Chapter 36 #2
We flew for some time, Lyle taking various readings, before we found it.
It was enormous, a hole in the world on the eastern edge of the Eurasia supercontinent.
We flew to the lip of the crater, and I walked along the edge for a time, my boots plowing through a dense layer of ash, each step sending plumes in the still, gray air.
The crater stretched next to me, so colossal it was easier to internalize it by imagining I stood on a mountaintop, looking down a massive slope toward the ground below.
Steam rose in huge plumes in the distance, near the center of the crater.
“Judging by iridium and sulfate aerosol levels in the air, this impact took place less than fifty years ago,” Lyle said.
“How big would it have been?”
“The crater is one hundred and thirty miles in diameter. Extrapolating from that, I would estimate an asteroid size of between five and eight miles in diameter, depending on material composition and speed at impact. The energy output would have been slighter larger than the asteroid strike responsible for the Chicxulub crater, an impact considered at least partially responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.”
I stopped and stared around at the gray darkness. “Is there anything left alive?”
“Across the entire world? Certainly. Bacteria and viruses for sure. Some hardy plant life, small mammals and insects, sea life. The Earth has been through this cycle before. Life will recover.”
I nodded.
“Do you want to keep going?” Lyle asked.
I laughed. “What else is there to do?”
Lyle was silent. I resumed walking.
On the thirty-seventh day, it was sunny and beautiful.
One moment I stood in heavy, cold, oppressive darkness.
I blinked, the world slipped, and I stood in early-morning sunlight streaming sideways along a mountain range between high banks of puffy white clouds.
Trees, alien in their twisting, vine-like nature and massive, flat leaves, rose around me and shivered in the morning wind.
“Ah,” I muttered, and a deerlike creature to my left jerked its head up, startled, and crashed away through the underbrush on six churning, spindly legs.
“All the continents have drifted together by now,” Lyle said. “This flora is very interesting. The evolution of trees of this size and configuration must have necessitated—”
“What year is it now? Approximately, I mean.”
“Three hundred and seventy-six million, five hundred thousand CE. Give or take a few thousand years.”
I laughed. “What’s a few thousand years between friends, anyway?”
“How are you feeling, Dad?”
The sunlight was warm on my face. “I don’t know.”
I had Lyle take us into the upper atmosphere. I gazed down at the surreal, alien landscape. Lush jungle, interspersed with rivers and a few massive lakes. Mountains rose in the distance, an enormous chain crossing from one horizon to the other.
“Pangea Ultima has formed,” Lyle said. “A single supercontinent. The mountain range is most likely the border between what was once North America and Africa.”
I picked the highest point I could see and had Lyle fly me there.
I walked along the mountaintop under clear skies, the sun turning the snow-covered ground an ethereal, sparkling white.
I sat on an outcropping and stared at the incredible, wild lands around us.
Clouds rolled in, churning storm heads bringing torrents of water as they butted up against the mountain range.
I watched the storm. I read the Word again. I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, what I’d missed the first half dozen times I’d read it. But for some reason I kept coming back, back to Lyle’s words, and each time a certain passage would resonate with me.
“The End will come, eventually. Not just our own personal endings, but the End of everything as we know it. The universe itself will cease to be. It may end in a reversal of its beginning, collapsing down into the Big Crunch. Or, as current theories suggest, it may continue to expand onward, until the last embers of the stars burn themselves out, until the last black holes evaporate into nothingness, until the temperature of the entire universe drops to absolute zero and the atoms themselves cease their endless movement. A crunch, or a whimper, or something yet unimagined. But unlike the universe, we are not bound by physics, by the constraints of quantum mechanics. How will your ending come? How will you make it?”
I stood and walked along the craggy, ice-covered peak, listening to the wind howl.
The sun, here in the thin atmosphere, reminded me of how it looked on the moon, enormous and brilliant, undimmed by air or clouds.
I looked down a thousand-foot rock face.
It was as if the mountainside had been sheared off by a great ax, leaving behind the naked, exposed innards of the huge mountain.
“Dad?” Lyle asked. His voice was soft, gentle.
“I suppose you would catch me if I jumped.”
“Yes.”
