Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 21

The next day after a fitful sleep she found the nearest subway station and rode uptown to the Upper West Side amid others who, like her, warily occupied apartments of the dead. In exchanged glances they communicated how long they'd been here, conveying the jitters of a newbie or the resigned calm of those who'd grown comfortable in their new personas. Abby climbed the stairs at an uptown stop, emerging from the p.i.s.s-scented station into deep forest, where gilded light streamed through boughs of red cedar and hemlock. A bunny appeared, regarded her, and sniffed the air as if it were animatronic. Abby steadied herself with a stick and tried to avoid sinking into the forest floor in Sylvie's Jimmy Choos. She came to a clearing of sorts, where stood the overgrown ruins of a house, a tool shed, and what appeared to be a heap of lumber. The hardened ground, covered in crosshatches of fossilized tire treads, trembled as a subway pa.s.sed underfoot. A newman, pale, weak, ribs showing from decades of hibernation, emerged from the shed, supporting himself on the door frame. His hair was black, a thinning bob, his nails yellow and long. Black dirt ringed his mouth. He chewed purposefully, occasionally reaching to the ground to gather another handful of soil. He made it only a few steps toward Abby before he had to sit down in gra.s.s that buzzed with fat, dumb b.u.mblebees. As Abby stepped closer the thing looked scared, flinching as if expecting to be struck.

Abby a.s.sured the newman their races were no longer enemies. She told him her name.

The newman said, "I'm Eo. Is he close?"

"Who?"

"The king. I woke hearing his call. He must be close."

"Wait," Abby said, squinting at the overgrown shack, "is this Star and Nick's house?"

"You know about Star and Nick?"

"I listened to a story about them . . ."

Inside the shack, a voice. Abby asked the newman who was inside.

"Star is inside."

Abby crouched into a tunnel through the brambles and emerged in the shack's spa.r.s.e kitchen. A black girl about eight years old, her hair in pigtails, wearing a bright yellow dress, sat on an easy chair in the middle of the living room, staring straight ahead. Abby slowly approached and said, "Star?"

The voice that came out of the girl belonged to the long-dead woman. She said, "We were mostly happy otherwise, the three of us. Little Nick, Marc, and me. During the day my husband was friendly and intelligent and witty. He worked hard for us, drafting. He loved Nick. But at night he spoke in a demon's voice, in a language of hisses and barks. Nick, he slept through everything. At first I'd wake Marc and he'd get angry and confused and deny he'd been talking in his sleep. He spent the long summer nights and weekends working on the new house. And it seemed the more he worked on it the more he talked in his sleep in that strange language. The tone of his voice changed in his sleep, became more menacing, more vehement. Marc would lie in bed shaking while he spoke, spitting out words, cold sweat dripping off his body. I didn't know what to do. I tried to convince him to see a doctor but he refused.

"One day I checked a tape recorder out from the library, brought it home, and put it under the bed. That night when his crazy talking started I recorded twenty minutes of it. But I didn't tell him about it right away. I waited a couple days then got up the courage to take the tape to the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, where I met with a linguist. She had done some research into the phenomenon of speaking in tongues and I thought she might be able to shed some light on what Marc was doing. I played the tape for her and she just looked puzzled, then asked if she could borrow the tape and play it for some of the other professors in her department. I figured she'd never get back to me. For weeks after that I continued to go to bed every night terrified. I read about night terrors and anything I could get my hands on at the library that had to do with sleep.

"Finally I'd had enough and recorded Marc again, this time for about half an hour. The next night after we'd put Nick down for bed I played the tape for him. First he looked confused, then shocked, then afraid. I didn't tell him I'd already shared the tape with someone at UW. Then I got a letter from the woman-we had no phone-asking that I come to the university as soon as I could. She wanted to introduce me to somebody.

"On the drizzly day I showed up on the campus, the linguist introduced me to someone named Dr. Pliss. A Native American man, he specialized in recording and preserving languages that were on their way to extinction. We met in his office over coffee and he seemed excited. He said that he was pretty sure Marc was speaking in a language that hadn't been spoken in over a hundred years, one that belonged to a tribe whose last known members were slaughtered in eastern Was.h.i.+ngton in the late 1800s near Lake Chelan. Dr. Pliss was a broad, heavy man but his voice wavered as he spoke about how rare and miraculous this was. He only knew about the language because a missionary had written a doc.u.ment in 1890 in which he instructed other missionaries how to communicate with the tribe.

