After the Collapse (6 page)

A small auroral screen opened up in the sky not four meters from Pertinax. He could smell the scorched molecules associated with the display.

Don Corleone appeared on the screen: one or more of the resident AIs taking a form deemed familiar from Pertinax’s recent past viewing records.

“You have done well to bring us this information, steward. We will now enforce our justice on the humans.”

Pertinax’s teeth chattered. “Puh-please try to spare my companions.”

The representative of the tropospheric mind did not deign to reply, and the screen winked out in a frazzle of sparks.

The nighted sky grew darker, if such was possible. Ominous rumbles sounded from the west. Winds began to rise.

The mind was marshalling a storm. A lightning storm. And Pertinax was riding a bomb.

Pertinax frantically shut off the feeder line to the methanogens. The balloon began to descend, but all too slowly for Pertinax’s peace of mind.

The first lightning strike impacted the ground far below, after seeming to sizzle right past Pertinax’s nose. He knew the bolt must have been farther off than that, but anywhere closer than the next bioregion was
too
close.

Now shafts of fire began to rain down at supernatural frequency. Turbulence rocked the gondola. Thunder deafened him. Pertinax’s throat felt raw, and he realized he had been shouting for help from the balloon or the mind or anyone else who might be around to hear.

Now the cascade of lighting was nigh incessant, one deadly strike after another on the Overclockers’ village. Pertinax knew he could stay no longer with the deadly balloon. But the ground was still some hundred meters away.

Pertinax jumped.

Behind him the balloon exploded.

Pertinax spread out his arms, transforming the big loose flaps of skin anchored from armpits to ankles into wings, wings derived from one of his ancestral strains, the sciuroptera.

After spiraling downward with some control, despite the gusts, Pertinax landed lightly, on an open patch of ground near a wooden sign that announced the “City Limits” of “Chicago.”

He had arrived just in time for the twister.

Illuminated intermittently by the slackening lightning, the stygian funnel shape tracked onto land from across the lake and stepped into the human settlement, moving in an intelligent and programmatic fashion among the buildings.

Even at this distance, the wind threatened to pull Pertinax off his feet. He scrambled for a nearby tree and held onto its trunk for dear life.

At last, though, the destruction wrought by the tropospheric mind ended, with the twister evaporating in a coordinated manner from bottom to top.

Pertinax ran back toward the town green.

The many fires caused by the lightning had been effectively doused by the wet cyclone, but still buildings smoldered. Not one stone seemed atop another, nor plank joined to plank. The few Overclocker survivors were too dazed or busy to interfere with Pertinax.

Seared streaks marked the town green, and huge divots had been wrenched up by the twister. Windblown litter made running difficult.

But a circle of lawn around the cage holding the wardens was immaculate, having been excluded from electrical blasts and then cradled in a deliberate eye of the winds.

“Is everyone all right?”

“Perty! You did it! Yes, we’re all fine. Even Cimabue is finally coming around.”

Within a short time all were freed. Pertinax clutched Chellapilla to him. Sylvanus surveyed the devastation, clucking his tongue ruefully.

“Such a tragedy. Well, I expect that once we relocate the remnant population, we can wean them off our help and back up to some kind of agrarian self-sufficiency in just a few generations.”

Pertinax felt now an even greater urgency to engender a heir or two with Chellapilla. The demands on the stewards of this beloved planet required new blood to sustain their mission down the years.

“Chell, have you decided about our child?”

“Absolutely, Perty. I’m ready. I’ve even thought of a name.”

“Oh?”

“Boy or girl, it will have to be Storm!”

WAVES AND
SMART MAGMA

Salt air stung Storm’s super-sensitive nose, although he was still several scores of kilometers distant from the coast. The temperate August sunlight, moderated by a myriad, myriad high-orbit pico-satellites, one of the many thoughtful legacies of the Upflowered, descended as a soothing balm on Storm’s unclothed pelt. Several churning registers of flocculent clouds, stuffed full of the computational particles known as virgula and sublimula, betokened the watchful custodial omnipresence of the tropospherical mind. Peaceful and congenial was the landscape around him: a vast plain of black-leaved cinnabon trees, bisected by a wide, meandering river, the whole of which had once constituted the human city of Sacramento.

