2063. Decades after a devastating nuclear war, the last remnants of humanity struggle to survive, and hope for a new start on another planet. Aaron Turner, one of the leading researchers at the Renaissance Project, is one of them.

This is set in the near-ish future, so it's only sort of sci-fi; mostly human interest. Here we meet the characters, and the world. This is chapter one of a five-part novel. As always, share and enjoy, and please chime in with criticism and feedback! If you like the story, that makes me happy. If you don't like it, the only way I can get better is if you tell me.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

Water, Paper and Clay, by Rob Baird. Part 1: "It sets my mind to wander..."

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The window looked out on rain — as it always did; as it had for decades. By then, to us, it was nothing but white noise: the dull, rhythmic tapping against the roof, the hiss of tires as cars slunk by on the street outside, the splash of boots in puddles that never seemed to dry. You could almost ignore it, and in those days I suppose I did.

I had more important things to be focusing on, after all. As the lead biologist in the Sequencing Department of the Renaissance Project, I, Aaron Turner (Class 1, Lower Echelon) faced the unenviable challenge of preserving the Earth's biodiversity against its now inevitable extinction. 

To make matters even more appealing, I was doing it in the most difficult way possible: moving the whole thing to another planet. My research partner was fond of saying that the only difference between the work we did, and the work of Sisyphus, was the temperamental intermediary of our computers.

It was at these computers that I now swore. With the rain drilling into my head I was losing my objectivity, my sense of detachment. If you weren't careful, you could lose sight of your immediate goal — then the magnitude of the whole damned project came down on you, and you were useless for awhile. I'd managed to stave that particular problem off, for the moment, but the computers... I struck the table next to my terminal — hard, hard enough to make me wince. "Son of a god damned bitch."

"I don't have children, remember?" Across the table, Maria Wells (Class 3, Lower Echelon) looked as tired as I was. She was a shepherd, like me, with dark eyes that always seemed thoughtful. Wells was five years my senior, though you would never have guessed it to look at us; I was already starting to go grey around the muzzle. When I didn't respond to her joke, the shepherdess prodded further. "What's going on?"

"We're losing it," I said.

She smiled grimly. "What else is new?"

Maria had a way of being quicker than I with words; I shook my head again to clarify. "I mean the simulation. It's going unstable at about nine hundred iterations in."

Her eyebrow raised. "Nine hundred? Well, you're doing better than I am. I get terminal indicators at about... four-fifty, and the collapse goes geometric at six hundred, consistently."

"So maybe this whole Mars thing will just be a short vacation." I rested my muzzle on my paws and stared into the numbers and charts that marched over my computer terminal. Six hundred cycles was only three hundred days — not even a full year. Not only was it not acceptable in the long run — in the long run, the ecosystem had to be completely stable — it wasn't even enough time enough to justify our division's existence. There were plenty of people who thought the resources were being misallocated already.

"'Remember, it's a one way trip,' Aaron." Maria's voice was a sing-song mockery of the phrase we heard constantly at the Renaissance Project. We were consistently exhorted to remember that, for the massive arks at least, the journey to Mars was permanent. The plants and animals we took to stock the Martian ecosystem would have to be self-sufficient for creating a new world. It was a clever truism, and it made our problems substantially worse. "What are you doing, anyway?"

"I moved all the third segments forward plus twenty, to buffer the atmosphere, and then delayed the fourth segment introductions by thirty cycles. But if you push either of those variables any more, you lose the edge. Nine hundred and eight is the best I've done."

Maria scratched her long muzzle thoughtfully, her whiskers twitching in the too-bright lights of the laboratory. "What if you doubled the complement of three-segments you deployed?"

I shrugged, and typed the new variables in. At first the system seemed stable; it gave no signs of distress as it crossed a thousand cycles, and then fifteen hundred. Suddenly, we lost the field mice; three hundred cycles later, Mars was a dead rock. "The problem is genetic diversity, it's as simple as that. The computer's pretty conservative, and it's projecting they're going to collapse under their own weight. Now, maybe they will and maybe they won't but... it's damned foolish to believe that we'll completely avoid disastrous bottlenecks, with the mass we're being given."

"It's like trying to cover the Washington Mall with a wad of gum," Wells said glumly. "Don't try increasing the CME delta, either. I tried that. It's... well, the readout is buried in one of these stacks. Didn't work, although I have to admit, it sounded like a good idea, in theory."

"CME sounded like a good idea, in theory," I pointed out. Rheingold and Ng had won the Nobel Prize, fifteen years before, for publishing a method of computer-mediated evolution. They had been fostering artificial genetic diversity to model speciation in the Galapagos. As more practical types, we were trying to use their tools to stretch the limited populations we were going to be allowed to take with us off the planet. The arks could only carry so much weight, and much of it was slated for the infrastructure of the planned Martian colony. 

The biosphere was... well, nobody would come right out and tell us that it was a secondary concern, but you could tell that given a choice between packing fifty palm trees and packing an auxiliary power generator, they were going to choose the generator every time. So we used sophisticated (for certain values of the word) computer algorithms to make up the difference, replicating millions of years of genetic variability with the press of a button. The only problem was that it didn't work. 

"You know? I have no faith in the Nobel Prize anymore. None whatsoever." 

At this joke, I finally chuckled. Nobody had faith in the prizes, which had been bought out by Saab ten years before. "Admittedly, to their credit, neither of them think what we're doing is a good idea. But then..." I sighed. "But then, neither do you or I. Not that we have much of a choice — how do you suppose Noah did it?"

Maria's back was to the window, with its constant streaks of rain; that aspect of the metaphor was perhaps less obvious to her. All the same her answer was characteristically laconic. "He had help," she said, and then her fatalistic grin returned. "We should be so lucky."

Divine intervention, of course, was categorically unlikely, and we both knew it. "Perhaps we should just tell them to build another spaceship," I suggested. "Then it would become an 'engineering problem.'" Our mutual friend, a terse and frequently morose man named Jake Ellis, had complained to us at length about the many issues that were simply foisted on the starship designers as 'engineering problems' — as though they could be easily solved with just another iteration of the blueprints. Ellis designed the software that ran the life support system for the massive arks, and I imagine he was probably more overburdened than most of the engineers — something we, of course, didn't help with at all.

The problem, you must understand, was that all of the theoreticians — the people not involved in actually creating the ship — were in the same boat, so to speak. Besides the three arks being built at McChord, there were the two under construction in the Eurozone, six from the Ni-Si-Ko tripartite alliance, five from India, and four being constructed under the auspices of the United Nations — in theory. We never heard much about the UN arks. 

They were massive, of course — the largest spaceships ever built, by far. All the same, there were practical limits of what could be taken aloft, and no good way to increase those limits. The world's industry, or what was left of it, was already overtaxed. The genetic bottlenecks being faced by Wells and I could've been solved easily had we been given room to take more than a handful of samples of each species — but we weren't. Thus we had to improvise — with computer-mediated evolution, with careful balancing of species introductions, with deliberate sacrifices made to leave one whole clade behind on Earth, likely to perish forever, in exchange for another that might exert a stabilizing influence. 

I could not have denied that we were playing God, and I wanted no part in it.

Wells seemed to sense my frustration, then, for the shepherdess sighed heavily and stood, her expression set. "Hell with it, Aaron; I'm going to get some coffee. You want some?"

