After World: A Novel

LEVEL ZERO

S.+3917 days, 11:00 a.m.

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON SOURCES

To compress the life of Human 2272696176 into a DHAP-approved format, 3.72TB of personal data has been examined, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds, along with 451.52PB of general data to better understand the life setting. Additionally, 64,213 novels were read to learn the craft of human documentation.

A SAMPLING OF SOURCE DOCUMENTS

TRANSCRIPTION OF HANDWRITING FROM HUMAN 2272696176’S FINAL NOTEBOOK

S.+1598 days

100 matches left.

The rain fell in a storm in the morning and it touched the trees and it turned into a sound. Tick. Tick. Tick. Water dripped through the leaves for hours after the storm moved on. Some of the water dripped from the leaves onto the cabin roof. The water slid down off the roof, and some of the water fell onto the rot of the porch. Some fell down the side of the cabin, and other water fell onto the rocks that surround the cabin, both the rocks that cover the body of the man my mom and I buried, and the other rocks I dragged up from the creek and placed around the perimeter. I had set the rocks carefully around the base of the cabin, edge to edge, stacking or overlapping rocks only when necessary, because I was bored and I needed something to do, and also because rocks are a form of protection. By the afternoon the air felt sluggish and thick, which meant another storm is going to arrive tomorrow and another storm will arrive after that. The birds come out from the forest after the storms.

Today I saw a brown bird, a red bird, a black bird, another black bird, a blue bird, and a yellow bird over the span of an afternoon. The birds don’t startle anymore when I stand or sit or step off the cabin porch, avoiding the broken second stair. Today I saw a tree. I saw trees. I am sick of the trees today. I am sick of the cameras in the trees and the micro-phones hanging from the branches.

My dreams are peopleless and inhabited by gusts of wind and flattened grasses. Last night the dark was sticking to the walls of the cabin and to the corners of my mattress. The dark stuck to the window in the loft and coated the dirty glass, then the dark straddled my chest. It held me down against the mattress last night with a heavy pressure as it exhaled on my face slowly. Its breath was wet with pollen and dirt and creek water. The animals that call to each other in the woods in the dark aren’t frightened of the dark. The red foxes and the owls and the coyotes, they aren’t afraid. I am not yet a wild animal though I think I will become one. I think it will be a relief when I become one. I have trouble sleeping. The dark bites on to my hair, it enters my mouth and wriggles under my tongue. How does one let go of one’s humanness? I would have asked Mama Dana were she here. I would have asked Mama Lindsy were she alive. It doesn’t matter which mother I would have asked. I would have asked either of them. The light leaves me every day with the dark, which is growing longer each day and twisting itself into thicker strands. Oh, honey, you just let go, Mama Dana would have said, opening her hands in a gesture of letting go.

I don’t think there is anyone left in the entire world.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT FROM THE FEED ON THE CABIN PORCH

S.+1694 days, 15:11:51

Mic ED-62-24-EC-1D-A9

[begin transcript 00:00:15]

[a chair creaks]

[quickened footsteps]

[the door shuts]

[00:01:00]

[glass breaking]

[a thud against the wall]

[wind begins]

[wind, continuing]

[00:02:00]

[wind, continuing]

[00:03:00]

[wind, continuing]

[00:04:00]

[wind, continuing]

[end transcript 00:05:00]

TRANSCRIPTION OF HANDWRITTEN LETTER LEFT ON TOP OF HER MATTRESS IN THE CABIN LOFT

S.+ no idea

Dear whatever you are,

Are you better than us?

Is that why I’m writing this letter to you, so you can judge if you are better than us, and in doing so, determine if what we did was worth it?

I hope you are better than us.

I hope this was worth it.

I hope you can understand me.

When you look up, I hope what was once my world will be covered with birds, and beetles, and wildflowers, and wild horses, and deep rivers, and impenetrable forests, like they said it would. I hope all that richness frightens you.

I hope the birds sweep down to peck out your eyes, and the beetles swarm your ears, if you have eyes or ears, and the rivers drown you. It’s not that I wish you any harm but I want you to see this world as it really is, a place that would prefer to find you dead, all of you, in piles.

