I shrugged. Birds were bellwethers of the Die-back. In 2047, their vanishing was banal. I said carefully, “Mom, maybe you really should think about moving away.”
She eyed me with a bit of humor in her expression. “You’re claiming it’s any better anywhere else?”
“Not really, no.”
“Then stop wasting time.” She sipped her tea, dismissing me.
My old room was small, but it looked out to sea, and I’d always loved it.
Of course it wasn’t really mine anymore, and yet there had never been a precise date when it had ceased to be mine. I just slept in here less and less frequently, and at some point my parents had had to make decisions about sorting it out without consulting me.
Well, they had stripped it. Now, replacing my turn-of-the-century gadget-age décor, it was done up in the faux-naturalistic style that had been so popular in the 2020s, with a bamboo-effect wallcovering and a green carpet of soft-bladed artificial grass. In those days, before I had started to work on the commercial development of Higgs-energy, I was a consulting engineer for the nuclear-energy industry, and I had stayed in a
lot
of hotels. This style of decoration had been everywhere, endless lengths of tropical-parrot wallpaper and crocodile-skin-effect floor covering, adorning anonymous concrete blocks in Warsaw or Vancouver or Sydney. It was as if we were mourning the loss of all the green stuff, even while the real thing was imploding into the Die-back all around us.
I dumped my bag on the bed and opened the wall cupboards, looking for somewhere to hang my few shirts. But the cupboards were piled high. Some of this was my mother’s clothing. The materials felt brittle to the touch, the clothes very old and rarely worn.
But there was still a relic of my own old stuff stored here. There were no clothes. No doubt they had all disappeared into the maw of charity, and my old T-shirts and trousers might even now be adorning some refugee child from flooded Bangladesh or parched Egypt; it was an age of refugees, plenty needing to be clothed. But there were computer games, books, and a few of my classier-looking models, such as the huge mobile of the International Space Station that had once hung over my bed, now neatly disassembled and stored in bubble wrap. Some toys had survived, mostly tie-in figurines and die-cast models, all carefully stored inside their boxes.
It was, to my eyes, an eclectic mix; parents sorting out their children’s middens are a random filter. It seemed my mother had selected objects not of sentimental value but that might be worth money someday: a toy survived the cull only so long as it was in good condition and if she could find its packaging. But those mint-condition auction candidates, of course, were precisely the toys I had spent the least time with. Still, her eye for value had been good. A lot of the computer games could have raised some cash; there was a whole industry of silicon-chip archaeology turning out readers for such things, gizmos several electronic generations old and yet still precious to sentimental old fools like me.
I did come across one chance fossil that had escaped the cull, despite having no discernible value. It was a small tin, slotted so it served as a money box. Here I found newspaper clippings and collector cards and Internet printouts, mostly to do with the space program, and a little leather pouch full of pennies dated the year 2000, and loose postage stamps, and fast-food stickers and button badges from TV-show promotions, and a tiny travel chess set on which I had taught my brother to play, late at night when we were supposed to be asleep. All of this junk had been handled and pored over endlessly. That little box was a screen grab of my mind aged ten or eleven, the stuff so small and worked over it was almost like scrimshaw. But it was also a little off-putting, grimy with the handling. I probably ought to have got out more, I thought.
I closed the box and put it back on its shelf. But as I did so I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. It hit me like a physical blow, a punch in the neck, and I had to sit down. It was just that the kid who had filled that box had gone as if he never existed, the whole rich complicated texture of his life unraveled. Life was so rich, but so transient: that was what made me sad.
But moping over this junk wasn’t filling any sandbags. I closed the cupboard, changed into a T-shirt and shorts, threw on some fresh sun cream and bug repellent, and headed down the stairs.
The porch with the swings was still intact, though it would benefit from some TLC. I walked across the backyard, where John’s kids were still playing. It used to be a lawn; now it was just a concrete slab. The kids gave me polite Happy smiles, and I waved back and walked on, with an armful of empty bags.
