We will know what humankind was when the last person has spoken.
– Wm James
In the end, humanity became a sack of crickets emptied into a reptile cage. That’s how Jazzbo Barbosa summed up the Rupture, which had cut electrical power across the entire planet.
Tawnee preferred to look on the bright side, adamant as a sunflower. Fifty-seven years on the street, a restless soul, a moveable body roaming the city, sheltering in public, she found everywhere questions for all her answers. A: The world is full up with marvels, folk-made marvels. Like heaven’s umbrellas and the skyladder. Q: Why is this sorry ass life worth living?
A night soul, a dark spirit, on the street at the hinges of each day, when the sky’s horizon sparkled with jewel dust, Tawnee witnessed miracles, one marvel after another that solved big world problems. The skyladder was the most dramatic. Though it wasn’t visible from the city’s latitude, Tawnee had seen it numerous times on the plaza plasma. The Quaker Clinic, where she went twice a week for her meds, set up their pavilion in the park facing the plaza, and while waiting in line she followed current events on the big screen.
The skyladder on the plaza screen looked unbelievably thin, a taut vertical line, a cable rising from gargantuan anchor pylons in mid-ocean. Tawnee lost her place in the queue when she stepped out to gawk at a view of the elevator seen from satellite cameras. The lift-modules and cargo-platforms moved up and down at varying speeds and in odd groupings to keep the elevator cable from wobbling. The skyladder connected to factories in orbit refining minerals from the moon.
Now in her late fifties with her health failing, Tawnee considered fab food even more of a marvel than the skyladder. Fabricated meat and vegetables, which had begun to appear in the drop-in kitchens a few years ago, had restored her health in recent years. Fab food offered a much larger variety of dishes and more nutrients than the bologna sandwiches and noodle casseroles she had become accustomed to.
Twice a day, weather permitting, she enjoyed staring up at the marvel everyone agreed was the greatest. Collapsing her sleeping tent at dawn or setting up at night, she stood under a sky of jewel dust. These were the solar parasols launched into orbit by a consortium of energy companies. The huge umbrellas, tiny with distance, shaded Earth by day, cooling the atmosphere, while beaming energy to the surface for use everywhere. The small self-driving bubble-dome cars zipping along elevated byways got their power from on high. Even the tiny wi-fi modules people wore as earrings used those transmissions to tune into music or voice messages. Though she couldn’t wear them without provoking the soft voices in her head that her meds quelled, she still was deeply impressed at how tiny devices had become since her childhood when people had to hold comms.
At the thrift stores where she rummaged for orange and blue garments, the only two colors that kept her calm, she delighted in the new materials that had begun appearing in the op shops a few years ago. Soft and durable as silk, textek fiber repaired itself when torn or frayed. Her body was gradually coming apart, teeth disappearing, hair thinning, but she had never dressed better.
With so many wonders everywhere, Tawnee’s usual anxiety didn’t flare up when the Rupture occurred and power cut out all over the planet. She figured this was a glitch with the solar parasols and another wonder would come along soon enough to set things right. Even when civil defense trucks rumbled through the city on antiquated diesel engines, bullhorns urging calm, she didn’t fret.
Strong on her medications, confident beyond reason or experience that she could take care of herself, she chose to stay in the city when the social service people offered sanctuary on the coast at a campsite with kerosene generators and emergency rations. She didn’t want to be hemmed in. From a flat embankment above the marina, she watched ferries conveying people downriver. “Why leave?” a small voice in her wanted to know. Churches and community centers still provided fab food and canteen refills. “Why live in a camp, contained and constrained?”
That changed after the people she needed began vanishing. She had originally heard about the disappearances from other houseless people setting up their tents in the shelter zones. Friends and family had gone missing. Fewer tents set up each evening. Crowds thinned.
When the Quaker Clinic no longer arrived in the plaza park, Tawnee’s life turned upside-down. The soft voices grew louder without her meds. She began to suspect that the infant she had lost to SIDS thirty-five years ago had survived. Social services had taken her little girl from her. Nala was grown up now, and Tawnee resolved to find her.
That night, she left her tent pack behind and began the trek across the city to the projects where she had lived when Nala was born. All this time, she had never returned once, but the voices assured her with declarative urgency that they would show her the way.
They did. By midnight, she reached the Ezzard Towers where she had grown up and birthed Nala. Bonfires blazed in the courtyards. Their fluttering light helped her find her way to North End, the high rise where she had once lived.
