The Ones We're Meant to Find(48)
Right now I’m resting, the oar laid across my lap, and all around me, the water’s glass-still, mirroring the clouds in the sky.
Maybe it’s that—the clouds are making me pensive. Or maybe the clarity of the surface is drawing me to the mysteries still beneath it. That’s what we do as humans, right? We unwrap the secrets of one thing and move on to the next, like kids tearing into presents, leaving a trail of ripped paper in our wakes.
It’s kind of sad, honestly.
The thought rings through me. I double over, hands splayed on the mattress encasement, remembering.
“It’s kind of sad.” I’m in a boat and Kay is sitting across from me, the sea glittering around us. The sun beats down, warming my skin as I say, “Everyone’s so focused on outer space, but we haven’t even finished exploring Earth.”
Kay considers my words. “Like the sea.”
“Exactly! Like the sea.”
“Maybe it’s not sad,” she says. “We would have drained it long ago if we could, just to find the secrets at the bottom. And then it’d be like everything else. Discovered.”
I blink. Then smile. We don’t have many shared hobbies or talking points, and I’d almost dismissed the idea of visiting the sea when it came to me in the middle of hot yoga. I’m glad I didn’t. It’s brought us to the island, and Leona, and to moments like these, when Kay reveals that she understands me more than she lets on. I reach for her—
—My fingers grasp the air.
My surroundings haven’t changed. The sea is still glassy, the sky still cloudy. But everything is different. I feel different, my head swimming with names.
Leona.
Who else is there? Did I know a Hubert? A Genevie? Why have I forgotten them? And Kay and me. On a boat. In the sea. Is that how we were separated?
I take deep, calming breaths, like I did in yoga. That’s right. I actually did yoga. I remember now. But I’ve either gotten rusty or I was never any good because my body won’t calm. I plunge the oar into the water and start rowing to distract myself from my building panic. I wish Hero were here. But then I’d have to tell him: Even now, years later, I don’t remember everything.
What if I never do?
Not even after finding Kay?
I ease Genevie into choppier waters. The sight of normal waves relaxes me, and I’m about to set the oar back across my lap when my grip tightens around the handle. I raise the oar, paddle poised in the air as something cuts through the water in the distance, swimming toward me.
Not something.
Someone.
20
SHE’D COME A LONG WAY. From the girl she’d been two weeks ago, hiding behind her own kitchen island, to this: standing center stage, in the flesh, before a full auditorium. Five hundred holographic people in attendance, yet the questions were always the same. How long before a consensus is reached? Not up to Kasey. How long will rollout take? Too long, if it went like these questions. And most popularly:
“How long before it’s safe to repopulate Earth again?” asked a person in the front.
Longer than people would like, and in the past Kasey would’ve hesitated before giving the distasteful answer. But the beat of her second heart made her fearless. “One thousand years.”
The audience reacted violently. Kasey expected no less. At every presentation (and this was the eleventh) someone argued that radioaxons decayed in less than a century, so why, then, the millennium? Why not? was Kasey’s question. Allow the sea to reuptake a millennium’s worth of carbon emissions while they underwent stasis. Wipe the slate clean. Save future generations.
But she kept her mouth shut. People wanted the quickest, easiest solutions. To solve their most immediate problems, they could steal from any future other than their own. And to think they acted like Kasey was the villain, shortchanging them, when she was offering them a deal to better the world.
Well, offering it to some of them.
“You expect us to spend a thousand years holoing through our lives?” one audience member asked, as if holoing were a prison sentence.
“No,” answered Actinium, more diplomatically than Kasey might have. She was glad to have him on the stage at her side.
Condition one: I get to present with a partner of my choice.
“Unlike commercial ones,” Actinium explained, “medical-grade pods administer a version of general anesthesia.” This was key: Only in pure stasis could they shave extraneous habitat mass down to zero and lower per-capita storage volume. “The passage of time won’t be experienced.”
The voices dropped to unsettled mutters.
A hand rose in the back. Actinium nodded, and the person asked, “How can we possibly expect to return to the same standard of living if we abandon the planet for one thousand years?”
Standard of living? Kasey’s teeth clenched. “Standard of living” was the reason why so many had refused to move to the eco-cities in the first place, only to decry the imposition of ranks later, when outside conditions deteriorated enough to impact their day-to-day lives.
“How do our homes and streets stay clean?” said Actinium, turning the question back to the asker. “Bots already perform ninety percent of infrastructure maintenance in territories and eco-cities alike. A degree of rebuilding is inevitable upon re-habitation, but automated reconstruction measures will be put in place in advance to lighten the load.”