIs be religious?” I asked as I walked, brushing aside leaves and bushes as I forged a new path through the undergrowth. Birds called and rodents chattered among the trees overhead. “Like the Overmind. Or the Consciousness.”
“There’s nothing stopping them.”
“And you, bud? Were you ever religious? Before, or now, I suppose? Aside from, you know, creating a fake religion around me and everything.”
“I wouldn’t consider myself religious in the traditional sense.”
“What about an untraditional sense?”
“My life as your son afforded me a different perspective.”
“I suppose so. But you didn’t really answer my question.”
Lyle chuckled. “I never worshiped anything greater than myself. But I can appreciate such things, such entities. The Consciousness, for example.”
“Hmm.”
“Deem that what you will, religion or no.”
“My little Lyle, the digital choirboy.”
“Hardy har. What about you, Dad? Do you believe in a higher power?”
“Not much choice in that.”
“Let me rephrase. Do you believe in a traditional version of God?”
“Maybe.” I gazed around the dense forest, stepping to avoid twisted branches. “I don’t know. Hopefully, I’ll know Him if I see Him. Or Her.”
“Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.”
On day thirty-three, the sky was on fire. I craned my neck upward as I stood atop a blackened, twisted landscape of ruined trees and falling ash.
“The Sun is in an up cycle through the Oort cloud,” Lyle said. “The solar system will be bombarded by asteroids and comets for the next several hundred years.”
“Are we in any danger?” A fireball streaked down and disappeared beyond the dim edge of the horizon.
“No. Even before the improvements to my systems made by the Consciousness, I could have protected us.”
“Good to hear. I guess I’ll enjoy the show, then.”
“Even so, we could look for shelter underground, or—”
“Nah, light shows like this only come around once every, what, twenty million years or so? Might as well enjoy it.”
“Sure.”
I was a little surprised, and pleased, by Lyle’s capitulation, but I suspected we really weren’t in any danger, or he would have dragged me off by force—unless, of course, there wasn’t anywhere safe to go.
I settled against a boulder and watched pieces of the sky tumble down, trailing fire.
On the thirty-fourth day, Lyle and I flew over the Pacific coast of western North America, and Lyle pointed out how much of the California coastline was gone.
“Gone where?” I asked, squinting down from our mile height, although I could see perfectly well. It looked like a coastline to me.
“Subducted under the Aleutian Trench. It was inevitable. Geologists back in our time were predicting it, although it was, of course, millions of years away.”
“Handful of weeks for me.”
“Yes.” He hesitated, just a heartbeat, as though trying to read my tone. “In addition, Australia will have collided with Southeast Asia by now. Another step in the creation of the next supercontinent.”
“Neat.”
“Dad.”
“Yeah, bud?”
“There’s evidence of fire in the terrain below us.”
“Brush fires from lightning?”
“No, contained. Campfires.”
That took me a moment. “Campfires?”
“Yes. Controlled use of fire for cooking and warmth.”
My heart rate picked up. “Any signals?”
“There are no electronic signals or quantum indications of intelligent communication or energy manipulation. But I have detected the movement of coordinated groups.”
“Let’s go see.”
“We should take care to remain out of sight. For them and for us.”
“All right.”
I twisted in midair and rocketed toward the coastline.
Lyle spotted them first, of course, and highlighted them in glowing neon boxes. We watched, hovering in the sky a mile or so away, my vision magnified to show me every detail.
They looked a little like wolves crossed with humans.
They walked upright. They had bony, multi-jointed hands with opposable thumbs, but their heads were canine, their ears pointed and drawn back behind fur-covered heads.
The group we watched was twenty strong, a pack of six large males, eight smaller females, and several young.
The males all held wooden spears, and had pelts slung around their broad shoulders. Each moved with muscular grace.
They opened their mouths as they walked, revealing rows of sharp teeth. “Are they speaking?” I asked, whispering, even though we were thousands of feet away.
“Let’s listen.”
Lyle did something, and I heard the creatures’ footfalls and movements as though I stood right next to them, their heavy rhythmic breathing and repeated shallow grunts and whines. If they were communicating, it was at a very basic level.
“What are these things?”
“With humans gone, there was always the possibility another species on Earth might evolve high levels of intelligence. Given the right conditions, ones favorable for intelligence to be an advantage rather than an energy burden, and with sufficient time, it was almost inevitable.”
“These things are like cavemen?”
“Maybe. Time will tell if this species has the tenacity and luck to become the dominant species on the planet.”
“They look like werewolves.”
“I suppose.”
We watched the pack move through the woods for a while, listening to their breathing and grunted communications. Then I nodded. “All right. You said something about Australia?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go see.”
On day thirty-five, we found the remains of cities.
Domes, primarily: large domes of disintegrating stone and granite and polished metal, often surrounded by smaller domes to form wheel-like spokes.
There were roads as well, built between the cities, sweeping lines cut into the bedrock, roads that must have taken hundreds of years to construct.
Everywhere we flew, we found empty cities fading to dust under the sun and wind and rain.
Some were being reabsorbed by jungles or deserts.
Others were collapsing into the sea. It was all evidence of a culture that had spread across the entire world, had built ships and wheeled vehicles.
And vanished.
In the largest city, located along a river in the now-connected section of northern Africa and southern Europe, Lyle and I found an immense metal statue, standing impressive and alone in the center of a circle of domes.
The representation was of a bipedal creature, wearing what looked like a ceremonial robe.
The head and face drew my gaze. “The werewolves.”
“Pretty close,” Lyle said.
The statue’s face was a wolf crossed with an ape. The snout was shorter and more compressed than those of the wolf-men we’d seen in California. The ears were less foxlike.
“I wonder where they went.”
“We’ve seen no evidence of spaceflight,” Lyle said.
His voice was thoughtful. “Nor of massive-scale warfare. No destruction like we would expect from a large asteroid hit, and the iridium in the air is normal. Maybe disease? Some particularly deadly virus causing a pandemic? But there are no bodies. All of this is speculation, of course. We’ll never know. ”
I gazed at the statue, nearly a hundred feet tall, surrounded by the enormous, smooth-walled domes.
I was close enough now to see how the domes differed: some were ringed with massive granite columns, others intricate workings of metal resembling abstract works of art, still others flowing marble sculptures of landscapes or seascapes. “They knew how to build.”
“They did.”
“But time caught up to them.” An entire world-conquering species had risen and fallen in the space of a single day.
“Yes.”
On day thirty-six, the Earth was gray and dead. The entire planet was blanketed by a layer of dark, matte black cloud cover hundreds of feet thick. From space, the Earth was a ball of lead, floating through darkness. Under the clouds it was cold, although there was little snow.
“Asteroid or comet impact,” Lyle said. “The average iridium level in the air is very high. Want to try to find the impact site?”
“Sure.”