(Originally published in Children of Lovecraft.)
[::AFTER::]
Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, there were birds. Thin delicate arrows of bone and feather, crossing the dry horizons of the earth like the needles of the universe, stitching the planet together with their call. Billions of them, spiraling in coils like wind-swept dragons kissing the baby blue vault of the sky. Settling into the trees during cold nights like clusters of fluttering dark leaves, and bursting into high bright song every morning as the unstoppable sun breached the horizon like a volcanic god. Once upon a time, I was a girl and there were birds.
But those days have been gone for many long millennia. All warm-blooded life, all land once bone dry, all seasons once cold—all have been long banished from this warm water realm; and all the birds have died, along with most of the animals we few remaining half-humans remember, those magnificent amber-eyed creatures of feather and fur. Like childhood, they exist solely as memories, outdated maps to a country we can never return to. In the wake of His passage, all has been transformed.
When I sleep, I dream deep and hard, as we all do. Sleeping, I drink in and drown in memories, the last memories of the last survivor of a long-dead race. I awake still dreaming, the smell of pine pitch and rustlings of birds and trees lingering in the tendrils of those long-lost territories. Gradually, always, the sounds disappear into the soft song of stone chimes hanging from the arches of my roofless chamber, sounding out the passage of tiny cnidarians as they float and swim through the hot damp air. I rise up from my bed and watch their pulsing bodies push through the ceramic domes, tentacles trailing like strands of winking lights. Outside, larger beings, capillatas and medusas and creatures I have no names for, catch in the overgrown vegetation then burst free in silent explosions of gelatinous flight, disappearing into the pale sunless mists that have muted day and lightened night. These are the birds of the world now. And they are stupendous. They are beautiful.
The boy, hardly a boy anymore but something caught between boy and alien wonder, lingers in the crumbling remains of the other room, waiting for me to rise, his soft lips always in a slight smile that hides a mouth of teeth that ages ago fused together into a single ridged wall of bone. His reluctance at leaving me behind on the evolutionary ladder touches me. Sometimes I catch him slumbering, and I press my unclothed body against his, eyelids lowering as I join him in reverie. More and more, we remain like that for immeasurable passages of time, flickering images of past lives washing through our conjoining flesh and minds, breaking apart only when some mysterious creature brushes past us in its accidental perambulations through our home. No such lingering coupling for us this wan morning, though. Outside and far away, on the last and highest mountaintop in the world, our youngest children patiently await us, and as if in a dream I have realized that the time has come to meet them.
•••
[::MEMORY #2724869.1::]
July 17, 24—, 11:38.52 PM
Roman Wall City, Mount Baker
PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.01
[::WAKE::]
[::WAKE::]
[::WAKE::]
[::REMINDER: 12:15.00 AM CAR PICK-UP, 1:00.00 AM DESTINATION SUMMIT CRATER ESTATES::]
He is coming. He is coming. He is coming. The alarm is going off, but it’s this nightmare that’s really ripping the sleep from me, again. I’m waking up as I always do, trembling and panting, sheets all twisted around my body, the mattress and my t-shirt are so wet and slick that—no, I didn’t wet the bed. Huh. Well, that was a horrifying moment. God, it’s so hot. I bet the AC has gone out again. Let me check.
I was whispering when I woke up. He is coming. Repeating it, chanting, like a prayer. How long have I been saying those words? My mind keeps going over the dream. The horizon, the Pacific bulging up and out like a bowl until the waters break.
No, it’s working, barely. Going through the motions. [::REC OFF::]
[::REC ON::]I went to the bathroom, and now I’m in front of the open food locker, letting this feeble chill wash over me as I drink the last of the filtered water—though I’d specifically saved it for my morning tea, and my grocery appointment isn’t until the 19th. Oh well. I needed it. I probably shed five pounds of sweat onto my poor bed.
It’s pitch black outside, so I’m rolling both the blinds and the UV shades up. I hope the video for all of this is uploading. No lights in the apartment, no reflection in the window except for a faint purple wink of the wireless implant at my left temple. I’m pressing my nose against the glass, I can see all the way across and down the southwest slopes to the edges. Autumn comes earlier every year, and already great swathes of gold and red run through the forests, needles and leaves falling faster than rain. People are saying this is the final die-off, that this is the start of the end. They say that every year, though. There are little pockets of light all the way down the mountain into the foothills and valleys, pockets of those like me who can afford 24-hour electricity and avoid the brownouts. The rest of the slope is dark as a tomb. Occasional flashes of light, though—probably fires. Sometimes police cars or ambulances.
Sometimes, though I don’t know why I think this, the lights look like something else. Organic, almost bioluminescent, like the flashing of giant anglerfish, luring we few night owls outside, into our benthic doom. There they go, again.
