Fighting for the Future, page 13
She lobbed mental commands and virtual movements that were automatic and reflexive, almost below the level of conscious thought. The only result was an angry amber glow in the corner of her vision indicating that something had gone completely wrong.
The van—normally linked into Leanna's headware through the network—lurched to the left, and she scrabbled helplessly with her mind at the nonresponsive interface. Desperate to trigger a reboot or to pull up a menu, Leanna's eye darted across the screen—no, not the screen anymore, just her field of view. She couldn't make sense of what she was seeing. Her senses, her entire reality was filtered through the sharpening algorithms of her headware. Now, there was no filter, no layer between her and the confusing cloud of vision that competed for her attention.
She was outside the range of the distributed computing network, but that wasn't all. Maybe it was the clouds of radioactive dust that floated across the wasteland. Maybe it was charged particles falling with acid rain across the plains. Or heavy metals wreaking havoc with delicate transmitters. Whatever the cause, Leanna was hundreds of kilometers away from help with a head full of tech that was glitching badly.
The haze of dull and washed-out color assaulted Leanna's senses. She blinked, her eyes refusing to focus on the infinite depth that now pressed in on her instead of the menus and buttons that always floated just within her reach. From the haze of sensations, the strange and blurry depths that now surrounded her, Leanna watched as a punctuated series of white dashes emerged out of the haze and slipped toward her, then under her. Then the strange white dashes began to drift lazily to her left, slowly at first, then faster as the seconds passed.
Lane markings! Those dashes were lane markings, Leanna realized. The van was drifting across one lane, then another, then another. Leanna screamed, and grabbed the manual wheel of the van. She just managed to correct the drift before she slid off the road entirely.
Then, too much. The van lurched under Leanna's grasp, tires squealing across four lanes in the other direction before Leanna yanked it back again, nearly overcorrecting once again, but finally wrenching the uncooperative van back onto a stable path.
Leanna wasted a few minutes trying to find the manual shutoff for the cruise control before finding that merely hitting the manual brake pedal turned off the semi-autonomous speed control and allowed the van to slow and finally coast to a stop on the shoulder of the empty highway.
She'd known that this was going to be hard. But somewhere out there were answers. Her mother had traveled these same roads, when she'd abandoned her daughter and their home for—something. Leanna had never known what it was out in the wastelands that had drawn her mother to leave everything she knew behind. But now, Leanna could feel the lure of answers drawing her westward like a magnetic pull. Even as the pounding empty cacophony in her head made her want to turn the van around and flee back into the neon embrace of the city.
"Keep going," said a voice from the back of the van.
Leanna spun around. Impossible. Aside from her bags, there wasn't anything or anyone back there. Wasn't there?
There hadn't been anyone there when she'd left. She hadn't stopped until now. Her heart pounded, her vision blurred, and she felt herself beginning to shake. She faced the road and seized the steering wheel, if only to steady herself.
"Don't go back," the voice called dimly.
Leanna fumbled with the seatbelt and clambered into the cargo area of the van. She flung her bags off the neat pile she'd left until she uncovered the bottom bag, a weather-worn green canvas duffel. Leanna tugged the zipper and pulled out the tattered ribbon dress, the last possession of her mother's that she'd kept all these years.
Gingerly, Leanna unfolded the dress with its plain floral-print fabric and perfectly straight lines of red and blue along the seams. When Leanna was nine years old, her mother had promised to help her make her own ribbon dress. The first in a long string of broken promises. From within the folds of the dress, Leanna uncovered the cheap injection-molded plastic box. No voice here. This was an urn. Just ashes. Her mother's ashes. Distant and neglectful, even in life. But mostly absent for her childhood. Leanna hadn't heard from her in twenty years. That is until the medical examiner asked her to collect the remains. Leanna hadn't even realized her mother had snuck back into the city.
