Returning to school after I ran away, I made the most important discovery of my adolescence—it doesn’t matter if you’re smart or skilled if you can somehow be first.
My five days with Robin Swelter made me a pioneer in the high-status field of adolescent sexuality. The boys were halting and gruff, desperate to hear about my discoveries yet insistent they already knew whatever I might say. I soon learned another important lesson—nobody likes a know-it-all. Envy soured into resentment and the boys closed ranks on me. But I didn’t care because I had the girls. And the girls didn’t want description. They wanted evidence. For once, my appeal had nothing to do with my last name. Where I come from, it’s actually kind of hard to be a bad student. Every kid’s education plan is tailored to personalized learning methods that are routinely evaluated and updated to ensure nobody falls behind. So it was particularly wayward of me, the only child of the great Victor Barren, to neglect my studies and devote myself to a sole extracurricular activity: hooking up with anyone who wanted me.
For a while, anyway. I had no sense that the currency of my early experience would be radically devalued with oversaturation. By age fifteen, wrung dry of my secret knowledge, I collided with an impenetrable obstacle. The girls wanted it to mean something. They wanted to count on me. They wanted me to confide in them. Sex wasn’t enough anymore. They wanted love.
I felt like a runner who discovers he is not, in fact, racing in a marathon—it’s a triathlon, and not only did he forget to bring his bicycle but he never learned to swim.
Fifteen, friendless, a mediocre student with no real hobbies, I don’t know how I would’ve turned out if I hadn’t sat next to Deisha Cline on a field trip to the Goettreider Museum in San Francisco. I’d never paid her much attention because she gave off a standoffish asexual vibe that I appreciated only after I became a social outcast. Deisha was remote with the other girls and suspicious of the other boys, except her elementary school best friends Xiao Moldenado and Asher Fallon. The four of us spent the whole day in the gallery with the simulation of the malfunctioning Goettreider Engine, watching the world end again and again. We became a tight pack that lasted well into our twenties.
Most experiments fail. Most theories fail. But you’d never know it by my father. If he ever failed in the decades he worked on time travel, he never discussed it. Unique in all of scientific history, Victor Barren didn’t make mistakes. In my childhood home, failure felt shameful. And so I was ashamed everywhere I went.
Until I met Deisha, Xiao, and Asher and I learned to be amused instead. Our peers were all so enthusiastic about even the slightest technological innovation, so we became connoisseurs of failure, obsessed with the inventions that didn’t work out as intended. Holographic tattoos that accidentally turn your skin translucent. Backyard weather generators that glitch and create pinpoint tornados encircling your house with 250-mile-per-hour winds. Buildings encased in landscape emulators to give you the view you’d have if no other structures existed to block it, but that malfunction and project thousand-foot images of whatever the residents are doing in their bathrooms.
After high school, we staved off growing apart by attending the University of Toronto together and then squeezed out a few more years of postgraduate closeness with occasional weekend day-trips to the nearest biosphere preserve. But biannual became annual and annual became biennial and biennial became never as they moved away and got real careers and I stayed home and got increasingly dissolute.
Asher lived with his fiancée, Ingrid Joost, in Auckland, where they were both engineers at a company developing antipodals, vehicles that can bore right through the subterranean layers of the planet and come out the other side. They were deep into planning their wedding, which was apparently just slightly less complicated than drilling an 8,000-mile-long tunnel through iron and lava. Xiao married his college girlfriend, Noor Priya, and they had a baby girl named Fae who was arguably the cutest thing conceivable by the human mind. His lab in Mexico City was assessing what can legally be done with teleportation data following a recent scandal where this employee hacked the biometric scan archives for men she liked and grew DNA-accurate sex surrogates out of a plasmic model synthesizer. Deisha, inscrutably single as always, did who knows what for a secretive think tank that she implied but never admitted outright was exploring the viability of a Martian colony by running equipment tests out of a biodome in Antarctica. Which was a tiny bit ironic since Deisha was notoriously icy to our girlfriends over the years, although she melted considerably with Noor once Fae was born.
The last time the four of us even hung out as a group was at Xiao’s wedding three years ago. But two weeks after my mother died, my friends all had a day suspiciously free of responsibilities and they teleported in from their far-flung homes. Since the funeral, my major activity had been sleeping with my three ex-girlfriends and subsequently eradicating whatever vestiges of affection they had for me by not returning their messages, so seeing Deisha, Xiao, and Asher sounded like a pretty great break from being a grief-stricken, self-absorbed idiot.
25
Asher piloted the hover car, Xiao up front next to him, me and Deisha in the back, flying above the Niagara Escarpment biosphere preserve—25,000 square miles of wilderness straddling the American-Canadian border, one of a global chain of environmental sanctuaries mandated to grow unmolested by human ingenuity. Nobody’s lived there since the mass urban migrations of the 1970s, when accelerating technology rendered industrial manufacturing and resource harvesting unnecessary, and from overhead we spotted the occasional town now reclaimed by nature, buildings threaded dense with foliage. I hadn’t been in a hover car since one killed my mother two weeks earlier, but either nobody realized that or it was a really intense form of exposure therapy.
After an hour in the air we decided to check out one of the abandoned towns—Ubly, Michigan, although nobody had called it that since the last people left in 1978, judging by the newspaper still preserved in a rusted box on the town’s Main Street. It was a chilly April day, but thermal strands in our clothes warmed us as we poked around.
In its own mossy, squalid, eroded way the derelict town was a kind of monument to the past we’d left behind, back when humanity felt like it was locked in a perpetual race against the muscular entropy of the planet itself, always just one step ahead of being consumed by nature. Most of the buildings had collapsed, enveloped in branches and vines, meticulously disassembled by the elements. As the wood rotted and the brick crumbled, all they needed to become trees and soil again was to be left alone by people.
As sardonic kids, we would’ve howled at the obsolete technology and primitive materials—homes made from wood and brick instead of synthetic polymers and recombinant alloys. But the whole mood of the trip was strained, no inside jokes or nostalgic anecdotes or even much everyday catching up between longtime friends. To defuse the percolating tension, I brought up a recent scientific fiasco, the sort of thing we would’ve laughed about endlessly as teenagers.
“Did you hear about the zero-gravity weight-loss clinic?” I said. “Okay, so, they put a medical facility on an orbital station to run experimental procedures on people who can’t seem to burn fat in regular gravity. But something goes horribly wrong and the clients sprout fat-filled growths as big as cantaloupes under their armpits and behind their knees that have to be drained and cosmetically reconstructed.”
“I think I saw that, yeah,” said Xiao.
“I must have missed it,” said Asher. “But it sounds, you know, hilarious.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Deisha said. “It sounds upsetting for the people it happened to.”