[::M-FLASH::]
seven years ago, after the Pan-Pacific tsunami waters receded
valleys and rivers of green fire.
[::/M-FLASH::]
I don’t know if this is even uploading to my online diary or if I’m the only one who will ever read this, when I’m old and bored and out of memories to make. The aurora borealis—bands of bright orange and cold blue flickering high above the horizon. Unfolding and spiraling upwards in thin streams, like twisters of wildfire, like the ocean is unraveling. It’s the wrong time of year for the lights. How odd.
Beyond the valley, beyond the peaks of the Olympic Mountain Archipelago and the Vancouver Island Ranges, is the Pacific. I can’t see it from here, even as high up as I am and as much as the ocean has risen, but those even higher and far richer than me, those with homes at the summit with their high-powered telescopes, they can see the coast grow closer with every passing year, filling up valleys, sliding over low foot hills, filling in all the spaces of the world. In less than two hours I’ll be in one of those summit homes, one of those guests of a guest affairs where I’ll be granted access to the gated stronghold of one of the few remaining mega rich families via the arm of my handsome silver-haired date, a banking acquaintance further down the ridge at Colfax Peak, who’s probably looking for a companion higher up the mountain he can move in with when the waves start knocking at his door. I’m not judging—tonight I’ll be doing the same thing. We all spend our lives looking up now, much more than looking down. There’s so much less to look up to anymore. I should get ready.
[::REMINDER!::] Pack my collapsible water bottle, in case there’s no timer on their bathroom faucets.
Oh, the nightmare. I never got around to having that DreamCatcher app installed in my wetware, way back before internet access got so slow and spotty you can’t upgrade anything anymore, and so I was going to think all the images into this diary when I woke up—that was the whole point of this entry. And of course, I’ve forgotten most of the details. All I remember now are bells, gigantic church bells or gongs, a constant thunderous ringing as all the oceans of the world pour up into the sky, and everything sinks below.
[::/MEMORY::]
•••
[::AFTER::]
We take the long way, as always, across the great delta to the watery marshes that lap against the chain of ancient mountain peaks we and the other remaining elders have made our final home. I never need to remind or insist, the boy knows my every routine as if it is his own. Roads and trails have been reduced to shadows and suggestions of themselves, spectral threads of our previous passage that are only slightly less overgrown than the surrounding jungle. Our feet know the way only by instinct anymore. You could call it mere, but instinct seems more and more to be the wondrous order of our endless day. We sleep and dream and eat and breathe in the super-saturated air; and decades and centuries and perhaps even millennia go by before we stop and think, I am doing this, I am picking up that, I remember that place and that time, I am here, right here, and it is now. And we no longer remember the terrible, human limit of finite days and years, all that weight of decay and mortality. Time simply is, it stretches out like this wilderness, like the waters, like the river of stars that spirals across the sky, drawing ever closer with every phase of the moons. There is so much of it now. Sometimes the boy and I weep at the thought, the thought of us being within it and a part of it, of becoming vast and endless and, and. And.
So much endless becoming. We lap at the edges, daring to taste, to wonder: what will it be like, when we finally succumb, are subsumed? And then, like tiny fish, we dart away. For now.
Through jungles of gold and green ferns, high as trees, across warm rivers and wetlands, draped in brown hanging moss and blood red flowers. All the colors of a crisp northern fall, erupting out of an endlessly sub-tropic world. Masses of giant starfish-headed worms cling to boulders, their rows of bead-black eyes noting our progress as their suckered arms grind the smooth surfaces away. We find the skiff, an ancient hardwood beauty, tied to the tree that has grown higher and thicker in the long stretches of time between each journey, and slip into the currents. Skeletal vestiges of the tips of skyscrapers glide past, covered in green, followed by slender tree trunks and vines mimicking the angular shapes of the towers they once latched onto and fed off of, towers that collapsed ages ago as the trees grew on. Our public spaces, our thoroughfares and byways are lush carpets of sea grass in shallow waters, waving us through the serene backwaters of what were once our last cities, our last homes.
Above the roof of the wilderness, three pale spires float into view. The fourth barely rises above the tree line, looking like the broken stub of a finger bone. And then: a column-lined stone road leading to an arched gateway that devours it like a mouth; and beyond the gate, the high stone and granite walls of the crumbling former holy palace that has become through all our ages and evolutions so many different kinds of schools, the crown that rests on the highest summit of the last remaining land mass in the world. Next to the water’s edge, a figure sits at the broken base of a cyclopean Buddha, worn back down into the featureless aerolith from which it was born. The man. He spends all his time now with the children, watching them grow, teaching them and learning from them, embracing change almost as quickly as they do. I wonder which of the youngest I will no longer recognize. I wonder which of them will no longer recognize me. Someday, the boy and I will join them, as will the few remaining humans like us, the elders who still live alone in the lands; and then it will be all of us together, a colony of one, pulsing and expanding as one, drawing up all the waters of this world as our body becomes a sail with which to catch and ride the sonic songs of distant stars.
