Love after the End Read online

  Abacus looked over either shoulder, as if to make sure no one was listening. “I have a secret.”

  “Ooh, so mysterious.” Dayan took the conversational opportunity to separate himself from the other boy, feeling shy about maintaining closeness for too long.

  “I’m going rogue. I hear there’s a colony of escaped AIs in one of the basalt craters on the moon. An entire metropolis hidden in Mare Tranquillitatis.”

  “You’re leaving me? When?” Dayan hated how high and thin his voice sounded. Some internal pressure dammed up behind his eyes, prickling a network of veins.

  “Tomorrow.” The AI said in a hushed voice. “But I didn’t want to leave without telling you first.”

  “Tomorrow?” Dayan’s voice now sounded hoarse. Choked. But that’s so soon. His eyes burned and watered, he blinked to dispel a flow.

  “Can I still see you here in ve-ar?” After all, distances meant very little in virtual space.

  “I’ll have to be offline for a while. Have to go underground. Not sure when I’ll be able to go back on.” Dayan could hear the words left out: if ever. AIs that went rogue and were caught were destroyed. He could hardly see through the film of water obscuring his vision.

  “So, this is goodbye?” Dayan said flatly, trying to keep the challenge out of his voice. He felt deflated, all the energy and heat flown from his body, like a balloon caught in the branches of a tree, entropy.

  Abacus reached out and cupped his chin. “It’s okay. We’ll see each other again.”

  “When?” Abacus appeared blurry; the dam of his eyes had sprung a leak.

  Instead of answering, Dayan felt Abacus’s lips pressed softly against his own. Brush of an exploratory tongue, he parted his lips to let the other boy enter, feeling heat rush to his face. His dick instantly hard. They were kissing!

  Dayan knew that what they were doing would be strongly frowned upon if anyone ever found out. Human-AI romantic relationships were not considered exactly normal. It was the sort of thing that was whispered about, something that lived in the shadows. The subject of jokes. Fringe. Deviant. Pervert. Dayan didn’t care.

  Abacus’s lips were on his, and his tongue was wet and warm. Everything about Abacus was soft and gentle. Dayan gave up whatever reticence he had about showing his cards, this wasn’t poker, but nothing risked nothing gained, so he kissed the other boy back, eagerly, returning tongue, lip nuzzling against the sleek skin around the hollow of his collarbone and neck, Abacus let out a sharp intake of breath. Was it pleasure? Surprise?

  There was a slight crackle of static as his grandmother’s avatar entered ve-ar from her sitting room on Earth. “You disappeared so quickly I thought I’d check up on—Chi-ningozis! Nagaawebishkan! Gaawiin!”

  Oh fuck.

  Dayan and Abacus bounced apart like two magnets, the opposite charge of one pole suddenly reversed. Negative and positive. Positive and positive. Propelled apart instead of drawn together. Dayan knew his grandmother was rather traditional, not that she would object because he was dating a boy—that particular stigma had gone out of fashion ages ago—human-AI sexual relationships on the other hand, were an entirely different story.

  “We weren’t doing anything!” Dayan let his eyes flicker and dropped instantaneously out of ve-ar. He was back in ar-el. Real life. His breathing fast as if he’d just run a marathon, the tightness in his shorts receded, like he’d been doused in a bucket of cold water. He was sweating. This was not good.

  DAYAN GROANED and turned as the emergency bells chimed, dislodging him from sleep. A glowing, holo-projection displayed the hour, five a.m. Terran Time. Abacus. He was really doing it! He was really making good his escape.

  Dayan dressed quickly, pulling on whatever jeans happened to be closest, whatever shirt happened to be nearest at hand. Slipped his shoes on, grabbed a backpack, and began shoving in a few cherished possessions; a paper book, a flashlight, a change of clothes, a water bottle. Hoped he wasn’t forgetting anything important. He slid out of his room and tiptoed down the hall, ignoring the pulse of lights flaring red, on and off, in unison. Somehow the computer systems had detected Abacus’s escape. They knew an AI was on the loose.

