If you think people are going to weaponize G, Anja wrote, That’s so BCE. Before Crisis Era.
“Anja, if a crystal ball told us Earth would collapse in fifty years, do you think people would make clouds to water crops or use The Garden to control resources?”
Anja, shaking her pen, unbuckled her backpack, a beat-up roll-top she carried everywhere. He knew she was stalling. Lately, she’d begun calibrating her responses, taking her sweet time to process whatever she felt she had to before putting pen to paper. Erin couldn’t tell if it was a sudden trust thing or some weird need to baby his feelings, but it drove him crazy. Everything about her drove him crazy—her mixed signals, their nebulous relationship, and the way she made him second-guess not just her words and gestures but his own. Just the day before, while walking to clear their heads, they’d stopped at the grassy playground where his sister liked to sit with her friends. Mai wasn’t there, but they’d stood for a while, watching the chirruping kids, Anja’s arm slung around his neck. The first time she’d done this, he’d brought his arm around her waist, but it had felt wrong. Now he kept his hands in his pockets, trying not to focus on the warm lean of her weight. As heat migrated across them, collecting exactly where he didn’t want it to, he hastily turned to update her on the news they’d been following—another cyberattack by the untraceable hacker that had been targeting the federal government, this time replacing the names of the politicians on Congress’s website with those of their biggest donors—when she touched her lips to his, briefly but softly. By the time he realized what had happened, she was licking her lips analytically, and that was it. They’d walked back, debating the attacker’s identity (Anonymous? Or that new one, Bakteria?) and the merits of such an attack (did consciousness-raising work anymore?), the moment—or was it non-moment?—gone, swept from her mind and dumped into his.
Anja uncapped a new pen. No risk, no future. If we don’t make G, someone else will. Is that more scary or not.
The question was rhetorical, but these days he’d been oppressed by a vision: an infernal Earth where all nine circles of hell had overlapped, producing one endless refugee camp while the powers that be competed for climate control, the prevailing state lording it over the muck of the whole human species. In no way did he want to contribute to that.
“Fine, but we need to build The Garden in a way that we have a future,” he said.
So we’re building a mirror world to see which futures to weed out. If we can show people, if they really see, they’ll want to avert the worst. Even rich people are still stuck on Earth.
“I just know people’ll capitalize on it, use it to spread doomsday shit and justify whatever.”
You sound like my dad. Every garden has a snake, E.
That night, in his basement, Erin embedded a self-destruct mechanism into The Garden that could be triggered by the simultaneous activation of a code, nuclear-weapon-style. He felt childish, but he wanted a way to remind them of their partnership at critical crossroads. He built a synchronized random code generator app for himself and Anja. When he showed her the next day, she gazed at the app, trying to—decode its meaning? decide what to do? And with heart-stopping clarity he realized that for him, more than anything altruistic or humanitarian, the thought that there could be a universe in which he might never have met her, where a boy named Erin and a girl named Anja might never have existed, or might never exist again, hollowed his heart, a yawning cavern with no one to spelunk it. The feeling was so visceral it flipped a switch, a primal mechanism coded deep in the brain to reject any notion of a universe in which the human species didn’t exist. Anja, though, was hardwired differently, and maybe this was what they’d understood as she dutifully installed his app on her phone.
* * *
—
LEANING AGAINST the virtual office window now, Erin half-expected to see the top of Mortimer’s head emerge from the entrance below. But nobody had added that flourish to the logout process, and the glossy glass revealed only a dusky panorama beaded with city lights scattered above chainlinks of street lamps warming some neighborhoods while bleaching others. He appreciated this detail, not just its faithfulness to the physical world, where floodlights (urban ecology and human circadian rhythm be damned) were becoming popular in response to metropolitan deterioration, but the way it reproduced the city’s political texture, its zones of social divide. Fifteen years ahead of the physical world, The Garden was projecting a steady expansion of these floodlight zones as rubbled blocks and darkened quadrants multiplied, further splitting the moderate middle, expanding the left and emboldening the right, and generally increasing urban police presence and rural militias to keep up the order. Next week, they were incorporating an epidemic model; next month, space models tracking high-threat meteors and solar flares. In a year they’d begin to see patterns of human responses to the conglomeration of threats exposing the inherent porosity of human borders: national, biological, planetary. But The Garden wasn’t a crystal ball. And prophecies were used as much to cement outcomes as to avert them. The Garden merely showed a probable future, and it was here, in the open seam of the present—while it was still open—that Erin hoped to meet Anja again. He scanned the length of street below the office. No unusual movement.
He logged out to take his physical self for a run.
* * *
—
HIS NEIGHBORHOOD was busy for a weekday night, the warm LED glow from the converted gas lamps pleasantly slowing time, softening its blow. Affluent but mixed, and proud of its historicality, the neighborhood had preserved its original facades, the bricks and the moldings, the lush private courtyards, the pattering wedding-cake fountains still delighting plaster cherubs and city birds, enticing the occasional family to spread towels in the plush grass. Erin lived just outside this lambent orb, but his run took him through its center, past the original magazine building, and back to his street where ultramodern condos abutted the Section 8 complex, the defunct bus depot rusting against the state-of-the-art biotech facility that had recently replaced the flower exchange that once supplied the city’s florists. From his apartment, Erin could see the lit facility, crowned by rainbows of gray overpasses sheltering the city’s climate refugees rerouted from facilities like Angel Island 2, which, along with its historical original, had become submerged by rising sea levels. Jogging up eight floors, Erin unlocked his door, legs burning.
A message was waiting for him, the second in a day. Another Word file.
Time is a relative construct that starts and ends with the body. Your time is running out. But you have extra lives in The Garden. Make your move.
Erin stared. Was this a threat? Was Anja working for someone? Titan? It seemed unlikely; the cybertech behemoth was exactly the kind of company Anja would’ve made it her mission to subvert. But high school was a long time ago. On the other hand, what if this wasn’t Anja? The possibility, kept to a sibilation until now, hit him, volume turned up. If this wasn’t her, who was it?