Richard Powers - Bewilderment

A shout rose from the seats around us—a thwarted creature ready to strike. The woman to my left held her phone level in front of her, as if about to eat an open-face sandwich. “They just said we’re in a no-fly. Yeah. Total no-fly.”

Another voice came over the PA, one so homogenous it must have been synthesized. “Passengers in need of unanticipated accommodation should apply at the service counter to enter a hotel discount voucher lottery.”

Robin tapped my calf with his toe. Are we going to get home tonight?

My reply was lost in shouts from down the concourse. I told Robbie to sit tight, then headed toward the commotion. A frustrated passenger three gates down had jabbed a ticket agent in the hand with his phone stylus. I returned to our seats, where the substantial woman was telling her phone, “It’s a cover-up, right? It’s those HUE people. Am I right? It goes deeper than you think.”

I wanted to warn her that it was no longer legal to say certain things in public.

Robin eyed the gate, humming to himself. I leaned in. The song was “High Hopes.” High apple pie in the sky hopes. Aly used to sing it to him in his infancy, while bathing him.

WE MANAGED TO MAKE IT HOME. Robbie went in for the neurofeedback session he’d missed, and I put out a rash of fires. A few days later, he took me birding. Holding still and looking had become his favorite activity in all the world. Naturally, he assumed it would bring out the best in me, too. It didn’t. I held still. I looked. All I could see were the dozens of outings my wife had asked me on, before giving up and going birding with someone else.

We went to a preserve fifteen miles out of town. We came to a confluence of lake, meadow, and trees. Right here , Robin declared. They love edges. They love to fly back and forth from one world to another .

We sat in tall grass by a boulder, making ourselves small. The day was crystalline. We shared Aly’s old pair of Swiss binocs. Robbie was less interested in spotting individual birds than he was in listening to the calls fill the ocean of air. I didn’t realize how many kinds of calls there were until my son pointed them out. I heard a song, wildly exotic. “Whoa. What’s that?”

His mouth opened. Serious? You don’t know? That’s your favorite bird .

There were jays and cardinals, a pair of nuthatches and a tufted titmouse. He even identified a sharp-shinned hawk. Something flashed by, yellow, white, and black. I reached for Aly’s binoculars, but the prize was gone before I got them up to my eyes. “Did you see what it was?”

But Robin was tuned in to other thoughts, receiving them over the air on some unassigned frequency. He gauged the horizon, immobile for a long time. At last he said, I think I might know where everybody is .

It took me a while to remember: The question he’d latched onto so long ago, on a starry night in the Smokies. The Fermi paradox. “Then hand them over peacefully, buddy. No questions asked.”

Remember how you said there might be a big roadblock somewhere?

“The Great Filter. That’s what we call it.”

Like, maybe there’s a Great Filter right at the beginning, when molecules turn into living things. Or it might be when you first evolve a cell, or when cells learn to come together. Or maybe the first brain .

“Lots of bottlenecks.”

I was just thinking. We’ve been looking and listening for sixty years .

“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

I know. But maybe the Great Filter isn’t behind us. Maybe it’s ahead of us .

And maybe we were just now hitting it. Wild, violent, and godlike consciousness, lots and lots of consciousness, exponential and exploding consciousness, leveraged up by machines and multiplied by the billions: power too precarious to last long.

Because otherwise… How old did you say the universe is?

“Fourteen billion years.”

Because otherwise, they’d be here. All over. Right?

His hands waved in every direction. They froze when something primordial signed the air. Robbie saw them first, still mere specks: a family of sandhill cranes, three of them, flying southward in loose formation toward winter quarters that the young one had not yet seen. They were late leaving. But the whole autumn was weeks late, as late as next spring would be early to arrive.

They drew near along a liquid thread. Their wings, gray shawls trimmed in black, arched and fell. The long dark tips of their primary feathers flexed like spectral fingers. They flew outstretched, an arrow from beak to claws. And in the middle, between the slender necks and legs, came a bulge of body that seemed too bulky to get airborne, even with all the pumping of those great wings.

The sound came again, and Robbie grabbed my arm. First one, then another, then all three birds unspooled a chilling chord. They came so close we could see the splashes of red across the bulbs of their heads.

Dinosaurs, Dad .

The birds passed over us. Robbie held still and watched them wing away to nothing. He seemed frightened and small, unsure how he got here on the edge of woods, water, and sky. At last his fingers loosened their grip on my wrist. How would we ever know aliens? We can’t even know birds .

WE SAW SIMILIS FROM A LONG WAY AWAY. It was a ball of perfect indigo, glinting with the light of the nearby star it captured.

What’s that? my son asked. People must have made that .

“It’s a solar cell.”

A solar cell that covers the whole planet? Crazy!

We made a few rotations around the globe, confirming him. Similis was a world trying to capture every photon of energy that fell on it.

That’s suicide, Dad. If they hog all the energy, how do they grow their food?

“Maybe food is something else, on Similis.”

We went for a look, down to the planet’s surface. It was as dark as Nithar, but much colder, and silent aside from a steady background hum, which we followed. There were lakes and oceans, all frozen under thick ice. We passed underneath scattered, blasted snags that must have been thick forests once. There were fields of nothing, and grassless pastures of slag and rock. The roads were abandoned, the towns and cities empty. But no sign of destruction or violence. Everything had fallen into decay slowly, on its own. The world looked as if all the residents had walked out and been taken into the sky. But the sky was covered in solar panels, pumping out electrons at full tilt.

We followed the hum down into a valley. There we found the only buildings still intact, a vast industrial barracks guarded and repaired by ever-vigilant robots. Great conduits of cabling channeled all the energy captured by the solar shell into the sprawling complex.

Who built this?

“The inhabitants of Similis.”

What is it?

“It’s a computer server farm.”

What happened to everyone, Dad? Where did the people go?

“They’re all inside.”

My son frowned and tried to picture: a building of circuitry, infinitely bigger on the inside than on the outside. Rich, unlimited, endless, and inventive civilizations—millennia of hope and fear and adventure and desire—dying and resurrecting, saving and reloading, going on forever, until the power failed.

FOR HIS TENTH BIRTHDAY, the boy who once could not be roused in the morning without wailing like a howler monkey brought me breakfast in bed: fruit compote, toast, and pecan cheese, all artfully arranged on a platter accompanied by a painted bouquet of mums.