Year's Best SF 17

We fly on, pausing to hover over interesting animals and historical sites—now just fields of broken glass, as the concrete had long washed away and the steel rusted into powder—while Mom thinks more stories to me. Over the Pacific, we dip down to scan for whales.

“I put the ‹whale› in your name because I loved these creatures when I was your age,” Mom thinks. “They were very rare then.”

I look at the whales breaching and lobtailing. They look nothing like the ‹whale› in my name.

Over America, we linger over families of bears who look up at us without fear (after all, the maintenance flier is only about the size of a mama bear). Finally, we arrive at an estuarial island off the Atlantic coast covered with dense trees punctuated by wetlands along the shore and rivers crisscrossing the island.

The ruins of a city dominate the island’s southern end. The blackened, empty frames of the great skyscrapers, their windows long gone, rise far above the surrounding jungle like stone pillars. We can see coyotes and deer playing hide-and-seek in their shadows.

“You are looking at the remnants of Manhattan, one of the greatest cities from long ago. It’s where I grew up.”

Mom then thinks to me of the glory days of Manhattan, when it teemed with humanity in the flesh, and consumed energy like a black hole. People lived one or two to a vast room all their own, and had machines that carried them around, cooled or warmed them, and made food and cleaned clothes and performed other wonders, all while spewing carbon and poisons into the air at an unimaginable rate. Each person wasted the energy that could support a million consciousnesses without physical needs.

Then came the Singularity, and as the last generation of humans in the flesh departed, carried away by death or into the Data Center, the great city fell silent. Rainwater seeped into the cracks and seams of walls and foundations, froze and thawed, pried them open ever wider, until the buildings toppled like trees in the ancient horror of logging. Asphalt cracked, spewing forth seedlings and vines, and the dead city gradually yielded to the green force of life.

“The buildings that still remain standing were built at a time when people over-engineered everything.”

No one ever talks about engineering now. Building with physical atoms is inefficient, inflexible, limited, and consumes so much energy. I’ve been taught that engineering is an art of the dark ages, before people knew any better. Bits and qubits are far more civilized, and give our imaginations free rein.

Mom smiles at my thoughts. “You sound like your father.”

She lands the flier in an open field with a clear view of the ghost skyscrapers.

“This is the real beginning of our trip,” Mom thinks. “It’s not how long we have that matters, but what we do with the time we have. Don’t be scared, Renée. I’m going to show you something about time.”

I nod.

Mom activates the routine to underclock the processors on the flier so that its batteries will last while our consciousnesses slow down to a crawl.

The world around us speeds up. The sun moves faster and faster across the sky until it is a bright stripe arching over a world shrouded in permanent dusk. Trees shoot up around us while shadows spin and twirl. Animals zoom by, too fast to be perceived. We watch one skyscraper, topped by steel step-domes rising to a defiant spear, gradually bend and lean over with the passing of the seasons. Something about its shape, like a hand reaching for the sky and tiring, moves me deeply inside.

Mom brings the processors back up to normal speed, and we see the top half of the building fall down and collapse with a series of loud crashes like calving icebergs, bringing down yet more buildings around it.

“We did many things wrong back then, but some things we did right. That’s the Chrysler Building.” I feel infinite sadness in her thoughts. “It was one of the most beautiful creations of Man. Nothing made by Man lasts forever, Renée, and even the Data Center will one day disintegrate before the heat death of the universe. But real beauty lasts, even though anything real must die.”

Forty-five years have passed since we set out on our trip, though it didn’t seem to me much longer than a single day.

Dad has left my room just the way it was on the day I left.

After forty-five years, Dad now has a different look. He’s added more dimensions to his figure and his color is even more golden. But he treats me as though I only left yesterday. I appreciate how considerate he is.

While I’m getting ready for bed, Dad tells me that Sarah has already finished her schooling and started a family. She has a little girl of her own now.

I’m a little sad at this news. Underclocking is rare and it can make someone feel left behind. But I will work hard to catch up, and a real friendship will survive any gap of years.

I would not exchange the long day I spent with Mom for anything in the world.