They called it Elysian Fields but the space was more like a beach. An infinite beach or a valley of ghosts. Waking up her computer, Meadow found herself back in the twilight of the portal she’d been shown by the Book People. Though she’d been wandering through it for over a week, a forest of avatars still stretched as far as she could see in every direction. So many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Since entering, she had left her computer on, had used it for nothing else, afraid that if she shut it off, or even used it for any of the work she was supposed to be doing, she wouldn’t be able to get back. So she was glad, in a way, that the workday had gone to hell, and she hung back, lingering, as one by one the others left, first Jak, of course, then Gabe, but then even Chen left early, and she was finally alone in the lab.

With the reverence that overwhelming scale always gave people—the night sky, geological time—she continued to wander the vast plain of avatars. They stood there silent and apart from one another. There were no hellos. No goodbyes.There wasn’t even the kind of 'waiting together though apart' that people adopted during pandemics. Rather, they stood as chessmen on a board in mid-game, de-peopled of most of its pieces. Though many faced her, they seemed faceless, their features blurred out as on MyDeathSpace, the mouth of one an expressionless line in the deep shadow cast by the bill of a baseball cap. Another wore a widow’s veil. As Meadow moved her avatar among them, she saw that the faces of others were shrouded by what seemed a perpetual dusk. Many of the avatars were holding framed portraits of fine young men in military uniform, yearbook photos, baby pictures, happy couples in vacation settings—snapshots of all kinds, held to chests the way family members haunt disaster sites in search of husbands lost when an earthquake opens the ground and closes up around the unfortunate; or wives who had gone to work in office towers that came tumbling down; or daughters or sons who had gone off to war, or to sea, or to space, or the frontlines of a Covid ward and never returned.
Some of the avatars she passed spoke to her, she thought. But as she answered one, then another—“I’m sorry. No, I haven’t seen them. I don’t know”—she realized that they weren’t so much speaking to her as mumbling to themselves: “Why did you leave? Why did you let go of my hand? Why did you run to the right and live while I went to the left and ended here? Why me and not us?”

Meadow came upon a tableau: five bodies swaddled in white linen, laid out on the ground. They were all members of a single family that had drowned in the tsunami, laid out as though sleeping beside one another. Father, mother beside him, as they must have laid down in life on the evening before the wave hit, teenage daughter beside her mother, then their two smaller sons.

As Meadow’s avatar moved closer, she could see that the corpse of an infant had been placed in the mother’s arms. Meadow recognized them because a photo of this very scene was famous. At the time of the disaster, it had won a Pulitzer for the way it captured a humanity that was so easily lost in the statistics of the thousands who had been swept out to sea—like 3,000 grains of rice going over a waterfall, as one writer put it. Now, someone had modeled the very image here in W.2., the whiteness, and folds of their shrouds giving it all the aspect of the Pietà. Except the cloth around their faces was as gauze, and wound as tightly as a spider’s filament, and she wanted to weep for the peaceful expressions that had been put on their faces….
Had those expressions been taken from life? she wondered, moving on, wanting it to be true so bad that she ached. She moved a little quicker so she wouldn’t be tempted to look for signs that would give away an answer she might not want to know. One thing was certain, here in W.2 there was no smell.
Then another avatar was suddenly standing before her: one of those motherly types who wore pink overalls to the farmer’s market. Unlike the others, she was smiling sympathetically. “The apocalypse isn’t what it used to be,” she said pleasantly. In the distance, Meadow could see others building something. An ark or huge wooden bird. A phoenix? Trojan horse? Who are you, she wanted to ask. What are you? What was any of this? A trick? A joke? Or a way to go along with people?—the way her mother used to indulge her own aged mother after Alzheimer’s turned her into the young woman she imagined herself to be, back in their kitchen, happily making her daughter’s lunch for school. It was all a wiki of some kind, she could see, averaging human knowledge but why? To what purpose?

The Gardener, as Meadow thought of her, asked, “Is there anything you’d like to know?”

