Sagerius had died trying to resurrect the ancient world. Her father had traveled beyond the Barren Lands in order to find the answers. Now Flora knew that he had found nothing. They could never save the rest of the world and make it inhabitable because the rest of the world didn’t exist. No one had programmed it.
Flora looked down at her dark hands, smeared in blood and dirt from the climb. They weren’t real. Her dreams of Jane had seemed so real, and now it turned out that they were more real than her own life. Flora, her friends, the Institute, in fact, all of Terrene was just a dream world created by the ancients.
Her mother had been right. She should have just been happy living a normal life in Terrene. Why had she risked everything for a dream and some fable about the Port? She reached inside her cloak with her numb fingers and clumsily pulled out the Portkey. It still shone brilliantly despite the dreary surroundings. What was so special about this little bauble?
“Halt!”
She turned around to see Romulus sitting grandly astride his stallion at the edge of the precipice above her. He looked resplendent in his elaborately fashioned crimson robes and several layers of heavy overcoats. Four of his crimson-robed guards flanked him on both sides, also on horseback. Two figures were slumped over behind guards. It looked like their hands were tied behind their backs. Flora squinted, trying to see if she could make out who the figures were, but at a hundred yards away, and at this angle, she couldn’t make out any details.
“I command you to turn around and bring the Portkey to me,” Romulus called out boldly, his voice unaffected by the harsh winds.
Flora remained silent. There wasn’t much point to this charade.
“Too stunned to speak?” Romulus said. His voice took on a measure of snideness that he had always hidden before. “Perhaps you thought I would have been fooled by the tracks leading east.” Flora barely registered his words. “I’m not stupid enough to fall for that. In fact, I always knew where you were headed. I’m the one that should be surprised you managed to make it here before I did.”
Flora opened her mouth to speak, but she found that she couldn’t muster the strength to let out anything more than a guttural whine. Her lips were too frozen to form words. It didn’t matter. Flora couldn’t think of what she would say anyways. Then she heard a familiar voice.
“Don’t do it,” Mendel cried out from behind one of the guards. “You can still make it to the Port before we reach you.” The guard sitting in front of Mendel cuffed him in the head, eliciting a yelp of pain.
“Why are you doing this?” Aster pleaded from her position behind one of the other guards. “This is the Port. Let Flora bring the key there. Maybe it’ll provide the answers we’ve been looking for. It’s what the Institute has been working towards all these years. Maybe we can still save the world. Maybe we can bring back the world of the ancients.”
“And maybe,” Romulus said, anger creeping into his voice. “Maybe humanity doesn’t deserve a second chance to ruin the world.” Flora’s ears perked up. Why did that sound so familiar? “The ancients had their chance, and they ruined it. The future belongs to Terrene. It’s our world now, and I will protect it by force if necessary.” And then she recognized it. Romulus was speaking in Tony’s voice.
Flora couldn’t help it. She laughed. The insanity of it all erupted from her chilled lungs as her laughter echoed throughout the mountains. Sagerius, her, and even Romulus...they were all just shadows acting out the memories of ancients that had died long ago, just glitches in the software. Though pain coursed through her chest, and her stomach ached from the exertion, she laughed and laughed, the sound all the sharper in contrast to the sudden silence. She could see the looks on Mendel and Aster’s faces. They thought she was insane. But not Romulus. He just looked angry.
“What’s so funny?” Romulus demanded as Flora’s laughter petered into silence.
When Flora recovered, she answered, “Do you even know what you’re fighting for? What this world is?”
Romulus reached behind him, pulling out a longbow. “I’m fighting for the Institute, for our rightful place in Terrene, and for the future of mankind.”
Though it hurt, she laughed some more. She couldn’t believe that Romulus used to look so majestic to her. Now he just looked like a caricature of a despot. He was the imaginary villain in this imaginary world.
“Do not test my resolve,” Romulus continued. He notched an arrow onto his bowstring and pulled it back, aiming it towards Flora. “Now bring me the Portkey.”
