Not something.
Someone.
20
SHE’D COME A LONG WAY. From the girl she’d been two weeks ago, hiding behind her own kitchen island, to this: standing center stage, in the flesh, before a full auditorium. Five hundred holographic people in attendance, yet the questions were always the same. How long before a consensus is reached? Not up to Kasey. How long will rollout take? Too long, if it went like these questions. And most popularly:
“How long before it’s safe to repopulate Earth again?” asked a person in the front.
Longer than people would like, and in the past Kasey would’ve hesitated before giving the distasteful answer. But the beat of her second heart made her fearless. “One thousand years.”
The audience reacted violently. Kasey expected no less. At every presentation （and this was the eleventh） someone argued that radioaxons decayed in less than a century, so why, then, the millennium? Why not? was Kasey’s question. Allow the sea to reuptake a millennium’s worth of carbon emissions while they underwent stasis. Wipe the slate clean. Save future generations.
But she kept her mouth shut. People wanted the quickest, easiest solutions. To solve their most immediate problems, they could steal from any future other than their own. And to think they acted like Kasey was the villain, shortchanging them, when she was offering them a deal to better the world.
Well, offering it to some of them.
“You expect us to spend a thousand years holoing through our lives?” one audience member asked, as if holoing were a prison sentence.
“No,” answered Actinium, more diplomatically than Kasey might have. She was glad to have him on the stage at her side.
Condition one: I get to present with a partner of my choice.
“Unlike commercial ones,” Actinium explained, “medical-grade pods administer a version of general anesthesia.” This was key: Only in pure stasis could they shave extraneous habitat mass down to zero and lower per-capita storage volume. “The passage of time won’t be experienced.”
The voices dropped to unsettled mutters.
A hand rose in the back. Actinium nodded, and the person asked, “How can we possibly expect to return to the same standard of living if we abandon the planet for one thousand years?”
Standard of living? Kasey’s teeth clenched. “Standard of living” was the reason why so many had refused to move to the eco-cities in the first place, only to decry the imposition of ranks later, when outside conditions deteriorated enough to impact their day-to-day lives.
“How do our homes and streets stay clean?” said Actinium, turning the question back to the asker. “Bots already perform ninety percent of infrastructure maintenance in territories and eco-cities alike. A degree of rebuilding is inevitable upon re-habitation, but automated reconstruction measures will be put in place in advance to lighten the load.”
A lull, as people absorbed this information. Then came the surge.
“Is everyone in a pod?”
“How will we ascertain outside conditions?”
“You say Operation Reset will erect habitability barometers around the world,” someone said—the only one, apparently, who’d bothered reading their press release. “And that once certain conditions are met, the pods will transport everyone to the surface. But how can you be sure of those conditions? One thousand years is a long time.”
Finally. A worthwhile question. Because the person had a point: Barometers only measured what they were programmed to measure. Even if correct levels of sunlight, water, and minerals were recorded, humans were finicky. One oversight—a new species or disease—could mean the difference between survival and extinction.
There was only one way of knowing habitable for sure, and it called on Kasey to break the law a second time.
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IN THREE COUNTS, HE REACHES the mattress boat. It’s faster than I can react.
Too fast.
That’s what gets to me. Not the fact he swam the whole way, or his ability to find me at all, but his unnatural speed. His hands clamp onto the mattress’s edge, his fingers white against the hunter green, and I can’t move. I’m paralyzed as he claws onto Genevie. She lurches, and my legs crumble. I collapse as he stands, water pouring off his person and pooling around his feet.
“H-Hero?”
He steps forward. I scuttle back, hand colliding with an object—the oar. I seize it by the paddle and stand as he takes another step forward. I shove the handle between us, gaze finally rising to his face— His blue eyes are unblinking.