Meadow thought a moment, and then said, “Yes,” remembering all the yearning that had brought her here. The pain of childbirth, the number of hours she had spent feeding Nico, and watching him grow, learning to hold up his head, then sit. Then speak. Then struggle to draw robots and play the flute. For nothing. She remembered how it had been when she’d first met William. They’d been young then. Their lives stretched out like a runway before them. How badly she had wanted him. Had wanted everything. To know. A thirst for knowledge. Early explorers had died for less. A craving to know more powerful than the drive to mate. Or even survive. All the novels that had been written in prison—why?—all the thoughts and theories people had brought into the world—why?—only to have them fade into oblivion. The question came to her on its own, as though summoned by some collective memory: “Is our world ending?”

“Yes.” But there was no dread, or even resignation in the Gardener’s voice. “When has it not been?”

No extinction, only transformation went through Meadow’s mind. But that wasn’t what she’d meant. What she’d meant was to ask if everyone was entering a new age—one of those transitions that the Earth had gone through five times before when it erases its surface, and starts over. Unimaginable numbers of trilobites. Were we those creatures now?—the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere changing again, becoming acidic, poisonous for mammals? Another shake of the Etch A Sketch?—brought on by humans, and the shortest of all: a transition between an Earth  so massive that it could absorb any stain, and whatever would come after the straw that broke its back. Time to start thinking like a mountain, William had said, stone being its skeleton, the deep time of the cosmos here on earth. The teacher of Sisyphus. The eternal of every shore. The black, polished meteorite that links heaven and earth, now orbited by worshipers in Mecca.

 

Albertus Mangus once theorized that living animals had emerged from the bedrock of Eden, and that fossils were those fish, snails, and other creatures that had not completely transitioned when Eden fell. Was it happening again? Stardust caught in the devil’s bargain? Were tsunamis, earthquakes, the reversal of the magnetic poles, ice ages, all just different versions of the earth arching its back to bite back?…. Or maybe those New Agers were right. Maybe we really were all just avatars in the virtual world of some other civilization: Game Over—Restart—Game Over—Restart—Game Over—Restart…. An alien civilization’s W.6022666…. There was compelling evidence for the idea that our reality was someone or something else’s simulation, after all—especially the stubborn persistence of belief in life after death—even if the alien whose created world we lived within was the Earth itself.

Maybe that’s what the Gardener had meant. Meadow thought about that. And about all that had come to pass in her life and in all the lives there had been in the four billion years since the Earth cooled enough for its crust to form: superheated steam on the bottom of the sea creating the static electricity that charged particles—the spark of life—creating amino acids, strings of amino acids combining to form DNA, DNA creating microbes, and ending their pacific world. Is that when yearning began? Fear? The smallest mite scurries to escape the shadow of a descending hand, and she felt somewhat like that mite as life, not her life but life itself, washed over her as so many waves that they filled her with a sense of the sea.

