He’s twenty-six when Ilium develops its first treadmill prototype. Now rather than sit at a terminal and twitch through spaces with a scroll wheel, he’s walking through them on his own two feet, helping the AI cleanse the map of the ugly and the inconvenient. He averages fifteen miles a day.
* * *
One afternoon when Seymour is twenty-seven, he puts on his wireless headset, saturated with the smell of his own sweat, mounts the treadmill, hangs over the Earth, and a dark blue lake in the rough shape of a G comes flying toward him.
Lakeport.
The town has metastasized over the past decade, condos grown like carbuncles around the southern shore of the lake, housing developments unfurling beyond that. The software drops him in front of a liquor store where someone has shattered a front window; he fixes it. Then to a pickup truck driving along Wilson Road, its bed jammed with teenagers. A banner streaming behind them reads: You’ll die of old age, we’ll die of climate change. He traces an oval around them, and the truck evaporates.
The icon he’s supposed to touch to send him to his next flag flashes; instead Seymour begins walking home. A quarter mile down Cross Road, the aspens are turning gold. An automated voice crackles in his headset, Moderator 45, you are traveling in the wrong direction. Please head to your next flag.
The Eden’s Gate sign is still there on the side of Arcady Lane. The double-wide is gone, the acre of weeds replaced by three townhomes with overwatered lawns, so seamlessly integrated into the other homes on Arcady Lane that it looks as though software has placed them there instead of carpenters.
Moderator 45, you are off course. In sixty seconds you will be sent to your next flag.
He breaks into a run, heading east down Spring Street, the treadmill bouncing beneath his feet. Downtown, at the corner of Lake and Park, the library is gone. There’s a new hotel in its place, three stories with what looks like a rooftop bar. Two teenaged valets in bow ties stand out front.
Junipers gone, book drop box gone, front steps gone, library gone. Into his mind flickers a vision of the old man, Zeno Ninis, sitting at a little table in Fiction, hunched behind stacks of books and legal pads, his eyes damp and cloudy, blinking as though watching words flow invisibly in rivers around him.
Moderator 45, you have five seconds…
Seymour stands on the corner, breathing hard, feeling as though he could live a thousand more years and never make sense of the world.
Redirecting you now.
He is yanked straight up into the air, Lakeport shrinking to a dot, the mountains swiveling away, southern Canada unfurling far below, but something has gone wrong inside him; everything is spinning; Seymour falls off the treadmill and breaks his wrist.
May 31, 2030
Dear Marian,
I know that I will never understand all the consequences of what I have done or apprehend all the pain I caused. I think of the things you did for me when I was young and you should not have to do any more. But I was wondering. During the trial I learned that Mr. Ninis worked on translations and that he was working on a play with the children before he died. Do you know what became of his papers?
Yours,
Seymour
Nine weeks later, he is called to the prison library. An officer wheels in a dolly stacked with three cardboard boxes marked with his name and red Scanned stickers.
“What’s all this?”
“They just told me to bring it here.”
Inside the first carton is a letter.
July 22, 2030
Dear Seymour,
I was happy to hear from you. Here is everything I could gather from the trial, from Mr. Ninis’s house, and that we recovered at the library. The police might have more, I’m not sure. Nobody ever did anything with all this, so I’m trusting you with it. Access is part of the librarian’s creed, after all.
If you can make any sense of it, I think one of the children Zeno worked with would be interested: Natalie Hernandez. Last I heard from her, she’s taking classes at Idaho State in Latin and Greek.
At one time you were a thoughtful and sensitive boy and it is my hope that you have become a thoughtful and sensitive man.
Marian
The cartons are crammed with legal pads covered with crimped pencil-writing. Sticky notes blanket every other page. Down the sides of each box someone has stuffed plastic sleeves containing eleven-by-seventeen-inch facsimiles of battered manuscript pages with half the text missing. There are books too, a five-pound Greek-English lexicon, and a compendium on lost texts by someone named Rex Browning. Seymour shuts his eyes, sees the golden wall at the top of the stairs, the strange lettering, cardboard clouds twisting over empty chairs.