Echoes now. Alerts and dings of notifications, but far away. The phantom feeling of vibration in her head and her fingertips. Like she was at the bottom of a well. Or the plinks and dings of incoming messages were at the bottom of the well, and Leanna was at the top, peering down into the darkness.
More voices, more words but indistinct. Memories. Fears. Some twisted sense of Leanna's guilt and fear of abandonment. An audio loopback, some side effect of the drastic disconnection of her headware?
Her mother had left her a memory chip full of twenty years of scratchy voice recordings—letters to Leanna that her mother had no way of delivering, except with her dying moments. Leanna had listened to some of them, until they became too painful, and uploaded the rest into the wetware storage of her implants to access at some future date. That must be what she was hearing. Somehow, some strange bleedthrough from the failing storage and her mind's clumsy attempts to reconcile the sensory inputs. Or maybe just hallucinations. But whatever it was, the voices all sounded like her mother spoke in her mother's voice.
"Go." The voice was urging her to keep going, into the wastelands, and towards the refuge that Leanna's mother had abandoned her for so many years before.
Not trusting herself to drive, Leanna slept a few hours during the day, letting the solar cells trickle-charge the van's batteries as best they could. The reddish-orange sky was overcast with yellow sulfurous clouds, which admitted only wan and anemic sunlight onto the cracked and dry plains. These were the aptly named deadlands. No one lived out here, nothing could live on this land, under these poisoned skies. Had anything ever grown on these dead plains, let alone fields of wheat and corn that people actually ate?
When she started the van again, she clutched the wheel, afraid something would go wrong with her vision again, that she'd lose focus or be unable to control herself. But she managed to get moving and stay moving. So many painful hours later, she steered the van off the crumbling highway and through a winding access road choked with rubble and rusting hulks of discarded vehicles. Up an endlessly winding road that seemed like it would never end, she let the van roll into the shattered parking lot where the crumbling remains of an ugly concrete block building now sat.
Looming behind the broken building, there was a ragged, scorched rock face that towered above a hill of scree. In the spaces where the rock face hadn’t yet crumbled away, it was buried underneath a tangled mat of lichen and vines in unearthly colors: indigo and magenta and gray-green covered almost everything, and obscured the giant faces that she knew lurked beneath.
When she spoke to herself, her words were thick and slurred. "Is that Mount Rushmore?"
Her mother's voice echoed in the back of her head. "No. It never was, honey. That was Tunkasila Sakpe Paha. Six Grandfathers. But it's not that anymore, either."
Hours later, Leanna was nearing the coordinates her mother had left for her. Decades before, the topsoil had dried up and blown away, the ground scoured down to scree. The omnipresent yellow clouds hung low and dark, and the stinking sulfur-tinged rains drizzled on and off at all times, creating a dank and muddy landscape from which the skeletons of long dead trees spiked up to form a tangle of dry and broken branches. These were the deadlands that had once been called the Black Hills—ironically because the density of verdant trees and forest was such that hills and mountains looked black from afar.
As she steered the van over the crest of a high ridge, the pounding in Leanna's head had mostly ceased, but the tension and panic still held like a vise. She longed to reach out with her mind's eye and gather information. She wanted the reassurance of the constant stream of data that reminded her of where she was, and what she was doing. She wanted to check her e-mail, goddammit.
But the network was gone. She was past its reach.
The van began down a sharp, steep decline into a valley below, and for the second time in as many days, Leanna wondered if her senses were betraying her with hallucinatory images.
"It's real," her mother's voice said, in a distorted, scratchy imitation of a reassuring tone. Nonetheless, her mind rebelled, refused to interpret that her eyes had fallen upon a monstrously proportioned mushroom towering above the valley floor. Four hundred feet at least, and twice as wide, with a stalk as wide around as a city block. The mushroom towered above the valley floor, not a cartoon redcap, but a bulbous organic accumulation of folds and tissue, like coral or a morel grown to titanic proportions. The shadow it cast stretched for a mile and a half. Then Leanna spied others, not nearly as tall as the behemoth in the center of the valley, but still towering above the structures and people below.
