Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Oh my darling, don’t you cry , my grandmother sings. Stay right by your side forever, yah hey yah…

Sela. My name is Sela. I am thirteen years old. I stand at the caves where my ancestors rode out the storm that once tried to take us down. It is here where we survived, and here where we will survive again.

“YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING,” MAX SAID. “YOU’RE STILL HAVING nightmares about the car. When you’re awake, it’s what you think about. I’m right, Cody, aren’t I?”

“Mostly,” I told him, and then neither of us said anything else for a while. We sat together and stared at the ugly red river. It was Max finally spoke up and broke the silence.

“Well, I was thinking,” he said, “maybe if you were to write it down. That might help, I was thinking.”

“It might not, too,” I replied. “I already saw Dr. Lehman twice. I did everything he said, and that didn’t help. How’s writing it down supposed to help?”

“Well, it might,” he said again. “You can’t know until you try. Maybe you could get the bad stuff you saw out of your head, like when you eat spoiled food and throwing up helps. See, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Maybe you ought to think less, Max. Besides, where am I supposed to get anything to write it on?”

He promptly handed me the nub of a pencil and some paper he’d torn out of the H–G volume of an encyclopedia in the Sanctuary library. I yelled at him for going and ruining books when there aren’t so many left to ruin.

“Cody, we can always put the pages back when you’re done,” he said impatiently, like I should have thought of that already without him having to explain it to me. “Only, they’ll be better than before, because one side will have your story written on them.”

“Who’s gonna want to read my story?” I asked.

“Someone might. Someday, someone might. Anyway, that’s not the point. Writing it’s the point.”

Sitting there on the riverbank, listening to him, it began to make sense, but I didn’t tell him that, because I didn’t feel like letting him know I didn’t still think he was full of shit, and because I still don’t think I can do this. Just because it’s my story doesn’t mean I can put it into words like he wants.

“At least try,” he said. “Just you take a day or two and give it a go.” I told him I had too much to do in the greenhouses, what with the beans and corn coming on ripe, and he said he’d take my shifts and no one would even care because there’s so little work right now at pumps and filters in the hydroplant.

“Oh, and while you’re at it, put in how things went wrong with the world, so when things get better, people will know how it all happened.”

I said that was just dumb. Other people have already written it down, what went wrong. The smart people, the people who weren’t four years old on the first day of THE END OF THE WORLD.

I stared at the shiny encyclopedia pages in my hands. If they’d been ripped out of a real encyclopedia, words would already have been printed on both sides, but they were just copies got made right after THE EVENT. See, that’s how the olders always talk about it, and they say certain words and phrases like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER and THE EVENT and THE GOO as if they were being said all in capital letters. I stared at the pages, which were at least real paper, made from real wood pulp, and I told him if I do this I get more than a kiss. Max said sure, why not, so long as you’re honest, and he kissed me then and told me I was prettier than any of the other girls in Sanctuary (which is bullshit), and then he left me alone at the edge of the river. Which is where I’m sitting now. Sitting, writing, stopping to toss a rock that’s still a rock into the sludgy crimson river that isn’t still a river because most of the water went FACSIMILE twelve years ago.

The river moves by about as slowly as I’m writing this down, and I count all the way up to fifty-three before the rock (real rock) actually sinks out of sight into the not-water anymore. At least the river still moves. Lots of them went too solid. I’ve seen rivers that stopped moving almost right after THE EVENT. These days, they just sit there. Red and hard. Not moving, and I’ve even walked on a couple. Some people call them Jesus Streams. Anyway, I walked all the way across a broad Jesus Stream on a dare. But it wasn’t much of a dare since I got a good dose of SWITCH OFF in me right away, back when I was four.

Okay. Fine, Max. So I’m doing this even though it’s stupid. And you better not welch on that bet or I’ll kick your ass, hear that? Also, I’m not writing much about what happened. I shouldn’t waste my time writing any of that stuff. I don’t care what Max says, because that’s all down on paper somewhere else. I don’t even know most of it, anyway, that EVENT three-quarters of my whole life ago. What I know for sure doesn’t take long to set down. I learned what they bother to teach about THE GOO in classes. They don’t teach all that much because why bother telling us about THE BEFORE and WHAT WENT WRONG so we got THE EVENT, when what we need to be learning is how to run the hydros and keep the power on, horticulture, medicine, engineering, and keeping the livestock alive (Max’s dad used to oversee the rat cages before he was promoted to hydro duty, or Max would still be feeding pellets to rats and mice and guinea pigs). But, okay, Max:

Twelve years ago, in THE BEFORE, there were too many people in the world, and most of them were starving. There wasn’t enough oil. There wasn’t enough clean water. There wasn’t enough of much of anything because people kept having babies almost as fast as the rats do. They’d almost used up everything. There were wars (we don’t have those anymore, just the rovers and sneaks), and there were riots and terrorists. There were diseases we don’t have anymore. People started dying faster than anyone could hope to bury them, so they just piled up. I can’t imagine that many people. Ma’am Shen says there were more than nine billion people back then, but sometimes I think she surely exaggerates.

Anyway, in the year 2048, in a LOST PLACE called Boston, in a school the olders call MIT, scientists were trying to solve all these problems, all of them at once. Maybe other scientists in other parts of the world at some other schools and some of THE COMPANIES were also trying, but SWITCH ON happened at MIT in Boston, which was in a place called New England. SWITCH ON, says Ma’am Shen, started out in a sort of bottle called a beaker. It gets called THE CRUCIBLE sometimes, and also SEAL 7, that one particular bottle. But I’ll just call it the bottle.

Before I started writing this part, I made Max go back to the library and copy down some words and numbers for me on the back of one of these pages. I don’t want to sound more ignorant than I am, and it’s the least he could do. So, in the bottle, inside a lead box, were two things: a nutrient culture and nano-assemblers, which were microscopic machines. The assemblers used the culture to make copies of themselves. Idea was, make a thing you could eat that continuously made copies of itself, there’d be plenty enough food. And maybe this would also work with medicine and fuel and building materials and everything nine billion people needed. But the assemblers in the bottle were a TRIAL. So no one was sure what would happen. They made THE GOO, which Max’s notes call polyvinyl chloride, PVC, but I’ll call it plastic, ’cause that’s what it’s always called when people talk about it. People don’t talk about it much, though I think they might have back before the SWITCH OFF really started working.