I turned away. I really, truly, did not want to hear this. Maybe every kid dreams that she is special, that her name will be known forever. It’s just a fantasy, an expression of adolescent yearning and uncertainty, something you grow out of. But now this Alia, this strange being from the future, was saying that for me, Michael Poole, it was so. It was as if every paranoid, grandiose dream I had ever had were folding down into this moment. But I did not want to be a fulcrum, famous for all time.
Gea said, “To be clear, you believe that Michael’s great contribution will be the hydrate project. The Refrigerator.”
“Yes. But there is more.”
“What else?”
“The restoration of Morag was part of it. I have more to ask of you, Michael Poole, a grave responsibility… You will see.” She glanced around at us all, our bewildered, angry faces. “But this is not the time. I will return.”
Rosa snapped, “When?”
But Alia would only speak to me. “When you call me, Michael.”
And she disappeared. There was nothing left but the chair where Morag had sat, with the little vials of wine and salt, and a small heap of crumpled, abandoned clothing.
We all sat back. Tom blew out his cheeks. Sonia was wide-eyed, silent — delighted, I thought, full of wonder.
John seemed angry, resentful. “I wish they had left us alone. These future ape-people, whatever they are. This is the Bottleneck, for God’s sake. Don’t we have enough to do without dealing with the future as well?”
“I imagine we all feel like that,” Rosa said. “But we may not have a choice. It is precisely because this is a time of crisis that Alia has come here. It seems we are important enough to merit visitors from the future — or at any rate, Michael is.”
John said, “I don’t want to know about the future. I don’t want to think of my life as just an archaeological trace, locked in stone. It’s my life. It’s all I have.”
“I understand. But it can’t be helped.” Rosa stood. “This has been a long session. I suggest we break, sleep, eat. We will talk tomorrow.” She eyed me. “And then you will summon back your admirer from the future, Michael.”
“If I must,” I said.
“I think you do. For it appears you have a mission. How exciting,” she said dryly. And, with a flourish like a stage magician’s, she vanished in a mist of pixels.
That night I lay down in my room, alone for the first time since the bombing. Morag was gone — if she had ever been there at all.
The exorcism and all that had followed had been a roller-coaster ride for me. I was battered, bewildered, and resentful at everybody: Rosa for setting the whole thing up, Alia who had somehow engineered all this with her “Witnessing” from the far future — and Morag, for returning into my life in such a remote and agonizingly incomplete way, and then leaving me again. None of which was fair, of course. Shit happens, I told myself, even such astounding shit as this. Even Alia wasn’t to blame. She might look like a stretched orangutan, but I had seen in her eyes, in the way she looked at me, that she was a person, fully conscious, fully formed emotionally. She was no doubt a product of her times and her society, just as I was. And I had seen, inexplicable as it was, that she was fond of me. It was as if I had developed a crush on Wilma Flintstone. What a joke.
As I drifted toward sleep, exhausted, my thoughts softened. It was in just this sleeping-waking condition that I had had so many glimpses of Morag in the past. But I knew that this time she would not come to me.
The next day I woke feeling drained. When I ordered the curtains to open, they revealed a day that was harsh even by Alaskan standards, with a sky like a steel prison roof clamped down over Deadhorse.
I had a sudden, sharp memory of a contrasting morning on Florida, a winter’s day full of bright cold sunshine, when I had gone out, at age ten or so, to fly a kite or a Frisbee or a water rocket or some damn thing. I could hear the boom of Atlantic breakers kilometers out, smell the sharp salty brine, feel the texture of the sand under my feet and on my skin. Every sense open to the max, I was fully locked into the world, and I never felt so alive, so joyous. But even then, I think I knew I wouldn’t always feel this way. I would age, my eyes would glaze over, my hearing clog, my fingertips crust over with dead flesh, and my body would become like a space suit, insulating me from the world. I knew it even then, and I dreaded it. And in time it had come to pass: this was my reality, my own aching, aging body, a face like old leather, a head stuffed with cotton wool.
When I thought back over the events of the day before — an exorcism, for God’s sake, the strange appearance of Alia, all that allusive gabble about the future — it seemed foolish, an indulgence, like the memory of a dinner party where the talk got out of hand. It seemed to me that morning that Alia’s future was a bright and shiny bubble that had somehow burst in my head overnight. And reality was responsibility: responsibility to my real work, the hydrate project.
So I went to work.
I grabbed some breakfast at Deadhorse’s one and only coffee shop, and made my way to the offices EI had set up in a small three-story block. I picked a cubicle, started up a softscreen with a tap of my fingernail, and put in a call to Shelley. While I waited for a reply I ran through my mail and other progress reports, trying to get a sense of where the project had gotten to while I had been absent in other realms.
Technically the project was going well. In a way the bombing had done us good; the heart of our prototype setup had been swept away, and Mark Two was proving to be a much sounder beast. We were starting to look further afield, too. We had started to talk to the Canadians about spreading our work out along their Arctic coast, and the Russian government had already given us permission to set up another pilot off the Siberian shore.
To obtain a mandate to roll out a global solution, it was the U.S. government, the UN, and the Stewardship agencies whose endorsement we really needed, of course. But once again poor, deluded Ben Cushman, our bomber, had probably done us long-term good. I thought that among the commentators and opinion formers a consensus was emerging that regardless of the environmental arguments, to allow our project to fail now would be a betrayal of Barnette, and of the others who had died.
That was all fine, but we still needed to make the case. And so we were starting to work with Gea’s sponsors toward a presentation to the UN. It would be given by Gea herself. Given the loss of Barnette, I couldn’t think of a better spokesperson for the cause. But it would be the first time an artificial sentience had addressed the UN General Assembly: quite an occasion. I wondered what form Gea would choose to incarnate herself. Presumably not my uncle George’s toy robot.
“How about like Alia?” I said to Shelley, when she at last came on the line. I had downloaded a record of our exorcism to her. “Perhaps an apelike post-human form would be a fitting symbol. All our futures are in the balance, et cetera.”
“Yes. And if things go wrong she could climb a pillar and swing out the window.” Shelley seemed to be multitasking: as she spoke to me she kept glancing aside, and I thought somebody just out of sight was passing her bits of paper as we spoke.
Shelley had been at her desk since six. She had always had those enviable reserves of energy, but since the loss of Ruud Makaay a vast burden of responsibility had fallen on her, and the lines around her eyes were disturbingly dark. “Hey, Michael,” she said, “I don’t want to hang up on you but we’re kind of rapid-responding here. Is there anything else you need from me right now?”
“I called to see what I could do for you.”
She eyed me; for a moment I had her full attention. “Look, Michael, we’re trying to ramp up to a production facility. We’re at a level of detail you can’t much help with. There’s always Gea’s speech; you could work on that, if you’re kicking your heels. But you have other stuff to sort out, don’t you?”