“Would I even die, now, if you didn’t? With all the enhancements the Consciousness gave me, if I fell and fell until I hit the ground, would I even die?”
Lyle was silent for a long moment. “Eventually, if I didn’t help you. You would be in enormous pain.”
I snorted. “No shit.”
“Dad, are you—”
“It’s strange, not having to eat or drink anymore.” I toed a piece of ice off the edge. It tumbled, caught a draft of wind, and spun away. Disappeared. “It’s like I’m not human anymore.”
“Maybe, in one sense of the word, you’re not. But you’re still you, still Scott Treder.”
“As much as I can be, I suppose. As much as anyone is the same person they were the night before, when they wake up the next morning.”
“Dad—”
I pushed another piece of ice off the edge, watched it until it vanished. “Do you have some built-in self-destruct capability for when you can’t take it anymore? Or do you have to keep going?”
Lyle was silent for a long time. “Were I to so decide, I could, theoretically, destroy myself. I could shred the tenuous and ephemeral aspects of my computational matrix forming me, forming my sentience, the thing that understands what I am. The thing that could look in a proverbial mirror, see an errant mark on my face, and wipe it off. In that manner, I could, in a sense, commit suicide. Like Xavier. Like my son did.”
“Christ. I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I’ve had decades to get past it.”
I looked out across the crater, vast and deep. “What happens?”
“After you die?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the question of all conscious creatures, isn’t it?
What is the end, and is it a true ending, or the beginning of something else?
Did I—the thing that is me, was me in my physical life—carry on to some next existence?
I can’t say. And even I, having copied my memories into this computer system, can’t comprehend nothingness, the total absence of thought, absence of being.
Like you, like all humans, like all conscious creatures, I can’t truly imagine losing my sense of self, the ability to think.
When I consider an absence of thought, I am still thinking, as it were, still imagining myself as myself, there in the nothingness. ”
“Maybe that’s the point of it all. Total release from everything in this world, this universe.”
“Maybe. Of course, there are opposing views.”
“Such as?”
“Heaven and Hell. An afterlife, where suicides are punished for capriciously discarding the gift of self-awareness.”
“Do you believe in Hell, Lyle?”
“I do not believe, and never have, in that for which I can find no compelling evidence.”
I barked out a short laugh. “A very lawyerly way of putting it. Maybe more politician than lawyer, talking without saying anything.”
“Call it what you will.” Lyle was silent for a moment, and I started to lose myself in the slow roll of the clouds. His voice brought me back. “Do you really want to die, Dad?”
I stood on the edge of the mountain, rocking in the occasional gust of wind, listening to the silence, feeling the sun on my face and none of the terrible cold.
I stared down the sheer face of the rock wall, watching it slide away below me.
With a mental twist of my perspective, I saw the wall as the ground, flat and stretching out in every direction, as though I was hanging on to the side of a vast plate.
I felt, once again, the cold circle of my own pistol, pressing hard against my forehead. The icy rage in the eyes of the man whose friend or relative I’d killed. Sitting there, in that chair, under the bare lightbulb, bloody and tired.
Just fucking do it.
I’d thought I’d wanted to die.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to die, bud. Not yet.”
“Good.”
On day thirty-eight, the temperature across the planet was scorching.
The ice caps had melted, and much of the surface of the Earth was underwater.
Mountains were islands. The little land left exposed was desert, especially in the equatorial regions.
Even so, Lyle and I still found life. Lizard-like creatures, small and fast, hunted flying insects.
The insects, in turn, appeared to live off hearty, cactus-like plants.
The supercontinent had split again. There were new continents under the waves, demarcated by the island tops of underwater mountains.
“Plate tectonics don’t stop,” Lyle said.
The next morning, I stood on one of the islands and watched the sun rise. When the world slipped, I fell, plummeting perhaps ten feet before Lyle caught me.
“Shit!”
“Sorry,” Lyle said. “I should’ve anticipated the geographical change.”
I looked down. What had been an island in the middle of a massive ocean was now a craggy, empty desert far below me. Desolate gray land stretched from horizon to horizon as far as I could see. “Where’s the ocean?”
“Boiled off.” Even as he spoke, the sun edged above the horizon, and although it was hidden behind a heavy curtain of dense clouds, I could see it was larger and a deep orange red.