Palimpsest

The hatch slid aside with a metallic whir. Dawn, burning bright in a sky still filled with pollutants that scattered the light into unnatural hues. A thousand feet below me, the remnants of the skyscrapers stabbed up like broken blades. I took a breath, testing the suit; the tang of ozone-purified air reassured me as I leapt, rappelling down the guideline to the surface. A hot wind, still noxious even after all this time, blasted at my tether; I oscillated nauseatingly for a moment before it anchored to the ground below. In the long light of morning, the towers threw jagged rows of toothed shadows as I descended into the mouth of the earth.

I touched down on the shattered surface. The buckled asphalt I alighted upon stretched away from me north and south in a long, broken boulevard, torn apart by roots where growing things had forced their inexorable way through even in this place. Life was persistent. Something about that was heartening—when it was merely flora. I felt at my side for my weapon’s familiar heft, glanced quickly upwards. The dropship overhead was a reassuring presence, even if it could only come down so close before the repulsors would damage the fragile buildings looming above me.

Staying in the open was dangerous. I moved almost as soon as I touched down, sprinting with suit-assisted speed for the shadows. Gravity would weigh you down here, even after all our training, but the suit compensated for that, for the unavoidable brittleness of body and bone too long away from home. The skyscrapers had been lessons we did not learn in time: stretch too far, human, and you too will grow frail. For all that, every time I touched down with feet that would never dare stride bare across this toxic land I could feel the knowing in the soil, the memory of uncountable footfalls echoing through time. Even through an inch of plasteel sole, this land was unmistakably where my forebears had run and hunted and fought and, yes, died, stretching back in a line unbroken despite everything that had happened.

It was that thrill of recognition, of belonging, that kept bringing me back—kept bringing us all back, the foragers and the terraformers alike. The other foragers, the ones who had been coming here long before I was even old enough to leave the Lyceum, had picked over much of what remained. It fell to us, the fourth or fifth generation of necrologists, to find whatever precious ephemera still waited to be excavated from the most dangerous of the ruins. And time, as it had not been in millennia, was of the essence: soon the massive automatons we called the terrorformers would crest the horizon, their spinning, jagged wheels far taller than anything that had ever been built on this planet, and all of this—this magnificent, sprawling, shattered city, and every street and every storefront and every ghost and every dream once dreamt here—would be ground down into unrecognizable, inert loam once more. The stuff of terraforming, the blank slate on which we would start anew. The plowed-down bones of empire and failure, ready to be reshaped into something better, ostensibly, if we got it right this time.

And so I entered the building, the one that had been tagged both “unexplored” and “critical failure imminent.” This one was once sixty stories tall, though time and partial collapse had rendered it perhaps two-thirds of that height now. I picked my careful way within, broken stone and glass crunching under my feet. I found the central shaft and began my gravity-assisted ascent. I was more than halfway up the structure before I ran into an immovable obstacle; at some point the tuned mass damper near the apex had ripped free, crashing through several floors before lodging itself just above me. Descending a few floors, I found an opening and stepped through. This had been a residential structure, but doors had long since rotted and, beyond the transoms, glassless apertures gaped at the world below. I picked my way over to what was once a window and wondered what it would have been like for them, standing thus, always taking the earth far beneath them for granted, until one day they could not.

Collapsing structures did not lend themselves to reverie. I rooted through dwelling unit after dwelling unit, but in each one, there was nothing left to recover. Water damage. Collapse. Evidence of animal infestation. Blackened walls where fire had ripped through. Belongings scoured or carried away by wind. Sometimes simple time and decay sufficed.

And then: paydirt. I recognized the small metal box immediately: a vault in which precious items were often stored. This one had the good fortune of appearing intact. A few careful blasts from my laser incinerator fixed that, and as the vault door fell away, I saw the prize within: a small black book of the kind that often bore writing, and tucked half-within it, a fragile stack of ancient currency, miraculously preserved over the millennia by the vault. I couldn’t believe my luck: if this had any writing in it, no matter how quotidian, it would be a priceless find. How rare it was to read our forebears’ work, so thoroughly had shame led them to scrub their own words from our memory. I didn’t dare touch it; too often, paper artifacts degraded instantly upon rude handling. Instead, I pulled out my gravitongs and, with trembling hands, manipulated them to levitate the notebook and delicately prise the cover open. Yes. There was actual handwriting within, and if I read the antiquated date format accurately, it was mere months before the end. A treasure like this, in the hands of one less scrupulous, would be worth a fortune or a lifetime on the black market. I would give it to the Lyceum, though, where it would be studied and then, its secrets gleaned, reposed in proper honor.