"This was all fascinating but I wanted to know what Marc was saying. That's when the linguist-sorry, I can't remember her name-and Dr. Pliss looked at one another in a strange way. Then Dr. Pliss pulled a piece of paper from his file drawer and slid it across his desk to me. It was filled with words in all capital letters. They said: KILL THE BOY, HE WILL BRING ABOUT THE LAST DAY, HE WILL DESTROY THIS WORLD, KILL HIM NOW, KILL THE CHILD, KILL HIM BEFORE HE BRINGS DARKNESS AND SUFFERING, YOU MUST KILL HIM, YOU MUST STOP HIM BEFORE HE BRINGS ABOUT THE DEATH, STOP HIM STOP HIM, HE BRINGS DEATH, KILL HIM, KILL YOUR SON, KILL YOUR SON NOW, KILL HIM NOW, KILL KILL KILL HIM, YOU DON'T HAVE MUCH TIME, KILL THE BOY, KILL THE SON, KILL HIM STOP HIM NOW.

"The linguist led me out of the building, supporting me as I stumbled down the hall and out onto Red Square. I was terrified to go home but my terror for my own safety was nothing compared to my fear that my husband was going to hurt my boy.

"When I got home, Marc was sitting in the living room holding the letter from the linguist. He asked what it was. In ten minutes our world unraveled. I told him about the tape I had sent to UW, and of the conversation I'd just had with Dr. Pliss. I told him about what the transcript said. Marc was furious. I watched his face waver between fear and rage. The shack became too small to contain his emotions, so he went outside. I sat on the couch and cried. A while later I heard the echoes of hammering and I looked out the window to see him pounding nails into plywood, working on the interior walls of the new house. He worked well into the night. I went to bed and lay awake waiting for him. When he finally came to bed, smelling of sawdust and sweat, I tried to touch him but he shrugged me off. I listened to him fall asleep and that night he didn't talk in his sleep for the first time in a long time.

"The next morning Marc got up early and went out to work on the house again before he went to his job. I walked Nick to the bus stop, returned home, and made some tea. As I pulled the teabag from the cup I heard Marc cry out. I raced outside, knowing he'd been hurt. When I found him he was lying unconscious on the concrete foundation. He'd fallen from the second story. Blood was coming out of the back of his head, pooling on the foundation.

"In the hour I watched my husband die I lost my mind. I could have gotten in the truck and driven to the nearest house with a phone. I could have run down the driveway and flagged the first pa.s.sing car. But I chose to stand and do nothing and let him die. I felt for his breath with the back of my hand. I felt it coming from his nostrils at first, in little bursts. The halo of blood grew wider. Then his breath stopped and his skin grew cold.

"I chose my son over my husband. As I watched Nick grow I remembered Marc's dark prophecy in the language of a long- extinct people. I locked his shedful of silly plans. My world grew dark and small. Nick was all I had, my only reason to live. Until one day his friend, who'd suffered the loss of his whole family, became my lover. For a brief moment our darknesses canceled each other out. Then Luke had to leave.

"Nick returned home from time to time as I became an old woman. He spoke of a glorious new age. He barked and paced, drunk on philosophy and the future of man.

"I just wanted to protect my little boy. I didn't want-please, I didn't want those horrible words to be true. Please don't let them be true."

As the little girl sobbed, Abby quietly retreated from the shack, rattled, convinced in her gut that this testimony was not hers to witness. Why had she, of all people, been privy to the story of the onset of the FUS? And what ever became of the recording she'd made at the Seaside Love Palace? Rather than illumination, all this information about Luke, Nick, and Star promised an ever-encroaching darkness. It was as though the very thing preventing her from acting on these stories was her inability to remain herself. She kept slipping, lightly superimposed over her own body, the borders of her self and her physical form not quite jibing. While snooping on other people's lives, her own had come under increasing, unnerving, and invisible scrutiny.

Eo was gone. Up ahead, through the trees, came street noises, honks, a river of rubber and asphalt. Between the trunks of trees materialized the gray faces of buildings. Abby stepped from the woods onto Broadway, across the street from Lincoln Center, and rubbed her eyes.

