At the mention of the posthumans who had spliced and redacted Storm’s species out of a hundred baseline genomes, Storm felt his emotions flip-flopping from sadness to anger.
“Don’t mention the Upflowered to me! If not for them, my mother and father would still be alive!”
Sylvanus shook his wise old head. “If not for the Upflowered, none of our kind would exist at all, my son.”
“Rubbish! If they wanted to create us, they should have done so without conditions.”
“Are you not, then, going to step into my paw prints, so that I might lay down my own charge? You’re fully trained now….”
Storm felt a burst of regret that he had to disappoint his beloved old “uncle.” But the emotion was not strong enough to countervail his stubborn independence. He laid a paw-hand on Sylvanus’s bony shoulder.
“I can’t, uncle, I just can’t. Not now, anyhow. And in fact, I’m leaving this bioregion entirely. I have to see more of the world, to learn my place in it.”
Sylvanus recognized the futility of arguing with the headstrong youth. “So be it. Travel with my blessing, then, and try to return if you can before my passing, for a final farewell. I’ll get Cimabue and Tanselle to breed my successor, while I hang in there for a while yet.”
And so Storm had set out westward, across the vast continent, braving rain and heat, loneliness and fear, with no goal in mind other than to see what he could see. He and his trusty marsupial avian-ursine mount, Bergamot, foraged off the land, supplementing their herbivore diet with various nutriceuticals conjured up out of Storm’s Universal Proseity Device.
Crossing the Rockies, he had encountered the tropospheric mind for the first time since his abdication. He had been deliberately avoiding this massive atmospheric intelligence due to its tendency to impose orders on all wardens. Storm feared chastisement for his rebellion. But traveling this high above sea level, there was no escaping the lower tendrils of the globally distributed artificial intelligence.
A chilly caplet of cloud stuff, rich in virgula/sublimula codec, had formed about his head, polling his thoughts by transcranial induction. Storm squirmed under the painless interrogation, irritated yet helpless to do anything.
A palm-sized high-res wetscreen formed in the air, and on it appeared the current chosen avatar of the tropospheric mind: a kindly sorcerer from some old human epic. (The tropospherical mind contained all the accumulated data of the Earth’s digitized culture at the time of the Upflowering, a trove which the wardens frequently ransacked for their own amusement and edification.)
The sorcerer spoke. “You follow a lonely path, Storm. And a less-than-optimal one, so far as your own development is concerned.”
Anticipating harsher rebuke, Storm was taken aback. “Perhaps. But it’s my choice.”
“Yet you might both extend your own growth and aid me and the world at the same time.”
“How is that?”
“By joining a cohort of your fellows now assembling. As you work with them and bind together as a team, you might come to better appreciate your innate talents and how they could best benefit the planet under my direction.”
“Your direction! That’s always been my quarrel. We’re just pawns to you! It was under your direction that my parents died.”
Had the sorcerer denied this accusation, Storm would have definitely walked out on the mission. But the sorcerer had the good grace to look apologetic, sad and chagrined, although he did not actually accept responsibility for the deaths.
Mollified, Storm felt he could at least inquire politely about the mission. “What are these other wardens doing?”
“They are building a ship, and will embark from San Francisco Bay for the island of Hawaii, where they will confront my insane sister, Mauna Loa. She has already killed all the resident wardens there, as she seeks to establish her own dominion. No communications or diplomacy I have had with her have changed her plans. You think me a tyrant, but she wants utter control of all life around her.”
Storm said, “Maybe she’ll listen to reason from us.”
“I sincerely doubt it. But you should feel free to try. In any case, I believe the odyssey will offer you the challenges you seek. Even a magnitude more.”
Storm’s curiosity was greatly piqued. Curse the weather mind! It was impossible to outwit or out-argue something that used a significant portion of the atmosphere as its computational reservoir. This was precisely why Storm had avoided speaking to the construct.
“If I agree to go on this journey with them, it does not mean I will fall right back into your tidy little schemes for me afterwards.”
The sorcerer grinned. “Of course not.”
Storm instantly regretted giving his tacit consent. But the lure of the dangerous mission was too strong to resist.
“Allow me,” said the tropospheric mind, “to download your optimal route into your UPD.”
Utility fog shrouded Storm’s panniers, pumping information into his proseity unit as he gee’d up and rode on.
* * * *
Now, so close to his West Coast destination, Storm felt compelled to surrender his nostalgic ruminations for action. He kicked Bergamot into motion, and the biped surged in its odd loping fashion across the fruited plains that had once been covered by human urban blight.
As he passed beneath the cinnabon trees, Storm snatched a few dozen sweet sticky rolls from the branches overhead, filling a pannier with the welcome treats. He tossed several, one at a time, into the air ahead of him, where Bergamot snapped them up greedily with lightning reflexes. Gorging himself, eventually sated, Storm licked his paw-hands and muzzle clean.
Following the directions in his UPD, paralleling the Sacramento River for most of the journey, past the influx of its many tributaries, through its delta, Storm came in good time to the shores of San Pablo Bay. He continued west and south along that body of water, eventually reaching his ordained rendezvous point: the northern terminus of the roadless Golden Gate Bridge, anomalous in the manicured wilderness.
One of the select human artifacts preserved after the Upflowering for its utility and beauty, the span glistened with the essentially dumb self-repair virgula and sublimula that had maintained it against decay for centuries.
Storm admired the sight for a short time, then homed in on the scent of his fellow wardens. Following a steep path, he reached a broad stony beach. There he found ten wardens finishing the construction of their ship, and ten Kodiak Kangemus picking idly at drifts of seaweed and bivalves.
Six of the wardens worked around a composite UPD device. Their individual reconfigurable units had been slaved together in order to produce larger-than-normal output pieces. Three wardens fed biomass into the conjoined hopper, while three others handled the output, ferrying it to the workers on the ship. Those other four wardens, consulting printed plans, snapped the superwood pieces into place on the nearly completed vessel.
At first no one noticed Storm. But then he was spotted by a female, noteworthy for her unique piebald coloration.
“Ho! It’s the supercargo!”
Storm bristled at the slight, but said nothing. He dropped down off Bergamot, shooing the beast towards its companions.
The ten wardens hastened to group themselves around Storm, in a not-unfriendly manner.
“You’re Storm,” said the pretty pinto female. Her voice was sweet and chirpy, her demeanor mischievous. “I’m Jizogirl. The weather mind told us you’d be here today. Just in time, too! Let me introduce everyone.”
During the hellos, Storm uneasily sized up his new companions—all of whom were at least a few years older than he, and in some instances decades.
Pankey, Arp, Rotifero, Wrinkles and Bunter were males. Tallest of the ten, Pankey’s bold mien bespoke a natural leadership. Arp managed to look bored and inquisitive simultaneously. Elegant Rotifero paid little attention to Storm, instead preferring to present his best profile to the ladies. Wrinkles plainly derived his name from his exaggerated patagium: the folds of flesh beneath a warden’s arms that allowed brief aerial gliding. Bunter, plump
