Then we add more layers. Space model. Ocean model. Pollen. Pollution. Etc.
“Eventually, we’ll have an Earth model, a complete real-time replica of our planet. Progress it forward a decade or two, and voilà: it’ll predict the future. We’ll be rich!” Erin said.
We can do so much more, Anja wrote.
“Fine, we’ll save the world. After we get rich.”
Sometimes you’re so small, E. Think Species. Think Climate Control.
“And that’s how we attract the wrath of the gods,” he’d said, laughing. “Didn’t you learn anything in English?” But the idea, luminous with destiny, stuck, and they’d spent the rest of the summer drafting a proposal, detailing the steps they’d take, the teachers they’d consult. The final product would be a Web-based virtual reality program that would utilize humanity’s collective effort to track Earth’s changing climate and its effects on the human species, while participants recruited to identify weather patterns would also, eventually, be invited to design survival tools—new habitats, new gear, new farming methods—in response to the planet’s changing environment. In maturity, they’d concluded, The Garden would be more than a game; it would be a tool capable of not only predicting Earth’s weather but crowdsourcing solutions to the climate crisis in real time.
* * *
—
THE PROJECT, obviously wax-winged, had been preposterous, but no one had denied it had spark and engine, and in daydreams, Erin still believed they might have pulled it off—if Anja had stayed to graduate from high school. Instead, she’d left him with a buggy pre-alpha app and a “thesis” paper, written solo, describing what could’ve been. And it had hijacked the next seven years of his life. Now, midway into the 2030s, he had a full-blown virtual reality weather prediction program with the kind of real-world application they’d envisioned.
At his desk in his recently rented one-bedroom, Erin opened his laptop and raised his hands for the blue eye to scan his face and fingerprints. It was a split-second procedure, but the irony was never lost on him: he, the human subject, held up by his electronic tool.
“Messages?” he said.
No messages. And unlike the previous day (and the day before that, on and off for almost two months now), his machine appeared uninfiltrated. No animated serpent coiling up a bookish Tree of Knowledge. No winged Lucifer flashing his feathered trench coat.
“Last installed file?”
A window bloomed: his document folder. And there she was, though “she” was a dangerous designation, like naming a phantom, a cipher. He examined the new file: a seemingly benign Word document. Not that it mattered; “she” respected no walls. He clicked it open.
The world is deconstructing. You’re the last human generation with any chance of survival. There is a Garden in the desert of time. You alone know the coordinates. Enter your move.
The words, an echo from long ago rendered in the language of twentieth-century adventure games, prickled his scalp. Was his intruder soliciting a response? He stared at the cursor, its anticipatory blink almost human. He typed, Anja? His nerves leapt; his fingers fluttered above the Enter key before pressing down, connecting the circuit.
The cursor skipped, blinked, then continued to blink: a regular Word file, not a Trojan horse. Exhaling, he deleted his keystrokes and clicked the green icon on his desktop.
* * *
—
NOTHING HAD changed in The Garden since he’d last logged out. The virtual planet was still pockmarked; storms were still pirouetting around the globe, whipping wrecking balls of wind, rain, ice, and snow, bursting pipes, drowning subway lines, disconnecting entire neighborhoods, winding back quadrants of civilization a century or more. Along fault lines, earthquakes rocked, buckling buildings, upending roads, heaving waves that redrew the coastlines. Everywhere temperatures thrashed and sea levels rose, shrinking beaches and exhausting marine life, submerging chains of islands, further spreading toxic material seeping from abandoned military bases no longer frozen by icecaps or quarantined on solitary atolls. Inland, rivers dried up and deserts expanded, denuding jungles and sparking fires that devastated towns, habitats, ecosystems, leaving the sun to irradiate the earth like a microwave. Erin zoomed into his last saved location: a bench outside a dog park in a city neighborhood, an exact virtual replica of the bench outside a dog park in his own real-life neighborhood—except progressed fifteen years into the future.
He felt the twinge every time he opened this world he’d envisioned with Anja. Anja would deem it lacking—the blunt details, the stutter in the rendering—but this was the best he could do, with investors coming and going, the fluctuating funds making a committed team difficult to retain. Just establishing the fundamentals—which weather models to use (ongoing dilemma); how far to progress the world (fifteen years); and to what end (disaster preparedness; damage minimization; maybe, ultimately, climate control)—had been a titanic milestone. Now The Garden was live, had been for a year, and was beginning to produce results: breakthrough accuracy in weather prediction and an ever more complete virtual replica of the world, all of it expanding the program’s usefulness, magnetizing all kinds of people and, increasingly, companies—just as they’d anticipated.
Snapping on his VR headset, Erin entered The Garden and was immediately surrounded by the sound of snuffling dogs in the dog park, the yapping blur, rendered from his avatar’s POV, bounding and coiling, their low growls quivering at the edge of play and aggression. He couldn’t remember who had worked on these details—Fernandez? Parker? Liu?—but they’d done a good job. He stood, appreciating the drag of his shadow as it slid off the bench, and rounded the fence to the sidewalk. Traffic had increased in recent months as more users participated in the project, but at the moment the cars were stopped at a light, and he crossed toward an old ornate magazine building that had so far withstood the wind, rain, snow, and corresponding floods that had condemned several surrounding blocks—a worrisome trend that had also begun to manifest in the physical world, where worsening weather conditions were crumbling the oldest neighborhoods around the globe.
At the building’s entrance, he glanced at the blackened vent on the wall. Erin himself had added that detail, reproducing the scorch mark left there by the electrical fire that had almost destroyed the actual building in the physical world in the late 1800s. The mark added no practical, or even aesthetic, value to The Garden, but it was a piece of history, a record of something lived. Erin had never cared for dioramas and living museums, never worshipped at the altar of authenticity obsessed with hyperreal preservation; what he wanted was to conserve the evidence of humanity, which The Garden, as populous as it was (a million active avatars at any given moment), seemed devoid of the longer he was here. More than anything, it was this—the progressive erasure and dismissal of history—that foretold for him humanity’s eventual disappearance. Just fifteen years behind The Garden, the physical world was already beginning to empty itself of human presence, leaving carapaces of civilization in varying stages of extinction. Most corporate buildings were dead, fluorescent offices having reached near obsolescence in a world gone online, with the few remaining factories, largely automated, overseen by fewer and fewer people. The only structures that lit up any more were residences and small commercial buildings like this one, its occasional vacancies quickly filled by boutique companies that valued its high ceilings and tall windows in a location outside, but accessible to, the darkening museum of downtown.