All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,98

means more disease. The chaos and starvation will worsen. There will be more wars, and worse wars. Wars like nobody has ever seen. God forbid we have to resort to the Unraveling.”

“When the whole world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos,” said Ernesto. Patricia couldn’t find it in herself to cry anymore.

25

LAURENCE WISHED PATRICIA could be here, by his side, to see this. He imagined explaining to her what she was seeing, and why it was even more amazing than it looked.

Laurence stood on a gantry, hundreds of feet above ground level, with Denver spread in a fetal position to his left. Six steel-and-fiberglass praying mantises perched over an empty space in the gantry’s center—the space that could, one day, burst open and reveal the Pathway to Infinity. Normally Laurence would be paralyzed with vertigo, standing on top of a skyscraper with no railing, but he was too overwhelmed with the magnificence before him to worry about heights. Each of the huge red mantises had a power coil in its “tail” section, and then a midsection supported by two pairs of legs, with a collection of equipment that included the antigravity generators that Laurence’s team had been working on for two years. The “heads” of the insects consisted of focusing devices, which would stabilize the opening that the antigrav beams helped to create. This insane structure seemed to dwarf the mountains in the distance. Even in the face of unthinkable horror, even with what had happened to Patricia’s mom and dad and so many other people Laurence had known, there was still brilliance in the world. Saving wonder. He only wished he could show Patricia, so she could either feel comforted or laugh at his hubris; he almost didn’t care which, as long as it lifted her misery a little.

Just like every moment since Patricia ran out on Laurence months ago, he tried to guess what she would be saying if she were here. And where she actually was, and what she was doing. Whether she was okay. He felt as though he were having an argument with her in his head, his optimism against her despair. Next to him here on this platform, Anya, Sougata, and Tanaa were freaking out over every detail of the engineering, but Laurence barely even heard what they were saying.

“Let’s hope it works,” Anya said.

“We could be months away from preliminary tests,” said Sougata. “But it’s still a beautiful thing, man.”

By the time they took the elevator back down to ground level, Laurence was obsessing about Patricia again, to the point where the fantastic wormhole generator—the coolest device in the history of the planet—was shoved to the back of his mind. He felt like he was trapped in a moment of time, where he’d just told her he loved her, and hadn’t been able to move forward to whatever happened after that. The further away he got from that moment, the thinner he stretched. He was temporally dislocated, and the time differential was only growing more severe.

Back at ground floor, Laurence wandered the old industrial park that Milton Dirth had refurbished. People in dark uniforms guarded the perimeter. Nobody was allowed in or out without Milton’s verbal permission—and nobody had seen Milton in weeks. All phones, personal computers, and Caddies were confiscated on arrival at this campus, and none of the computers were connected to the internet. There was an intranet, plus someone had created internal mirrors of a number of scientific and technical websites. They did have a TV with CNN, so they’d been able to keep track of the slow-motion emergency: Chinese saber-rattling in the South China Sea, Russian troops massing, the water wars. People, people they knew personally, in refugee camps full of disease back east. But there was no way Laurence could get a message to Patricia, or find out how she was doing.

The building where Laurence worked (and lived, in a converted office with bunk beds) was the former headquarters of a start-up company called HappyFruit, Inc., which had marketed fruit that was genetically modified to include a tiny amount of antidepressants. “SQUEEZE THE JOY OUT OF LIFE” read one poster with a cartoon papaya that Laurence saw from his top-bunk perch every night. The first day or so, the idea of camping out at a start-up had seemed thrillingly surreal. Now, he was over it. At least HappyFruit had encouraged its employees to jog, so there were three showers. For a hundred people. The