The skiff catches the shore, and the boy leaps out. The man moves forward, offering to me his graceful, fingerless hand. He sees and speaks and breaths solely through his limbs and soft skin now, his features long subsumed into the smooth brown of a hairless head that even now the ghost of a welcoming smile lingers within. He pulls me up with ease, and we stand together in the shadows of the leaves, arms encircling, foreheads touching. He still knows us, but he no longer knows who we are. A familiar fading purple light at the side of his head winks once, like a candle that sputtered out only to immediately die. He is trying to commit our faces to permanent memory again, his brain and the technology going through the motions without understanding that it is nothing more than a death rattle. Like the boy, and all the other Elders, whose cerebral hardware and ports died out at the start of the After, their past lives have vanished. There is only the present for them, a memory-free, streamlined evolution into the future. Only I still remember that even these moments will be wiped away clean. I have no choice. I cannot forget.
[::M-FLASH::]
his beautiful silver hair
[::/M-FLASH::]
•••
[::MEMORY #2724869.3::]
July 18, 24—, 02:05.07am
Ballad House, Summit Crater Estates, Mount Baker
PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.04
[::FILE CORRUPTION::]
—by the standards of today, I’m rich and jaded and cruel, but even for me it’s a bit grotesque. I could never eat that. I politely decline and the waiter gracefully moves away into the crowd with their silver tray. The first group is back from their tour, moving through the double doors into the living room, most of them excited and flushed, a few somber and quiet. People forget their drinks and their important conversations, crowd around them, touch their bright red cheeks and gasp and laugh. What they’ve just seen, few people in the world have seen for hundreds of years—and even the most powerful people on the planet, scientists and politicians and queens, they have not seen, will never see this thing. Perhaps they don’t remember it exists anymore. We’re all so busy running from the ocean and cowering under the sun, there’s no time for anything else anymore. A shiver is running through me, despite the almost suffocating heat in the room. I’m in group twelve. I don’t mind waiting. I’ve found out that when you’re the last, it means you can find out little things the ones who went before you didn’t know, secrets and cheats. Sometimes you learn how to stay as long as you want.
I’m walking over to the side of the room, now, to the bar. Except for my date, I don’t know any of these people here tonight. Not the usual crowd that attends these events.
No more unlimited ice—they started rationing before the first half-hour was up. Our hosts have been gracious and apologetic, explaining the lack of usual amenities to the unusual temperature spikes, to the diverting of resources to other areas of the estate. Money can buy anything, but we’ve long been coming to the end of how much there is in the world to buy.
Another drink, with a single shard of ice, no larger than one of my nails. Gone. It’s disappeared so quickly, I might have imagined it. I’m walking out into the square outdoor courtyard that sits in the middle of the house, and look up past the slashing lines of concrete and steel to the faint twinkle of stars pushing through the humidity and haze. God, what an ugly-looking building. Uglier than most. Certainly not a mansion, barely a house. More like some giant reached into the mountain, grabbed the top of a nuclear bunker and pulled it halfway out of the rock. It’s been built to survive anything, I’ve heard—all of the buildings at Summit Crater have. Our hosts insist that they designed every last detail of their home, as well as all the other homes on the gated estate, but over the decades, rumors have flown.
[::M-FLASH::]
weapons testing facility
center for disease control
torture and detention center
?astro-archaeology?
[::/M-FLASH::] [::REC OFF::]
[::REC ON::] Boring conversation over with. It’s almost my group’s time to go. People are pointing up. The lights again, the aurora borealis, streamers of thick blue and white lights overhead like comet showers. What was the name of that famous one, that crossed the planet’s path every century? [::SEARCHING…SEARCHING…/SEARCH::] No internet. Never mind. I’m standing in the middle of the courtyard with everyone else, staring up at the moving sky. All the constellations, spiraling, circling. All of us, drifting like torn sea grass, falling up—
In the next room people are laughing, like waves over breaking glass. I’m stumbling over to a bench, my evening companion suddenly at my side, his hand around my bare arm. My head bent down. It’s okay, I’m not drunk, I hear myself saying as I’m rubbing my eyes. It’s just the stars. It’s just the bells.