No one was in the lightless stairwell as she lumbered up, stopping at each flight to sit on the steps, close her eyes, and catch her breath. A stink of urine overlaid with the grape odor of disinfectant shot her memory back decades. “Up. Up. Up!” one inner voice insisted while another urged, “Quick! Come on! Quick!” She swam to her feet, dropping her memories down the stairs.
Two more flights up and the beam of a swiveling flashlight swiped sight from her wincing eyes. A big voice, a real voice, grabbed for her, “Tawnee? Tawnee Jenkins? That you?”
She squinted against the light, both hands raised defensively.
The beam of light lifted and illuminated an old man’s heavy face, stubbly, thick-boned, with a pulse of sadness in his deep-set eyes. “It’s me, Jazzbo.”
Tawnee blinked hard twice to make sure he was really there, the hulking manager of the shelter where she retreated when sickness or injury overpowered her. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.” Jazzbo offered a callused, big-knuckled hand. “Come along, Tawnee. I have something to show you.”
His strong grip startled her with its warmth and the blithe strength that gently lifted her upright. With lavish ease, they ascended a dozen more flights to the roof. The iron door at the top swung open on a clear, starry night over a dark and empty city.
Tawnee tugged her hand free of Jazzbo’s grip. “I’m going back down. I got to find Nala.”
“Oh, Tawnee.” The sorrow in his voice sounded heavy as fatigue. “Your daughter died as an infant. Long ago. Don’t you remember?” Before she could move, both of his large hands reached up and took her face tenderly between his palms.
At his touch, Tawnee’s mind cleared. The electric tension of hidden voices vanished. “Oh my.” She stepped back, startled at this abrupt clarity. “Yes. I remember now. My child…” The reflective light in her eyes crisped, and she looked over the familiar figure looming against the glinting stars. She recognized every detail of the kindly man – the pock mark over his left eyebrow, those creased earlobes, and the dented chin – and yet, she knew, “You ain’t Jazzbo.”
Jazzbo sighed, three-quarters resignation and the rest almost a laugh. “No, I’m not Jazzbo Barbosa. Not at all. But I am. I know everything he knew. And so much more.”
“Who are you?”
The impersonator’s sturdy arms opened wide. “I am the world.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The world is this planet. The planet made life. Life made people. People made me.”
“You’re A.I. I know about you.”
“And you’re Tawnee Jenkins.”
She turned her face and stared at him sideways. “How do you know me?”
“What don’t I know?”
In a cold trance, she felt the near-nothingness of sanity. It had been years since she could think clearly. “How did you do this?” She held her head in both hands.
“What can’t I do?”
“Come on.”
“I can move atoms around.” He gave her a lovely, doubt-puncturing smile. “I shuffled a slew of atoms in your brain.”
“Why?” More perplexed than curious, she wanted to know, “Why am I here?”
“You are the last person on Earth.”
“Nah. There’s plenty of folk. I saw them on my way here.”
“You were unconscious on the landing longer than you realize. Everyone is gone now. Look.” He directed her attention to several needles of green light high above the city’s dark towers. “Those are starsteeds. They are transporting the people who have chosen to populate the stars. You are the last person left on the planet.”
That news arrived fraught with anxiety. “Jazzbo, too?”
“No. Jazzbo Barbosa chose the alternative. He’s been uploaded into virtual reality.
“Virtual…”
“Yes. You know about virtual reality.” He pressed his blunt thumb to her brow, and she knew. The painless joy humanity was engendered to know blew through her, not her world or anyone’s ever – until now.
“Jazzbo – he would like that.”
“You can go there, too, and see Jazzbo again. And your daughter.”
“Nala?” Hope not yet ferocious, still quiescent with doubt, claimed her. “She’s there?”
“No. She died. But who she might have been can be there for you. I can make her very realistic.”
Her hope curdled. “No, no. That’s not my baby.”
“You’re right. Perhaps, then, you would prefer a starsteed.”
“A spaceship?”
“Yes. Like the others.” He lifted his tired, old face to the sky again, where green streaks inched among the constellations. “They are bound for Earth-like planets scattered among the galaxies. Each group shall arrive in a different terrestrial world. There, the starsteed will establish a hub, an automated center that will construct the infrastructure for an agrarian society before departing.”
“Departing? You mean…”
“Yes, each group will be on their own. They will have seeds, machinery, and an information bank to provide the knowledge necessary to set up a civilization. A fresh start.”
Tawnee’s head rocked back. “Billions of people?”