My stomach quailed at the thought — neither of us had eaten since early in the afternoon — but I realized that I was unlikely to make much progress asleep. "Yeah. A coffee and... see if they have anything decent to eat, why don't you? A bagel or something. Do you need my card?" As government employees and members of the Renaissance Project, we were privileged to get real food — at least most of the time. They were strict about controlling access, though, to prevent us from becoming too demanding with our allotments.

"I think they know us well enough by now. Cream or sugar in the coffee?"

"No. Paint it black, Stones woman." I turned back to my computer as she left the room. Ellis said to me once that the trick wasn't stupidity, exactly, it was staying just smart enough. You needed tunnel vision — needed to be able to focus on the task immediately before you. My task was stabilizing the populations of small mammals. Wells and I hoped that we could recreate Earth like a pyramid, built trophic level by trophic level. We'd get the appropriate bacteria in place, and then the flora, and so on — each successive layer would build on what was already stable. With luck — and incredibly precise timing — we could get things working again.

It appeared, at least so far as the simulations were concerned, that we had built up the first several layers successfully. The problem was that they needed a cycle — otherwise the bacteria would eventually run out of food. They needed bigger things to disturb the soil and create waste, waste that the bacteria could feast on to begin the whole process over. 

For the first few weeks, I'd kept a log of all the animals I'd killed — sort of as a joke, you know? That lasted only until the reality of it all started to sink in — until the numbers crept over a million, and then ten million, and then a hundred. Wells and I knew that the simulation software continued to keep track of this — in the long term it could've been useful information — but we no longer checked and, when the numbers occasionally presented themselves, we looked away as if by superstition.

Regardless, by the time Wells returned and sat down, I was in the process of bungling eight million field mice towards a second extinction on the Red Planet. I was so engrossed by the genocide that I didn't notice Wells' toothy, grinning smile until I caught it from the corner of my eye. Then I turned. "Yes?"

"I've got it."

I caught the space-capsule mug of coffee she slid over the table, and took the bagel she offered me. "You've got more than the coffee, I'm guessing?"

"I think so. Take a drink. It's coffee, right?"

It wasn't an obvious question: even at the Renaissance Project, they sometimes foisted godawful-tasting ersatz on us. This time, however, as I took a sip, I favored the shepherdess with an appreciative nod. "Sure, it's coffee."

She leaned forward, almost girlishly animated, her tail wagging. "But you know, they don't have a coffee plantation back behind the counter."

"No..." Truth be told I wasn't even certain where the coffee plantations were, these days. It was possible, even, that we were still subsisting off freeze-dried stock squirreled away before the rains really got bad — the government said that they were importing fresh coffee, but then the government said a lot of things that we knew were merely propaganda. Either way I wasn't sure where Wells was going with the line of reasoning. "No," I said again. "They probably don't have a plantation, unless they've got some kind of ultraviolet lamp setup going on — actually, you know, I heard they were testing some hydroponics in the old hangar complex. Little Marty said that — "

Wells shook her head fiercely. "No, that's not what I meant. They don't have a plantation in the canteen, Aaron. Actually, they don't even have beans — I watched them make it. They just have freeze-dried grounds."

"Oh, Christ..." I breathed. "No, so they don't..."

My coworker's grin broadened. "They just have the coffee essence — "

"Mixed with a common substrate," I finished for her. "Of course. And if we can't bring along six hundred buffalo..."

"We can bring along the material to construct them — in a fraction of the space. They're all going to be suspended anyway, right? So instead of thawing them out, we can just build them. Doesn't that seem to make more sense to you? You see, I got to thinking of it when I was walking down... DHW has been talking a lot about artificial fertility, right; how even if you conceive, you can't always carry? That's why they've got those artificial wombs. But that has to be scalable — we can just use that, I'm sure of it. The only thing I'd be a little concerned about is behavior. We know a lot of these animals have to be taught survival skills by their mother. So we could just take a family, for good measure."

I pondered this, frowning in thought. "That won't help for gregarious animals like prairie dogs, though... it'll take more work, but we can just do a cut and paste, can't we?" I used the slang term for the incredibly complex neuroscience — scanning the electrical impulses in an animal's brain and then imprinting those impulses on a different one.

Like so much of what we did, this technology originated back when scientists still hoped that Earth herself could be salvaged through the magic of biotechnology. They wanted to create identical, docile stock animals that could be sent around the world, to wherever there was land left to raise them on.

Earth did not, these days, indulge such dreamers. But there were practical answers that could be salvaged from the wreckage of fantasy. "We'll have to do some research, but I have to imagine it'll pan out. It seems like a good idea — you agree?"

"At least in theory, sure. I'm with you; I don't know that it'll be possible to reconstitute them. But you know what that is?" 

I shook my head.

"That's an engineering problem." 

I laughed and, after a few moments, Maria joined me. After it started to ebb — we'd been working on the problem for ten hours that day alone — I took a bite of my bagel, chewing on it slowly. My partner watched me intently; I guess she must've known I had something to say. "That's genius level work there, Wells."

"You really think so?"

The bagel was terrible. Really terrible — stale, the ersatz meat oversalted and tasting of chemicals. But it was substantive; it gave weight to my thoughts. "I do." 

The shepherdess quieted, splaying her fingers as her paws turned towards me to accent the question that followed. "Promotion level genius?" 

I sighed heavily. "Probably. I mean, if not for this, then for the last four months worth of work. You must've put in a request, at this point, I imagine..." The class system was the government's attempt at triage: brutal, cold, and so effective it had been emulated all over. They divided us up by our abilities, at least in theory — I say "in theory" because I know it wasn't always so clean cut. There were a lot of useless bureaucrats with very high classes. "Didn't hear back on it?"

"Didn't hear back on it," she confirmed. 

Where we tried to create solutions to biology by making our failures 'engineering problems,' all of our human resource issues became 'Ad Int problems.' The Ad Interim Democratic Authority held final sway over everything; I scratched behind one of my ears with a slight frown. "It's not really in my hands..."

Wells' fingers played nervously against one another. "Ah, I know. I know. It's just that... it's just my mother, you know? They've got her in the class three clinic, but it's getting worse, and... they say they can't move her." I had no real idea what ailment plagued her mother — it could've been any one of a hundred issues, the result of all the fallout, and the rain, and the constant clammy chill of Earth's eternal winter. "I just don't know what to do, is all, and I thought maybe..." 

She was asking for my help. We'd become an economy of favors and pull. I wasn't good at playing the game, or at making my voice heard, but I nodded softly to her. "Look, I'll... I'll talk to Elizabeth. Maybe she'll listen, I just can't promise anything. But I'll see, ok?"

Maria smiled, faintly, but she knew that it was all we could do. Ad Int — they preferred "AIDA" on the grounds that it was a bit more noble sounding; neither I nor anyone I knew really cared about their feelings — was generally both unwavering and heartless in the exercise of their authority. After a minute, to let the silence hang, Maria shrugged in surrender. "So do you want to try a few more simulations? I think we can — "

"No," I said. "No, go home — it's not worth it. We're both too beat to make anything useful out of it, wouldn't you agree? I'll see you tomorrow, Wells."

"You sure?"

I closed the clamshell of my terminal with a firm, solid clunk. "I'm sure, yeah." Wells nodded, packing her belongings and exiting the office with a parting bow. When she was gone, and I heard the outside door click shut, I opened my computer again and started typing in a new set of variables.

*

The next evening I made my way down the hall of our office building to a door marked "ELIZABETH YUN" in imposing brass letters. Technically, I suppose, I outranked Yun — if I remembered correctly, she was a middle echelon class two. It didn't matter. As Ad Int's representative at the Project, her word was god. Nothing I could do would ever change that. 