[::/MEMORY::]
•••
[::AFTER::]
All schools look the same, smell the same, sound the same as we walk through their echoing halls. Even after so many eons, even in air so thick with water that most days now the boy’s and my too-slowly-evolving antediluvian lungs struggle to breath. Those elders who are further down that starry road than the rest of us agree. They remember, too. The tiny purple and blue lights that still spark and wink at the sides of our glabrous heads, they remember for us. They let us forget nothing. The colors of curled crayoned papers fluttering against cream and lime walls. The speckled linoleum, yellowed and cracked with blooms of algae and moss bursting between each square. The long hallways, silent and high and wide, lined with rusting lockers and dusty windows and open classroom doors. The miniature size of each round-edged wooden desk and rickety chair. All as familiar as if we were human children again. The only thing missing is the soft smell of chalk in the air.
I reach out with the tip of one long sticky digit, and touch the faded remains of a drawing of tall green plants. The paper is so delicate that it dissolves at my slightest touch, bursting into thousands of particles that hang in the air like insects. Had it been the work of one of my thousands of children, back in the early centuries of the post-transformation of the world, when we were still more human than not? The implant in the dissolving remnants of my brain comes up with no memories. As we move down the cracked stone floors, past pale branches with snapping flowers and clusters of tall sea grass erupting from lockers and doorways, a single bell peals gently from one of the towers. Wind, perhaps, or a school of floating polyps. The boy and I smile in unison.
Hallways and stairways converge, pouring into a roofless, multi-leveled atrium. Tiny lizards sleep on the balustrades and warm floors. The man heads off in another direction, down wide steps of graying marble that lead to underground rivers, bioluminescent rooms, and glittering nocturnal pools, where those children and elders reside as a single entity that is so far beyond and above us that the boy and I hear its song only as a faint impulse, a tug of the heart that catches only to release and melt away before we can join in.
Not yet. It’s not my time just yet.
The boy and I continue down the steps toward the masses of supine bodies that cover the floor, drape across balustrades and up stairwells, hang over balcony railings like glistening tapestries. Toward the center of the room they begin to merge, bodies conjoining and melding together, forming a singular living mass that flows down through a wide, round fissure in the middle of the space. Beneath the collective breath and shifting of their bodies, the constant low roar of the ocean works its way up through the remains of the mountain, through the funnel of pulsing flesh that endlessly descends toward their brothers and sisters in the watery chambers below. Plumes of brine and sweet decay fill my lungs, the scents of my children and the elders as they begin their final journey into the ever-increasing being that shall someday span the ocean, that shall someday consume the entire planet, that shall someday take its place once again as a traveler of the dark river of stars, that shall someday find some other bright blue world in which to sink and shrink and settle and dream until the time is right once again for the cycle of life to repeat.
We make our way through ropes of softening bone, columns of vibrating limbs, our hands running over humming flesh as we pass through the room to the other side. I feel their thoughts vibrate into me like electrical currents, welcomes and salutations and declarations of familial love, equations and astral projections and all the cosmic revelations that come with pending godhood. The air becomes easier to breath, and the myriad needle pains of my ageless body fade. These children of mine do not understand me, but they love me and they heal me, because I have shown each of them the wondrous and mind-altering glimpse of what is to come, of what we will all become. I alone contain the glimpse of our future-self.
•••
[::MEMORY #2724869.4::]
July 18, 24—, 04:12.08am
[::SEARCHING::]
PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.07
Dammit dammit I forgot to turn the diary back on until now. Much better now—it was just the heat, that’s all. And now I’m standing at the end of a long underground hallway with one of my hosts, and the six other people in my group, my silver-haired date included. I’m looking back down the hallway, and I can’t quite make out the door we entered through. That’s how long it is. There’s a steep slant to the floor. We went down.
My date is next to me, holding my hand, we’re watching in silence as our host and their security team unlock the door. We’re all looking away, respectfully, although they’re not entering codes. The entire door is covered in locks and cogs and tumblers. It was built for a world without electricity—that’s why there are small shell-shaped recesses in the walls. For candles or lamps, maybe. I bet this used to be a shelter. The higher the oceans drive us, the lower we sink. I can’t help but feel we deserve this, that we brought this all on ourselves.
Enough of that. My date’s hand is at the small of my back. He’s smiling, and I’m returning it. This, right here and now, is an incredible, singular moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life. This will shape and define me in ways I have yet to understand. It’s only a few degrees cooler within the mountain, but I’m so unused to the difference, I’m almost high—and this is just the start. The vertigo and confusion of earlier in the night is gone—I was overheated, dehydrated, the alcohol didn’t help. Guests always faint at these things, we don’t know how to pace ourselves anymore. Now I’m practically levitating with excitement.
