“Is this one of those… military meals?” Victor says cautiously.
“I think so,” Winnie says. “It was a condition on the funding. Darian ordered it. We had to carry the highest calorie to weight ratio for the least cost.”
“That should be impossible.”
“Well, that’s why we’re eating this stuff.”
“Two days down, ten to go.”
“I’d rather eat the canned stuff at this point.”
“Winnie, that stuff is fifty years old.”
“Well, it’s in a can, isn’t it? If the seals held—”
I tune out their bickering, and clean off my spoon. We’re all doing so much digging and walking and climbing, everywhere the boards can’t go, and we’re already hungry all the time, even in our sleep. I can’t imagine having to survive in this city, constantly harried and hunted, alone and terrified. And waiting for a rescue that would never come…
“The SOS sign at the botanical gardens,” I tell them, trying to stir up interest again. “I found a journal written by the people who made it.”
“No shit?” Victor says, interested at last. “Hey, look at that. Primary source corroboration. I don’t suppose they saved any seeds in that journal, did they?”
“Victor.”
“Sorry, sorry. I live in hope.”
The drone paths showed us intact statues, evidence of bombing, signal fires, SOS signs—many on rooftops, and one, just one, in what had once been pretty white gravel, surrounded by warm-temperature plants.
We picked this city because it’s a good research city. And I may have found the most important document in the entire thing. But who cares, right? There’s Darian out there, getting photomicroscopy images of the busted buildings to see if they were bombed, looted, attacked by Them; there’s Victor, carefully dissecting seedlings and mice; there’s Winnie with her portable lab, her little stable of human remains detection sniffer rats and crawlerbots. And me. Who reads diaries.
Sometimes I look around, wearily, and ask myself: Why aren’t more people studying the Setback? Why isn’t everyone studying it, why did we bother starting universities again, why did we rebuild them if not to figure out what happened? It knocked the entire world back to the stone age and everything had to be recreated from scratch. It was the greatest extinction event of a single species (us) in the history of the Earth, more than the K-T Event. We are the descendants of that zero-point-five percent of people who made it through those three years. Yet I personally know more people studying the Hundred Years War. Half of my friends are Renaissance scholars. Instead of the microscope of the world being trained on the Setback, everyone looked away.
I look at our research team and I wonder what the writer would have thought of us. Darian is the oldest, at twenty-seven, but all of us were born years and years after everything was over. We can’t know what it was like. We can read about it, we can dream about it, but we can’t know. This book is the closest I’ll ever come to knowing.
I sit in the remnants of the botanical garden and go through the scans of the first entries, under what’s left of the dome. They built it well; the iron bones jut bravely in their precise, original formations, exposed without their flesh of glass. The air is warm and damp, smelling of the sunflower fields outside the town. Before now, if you had told me that sunflowers had a smell, I wouldn’t have believed you.
About the statues… I mean, no one seriously believes the statues were ‘coming alive,’ but neither are the specifics quite clear either. There is minimal literature coming from the survivors even now, they don’t seem to want to talk about it and cannot be begged, coaxed, bribed, cajoled, nagged, bullied, or threatened into it (believe me), but they are adamant about the statues. And they all say, in their various languages, leaning forward into various microphones, meeting my eyes: Coming alive. But we don’t know how.
And there is a significant struggle to identify the enemy, period, who left nothing but these statues, which we made, and their traces, like tracks in mud, that we have to analyze as if they were fossils. There is the unspoken assumption that since no recordings survived on the tech of the time, at least some of the facts were made up or exaggerated. Well. Unspoken for most of us. Darian says it all the time. That’s why he’s more comfortable with his X-rays, his instruments, his lasers, his busted buildings and crater measurements, his numbers.
I helped him last summer, against his will (Dr. Aaron, unaware, lent me out to his supervisor’s lab), with a database on the purported earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, rifts, sinkholes, and so on, that supposedly happened during the Setback. “Look at this stuff,” he sneered. “Like some ancient book whimpering about the Great Flood. That’s how credible half this stuff is. Telling stories around a campfire, screwing it up with each re-telling.”
“You’d have a lifetime worth of work proving it though,” I said, strained, trying to be polite. “At least the evidence is recent. Not thousands of years old.”
“I suppose so,” he said grudgingly. “And at least for most of them there should be evidence.”
“But there’s—” I began, and stopped; we both knew I was going to say ‘first-person accounts,’ which he mistrusts and, I now think, with the experience of that summer behind me, hates.
Now, he walks past me and says, reminding me, “You’re obsessed with that thing. Find anything else useful?”
Heavy in his smug voice is the reminder that plays in my head all day and even at night, in my dreams: We only have ten more days here. Make it count. And don’t waste other people’s time.
But I have to; I force myself to ask the others to help me recon the buildings, looking for clues from the journal.
“This will be the only time,” I say, and try to keep the wheedling out of my voice. “Please. It’ll only take a few hours, and maybe we’ll find… we’ll… find things for your projects too.”
“All right,” Victor says. “I walk around all the time anyway.”
Darian looks at me stonily; his eyes are almost the same colour as the concrete, in his darkly tanned face. “So you’re looking for… what, exactly? Based on this diary?”
“Signs of marks on the doorways or walls. Showing which houses they looted. They said they had a bucket and a paintbrush. And, and, and”—I remember, and stumble over my words in my eagerness—”a bomb crater that was fresh at the time, two years post-Invasion. On Shoemaker Street. With a piece of shrapnel in it.”
“They were still being bombed two years later?” he says, interested at last. “That’s what they said? A fresh crater?”
“Yes! Brand new. The casing not even rusted, they said.”
“Oh, all right.”
All afternoon we scramble up and down the broken streets, tripping on cobbles, riding where we can, carrying the boards on our backpacks where we cannot. And we find nothing on any doorways or walls. “What colour paint did they use? Gray?” Darian grouses. I keep silent; there’s no way to jolly him when he’s in a mood like that, and you’re better off not even trying.
We pause briefly at what is obviously the shrapnel, still, after all these years, embedded in the house, and he says, “There’s no crater.” I don’t defend the journal, but nod; I should be yelling “Told you so!” because I am half-right even if it looks like I am half-wrong too, but I hang my head instead. Still, he point-marks the site and puts it in his notepad, and we keep walking, and he doesn’t leave us.
Victor is less vocally disappointed and I find myself hanging back so we can talk; outside of my first-year biology class I don’t really understand most of what he’s talking about. Every now and then a familiar word bobs up like an iceberg in the ocean of his excited monologue.