We walked back to the hotel in the dark. Robin was all over me. He couldn’t stop smirking. Dad. I can’t believe you did that. You stood up for the ol’ Life Force! I showed him my blackened fingertips. He loved it. You’ve got a record now. Criminal!
“And that’s funny… how?”
He took my wrist the way Fagin had tried to take his. He tugged me to a halt on the sidewalk alongside Constitution Avenue. Your wife loves you. I know it for a fact.
-
THE NEXT MORNING GOT US as far as Chicago. ORD was in a state of heightened security not safe enough to communicate to the public. Armed guards with Kevlar breastplates and canine sniffers worked their way up the concourse as we made our way to our gate. I had to keep Robin from petting the dogs.
The gate was a cocktail of jet fuel and stress pheromones. What we used to call freak weather was creating a cascade of delays and cancellations. Our connector to Madison was running late. We sat in front of a suite of four TVs, each tuned to a different band of the ideological spectrum. The moderate-liberal screen reported more drone-delivered poisonings in the Upper Plains states. The conservative-centrist one covered a private mercenary force deployed on the southern border. I pulled out my phone and attacked the two-day backlog of work. Robin sat people-watching, his face a study in wonder.
Every time I glanced up at the gate board, our flight slipped another fifteen minutes. Someone on the gate crew was ripping the Band-Aid off as slowly as possible.
Alerts rippled through every phone in the gate area. A text from the new National Notification Service flashed across everyone’s screens. The message was from the President, emboldened these last two months by a series of unopposed executive orders.
America, have a look at today’s ECONOMIC numbers! Absolutely INCREDULOUS! Together, we will stop the LIES, SILENCE the nay-sayers, and DEFEAT defeatism!!!
I muted the phone and returned to work. Robbie sketched. I thought he was drawing people in the gate area. But when I looked again, his figures turned into radiolarians and mollusks and echinoderms, creatures that made Earth seem like a crazy 1950s issue of Astounding Stories.
I worked, ignoring the fidgeting in the chair to my left. A substantial woman, her head on a swivel, was berating her phone. “Is something going on out there?”
Her phone answered in the sassy voice of a young actress. “Here are today’s best events in the Chicago, Illinois, area!”
The woman caught my eye. I looked away, at the bank of television monitors: a cloud of acrylonitrile vapor several kilometers long was spreading through the Ruhr. Nineteen people had died and hundreds were hospitalized. A small paw clasped my forearm. Robin regarded me, bug-eyed.
Dad? Know how the training is rewiring my brain? His wave included all the craziness of the concourse. This is what’s wiring everybody else.
The woman to my left spoke again. “There’s something they’re not telling us. Not even the machines know what’s going on.” I didn’t know if she was talking to me or her digital assistant. Everyone else around us was bowed and tapping, lost in their pocket universes.
A voice came over the PA. “Ladies and gentlemen in the boarding area. We’ve been informed that no flights will be leaving this airport for at least two more hours.”
A shout rose from the seats around us—a thwarted creature ready to strike. The woman to my left held her phone level in front of her, as if about to eat an open-face sandwich. “They just said we’re in a no-fly. Yeah. Total no-fly.”
Another voice came over the PA, one so homogenous it must have been synthesized. “Passengers in need of unanticipated accommodation should apply at the service counter to enter a hotel discount voucher lottery.”
Robin tapped my calf with his toe. Are we going to get home tonight?
My reply was lost in shouts from down the concourse. I told Robbie to sit tight, then headed toward the commotion. A frustrated passenger three gates down had jabbed a ticket agent in the hand with his phone stylus. I returned to our seats, where the substantial woman was telling her phone, “It’s a cover-up, right? It’s those HUE people. Am I right? It goes deeper than you think.”
I wanted to warn her that it was no longer legal to say certain things in public.
Robin eyed the gate, humming to himself. I leaned in. The song was “High Hopes.” High apple pie in the sky hopes. Aly used to sing it to him in his infancy, while bathing him.
-
WE MANAGED TO MAKE IT HOME. Robbie went in for the neurofeedback session he’d missed, and I put out a rash of fires. A few days later, he took me birding. Holding still and looking had become his favorite activity in all the world. Naturally, he assumed it would bring out the best in me, too. It didn’t. I held still. I looked. All I could see were the dozens of outings my wife had asked me on, before giving up and going birding with someone else.
We went to a preserve fifteen miles out of town. We came to a confluence of lake, meadow, and trees. Right here, Robin declared. They love edges. They love to fly back and forth from one world to another.
We sat in tall grass by a boulder, making ourselves small. The day was crystalline. We shared Aly’s old pair of Swiss binocs. Robbie was less interested in spotting individual birds than he was in listening to the calls fill the ocean of air. I didn’t realize how many kinds of calls there were until my son pointed them out. I heard a song, wildly exotic. “Whoa. What’s that?”
His mouth opened. Serious? You don’t know? That’s your favorite bird.
There were jays and cardinals, a pair of nuthatches and a tufted titmouse. He even identified a sharp-shinned hawk. Something flashed by, yellow, white, and black. I reached for Aly’s binoculars, but the prize was gone before I got them up to my eyes. “Did you see what it was?”
But Robin was tuned in to other thoughts, receiving them over the air on some unassigned frequency. He gauged the horizon, immobile for a long time. At last he said, I think I might know where everybody is.
It took me a while to remember: The question he’d latched onto so long ago, on a starry night in the Smokies. The Fermi paradox. “Then hand them over peacefully, buddy. No questions asked.”
Remember how you said there might be a big roadblock somewhere?
“The Great Filter. That’s what we call it.”
Like, maybe there’s a Great Filter right at the beginning, when molecules turn into living things. Or it might be when you first evolve a cell, or when cells learn to come together. Or maybe the first brain.
“Lots of bottlenecks.”
I was just thinking. We’ve been looking and listening for sixty years.
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
I know. But maybe the Great Filter isn’t behind us. Maybe it’s ahead of us.
And maybe we were just now hitting it. Wild, violent, and godlike consciousness, lots and lots of consciousness, exponential and exploding consciousness, leveraged up by machines and multiplied by the billions: power too precarious to last long.
Because otherwise… How old did you say the universe is?
“Fourteen billion years.”
Because otherwise, they’d be here. All over. Right?
His hands waved in every direction. They froze when something primordial signed the air. Robbie saw them first, still mere specks: a family of sandhill cranes, three of them, flying southward in loose formation toward winter quarters that the young one had not yet seen. They were late leaving. But the whole autumn was weeks late, as late as next spring would be early to arrive.