planet’s surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands—look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There’s no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.
And so Neelay gets out and sees the world. His children comb the Earth tonight with one command: Absorb everything. Eat every scrap of data you can find. Sort and compare more measurements than all of humanity in all of history has yet managed.
Soon enough, his learners will see across the planet. They’ll watch the vast boreal forests from space and read the species-teeming tropics from eye level. They’ll study rivers and measure what’s in them. They’ll collate the data of every wild creature ever tagged and map their wanderings. They’ll read every sentence in every article that every field scientist ever published. They’ll binge-watch every landscape that anyone has pointed a camera at. They’ll listen to all the sounds of the streaming Earth. They’ll do what the genes of their ancestors shaped them to do, what all their forebears have ever done themselves. They’ll speculate on what it takes to live and put those speculations to the test. Then they’ll say what life wants from people, and how it might use them.
ON A LEAD-GRAY AFTERNOON in the brutal hinterlands upstate, an armored van brings Adam back to school. Psych 101. He who understands nothing about people except their innate confusion is driven through the triple-depth, razor-mesh fences of his new digs for continuing education. A squat, concrete observation tower stands to the left of the entrance, three times taller than his boyhood maple. Inside the perimeter, a jumble of slab-walled bunkers waits for him, like something his son might make out of all-gray Legos. Off in the distance, surrounded by more razor-wire moats, men in bright orange—his new nation—play basketball in the aggressive, aggrieved way his brother Emmett always did, trying to scream the ball into the hoop. These men will beat him senseless many times, not for being a terrorist, but for siding with the enemies of human progress. For being a traitor to the race.
The warden riding shotgun in the van turns to smile, watching Adam’s face as they drive down the camera-lined chute of fences. Adam pictures Lois dragging little Charlie here, for hour-long visits, once a month at first, then a couple of times a year, if he’s lucky. Adam watches his son grow up in time-lapse intervals. He sees himself listening greedily to the boy’s staggered reports, hanging on every word. Maybe they’ll become friends at last. Maybe little Charlie will explain banking to him.
They pull up in the unload zone, just down from the set-back, guarded entrance. The warden and driver extract him from the van and escort him through the detectors. Glass the thickness of a Bible. Banks of monitors and electronically locked grates. Through the armored arch behind the checkpoint, a cell-subtended hallway disappears lengthwise down an optical illusion into forever.
The years ahead will run beyond anything he can imagine. The die-offs and disasters will make Bronze Age plagues seem quaint. Prison may become a hideaway from the sentence outside.
Of all the waiting terrors, the one he fears most is time. He does the math, calculates how many futures he’ll have to live through, second by second, until his sentence ends. Futures where our ancestors vanish before we even name them. Futures where our robot descendants use us for fuel, or keep us in infinitely entertaining zoos as secured as the one Adam now checks into. Futures where humanity goes to its mass grave swearing it’s the only thing in creation that can talk. Vast, empty expanses with nothing to fill the hours but remembering how he and a handful of green-souled friends tried to save the world. But, of course, it’s not the world that needs saving. Only the thing that people call by the same name.
A man behind the impenetrable glass in a crisp white shirt emblazoned with a civic emblem asks him for something. Name, maybe, serial number, apology. Adam frowns, distracted, elsewhere. He looks down. There’s something on the cuff of his neon jumpsuit. Round, small, brown, a little globe covered with sticky burs. He has come directly from one bleak brick holding facility, been pressed into a van, driven and unloaded straight into this