From the back gate the old gravel path led down toward the coast, as it always had. But before I got to the dunes I found myself walking across dykes and culverts and drainage ditches, and the rotting remains of many, many sandbags. I imagined my mother laboring here, determined, stubborn. But all her hydrological systems had failed, and when I looked back I could see the lines of sandbags retreating ever further up toward the house. You couldn’t drain away an ocean through a five-centimeter culvert.
I walked through the dunes and came to the shore. There was still a beach here, of sorts, but it sloped sharply away, soon disappearing under the restless sea. The erosion here had been relentless. Even the dunes seemed to have been eaten away. Here and there I saw stretches of a grayer mud, like a stretch of sea-bottom, not a beach at all. Driftwood and scattered bits of plastic garbage littered the shore, and I passed great reefs of dead seaweed, dug out by storms and stranded. The reefs were the source of that salty smell of decay I’d detected earlier. Bugs swarmed everywhere, not just mosquitoes but tiny little bastards that threw themselves at my exposed flesh. Insects, the great winners of the years of the Die-back.
The sea looked beautiful, as it always did, even if, stirred up by the endless storms, it was not quite so blue as it used to be. It was hard to believe the sea had done so much damage.
I found a dune that was resisting the ravages of time with the help of some toughly bound grass. In its shelter the sand was clean and even reasonably dry. I squatted down and began to scoop sand into my sacks. It was late afternoon by now. I was looking into the sun, which was declining to the southwest, to my front right.
That was when I saw her.
It was just something in the corner of my eye, a bit of motion that distracted me. I thought it might be a rare sighting of a seabird, or maybe it was just the sun playing on the lapping water. I stood up to see better. It was a woman. She was a long way down the beach, and the light reflected from the sea behind her was bright and sent dazzling highlights stabbing into my eyes.
Morag?
I was never frightened by these encounters, or visitations. There was no sense of fear, or dread. But there was always ambiguity, muddle, uncertainty. It might have been Morag, my long-dead wife, or it might not.
I also felt a certain irritation, believe it or not. I’d had such visitations all my life, and was used to them. But in recent months the frequency had increased. I’d been plagued by these visions, apparitions—whatever. Their incompleteness hurt me; I wanted resolution. But I didn’t want them to stop.
I took a step forward, trying to see better. But I was holding a three-quarters-full sandbag, and it started to spill. So I bent down to set it on the ground. And then I had to step over the hole I had dug. One thing after another, in my way.
When I looked up again she was still there, bathed in light, though she seemed a bit further away. She waved at me, a big hearty wave, her arm right over her head. My heart melted. There was more warmth in that simple gesture than in any of the responses I had had from John and his Happified kids. It was Morag, dead seventeen years; it could only be her.
Now she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. But the waves crashed, echoes of some remote Atlantic storm, and only a splinter of sound reached my ears.
John,
she said. Or it might have been
bomb.
Or
Tom.
“What did you say? Something about Tom? Morag, wait—” I blundered forward. But away from the line of the dunes the sand quickly got muddy, and soon my feet and lower legs were coated in great heavy boots of sticky sea-bottom ooze. Then I came to one of those big reefs of seaweed, piled high and deliquescing to a stinking mush. I cast back and forth, looking for a way through.
When I looked beyond the heaps of rotting weed she had gone.
Back at the house, the kids had gone inside to join in an immersive virtual drama on Grandma’s huge wall-mounted softscreen. The rising tide had caused water to bubble out of the ground around the house and lap over the yard; even their smart soccer ball had been defeated.
As the sun went down, I joined John at his patient Paintwork.
We applied the Paint laboriously. It was heavy, sticky stuff, full of lumps, kind of like Artex, and difficult to work to an even coat. Silver in color, it looked odd on my mother’s clapboard walls, making the house look like a mocked-up stage set. And as we scraped on the Paint it started to thank us, in a whispery voice that wafted from the wall:
Thank you, thank you for complying with all local sentience ordinances, thank you. . . .
“Oh, screw you,” said John.