Later, at home with bouillabaisse and a sandwich purchased from a deli around the corner from her apartment, Abby watched some early films by Thomas Edison on Sylvie's ancient television set. A man played a violin for fourteen seconds. An elephant, electrocuted. A steam train charged the camera, sending early-twentieth-century audiences scurrying for cover. Rightly, she thought.

In Central Park Abby watched children. Gleefully unaware that they inhabited a simulation of a once-vibrant city, the children appeared to understand that this was their world to take. The adults, far less so, as they meandered paths and contemplated the skyline from benches and hills, enraptured by the illogic of it all. Abby overheard gossip about some of the older people, folks who'd actually lived in or visited the original Manhattan, reduced to inconsolable weeping, begging to be returned to Seattle, away from this reminder of the greed and weaponry and genocides that had once infected the world. These elderly visitors to the city were doubly troubled at the sight of newmans busily at work, the former enemies of human beings now rebuilding and making amends. That the newmans had developed a sense of altruism struck them as a colossal hoax. Abby sat on a bench with a bag of popcorn and watched one FUS survivor go insane in front of her eyes, clawing at his face and screaming of terrors inexpressible. A couple citizens representing police officers escorted him from the park.

Woo-jin, meanwhile, found himself in a penthouse on Park Avenue, in one of the homes of Isaac Pope, a residence the late billionaire had never even actually visited. The closet was stocked with wing tips, French-cuffed dress s.h.i.+rts, tailored suits, and a row of pressed fantasy-themed T-s.h.i.+rts shrugging on wooden hangers. In the bathroom various scented things in bottles stood on polished marble shelves. After a shower of confusing shampoos, Woo-jin found a suit that fit and did the best he could to make his face look like a real face. Clothed, back in the master bedroom, he nudged a door that opened onto a hallway lined with art he didn't have the patience to glom on to brain-wise. In a library, hardback techno-thrillers squatted in exotic hardwood bookcases. A couple of replicated contracts sat unsigned on the desk. Woo-jin wandered to the kitchen, where he paused to eat some things like sandwiches and puddings, then into a living area with an enormous movie screen. He thought of how less cramped Patsy would have been in here. Patsy growing eyeb.a.l.l.s in her armpits, braying for gingersnap cookie dough. Smus.h.i.+ng his face to a window and watching cars far below, Woo-jin whispered her name. After a while he pulled his face from the gla.s.s, leaving two dripping patches of tears, then wearily pushed his cart laden with the pizza box ma.n.u.script to the elevator.

On the street buildings moaned, harboring their captive ghosts. Woo-jin pa.s.sed the Met, its doors open to a psychic blast furnace. Disturbed, he jogged across the street to get out of range of all the art howling from inside. Finally he found what he suspected he was searching for, a lonely and molested-looking phone booth. For some reason this one had been allowed to remain standing, an upright coffin reminder of how people used to conduct conversations while immobilized in public. A Yellow Pages sandwiched in a taco-like plastic sh.e.l.l dangled from the low shelf. He picked it up and looked for the Ls. Here: Literary Agents: See Agents, Literary. He found the Agents, Literary. Was anyone else going to need this section? Guiltily, Woo-jin tore the pages out of the book and stuffed them inside his coat, then hustled as fast as he could from the scene of his theft, pus.h.i.+ng his rattly cart, until he was sure no cops were on his tail.

For days Woo-jin pushed his ma.n.u.script, from the Upper East Side to Tribeca, from the Financial District to SoHo to Midtown, proceeding alphabetically through the list of literary agents. In every instance, all the way into the D section, he found empty offices. Apparently the newmans weren't in a hurry to a.s.sign anyone to represent former representatives of novelists and memoirists. He parked his cart in Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park, revising, slicing through whole sections with his Sharpie. It seemed that while he had been otherwise engaged, his book had begun to fall apart. It wasn't that he'd accidentally shuffled the order of the pizza boxes-which, as it turned out, had actually improved the thing-but that the thoughts captured in it appeared to belong to someone far stupider than he. Overnight he'd lost confidence in his capacity to write the instructions he'd been a.s.signed to write. Who the h.e.l.l was he to tell anyone how to love people?

A parade tumbled through the park. A shambling thing, composed of salvaged clothes hanging from the angled frames of newmans, some of them playing instruments: battered bra.s.s and wind, a violin, an untuned guitar that struggled to a.s.semble a chord. They looked beaten down, these unenthused servants of humanity, as if they'd been dry-humping existence to death. The instruments conspired to produce an off-key dirge and Woo-jin came to see that it was a funeral, with six pallbearers bearing aloft an aluminum casket. One of the newmans peeled off from the rest and slumped onto the bench beside Woo-jin. She sported a shaved head, fidgety hands, and something in her back that repeatedly clicked as if broken.