She was a tabby cat, slightly built — a quarter of a meter shorter than me, at least. All the same she was... imposing, I guess, is the best word for it. I didn't like going into her office, and I didn't like having to ask her for anything. It was the control she exerted — the absolute authority, hidden under a smile that was almost matronly, and a thin, graceful frame that made everyone who saw it think geisha.

She'd seen me, waiting outside the door, and beckoned me to enter. "Good afternoon, Aaron — please, please, come in! Come in! What can I do for you?"

They asked this often, the Ad Int wallahs who were tasked with keeping eyes on us. It was part of the fiction of our relationship — that they existed to serve us, and that we respected their assistance. "You received a copy of the report I sent to Dezirian, I hope? I think I included you in the distribution chain." I'd summed up the progress Wells and I had made in a short brief, meant to be easily digestible to the uninformed. 

It took her a moment to recall, but then she nodded. "I did! Congratulations — that puts you only a week beh... no, I'm misreading this. I'm very sorry — this puts you ahead of schedule, now, doesn't it? It's good to have some news like that... the propulsion department is forecasting another two weeks of delay, from their last update..." She sounded slightly melancholy — it was always hard for me to tell if this was an act; if she was trying to draw some information from me. I knew nothing about what was going on in the propulsion department.

"I'm happy that we're finally making progress, yes ma'am."

Yun smiled — beamed, almost, really. She was probably trying to ingratiate herself. The Ad Int employees knew that they weren't really welcome. They knew they were a formality — a necessary evil. Overcompensating, her voice was bright and chipper. "Good, good. Was that all you wanted?"

I wanted to run for the door. Instead, of course, I merely shook my head. "No... I have a personnel request, one I didn't attach to the progress report."

"Oh?"

"Well, you've probably noticed from our past reports that what tends to happen is we claw our way back ahead of schedule at the end of a trophic level, and then immediately wind up behind again when we hit the next one. We've tried to account for it in sprint planning, but I want to be more prepared now. Explicitly prepared — we're starting to put carnivores together. It's going to be tough... I'd like to try to stay ahead of it."

Yun pulled a thin tablet computer out, and began flipping through our records. "That does seem to be what happens... at least, I can see regular, punctuated cycles in your predictions — I presume that's what you mean? Yes, I can see it, then. Do you know why this is happening? Your reviews are always good, but... are you getting worn out?"

"Well, that's some of it, I suppose. But mostly it's that each new layer is forcing us to innovate, and we can't tell what we're going to have to do when we first start. I don't think it's an issue of our workload; the work is pretty constant. Wells and I have been putting in solid days for the last month and a half, since the spring reorganization. Ten, twelve hours, most days — I'm not sure we can really push much past that." 

Her smile, this time, was decidedly motherly. "You know, the environmental reports suggest you're here a bit longer than that. And yes, I know that your timesheets disagree. I also know that you don't have it easy in your department, don't worry. Can I help?"

"More people would be useful," I said. I knew this would be turned down — every department wanted more people, and it was hard to argue that we really needed it when we kept on schedule with what we had. "Ideally, I'd want another class three or two, to handle some of the work we can't farm out to the programming teams in Portland." Wells and I only came up with the ideas, and a vague idea of how to execute them — the nitty-gritty of the planning came from the Renaissance Project's Portland office, another class two settlement further down the Pacific coast. 

Yun's expression didn't really change as she thumbed through a few readouts on her computer. "I might be able to send another analyst your way, but probably not before winter or next spring, and the commit date for your team is supposed to be this fall." 

That was another thing. Ad Int employees spoke in terms of seasons. It was propaganda that, I have to imagine, they were explicitly directed to use. Nobody else took the concept seriously; it could've been used for a shibboleth. 

I never used the terminology myself — for it was, after all, hard to think of the constant dreary rainfall outside as 'summer.' In the movies, summer was full of sunlight, and children eating something called ice cream. Ad Int's world was not our own. "Not any sooner?" 

"Offhand, I don't see how, Aaron. I'm really sorry we can't make that happen."

I shook my head. "No, no. I understand." Christ, but it was all a charade, wasn't it? All of us playing a part. I didn't understand Ad Int at all. "I guess... our real problem is that we get all this high-level work, and I'm spending a quarter of my day filling out forms to give my class three access."

"That's Wells, right? Maria Wells?" 

"That's right. If she was a class two, I wouldn't have to do that. We could... spend more time trying to get our work done, and less trying to make sure we're all on spec. I mean, having the guidelines is great, but... you can see from our timesheets that it doesn't always work." In theory we were allowed to spend no more than sixty hours a week in the office, for mental health's sake. In practise, as Yun knew, I was frequently in far longer, especially if weekends were considered. 

"You want Wells moved to a new class?"

I had tried to couch the request in terms of efficiency — we weren't supposed to get emotional, when dealing with our work. "That would be ideal, yes. I'd think with that we could get another six hours of productivity a week."

Yun leaned back. "Will you answer a question for me?"

Was I on thin ice? I wasn't sure. "Yes?"

The tabby leaned forward, her look conspiratorial. "This is just so you can send somebody else to the progress checkins, isn't it?" I must've looked surprised, for she laughed. "I know I'd want to get out of listening to Crawford drone on." 

So she was kidding — letting me know that her guard was down. The smile I gave her was intended to look unforced, as though I was in on her joke about Dr. Crawford — the deputy director for the Renaissance Project, whose biweekly "progress checkins" could be guaranteed to suck four or five hours out of my day. "Oh... well, maybe just a little." It wasn't true, but perhaps if Yun thought she and I shared something in confidence, she might be more willing to play along.

She laughed, and sat back once more, tapping her computer screen a few times. "Well, your secret's safe with me. I can authorize a class transference." Because the class system was not officially hierarchical, and because it was supposed to be innate, she was careful not to describe it as a promotion — though we all knew what it was. "What's the green line for your departmental files? Class two lower or middle?"

"Middle, ma'am."

"Well, then we'll be classmates!" She tapped a few more times, and then smiled up at me. "Done and done. Was that all, then, Dr. Turner?" 

"Yes, ma'am." 

"Glad I could help. Come back soon, Aaron, you hear?" 

I heard, yes. It wasn't a command I was eager to obey; I bowed as gracefully as I could, and then stepped back into the hallway. I was happy that she'd authorized the change for Wells — and it would no doubt make the shepherdess's life much easier. All the same, I never enjoyed having to meet with Yun. 

Sometimes I regretted being so standoffish with her. Perhaps she was a perfectly nice person, outside of work — she had never been anything but polite in the office, at least. There was just something about it, though I felt guilty saying so. In the past they talked about "business casual" dress; Jake Ellis described the Ad Int manner of speaking in a similar way: "formal informality."

What Yun reminded me of, more than anything, were the chipper pre-recorded voices on the autobus or the subway, the ones that told you to have a nice day and announced the upcoming stops. They were warm and bright — like summer, if what the movies said was true. They just weren't quite... human.  

*

I don't know who's going to read this, ever, but I hope to god you don't know any of this firsthand. And on that hope, on the prayer that your world looks a lot different, I guess I'll explain. 

It's not that nobody knows who to blame for the nuclear war. It was the Chinese, although I'm sure they didn't really know what was going to happen — who could? So it's not that nobody knows who to blame, it's that nobody knows what blaming anybody gets us. A historical record, is what I figure. 

