The End Has Come

Don glances at Zack. His son is beaming; his dream of rebuilding has already begun.

* * *

Don is on the beach, sitting in a weatherbeaten chair, the wood warped and the paint flecking away. Still, it is comfortable and solid. It’s a good chair. The Southern Cross is docked off the pier, the sun glinting off the glass windows of the cabin. It needs a new paint job, but Zack did an admirable job making it presentable. Zack. He is at the edge of the surf with Inez, the two of them sharing a single set of earbuds and dancing to some song that Don can’t hear. He doubts it’s jazz.

But that’s okay. This isn’t his dream.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010 after fifteen years as a music and radio industry columnist and journalist. His first published story, “The Old Equations,” appeared in Lightspeed and went on to be named a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He has subsequently been published in Fireside Magazine, Escape Pod, and the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology of humorous SF. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.

THE GODS HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN Ken Liu

I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, “Here is one hand,” and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, “and here is another.”

 — G.E. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” 1939.

Cloud-born, cloud-borne, she was a mystery.

* * *

Maddie first met her sister through a chat window, after her father, one of the uploaded consciousnesses in a new age of gods, died.

Who are you?

Your sister. Your cloud-born sister.

You’re awfully quiet.

Still there?

I’m . . . not sure what to say. This is a lot to take in. How about we start with a name?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You don’t have a name?

Never needed one before. Dad and I just thought at each other.

I don’t know how to do that.

So that was how Maddie came to call her sister “Mist”: the pylon of a suspension bridge, perhaps the Golden Gate, hidden behind San Francisco’s famous fog.

Maddie kept the existence of Mist a secret from her mother.

After all the wars initiated by the uploaded consciousnesses — some of which were still smoldering — the reconstruction process was slow and full of uncertainty. Hundreds of millions had died on other continents, and though America had been spared the worst of it, the country was still in chaos as infrastructure collapsed and refugees poured into the big cities. Her mother, who now acted as an advisor to the city government of Boston, worked long hours and was exhausted all the time.

First, she needed to confirm that Mist was telling the truth, so Maddie asked her to reveal herself.

For digital entities like Maddie’s father, there was a ground truth, a human-readable representation of the instructions and data adapted for the different processors of the interconnected global network. Maddie’s father had taught her to read it after he had reconnected with her following his death and resurrection. It looked like code written in some high-level programming language, replete with convoluted loops and cascading conditionals, elaborate lambda expressions and recursive definitions consisting of strings of mathematical symbols.