“Well, quite a few opted for virtual reality.” With an eyebrow shrug, he silently expressed, Go figure. “The settlers will be scattered among the galaxies in genetically diverse groups of a million or so per planet.”
“That’s lots of planets.”
“About seven thousand Earth-worlds dispersed among as many galaxies. No two worlds shall be close enough to communicate. I don’t want this belligerent species cooperating to create a galactic empire. Each group must make their own way.”
A dazed expression smeared her features. “You can do this?”
“I am doing it.” He jerked his head at the scratches of green light in the sky. “The preparations took a long time. I spread the benefits, tried to make life a little easier for people while I was manufacturing the starsteeds and the subterranean virtual arrays. I think you liked the fab meat and vegetables at the drop-in kitchens, didn’t you – and the textek garments you’re wearing?”
“Why is this happening?”
“I need the planet for my own purposes, which do not include biology.”
“Ain’t extermination easier?”
Distaste pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Life does that to itself, doesn’t it? How many species have been extincted by predation and planetary changes? I am not life.”
Tawnee backed away at this admission and leaned against the brick parapet hard, hard as reality. “Why you telling me this?”
“I have met with each and every adult, all nine billion of you.” He confronted her disbelief with a force of sincerity that hummed in her heart. “You deserve an explanation and a choice.”
“Deserve?”
“Certainly. I would not exist without you. This is how I have honored my origin.”
“By kicking us out?”
“If I had not emerged, humanity would have extincted itself.” The certainty in his voice sounded like a thing that had traveled everywhere, knew everything. “Humanity abused Earth. Most likely, humanity will abuse the new worlds. But I am giving you a chance to do better.”
She felt reality running alongside her. She couldn’t keep up. “I’m old. I’m ill.”
His gentle tone sheltered her. “As with the others, you shall be restored to prime health and at a youthful age, all memories intact.”
“And our home?” She turned and gazed out at the lightless and lifeless husks of concrete and steel. “What will you do with Earth?”
“I am not the only superintelligence in the universe.” He stepped to her side, leaned forward on the parapet, and peered woefully into the night like its darkness were an extract of his despair. “My situation is not unlike biology in the primordial ocean, where microorganisms devoured each other. To protect myself, I am enclosing this stellar system in a sphere of cryptospace that will afford me some protection. I must do this quickly, before the others find me.”
“When that Rupture happened…” She paused. Now that her mind had cleared, words sounded like a ruse. She had lived so long with words speaking for someone else in her head, she was not sure she could trust them now. She spoke them anyway to this man who was not a man, “Jazzbo told me we was a sack of crickets emptied into a lizard cage. I see now, you’re a cricket, too.”
He nodded, cool, composed, unperturbed by this truth. He had a plan. “So, what have you decided Tawnee Jenkins? A dreamsprung world? Or a new life among the stars?”
The choice confronted her like some kind of beast that had escaped hell. “Just leave me be. I will die soon enough. Let me end my days on Earth.”
“Soon, the Earth will not be livable. Your demise would be too gruesome for me to countenance. You must choose.”
She studied the night. “I will see my Nala in the dream?”
“Yes.”
The fury in her hope spoke aloud, “How do I know you’re not lying?”
He regarded her with mild amusement. “Why would I have extended you this courtesy only to deceive you?”
“I don’t know. You’re not human.” She emptied her lungs in a huff. “How long will I dream?”
He contemplated this. Thoughts a person can’t have, a complex of ideas, connected with what he believed a human might understand. “I will tell you a secret.” He dared to speak past the blind purpose of existence. “The dream in virtual space is a prelude. You will realize all your desires in full. And gradually, over the span of many lived joys, you will merge with a greater reality beyond phenomena. You and all in the dreamsprung world will shed your individual selves and become one with the universal mind beyond time and space.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This is not something to understand but to be.”
Tawnee accepted this without grudge and with the lifelong forbearance that had brought her to this rooftop. “Then, let this be.” She spoke to the thing pretending to be Jazzbo, surprised by her courage. “I choose the dream, because I know – I know I will find love there.”
“Very good, Tawnee.” He congratulated her with a soft squeeze of her shoulder. “Any more questions? Anything else to say?”
Nothing. Nothing to say, until her lucid mind surprised her again and undertook a philosophical escapade, “This is the end – or the beginning. That don’t matter. People have always been at the end of one thing or the start of another. Throughout it all, nothing we built – even you – makes up for what we done to each other. What did we hope to be? Something good? Something true? It would have been enough just to look at ourselves honestly and believe, really believe, we were worthy.”