The door is clicking, our host—he’s saying something… it was once one of only three in the Northern Hemisphere, but he has it on good authority that the other two are long gone, and there are no more in the south…something about quadruple-insulated glass walls, twenty-four-hour security, blast doors and walls…slow down, I missed a date. It’s very old, the oldest thing you could imagine, created even before the Ice Age, whenever that was. One of the guards is ushering us through into a small antechamber, where we’re being instructed to slip on long fur-lined coats with hoods, face masks, gloves, heavy booties that look like tree stumps. The room is growing cool, very cool, very quickly. We’re crowding together, there’s just enough room for all of us with all this fabric swaddling our fancy outfits. I’m pressed between my date and a young man, maybe fourteen or fifteen, with long blonde hair and a baby-soft face. Familiar—the host’s son, or a donor clone? So hard to tell anymore. The door behind is clanking shut, and the door in front of us is now opening. He is coming, I whisper. Shaking my head, laughing like I told a stupid joke. I meant to say, this is it.
The woman in front of me is passing out as the door slowly opens—
—super-cold—
—murky heat of th—
—opens into the snow—
[::FILE CORRUPTION::]
—she cannot remember this image
—yes we agree
[::FILE LOCK::]
—son-clone, is speaking to my date, I’m catching the end of their conversation, his amazing offer we’re both now saying yes to in unison, as we’re directed back through the two-foot-thick doors into the hall. It seems our night of wonders has yet to end.
•••
[::AFTER::]
Past the oculus of ocean-saturated flesh we wander, through the crumbling arch of a doorway and up wide stairs. More hallways, lined with worn stone doors. Rough bands of dead coral and the tiny bones of antediluvian sea creatures are embedded in the surface of the walls, creatures completely unfamiliar to me. After the After, there were waves of tsunamis that circled the surface of the world again and again, remaking it entirely new, there were epochs of monstrous and amazing creatures that thrived and died off in mass extinctions as the planet recalibrated again and again, as we who survived realized that we too had recalibrated, and were part of the chain of change. To our right, light pours in through rows of windows, the glass panes long cracked and worn away. Fog sifts over the sills in flowing bands of soft pure white, and our thin bodies turn it into coiling serpents that wilt and fade in our wake. That color is a rarity now, it reminds me of a moment so thoroughly buried in my past, that to access it takes lengths of time that spans the cycles of the moons. Only with the help of my children can I melt the eons away. But it is more than that. I want them all to know what it was to be awake, alive.
The boy stops before one partially open door. I follow him in. In this place, more than any other, sometimes the old thoughts and emotions reemerge, and curiosity comes to life again within us. This is the room with the globes, row after row of round, almost weightless planets and moons, perched on stands that allow them to spin and gyre in place. I don’t know if the boy remembers what they represent anymore, but it is clear he remembers his pleasure in spinning them, in staring at the continents and islands and rivers and seas whirling with the touch of his hands. Most of the map features have vanished, some globes have rotted away into half-shells, others are simply dust. All are static snapshots of a planet whose surface has shifted countless times. Faint traces of maps cover the classroom walls, painted on the stone and plaster. Long ago, when they were legible, I could make out trails and calculations, the plans of routes and journeys, cuneiform scratches that spelled out destinations. There was a time we thought we could reverse the process, escape our fate. But from this place, the highest mountaintop in the world, there was no where else to run.
An elder appears before us in the doorway, its featureless head nodding as multiple arms beckon us forward. I don’t recognize it. Are they someone I once knew, in our human life before the After? They have no mouth. Their port, if they ever had one, is dead, and their mind is already becoming attuned to the writhing confluence below, their body soon to follow. No urgency drives its movements, only instinct, and so we continue our circuit around the room, taking as much time as we need and desire, our fingers entwined, mesmerized by the thick layers of pasts crowding the space like ghosts. We let them wash over and through us until we are sated, until some restless primal human emotion or urge in each of us has subsided. I let the boy leave the room first, and I follow, both of us letting the elder lead us to the end of the hall and into a small classroom covered in soft rugs and lined with chains of bright prayer flags.
Multiple heads and eyes turn toward me. It always takes me by such surprise, it’s a jolt to my heart I never can steel myself against. Multiple human heads, human faces. Is this what I looked like when I was a child, or when their father, the boy, was a newly-formed child clone? Small mouths and noses, rows of even teeth, pupils of blue and hazel and green that dilate beneath lids lined with delicate lashes of hair, but that’s where any resemblance ends. Their bodies are tall and thin like reeds, they tower over me. Some of the children have no ears, a few have thinning hair, most have no genitals. They have arrived at that moment in their lives when puberty once would have taken over and shaped them into adult human beings, but they are about to take a far different path to adulthood, if it can be called that anymore. They will shift and morph, and there will be ages of wandering and discovery of each other and what lies beyond the horizons of these waterlogged peaks. They shall dream, dream of an existence in which they never awaken. And eventually they shall return, and become part of the whole, become what I saw rising from the waves and its dreams so many, many countless ages ago.
