Could I borrow the time machine just for, like, a minute. I just need to go back and warn myself to give up on this whole Old Earth trip. Just stay home, get drunk, and have a sim-fling with a stranger, resign myself to a normal third-wave life, and it’ll be better than all this.
Sadly, tachyons were forevermore out of reach, and people were stuck with the results of their terrible decisions, even if they’d only tried their best all along and honestly what the actual fuck was she supposed to do?
Confess everything to the scholars, accept professional ruin, and endure the smug look on a bunch of perfect first-wave faces.
Or go along with Zhi’s madness, and hope that it didn’t get her literally instead of figuratively murdered.
It was no choice at all, really. Better to push off the inevitable a little longer, even if it meant doing insane things. Which is how Kas found herself following Zhi’s directions to reach the scav town under the Drome.
Good sense of direction or no, she’d hit at least four dead ends on her way, and had to laboriously back up to a place she could identify on the dumb hard-copy map Zhi had sketched for her. Under the skin of ruins, Old Earth was a hive of metal and monocrete many layers deep—whether she was underground, or the original ground layer had been buried long ago, Kas had no idea. She followed tunnels, ladders, and stairs, with only occasional arrows painted on the walls to indicate other humans lived somewhere nearby, lit by flickering stripes of glow-paint that went dark at regular intervals.
How do people live without network? Parts of Sentinel would be just as much of a maze, she was sure, but you’d never visit them without an algo confidently whispering directions into your ear or laying a glowing trail over your vision. When she finally reached a scrap-metal arch painted with a few incomprehensible glyphs, with steady light and human voices beyond, Kas was ready to cry with relief.
The town—if that was the word for it—occupied a huge open space, boxy and high-ceilinged, with tunnels running off in all directions. Its “buildings” consisted of whatever the inhabitants could be bothered to throw together to get a little privacy, and they varied wildly—a snug-looking house made of chiseled monocrete blocks stood next to a scrap-metal shack that looked on the verge of collapse, and beside those were derelict vehicles, tents, canvas domes, and other, stranger accommodations. There was even an old warbot, stripped of its internals and turned into a shelter, laundry hanging limply from its limbs.
There were more people than Kas had expected. Obviously people still lived on Earth, but she’d had the vague idea that it was only a handful, and the kilometers of empty tunnel she’d walked through tended to reinforce that notion. But—her mind was settling back into its scholarly mode, like an ancient bot returning to a familiar routine—that was a trick of the scale. With dozens, possibly hundreds of levels, the area available in just the region around the Drome was colossal; the odds of running into anyone if you weren’t trying to were slim. No wonder Zhi can hide an entire Third-Empire warbot without anyone noticing.
Walking down the main street—the only street, really—was like stepping into some kind of ancient-world sim. Everyone she saw was here, not auto-piloting while their attention was off in the net, and most of them were staring at her. It didn’t feel dangerous, just curious; an acknowledgment that, with her off-world looks and scholar’s robe, Kas was more interesting than most people who strolled through.
Kas stared back in return, fascinated. The scavs were dressed in patches of bright colors, repurposed fabric printed with logos and slogans of corporations that no longer existed and political movements long-dead. Almost everyone was engaged in some kind of work that any Sentinel citizen would delegate to bots—fixing machines and clothes, preparing food, cleaning, and a hundred other domestic chores Kas couldn’t even identify. Young children—so many children, more than Kas had ever seen together in one place—ran around in swarms, apparently at random, laughing and shouting.
They were all so young. At twenty-five, Kas was used to being the youngest person at gatherings that regularly included a dozen double-centenarians in their gel-padded mechassistors. Here she felt like she was practically an adult, which gave her a warm feeling until her scholarly brain took a guess as to why.
It’s because they all die, idiot. No