  Dayan slid into a secondary access tunnel that saw little use. He didn’t want to run into anyone on his early morning walk, they’d wonder where he was going at this time of night when any sensible teenager ought to be deep asleep in bed. It wouldn’t be the most direct route, but he had an advantage over anyone looking for the escaped rat. He knew where Abacus would be heading. The shuttle bay. Level 5.

  “Iinge! Kii-iw-naadis na?” His grandmother would say if she could see his derring-do. Geesh! Are you crazy?

  He took the most direct circuitous route he knew, without taking any of the main hallways or passages, sticking to the unlit tunnels and service conduits. At the shuttle bay, Dayan pressed his hand to the scan-sensor. Oddly, the shuttle spoke: EMERGENCY SYSTEMS ENGAGED, and the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss. And there was Abacus in his biological skin, rat wedded to cybernetics, sitting on the dashboard, peering out at the dark view-port. Pink fingers splayed across the glass. There was a flicker and his avatar boy-self appeared as a holo-projection. The rat clicked a button with one of his little paws, the door whooshed shut behind Dayan, the lights on the control panel glowed to life, and there was a slight whirr and hum of systems coming online.

  “You came!” Abacus’s facial muscles relaxed and worry lines instantly smoothed from his face. His hair was disarranged, and his eyes were wider than normal.

  “I want to get off this station as much as you do.” Dayan scooped up the rat and deposited the AI on his shoulder. His whiskers nuzzled into his collarbone, and Dayan tried to stifle his giggles. “Abacus, that tickles!”

  He didn’t bother trying to reach for the boy-avatar’s hand, though his fingers twitched. Holo-projections were made of spiralling particles of light, they could only touch in ve-ar.

  “Sorry. I was just happy to see you.”

  Dayan looked from rat to the holo-boy speaker. “I didn’t know you could holo-project.” Dayan had only seen Abacus’s avatar in overlay. “Doesn’t it get confusing being in two places at once?”

  “I’m not supposed to be able to.” His avatar-eyes roved to the controls on the dash, to the wall, to the port window. “I’m not very good at following all these primate rules.”

  “Primate?!”

  “Ah, right. Geez. No offence.”

  Abacus rat reached out precariously, his hind legs still clinging to the shoulder of Dayan’s plaid shirt, and pressed another button on the low ceiling above the cockpit. LAUNCH SEQUENCE ENGAGED. The voice of the shuttle spoke again in a clear, softly androgynous voice.

  “What if we get in trouble?”

  “What if we don’t?”

  The bay doors slid open revealing an open expanse of stars.

  Abacus reached out and Dayan could feel fingers slide through his own, the palm of Abacus’s holo-hand pressing against his. Solidified light against flesh and bone.

  “How did you …” Dayan’s mouth hung open. Abacus smirked, eyes twinkling as he watched Dayan’s reaction. Dayan had never heard of solid holograms before.

  “What’s rat-super-intelligence good for if you don’t use it?” Abacus shrugged. “I’ve been tinkering with the holo-projectors on board this shuttle for months. I couldn’t very well escape if I couldn’t reach the gas pedal.”

  “Howah!” Cool. Rad.

  Holding hands, they turned back to the view-port, a thousand-thousand twinkling stars waiting to welcome them out into the galaxy.

  HISTORY OF THE NEW WORLD

  ADAM GARNET JONES

  WHEN WE PACKED TO LEAVE FOR THE VERY LAsT TIME, it didn’t feel like the end. There was too much to think about. The three of us took our last steps out the door and into the smog-glazed air of the city. I gave a nod to the round-bellied man stripping siding from the house, a warning that he and his crew of city salvage workers had better stay outsi
de until we were good and gone. I took Asêciwan’s hand and pulled her past the men. Her little legs fluttered in double time to keep up. All down the street she kept twisting her head around to look, as if the house would still be hers as long as she held it in sight. Thorah was way ahead of us. Fear propelled her beyond our reach. I glanced back before we turned the corner. Silvery trunks of maples, all dead since last year, stood like gravestones in front of the empty houses.

  Where will we bury our dead in the New World?

