The End Has Come (47 page)

“You survived the scan?” asked Maddie.

“Of course,” said Adam.

But Maddie sensed that this wasn’t quite right. Earlier, in the video, there were wrinkles near the corners of Adam’s eyes. The face of the Adam in front of her now was perfectly smooth.

“It’s not you,” said Maddie. “It’s not you.”

“It
is
me,” insisted Adam. “The only me that matters.”

Maddie closed her eyes and thought back to the times Adam had appeared on TV in interviews. He had said he didn’t want to leave Svalbard, preferring to conduct all his interviews remotely via satellite feed. The camera had always stayed close up, showing just his face. Now that she was looking for it, she realized that the way Adam had moved in those interviews had seemed just slightly odd, a little uncanny.

“You died,” said Maddie. She opened her eyes and looked at the Adam, this Adam with the smooth, perfectly symmetrical face and impossibly graceful limbs. “You died during the scan because there’s no way to do a scan without destroying the body.”

Adam nodded. “I’m one of the gods.”

“Why?” Maddie couldn’t imagine such a thing. All of the gods had been created as a last measure of desperation, a way to preserve their minds for the service of the goals of others. Her father had raged against his fate and fought so that none of the others had to go through what he did. To choose to become a brain in a jar was inconceivable to her.

“The world is dying, Maddie,” said Adam. “You know this. Even before the wars, we were killing the planet slowly. There were too many of us squabbling over too few resources, and to stay alive we had to hurt the world even more, polluting the water and air and soil so that we might extract more. The wars only accelerated what was already an inevitable trend. There are too many of us for this planet to support. The next time we fight a war, there won’t be any more of us to save after the nukes are done falling.”

“It’s not true!” Even as she said it, Maddie knew that Adam was right. The headlines and her own research had long ago led her to the same conclusion.
He’s right.
She felt very tired. “Are we the cancer of this planet?”

“We’re not the problem,” said Adam.

Maddie looked at him.

“Our bodies are,” said Adam. “Our bodies of flesh exist in the realm of atoms. Our senses require the gratification of matter. Not all of us can live the lifestyle we believe we deserve. Scarcity is the root of all evil.”

“What about space, the other planets and stars?”

“It’s too late for that. We’ve hardly taken another step on the moon, and most of the rockets we’ve been building since then have been intended to deliver bombs.”

Maddie said nothing. “You’re saying there is no hope?”

“Of course there is.” Adam waved his arm, and the white room transformed into the inside of a luxurious apartment. The hospital bed disappeared, and Adam was now standing in the middle of a well-appointed room. The lights of Manhattan shone beyond the darkened windows.

Adam waved his arm again, and now they were inside a voluminous space capsule. Outside the window loomed a partial view of a massive sphere of swirling bands of color, and a giant red oval slowly drifted among the bands like an island in a turbulent sea.

Once more, Adam waved his arm, and now it wasn’t even possible for Maddie to understand what she was seeing. There seemed to be a smaller Adam inside Adam, and yet a smaller Adam inside that one, and so on, ad infinitum. Yet she was somehow able to see all of the Adams at once. She moved her gaze around the space and felt dizzy: space itself seemed to gain an extra level of depth, and everywhere she looked she saw
inside
things.

“We could have all we ever desire,” said Adam, “if we’re willing to give up our bodies.”

A disembodied existence,
thought Maddie.
Is that really living at all?

“But this isn’t
real,”
said Maddie. “This is just an illusion.” She thought of the games she used to play with her father, of the green seas of grass that seemed to go on forever, of the babbling brooks that promised infinite zoom, of the fantastic creatures they had fought against, side by side.

“Consciousness itself is an illusion, if you want to follow that logic to its conclusion,” said Adam. “When you put your hand around a tomato, your senses insist that you’re touching something solid. But most of a tomato is made up of the empty space between the nuclei of the atoms, as far from each other, by proportion, as the stars are apart. What is color? What is sound? What is heat or pain? They’re but pulses of electricity that make up our consciousness, and it makes no difference whether the pulse comes from a sensor touching a tomato or is the result of computation.”

“Except there is a difference,” the voice of Mist said.

Maddie’s heart swelled with gratitude. Her sister was coming to her defense. Or so she thought.

“A tomato made up of atoms is grown in a distant field, where it must be given fertilizer mined from halfway across the world and dusted with insecticide by machines. Then it must be harvested, packed, and then shipped through the airways and highways until it arrives at your door. The amount of energy it takes to run the infrastructure that would support the creation and delivery of a single tomato is many times what it took to build the Great Pyramid. Is it really worth enslaving the whole planet so that you can have the experience of a tomato through the interface of the flesh instead of generating the same impulse from a bit of silicon?”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Maddie. “My grandmother and I grew our tomatoes on our own, and we didn’t need any of that.”

“You can’t feed billions of people with backyard gardens,” said Mist. “Nostalgia for a garden that never existed is dangerous. The mass of humanity depends on the fragile, power-intensive infrastructure of civilization. It is delusion to think you can live without it.”

Maddie remembered the words of her mother.
The world has become too fragile for us to count on people.

