Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

How long did it take to restore?

About two years. Pushing a bucket around with a mop one night I realized I’d become a custodian. I laughed. What a thankless job, holding chaos and disorder at bay in the silent halls of an empty school.

Did you consider getting back in touch with Wyatt and Erika, or with Star?

What would I tell them? They belonged to a previous version of me. My holy task required that I cut off as many human connections as possible and wait patiently for Mr. Kirkpatrick’s return. His academy would be in perfect shape, ready for pupils. I imagined he’d confer on me some special role, the caretaker of the academy. I found this solitary duty suited me.

He never arrived.

There’s still time.

You sound pretty confident about that.

I know this because the one person who did show up was Dirk Bickle. He just pulled into the parking lot in his ridiculous Hummer while I was mowing the play field. The Sikh guys weren’t with him this time. His gratitude was obvious in how ferociously he embraced me. I invited him in and showed him around, pointed out the work I’d done on the electrical and ventilation and floors. He beamed. In my quarters I served him coffee and asked him what was supposed to happen next.

He told me he was ready to reveal the master plan. He started with a hypothetical question. What if I was faced with the following choice—I could save the human race from self-imposed destruction, and the rest of humanity’s existence would be peaceful for another thousand years until an asteroid obliterated the earth, or I could single-handedly destroy the human race and by doing so ensure that new life would appear after earth’s destruction, on Mars.

[laughs]

I told him the choice was false. First, if humans lived another thousand years on earth, we’d surely develop technology to either obliterate the asteroid or escape the planet altogether. Second, how would new life emerge on Mars if humans weren’t around to make it happen?

Bickle answered in the form of another question. Wasn’t it interesting, he said, that humans had imperiled the planet at precisely the moment when we’d become capable of developing a technological solution to undo the damage? What held us back, he said, was our orientation to nature. We’d thoroughly externalized it instead of coming to terms with ourselves as its greatest force. We speak of “the environment” as if it’s something apart from us. We speak of protecting the environment and being environmentally friendly as if the environment exists outside our homes. Worse were those who wished to restore nature to some prehuman state, failing to recognize that nature is constantly changing. The only rational choice, Bickle said, was to adopt an inventionist philosophy of environmental stewardship and engage in full-scale planetary reengineering, and to embrace the spirit of this project as a natural phenomenon rather than an artificial, human enterprise. The concept of artificiality was itself artificial. Mr. Kirkpatrick saw through the cultural construct that would segregate nature, humanity, and technology. His was an effort to redeem the human race through understanding that we were meant to control the course of nature and engineer it for the purposes of beauty.

Did you ever suspect that Bickle was just fucking with you?

I considered it. But why would the guy go to so much trouble just to mess with my head? There had to be a reason for him to follow me around, show up with a mystical refrigerator in the desert, save my life. Obviously he was a true believer of something . Even if that something was a delusion, it was an attractive delusion. Keep in mind I was surrounded by a society in which people didn’t appear to believe in anything deeper than their product wish lists. Think about it. Utah is populated largely by people who believe their prophet discovered a pair of gold plates and spoke to an angel named Moroni. Hollywood is run by people who surgically alter their appearances and think they’re descended from an alien named Xenu. People believe in ghosts, UFOs, a Heaven in which they’ll reunite with all their dead relatives. Let’s not even get into Christianity with its flaming sword guarding the tree of knowledge. Human beings just fundamentally believe crazy fucking shit, the crazier the better. What Bickle was hinting at seemed a lot less crazy than praying to Jesus to make you rich. Is believing that human beings are meant to be stewards of life in the universe really crazier than believing a certain brand of car makes you sexy or that God is keeping track of how many times you masturbate?

[laughs]

So Bickle moved into one of the spare dorm rooms and began revealing Mr. Kirkpatrick’s teachings to me. The rift between Kirkpatrick and the dropouts had pretty much destroyed the academy, he said, and he had no idea where Mr. Kirkpatrick had gone. Into the desert, maybe, where all prophets go. He told me of great awakenings and celestial visitors, Kirkpatrick’s series of prophetic dreams in which he communicated with Freidrich Nietzsche on the Bardo plane, becoming one with the philosopher and finding himself, in this act of communion, transformed into a planet-devouring phoenix. Kirkpatrick was Nietzsche’s heir, spreading the word that the distinction between the overman and the human was the overman’s responsibility to spread life itself through the universe. Bickle led me through the prophecies, late into the night. He said Mr. Kirkpatrick had been waiting for me to reach a state of receptivity before briefing me on the program.

Or maybe they were waiting for you to become wealthier so they could come after your money.

I feel sorry for the smallness of your thinking, I really do.

It all sounds bogus to me.

Do you want to hear the rest or what?

Why not. Go ahead.

One night after our lessons I asked Bickle what had caused the strife between the dropouts and Kirkpatrick. He became solemn and started speaking about Nick’s final invention. You remember how he created that machine when we were in high school, the one that took itself apart?

The science fair.

Right. Well imagine such a machine operating on a global scale. Actually, you can’t call it a machine, per se. Consider it a program, a system, a Rube Goldberg series of actions and reactions spreading outward from a central node. To call it a weapon would be too reductive. It was a device that set certain events in motion. The finger that topples the first in a row of dominos. Bickle called it the Rebooting Device, a technology designed to reconfigure the planet and bring about a new era.

What kind of era?

[laughs] He called it the Age of Fucked Up Shit.

Where was the device?

In a safety deposit box in a Chase bank in midtown Manhattan. Bickle gave me the name of the bank, the box number. I remained expressionless and didn’t let on that I had the key. We continued our lessons. A month passed in deep meditation. The desert heat pressed down on me and just looking at the world outside my head was like one long good-bye. Finally Bickle packed up his Hummer and left, promising that Kirkpatrick would return. I waited a day, then caught the first flight to JFK.

After years of living in the desert suburbs working with my hands, speaking to few people, in a sort of monastic haze, stepping out of a cab in Midtown Manhattan was like getting electrocuted. I checked into a hotel in Times Square. It was a Sunday, so I waited until the next morning to go to the bank. I arrived as they opened and asked for access to box #3487. I had to sign something, and when I provided my ID and signature, they matched the info on file. This seemed like further confirmation that I was supposed to be pursuing this particular path, like the dropouts had forged my signature ahead of time. In a room of brass-doored safety deposit boxes, I took the key that Erika had vomited up and turned it in the lock. The clerk turned his key, and I pulled out a box and set it on the table.