a different scale of time. They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans. He can’t remember how the story ends. It doesn’t matter. Every branch’s tip has its own new bud.
. . .
MIMI SITS under those branches whose supple strength no engineer could improve upon. She tucks her feet up under her legs. Her head bows and her eyes close. The fingers of her left hand twist the band of jade around her right ring finger. She needs her sisters, but she can’t reach them. A call would be worthless. Even traveling to see them would do nothing. Mimi needs them as little girls, dangling their feet from the branches of a nonexistent tree.
The jade mulberry spins under her fingers: Fusang, this magic continent, the country of the future. A new Earth now. She pulls at the ring, but her fingers have swollen, or the green band has grown too narrow to remove. The skin on the back of her hand is as papery and dry as birch bark. Somehow, she has become an old woman.
The length of her accomplice’s sentence spreads out in front of her, one day after the other. Seventy plus seventy years. Then Maple is there again, behind the log fortress wall they built to defend Deep Creek. The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.
The hair stands up all over her papery skin. That’s what he has tried to make. That’s why he let the state put him away for two lifetimes and still incriminated no one. He has traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of strangers. One that refuses the judgment of the world and all its blindness. One that tells her to hold still, take his gift, and go on living.
ADAM LIES bound in his prison bed, replaying those words he spoke to his wife a week before trial, the ones that turned whatever residual feelings she still had for him into rage and hate. If I save myself, I lose something else.
What? Lois hissed. What else is there, Adam?
The learners can’t tell, yet, what the fight is over. They can’t yet tell the difference between remorse and defiance, hope and fear, blindness and wisdom. But they’ll learn soon enough. A human can feel only so many things, and once you enumerate them all, once you sample seven billion examples from each of seven billion humans and fit them together in their trillion trillion contexts, all things begin to come clear.
Adam himself is still learning what he meant. Still trying to figure out the uses of a useless choice. All day long now, in this holding cell, he reviews the evidence. He can’t say, yet, what his life was worth or what branch it should have followed. He still isn’t sure what else besides the self there is to save or lose. He has some time to think about this. Seventy plus seventy years.
WHILE THE PRISONER THINKS, innovations surge over his head, across the flyover from Portland and Seattle to Boston and New York and back again. In the time it takes the man to form one self-judging thought, a billion packets of program pass over. They course under the sea in great cables—buzzing between Tokyo, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Bangalore, Chicago, Dublin, Dallas, and Berlin. And the learners begin to turn all this data into sense.
They split and replicate, these master algorithms that Neelay lofts into the air. They’re just starting out, like simplest cells back in the Earth’s morning. But already they’ve learned, in a few short decades, what it took molecules a billion years to learn to do. Now they need only learn what life wants from humans. It’s a big question, to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren’t alone, and they never have been.
MIMI SITS baking in the grass, even in the shade of her pine. The hottest year on record will soon be followed by an even hotter one. Every year a new world champion. She sits cross-legged, hands on knees, a small person making herself smaller. Her head is light. Her thoughts won’t cohere. There’s nothing else to her now but eyes. She has practiced, for years, on humans, holding still, doing nothing but letting herself be looked at. Now she takes the skill outside.
Below her, past the knots of sunbathers, down a shallow auditorium slope,