Storm reined to a halt his furred and feathered steed—the Kodiak Kangemu named Bergamot was a burly, scary-looking but utterly obedient bipedal chimera some three meters tall at its muscled shoulders, equipped with a high saddle and panniers—and paused for a moment of reflection.

The world was so big, and rich, and odd! And Storm was all alone in it!

That thought both frightened and elated him.

He felt he hardly knew himself or his goals, what depths or heights he was capable of. Whether he would live his long life totally independent of wardenly strictures, a rebel, or become an obedient part of the guardian corps of the planet. Hence this journey.

A sudden lance of light breaking through a bank of clouds brightened Storm’s spirits. Despite the distinct probability that the photons had been deliberately collimated by the tropospheric mind’s manipulation of water molecules as a signal to chivvy him onward.

Anything was possible, Storm realized. His destiny rested solely on the strength of his character and mind and muscles, and the luck of the Upflowered. Glory or doom, fame or ignominy, love or enmity…. His fate remained unwritten.

And so far he had not done too badly, giving him confidence for his future.

The young warden had now traveled much further from home than he ever had in his short life. All to barge in upon a perilous restoration and salvage mission whose members had known nothing of Storm’s very existence until a short time ago.

A gamble, to be sure, but one he had felt compelled to make. Perhaps his one and only chance for an adventure before settling down.

The death of Storm’s parents, the wardens Pertinax and Chellapilla, had left him utterly and instantly adrift. Although by all rights and traditions, Storm should have stepped directly into their role as one of the several wardens of the Great Lakes bioregion, he had balked. The conventional lives his parents had led, in obedience to the customs and innate design of their species did not appeal to Storm’s nature—at least not at this moment. Perhaps his unease with his assigned lot in life was due to the unusual conditions of his conception….

Some twenty years ago, five wardens, Storm’s parents among them, had undertaken an expedition to the human settlement of “Chicago,” one of the few places where those degraded
Homo sap
remnants who had disdained the transcendence of the Upflowering still dwelled. During that dangerous enforcement action, which resulted in the destruction of the human village by the tropospheric mind, Storm had been conceived. Those suspenseful and tumultuous prenatal circumstances seemed to have left him predisposed to a characteristic restless thrill-seeking.

His conception and birth among the strictly reproductively regulated wardens had been sanctioned so that Storm might grow up to be a replacement for the elderly warden Sylvanus, who, at age one-hundred-and-twenty-eight, had already begun to ponder retirement.

And so Storm was raised in the cozy little prairie home—roofed with pangolin tiles, pots of greedy, squawking parrot tulips on the windowsill—shared by Pertinax and Chellapilla. His first two decades of life had consisted of education and play and exploration in equal measures. His responsibilities had been minimal.

Which explained his absence from the routine surveying expedition where his parents had met their deaths.

A malfunctioning warden-scent broadcaster had failed to protect their encampment from a migratory herd of galloping aurochs, and Storm’s parents had perished swiftly at midnight in each other’s arms in their tent.

Sylvanus, all gray around his muzzle and ear tufts, his once-sinewy limbs arthritic as he closed in on his second century, condoled with Storm.

“There, there, my poor boy, cry all you want. I know I’ve drained my eyes already on the trip from home to see you. Your parents were smart and capable and loving wardens, and lived full lives, even if they missed reaching a dotage such as mine. You can be proud of them. They always honored and fulfilled the burdens bestowed on our kind by the Upflowered.”

At the mention of the posthumans who had spliced and redacted Storm’s species out of a hundred baseline genomes, Storm felt his emotions flip-flopping from sadness to anger.

“Don’t mention the Upflowered to me! If not for them, my mother and father would still be alive!”

Sylvanus shook his wise old head. “If not for the Upflowered, none of our kind would exist at all, my son.”