That wasn't all. Somehow, impossibly, the valley was lush, verdant, even. No. Not verdant, because that meant "green." None of the lush plant growth, crops and farms, towering trees and scattered forests, was green. She saw magenta, and a grayish-blue-green, and scattered dots of dull orange and mustard yellow.
As the van entered the valley, she saw that these weren't plants at all. No leaves or fronds or wheat stalks grew here. Instead, irregular fields of mushroom and huge bulbous tangles of lichen and rolling mounds of moss.
Even though Leanna was a hundred miles inside the deadlands, where nothing was supposed to live or grow or survive, there were buildings. Barns and longhouses and a town, or at least a village. It made no sense. None of this was possible in the deadlands. Leanna found herself desperate to log in to the network and compare what she was seeing to the history, the statistics, the sheer empirical impossibility. Because it couldn't possibly be true.
Still reeling from the impossible sights, Leanna drove the van across the valley floor towards the monolithic mushroom that towered above all else. As she neared her destination, she saw a squat concrete building nestled among the folds and fronds of the titanic fungus. Straight lines and square shapes gave way where the structure backed up against the mushroom, becoming more fluid, curved and organic. It was as though the architects had taken more inspiration from the mushroom the closer the structure got, until it wasn't clear where one ended and the other began.
As soon as Leanna pulled to a stop and climbed out of the van, a crowd poured out of the building, more than Leanna would have expected, but perhaps there were more structures under the surface. That certainly seemed to be true of many aspects of this place.
They smiled and called out welcomes to Leanna, but mostly they murmured and talked among themselves, as though Leanna was both welcome and expected, just another family member returned after a long journey.
Distantly, Leanna noticed that every one of the crowd looked like her—black hair, brown eyes, and a warm tan skin tone that could be mistaken for any racial origin from Mexican to Portuguese to Greek. Native American. From the looks of the crowd, they weren't all Lakota like her mother, but probably refugees from any of a dozen tribes whose reservations had been decimated in the last few decades of ecological catastrophe.
Finally, one woman separated from the crowd and approached Leanna. She was old and wrinkled, her braids long and gray, but carried herself with a grace and authority that made Leanna think that if she wasn't in charge, whoever was in charge listened very carefully to what she had to say.
"Leanna, welcome," the old woman said, her arms spread wide, as though to welcome Leanna into a warm embrace.
"I—I don't know you," Leanna said slowly. "I don't know any of you. I don't understand what this place is—my mother, she –" Confusion and the ache from her disconnected headware vied for attention.
A look of sadness flashed across the woman's face. "Of course. So sorry, dear. I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is Kay Alkire. You must have so many questions. I can tell you anything you want to know." The old woman reached out and held Leanna's hand. "We loved your mother, and she loved you, and leaving you behind was the hardest thing she ever did. But you're home now."
Home? No. Leanna felt herself panic at the thought. She'd made it here, but she needed to leave as soon as she could. To return to the city, back to the network, back to herself. "No, no—I'm not—"
"Trust her," Leanna's mother's voice echoed in her head, stronger now.
The old woman turned away. "Hold my arm and walk with me for a few moments, won't you? I need someone to make sure I don't fall. I can tell you more about your mother and this place."
Numbly, Leanna agreed. She took the woman by the elbow, and they walked along a well-worn path circling the huge mushroom
As Leanna and Kay walked slowly around the huge mushroom, they traversed fields of purple lichen, swaying fronds of transparent threadlike mushrooms, and dense mats of mosslike fungi. And throughout the walk, Kay told the story of the Black Hills Enclave.
It started just before the collapse of the U.S. government and a resurrection of an all-but-dead political movement. One of the last gasps of the crumbling empire saw the U.S. give the Black Hills back to the Lakota. Not just the Lakota, but a coalition of tribal governments in exile from whom the U.S. had seized reservations and dissolved tribal governments back when they decided to strip mine most of the mountain west to build arkships.