"Who died?" Woo-jin asked.

"Our great leader Stella Artaud! An old soldier from the FUS is capturing and torturing and killing my kind! Oh, how terrible, my heart can hardly bear it! Alas! A great violence has descended upon our creation! Oh, it's horrible! I thought our races had resolved their differences. I thought we lived in peace! But still, oh! The horrors persist!" Artificial tears spurted from her ducts as from an overactive winds.h.i.+eld washer on a car. The newman shuddered, and a piece of her face fell off. Frantically, she began picking at parts of her body, taking off a digit here, a chunk of fake flesh there, yanking wires from her gut, sensors from her skull, and in less than a minute all that remained was a grief-induced pile of components, not a single part connected to any other part.

The funeral pa.s.sed and deposited in its wake a raggy heap that resolved itself into a man. As the man shuffled toward Woo-jin his very self seemed to generate garbage-a trail of soda cans and fish skeletons and fast-food wrappers and horseflies. His head looked like a giant beard with some eyeb.a.l.l.s thrown in as a bonus. He took a seat beside Woo-jin to offer a few moments of pointless dialogue, all the while generating trash, which acc.u.mulated in piles around him, from the folds of his smelly garments. He eyed Woo-jin's ma.n.u.script-on-wheels somewhat skeptically, as if it were a piece of public art that tested the boundaries of collective community standards. His filthy hand emerged from his rags. Woo-jin shook it. The man said his name was Glyph.

"So have you figured out the deal with this place, yet?" Glyph said. When Woo-jin shook his head, Glyph rolled his eyes. "They're building this joint just to tear it down again, man. As soon as the last brick is laid, the whole s.h.i.+tty thing becomes one giant history lesson. They're luring us humans in here so they can screw us over once again, getting it all populated and pretty as a picture before they reenact the FUS. Then they'll rebuild it again and reenact it all over, on and on into the end of civilization. Get out while you can, brother." A half-empty can of creamed corn fell out of Glyph's pants and rolled along the cobbles. "What do you have going on here? Some kind of artwork?"

"It's supposed to be a book. About how to love people," Woo-jin said. At that moment the clouds opened overhead like they'd been gutted with a filleting knife. Desperately he pushed the cart, searching for an awning somewhere to protect the ma.n.u.script from the rain. Within seconds his fancy new clothes were soaked through. Suddenly the world went slapstick. Woo-jin slipped on a turkey bone jettisoned from Glyph's garments and the cart teetered, then spilled its contents on the ground. On his hands and knees, Woo-jin tried to gather the pizza boxes with their words bleeding before his eyes. Here was his chapter about loving foster sisters who demand cookie-dough ice cream at two in the morning. Here were some sentences about was.h.i.+ng dishes, about how not to eat your own tongue, about finding yourself ignored and alone in a trailer hauled into the sky.

By the time he was able to muscle the cart under the awning of a bodega the rain had lifted, leaving rainbows in its wake. Woo-jin pawed through the pile of wet cardboard looking for something salvageable but the words had turned into inky puddles and the pages had begun to disintegrate. As the ma.n.u.script fell apart, as the words grew more unintelligible, so too became the ideas those words had once propped up. How were people supposed to love one another? Woo-jin hadn't a clue. All he had was his love for one person, the flawed, hideous human being his foster sister had become. How could loving someone as nasty as Patsy help him draft a treatise on loving anyone else? He remembered the message his future brain had left for him, that it was his responsibility to provide the Last Dude with reading material. What would a guy at civilization's end need to know about loving people? And why would he need a guide book if there was no one around to love? In the rain, with the ma.n.u.script turning to mush, it came to Woo-jin what he had to write. All this time the book's t.i.tle had misled him. It wasn't supposed to be about how to love people. It would be about how, at one time, we loved people. Woo-jin imagined the decrepit old man at his campfire, eating from the refrigerator's never-ending bounty, his messages spread on the desert floor far below. To this audience of one, Woo-jin would write that there used to be human beings here. We used to love one another. Or we tried to love, we wanted to love, but we kept s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up. We stumbled toward love but fear led us into shadows. When we found the capacity to love those who'd wronged us, those who seemed most undeserving of our love, in those delicate moments, marginalized by the sweep of history, our future appeared almost hopeful. His book, Woo-jin realized, would be the only thing telling the Last Dude that he too was loved. This distant r.e.t.a.r.d's voice recorded on brittle paper would be the only source of light in that final man's heart. Whatever he'd done to earn this fate, this eternal hauling of rocks in a vast waste, Woo-jin would a.s.sure him that his suffering wasn't for nothing, that as a human being he still deserved love, despite the fact that anyone who could possibly love him was long dead.