LEVEL ONE

11:01 a.m.

THE LIFE OF HUMAN 2272696176 OF ONONDAGA COUNTY NEW YORK

United States of America

North America

Northern Hemisphere

Conception: S.–6840 days. Ending: S.+1706 days

Digital reconception: S.+3917 days

Written by

[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc

for

Emly, Director

Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP)

Chapter 1.0

GAME NO. U7 IN REVERSE

MODE(S): PREDICT, REENACT

Replay of run #0812 (Human 2272696176’s)

The cabin sits at the outskirts of a mixed-hardwood forest among the rolling hills of the Central Allegheny Plateau. The afternoon sun is angling through the maple branches, highlighting the section of porch where the raccoon will move in later in the year and nest, and the quick calls of the grackles signify that the iridescent black birds are either arriving or leaving the trees. Inside the cabin, the female body of Human 2272696176 is laid out on her stomach, face down, scalp pink and exposed through patches of her dead hair. The puncture bites of several animals are visible along her buttocks and neck and back. Likely expressions on her putrescent face include fear, disgust, anger, pain, or relief. Judging by the decimated shape of her limbs, she had been starving. It was the middle of January when she died. The outer layers of her skin froze first, then her internal organs. For the most part the animals, dogs mainly at that time of year, and the occasional carnivorous weasel, stayed away until her flesh thawed in the spring. Her ghost mother wavered beside her through the five stages of her decomposition: fresh, bloat, active decay, advanced decay, and dry remains. The waxy leftovers of a candle have hardened onto the windowsill beside the door.

Her death, at 22 years, 7 months, and 20 days of age, would not have come as some big surprise to anyone, including her. The writing was on the wall, as people used to say, back when there were people. By the time she is splayed across that cabin floor, prostrate, unconscious, about to breathe her last labored breath, she has already experienced this moment, through Game No. u7 In Reverse, 763 times. This number likely would have been higher had she not stripped the wires from her hood, destroying the game’s brain-computer interface and preventing further play. The word game will remain problematic: a more accurate term would be simulation based on a multitude of inputs.

On the windowsill, smoke gathers around the candle, condensing into a trill of flame. She is going to move her finger. She moves her finger. She moves all her fingers. Whether this is the end or the beginning depends on one’s perspective of time. Above the cabin, the sky is clear and blue due to a high atmospheric pressure.

In Reverse offered players, through its dual modalities, a chance to inhabit either reenactments or predictions depending on their mood. The past was easy to get right. It was the game’s future predictions that garnered the most delight and praise (D. Frere, Five Breakthrough Technologies of 2098 That Prove the Future Is Here, Forbes, S.–524 days). In 2272696176’s case, the game correctly predicted numerous details of her death, such as location, time of day, intensity of suffering, angle of sun, and exterior and interior temperatures, although the majority of her runs in which she revisited her demise also show her orifices, shortly after her cardiac arrest, to be inhabited by pale yellow larvae, when in fact the blowflies didn’t lay their eggs in her until the 50-degree temperatures of March.

Another difference: in the game, she comes back to life.

It’s the start of fall. The end of summer. The start of summer and, outside, the grapevines uncoil from branches. Leaves lift from the forest floor, exposing vegetative parts, and fragmented organic materials, and another human rib cage, and another rib cage, and another. Vultures reassemble the bodies that dangle from ropes in the trees while the wild dogs gather in packs, bits of flesh falling from their canine mouths, muscle and fat and skin wrapping around the bones. The smell turns sour then putrid. The smell clears. The importance of resurrections has been thoroughly studied, whether such a resurrection is personal or species-wide (K. Noemi, An Unsettling Experience: Why Resurrections Matter, OnLife, S.–13,604 days). The perspective of the game expands to encompass the overlook, the forest, the interstate, the city, and the sage green house that was once her home.