“Rubbish! If they wanted to create us, they should have done so without conditions.”

“Are you not, then, going to step into my paw prints, so that I might lay down my own charge? You’re fully trained now….”

Storm felt a burst of regret that he had to disappoint his beloved old “uncle.” But the emotion was not strong enough to countervail his stubborn independence. He laid a paw-hand on Sylvanus’s bony shoulder.

“I can’t, uncle, I just can’t. Not now, anyhow. And in fact, I’m leaving this bioregion entirely. I have to see more of the world, to learn my place in it.”

Sylvanus recognized the futility of arguing with the headstrong youth. “So be it. Travel with my blessing, then, and try to return if you can before my passing, for a final farewell. I’ll get Cimabue and Tanselle to breed my successor, while I hang in there for a while yet.”

And so Storm had set out westward, across the vast continent, braving rain and heat, loneliness and fear, with no goal in mind other than to see what he could see. He and his trusty marsupial avian-ursine mount, Bergamot, foraged off the land, supplementing their herbivore diet with various nutriceuticals conjured up out of Storm’s Universal Proseity Device.

Crossing the Rockies, he had encountered the tropospheric mind for the first time since his abdication. He had been deliberately avoiding this massive atmospheric intelligence due to its tendency to impose orders on all wardens. Storm feared chastisement for his rebellion. But traveling this high above sea level, there was no escaping the lower tendrils of the globally distributed artificial intelligence.

A chilly caplet of cloud stuff, rich in virgula/sublimula codec, had formed about his head, polling his thoughts by transcranial induction. Storm squirmed under the painless interrogation, irritated yet helpless to do anything.

A palm-sized high-res wetscreen formed in the air, and on it appeared the current chosen avatar of the tropospheric mind: a kindly sorcerer from some old human epic. (The tropospherical mind contained all the accumulated data of the Earth’s digitized culture at the time of the Upflowering, a trove which the wardens frequently ransacked for their own amusement and edification.)

The sorcerer spoke. “You follow a lonely path, Storm. And a less-than-optimal one, so far as your own development is concerned.”

Anticipating harsher rebuke, Storm was taken aback. “Perhaps. But it’s my choice.”

“Yet you might both extend your own growth and aid me and the world at the same time.”

“How is that?”

“By joining a cohort of your fellows now assembling. As you work with them and bind together as a team, you might come to better appreciate your innate talents and how they could best benefit the planet under my direction.”

“Your direction! That’s always been my quarrel. We’re just pawns to you! It was under your direction that my parents died.”

Had the sorcerer denied this accusation, Storm would have definitely walked out on the mission. But the sorcerer had the good grace to look apologetic, sad and chagrined, although he did not actually accept responsibility for the deaths.

Mollified, Storm felt he could at least inquire politely about the mission. “What are these other wardens doing?”

“They are building a ship, and will embark from San Francisco Bay for the island of Hawaii, where they will confront my insane sister, Mauna Loa. She has already killed all the resident wardens there, as she seeks to establish her own dominion. No communications or diplomacy I have had with her have changed her plans. You think me a tyrant, but she wants utter control of all life around her.”

Storm said, “Maybe she’ll listen to reason from us.”

“I sincerely doubt it. But you should feel free to try. In any case, I believe the odyssey will offer you the challenges you seek. Even a magnitude more.”

Storm’s curiosity was greatly piqued. Curse the weather mind! It was impossible to outwit or out-argue something that used a significant portion of the atmosphere as its computational reservoir. This was precisely why Storm had avoided speaking to the construct.

“If I agree to go on this journey with them, it does not mean I will fall right back into your tidy little schemes for me afterwards.”

The sorcerer grinned. “Of course not.”

Storm instantly regretted giving his tacit consent. But the lure of the dangerous mission was too strong to resist.

“Allow me,” said the tropospheric mind, “to download your optimal route into your UPD.”

Utility fog shrouded Storm’s panniers, pumping information into his proseity unit as he gee’d up and rode on.