They say that it started as a fight over the Spratly Islands, but it goes back a little bit further than that. As an economy, China was running away — their industrial output, fifty years ago, was completely unmatched. By 2015 they were consuming a plurality of the world's concrete and steel and coal. For a time, that was alright — NorthAm, which at the time was the triplet countries of Mexico, the United States, and Canada, could keep up with that. So could Europe and India.

But they kept growing, until at last they had nothing at all to spend it on — it's a problem with exporting countries, I was told by a friend of mine who used to be an economist. Eventually you find that you can't export anymore. They had a lot of money, a lot of resources, and a lot of unemployment. At first that just meant those prestige projects — the Three Gorges Dam, the base on the moon, the space elevator they started constructing. But that can only employ so many people, and they looked elsewhere. 

In the very early days of nuclear technology, a century ago, the Windscale reactor in what was then England caught fire. They tried to suffocate it, the same way as you might fight any other fire. But it had gone too far for that; the inferno was so hot that it stripped the oxygen away from the carbon dioxide and combusted it anyway. That's the image I get when I think about the Chinese Empire's economy then — literally so powerful that it could not be stopped. 

The only reasonable place to spend that much money was the military, and they developed the strongest one in the world. But standing armies get antsy, and they suffered from the same problem as many other great empires — a sense of entitlement. In this case, their eye turned to the Spratly Islands, with their abundant reserves of oil and natural gas. They weren't the only ones who wanted the Spratlys; the United States and some of her allies did as well. It was those allies that China attacked. 

Reports from later, from afterwards, make it seem like, once it had been started, the war could not be stopped — that it happened so quickly that nuclear devastation was completely inevitable. Not enough of the military leadership survived to know for certain what happened, except that the eastern seaboard of the former United States, and many of the largest cities in China, had effectively ceased to exist. 

It was worse, I think, for the rest of the world — Europe, India, Africa, South America. Those countries that had nothing to do with the war, but suffered for it anyway. That was when the ash started, and the skies got dark. For a few years, they say, you could hardly see the sun. By 2063, the year that I was finishing up work in the Renaissance Project, there were a few weeks of sun a year on the west coast, and certain parts of the world where it was relatively common — including the capital at Denver. 

Things had changed enough by then, anyway. The governments of Canada, the United States, and Mexico had re-coalesced in the Ad Interim Democratic Authority — technically an elected body, although so few people bothered to vote that their terms were effectively limitless. 

It was they who, in 2046, realised that the scarcity of the Earth's resources called for drastic measures. It was called the Triage Bill; an attempt to classify people based on how useful they were to the future of the territory under Ad Int's control. It was so cold, and so utilitarian, and so practical that every other government soon followed. 

For the people already in the workforce, they looked at skills and educational history. The rest of us, well, they had a chance to start on us early. When I was 17, I took a test — the Provisional Aptitude Assessment. That was what placed me into Harvard. It told me that I was a "provisional class 1," and when I received my job offer from the Joint Defense Advanced Research Center it came with it a guaranteed formalization of my rank as class 1, lower echelon — though the echelons were less important, and mostly figured in to pay calculations. It was class, the larger category, that everyone paid addition to. 

Class one was reserved for high-ranking government officials, scientists, doctors, and the managers of the few large corporations that still existed. Class two encompassed military personnel, police officers and rescue workers; engineers like Jake Ellis were also generally class two, because the work they performed was essential in keeping the country going. Class three included educators, bureaucrats in the civil service, technicians, and average businessmen. Class four was for farmers and skilled laborers. Menial laborers made up the fifth class — most people, I'm told, were class four or five. 

Children were class six, at least until they could be reclassified. The mentally ill and those who were too sick or old to work were class seven. Class eight were the homeless and the criminals, those people that Ad Int had for all intents and purposes completely forgotten about. The first five classes comprised what Ad Int considered to be a functional society.

I know there's been a lot written about class — where it came from; whether it was justified. I myself found it abhorrent, but the cold fact was that it could not be escaped. It was so logical, and so difficult to argue with, that they applied it rigorously. 

Class determined where you could live, what medical facilities were available to you, and who you were expected to associate with. It limited your travel options, your work opportunities, and your rations. That was the genius of it, its ubiquity. It was rational, it was impossible to challenge, and it was everywhere.

For instance, in the mass transit system that threaded through the Pacific Northwest, the computer that greeted me at the door: "Class two lower status or above is required to board this vehicle." The voice sounded like it was coming from inside my head, though I knew it was only the little speaker chip I had implanted in my ear. I raised my card so that the autobus's scanner could see it. "Welcome aboard, Dr. Turner. The first available seat is in row six." It was, I thought again, very much like listening to Elizabeth Yun. I took the seat and dropped into it heavily. 

The busses were electrical, running off the nuclear plant at Fort Lewis. I guess we weren't supposed to think too long about how quickly we'd turned back to the atom, after it had leveled the whole of human civilization. Irony, that was another thing Ad Int recommended we all move past. But, at least, it meant that the busses weren't contributing to the crud that was messing up the atmosphere.

Before the Fires, and the reconstruction, the space where the Renaissance Project was located had been called McChord Air Force Base. It had supported the nation's transport aircraft, when aircraft still needed paved runways. 

The runways were all that was left, though you couldn't tell it — they were hidden beneath the scaffolding of the three great arks. The hulls had been completed the previous year. Disappointingly, they looked nothing like I'd hoped science fiction spaceships might. Long, gunmetal grey, and perversely phallic, the arks appeared somewhat like whale-shaped missiles. 

But they were our hope, the promise of a ticket off the planet. As long as they were there, with a bustle of frantic activity around them, we knew we had another chance. Did we deserve it? Well, that was a different question, of course. I closed my eyes as the bus pulled away — I didn't like to watch the scenery, because it was bleak and frightening. In my more idealistic days at the Renaissance Project, I'd tried to empathize with that outside world; now I found I had no empathy left to give.

But I can reconstruct the trip from memory, anyway. McChord City, which encompassed most of the old airbase, was a class two facility — so were most of the workers there, with the exception of people like Wells, who had special dispensation. Olympia, where I lived, was also class two, with a few outlying lower-class suburbs. I was a bit of an aberration there; the closest class one settlement was the Microsoft Enclave, and a few of the higher-ranking Renaissance employees did live there. For me, well, there was little love lost between myself and the businessmen — I was content enough in Olympia.

Between McChord and Olympia lay the slums of Eleazaria. The town — the "City of Lazarus," proving that Ad Int wasn't beyond irony after all — was class five, slotted for the lowest of menial workers. There were few services there. Even power, I'd heard, was intermittent. For all intents and purposes it was what, fifty years ago, we would've called the third world.

I'd heard it said that the Pacific coast had it easier, comparatively — that they were spared most of the devastation of the Fires. Having worked for a time at JDARC, the Joint Defense Advanced Research Center in old Arlington, I'd have to agree — the compound had been alright, and the Defense Complex on the site of the old Pentagon was class 1, but the rest of it was pure misery. It's small wonder they moved the capital to Denver, even though the Fires spared Washington, DC itself.

Whether or not any given city had been burned down, the whole eastern seaboard was an endless sea of decay, a bleak expanse of grey skies and greyer people. And, looking at the pictures of the old times, the contrast was greater there — as if those cities were nothing more than a monument to just how far we've fallen. Cities like New York, where the skeletal skyscrapers stand empty, maintaining their dismal vigil like watchmen dying on their feet. Cities like Pittsburgh, where deer nose among the toxic, rusted ruins of what was once a great industrial hub.

