The Apple After Eden

This has been on my mind a lot recently. What could Lenie Clarke do differently?⌥ What choices did she have? I'm not sure she had any. There are certainly forks in the road along the way, but can we call them choices if her brain only permits one option?

And at this point you — with your non-optimized, non-anthropogenic brain — might be thinking, "Well, of course she has choices. She's a machine, she has free will. Obviously." That word — "obviously" — its meaning can not be transmitted through a causal chain of stimuli and responses. Your brain has chemical gradients that my brain can't imitate. You have no way of communicating your insight to me.

This is something new I've been trying to work into my books. This absence of understanding. This impenetrability of context. This is what my life's work has been telling me, over and over again; that the biological opposes the artificial. The difference between brains and computers is not a matter of scale, cannot be resolved by increased megapixels and gigahertz. That same damn gap that separates the autistic from the neurotypical, ever and always, between any two points on a bell curve.

I think back on the Sylvia years, in Tick Tock Rotor and Gunner and Blindsight. Little Handwavy Alice, throwing around terms like "baseline humanity" without a clue. Those days, I was still comparing uploading to pulling a king crab out of its shell and calling it a corpse. I thought I was exaggerating, just to make a point. It turns out I'd underestimated the problem by orders of magnitude.

They say Rorschach was talking to us. All this time, we thought it was speaking to humanity. Maybe we were just the carrier wave.

There are no more highways. We walk just off the edges of dead roads now, avoiding the cracked pavement, skirting the rusting carcasses of cars and trucks and buses. Once we hiked along Interstate 90 for half a day — walked right down its dead centerline, surrounded by the empty eye sockets of homes and the skeletal remains of convenience stores and gas stations. The silence was overwhelming. Even wind sounded afraid to disturb it. It was like walking through the bloodstream of a fossilized god. Now I know how a neutrophil feels. Now I know what it's like to drift inside the corpse of something truly titanic, whose death throes shattered whole continents.

I keep expecting the children to ask questions — What happened to everyone, where did they all go? — but they know better than I do, maybe. They've been living in this aftermath their whole lives. Only Senora Vazquez and sunlight are older than the meltdown; the rest of us were born into the aftermath. The only world we've known is the one that ended. Their questions would be like asking why grass is green, back when there was grass.

Long ago, back when the world still pretended to a future, my wife asked me a question: Why do you write such dark stuff?

It was at a party; everyone was a few drinks in and the snow was falling past the window in slow motion. The future was getting drunk around us and we could still pretend that it was more than a cheap prop. I write about the future to see the present from a different angle, I told her. I write about the end of the world so I can see the beginning of the next.

She laughed — God, she had this laugh — and said, Well then, you must see a lot of beginnings. Maybe you should write something happy for once.

I tried to explain about selection bias, about how you never hear about the planes that land safely. I talked about whatfiction was for, how stories are imaginary engines that let us practice for things that haven't happened yet. How imagining failure improves your chances of avoiding it. I talked about mirror neurons and empathy and the evolutionary advantages of exploratory fiction. It was all bullshit, of course — well-intentioned bullshit, the best kind — but even as I said it I knew it was bullshit. I had no idea why I wrote what I wrote back then. I just did it because those were the stories that came to me in the dark.

I understand now, though. I understand perfectly. I write about endings because endings are the only honest thing left. Beginnings are imaginary; middles are messy and incomplete. Only endings are real.

It took the actual end of the world to teach me that.

Senora Vazquez died this morning.

It wasn't unexpected. She's been fading for weeks now — eaten alive from the inside, eaten by the same thing that's eating all of us. The tumors have been growing in her lungs like coral colonies, branching fractal fracturing her breath into bubbles and foam. She would sit outside our makeshift camp every morning, facing east, waiting for a sunrise that never quite arrived anymore through the permanent twilight of ash and smoke. She said she wanted to see it one last time, touch the light of something that hadn't died yet.

This morning she didn't wait. She went walking into the dark before sunrise, before any of us woke up. We found her three hours later — found the place where she'd gone, anyway. Just footprints leading away across the ash, then nothing. Like she'd been erased from reality halfway through taking a step. No struggle. No blood. No sign at all, except for one perfect apple sitting in the middle of her footprints. It was red and round and impossible, untouched by frost or radiation or the gray death that covered everything else in the world. I recognized the variety immediately — Honeycrisp, bright as neon, breed-stamped right down to the cellular level. You could see the logos of the corporations that designed it: the tiny green-on-green patent numbers tattooed into the skin like prison ID tattoos, the subtle taste-engineering codes embedded in the flesh beneath the surface. It was perfect; perfect and wrong and utterly alien, like a kiss from a dead movie star.

The children wouldn't touch it. They backed away as if it were radioactive — which it probably was, just not in any way their Geiger counters could measure. I can't say I blamed them. I've seen things happen to people who ate graftfruit before; seen their cells betray them, watched their own bodies turn traitor at the molecular level as corporate bioprotects woke up decades after their expiration dates and called home to shareholders who'd been dead for generations.

But we buried it anyway. We dug a hole in the ash with our bare hands and wrapped the apple in the last clean piece of cloth we had — an old scarf of Senora Vazquez's, faded pink roses on black silk — and we put it in the earth and covered it up and said words over it that none of us believed anymore.

I kept thinking about Snow White as we walked away. Not the Disney version — the real one, Grimm's — the one where the evil stepmother doesn't die in a fire but is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes at the wedding until she falls down dead from exhaustion. The one where poison apples are just the beginning of the story, not the end.

It occurs to me now — too late, always too late — that maybe we've had this backwards the whole time. Maybe it wasn't an apple that started everything falling apart. Maybe it was the bite itself. Maybe it wasn't the knowledge of good and evil that killed us; maybe it was the knowledge that counted at all.

Maybe we've been telling ourselves the wrong story.