Flora hardly even looked up. “You still think any of this matters?” she called out to the ground. “You think any of this is real?” She lifted her arms above her head as she tilted her head back and stared up at the bland gray sky, the backdrop to this stage. “Nothing matters now.” She slowly turned, Portkey hanging from her outstretched arm, putting her back to Romulus and his men. Her heart was filled with a new aggression born from her doubt, confusion, and anger.
And then it all disappeared, replaced with the purity of pain. The world seemed to slow down along with her thoughts. Flora looked down to see her hands painted red. An arrow protruded from her chest. It looked so familiar. Maybe she had carved it with her own two hands just months ago.
The pain was the most real thing she had ever felt. How did the programmers know what an arrow through the chest should feel like? Maybe they could have made it feel like warm sunshine instead. What a waste.
She felt herself rotating. The arrow had hit her on the left, near her shoulder, causing her to spin around. As her head came around, she saw Romulus sitting astride his stallion, bow still in hand. Did she see regret on his face?
She stumbled backwards. The pain made it hard to think. It would be so easy to fall over and go to sleep. Was this how her story would end? She paged through the events of the last year. Her journey to the Institute with her cohort seemed so long ago. She thought about Sagerius, her father, her mother, Mendel, Aster, and even Crick. They were her family now. And then there was Jane, Paul, Mai-lin and Ashton. They were her family too. They had brought her here, made her risk everything to steal the Portkey and to find the Port. And now she didn’t know why she was here anymore.
Then suddenly Romulus disappeared from his saddle, reappearing on the ground. Mendel fell on top of him, kicking and screaming. Aster somehow managing to knock one of the guards off his feet as she too fell to the ground. A guard moved to pull Mendel off of Romulus, but Mendel refused to give up. “The Port,” he yelled over and over again as he was lifted off of a stunned Romulus. Another shape launched itself at the guard holding Mendel, and Mendel was free once more. Was that her mother? Maybe she imagined it, but she could swear that she saw the Mayor swinging his coat rack wildly. And there was Lucy. A full fight was breaking out above her, a miniature war between her loved ones and Romulus’ army. Why did they care so much?
Flora caught herself with one arm before she fell to the ground. Suddenly she realized that she cared as well. She could see the Port out of the corner of her eyes. It was only a hundred feet away. With effort, she pushed herself up from her knees and started stumbling towards the Port. Maybe this was all a farce, but she lived this farce passionately. Real or not, her friends and family were fighting for her, and she would fight for them. Even if this was just a video game, she would decide how it ended.
One step after another, she advanced towards the domed structure of the Port. In her left hand, she clutched the Portkey, her fingers too numb to feel the crystal in its grasp. Her right hand wrapped around the arrow’s shaft which still protruded from her chest. Crimson petals drifted from the wound, leaving a trail of flowers to mark her path. She stared ahead at the doorway and plodded towards it, barely hearing the continued shouts from Romulus’ men as they tried to subdue her friends.
An eternity later, Flora’s hand fell onto the door’s handle. It swung open effortlessly, and Flora was engulfed in a sea of light that wiped away her pain, her vision, and he
r consciousness.
Chapter 19: The Present
Dr. Jane Ingram saw light, but her eyes were closed. She heard a voice. Was it Ashton’s voice? She couldn’t think. So tired. Darkness.
Jane woke again. But this time there was only silence. She forced her eyes open. She wanted to see. Above her she saw the familiar glow of fluorescent lights. They had fluorescent lights in Terrene? She heard a beeping sound. They had alarm clocks in Terrene? She looked to her right to see a monitor beeping in time with her pulse. Then the door opened, and Ashton appeared by her side, once again holding her hand.
“Water,” she croaked hoarsely.
When she had downed the entire glass, she spoke. “This doesn’t look like Terrene.”
“It’s not,” Ashton replied. “We’re still on the Nimitz.”