My experience at JDARC had suggested to me that even the scattered outposts of civilization there — the Defense Complex; RBC Financial's enclave, and so on — did little to help. They merely magnified the devastation, in the same way that a flashlight deepens the night around it, or food reminds the starving of their hunger. It was the kind of bleakness that, if you stayed out of Eleazaria, you could avoid in the Pacific Northwest. The kind of bleakness that makes you wonder how we manage to endure.

This was the sort of thought that you pushed out of your mind, if you could. Ad Int provided lots of counseling for us, the higher up you went on the totem pole — they say that ten years after the Fires, suicide killed as many people as residual fallout. 

The bus rolled through a kilometer or more of run-down, weathered, empty houses before it crossed into the sheltered Olympia complex. Once, I guessed, these had been part of the town too. Now "Olympia" was just the buildings that hunkered down under the protective geodesic that shielded us from the rain. It was a fraction of its former size; we were not encouraged to dwell on what had happened to the rest. 

The bus let me off three blocks from my house. The turns had been worn into my feet through muscle memory; there was no chance of getting lost, even though I closed my eyes. I tried to think of what it must've been like, forty years before. There must've been playgrounds; must've been outdoor swimming pools and those 'convertible' automobiles you saw in the old movies, the ones with the removable tops. 

I had an apartment near the top of an older skyscraper — built in the final few years before the war, back when people were still in the business of creating great architecture. Then, it might've conveyed some status; now, it was hard to imagine anyone showing any particular enthusiasm for the grey, miserable scenery its broad windows looked over. 

I picked a random book from my shelf — the wealthy are expected to indulge some conceits, and I had anachronistically picked literature; I had something of a library, composed of volumes from all over the last few centuries. In this case, it was a Frederik Pohl novel — Gateway, a story about a man from a world more or less like my own, with too many people and too few resources. For Pohl, it was possible to get away from this, out in the solar system. 

That was the idea, after all. But for us... I had frequent doubts.

It was better at night, at least; I took the book with me to my balcony and sat, reading in the light from the low-wattage bulb set into the wall. Beneath me, autobuses and a few private electric vehicles crawled along the streets, and the lamps cast their dull white pall over the sidewalks. This world, of darkness punctuated by the occasional light, could almost have been a mirror of the night sky — had we ever been able to see such a thing. As it was, it was so stark and mechanical that it gave no hint of how mournful the tableaux might otherwise have been. 

In the morning it would be worse; with daylight, the world was composed only of the light grey above and the dark grey of concrete and granite below. There was no color — early on Ad Int had paid people to create murals, in order to break up the incessant dreariness. When, after a few months, people started ignoring these as they faded into the background, Ad Int had mostly given up. I couldn't blame them; most of us had as well.

But what could you do? They played ancient music, in the Project offices. Mostly they used it because it was public domain; EMI had fired a few missiles at a government plane ten years back following a licensing dispute. Only Maria really liked the stuff. But one of the songs stuck in my mind, a guttural lament. "No one here gets out alive," the singer says. I sometimes wondered if he had a crystal ball.

*

Three weeks later, Friday evening found Maria and I still at the office, struggling with a new kink in the rebirth. The essential problem was that it wasn't as simple as adding another species in sequence. We had to consider everything — each new species had a relationship to every other species, and causality was not always clear. It had taken us two days to realize that the extinction of a species of green algae had been due to our addition of some squirrels, through a complex chain of two dozen plants, animals, and microbes. 

On Earth, relationships are pretty robust. I guess we realized that after the Fires, when so much of the planet was devastated but life, somehow, managed to keep going. The Earth can absorb a lot of punishment, if treated properly. But that's because an ecosystem is a dense net of chain mail with millions of individual links.

We didn't have that luxury. We had to pick and choose carefully, and then meticulously plan the order of introduction of all the species — but we had to do so with a margin of error large enough to accommodate for the fact that we were lifting human civilization up and setting it down somewhere else. There were bound to be complications and holdups; we had to account for these too. 

If all we'd wanted to provide was a sustainable atmosphere and maybe some food animals, the job would've been much easier. But that wasn't good enough. Maria Wells had coined a phrase: "apple pie colonization." It had defined settlement in the past, and nobody felt like giving it up now just because we happened to be talking about another planet.

Apple pie colonization, to Wells, meant that anywhere you wound up, you had to make sure that you could bake an apple pie — meaning sugar, wheat for the dough, fresh apples, and whatever else — without having to have anything imported. But it went beyond that. It meant that, if you were sitting on a porch swing, you could have a bite of the stuff and never know whether you were in the Great Plains or the Utopia Planitia. Though they would never have admitted it, the Renaissance Project was single-mindedly focused on apple pie colonization. 

That was another one of those “big picture” things that we tried scrupulously hard to avoid. 

At the moment, Wells and I were focused on the results of our latest simulation, the sixteenth one of the day — “sixteenth time’s a charm,” Wells had said, with a heavy sigh. Collapse, when it came, was characteristically swift. We lost a species of pollinating insect, followed shortly thereafter by a whole clade of plants, and within a few dozen more cycles Mars had gone completely dead once more.

“I am become death,” I proclaimed. “The shatterer of worlds.”

Maria was more succinct. “Well, fuck.”

“Do we have any idea what happened, at least?” 

Wells unfolded the computer screen like a triptych, giving us more screen real estate to review the figures. “Yes... yes, right here. It’s the macrofauna again, look, see? We introduced those voles, and they decreased the oxygen content of the atmosphere, which took out the pollinators. That was it for the plants, then...”

I rubbed at my temples, trying to make sense of the graphs. “Shouldn’t they have compensated for that? Oh." I checked the numbers a few times — things had come apart quickly, in only a few dozen cycles. "No, no time, I guess. And we don’t have anything in the database with faster replication rates, if I’m not mistaken.” Nor was the solution simply increasing the number of plants — oxygen, like all corrosive materials, was highly toxic at sufficient concentrations.  

"None with the parameters we need, no." She looked as weary as I was.

"Alright, let's try this. Look how wide our lines are, all the margins for potential error. Let's remove those, and assume it goes absolutely perfect."

Wells lifted a mug of coffee to her lips, trying to take a drink — though, judging by when we had last gone for coffee, it had been dry for half an hour. We were operating on instinct, on reflex. "You know what happens when you assume, Aaron..."

I held my paw up, to still this line of discourse. "Sure. But let's try, ok? I mean... because here's the thing. If it doesn't work out under the assumption that everything goes perfectly, then we know we have to start from scratch across the board. If it does work... well..."

"Fair enough." She brushed her paws over the computer screen to comment out some of the subroutines we'd written to make the model more robust. "Ready?"

"Let there be light," I said. 

As the simulation started working again, Wells stepped away from the desk, returning in a few seconds with her coffee mug filled with water — the only thing we at the Renaissance Project had in unlimited supply. "What do you suppose the odds are that this will work?"

"This simulation?"

She shrugged, and tapped her claw on the ceramic rim of the mug, watching the ripples. "The Project."

"Well, you know, ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever lived on this earth are dead."

"Doesn't mean we have to join in. It's not like there's peer pressure, Aaron..."

Between the two of us, I had always been the more cynical one — although Wells had her moments. "It doesn't mean we have to, no, but you just asked about the odds."

"I guess partly I was trying to figure out why you're here, you know? You push yourself so hard for this, and... I have to wonder why, if you don't think it'll make a difference."