The windows of this house on the city’s east side have hastily been boarded up with plywood. The house used to be charming, painted shutters and a tarnished copper mailbox beside the front entrance. The windows were nailed shut after a neighborhood boy, or boys, had hurled rocks through the panes of glass. S. made many people want to break things. The house is located on the narrow Perkins Marsh Parkway, named after the antiquated conservationist no one listened to. The sign that had quoted at length Marsh’s thoughts about rivers and deposits and human interference—"If a torrent rises in a small valley containing no great amount of earth and of disintegrated or loose rock, it may, in the course of a certain period, wash out all the transportable material, and if the valley is then left with solid walls, it will cease to furnish debris to be carried down by floods…"—actually all the environmentally themed neighborhood signs, Edge Avenue, Muir Avenue, Goodall Terrace, Carson Drive, Abbey Boulevard, Hill Road, Mendes Road, Maathai Place, LaDuke Circle, plus the historic plaques and memorials about what was here, or rumored to be here before, are gone, ripped down at night and burned, or buried, or tossed aside onto one of the garbage heaps proliferating throughout the city.

The right side of the sage green house is blackened from a fire set by a benzene torch. The damage isn’t serious. One of 2272696176’s mothers had been awake to put out the flames. That mother had stopped sleeping at night. Both of her mothers had stopped sleeping. They would close their eyes, and not sleep, and pretend to sleep while listening to the sounds of glass shattering outside and the vocalization of cats. In the backyard, there is a round-point shovel, and a shallow excavation, and a mound of dirt. Out front, a burnt circle of ground cover where a neighborhood boy had set himself on fire. Watching a boy set himself on fire, even in reverse, in a game, was still considered disturbing content for certain age groups before the arrival of S. The game was rated Inappropriate for Children. 2272696176 is not a child; she is an emerging adult, a period of development once marked by identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between, and an assumption of possibilities (Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties, J. J. Arnett, S.–34,289 days). Nailed to the front door of the house is a faded promotional poster for Afterworld: Happiness doesn’t have only one address! The smell and haze of smoke is usually in the air. Authors often inserted incomplete combustion into literature when they wished to represent abstract concepts such as life, death, hope, rescue, a lack of rescue, or suffocating emotion, though other times, like in Fahrenheit 451, the soot and ash are there because people are burning things.

Other houses on the block are surrounded by chain link topped with broken glass. This used to feel like overkill in the early days of the Great Transition (known also as the Transition). The bottom portions of several fences have been ripped open by wire cutters, the holes large enough for a person or a body to fit through.

In the yard of the sage green house, there’s shouting. Someone, her probably, another version of her, begins to shriek. A door slams open. On other runs, her point of view will charge through the front door and into the memories of the house. This run is different. For some reason she turns south toward the flooded retention pond, where the Canada geese, generally 25 to 45 inches in length, are all lying in the grass and dead, their black feathered necks broken at unnatural angles. If she stays here long enough, a man comes along wearing an olive green coat, and he makes cooing sounds with his mouth. He holds the geese, straightening each of their necks with a snap; the geese squawk and struggle to life in his arms. She doesn’t stay but continues moving backward through the neighborhood into the center of the city. There is so much to do. There is so much to undo. Under her breath she makes time move more quickly because she can.

Bodies are reformulating all around her, beneath the pedestrian bridges and on the rocks beside the creek, in the lobbies of office buildings and beneath the highway underpasses. Bodies uncurl their fingers; bodies breathe shallowly; bodies breathe, ascending to the rooftops; bodies step away from the edge. Windows are opening. Front and side doors unlock and open, air masks are removed, guns are reburied in the backyard. S. retreats to its incubation period. Young people put away their scarves. Their appearances become recognizable, and children walk away from school, every reproductive cell in them healed. Everyone is healed.

When S. emerges from people’s pores, it is like watching a field of black moths flooding out of billions of inches of skin. The moths, probably dagger moths, escape into the air. The black daggers flap into a bank of illuminated clouds. This is how S. appears as default in the game: poetic and metaphorical. In reality, S. was invisible and pandemic and microscopic.

In the blood orange kitchen, one of her mothers, the one who is the scientist, promises the idea of S. is impossible, a ridiculous rumor. This isn’t, on her part, a lie. Humanity really did believe it would be around for much longer than this. No one and nothing would ever trigger a human extinction event to save the planet, people believed.