“Did something go wrong?” The beeping sped up as she regained her bearings and her ability to panic. “I thought I was going to wake up in the colony.”
“You did,” Ashton said pleasantly. Jane hated when he dragged conversations on like this. She raised her eyebrow, signaling him to continue.
“Well, your other branch did,” he continued, “along with my other branch. You see, copies of our consciousness woke up in Terrene along with the consciousnesses of all the other settlers. We’re the ones that got left behind.”
“So there’s another me,” Jane said. “And she’s the one that gets to build Terrene and work on finding a way to fix climate change? I can’t help feeling a bit jealous.”
“Well, they might have started a great journey, but remember, it’ll take decades, maybe centuries for them to develop anything useful,” Ashton said. “We’ll have plenty of exciting things happening here to keep us busy as well.”
“But when they do figure out how to live at peace with the environment, and even to prevent or reverse climate change, who’s going to apply it? Who’s going to be here to fix it?”
“We will,” Ashton said. Again with the terse answers. But before Jane could get him to elaborate, Ashton’s eyes glazed over and his head cocked to the side subconsciously as he read an incoming message on his corneal implant. Suddenly, his face flushed with excitement, and he rushed out the door before Jane could protest. Half a second later, he popped his head back in. “I’m sorry, I have to check something. I’ll be right back.”
Jane sat up in bed and stretched her arms high above her head. So there was another Jane Ingram in the Terrene simulation now. It would be her job to continue the research that may eventually solve the climate control problem. Did she trust Simulation Jane? She would have to. But the world here was falling apart. They were out of time, and Jane didn’t think that she could do much to keep this world from falling apart before Simulation Jane could lead Terrene towards a solution.
True to his word, Ashton returned almost immediately. “Mom, I need you to come take a look at something,” he said. She could almost hear his heart thumping away madly in his chest. “I mean, if you’re feeling okay, that is.”
“I’m fine,” she said, pulling herself up to her feet. “What is it you want me to look at?”
************
A few minutes later, Jane found herself once again standing in the middle of the simulation dome. But instead of the breathtaking landscape of Terrene, Jane now found herself surrounded by data, lots and lots of data. She pointed at some text to her right. “Pull that up to the front for me?” Ashton motioned, and the text in question expanded so that she could read it. “And that one,” she said, pointing to another snippet of data.
Jane felt her pulse race as all the pieces of information she looked at started to come together. She fought back the urge to rejoice and the need to cry. She had to make sure that this wasn’t some cruel joke. She forced herself to pour through all the data, every last bit. Four hours later, she was exhausted. She fell back into one of the chairs in the center of the room, barely able to feel her own feet.
“So what do you think?” asked Ashton eagerly.
“It’s...” she started, searching for the right word. “It’s beautiful. If the data here is real, and it certainly seems plausible, then the information here represents everything we’ve been looking for. It’s a perfectly elegant solution, with all the right tweaks to create a balanced climate. But...“ The smile fell from her face.
“What’s wrong?” Ashton asked.
“Well, this data just can’t be valid,” she said. “It must be some kind of hoax. I just haven’t found the catch yet. The number of tests and cycles this research refers to suggests that this project has been in development for hundreds of years, well before we were even aware of global warming. It’s impossible. Where did you get this?”
“This is from Terrene,” Ashton said, beaming.
“But how?” Jane asked slowly. “Wait,” she said, shock registering in her face. “How long was I out for?”
“Just a couple of days, Mom,” Ashton assured her. “And yes, I think this data is valid.” Ashton took a deep breath. “Do you remember how I showed you that this quantum computer is powerful enough to simulate things down to the atomic level?” Jane nodded. “And then I told you that we only had to simulate brains on the atomic level and could simplify everything else?” Jane nodded again. “Well, we found some more shortcuts and optimized our modeling which gave us a whole lot of excess bandwidth, so we over-clocked the whole system.”
“You what?” Jane asked, confused by the technobabble.