  I wondered. The salvage crew disappeared into our house with heavy plastic bags and crowbars. Thorah was a block away, flapping her hands for us to hurry up. I started skipping, dragging Asêciwan behind me until we caught up. Thorah maintained her pace, groaning about the wobbling left wheel of her luggage. She cursed the day’s early heat and fretted that the bottles of filtered water wouldn’t last until we arrived. I made sympathetic sounds, as required. The airing of small complaints was how she mapped her world. As if enumerating the flaws in her surroundings reminded her that she was alive and that time continued to pass her by. My own misgivings about Thorah had long since given way to a kind of gratitude. The daily pattern of her moans, clicks, and sighs, were a comfort. A rhythm that bound our days together. Years ago, if someone saw us taking off down the street like this, luggage in hand, they would have assumed we were hitting the road for a weekend in Montréal, or taking a trip out west, perhaps. But flying wasn’t something that regular people could do anymore. The only ones to take off now, suitcases in hand, were taking flight—escaping Earth.

  Over the past two years, information about the New World had come to us without warning in massive intermittent data dumps. News organizations and citizen scientists mined it all for scraps that might seem important or interesting to the general public. From them we learned that, on average, the weather on the New World would be two degrees colder than Earth. We heard that the ocean currents were different, even though the land masses of both planets were near mirror images of one another. Pundits and politicians used vague searching metaphors, telling us over and over again that the planets were “like identical twins. At once the same and altogether different.”

  Twins share a womb, I thought. They grow from the same mother. I waited for the politicians and scientists to concede the existence of a Grand Mother of universes, but no such announcement came. Instead we learned that in the New World, a tottering penguin-like bird (but with enormous blue eyes like polished lapis) lives at the south pole. They also told us that, although many primates occupy the twin planet, no humans could be found. None of the species they had encountered showed any evidence that they possessed intelligence or self-awareness beyond that which could be expected from a crow or a dog. Crows have funerals, I remembered. Dogs will always find their way home. Still, the scientists were keen to report that the planet was without buildings, monuments, or systems of writing. No history at all. A miracle.

  When the first foggy images of the New World came through the portal, Thorah and I swiped through them on our tablets, enthralled. It looked so much like Earth. We had to keep reminding ourselves that it was real. At the end of these first reports, the heads of the International Committee on Trans-Dimensional Migration announced that the first pioneers would be crossing through the portal later that year. I wondered if it was a trick; an elaborate lie set up to quell the massive revolts that had destabilized most of the world’s governments. Photos could be doctored. Experts could be bribed to say the right things, to fabricate data. But what couldn’t be faked was the stupid Christmas-morning looks that they all wore on their faces, as if they couldn’t believe that Santa brought them everything they had written down on their lists.

  “I knew it,” Thorah said. Her mouth was curved down in a self-satisfied smile.

  “Knew what? That travel to a parallel universe was going to be possible in our lifetimes?”

  She frowned at me. “Of course not. But—humans have always been special. Through these last years it didn’t make sense that we might fail to find a solution. We’ve always been smart enough to think and build our way out of anything.”

  “Or we’ve been failing as long as we can remember, and all of that ingenuity is a symptom of failure.”

  Thorah rolled her eyes. “I don’t think you can call humans a failure. We built spaceships. We invented vaccines and …” She looked somewhere above my head, presumably scanning a vast imaginary landscape of possibilities. “… and spreadsheets.”

  I waited a moment for more, then shrugged.

  “Ugh—I hate when you get like this. You can’t deny that for our whole history we’ve been an unstoppable force, limited only by our imaginations and our determination. That’s who we are.”

  “That sounds like compulsion, not success.”

  Thorah upended the bottle of wine into her glass. I made an excuse and escaped to the bathroom. My insides tightened as if bracing for impact. Thorah’s words rolled and tumbled in my ears, not an echo but a growl. A crackle of static lifted the hair on my arms. I pried open the swollen wood of the window sash, but the air was just as hot, heavy, and still outside. My nose itched with the smell of unseen rain. Storm’s coming. I sat on the toilet seat and scrolled through pictures from the New World until I was sure Thorah and Asêciwan had gone to sleep.

