Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

Then he flipped the question around in his head: He tried to imagine how he’d feel if humanity really did run out of hope in a year or ten and they didn’t have this radical option to offer. How would he explain that to some hypothetical person, in this apocalyptic panic? We might have had a solution, but we were too scared to pursue it.

“We can’t give up now,” Laurence heard himself say. “What I mean is, we can carry on with the research, for now, in the hopes that we’ll find a way to make it totally safe. And we can all agree we won’t even test the machine unless things look really, really bad. But if it comes down to a choice between the whole human race dying out in some nuclear holocaust or total environmental collapse, and a few hundred thousand people making it to a new planet, that’s no choice at all, right?”

Milton was nodding with his arms folded. Isobel snapped back to life with a gasp, as though he’d done CPR on her just in time.

Laurence expected someone else to jump in and argue with him, but everybody was hanging on his words for some weird reason. So Laurence said, “As long as humanity survives, the best part of planet Earth will have endured. I mean, you wouldn’t do anything without a backup plan, right? So this is just our backup plan, in case Plan A fails.”

They’d been meeting a few hours, and people were starting to come together behind the notion of developing the wormhole generator as an absolute last resort. Especially since the alternative was just packing up and going home, and waiting for the worst to happen.

At last, Milton spoke up again. “Thank you, all of you, for sharing your perspectives. This is not going to be an easy decision to make, and we’re not going to finish making it today. For now, though, I hope we can all agree to keep moving forward. With safeguards in place, as Anya suggested, to keep the device from being activated without overwhelming likelihood of a true doomsday occurrence. But I will say this: I believe it’s coming. The only question in my mind is the timescale. It could be six months or sixty years, but at some point, if things keep going along these vectors, we will be in a place where we are poised to end ourselves. We can only hope there will be enough warning before it happens to allow us to get some people out.”

The exact nature of the safeguards was left vague.

Everybody left the server room reeling with tension headaches and moral torment. Tanaa and Jerome rushed off to the storage closet, the only place with privacy in the entire compound, for some emergency nookie. For everybody else, there was a pleasant surprise: Someone had delivered two dozen pizzas while they’d been debating the fate of the world. Nobody had eaten pizza in months, since they got to Denver. Laurence grabbed three wide slices, folding the first slice lengthwise and stuffing it in his mouth.

The sun had gone down, and the one tree on the front lawn of the industrial park campus was making an evil silhouette against the outsized moon. Laurence ended up changing seats so he could eat pizza with his back to the big window, but he could still feel the world breathing down his neck. He looked over at Isobel, and she nodded at him, with one eye half-shut in a kind of minimalist smile.

WEEDS PUSHED OUT of all the cracks in the walls, the moment Ernesto broke the magical seals on the entrance to Danger and took his first steps out onto the landing. Patricia and Kawashima had spent hours disinfecting and defoliating the landing and stairs, and their efforts didn’t seem to have made any difference. Fungus blossomed and spread until the floor was squishy and the ceiling sagged with the added weight. Ernesto smiled, unsteady, and grew a beard of green. The seeds and spores on his hands sprouted, and greenery came out of every seam or opening on his embroidered suede vest, clean white shirt, and gray flannel pants. His white-streaked hair turned dark. Stems and leaves obscured his face.

“Crud,” Kawashima said. “We need to move fast. Help him down the stairs.”

Patricia did her part, but Ernesto could barely walk even with two people (shielded by protective spells) supporting him. And the stairs had gotten treacherous, with vines and bracken coming up through all the crevices. Patricia already felt bogged down by a mixture of weariness, guilt, and anger, since she hadn’t slept in weeks and her mind was overtaxed with trying not to obsess about the same two or three things. Everything was hopeless, people were drowning in death everywhere, and Patricia felt like a selfish monster every time she dwelt on her own personal shit. Like her parents — which, whatever, she hadn’t been close to them, in spite of their recent weak attempts at fence-mending. And Laurence, who had randomly declared his love for her and then gone missing for months. Just when she’d opened up to someone and started to feel like maybe she was worthy of love after all … She shouldn’t obsess about these things, because there was no fixing them, and people needed her to be present. Like Ernesto, who was about to tumble down the overgrown stairs while she was wallowing.

The banisters were mossy and the stairs were growing branches. Patricia and Kawashima gave up on supporting Ernesto, and just carried him down, two stairs at a time. They reached the final flight just as the staircase burst open and erupted with shrubbery. Patricia and Kawashima jumped over the rising branches, in unison, and reached the bottom step, with Patricia supporting Ernesto’s head and Kawashima holding his legs. Ernesto was a green man. Patricia could feel her own clothes growing a layer of gunk.

The VW Jetta that they’d spent a week enchanting for Ernesto idled out front, with Dorothea honking the horn every few seconds. They jumped over roots and branches in the vestibule, and ducked under the low-hanging vines in the doorway. The sidewalk cracked the moment Ernesto came near it, as long-buried jacarandas crashed upwards, casting trumpet flowers everywhere. Patricia shoved Ernesto in the back of the Jetta and got in next to him. She and Kawashima slammed the passenger-side doors and Dorothea sped toward the freeway before anybody had their seat belt on.

The bridge was closed. There was a wreck. They had to veer off and head for the Dumbarton. People had set fire to a bank and the fire had spread to other buildings: black smoke over SoMa. Patricia closed her eyes. On the radio, the president fizzed about plans and resolutions, but Congress couldn’t even convene because nobody could agree on temporary chambers and it was a Constitutional nightmare. Next to Patricia, Ernesto sloughed vegetation until he looked human again.

Trapped in the car with three other witches, Patricia felt desperately alone. Her eyes stung from lack of sleep, and her body felt like it was cannibalizing itself. She only wished she could go all-the-way feral from sleep deprivation and devolve to a lower state of consciousness, shut her higher brain down, because there was no way to think without obsessing and she was absolutely not going to do that. Ever since Superstorm Allegra hit, Ernesto and Kawashima had been sending her out on missions constantly, and it had almost kept her distracted enough. People were in trouble and needed a discreet helping hand. Other people were being predators and needed to be devoured by flesh-eating bacteria. Patricia had gotten so she could inflict flesh-eating bacteria in her sleep, if she ever slept. Now, in this car, she had nothing to do but sit with her thoughts, and it was unbearable. The only person she wanted to talk to was Laurence, who had dropped a bomb on her and then disappeared with no explanation. Sometimes she felt as though she’d had a chance at happiness and self-acceptance dangled in front of her and then snatched away. But that was the most selfish notion of all.