“We sped up the simulation,” Ashton said. “It’s like how we used to run time lapse simulations to study the long term effects of certain water and field allocations. This time, after we built the model and uploaded all of the inhabitants, we set the speed and let the whole thing run.”
“And how much faster did you run the simulation?” Jane asked.
“About 100,000 times faster,” Ashton said.
“So that means while a couple of days have passed here,” Jane said, the repercussions dawning on her, “in the simulated Terrene...”
“Six hundred years have passed,” Ashton said.
“Six hundred years?” Jane repeated. “So the other me, the Jane in the simulation... She’s dead already. All of the settlers are long dead. Generations have been born, lived, and then died?”
“That’s right,” Ashton said.
“A whole civilization was born, and a whole history was made,” Jane continued. “All while I was asleep. But then how did we get this?” she asked, gesturing at the skyful of data around them.
“Well, since the simulation ran at 100,000 times faster than real life, we couldn’t really monitor Terrene or communicate with the inhabitants in any meaningful way,” Ashton said. “So we just left things alone and set a trigger in the program to notify us when a solution was reached. The instant someone inside the simulation inserted the data key into the outgoing port, the program froze the simulation and extracted the data from the key. That’s what we’re looking at now.”
Jane frowned. “So what happens to the people of Terrene? There’s a whole civilization there, right?”
Ashton paused. “We haven’t had time to really figure that out yet.”
“But right now, the people of Terrene are frozen in time?” Jane asked.
“Correct. The whole simulation is paused at the exact moment when the key was recovered,” Ashton said.
Jane’s mouth dropped as the tsunami of possibilities bombarded her mind. They had built a whole civilization. Their descendants had developed the “Dragonfly,” an amazing organism that could save the entire world. The implications of Terrene itself, that they could now cheat time…
“I want to meet them,” she said. “We can do that right? Like how we interacted with Bryce that first time?”
“Of course we can set up a VR conference.” Jane turned around to see the original Bryce standing behind her. “Now, I wasn’t actually there for that conversation, but it looks like my other self did a great job.” Bryce turned to Ashton
. “Let’s make it happen.”
Chapter 20: The Beginning
Flora felt calm, peaceful. The pain was gone. Was she dead? She opened her eyes. Two blurred shapes hung over her like swaying branches. Slowly, the familiar face of Dr. Jane Ingram took form. Was she dreaming again?
“Hello Flora,” Jane said. “I’m Jane.” She glanced over to her right. “And this is Ashton.” Flora already knew all of this. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Flora glanced around quickly. They were inside a round white room, a single door to her left. “Am I dead?” she asked.
“No,” Jane responded.
“But you are,” Flora said.
“No,” Jane said. “I know you must be confused. I can’t say I understand everything myself, but I do know this. You’ve given us a tremendous gift, and for that, we are forever in your debt.”
“The Dragonfly?” asked Flora. “But your world...”
“Is doing fine,” Jane assured her. “And the Dragonfly will help us tremendously in our quest to make sure that it stays that way.”
“And me?” asked Flora. “What happens to my friends and my family?”
“You, your world...” Jane answered. “You are probably the most important gift of all, far more important than the Dragonfly.” She extended her hand to Flora. “You will change everything.”
Flora stood up slowly, her wounds healed but her mind just coming to grips with her new reality. With Ashton on one side and Jane on the other, she stepped out into the beginning of a new world.
Afterword:
Though I didn’t know it at the time, Terrene started on a beach in Thailand. I was on my honeymoon, as far from technology as you can imagine, sitting in a wooden hut and enjoying the serenity of a rustic land halfway across the world. I found myself chatting with a friend I had met while diving. As was strikingly common on this island, Colin had been traveling freely across the globe for months and had no visible plans beyond next week. As a baby gecko traveled freely across his head, we discovered our shared passion for science fiction, Climate change science, and all sorts of global topics. The world just got a lot smaller.