“The world of atoms is not only wasteful, it is also limiting,” said Adam. “Inside the data center, we can live anywhere we want and have whatever we want, with imagination as our only limit. We can experience things that our fleshly senses could never give us: live in multiple dimensions, invent impossible foods, possess worlds that are as infinite as the sands of the Ganges.”

A world beyond scarcity, thought Maddie. A world without rich or poor, without the conflicts generated by exclusion and possession. It was a world without death, without decay, without the limits of inflexible matter. It was a state of existence mankind had always yearned for.

“Don’t you miss the real world?” asked Maddie. She thought of the vulnerability that existed at the heart of all the gods.

“We discovered the same thing you did by studying the gods,” said Adam. “Nostalgia is deadly. When peasants first moved into the factories of the industrial age, perhaps they also were nostalgic for the inefficient world of subsistence farming. But we must be open to change, to adaptation, to seeking a new path in a sea of fragility. Instead of being forced here on the verge of death like your father, I
chose
to come here. I am not nostalgic. That makes all the difference.”

“He’s right,” said Mist. “Our father understood that, too. Maybe this is why he and the other gods gave birth to me: to see if their nostalgia is as inevitable as death. They couldn’t adapt to this world fully, but maybe their children could. In a way, Dad gave birth to me because, deep down, he wished
you
could live here with him.”

Mist’s observation seemed to Maddie like a betrayal, but she couldn’t say why.

“This is the next stage of our evolution,” said Adam. “This isn’t going to be a perfect world, but it is closer to perfect than anything we’ve ever devised. The human race thrives on discovering new worlds, and now there are an infinite many of them to explore. We shall reign as the gods of them all.”

• • • •

Maddie took off her VR set. Next to the vibrant colors inside the digital world, the physical world seemed dim and dull.

She imagined the data center teeming with the consciousnesses of billions.
Would that bring people closer, so that they all shared the same universe without the constraints of scarcity? Or would it push them apart, so that each lived in their own world, a king of infinite space?

She held out her hands. She noticed that they were becoming wrinkled, the hands of a woman rather than a child.

After the briefest of pauses, Mist rolled over and held them.

“We’ll protect each other,” said Mist. “We will.”

They held hands in the dark, sisters, human and post-human, and waited for the new day to come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed
, and
Strange Horizons
, among other places. Ken’s debut novel,
The Grace of Kings
, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. A collection of his short stories will also be published by Saga in 2015.

“To all that come to this happy place: welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.”

 — Walt Disney

The Disneyland generators were intended to keep the Park’s lights on during municipal power outages and emergency situations. They were never meant to power the entire Park for weeks on end, and one by one, they were giving up. Generator #3 had been showing signs of strain for three days. It fought long and valiantly, but in the end, entropy won. Generator #3 died at 6:15 AM on Monday morning, filling the air with the hot stink of biodiesel and exhaust. The other generators whined, struggling to pick up the slack. It was a lost cause. The techs on duty knew it but still grabbed their tools, ready to fight a battle that was already over.

In the Hall of Presidents, the lights flickered before going out. Amy — who most people called “the Mayor of Main Street” these days, despite her best efforts at rejecting the title — ran outside in time to see the brass streetlights that ringed Town Square die, leaving the area in darkness. She stood in the doorway, frozen with fear. People began to emerge from the surrounding buildings, exclaiming in dismay. Amy didn’t move. Even when someone shouted, “It’s dark all the way to the Castle!”, she didn’t move.

It was finally happening. After eighteen months of struggle, sacrifice, and pain, the lights were going out in Disneyland.

• • • •

It began with the sniffles.

First the sniffles, and then a mild cough, the sort of thing that wasn’t enough for most people to justify staying home from work or keeping the kids out of school. From there, it developed into severe congestion, breathing difficulties, and finally, a cascade of third-stage symptoms that seemed to come without warning, sometimes developing over the course of an afternoon. Bronchial inflammation, rash, fever, all building to internal hemorrhaging and multiple organ failure. Most people who got sick were dead inside of a week, and most people got sick. There were no final statistics published on this epidemic, but if Amy had been asked to guess, she would have said that nine out of every ten people caught the H13N3 flu. And of those nine, at least eight died, leaving two out of every ten people still standing — and one out of every two people weak, sick, and shaky.

It was no wonder things had collapsed as fast as they did. People who were on vacation died in unfamiliar hotel rooms and hospital beds, wondering how things had gone so very wrong. Others staggered their unsteady ways to the places where they remembered being happy. Amy would always remember the last guest to walk up to the gates of Disneyland. He was a little man, old enough to have been coming to the Park since it first opened, and his nose wouldn’t stop running.

She’d been standing on the train tracks above Town Square with a telescope stolen from Walt’s apartment, watching the plaza for signs of movement, when he’d come shuffling into view. She was at the gate to meet him by the time he arrived. It had been two days since she had shown up for her shift in Guest Relations. She hadn’t left the Park since then. None of the Cast Members who had been well enough to come to work had gone any further than the plaza.

“Hello, miss,” he’d said, voice thick with phlegm. “I know it’s irregular, but I couldn’t find my Annual Pass this morning. The wife, she always has them with her. Is there any way . . . is there any way you could see fit to let me come inside?”

“Welcome home,” she’d replied, and unlocked the gate for him. He hadn’t tried to touch her as he shuffled past her into the Park, and she’d been grateful.