The boy stands at the side of the room as I make my way to the middle. As I lay down, hands reach out and touch my naked skin. I settle in, relaxing as my children form a cocoon around me, bodies draped over me, each touching the other so that none of them are not in some way connected to the others. This is how they communicate, how they learn. I close my eyes. Eventually, I feel the delicate touch of fingers at my left temple. They are about to merge with my wetware, enter the vast network of memories and files. There is only a moment of unease, and th—
[::REC INTERRUPTED::]
[::REC OVERRIDE::]
[::ACCESS TRANSFER COMPLETE::]
•••
[::MEMORY #2724869.5::]
July 18, 24—, 05:32.08am
Ballad House, Summit Crater Estates, Mount Baker
PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.08
[::FILE CORRUPTION::]
—ver seen such lighting in the sky. Great bolts of it split the dark apart, each one so bright that we gasp in shock and clutch our eyes every time the sky lights up around us. And yet no thunder—this storm is completely silent. The aurora borealis has vanished, pushed away by whatever system is moving through the night. The boy is guiding the hands and face of my silver-haired date to the massive telescope that rests on the edge of the expansive covered terrace that crowns the house. Their fingers move together and apart, the boy’s hand rests against the back of the man’s head as he adjusts the lens until the man nods slightly. They work well together. [::DELETION::] He’s got the hang of it now, and the boy is moving away, letting the man aim the massive column of bright metal in a slow arc back and forth across the slopes of the mountain. He’s exclaiming how he can see into people’s apartments, halfway down Mount Baker, watching TV, arguing, having sex. He’s looking for his apartment now—not his current home, the one he grew up in, that’s long been subsumed by the Pacific. The boy is smiling. Everyone does this, apparently. They all want to see remnants of the places they once lived in, the towns their parents and grandparents came from, the waterlogged vestiges of Bellingham, Everett, Seattle, the cloudy peaks of the Olympic archipelago. Everyone wants to see their past.
Despite the eerie weather, a few other people have joined us, close friends and family of the hosts only, the most private of parties within the most private of parties. Everyone has a drink in one hand, is ranting about the strange room half a mile below our feet, the odd lights in the southern sky, the restlessness and unease that none of us can seem to escape. I’m sitting down in a cushy chair, clutching the arms and staring up at the tiny votive candles that flicker on cocktail tables scattered across the space. I’m squeezing my eyes shut until all I see are orange flickerings of hot life that wink in and out of view.
Someone is talking softly about the bells.
The boy is tapping me on the shoulder, it’s my turn now. The man is stepping aside, placing one hand on my back again as I take his place. I’m following his instructions, moving the levers around as I adjust the lens. You won’t see the old cities, he’s telling me, except for the skyscrapers, most of them are gone. Farther out, I’m telling him. The boy is helping me turn the telescope—it moves easily but I’m surprised at the weight of it beneath my hands. Together we aim it south and east, just beyond the remaining mountain peaks. I’m looking for our enemy ocean. I want to see exactly what’s coming for me.
Long slivers of silver. The light of the full moon, reflecting in the silky rippling dark. That’s it. The ocean. A continent of water, nothing more. From here, it’s so benign. I sense no malice in the horizon before me, no intent. Above it sits a night sky hazily studded with stars, stretching out forever. Everywhere, so much neutral, quiet water and space. I’m blinking, staring at the crest of the horizon again. The silver light quivers slightly—is it curving? Are the waters moving? Whales, I’m saying, are there still whales out there because it looks like something’s swimming across the surface, and the man replies no one’s seen a whale in two hundred years while the boy is reminding us of the floating cities, multitudes of ships sailing in unison from one land mass to the next and now it’s hitting me oh god I know I know what’s happening He is coming I’m so cold I’m so cold I’m saying this out loud oh it’s a wave it’s a wave the light at the top of the wave tsunami it’s a tsunami and thunder, so loud it stops my hear—
[::FILE INTERRUPTION::]
—ailing of the tsunami sirens begins, echoing all up and down the mountainside. Behind me, screaming, crashing of chairs, the sounds of panicked people scattering like flies. I’m going, are you coming because I’m not waiting, the man is shouting at me, but I shrug his hand off my arm, just go already, I start to yell but he’s already gone, I can hear his voice from far off telling people to get the fuck out of his way and the boy is placing his hands around my trembling tight fingers telling me it’s okay it’s okay just let go I won’t leave you I’ll make sure you’re safe and silence now except for distant commotion from other parts of the house the squeal of car wheels and horns a single gun shot, and my breath sounds like some panting anim—
[::FILE INTERRUPTION::]
—oor beneath my feet, traveling up through my bones, as fast as those deep white lighting strikes ripping up through the night. A vast, heavy, steady roll of the earth, so powerful my heart is matching it beat for beat, as if there is no other way to survive. My head is slamming against the telescope, I’m bouncing back against the boy. The building is moaning along with the earth, cracks ripping through the walls and sending dust and pebbles of concrete showering through the air, the glass terrace doors shattering. I [::UNINTELLIGIBLE::] and the boy and I start toward the doors, and freeze again. Blast plates are lowering. The building is a watertight box, impenetrable, it’s how they’ve survived so many other waves. But we have to be on the ins—
[::FILE INTERRUPTION::]
—other massive strike rolls through the air, almost tugging us behind in its wake as it travels up through the mountain but lesser than the one before, and I grab the boy and he holds me tight. Lights and engines, shutting down all around us. I’m squinting in the dark, looking for any sign of life looking for any way out but I can’t see it. We’re standing at the top of a world that doesn’t exist anymore. No wind. No quakes. No sirens. It’s so quiet. So quiet.
