Your One & Only(66)
Money seemed to have a lot to do with the collapse unfolding far away from early Vispera. Those with lots of money seemed to live longer, but not by much; they died too, and their children died with them. Althea Lane didn’t write very much about the collapse. It was as if she didn’t want to face it, as if writing it in stark lines in a journal would make it more real. Althea knew the history, however. From the point the Plague became public knowledge, it had taken thirty years for humans and human civilization to become sick and die, thirty years for it all to disintegrate into ashes. The telephones and televisions; the intangible money they valued so much; the particles of information floating through the air like dust motes, appearing suddenly and miraculously on glowing screens; the machines flying over the earth, carrying people to bodies of land all over the world, even carrying people to the moon. The families and birthdays, the mothers, fathers, children, and pets. All of it gone.
In 2090, Althea Lane received word that her mother had died four months before, and Family Days aired its last episode. She wrote about the Originals gathering around a glowing communal television with the surviving cooks, janitors, medical personnel, and lab assistants of Vispera. They watched the end of the story of a family that had never really existed. They grieved the loss of the story and the people in it as if they’d been real, but Althea understood it was not just the made-up family they were mourning, but the familiar world they had always known that was now coming to an end, a world that wouldn’t be making any more television stories. Their world was falling apart, and their own families, their real families, were dying. When the show ended, they held each other and wept.
Althea turned the pages, and read.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF ALTHEA LANE
(Excerpts)
April 15, 2091
Word came today that Dr. Una Vispa died a week ago, on April 8, Easter Sunday, during the siege on the U.S. Global Health headquarters in San Francisco. She was there to fight for the continuation of the Project, which the new government’s administration was threatening to shut down, calling it an abomination and a drain on resources desperately needed in the States. Before she left, I heard her speaking to the president of the World Commonwealth on the phone.
“You have no authority over Global Health!” she said. “In any case, what use is it to feed your children? They’ll be dead before the decade ends! The work Global Health is doing in Costa Rica is not for something as insignificant as individual existence. We are working for human existence.”
To the end she was silver-tongued, authoritative, and relentlessly single-minded. She was eighty-nine, an age none of us can hope to reach anymore. She’ll never see the world she built come to fruition, though none of us really will, not with the Plague sweeping through us as it is. Half of our community is gone now, but we carry on. This Project was her passion. Samuel said she was like a gardener who plants a seed but never sees the garden fully grown, never reaps the harvest. We’ve changed the name of the community to Vispera, in her honor. It means, appropriately, “eve,” and we surely are in those last dark hours before a new beginning.
The first clones are fourteen now. They stared at us with blank eyes when we told them about the death of the woman responsible for their existence, a woman who’d sat with them in lessons, teaching them almost every day of their lives about everything from history to morality to science. “You should just make more of her,” one of the Kate clones said. I guess they’re too young to really understand. They’re a strange little group.
May 31, 2094
The riots in Brazil have spread into Peru and Argentina. The news out of India is even worse, and the World Commonwealth is saying they’ve lost contact with China. That’s what they said: “We’ve lost contact with China.” How is that possible? We’re so secluded here, closed in by the mountains, these images of disaster we see on television seem unreal.
The first clones are seventeen now and they assist us in the labs. They’re learning as much about genetics as we can teach them, surpassing us at times in knowledge and research.
I wish we hadn’t fixed the eyesight of Hassan’s clones. I realize our genetic manipulation of the clones is only in the best interest of the project. But it’s so strange to see these young versions of Hassan working in the labs, whispering among one another, looking so much like him years ago when we were in school, only they’re without glasses. I remember him only a little older than the first generation is now, before we’d heard anything about the Slow Plague. His brow would furrow, and he’d tilt his glasses on top of his head and peer into the microscope, a pinched indentation on his nose. These clones of Hassan seem to be missing something when I look at them, and I’ve decided it’s the glasses. Hassan laughs when I say this, telling me they aren’t missing anything. The glasses, he says, are tiresome, and he constantly cleans them. Why should these new versions of him be subjected to bad eyes? But still. Without them, they will never be Hassan to me.
August 19, 2097
Viktor died today while rock climbing in the mountains. It was such a shock to us all. What was he doing rock climbing anyway, with his arthritis? It makes no sense. Such a waste!
December 2, 2099
It’s been three months since Hassan died from the Slow Plague, a plague that takes so many forms. In Hassan’s case, it was the celiac disease, though it could have been the arthiritis. It’s hard to tell at this point, we’re all afflicted with so many problems.