A voice came through Sylvie's phone.

"I've got your boyfriend," the man rasped. "Let me give you the address."

Half an hour later, facing a theoretical New Jersey, Abby walked briskly across the planks of a pier toward a squat structure, the temporary office of a building contractor. She entered the building without knocking, squinting to adjust to the dark.

This kind of room had appeared many times in movies. Empty but for a chair in the center, with a battered man tied to it. Scribbly explosions of blood spattered the floor. Abby didn't immediately recognize that this was Rocco, his face was so f.u.c.ked-up. A figure stepped out of a shadow, a man seemingly composed of three bodies. His head was gray and old, sorrowful, unblinking. This head rested on the torso of a bodybuilder, a s.h.i.+rtless gristle of muscles, veins, and scars. This torso in turn sat atop a pair of legs that moved in spastic jerks, almost dancing toward her.

"This is your boyfriend?" Skinner asked.

Abby nodded.

"Should I let him go?"

Rocco was unconscious, his chin against his chest, his breath going in and out of his body in irregular sputters and coughs.

"What did you do to him?"

"He's a DJ. He's got hundreds of embodiments. Including you, before the monks snipped your connection."

"He's not a DJ. He's just a Bionet technician."

In the anime version, Skinner touched a key on a remote, bringing banks of monitors to life on every wall, the room's darkness bleached by surveillance-camera shots of human figures going about their routines. This didn't prove anything, really. It could have been footage of anybody. Here and there a person sat motionless in a chair or at a table. Others walked in circles, did jumping jacks, pounded their heads repeatedly against walls. Skinner pointed at a monitor displaying Abby sitting on her chesterfield, watching television. "These are just some of his embodiments," Skinner said.

"I don't believe you."

"Watch this." Skinner fiddled with the remote some more, muttering grumpily at the b.u.t.tons. For a second the screens went blank, then sequences popped open, shots of this room with the chair and Rocco more or less confined to it. Each monitor ran a different clip culled from hours of torture. In some Rocco was conscious and talking, or not talking. In others he screamed and writhed and pa.s.sed out from the pain. Abby s.h.i.+elded her eyes but the violence came through the audio, the smack of flesh getting rearranged, bones snapping beneath muscles, the high-pitched panic of dental extraction. Bile curled in her throat. She turned her eyes to Skinner, expecting to see the smugness of a torturer, but finding his face defeated.

"I inflict violence on the world," Skinner said.

"You're a monster."

"That's about right."

"Did you get the information you wanted from him?"

"He gave me a name, an address. I have no way of knowing if it means anything."

"I still love him."

"That may be true."

"You think I should hate him because I was his embodiment."

"I don't care what you feel about him," Skinner said. "I was just doing him a courtesy. Someone was going to have to retrieve the guy after I finished with him. He gave me your name." He turned to leave, then stopped. "You think I do this because I'm strong and you're weak? I do this because it's my only recourse. I don't enjoy this."

"Boo-f.u.c.king-hoo for you."

Skinner fiddled some more with the remote and all the monitors went blank except for one, in which Rocco, close-up, blood gus.h.i.+ng out of his nose, spilled the beans. Off-camera, like a mobster-hunting detective from the world of noir, Skinner asked who he worked for. "Mr. Kirkpatrick. There have always been the slaves and the enslavers. The pa.s.sives and the actives. I'm just a technician. I don't pick the slaves. I get a.s.signments. I establish their routines. When they wake up. When they eat. When they sleep. When they f.u.c.k. What they buy."

The off-camera Skinner in the clip said, "I'm going to ask again why they took my boy."

"There's been talk there's a clone baby with super-admin privileges. Not good. With super-admin privileges you can take down the whole 'net. You can lock out all the DJs or turn admins into embodiments." Rocco spat out a gob of blood. "There's only one super-admin, and that's Kirkpatrick."

