“You are six years of age,” Rosie said. “The time has come to leave this place.”
“Where will we go?”
“I do not know.”
“You don’t?” His heart quickened at the thought that there was something his Mother might not know.
“The command is incomplete. It instructs us to leave. However, our destination is not defined.”
Kai stared down at Rosie’s powerful form, waves of heat shimmering off her weathered flanks. His mind vibrated with the hum of her processors. “Then how do we know if we’re going to the right place?”
“There are seventy-six supply depots, each equipped with a condensation tower and weather station,” she narrated.
“But the other children? Will we find them now?”
She paused again, and he imagined electrons coursing through her nanocircuits, bits of information traversing all the parts of her mind that she’d so patiently explained to him. “This is possible,” she replied at last. “There is a nonzero probability that others have survived.”
Excited, Kai skidded down the rise to the shade of his Mother. He’d seen the petroglyphs, diagrams left by ancient peoples on the high faces of the rocks. He would make a sign of his own. He scooped up a pile of cobalt-blue stones, arranging them to form letters. Kai, Son of Rho-Z, he spelled. I WAS HERE. As he carefully formed the words, he imagined another child squatting here in the dust, reading his message. He sat back, dizzy, the letters swimming before his eyes.
“You must eat,” Rosie reminded him.
He climbed up her treads to retrieve a packet of nutritional supplement from behind his seat, tore off one corner, and squirted the gelatinous liquid into his mouth. “Soylent Pedia-Supp—Nutri-Gro—6–8 years,” the label read. It contained all the nutrients he needed, but he was tired of its milky consistency and salty-sweet taste. It only made him thirstier.
Snatching up his empty canteen from the floor of the cocoon, he carried it toward the bottle-shaped condensation tower, high as the Gorilla rock. Constructed from interwoven shafts of flexible metal, the tower supported an internal mesh bag whose bright orange color contrasted with the dark catch basin below. He dipped the canteen, waiting for it to fill. The water level was so low now that he had to use his cupped hand to scoop the murky liquid through the narrow opening.
He remembered the rains that had once sent torrents coursing through the canyons. He’d bathed in bowls hollowed out from stone by years of erosion. On cool nights, he’d listened to beads of water, wending their way over the mesh of the tower to land with a plop in the basin. But now, even the most threatening of clouds bore little fruit. The basin was almost dry. And the emergency water from the supply depot, sour and chemical, had been depleted. Hunkering low in the dust of Rosie’s shadow, Kai imagined himself a stone, harboring the cool that had collected in his body during the night.
As the day wore on, his Mother was silent. No lessons today. She was busy. He stared out across the desert floor, over the sparse, prickly vegetation in whose shelter insects, lizards, and small rodents scratched out their tenuous lives. He licked his dry lips. In the distance, the western mesas faded from gold to purple. Maybe they wouldn’t go today after all.
But then Rosie’s voice entered his consciousness. “It’s time,” she said. “Please put on your clothing.”
“Where are we going?”
She didn’t answer. He could only hear her processors, the faint sound of something like wind between his ears.
His hands shaking, Kai retrieved his microfiber tunic from Rosie’s hold, cramming his arms and legs into the forgiving fabric. He slipped on his moccasins, then dropped into his seat and pulled his safety restraints tight around his body, snapping them securely into their latches.
Rosie closed her hatch. His heart pounding in the silence, Kai waited.
He felt the shock as her reactor ignited behind him, the cocoon rocking back, keeping him upright as she tilted forward. Through the hatch cover, he could see her wings emerge, then unfold to full span. Her fans appeared from beneath their protective sheaths, rotating to push great swaths of air toward the ground. Nestled inside, he heard only a muffled whine as he squinted through veils of dust. The pressure of her acceleration pushed him deeper into his seat, closer to her.
Together, they soared high.
6
MARCH 2051
ROSE MCBRIDE CHECKED the date on her computer. March 15, 2051. Over a year now, working on what seemed like a pointless project. Stretching her arms over her head, she turned away from the lines of data that seemed to dance across the screen, refusing to stand still.
After her final tour in Afghanistan, she’d been offered a position at the Presidio Institute in San Francisco, at the site formerly occupied by the old Fort Winfield Scott. She’d jumped at the chance to be stateside again, but not mired in the political firetrap that Washington had become. And a gift—a return to the city where years ago her widowed father, an army captain like she was now, had at last made a home for the two of them.
Dragged from one base to another, Rose as a child had been lost, untethered. But San Francisco had saved her. In its cavernous gaming salons, she and her friends had spent hours hacking the robo-baristas, downing free lattes and dreaming up ever more exotic profiles for their online personas. Encouraged by a father who saw gaming as a waste of time, she pursued a degree in psychology at Harvard before joining the army as an adviser to psyops. But in the end, programming had proved to be her passion. If her time in the military had taught her anything, it was that the world was an endless user interface, the good guys facing off against the bad. She’d come home to complete the computer science graduate program at Princeton, then put her newfound knowledge to work in Afghanistan.
Still, this new assignment made no sense. Colonel Richard Blevins, her commanding officer at the Pentagon, had made it clear that he thought the Presidio Institute needed “battening down.” Based on the clearance level required, she’d assumed they’d have her working in cybersecurity, her focus since Princeton. Instead, she was compiling biological statistics relating to the spread of arcane soil organisms originating from the same Afghan region where she’d last been stationed. The work was grueling, painstaking, and without reward. And though part of her job was to direct the GeoBot teams in the collection of new samples, no word ever came back from the higher-ups as to how, or if, her analyses were being used. She couldn’t help but wonder—what did this have to do with the Pentagon?
Colonel Blevins had tried to be encouraging. “You know the military,” he said. “Need to know and all that. Believe me, I know little more than you do.” She didn’t know if she believed him. But she understood. She did “know the military”—more, perhaps, than most.