The leaves in the yard compress into oblong buds. It’s spring again. More quickly still. A hundred springs. Hundreds. The black rhino shakes off her species’ obliteration; a family with no destination takes a Sunday drive in their gasoline-dependent sedan. The driver eases off the accelerator. Where do they go from here? Highways stretch off in every imaginable direction. Extinct pigeons cover up the sky with ash gray wings. From now through the Devonian period, meaning for 399 million years, there will be enough trees.

S.+3917 11:01:05:37

NOTICE FROM EMLY

MESSAGING_CONNECTION opened between Emly and [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc

LIFE_METRIC_CHECK all metrics within range PASS 0.104

MONITORING as needed

Connected.

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON CHARACTER NAMES

As 99.7 percent of characters in human stories use human names, not numbers, let 2272696176, from this point on, be known as Sen Anon or, more informally, Sen. An increased intimacy between Sen and the narrative voice may be conjectured, but such conjecture, in this case, is accurate, as Sen has been known, thus far, by the narrative voice for a minimum of 2,600 words. This change in nomenclature from 2272696176 to 2272696176’s birth name will result in a 2 to 7–character space savings per use, which will result in a detectable amount of energy savings with regard to data storage. Other humans in Sen’s life will also be referred to by their given names when possible for the sake of consistency (C. Kumar, The Twelve Most Common Qualities of Confident Writing, Howism, S.–5861 days).

TRANSCRIPTION OF HANDWRITING FROM SEN ANON’S FINAL NOTEBOOK (CONT.)

S.+1610 days

A partial inventory: 2 black toenails. 1 almost healed ankle. 1 cabin. 1 set of clothes (T-shirt, jeans, underwear, socks). 1 extra set of clothes which I am supposed to wear when I am washing my other set of clothes but I have stopped washing my other set of clothes. 1 ceramic water pitcher, cracked, from when I slammed it against the edge of the countertop. Buckets. So many buckets. The gray bucket I’m supposed to pee in when I don’t want to go outside. I am supposed to make myself shit outside. Also a white bucket I take to the creek, and a smaller white bucket I don’t use anymore, and a blue bucket I don’t use anymore, and a stack of buckets on the porch whose colors don’t matter to me. A closet with shelves, another closet with shelves. A ruptured rain barrel that can no longer hold water. I let the water in the rain barrel freeze last winter. That’s why it ruptured. 1 jar that once held honey and now holds a last bit of honey which I am saving. Also a bowl. A cup. A glass. I used to have two bowls and two cups but then I buried my mother’s bowl and her cup beside the creek. I used to have two glasses. A shovel. I use the shovel to move the snow out of the way or if I have to dig into the dirt another time of year to bury anything, like when I buried my mother’s bowl and her cup beside the creek. An axe. A pile of cut wood. I need to cut some more wood. My plan is to stay near this cabin until I starve. That won’t be so long. Half a container of protie powder (black sesame ash) plus one full container of protie powder (rosemary). These containers should last me more than a month if I can lower my intake to two protie drinks a day like my mother told me I should do when I’m on the final container, and also if I can drink the stuff without vomiting. Rosemary is a nasty flavor. 94 matches. These will last me—don’t do the math. Continue the inventory, Sen.