It was a question I'd asked myself, before. The truth was uncomfortable and I admitted it to few people — I was terrified of the future, which I had neither faith in nor hope for. I was terrified of each successive day, and so I tried to fill as much of my life as possible with distraction. It was that, I knew, or turn to alcohol. "It pays the bills, mostly. And for a geneticist, it's that or go back to JDARC, working on protective phages for the military." It wasn't true. I couldn't go back to JDARC because I hated the work and the hours were too short; the Renaissance Project wasn't just another job for me, and it wasn't just about the money. It was about occupying my spare time, so that nothing else could creep in. But the lie was easy. "How about you?"

"I think — I really think — that you need something to believe in. You need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. This is mine. Every day, I get up and I tell myself that I'm making a difference. This is going to work, and I'm going to have been a part of it. Because if it doesn't work, then we're all worm food anyway." 

I'd heard similar fatalistic arguments before — the post-apocalyptic version of Pascal's wager. "Well, I think that you're probab... ly..." I trailed off, tilting my head at the computer screen. 

"Son of a bitch."

I shook my head. "No — no. At least we know it's possible in theory, now."

Wells' laugh was much more bitter than her optimistic outlook on the future might've suggested. "Great, in theory. It's the practice that's the real bear..." She closed her eyes, and from her shifting expression I could tell that she was trying to steel herself. "Alright. Well, let's reset the sims, and delay the first introduction by another six... what?"

I was still shaking my head, though the period had shrunk. "No, let's not bother. We're not going to get this cracked tonight, Maria; might as well not beat ourselves up over it. I'm going to close up shop." When I saw that she was considering making an argument, I held up my paw — I was thoroughly exhausted. "Don't make me pull rank, miss class two."

She faltered, and then the shepherdess grinned. "Alright, alright. You win." She closed her terminal, almost vengefully. "I was getting tired of destroying the planet anyway."

As I shrugged on my heavy, waterproof jacket, I chuckled — though not with much mirth. "You know, fifty years ago there was a philosopher who argued that we were all probably a computer simulation, ourselves. If that's true, then what we've done... shit, Maria, if those squirrels have a god, we're going to face one hell of a reckoning."

Wells, too, was becoming formless and dark beneath an overcoat. She folded down the collar and drew the hood up and over it, so that just her muzzle protruded. "I want to read their genesis story, when they get it together, that's for sure. You ready to go?" 

"Yeah." I took a quick look around, and flipped the power switch for the lab off. It was a heavy thing, and rested below a plastic placard that, in clean white type, asked: 'are you doing your part?' It was strange to think that, once upon a time, people had left lights and computers running all the time — or had just turned them off from a switch on the device, without considering the parasitic drain on the grid. The Project's computers were all solid-state, and had been designed to resume nearly immediately and without error if power was removed and then reapplied. Before they built the new nuclear generators at Fort Lewis, power outages had apparently been a constant problem in the complex.

In the hallway outside, walking towards the exit, Maria turned to me. "So, do you have plans for the weekend?"

"Get some reading done, I guess. Maybe spend some time tomorrow or Sunday thinking about this stuff." I jerked my thumb back at the now dark office. 

"You spend too much time here," the shepherdess said with a slight frown. "This is the first time we've left together in a couple of weeks. Is it that important to you?"

I grinned. "Do you really think we'll keep ourselves out of the fateful ninety-nine?"

I hadn't meant it entirely seriously, but Wells' ears flattened — I could tell by the way her hood dipped slightly. "You know... I do, actually. For hundreds of millions of years, now, life has found a way to keep going. It's the impulse to survive, you know? If I gave up on that, there wouldn't be a reason for me to come in. It'd be a damned fraud." She held the door open, and I stepped through into the eerily grey summer's night. The rain had abated slightly, until it was just a light drizzle. 

"Maybe that's why I keep coming in, then. Sometimes I try to forget what we're really here for; just take it as a series of puzzles, all one after another. I find that helps, a little, too. Anyway, you don't have to worry about me. Is that your bus coming?"

Maria tilted her head. "No, I think it's yours." As the vehicle pulled to a slow stop, she shrugged a little beneath the heavy greatcoat. "Well, there's a community-building party in my neighborhood. I hate going to those, so... if you wanted to drop by and keep me company, you could at least get out of the apartment a little."

"I'll consider it," I said. "If I don't see you, have a good weekend, Maria."

*

It was actually her earlier point that I considered, though — the one about the will to survive. This basic, animal desire is what causes us to fight against insurmountable odds. It keeps the drowning from letting go their final breath; the terminally ill from permitting their eyes to close for the last time. It's a potent, powerful impulse, and it's driven everything from soldierly heroism to Alferd Packer. The problem, if I had to put words on it, was that I was no longer convinced that it was enough. 

A few nights previously, the radio had reported that cancer rates continued to climb. We were constantly exhorted to have children. Birth rates were abysmally low; part of this was due to the widespread infertility we sometimes heard of, but the greatest part was no doubt one of choice. Why, why in god's name would you want to bring a child into this world? 

As far as our species was concerned, I had little doubt that we were dying. It was not all sickness; for the most part, we were simply giving up. There was something miss, some vital spark that had gone out of the machine. Listless and bereft of purpose, we ambled along like zombies — the living version of all those factories in the old heartland, full of potential but completely inanimate.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus on something, anything, but my own nightmare of our future. It was impossible; impossible, too, was reading the book I had brought with me — an inspiring tome that I reread often to keep my spirits up. With each kilometer it clicked along, the bus seemed more and more like a coffin. Finally, impulsively, I pressed the button to bring it to a halt at the next stop. Obligingly, it began to slow almost immediately; a minute or so later, I was stepping out into the cold, damp dark of a Washington evening.

The rain had started up in earnest, and I pulled my coat tighter about me as I tried to ascertain my location. Eleazaria — it was, in theory, a class 5 settlement. Now, in the thick of it, it seemed far worse. It was dark; it reeked of filth and human misery. The cold night had given me one advantage: in my heavy jacket, I was shapeless, and looked nothing like a class one. There were no emergency services in the town; if I were to be attacked, nobody would come to my aid.

I walked purposefully through the slums — through stacks of desolate tenements from which no sound could be heard, and in whose windows no light could be distinguished. Despite the red brick and featureless, utilitarian concrete buildings, Eleazaria was near on to a human wilderness. I began to talk to myself to stave off the quiet, returning to my original quandary. I tried to isolate myself from what I saw in a cloak of words. 

This persisted a few minutes — I was walking up along the main street, towards the next closest bus station — with the white noise of the rain broken only by my soft murmurings and the crunch of glass beneath my feet like the remains of so many dreams. It was not until a voice interrupted me that I was forced out of my dark daydreams at all. I turned towards the source, a huddled mass on the corner. "What did you say?"

"Change, mister," the voice repeated. "Every bit helps..."

He sounded old, although I didn't think it was to the point of senility. There was strength left in it, if not dignity. "I — what for? Don't you get the government stipend, sir?"

The bundle of cloth made a low moaning noise, and I suddenly wanted to know what it was. Who it was, I corrected myself swiftly. I bent towards him until the stench repelled me, but was still unable to make out a face. At my inquiring gesture, though, he started to explain again. "I do, I do..."

"What do you need my change for, then?" I straightened up, tilting my head at him.

The coarse, harsh laugh was muffled through the blankets, and he moved a little with the rustle of plastic bags. "Because they fired me from my job, and the government won't pay for booze."