A new clip. Rocco with his head c.o.c.ked a different way, making a noise like laughing or crying, hard to tell which. "I saved Abby from getting arrested because I thought she was cute," he said. "I wrote a program that kicked up her hormones to make her fall in love with me. Then I got tired of her. That f.u.c.ker Bickle needed someone to babysit Kylee Asparagus so I volunteered her. While she was away we ran routines on the whole city. A ma.s.sive orchestration. Every citizen an embodiment, their daily lives planned out for them without their knowledge. Just think of what you can make an economy do. Then she returned before she was supposed to. We stuck her in the apartment watching TV."

Another clip, more violence. Coin-sized pieces of skin removed from the surface of Rocco's body. Skinner turned it off midscream, then pulled a Bionet transmitter from his pocket and tossed it to Abby. "Most of the heavy organ damage has already been fixed," he said.

"What address did he give you?"

"I'm not telling you. I don't want to put you in any danger."

"You're a relic. You should have died in the FUS."

"You're probably right," Skinner sighed. "Have you ever thought about why the world had to end? That once we hit nine billion people living on this rock, the only honorable thing to do was for most of us to kill ourselves off? And yet somehow the likes of you and me survived. Ridiculous, isn't it?" He pranced, skipped, and twirled his way to the exit. Abby peeled away the duct tape binding Rocco's hands and legs and pressed his b.l.o.o.d.y face to her white s.h.i.+rt.

"You're safe now," she whispered.

"Now?" Rocco wheezed. "Now I'm definitely not safe."

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 8.

You know that unsettling feeling when you're moving from one place to another and you finally empty your old house and as you're vacuuming you realize it's just a s.p.a.ce? That was how it felt at the academy. Something of consequence used to be here, but for whatever reason it disappeared. The windows were boarded up, the exterior was covered in grime and graffiti. Dead weeds where there used to be landscaping. As the real estate agent took down the "For Sale" sign I entered the main building. It felt like a grade school that had gotten roughed up and left for dead on the side of the road. All the rooms empty. No furniture, no artifacts to indicate this had once been a place to learn. The main building contained a dozen cla.s.srooms on two floors. There was a science lab building with a little planetarium, a library building with empty shelves, a maintenance building, and a dormitory with a cafeteria. There was a small athletic field and a gym.

I moved into what seemed like the headmaster's suite in the dorm building, bought some cheap Ikea furniture, and made it up like a monk's room. Minimal. I started to ask around the neighborhood about the building's previous inhabitants.

What kind of neighborhood was it?

Typical southwestern exurbia. Retirees and Latino families. That weird, thick, southwestern gra.s.s kept green with constant irrigation. The academy itself was right up against the mountains. There was a strip mall with a Starbucks. I started hanging out there, introducing myself to my new neighbors and asking about the academy. n.o.body knew what I was talking about. Some thought it was a typical grade school. One lady who lived three blocks away from it argued that it didn't exist. I got monotone answers from the few young people I met. Everybody was entranced by their own gut-level routines, the pursuit of Frappuccinos. I got nowhere and soon gave up. Besides, it wasn't as important to me anymore that I learn the history of the academy so much as that I start fixing the place to prepare for Mr. Kirkpatrick's return. I started signing up for cla.s.ses at the local Home Depot, reading home improvement books, educating myself on electrical wiring and plumbing. I did as much as I could on my own but when a job needed more than one guy I hired Mexican day laborers and learned what I could from them, too. I discovered things my hands could do. I spent the days sanding, painting, refinis.h.i.+ng woodwork. I replaced broken toilets and installed light fixtures. I got sc.r.a.pes and bruises and splinters under my fingernails.

How long did it take to restore?

About two years. Pus.h.i.+ng a bucket around with a mop one night I realized I'd become a custodian. I laughed. What a thankless job, holding chaos and disorder at bay in the silent halls of an empty school.

Did you consider getting back in touch with Wyatt and Erika, or with Star?

What would I tell them? They belonged to a previous version of me. My holy task required that I cut off as many human connections as possible and wait patiently for Mr. Kirkpatrick's return. His academy would be in perfect shape, ready for pupils. I imagined he'd confer on me some special role, the caretaker of the academy. I found this solitary duty suited me.

He never arrived.

There's still time.

You sound pretty confident about that.