* * * *

Now, so close to his West Coast destination, Storm felt compelled to surrender his nostalgic ruminations for action. He kicked Bergamot into motion, and the biped surged in its odd loping fashion across the fruited plains that had once been covered by human urban blight.

As he passed beneath the cinnabon trees, Storm snatched a few dozen sweet sticky rolls from the branches overhead, filling a pannier with the welcome treats. He tossed several, one at a time, into the air ahead of him, where Bergamot snapped them up greedily with lightning reflexes. Gorging himself, eventually sated, Storm licked his paw-hands and muzzle clean.

Following the directions in his UPD, paralleling the Sacramento River for most of the journey, past the influx of its many tributaries, through its delta, Storm came in good time to the shores of San Pablo Bay. He continued west and south along that body of water, eventually reaching his ordained rendezvous point: the northern terminus of the roadless Golden Gate Bridge, anomalous in the manicured wilderness.

One of the select human artifacts preserved after the Upflowering for its utility and beauty, the span glistened with the essentially dumb self-repair virgula and sublimula that had maintained it against decay for centuries.

Storm admired the sight for a short time, then homed in on the scent of his fellow wardens. Following a steep path, he reached a broad stony beach. There he found ten wardens finishing the construction of their ship, and ten Kodiak Kangemus picking idly at drifts of seaweed and bivalves.

Six of the wardens worked around a composite UPD device. Their individual reconfigurable units had been slaved together in order to produce larger-than-normal output pieces. Three wardens fed biomass into the conjoined hopper, while three others handled the output, ferrying it to the workers on the ship. Those other four wardens, consulting printed plans, snapped the superwood pieces into place on the nearly completed vessel.

At first no one noticed Storm. But then he was spotted by a female, noteworthy for her unique piebald coloration.

“Ho! It’s the supercargo!”

Storm bristled at the slight, but said nothing. He dropped down off Bergamot, shooing the beast towards its companions.

The ten wardens hastened to group themselves around Storm, in a not-unfriendly manner.

“You’re Storm,” said the pretty pinto female. Her voice was sweet and chirpy, her demeanor mischievous. “I’m Jizogirl. The weather mind told us you’d be here today. Just in time, too! Let me introduce everyone.”

During the hellos, Storm uneasily sized up his new companions—all of whom were at least a few years older than he, and in some instances decades.

Pankey, Arp, Rotifero, Wrinkles and Bunter were males. Tallest of the ten, Pankey’s bold mien bespoke a natural leadership. Arp managed to look bored and inquisitive simultaneously. Elegant Rotifero paid little attention to Storm, instead preferring to present his best profile to the ladies. Wrinkles plainly derived his name from his exaggerated patagium: the folds of flesh beneath a warden’s arms that allowed brief aerial gliding. Bunter, plump as a pumpkin, was sniffing suspiciously in the direction of Storm’s panniers.

Beyond the charming Jizogirl: Catmaul exhibited an athlete’s lithe strength; Faizai echoed Rotifero’s sexual preening; Shamrock was plainly itching to get back to work, as if looking to impress Pankey and secure the number-two slot; and Gumball shyly pondered her own paw-feet rather than make eye-contact with Storm.

“Pleased to meet you all,” said Storm. “I’m anxious to learn more about our mission. I hope I’ll be an asset.”

Pankey spoke. “You are rather the hundredth-and-one leg on a centipede, you know. We had a complete roster without you butting in.”

“Pankey! For shame!” Jizogirl made up for her earlier quip about “supercargo” in Storm’s eyes with this remonstrance, and he chose to appear unaffected by Pankey’s gibe.

“I know I can be of some use. Just tell me what to do.”

“Well, we want to sail at dawn, and we still have several hours of work to accomplish before dark. So if you could possibly pitch in—”

“Of course. Just point me toward a task.”

“Why don’t you collect biomass for now? It’s the simplest chore.”

Storm bit his tongue against a defense of his own abilities, and merely said, “Sure. Should I slave my UPD to the others?”