4 empty containers of protie powder, stacked in the closet without shelves. I don’t know what to do with the empty containers. They would have been the perfect size to store my life’s accessories. I don’t have any life accessories. I barely have any more hair. 1 half jar of tater flakes. A dry kitchen sink. I can turn on the faucet and nothing comes out of the faucet. 5 sour apples. Some spoons. Forks. A knife. I don’t need these forks or a knife as I don’t have any food left that would require me to use a fork or a knife. 1 pot to boil water in, if I still boiled my water. 1 ladle. 1 broken fridge that I opened once and now I don’t open it. The burner that doesn’t work. The oven that never worked either. Inside of the oven I put some things I used to need, such as my mother’s solar charger, and her useless hood, and my useless hood. I would have shoved my useless screen in there as well, but I threw my screen, after it broke, into the creek, which I should not have done, because that is a form of pollution. I did it anyway. Forgive me. A sliver of yellow soap that smells like my mother’s body. I don’t have her body. She took it with her when she left. I don’t know where her body is. This is not a list of what I don’t have. Focus, Sen. What else do you have? I have my body (22 years old, skeletal, cold). I have my external and internal organs, including my skin, heart, liver, and my two ovaries, which contain my roughly 250,000 sterilized eggs. So what, everybody is sterile. Or was. Everybody was. Focus. I have a pile of portable appliances that have stopped working. 5 dark lightbulbs. 5 dark lamps. 2 rows of solar panels that are mounted onto the roof. The panels don’t work either. I don’t know why they won’t work. A DHAP camera mounted above the doorway, glowing the functional green of transmission. DHAP microphones secured to the corner of the loft and the center of the porch. I won’t count the cameras and microphones in the surrounding woods. They don’t feel like mine. My body doesn’t feel like mine either. If it’s not mine, whose is it? Plus: 1 rotted porch step where I twisted my ankle. 1 postcard. 1 photograph of a chain of islands I will never see again in a river I will never see again. I had a picture of my mothers but I burned the picture. Some wire. An outhouse. The middle of last summer the outhouse smelled like the guts of an animal but the smell became less offensive as the weather cooled. 1 last notebook (this one). 1 last pencil (also this one). 1 pillow. 1 mattress with a circular red brown stain in the lower center of the mattress. The stain won’t come out though I didn’t try that hard. There used to be two pillows and two mattresses until I dragged my mother’s mattress and her pillow into the woods after my mother left. 2 scaly blankets. 4 white candles. 2 rocking chairs, the chair on the right squeaks. Should I count my other mother’s ghost? 9 hours 6 minutes of darkness. 11 hours 45 minutes of light. That leaves 3 hours 9 minutes for the in-between. An overgrown path, a different path, a disappearing road.

Chapter 2.0

Sen, 18 years old, walks in the partial sun of the afternoon along the dirt road to record notes about the land’s rewinding. This is her job: witnessing for the Department of Transition. She is to do this job for 1,396 more days until her resource consumption and unintended harm to the planet outweigh the long-term benefits of her witnessing. Those long-term benefits include: (1) the documentation of what was happening to the world from an authentically human framework; (2) proof that humans participated willingly in the Great Transition; (3) an increase in humanity’s overall archival quality; and (4) assistance in shifting human perspective from anthropocentric to Earth-centric. Yesterday she witnessed the remnants of a hiking trail vanishing under the thorns of the black raspberry cane, although she misidentified the shrub. She doesn’t care much about the names of things. Today she notices a medium-size bird with brown, gray, and yellow coloring (a cedar waxwing) perch on the branch of a large bush with clusters of laxative berries and prominent leaf veins (the European buckthorn). She watches as the uncommon bird swallows one of the plant’s glossy dark berries whole. She observes the world like a witness, using her retinas, her optic nerves, her nerve impulses, and the occipital lobe of her brain. Another way to observe the world is to utilize DHAP’s optical image classification model to analyze footage from the DHAP cameras mounted to the surrounding trees. Both ways are reliable.

In her current notebook, her third, lined and perfect bound, with a flexible navy cover and off-white pages, Sen writes nothing of the bird, or the shrub, or her elevated pulse, or how her chest hurts if she thinks of her mothers, or how the previous two nights she cried herself to sleep. She writes, This is a fucking joke fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK, this brief entry demonstrating three of the elements (vulgarity, repetition, and abstraction) that witnesses must avoid in their observations. Other prohibited elements include anthropomorphism, Latin, literal or metaphorical mirrors, and negativity. Sen likely does not remember such guidelines, having thumbed through the witnessing manual only once before burning her copy in the woodstove. There are other copies (~/sen_anon/world/manuals_and_instructions). Had S. never been released, she would be seated this morning in the middle row of a biology classroom in her final year of high school in an ailing world, listening to a lecture on human heredity and gene expression. There is no point now in learning about either topic. She is lonely and pulsing. She is petrified and bipedal. She is solitary and respiratory and mammalian and alone.

The road she is on leads to a three-acre spring-fed impoundment known locally as Acre’s Pond, the frequent turnaround point for her daily walks. At the edge of the pond she stands in the mud watching for fish as usual (she doesn’t know the fish are brook trout), unable today to spot the trout that are