Back then, most folk thought giving the Black Hills back was either a smug screw-you to the tribes—enjoy your poisoned wasteland; we're done with it—or a truly epic case of white guilt.
The first refugees didn't last long. Their plants would wither; the livestock died straight away. No water was safe to drink. Dust that got in their lungs wrecked their insides. Toxins, radioactivity, you name it.
But by then the U.S. was crumbling in on itself. The arkships were ferrying millions out into the stars, while mega-metropolises like the one Leanna had left behind walled themselves off, domed their skies, and tried to block out the slow-motion collapse of the rest of the country.
The second wave of tribal refugees needed a miracle. The only land left to them was this bitter, alkaline wasteland, muddy with acid rain and cut off from the sky by yellow-brown clouds nine months out of the year. But somehow, they needed to make it livable—for themselves, as well as the thousands of desperate Native American families who all across the country were already caravanning out of the ruined cities and refugee tents towards a promised land that just might kill them.
The solution that a half-mad, brilliant cadre of university-trained tribal scientists had cooked up was too strange, too bizarre to take seriously, until it worked. In the soup of radiation and heavy metals that filled this valley, they'd discovered a creature that thrived on the poisonous environment—a polyextremophile. This bizarre quirk of evolution was a single-celled organism—not a bacteria, not a fungus, but a strange ancient order called archaea.
The scientists designed viral vectors to unzip and rewrite each refugee's genome, so that every one of each of their trillions of cells would open up and accept the archaea into itself. These organisms ceased to become life forms and melded with their new environment, becoming a human organelle, as much a part of who they were as the DNA that had been passed down through hundreds and hundreds of generations, and the mitochondrial DNA passed down from mothers to daughter in an uninterrupted line from first human to last.
Just as mitochondria had once been single-celled lifeforms, the poison-eating archaea became a part of the refugees and their cells, and along the way, gifted them the ability to live and thrive in this inhuman environment. They followed it up by engineering crops and pollinators, soil and fauna. Livestock and groundwater, all so it would live and thrive with the archaea. For some reason, fungi took to the new way of life better than plants.
And so, with machines held together with electrical tape, with technology looted, borrowed, or stolen from an empire in the midst of a slow collapse, the Black Hills Enclave had created not just a new ecosystem but an entirely new branch of human evolution
"My mother was a part of this?" Leanna said, her head pounding, her vision swimming with ghostly echoes of a user interface that evaporated as soon as she tried to focus on it. They were back in front of the strange concrete building that gave itself over to the mushroom.
"Your mother was a part of all of us. Of the land, of the community we're trying to build. Dear, you need to understand. What we have here, it's much more than just an enclave, or a settlement. You need to understand that."
"What do you mean?"
"We're connected to the land now, Leanna. And we need your help to make what we're building here transcend our lifetimes."
"Connected?" Leanna asked. Suddenly, things seemed less certain.
"Everyone who comes here is transformed. In doing so, they become connected to everything living in this place. It's a little hard to explain, but it's a sense as real as touch or smell or hearing. When things are healthy, growing and thriving, it feels—right. And when there's something out of balance, when there's something strangling the growth or poisoning the balance, we can sense that, too. And it feels wrong. It's a—they call it a gestalt. It's something that the new organelle pulls out of what we smell and taste all around us, and it gets passed back as a feeling for the land."
"Okay. But what do you need me for?" Leanna asked.
"Oh, dearie. I'm so sorry. You look so much like her, it's easy to forget I'm not here, talking to her again. Come on inside, and see what your mother was working on. If you don't want to help, we'll send you on your way. But please, for your mother's sake, at least take a look."
Kay led her into the concrete building, which felt like a cross between a bunker and a community center. Down, down endless stairs into a basement and a sub-basement, surely far enough to be both inside and beneath the monstrous mushroom that towered above.
