when what we need to be learning is how to run the hydros and keep the power on, horticulture, medicine, engineering, and keeping the livestock alive (Max’s dad used to oversee the rat cages before he was promoted to hydro duty, or Max would still be feeding pellets to rats and mice and guinea pigs). But, okay, Max:
Twelve years ago, in THE BEFORE, there were too many people in the world, and most of them were starving. There wasn’t enough oil. There wasn’t enough clean water. There wasn’t enough of much of anything because people kept having babies almost as fast as the rats do. They’d almost used up everything. There were wars (we don’t have those anymore, just the rovers and sneaks), and there were riots and terrorists. There were diseases we don’t have anymore. People started dying faster than anyone could hope to bury them, so they just piled up. I can’t imagine that many people. Ma’am Shen says there were more than nine billion people back then, but sometimes I think she surely exaggerates.
Anyway, in the year 2048, in a LOST PLACE called Boston, in a school the olders call MIT, scientists were trying to solve
Before I started writing this part, I made Max go back to the library and copy down some words and numbers for me on the back of one of these pages. I don’t want to sound more ignorant than I am, and it’s the least he could do. So, in the bottle, inside a lead box, were two things: a nutrient culture and nano-assemblers, which were microscopic machines. The assemblers used the culture to make copies of themselves. Idea was, make a thing you could eat that continuously made copies of itself, there’d be plenty enough food. And maybe this would also work with medicine and fuel and building materials and everything nine billion people needed. But the assemblers in the bottle were a TRIAL. So no one was sure what would happen. They made THE GOO, which Max’s notes call polyvinyl chloride, PVC, but I’ll call it plastic, ’cause that’s what it’s always called when people talk about it. People don’t talk about it much, though I think they might have back before the SWITCH OFF really started working.
Okay, lost my train of thought.
Oh, right. The bottle at MIT. The bottle that was supposed to save the world, but did just the opposite. The assemblers (or so say Max’s notes, and I can hardly read his handwriting) during the TRIAL were just four at the start, and four of them made four more of them. Those eight, though, because the production was exponential, made eight more assemblers. Thirty-six made seventy-two made 144 made 288 made 576 copies, then 1,152, 2,304, 4,608, and this was just in one hour. In a day, there were…I don’t know, Max didn’t write that part down.
The assemblers went ROGUE and obviously the bottle wasn’t big enough to hold them. Probably not after a few million, I’m thinking. It shattered, and they got out of the lead box, and, lo and behold, they didn’t need the culture to make copies of themselves. Just about anything would do. Glass (the bottle). Stone. Metal (the lead box). Anything alive. Water, like the river. Not gases, so not air. Not water vapor, which is one reason we’re not all dead. The other reason, of course, is SWITCH OFF, which was made at another lab, and that one was in another LOST PLACE called France. People got injected with SWITCH OFF, and it was sprayed from the air in planes, and then bombs of SWITCH OFF were dropped all over. THE EVENT lasted two weeks. When it was more or less over, an estimated seventy-eight percent of the global biomass and a lot of the seas, rivers, streams, and the earth’s crust had stopped being what it was before and had become plastic. Oh, not all crimson, by the way. I don’t know why, but lots of different colors.
I didn’t know all these numbers and dates. Max’s notes. What I know: my parents died in THE EVENT, my parents and all my family, and I was evacuated to Sanctuary here in Florida on the shores of the St. Johns crimson plastic river. I don’t think much more than that matters about THE EVENT. So this is where I’m gonna stop trying to be like the vandalized encyclopedia and tell the other story instead.
The story that’s
Isn’t that what Max wanted me to start with?
I’m discovering, Max, that I can’t tell my story without telling lots of other little stories along the way.
Like what happened the day that’s still giving me the bad dreams, that was almost a year ago, which means it was about five years after most of the Army and the National Guard soldiers left us here because all of a sudden there were those radio transmissions from Atlanta and Miami, and they went off to bring other survivors back to Sanctuary. Only, they never brought anyone back, because they never came back, and we still don’t know what happened to them. This is important to my story, because when the military was here with us, they kept a checkpoint and barricades on the east side of the big bridge over the St. Johns River, the Sanctuary side. But after they left, no one much bothered to man the checkpoint anymore, and the barricades stopped being anything more than a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate.
So, the story of the Army and National Guard leaving to find those people, I had to get that out to get to my story. Because I never would have been able to climb over the fence if they hadn’t left. Or if they’d left but come back. They’d have stopped me. Or I’d probably never even have thought about climbing over.
Back in THE BEFORE, the bridge was called the Mathews Bridge. Back in THE BEFORE, Sanctuary wasn’t here, and where it is was part of a city called Jacksonville. Now, though, it’s just the bridge, and this little part of Jacksonville is just Sanctuary. About a third of the way across the bridge, there’s an island below it. I have no idea if the island ever had a name. It’s all plastic now, anyway, like most of the bridge. A mostly brown island in a crimson river below a mostly brown plastic bridge. Because of what the sunlight and weather do to polyvinyl chloride—twelve years of sunlight and weather—chunks of the bridge have decayed and fallen away into the slow crimson river that runs down to the mostly-still-crimson sea. The island below the bridge used to be covered with brown plastic palmetto trees and underbrush, but now isn’t much more than a scabby-looking lump. The plastic degrades and then crumbles and is finally nothing but dust that the wind blows away.
I wanted to know what was on the other side. It’s as simple as that.
I considered asking Max to go with me, Max and maybe one or two others. Maybe the twins, Jessie and Erin (who are a year older than me and Max), maybe Beth, too. There are still all the warning signs on the fence, the ones the military put there. But people don’t go there. I suspect it reminds them of stuff from THE BEFORE that they don’t want to be reminded of, like how this is the only place to live now. How there’s really nowhere else to ever go. Which might be why none of the olders had ever actually
“What do you think’s over there?” I asked Max, the day I almost asked him to come with me. We were walking together between the river and some of the old cement walls that used to be buildings. I remember we’d just passed the wall where, long time ago, someone painted the word NOWHERE. Only, they (or somebody else) also painted a red stripe between the
“Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing’s over there anymore,” and Max shaded his eyes from the bright summer sun. Where we were, it’s less than a mile across the river. It’s still easy to make out where the docks and cranes used to be. “You can see for yourself, Cody. Ain’t nothing over there except what the goo left.”
Which is to say, there’s nothing over there.
“You never wonder about it, though?”
“Why would I? Besides, the bridge ain’t safe to cross anymore.” Max pointed south to the long span of it. Lots of the tall trusses, which used to be steel, have dropped away into the sludgy river a hundred and fifty feet below. Lots of the roadway, too. “You’d have to be crazy to try. And since there’s nothing over there, you’d have to be extra crazy. You know what suicide is, right?”
“I think about it sometimes, is all. Not suicide, just finding out what’s over there.”
“Same damn difference,” he said. “Anyway, we ought’a be getting back.” He turned away from the river and the bridge, the island and the other side of the river. So that’s why I didn’t ask Max to cross the bridge with me. I knew he’d say no, and I was pretty sure he’d tell one of the olders, and then someone would stop me. I followed him back to the barracks, but I knew by then I was definitely going to climb the chain-link fence and cross the
