The horn bellowed; everyone surged and waved. In the ripple of hands, he saw his daughter lift her face. The horn bellowed again; the crowd around him pushed and shouted, the frantic swell crushing him into the railing. Of course, there was no way to know what future he’d opened by leaving her here; but there was also no way to know what future he’d averted. What he knew was that Ayumi’s sights, like Mitsuru’s, had always been set farther than his own—how could he refuse her this growth? He thought about his eldest, how tentatively he’d proclaimed his interest in the surgical science, fearful of hurting his father’s feelings—which, naturally, were hurt, but not enough to blind Masayuki to the possibilities; he knew his son would go on to do good in the world. He thought about his youngest, an active infant who’d opened his eyes to stare at him moments after his birth. Perhaps someday this child too would leave them. All week, he’d wished his wife were here, with her clear-eyed ability to dowse where he could not, feeling with her own heart for answers beyond his purview. But maybe the times called upon one to place one’s trust in one’s fellow man and bet on mankind’s collective potential. After all, the world was bound to get better, he told himself; he was already looking forward to his next return to California. In the meanwhile, there were always letters; in fact, he’d write the first one aboard this ship.
Craning over the railing, he looked across the widening strip of water cleaving the ship from the pier. Hands open, the crowd was yearning toward them, but where was Ayumi? He scanned the diminishing faces, his chest squeezing, then sprouting, as at last he caught sight of the running speck now calling to him, arms aloft, a kernel of new life he hoped would grow and bear fruit, a burgeoning cornucopia that would go on to nourish and shelter all his unknown descendants in ways that perhaps he, an unextraordinary man born with one foot in the old world, may fail to.
SEVEN
THE GARDEN, AKA THEOREM
FOR THE
SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES
“So the world’s deconstructing,” Erin said. It was day three of their senior year of high school. He and Anja were sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria. “War’s breaking out on all planes of existence. We’re, like, the last human generation still holding out any chance of survival. What do we need to do?”
Anja, looking up from her phone to read Erin’s lips, tapped her pen against the notepad she favored. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Erin loved this about her, the tick of her brain pulsing through her body, tapping out a syncopated rhythm as she raced her thoughts to their possible ends. He adored her. Probably had from the moment he saw her three years earlier, her beetle-shaped headphones clamped to her ears, long blunt hair, straight as her back, dropping anchor in what he, a month into freshman year, had come to think of as his seat, two rows from the back. He’d strode over, plucked the headphones off her head, and was walloped, his homeroom watching. Worse, though, had been the distress on her face, her hands fluttering to cover her naked ears.
She flipped her pen, wrote, Planet’s salvageable? Humans are salvageable?
He nodded, and nodded again.
Flip, tap. Flip. Cause of World Event?
He thought for a moment. “Anthropocene.”
You mean Neoliberal Self-Destruction?
“Call it whatever.”
Anja narrowed her eyes, her pupils pulling into pinpoints before releasing their javelins of light. Her dad, a drinker, loved to hold forth on America’s dream of Empire, crudely laid bare over a decade ago by the triumph of the yellow-haired duck. Remember, kids, he’d say. That Duck wasn’t some random nightmare; he was The Neoliberal who didn’t bother with civil liberties.
“Okay, okay. Point taken,” Erin said. Close to the end of the 2020s, it was clear where the world was headed. Cemented by the long-ago wars of the 1930s and ’40s, the United States still had leverage, with its vast market and military umbrella, but along with the Russians and Chinese, it was now just one of three empires competing with varying degrees of subtlety to divide up the world, indenturing the poor and incentivizing countries rich in resources but stingy with cooperation. As the empires rubbed up against each other, physical wars, increasingly fought by drones and AI, still erupted in convenient third-party territories, but the bigger war was largely invisible, taking place in the underlayers of a cyberspace trolled by rogue entities targeting networks and individuals who thoughtlessly uploaded their lives. As their history teacher, an Iraq War veteran with a silvery beard, often said, a stylus pinched between his prosthetic fingers: The enemy is everywhere; where’s the real war?
Anja resumed her tapping, the plastic rhythm quickening to a drum roll. She stopped, wrote, Did we get approved???
Erin grinned and held up their permission form. The principal’s swooping signature had joined those of their English, biology, and computer science teachers. “We’re on,” he said, his own nerves leaping now, her neural rhythm jumping the synaptic gap between them. He took her pen. E+A Project #1, aka The Garden.
* * *
—
IN MANY ways, that project, their joint high school senior “thesis,” as they’d ostentatiously called it, had been an ambitious bust, “ambitious” being the key word and maybe why their principal had approved it. Anja had done much of the coding while he refined the concept, the two of them camping out in his basement after school, Erin cranking his mother Luna’s vintage goth band CDs, Anja occasionally surfacing to sweet-talk his sister Mai whenever she thumped on the door, her ninth-grade sensibilities affronted by Robert Smith’s unearthly wails. It was rewarding work. While the project had to satisfy the agreed-upon requirements of AP English, AP Biology, Environmental Science, and Programming, they got to build a computer program inspired by Mozak, a Web-based citizen-science “game” created in the early 2010s to aid medicine. Anyone with Internet could participate in Mozak; all you had to do was look at images of neurons spidering across your screen and identify shapes, the idea being that humans were still more adept than a computer at complex pattern recognition. The data then helped scientists create 3-D images of neurons. It was brilliant. When he and Anja first stumbled across it over summer break, they’d played it obsessively. Then they’d moved on, but the idea had burrowed into their brains, eventually effervescing out of their many conversational rabbit holes like a rich, fermented substance. How, they wondered, could they tap its potential? Could they, for example, build a climatological Mozak to tackle their most urgent crisis driving all wars, fueling all economies, pushing humanity ever closer to extinction?
You mean a crowdsourced weather pattern recognition program? Anja had written. Like make weather predictable further and further in advance?
Erin nodded. “All we’ll need is a virtual replica of our world. Superimpose a weather model. Then invite people to ID weather patterns. Like when pressure drops this much in the morning, it means snow in the afternoon, or whatever.”