I secured the artifacts in a hermetically sealed pouch and concealed my precious cache in a compartment on my chest. This, this priceless remnant of our past, was why we foragers braved the dangers of the blighted earth. My mission complete, I turned to make my escape.

And that’s when it happened.

Above me, the mass damper shifted. I heard it first, then felt the entire building shake as it groaned and tore loose from whatever tenuous structure held it. It crashed through the floors above me, concrete collapsing in a terrible wave before it. In an instant, before I could think or react, its massive weight slammed into me with shattering force and I was pinned. Frantic, I tried to move, but tons of steel pressed down on me. My mind went wild for a moment, reeling through terrible possibility—crushed here, or stuck until the terrorformers came and rolled over me and tore me into nothing, plowing my constituent atoms back into the earth—

I took a breath, and then another, and then another. Focusing only on my breath. Calm. I wiggled my hands and feet. Good. I still had mobility within my suit, which meant that I might stand a chance still of getting out of this. When I had pushed back the panic encroaching at the edges of my mind, I grabbed for the Lyceum training that had prepared us for moments like these. First: how long until I was crushed to death? Numbers flashed on my helmet. Judging by the weight pressing down on me, my forager’s suit could withstand a few minutes at most. I would have to extricate myself quickly or I would die here.

I willed myself to stillness, closing my eyes to think. Our suits’ latticed graphene exterior had a shear modulus of over a thousand gigapascals, and steel’s was only about eighty. The suit could unleash a shear wave that should tear through the beams currently crushing me, and the suit could easily withstand the discharge. That might give me enough room to maneuver out and blast free. If not . . . well, best not to think about that. Lacking better options, I called up the list of commands on my visor and let my vision flick to the one I needed. I braced myself, and then—

—crack—

The concussive wave shredded sideways out of my suit; for a dizzying moment I was falling and I could see sky both above and below. I fired my suit’s repulsors, blasting sideways, hoping there wasn’t a girder between me and the open air. Above me, the building pitched and swung, shorn and sliding apart. I crashed through a wall that disintegrated around my suit and slammed into something else, but it gave way and I was free, blessedly free, and plummeting to the broken street below. I spun to point feet downward and hit the repulsors again, slowing my descent until I alighted and dashed away from the collapsing building behind me. The street rumbled and bucked as uncountable tons of debris obliterated the entire block.

From a safe distance, I knelt, catching my breath. A rhythmic thrumming brought me to my feet, breath hitching: those were the sounds of some running creature, and any predator that would be drawn to rather than away from such a titanic sound was certainly not one I had any interest in engaging. I reached for my weapon, then thought better of it, sprinting full-out for my guideline. I grabbed it and hit the release just as the creature burst onto the street; quadrupedal and six-eyed, it loped toward me on legs that looked alarmingly designed for leaping. The guideline retracted, carrying me with eyewatering speed toward my dropship. The creature leapt, but I was already out of range; I fired a blast that seared a smoking burn mark in the beast’s leathery skin, but did little to scare it off. Gene editing was all well and good, but the splices had truly been one of our forebears’ worst ideas.

Once aboard, I hesitated before setting the dropship to rendezvous with the Lyceum vessel in orbit at one of the libration points. I knew this would be the last time I saw this city before it was churned under, so much history swept away. The terraformers saw their work as a way to return home to a prepared planet, an anthropogenic Eden fruiting and ready to bear her new progeny. I couldn’t help but think of it as a charnel ground. Once, this city had been home to a vast potter’s field, a place where the nameless poor were interred. It had been a forlorn island barred from visitation by the living, and even millennia later remained beige and empty amidst the dense forest of steel. If they had so feared building atop their own burial grounds, why then were we any more confident we would do better on a planet-scale abattoir?

I watched until the city was just a gray, undifferentiated blot in bas relief against the green and blue. Soon enough, it would be less than that, would be nothing at all. As the curvature of the earth came into view, I turned away from the familiar sight and pulled the little black book out of my chest compartment. I placed it in the stasis box and waited as it scanned the pages scrawled with ancient text. It finished, displaying the last page: a drawing, and I inhaled sharply at the detail, the fineness of it. A woman, in profile, and even now, thousands of years since pen was laid to paper, I could tell the artist had loved her. It was close enough to the end; maybe she had lived, maybe she had been one of the few who escaped. Or perhaps not—perhaps she had died down there in that city. Whatever her fate, I was glad to have recovered this much of her, of them.

It had been beautiful, before it came crashing down.