Yeah. That’s when I started getting really freaked out. He asked me about the key and I said I didn’t know anything about a key, even though it was in my wallet. He seemed to believe me. We got back on the road and drove through the night. I asked him why the academy existed. He said it existed to perpetuate life in the universe, that this calling was ancient, and that there were certain races spread throughout the universe who were responsible for keeping life going. He called them the stewards. There were thousands if not millions of steward races out there. Some stewards succeeded, others failed, but all were driven by the imperative to seek out conditions suitable for sustaining life. That’s how we got here, on earth, he told me. Earth life was created billions of years ago by a long-extinct steward race. They set evolution in motion, and intervened on a few occasions, like when they initiated the messiah program.
Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha. They all encouraged humanity to evolve at a pivotal moment, with religion providing the societal framework that spurred improvements to the cerebral cortex and rational thought, technology—all the means by which humanity would one day come to possess the power and responsibilities of a steward race. But there was a complicating factor. Humanity would have to push itself to near extinction to reach that point. The technologies we needed to evolve into a steward race were the same as those that would recover our destroyed planet. It was true. We were ecologically doomed, past the point where our half-assed gestures could do any good. We were all going to die in a big way. And Nick wasn’t talking about little old nuclear warheads. We hadn’t yet seen the worst, he said. We were about to enter a period of history when we would witness horrors that could only be described through metaphor. Global warming was part of it. Nuclear war was part of it. Genocide was part of it. Islamic and Christian radicalism were part of it. Overconsumption and superviruses were part of it. But they were only
We arrived in Phoenix and drove another few hours into the desert, I don’t even know where really. Nick told me where to go. Up into the hills somewhere, onto a mesa. I was exhausted and didn’t know what to believe anymore. Finally Nick told me to pull over. We got out of the car and Nick popped the trunk, inside of which were a couple backpacks, food, water, bed rolls. He told me we needed to hike a ways before we got to where we were headed. I followed him, sweating, fatigued, wishing I was back in San Francisco with Wyatt and Erika. I hadn’t even told them I’d left. They were probably worried about me. As the day wore on I began to suspect Nick was putting me on. We started arguing. I accused him of being in a Scientology-lite cult. Nick just kept walking, a few paces ahead of me. I wanted to go home. This was old now. This wasn’t an adventure anymore. I was complaining when we crested a little hill and came upon the encampment.
That’s what you could call it. It was the weirdest thing. Out in the middle of nowhere and there’s a refrigerator standing there. The encampment was this little circle of things around the coals of a fire pit. A tire, a pile of stuffed animals, a pile of books.
“What the fuck is this place?” I said.
Nick said, “This is where the Last Dude makes his stand.”
That’s when he shot me.
NEETHAN
The red polyfiber carpet traced a path through the forest of impossibly ancient redwoods. Neethan F. Jordan, his beard almost completely filled in, hiked with walking stick in hand, his clothes soaked through with sweat, his necktie now tied around his head as if he’d stepped out of a commercial in which office workers comically erupt in a
Up ahead floated a Nike Air sawed-off shotgun. Neethan jogged to it, jumped, and made contact with the holographic weapon. In an instant he heard the chime and looked down to find the shotgun in his hands. Why the hell did he need a gun? He pressed on through the trees, watching the sky through the pixelly boughs.
They appeared in short order: undead folks in shabby clothes. Coming out from behind trees and bushes, ambling toward him wielding little more than chunks of wood, moaning, attempting some kind of slow-motion attack. Neethan pumped the shotgun and aimed for the head of the closest one. The undead guy’s cranium exploded in a confetti-like atomization of brain and skull fragments, leaving the spurting stump of a spine protruding from the neck. It fell to its knees and then the body simply vanished. A lady zombie, looked like an ex-receptionist, lurched at him with a bad limp. He shot this one in the chest, and for a moment glimpsed the path ahead through the gaping hole his buckshot had created. This zombie vanished, too. A demographically balanced array of flesh- eating zombies began to appear on the trail in greater frequency, shuffling, arms outstretched, mouths hanging open, skin falling off bones, eyeballs missing, hair slimy and thin and black over their green faces. Neethan spied a box of ammunition sitting on a tree stump and aimed for it. When the blast hit, the shotgun automatically reloaded. The zombies started coming faster, more frantically, more enthused about feasting on his brain. The quicker he could pump the shotgun and squeeze off a shell, the quicker they seemed to come, until at last one of them was able to take a swipe at his face at close range.
A curtain of red fell over Neethan’s vision.
For a sliver of a moment, passing so quickly he didn’t register what was happening until much later, all was darkness and silence. As dark and silent as if he had spelunked the depths of a cave and then, reaching the deepest, darkest place in the cave, stuck his head down his own throat and disappeared inside his own body. A darkness final and unremitting, a darkness that offered no acknowledgment that there could ever be any illumination, an absolute black, a blackness so extreme it coated him and penetrated his skin, rendering everything that might have color when exposed to light completely transparent and thus now only a vessel for this categorically absolute absence of light.
Then he regained consciousness, if one wanted to call it that, standing again on the trail with the shotgun in hand, a few paces back from where he’d last fallen, and as he progressed the same zombies came out from the same hiding places and he blasted them again, sweeping the weapon back and forth. The path took a turn to the right and around the corner floated a new gun, looked like a machine gun manufactured by Dell. He shot this gun with his current gun and the new gun materialized in his hands. Turning this gun on the zombie onslaught, he trudged toward the tree line to a bluff overlooking the vast Pacific. When he felt confident that all the zombies had been vanquished and none would sneak up behind him, he sat on the forest floor and gazed out to the sea, a masterpiece of color and texture. Waves individually curled and dissolved, each one bound up in vast equations, sunlight bouncing off the rippling and roiling surfaces. Who had spent the insane amount of time it took to code all these waves? Who but those few who interfaced with the qputers could pull off something as magnificent as a to- scale simulation of an entire ocean?
The red carpet slithered down a path demarcated by a driftwood hand rail, then veered north. From where he stood on the bluff, Neethan saw the carpet stretch for miles along the beach. Gulls dotted the backdrop amid clouds migrating eastward. In the woods at his back, the zombies stirred, lurching from their hiding places to confront some new armed interloper. Neethan made his way down the path to the beach. It certainly smelled like the Pacific Ocean, an olfactory hallucination of decaying kelp and expired crustaceans. He followed the path, a red wound