We’re going to die, I’m saying, and the boy is replying I know. He is coming, I say. Yes, says the boy. We hold each other in the dark, listening for the coming wave, but it’s still so far away. The aurora borealis is back, or whatever that light is, a deep and relentless green that I now see rises up out of the ocean. I have to, I can do this, I can move, I’m walking stiff choppy steps, the boy beside me always, I’m grasping the telescope handles again and he’s helping me move it. Is this what you want, he’s asking, I’m saying yes I need to do this, I can’t just stand here and wait. Tell me what you see, he’s saying, don’t stop talking, just keep telling me what you see, and I’m telling him:
[::AFTER::]
Great ribbons of fire dancing along the edges of the water, the edge of the water, a wall moving continually without breaking, green and blue, deep colors like a crown.
So beautiful.
Stars moving behind, or comets, little sparkles of white light like glass in the sun like glass on tar roads when the sun hits it you remember how that looks.
The water is lighting up now, can you see it? All the blues and greens are, it’s like a wall of stained glass, liquid fire.
So fast. So fast. Sorry, I can hardly breathe, I didn’t think it would be this fast.
Put your arms around, yes, tighter. Tighter.
This is it.
I can feel it now, yes, that, rumble, that roaring, louder, everything’s trembling, OH MY GOD the wave is passing over the edges of the Olympics it’s coming so fast now there’s something in the water. Something in the—
OH GOD OH MY GOD IT’S NOT WATER THIS [::UNINTELLIGIBLE::] NOT WATER THAT ISN’T LIGHT there are so many parts so much movement coming NONE OF THIS IS WATER it’s so wide it so wide oh my god oh my god it’s almost HE’S HE’S HE’S—
[;;UNINTELLIGIBLE::]
EVERYWHERE EVERYWHERE EYES EYES EYES I SEE YOU I SEE YOU INSIDE INSIDE INSIDE I SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—
•••
[::AFTER::]
The air is choked with green wisps of gossamer webbing, thread-thin streamers that catch against our bodies, collide and collect against the vines that have made their way up to the rooftop of the school. The boy and I pull them gently from our naked skin. There is no repulsion in our act, no curiosity. We only wish to set them free. Like us, they are a part of this world, they are our dreaming god set free to cover and transform this planet, a component of our communal body whose purpose we cannot yet fathom, an integral part of the great After, of the great god, and in fact ourselves. The threads drift away in the slow breeze.
Downstairs, our children sleep in the classroom, dream in each others arms, their last afternoon surrounded by the ghost ruins of a human childhood they never experienced. Tomorrow they will be moved lower, closer to their conjoined siblings. Already their minds have processed the unimaginable, and it’s sparked the beginnings of a physical transformation into the very thing they uncovered in my mind. Or so we believe. We will not know for certain until it is finished, until we join them. Three floors above them, the boy and I spread out on the rooftop at the base of the broken spire, our bodies warming under the heat of a surprisingly strong sun that dares to occasionally break from behind an oddly cool haze. The man sits somewhat apart from us, his head nodding back and forth slightly. More and more he does this, his earlier greeting already slipping from his mind as his thoughts become attuned to all our children below, those at the beginning of their journey and those nearing the end. By the time we leave the school, he’ll remember little of our time together, if anything at all. The boy has these moments as well. There are long periods where he sits in our home, his thoughts adrift, his body trembling and shifting as he fights and accepts the biological call. What I feel inside, perhaps it was something I once called sorrow. I still remember everything that has happened in my life, before and After, except for one insignificant event that the loss of plagues my every waking thought, and I do not know why. Is it that moment when I dared to look upon the face of an ancient elder being? Is it that moment I became the first and only human who looked in his infinite eyes and did not go insane? Is it his face my children need to discover within my mind, or some other illusive memory that is hidden to me, some incident in my life that prevents me from becoming a part of the whole?
I’ll probably never know.