It was an honest answer, just not one that I was particularly enthusiastic about. "And why should I help you with that?"

He coughed. "Because I'm being straight with you, kid. Ain't honesty worth anything?"

I tried to force some conviction into my voice. "I don't have to help you kill yourself, though, do I? And I'm no kid — I'm in my thirties."

The form moved again. His cough and laugh met together in a sick sound — he must've been ill with something, one of the myriad diseases that, in the civilized world, we ought to have eradicated. "Thirties? Christ, kid, I remember the Fires. I remember when it wasn't like this. Jesus, kid, you don't want to help me die? Then tell me what I've got to live for..."

I had no answer. Maybe, in fact, there was no answer possible — maybe he was right; all we could do was hasten the inevitable. I looked around, and suddenly there were more huddles, it seemed, receding from every still-working streetlamp like cockroaches. Or like childhood monsters, lurking in the fringes of the dark. 

I saw Eleazaria again as if for the first time. I saw the windows; perhaps half of them were gone, and what remained were stained and cracked with neglect. I saw the bottles of potent liquor, drained to keep the wolves of living at bay. They stood like votive candles — or lolled here and there lazily, like dejected pets. I saw the trash, discarded carelessly so that the streets looked like the untended nest of a carrion bird. I saw the rain, splashing against puddles that brimmed with human waste. The rain was starting to soak into me. 

I gave up. 

At the sound of clattering change, he mumbled something — I took it as thanks, but it might've been nearly anything. Advice, a blessing — a curse. I'd given him all my loose change; maybe twenty dollars worth. Enough to forget that he was alive for a good long while — I hated to think that this was a gift, although of course it was. 

Now, as I continued my walk back to the station, I wondered about every empty bottle, every discarded appliance, every shard of a bitter life destroyed. Where was the will to survive here? I reached the bus stop without any clear answer, and was disappointed to find no bus, and no indication that any was incoming. I was increasingly cold and wet, with my resolve draining swiftly. Finally, unable to bear it a minute longer, I looked around for shelter. My options were slim: there was only a single lamp on along the entire block, casting a pallid glow on the word 'coffee'. It was still open; I cracked the door just wide enough to enter, and then stepped into the light.

*

The sign above the door had read, simply, "Eighth Street Café." At first I thought it might've been one of the government-run shops, but there was none of the sterility I generally associated with Ad Int. The inside was old, and yellowed with age, but reasonably well-kept. Most importantly it was warm — there was a fire burning in the corner. If nothing else, the Pacific Northwest is made more bearable by its abundance of lumber, and Ad Int has never seen fit to keep the class fives from coughing more soot into the atmosphere. 

Troublingly, however, the restaurant seemed to be abandoned. I glanced about and saw no one; it was not until I stepped closer to the counter and accidentally disturbed a chair that there was any sign of activity at all. A woman emerged, presently, from what I took to be the kitchen. Judging from her markings, I guessed that she was a raccoon — if not purebred, then at least more than half. I couldn't see her tail, but the black mask that framed her face was striking. Her dark hair was pulled back, cinched into a ponytail, which accented the effect.

The face itself, and its owner, looked somewhat worn; it was not hard to tell that she'd been there for some time — was probably, at that point, closing up the establishment. "Can I get you anything?"

So much conversation was mediated by the expectations of class — what you were allowed to say; what one person should say to another when they didn't know where the other person sat... It was all nonsense, of course. Rigid, silly formality that did nothing to help anyone. Regardless — since people seemed to take to those class-based roles — transactional conversations were always interesting for a first impression. When everyone is working from the same script,it doesn't matter what class you are — you always have the same lines. I recited mine, as though in a foreign language class. "Some coffee, please."

"Sure thing, five dollars a cup." On seeing my appearance — I imagine I looked incredibly pathetic — the woman diverged ever so slightly from the expected reply. "No, on second thought, the first cup's on the house." Her voice was soft and unaccented, and she sounded like a local. She didn't look old, either, which meant that she'd almost certainly spent her entire life in Eleazaria, or very close by. If she thought I looked miserable, it suggested that I was truly wretched — knowing what she had to compare me against.

And I felt miserable, so she wasn't alone in this assessment. I glanced down, at the battered jacket, dripping water steadily onto the floor. "Do I look that bad?"

At this, she only smiled. "If you want, you can put your coat over by the fireplace. Might dry a bit faster. I'll be right back, alright? I'm going to put you on the honor system, far as the coffee's concerned — the pot's right here." It was behind the counter, but not so far as to make reaching impossible.

I nodded, and when she left I took her up on her offer, stretching out my jacket and resting it on a rack by the fireplace. My shirt and slacks beneath had also started to succumb to the damp, and on reflection I sat close to the fire myself, opening my attaché case — the one thing I had that was absolutely waterproof — to take out my book. 

It had always been a quick read, and I was perhaps a chapter and a half into it by the time the woman reemerged, carrying two bowls of something hot and steaming. "You want some clam chowder? Seems a shame to throw it out, you know?"

The café, I suppose, must've been getting a government stipend of some kind — otherwise, with no customers, I saw no way for them to afford any ingredients at all, let alone the dairy products for chowder. I hadn't had any for years, at that point, so I nodded, even though clam chowder had never been one of my favourite dishes. "That would be wonderful."

She poured a cup of coffee for herself and joined me at the table. "So what brings you here at this time of night, anyway — if you don't mind my asking?"

"Waiting for the bus. Do you know the yellow line schedule offhand?"

One of her eyebrows arched, and the raccoon's head tilted ever so slightly. "Yellow line? Uh, well, they run all night, on about thirty minute intervals. We don't have a tracking computer here, though, sorry." 

"Oh." I thought for a moment, and then shrugged — my coat was only going to get dryer the longer I stayed. "Well, thirty minutes isn't so bad." 

She shook her head, and then we ate in silence for a few minutes — it was halfway decent chowder; not great, but better than you'd expect in a class five settlement. Better than the coffee, at least, which was terrible — plainly ersatz, and perhaps a little rancid. Finally my companion spoke up. "What's a yellow-line rider doing here?"

"I guess I needed a walk."

The woman seemed a bit taken aback. "Through the E? Christ, hon, you've got stones."

"I didn't know where I was at the time. I..." catching her expression, I shook my head swiftly. "No, no. I didn't mean, like, drugs." 

"Oh, alright." It wouldn't have been a bad guess; nearly everyone spent at least some fraction of their time under the influence of one chemical or another. Eleazarians, I had learned, apparently leaned towards liquor — probably because it was cheap. 

The upper classes tended to indulge in highly engineered designer drugs, a vice that was so commonplace Ad Int no longer even bothered to police it. I knew nobody who didn't partake every once in a while, including myself — but not tonight. "I was... well, I just had a lot on my mind, and I wanted to clear it. And this was the only light on, you know? It seems like a pretty nice place, though."

We had finished the soup; she took the bowls back and set them on the counter. "Thanks, I guess. I just work here, but... well, it's been nice enough to me, anyway. I'm Amy Buchanan, by the way." She offered me a handshake, which I took quickly; her hand was warm, and slightly damp from washing up. It was a nice, solid handshake — that's another good way to communicate without the trappings of the class system; good handshakes aren't limited to anybody in particular.

"Aaron Turner," I answered in kind. "It's nice to meet you."

She sat back down, and reached out to brush a finger over the novel I still had slightly open. "What're you reading?"

"Uh. La Montagne d'Or, I think it's called in French."