The dubious color scheme was one reason my mother hated this stuff. But it was silver, which deflected much of the sunlight, thereby cutting down on air-conditioning costs, and it was laden with photovoltaic cells to make the whole house a solar-powered sink.
And the Paint was dense in processors, billions of tiny nanofabricated computers each the size of a dust speck and about as smart as an ant. As we applied it the little brains linked up with each other through the conducting medium of the Paint itself, and burrowed their electronic way into the house’s systems, seeking connectivity with power points and actuator controls. Artificial intelligence in a can: when I was a kid it would have seemed a miracle. Now sentience was a commodity, and this was just a chore.
For a while we worked together in stolid silence, my brother and me. The light leaked out of the sky, and my mother’s porch lanterns, big cool bulbs, popped into life. Mosquitoes buzzed and swarmed.
John made small talk. “So how about the digital millennium, huh? You’re the engineer; tell me if I need to worry.”
I shrugged. “We’ll survive. Just like Y2K. It won’t be so bad. They’ve done a few trial system excavations to check.”
John laughed at my choice of word.
Excavation.
It was the latest scare story to sweep the planet. Next year’s date, 2048, was an exact power of two, in fact two to the power eleven, and so it would require an extra binary digit to represent it in the memory of the world’s interlinked computer systems. Nobody quite knew what that was going to do to the “legacy suites,” some many decades old, crusted over with enhancements and embellishments, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, grisly old codes rotting in computer memory like the seaweed on my mother’s beach.
“So,” John said, “just another scare?”
“We live in a time of scares and wonders.”
“It’s not a rational age.” As the Paint continued to thank him, John sighed. “Listen to this damn stuff. Lethe, maybe it’s rational
not
to be rational.”
Intrigued, I asked, “What do your kids think of the millenium?”
“Nothing, as far as I know. I try to get them to watch the news, but it’s a losing battle. But then, nobody watches the news nowadays, do they, Michael?”
“If you say so,” I snapped back.
This conversation, tense, on the edge of fencing, was typical of us. It was the thin surface of an antagonism that went back to our late teens, when we had started to become aware of the world, and we had begun to shape our attitudes to the future.
I had aimed to become an engineer; I wanted to build things. And I was fascinated by space. After all, when I was ten years old they discovered the Kuiper Anomaly: an honest-to-God alien artifact sitting at the edge of the solar system. For those of us who cared about such things, our whole perspective in the universe had been changed. But we were in the minority, and the world continued to turn, and I was out of step.
John, though, became a lawyer, specializing in environmental-damage compensation suits. I thought he was cynical, but in the wake of the vast political and economic restructuring that had followed the Stewardship program he was undoubtedly successful. By tapping into the vast rivers of money that sloshed to and fro in a destabilized world he had become hideously rich, and was now aiming for greater ambitions—while I, an engineer who built things, could barely pay the bills. That probably tells you all you need to know about the state of the world in those days.
We really got along remarkably bad, for brothers. Or maybe not. But still, this was my brother, the only sane person left who had known me all my life, with due respect to my mother.
And I longed to tell him about Morag on the beach.
I’d never told anybody. Now I felt I should. Who else to tell but my brother? Who else should know about it? He would mock, of course, but it was his job to mock. Standing there working with him, as the lights grew brighter in the gathering gloom, I plucked up my courage, and opened my mouth.
Then the lights fizzed to a silver-gray nothingness. Suddenly John was a silhouette against a darkling sky, holding a useless paintbrush. We heard cries of disappointment from the kids inside the house.
“Damn it,” John snapped.
The house, or anyhow the Paint, was apologizing.
Sorry, sorry for the inconvenience.
It was a cooperative brownout, as the sentiences dispersed in the neighborhood houses and bars and shops and streetlamps, and in the water pumps and buses and boats, responded to symptoms of alarm coming from the local power microgrid—usually a glitching in the main supply frequency—and shut themselves off. It was better this way, better than the bad old days of stupid systems and massive blackouts, everybody said. But it was a royal pain in the butt even so.