Richard Powers - Bewilderment

But here’s the solution I never told him: Say life is easy to kick-start from out of nothing. Say it’d been springing up in every crack of the cosmic sidewalk for billions of years before the Earth appeared. After all, it sprang up here the moment this planet stabilized, from the same stuff that exists everywhere in the universe.

And say that over the eons, countless millions of civilizations arose, many of them lasting long enough to venture into space. Spacefaring creatures found each other, linked up, and shared knowledge, their technologies accelerating with each new contact. They built great energy-harvesting spheres that enclosed entire suns and drove computers the size of whole solar systems. They harnessed the energy from quasars and gamma ray bursts. They filled galaxies the way we once spread across continents. They learned to weave the fabric of reality itself.

And when this consortium mastered all the laws of time and space, they fell into the sadness of completion. Absolute Intelligence surrendered to nostalgia for the camping and woodcraft of its own lost origins. They created consoling playthings—countless sealed-off planets where life could evolve again in its pristine state.

And say that life in one of those terrariums evolves into creatures with two thousand five hundred times as many synapses as there were stars in a galaxy. Even with such brains, it would take those creatures millennia to discover that they were trapped forever in a simulated wilderness, looking out onto a virtual firmament, trapped in childhood, alone.

The catalog of solutions to the Fermi paradox calls this the Zoo Hypothesis. Zoos made Robin queasy. He couldn’t stand to see sentient beings confined.

My own parents raised me a Lutheran, but I lost all religion at the age of sixteen. All life long I’ve believed that when a person dies, all the beauty and insight and hope—but also all pain and terror—everything stored in her one thousand trillion synapses disperses into noise. But that night in the Smokies, in our two-person tent, I couldn’t help petitioning the person who knew Robin best in all the world. “Alyssa.” My wife of eleven and a half years. “Aly. Tell me what to do. We’re fine together, in the woods. But I’m afraid to take him home.”

AT THREE A.M., IT POURED. I scrambled into the rain to put the fly on. The bedlam terrified Robin at first. But, running around in the downpour, he began cackling like a crow. He was still laughing when we got back in the tent, soaked to the bone in a puddle of our foolish optimism.

“I guess I should have insisted on the fly.”

Worth it, Dad. I’d leave it off again!

“You would, would you? You and your inner amphibian.”

We cooked oatmeal over the portable stove and broke camp late that morning. The trail looked different from the other direction. We headed back up and over the ridge. It surprised Robin, how much was still growing, so late into the season. I showed him witch hazel, waiting to flower in January. I told him about the snow scorpionfly, which would skate on ice and feed on moss all winter.

Too soon, we were back at the trailhead. The sight of the road through the trees crushed me. The cars, the asphalt, the sign listing all the regulations: after a night in the woods, the trailhead parking lot felt like death. I did my best not to show Robin. He was probably protecting me, too.

We hit traffic on the road back to our rented cabin. I pulled up behind a Subaru Outback loaded down with high-performance mountain bikes. The queue stretched in front of us, out of sight: half a mile of backed-up SUVs, all starved for the last little scraps of eastern wilderness.

I looked over at my passenger. “You know what this is? Bear jam!” I’d told him we might see one, here in the densest population of black bears on the continent. “Hop out. Walk down a ways and see. But stay close to the road.”

He studied me. Serious?

“Of course! I’m not going to leave you here. I’ll stop and pick you up when I reach you.” He didn’t move. “Go on, Robbie. There’s all kinds of people up there. The bears won’t hurt you.”

His look withered me: he wasn’t worried about the quadrupeds. But he let himself out of the car and stumbled ahead, alongside the stopped cars. The small victory should have cheered me.

Traffic crept along. People started honking. Cars tried to U-turn on the narrow mountain road. Cars pulled off onto the shoulder, haphazard, their passengers milling out into traffic. People grilled each other. Bear. Where? A mother and three little ones. There. No, there. A ranger tried to get the cars to move on through. The queue ignored her.

Minutes later, I reached the throng. People pointed into the woods while others lifted binoculars to their eyes. People aimed tripod-mounted cameras with howitzer lenses. A line of people warded off nature with their cell phones. It looked like a crowd outside an office building watching a person on the tenth-floor ledge.

Then I noticed the family of four, drifting diffidently back into the undergrowth. The sow cast a look over her shoulder at the assembled humans. I saw Robin in the crowd, gazing down, in the wrong direction. He turned and saw me and trotted toward the car. The traffic was still stopped dead. I rolled down the window. “Stay and look, Robbie.”

He jogged to the car, got in, and slammed the door behind him.

“Did you see them?”

I saw them. They were fantastic . His voice was belligerent. He stared straight ahead, at the Outback still in front of us. I felt an incident coming on.

“Robbie. What’s wrong? What happened?”

His head turned away and he shouted, Didn’t you see them?

He stared at his hands in his lap. I knew enough not to push things. The spectacle over, traffic started to move at last. Half a mile down the road, Robbie spoke again.

They must really hate us. How would you like to star in a freak show?

He stared through the side window at the snaking river. Minutes later, he said, Heron . The word was nothing but flat fact.

I waited for two more miles. “They’re very smart, you know. Ursus americanus . Some scientists say they’re almost as smart as hominids.”

Smarter .

“How do you figure?”

We’d popped out of the park and were driving back through the gauntlet of recreational economy. Robin held his hands out toward the evidence. They don’t do this!

We passed the fudge shop and the hamburger stand, the tube rentals, dollar store, and bumper cars. We made a left past the visitor center, back uphill to our cabin. “They’re just lonely, Robbie.”

He looked at me as if I’d renounced my citizenship in the clan of sentient beings. What are you talking about? They weren’t lonely. They were disgusted .

“Don’t shout, okay? I’m not talking about the bears.”

The puzzle slowed him down, at least.

People are lonely because we’re jerk-faces. We stole everything from them, Dad .

Warnings were everywhere, from his rigid fingers and twitching lips to the purple flush rising around his neck. Another few minutes would undo all the gentleness of the last few days. I didn’t have the stamina for two hours of wounded screaming fit. Years of experience had taught me that my best course now was distraction.

“Robbie, listen. Suppose the Allen Telescope Array had a press conference tomorrow where they announced indisputable evidence of intelligent aliens.”

Dad .

“It would be the most exciting day on Earth. One announcement would change everything.”

He stopped twitching, still disgusted. But curiosity beat disgust in Robin, nine times out of ten. So?