I know this because the one person who did show up was Dirk Bickle. He just pulled into the parking lot in his ridiculous Hummer while I was mowing the play field. The Sikh guys weren't with him this time. His grat.i.tude was obvious in how ferociously he embraced me. I invited him in and showed him around, pointed out the work I'd done on the electrical and ventilation and floors. He beamed. In my quarters I served him coffee and asked him what was supposed to happen next.

He told me he was ready to reveal the master plan. He started with a hypothetical question. What if I was faced with the following choice-I could save the human race from self-imposed destruction, and the rest of humanity's existence would be peaceful for another thousand years until an asteroid obliterated the earth, or I could single-handedly destroy the human race and by doing so ensure that new life would appear after earth's destruction, on Mars.

[laughs]

I told him the choice was false. First, if humans lived another thousand years on earth, we'd surely develop technology to either obliterate the asteroid or escape the planet altogether. Second, how would new life emerge on Mars if humans weren't around to make it happen?

Bickle answered in the form of another question. Wasn't it interesting, he said, that humans had imperiled the planet at precisely the moment when we'd become capable of developing a technological solution to undo the damage? What held us back, he said, was our orientation to nature. We'd thoroughly externalized it instead of coming to terms with ourselves as its greatest force. We speak of "the environment" as if it's something apart from us. We speak of protecting the environment and being environmentally friendly as if the environment exists outside our homes. Worse were those who wished to restore nature to some prehuman state, failing to recognize that nature is constantly changing. The only rational choice, Bickle said, was to adopt an inventionist philosophy of environmental stewards.h.i.+p and engage in full-scale planetary reengineering, and to embrace the spirit of this project as a natural phenomenon rather than an artificial, human enterprise. The concept of artificiality was itself artificial. Mr. Kirkpatrick saw through the cultural construct that would segregate nature, humanity, and technology. His was an effort to redeem the human race through understanding that we were meant to control the course of nature and engineer it for the purposes of beauty.

Did you ever suspect that Bickle was just f.u.c.king with you?

I considered it. But why would the guy go to so much trouble just to mess with my head? There had to be a reason for him to follow me around, show up with a mystical refrigerator in the desert, save my life. Obviously he was a true believer of something. Even if that something was a delusion, it was an attractive delusion. Keep in mind I was surrounded by a society in which people didn't appear to believe in anything deeper than their product wish lists. Think about it. Utah is populated largely by people who believe their prophet discovered a pair of gold plates and spoke to an angel named Moroni. Hollywood is run by people who surgically alter their appearances and think they're descended from an alien named Xenu. People believe in ghosts, UFOs, a Heaven in which they'll reunite with all their dead relatives. Let's not even get into Christianity with its flaming sword guarding the tree of knowledge. Human beings just fundamentally believe crazy f.u.c.king s.h.i.+t, the crazier the better. What Bickle was hinting at seemed a lot less crazy than praying to Jesus to make you rich. Is believing that human beings are meant to be stewards of life in the universe really crazier than believing a certain brand of car makes you s.e.xy or that G.o.d is keeping track of how many times you m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e?

[laughs]

So Bickle moved into one of the spare dorm rooms and began revealing Mr. Kirkpatrick's teachings to me. The rift between Kirkpatrick and the dropouts had pretty much destroyed the academy, he said, and he had no idea where Mr. Kirkpatrick had gone. Into the desert, maybe, where all prophets go. He told me of great awakenings and celestial visitors, Kirkpatrick's series of prophetic dreams in which he communicated with Freidrich Nietzsche on the Bardo plane, becoming one with the philosopher and finding himself, in this act of communion, transformed into a planet-devouring phoenix. Kirkpatrick was Nietzsche's heir, spreading the word that the distinction between the overman and the human was the overman's responsibility to spread life itself through the universe. Bickle led me through the prophecies, late into the night. He said Mr. Kirkpatrick had been waiting for me to reach a state of receptivity before briefing me on the program.

Or maybe they were waiting for you to become wealthier so they could come after your money.

I feel sorry for the smallness of your thinking, I really do.

It all sounds bogus to me.

Do you want to hear the rest or what?

Why not. Go ahead.

One night after our lessons I asked Bickle what had caused the strife between the dropouts and Kirkpatrick. He became solemn and started speaking about Nick's final invention. You remember how he created that machine when we were in high school, the one that took itself apart?

The science fair.