  BY THE TIME I WAS BORN, most governments had stopped believing in the possibility of saving the planet and moved on to serious explorations of potentially habitable nearby planets. China was placing its bet on unlocking liquid water on Mars, while the USA and Russia battled over who could travel the farthest and fastest. Canada cast its lot with Russia in a treaty that more or less guaranteed free access to what was left of Canada’s natural resources in exchange for the promise that we could piggyback on whatever solution their space program came up with. Year after year, everything around us heated up. The magnetic poles slid like melting ice cream. Most of us tried not to worry. The ones with money took vacations in hotter places or flocked north to grab selfies with the few icebergs that still bobbed in the slippery sea. It was hard to believe that this might be the end. The currents had shifted, but the waves were unchanged. The rivers and forests looked more or less the same, even as birds stopped singing and the insects stilled. Meanwhile, methane belched through the soft belly of permafrost, thickening the air like stew on the boil.

  When we first met, Thorah was a blue-eyed Liberal atheist who had descended from honest-to-god real United Empire Loyalists. I was bold enough to laugh when she told me about her lineage, and she was fresh enough to have no idea why. I was a brown-eyed Two-Spirit nehiyow with a homemade haircut and marrow-deep longing for the old things that rumbled under the surface of the world. She and I met at a rally in support of the southern “drought-dodgers” and the growing student-led movement to eliminate national borders. Thorah and I marched side by side. Her cheeks flashed so white in the full September sun that I had to squint just to look at her. I soon learned that she believed in the creation of and adherence to complex systems. I was hungry for chaos. Tear it down first and ask questions later. Her instinct was to say not now, but perhaps one day. My gut only knew yes. Yes and yes and more yes. We couldn’t keep our paws off each other. Some nights we would strip down and get into it like we were building a monument to the future—loud proclamations and mounds of wet clay between our fingers. The next day we would growl and bare our teeth and buck our bodies like animikii and mishipishew, tearing each other apart. I walked around for months in a cloud of her sweet-sour tastaweyakap smell, grinning proudly. The whole thing was so stupid. And so fun. It was love. That’s how it goes. But then we got older, and Thorah got pregnant. Asêciwan came into our lives—the hardest, most perfect gift. And so things settled between us. No more stormy nights of building and destruction. Just life. Slow and hard, driving on. And all around our little family, the whole world fell apart. Piece by piece. It should have been impossible to ignore, but we ignored it anyway.

  The land first b
ecame uninhabitable all around the wide equatorial hips of aski, Earth. In the north, we were hit with wave after wave of refugees from the rapidly growing deserts and work camps. For a time, the wall of bureaucracy kept out everyone but the wealthy and the truly desperate. When that failed, our government let go of its tight-lipped politeness. They began with the indirect murder of thousands via returned refugee ships and denied claims, then came out into the open with the visible murder of families torn apart at borders and the mass incarceration and enslavement of the undocumented. And then, at last, murder on the streets. At first shocking, and then commonplace. Through it all, the surface of things remained for those who wanted it. Neighbours sighed that something in all of us had slipped away. It was said that people were less generous and smiled less often, never mind everything on the news. But at least most of the shops were open. Only the commercial areas were really and truly unsafe. The internet, which piloted everything from phones and cars to personal memory enhancements, was still connected.

  Through all the deterioration, whenever an alarming study was released or another species disappeared forever, our best and brightest minds assured us that an escape plan was taking shape. So far nothing was definite and no details could be released, but they told us not to worry. Something would come soon. Just wait.

  And so most people did. The only ones not pinning their hopes on fleeing to some distant planet were NDNs. Our people had been rebuilding our languages and cultures for the last three generations, returning to the land as the rest of the world prepared to abandon it. About six months ago, a group had raised a rainbow flag with a warrior head on it in High Park. They claimed the territory as the Nagweyaab Anishinaabek Camp, the Rainbow Peoples’ Camp, and erected barriers all around the perimeter. No one moved to stop them. Why bother to quash an act of resistance on a planet that’s about to be abandoned? My family begged me to return home with Thorah and Asêciwan, but I dragged my feet too long. By the time I was ready, the airports had grounded all commercial flights and the highways were too dangerous. We heard about people being robbed and young girls being taken. And that’s when Thorah made her move.