perennial wheat seed, then a cluster of Awfulday traumatics, murmuring outside the local shelter. A drug store’s virtisement aggressively leaped at Tor, offering deals on oxytocin, vasopressin, and tanks of hydrogen-sulfide gas.
Out of habit, Tor dropped back into reporter-mode, no longer aloud, but subvocalizing into her boswell- recorder.
A warning laser splashed the ground before a distracted walker, who jumped back from rushing traffic. Tor heard giggles. Some preteens in specs waggled fingers at the agitated pedestrian, clearly drawing shapes around the hapless adult on some VR tier they thought perfectly private. In fact, Tor had ways to find their mocking captions, but she just smiled. In a bigger city, disrespectful kids were less blatant. Tech-savvy grown-ups had ways of getting even.
This must be why MediaCorp sent her doing viewpoint stories across a continent. So their neo reporter might reevaluate her smug, coastal-urban assumptions. To see why millions preferred nostalgia over omniscience. Heck, even Wesley expressed a sense of wistfulness in his art. A vague sureness that things used to be better.
Passing thought of Wesley made Tor tremble. Now his messages flooded with vows to fly out and meet her in D.C. No more vapid banter about a remote relationship via link-dolls. This time-serious talk about their future. Hope flared, almost painful, that she would see him at the zep port, after this journey’s final leg.
Tor’s golden path ended before a gray sandstone building. ATKINS CENTER FOR EMPATHIC AUGMENTATION was the benign title for a program that sparked riots back in Charleston, before transplanting to New Mexico. Here, just two desultory protesters kept vigil, letting IP placards do the shouting-pushing the legal limits of virt pollution, posting flurries of freespeech stickies across the building… even as cleaner programs swept them away. On one vir- level, janitor avatars wearing a Darktide Services logo pushed cartoon brooms to clear the protest-its.
Tor glanced at one synthetic leaflet. It responded to her attention by ballooning outward:
The Autistic Do Not Need a “Cure”!
Another blared and rippled.
One God Is Enough!
More of the animated slogans clustered, trying to crowd into Tor’s point of view. Regretting curiosity, Tor clamped on her CANCEL tooth, escaping the e-flet swarm, but not before a final dissent banner fluttered like some beseeching butterfly.
Leave Human Nature Alone!
As her spec overlay washed clean of vraiffiti, she pondered,
Approaching the front steps of the Atkins Center, Tor sensed the real-life protestors rouse to regard her through thick, colored lenses. In seconds, whatever group they represented would have her ident, beckoning co- believers to join from far locales, combining in an ad hoc smart-mob, bent on figuring out what she was doing here.
What of doom from outer space? Everyone knows how a giant boulder struck the Yucatan, sixty-five million years ago, slaying the dinosaurs. In 2024, the Donaldson Sentinel Survey finished cataloguing every regular asteroid big enough to do that again. And for the first time we crossed an existential “filter” threat off our list.
That leaves comets, myriad and unfeasible to spot in the distant Oort Cloud, till some minor perturbation drops one toward us. As may happen whenever the sun swings through a dense spiral arm. And we’re overdue. But let’s put those aside for later.
What about small meteoroids? Like some say exploded over Siberia in 1905, or that caused a year without summer in 536 C.E.? Today, such a “lesser calamity” might kill a hundred million people, but civilization will survive- if the mushroom cloud makes no one trigger-happy. So, yes. Downgrade the asteroid threat.
Assuming the big rocks are left alone! But suppose someone interferes, deliberately nudging a mile-wide object Earthward. Sure, no one travels out that far nowadays, though a dozen nations and consortia still send robot probes. And both China and the EU are talking about resumed manned exploration, as the
Suppose we do regain our confidence and again stride forth from this threatened planet. Well, fine! Start putting our eggs in more than one basket. Still, let’s be careful out there. And keep an eye on each other.
10.
Standing at the bow of his boat, Xin Pu Shi, the reclamation merchant, waved both hands in front of his face, saying
Peng Xiang Bin tried to crank the sack lower, but the grizzled old gleaner used a gaffe to fend it away from his boat. “I don’t want that garbage! Save it for the scrap barge. Or dump it back into the sea.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Bin complained, squeezing the callused soles of both feet against one of the poles that propped his home above the risen waters. His tug made the mesh bag sway toward Shi. “That camera buoy over there… it knows I raised ninety kilos. If I dump, I’ll be fined!”
“Cry to the north wind,” the merchant scolded, using his pole to push away from the ruined villa. His flat- bottom vessel shifted while eels grazed its mossy hull. “Call me if you salvage something good!”