"Oh... I don't speak French," she said — it sounded, to my ears, almost regretful. 

"Neither do I; this is an English translation. It means The Gold Mountain — it's about a family who chooses to emigrate from France at the end of the First World War. They want to come to America, because they're told it's a land of wonder, where even the mountains are made of gold."

Amy scoffed. "Oh, is that so?"

"No. It wasn't true then, either. But after the war, I guess France must not've seemed like much, with all the death and the destruction of the war. People are always willing to believe an interesting story over a dismal truth, aren't they?"

"I suppose..." She seemed unconvinced by the book. "That was a long time ago, though, wasn't it? The war and all that?"

"Yes. I mean... the book was only written ten years ago, but the war was.... early last century, I think. 1915 to 1920, if I remember correctly — really, a completely different time altogether. Think about it, I mean... airplanes were less than ten years old. No computers, no automobiles, no satellites or atomic shells..."

"How?"

I blinked. "What?" Her question had caught me off guard, and I had no ready answer. It was silly on its face, though with a moment's reflection I realized that it spoke to a deeper question. How had there been a world without cars? Without nuclear war?How could you even imagine such a thing? Was it any less silly than believing in a hollow earth, or alchemy? "Because it's... you use your imagination, that's all."

The raccoon shook her head with a frown, and honed the objection to a razor's edge. "I guess that's why I never got into books. They want you to pretend all this stuff is true when it's just... well, it's all made up, isn't it? If I wanted something made up, I'd just trip, or get drunk or somethin'."

"Well... there's something of a practical difference," I ventured. "When you're tripping, it's all created from within your mind, right?"

"'Tis."

"Then you're limited by your own perception and experiences. A book is... well, it's a little more like dreaming, I think, when you get lost in it — but it's somebody else's dream, see? It's like your living in someone else's dream. You get to see their perspective on the world; their unique ideas. It's a little bit more open — you think about things you wouldn't have otherwise. Also," I added as an afterthought. "They're cheaper, and maybe a bit better for you."

"Maybe," she allowed. "Well, alright so. I guess that's a fair idea. So you mean like you get to thinking about what it might be like a hundred years from now? I mean, I guess they probably didn't know that they didn't have satellites an' all that. So what don't we know we don't have? Your book tell you that?"

"No." I grinned. "That's our job. And it's a question for the ages, isn't it?"

"You could still think on it, now couldn't you? I bet what we'll do is have a way to make the sun shine more often, instead of for just a couple weeks a year. Actually... no, I bet we'll find a way to just store it in a box, or a battery, the way they do with those powerplants that use volcanos." She stopped. Her tone was an odd mix between combativeness and optimism, and I guess she was waiting for something, for my scorn or my judgment. When I didn't offer any, her next suggestion was more prosaic. "And we'd make the trash gone, just like that." She snapped her fingers.

"It's not a bad idea." And a particularly Eleazarian concern — higher-class settlements rarely had to deal with unpleasantness like that. "And that's my point... I might not have thought of that; you did."

Finally, Amy smiled — shyly. "I guess. Every year I hear about something new I'd never thought of. All these laboratory geniuses coming up with all these ideas — wonder whose dreams they're living in."

"I'm never sure," I said. "That's something I do pretty often, I guess; I look at the people around me and try to see the world from their eyes. I don't claim I'm good at it, just... otherwise, you get to feeling trapped."

"I know that feeling," she said, and stirred her coffee, staring into it and watching the vortex developing in the centre. "I do know that feeling."

"You know, Amy, can I ask... what... what are you doing here, anyway?"

"Instead of?"

"Instead of... something else, I don't know. Working in a laboratory somewhere." Part of me wanted to still believe that anyone was capable of everything. I knew that Ad Int's classification systems weren't completely baseless, nor completely arbitrary — so it was possible that there was something I was missing. On the other hand, I knew that some people chose to work below their class, for whatever reason — religious, frequently.

"'Cause I didn't like books when I was growing up," Amy said — much too quickly, for she averted her eyes for a moment. "'Sides, maybe I like what I do, you know? Y'ever think of that?"

"Sort of. I guess. I'm always hesitant to conclude that. You seem like the kind of person who wouldn't really get a whole lot out of watching the world pass by in double-decked busses while you serve coffee to homeless alcoholics living on a stipend. Like you wouldn't get a whole lot of this settlement, all the crime and the brokenness..."

"Maybe I do." Some of the firmness had ebbed, though she still wasn't looking at me. "Besides, it's all I'm good for, anyway."

That surprised me. "What's that supposed to mean?" My voice was angrier than I'd intended — angrier, certainly, than one would expect from Dr. "Turn-tail" Turner. That had been my nickname at JDARC, given behind my back for my willingness to retreat from something when my ideas were attacked. It had taken several years to try to work past that one, when I'd finally been told by a friend of mine. I pressed forward. "Why say something like that?"

"It's true," Amy said bitterly. The woman's eyes were fierce with it, hard stones set in her dark velvet mask. "If it weren't true, I'd not be here. You know that. If I weren't supposed to be living in Eleazaria..."

"I know what the government says. I also know they make mistakes — or that people do things by choice."

She shook her head. "I don't get what your problem is, mister. You come in here telling me I shouldn't be doing this? What the hell's your right to say that, anyway? What are you, Ad Int? I was six-fifty on my PAA, ok? Six goddamned fifty. What do you want me to be doing?" She looked up, finally, with an accusing glare. "What are you, anyway? Class three?" 

Not for the first time, particularly when dealing with people who were lower-ranked, I found myself somewhat class-conscious. "No. And, look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on your — " 

I had tried to avoid answering, but she was having none of it. "I asked what you were."

Now it was my turn to look away. "Well, I'm a geneticist up at McChord, working on the project there." I covered my muzzle with my paw, as though it might hide the words. "Class one — lower echelon," I added quickly.

It wasn't enough; Amy's eyes went wide. "Oh!" Her voice was a sudden squeak, and then she was backpedalling. "No, no, I'm sorry — I... I, ah, I'm a middle five, I didn't mean to, uh... I didn't mean..." She had become a completely different person. 

At that moment, I would say, I hated everything — hated me, hated the class system, hated the world that had made it necessary. "Please don't do that."

She stopped trying to apologize, but something was clearly different. The quiet came down hard; it left us to our thoughts for a few lingering moments. Finally she spoke again, willing herself to look me in the eye. "I think your coat's probably dry now, sir." So I was a pronoun again. I reached over to grab the garment; she was right, it had largely dried out. I thanked her, and she nodded shakily. "I should finish up in the back, sir, ok? Have a... ah, have a good night, yeah?" Then she vanished, without waiting for an answer.

Out of all of Ad Int's crimes, by far the most insidious was the belief that they had inculcated in us that we could be marked as inferior so easily — by a simple number, whether that was the class designation or the Provisional Aptitude Assessment test that drove it. We were being taught to think that you could reduce people in this way; it was almost unbearable.

So I sat quietly, waiting for a few minutes. Amy didn't reappear, and I resigned myself. I hadn't paid for the coffee, nor for the soup. I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and then, thinking better of it, added a ten as well. For a few seconds I looked these over, and thought about the money itself. Did it care that two pieces of paper — the same size, weight, and color — could be made so vastly different by the number stamped on them? Of course not — at least, no more than a coin realized how valuable it was to decision-making. 

I flipped a fifty-cent piece, and when it landed face-up I slipped the thirty dollars into The Gold Mountain before leaving it all behind.