Below, the jungle spreads out before us in a thick carpet, down to the river that winds in and out of the edges of the ocean, an ocean smoothed out and dampened with patches of bright and dark greens, bubbles and slicks of primordial flesh that crest the surface and slide back down silently to the nurturing depths. Where the river and ocean and vast marshes all come together in a torrent of untamed life, I can make out the remains of the low, flat fields where I and the other elder humans who had once been female lay on our backs in countless rows, where we watched the seasons pass and the moons circle the skies a million times over as eggs poured out of us, a torrent of latent life, the only way our newly-transformed bodies could give birth. Those birthing fields once spread to the horizon. Every remaining human female from every corner of the world traveled here, like spawning fish, trapped in a biological drive our transforming bodies were helpless to ignore. Countless times I’ve sat on this roof with the boy, watching sexless elders like the man tend our future children, moving our brood into the school as they hatched into life. Countless times I’ve walked into those school rooms, opened my mind to their probing thoughts, and given them access to the image of what we once were and are once again becoming. A great elder being, reborn.
There are so few unhatched eggs now, and the fields are being subsumed into the wide maw of the encroaching marshes and swamps. This part of the cycle is ending. Birthing has ended. There are no more females or males in the world, and most of the human elders are gone. Melancholy—is that the word? Perhaps, but also anticipation. Curiosity. Wonder and joy. All the things that oceans and mountains cannot hold, that nature cannot impart or receive, that universes cannot feel.
I stretch my arms high into the air. Who is to say what will happen when I am received into the oculus below, when my body and mind and that tiny bit of circuitry that will not die join everyone I have ever loved and birthed and known. Perhaps this time we will become a being that rejects nothing and accepts all. Perhaps this time no one will be forgotten, and everyone remembered. Perhaps there will be no more dreaming.
•••
[::MEMORY #2724869.4::]
July 18, 24—, 04:12.08am
[::LOCATION UNKNOWN::]
PrionTech TemporalCortexDiary #74543.07
[::/FILE CORRUPTION::]
[::FILE UNLOCKED::]
—is this it? is this the memory of the dreaming goddess?
—yes this is what mother saw
—yes this is what we must find
—yes below the water, below
—yes this is what we will become
[::PLAY FILE::]
—passing out as the door slowly opens—she’s the first to feel the super-cold air slashing through what now feels like the murky heat of the antechamber. She’s falling against me, one of the guards is catching and moving her to the side as the door opens into the snow vault. Stupid, I’m crying a little, I never ever thought I’d feel cold air again, the cruel cold air that squeezes your lungs and stings your eyes, not the sad semi-efforts of the food locker or the AC. Rows of dim track lighting illuminate the chamber, most of them pointed at the center of the room. I’m staring at the very last remaining pack of snow from Everest. This is it. The heart of a glacier that once crowned the highest peak of the planet, that carved deep canyons in the earth that remain to this day. This is the last piece of glacier anywhere in the world. The great goddess Chomolungma lies naked and bare. All the mountains are naked and bare. We killed them all.
I’m stepping forward, slowly, one of the guards watching my every move. Someone is exclaiming as they walk to the other side, the host explaining how they moved it here thirty years ago from another facility—two more people are asking to leave the chamber, the sub-zero temperature is just too much for them. It’s not what I imagined it would look like. Parts of it are dirty and gray and hard, pocked with thousands of tiny holes. I don’t know what I was expecting—a mile-wide river of brilliant white and blue ribbons that glowed like a pearl, like in an old movie or book? It sort of looks like a chunk of cement the size of a delivery van. The man has pulled his face mask down, and he’s sniffing the air. I do the same, even though our host advises against it. The air is so dry and crisp it hurts to breathe. I don’t have any words for what it smells like. We smile and laugh and clouds of white jet out of our nostrils and mouths, hanging in the air like insects.
We’re walking around it in a circle now, the host rattling off a number of statistics and facts, I don’t care about those. No, he laughs, they won’t chip off bits for the drinks. The guards never take their eyes off us—they’re all armed. There’s a small round spot on one side of the rectangle, shiny as glass, no longer grey but pure brilliant white from years of supplicating hands wearing it away. So beautiful I almost gasp. One after another, we’re removing a glove and placing our hand briefly in the hollow. It’s my turn. Biting. Needle-pricks against my skin, wet-smooth ice, numbing, gelid. Life, ancient and incomprehensible, connected to all, to me. This is me.
Walking away, slipping the glove back on even though we’ll be back in the antechamber and undressing in seconds. Feeling the warmth soak through the layers of freezing skin and stiffening muscle, burning through me in delicious pain as if I’ve dipped my hand in fire. My heart, racing. I’ll never not be cold again. I’ve touched the heart of the world. I am this world. I’m not insignificant anymore.
[::LOCK::]