Just before Voyager left our solar system for good, it turned its cameras around for one last look at home, which from that distance was smaller than a pale, blue dot, not even a pixel, upon which every child, man, woman who ever existed took breath, stood upright, was destined to dust; less than a pixel upon which all life had emerged: the first plants, then so many protozoans, trilobites and sea urchins, each with its span of days. Crushed to the density of rock, they formed a crust miles thick. Mudfish drew the first breath. The first insects. Buzzing and yowls breaking the silence in a world of sound far more complex than wind through leaves. Reptiles and amphibians and turtles and Archaeopteryx. The squish of squids. The perfectly shaped orifice on the tentacle of an octopus. The first bird. And bird lice. The first flowering plants, the first dance by a bee. Then a meteoritic flash and that Age was over. Patterns coalesce into larger patterns, the shrew five thousand million years in the making, an accident that was itself a convergence of genes shuffling from Pikaia, a worm with the first spine from which all other spines evolved. Whales. Monkeys. The first grasses grow over the past. Apes. Hominids, the first Australopithecines. That world ending under the crush of the first human footprint. Stones become weapons. Pictures. Massive slabs hauled miles to erect as Stonehenge. The first writing closing the silence of the vanished. Philosophy. A map of the world that could be held in the palm of the hand; pyramids built for eternity melt like sand castles, given enough time. Alchemy. Navigation based on the rhythm of waves. An anatomy of body weather. Unremembered peasants dying during the construction of The Great Wall. Why? A universe imagined as the music of the spheres. A monster brings the End of the World to the Aztecs. The first open-air opera in Rome. To celebrate Easter, witches are forced to sit on red-hot iron seats. The Unknown Turkish Soldier molders in his grave. Why? Plague. A cloth merchant uses the first microscope to reveal the beast that is the flea. Still, the great plague of Vienna kills 76,000… The End of the World. “Oh du lieber Augustin” becomes a popular song, commemorating the luck of the drunken musician who was accidentally thrown into a pit of plague corpses but survived to play in the taverns again—so many lives that had flashed into being, lived a moment, then were gone…. Disease decimates American populations; mound builders abandon their cities. Pocket handkerchiefs come into use. Hundreds of African languages. Marcello Malpighi dissects flies in 1669, and ever since biology students have had to memorize his names for the parts. Wallpaper becomes the must-have fashion. Histories erased. There were over 1,000 revolts on slave ships headed to America. Handel’s Water Music. So many conceptions of the world. All absurd. Shackleton. Some histories, like waves, canceling one another—animal electricity; Humboldt’s theory of all science as different faces of one Kosmos—others combining—Wallace, Darwin—to rise with tsunami force. Divide and conquer. Badminton invented. Audubon’s years in forests. Unremarked stable hands die saving horses from the Chicago Fire. Unremembered entomologists die exploring Paraguay. Paraguay not in need of exploring. Unremarked stories... Stories far too tiny to figure in any algorithm’s calculus. Robert Traub discovers continental drift from the physiological similarities between Old and New World fleas. Miriam Rothschild spends a lifetime compiling The Ceratophyllidae: Key to the Genera and Host Relationships with Notes on Their Evolution, Zoogeography and Medical Importance. Now obsolete. Watson and Crick sneak into Rosalind Franklin’s lab to steal her structure of chromosomes. Aerosol shaving cream shown to destroy the ozone layer; manufacturers fight findings. The Chewing Lice: World Checklist and Biological Overview (majestic). The pill, the auto and the bra struggle to shape women; the British Empire, the auto, struggle to shape men; the Christian manger, petri-dish babies, adoption laws struggle to shape the family. Billions of lines of code only readable on unusable machines, web links going dead. An epidemic of religious men shooting people in cafés…. A hose is threaded down the throats of others to drown them until they confess. Tsunami washes away most of the Bottom Billion landmass….

If a person stretched out their arms to represent the history of the Earth—fingertip to fingertip—a teacher of hers once said, the white crescent of the furthest index finger’s nail would be the span humans had walked its surface. When she thought of the rest of the arms' span, mudslides and volcanoes, wars and periods of peace, mass extinctions, famines, plagues and earthquakes tripped over each other in a mad stampede to bring on the present. When she thought of these same events ticking away over the course of 10,000,000 years, she came away with quite different impressions—a rock on a mountainside taking a thousand years to shift—impressions that meant quite different things for the people who would live through them: the particular way the taillights of her father’s car would glow as he pulled into their garage after work. Nico never lived to see this day….
Nurse, said one of the Book People, reciting a poem, You are the last….

Then she remembered: it was a poem William had shown her back before Nico was born and her only worries were for the Earth:

You are the last
Who will know her,
Nurse

​

Sunlight through the reed shade on the porch.

Not know her,
She is very old

How could anyone know her, she remembered, thinking of the Earth, of its breezes, of its pulsing waves….

You are the last
Who will see her

Or touch her

 

 

Or the feel on her cheek of the flannel pajamas her mother wore in winter. Despite all the yearning, all the centuries of digging and searching, if all the prehistoric skulls that had ever been found were gathered together, they wouldn’t fill the bed of a single pickup truck.

She knew the city referred to in the poem:

You forget the changes after a while
Sea walls instead of fortress walls, giant, offshore turbines
bring the horizon close
Unbelievable, at first
as the collapse of mountains
of ice
A monument rises,
crowned by a gilt figure
The Genius of Our Species
I suppose

​

People love to go out and look at it towards sundown
when it catches the dying light
Dazzling, like an artificial star
It looks…

Curious.

 

She herself had seen that crown at sundown, aligned with the evening star. And it had brought to mind machines falling silent, stars winking out. The heart monitor in her mother’s hospital room going to flatline. A faint, blue, pixel. She gave a sigh, “Hmm.” Then, after a moment she asked, “So what was that all about?”