There was a noise upstairs, the front door opening. Everyone in the basement got excited, saying, “They’re home! They’re home!” I started to ask Swan who they were talking about but she motioned for me to be quiet and listen. I heard the door close, people’s voices. I mouthed “Who is it?” to Nick. He whispered back, “The Millers.”
I whispered, “You guys are hiding in the basement of a family’s house?”
Swan shushed me. A couple pairs of footsteps creaked overhead. A girl’s voice. Swan said in a low tone, “They’re our test family. Jim and Helen Miller. They have two daughters, aged nine and six and a half, Melissa and Gina. Would you like to observe them?”
I said sure, why not, and followed Swan upstairs. We came up from the basement as Helen Miller was coming through the front door with a bag of groceries. I made a little startled jump, but Helen Miller walked right past me like I wasn’t there. Like one of those movies where the unseen dead observe the living. She put the groceries on the kitchen island and Jim walked into the room, gave her a kiss, and asked her how her day had been. Then Melissa came through the door, carrying her sheet music from piano class. Swan and I stood off to the side in the kitchen watching this whole scene go down. Was it some weird brand of street theater? Were these actors? They absolutely ignored us, going about their business in what was ostensibly their home, the basement of which was occupied by some fringe anarchist movement. I wondered if I was the target of an elaborately staged practical joke. I actually looked around the room trying to find cameras.
“The reason I asked you if you can drive a stick is that we need someone to steal the Millers’ Mazda,” Swan said. “The rest of us can only drive automatics. You’ll take Frog with you. He knows where you need to go.”
You have to remember that this was a day in which I’d met Chewbacca, gotten puked on, run into Nick after years of not knowing his whereabouts, and enjoyed some vegetarian fare with people with animal names in the basement of a painted lady outside Berkeley. I was seriously questioning my sanity. Swan seemed to recognize that I was going through some variety of psychic crisis and laid her hand on my shoulder. “You’re not crazy,” she said as the Millers removed a casserole from the microwave and sat down to eat. She told me that I was already involved, whether I wanted to be or not. There’d been a time, she said, when I had my life to myself, when I was merely curious about the academy, but now, after helping decipher the document Erika had channeled and by writing a pseudo-academic paper on the Bionet and qputers as a lark, I had entered the labyrinth. I was a fly, she said, a fly crawling down the throat of a Venus flytrap, my path heading in one relentless direction. That was my new name, she said. I was no longer Luke Piper. My name was Fly. I watched the Millers talk about baseball scores and weather reports, their silverware clinking on their plates. And even though I was standing in the same room, I was no longer part of their world, if I ever had been. This was what I had been yearning for all along: a secret mission, a purpose so mystifying I might only learn of its nature in the process of fulfilling it. I had no choice in the matter. I asked Swan where I could find the car keys.
And you took the car.
I picked the keys up off the kitchen island, went out to the curb with Nick, got in the driver’s seat of the Miata and backed out. Just like that. As we left the neighborhood I asked him where we were going. He told me Arizona, to someplace far from civilization. We left the Bay Area like we were escaping the looming wave of a tsunami, both of us laughing, suddenly embedded in these lives where there was no distance between impulse and experience. Fuck, I can’t tell you how liberated I felt! To just leave. And the farther away from the city we got, the more Nick emerged from his shell, like he needed to be outside the blast zone of those crazies to get back his old personality. I still had so many questions for him but figured I’d give him whatever time he needed to regain my trust. Finally, over burgers at some roadside place, at around midnight, he told me something that made me take this trip more seriously. “Your friend,” he said. “The girl? Erika? She visited the seed ship today.”
I asked what he meant. He described a project the academy was working on, to build a space ship that would contain the basic ingredients needed to terraform a hospitable planet. He called this the seed ship. According to Nick, the drug Squid gave Erika operated as a delivery method to the ship through time. After she’d erroneously received the transmission about the future of life in the universe, her writing had been misplaced on the seed ship. So the dropouts had to send her there to retrieve it. The whole thing sounded completely nuts to me but I couldn’t explain how he could have known details about Erika’s trip unless he’d been spying on us. Which he had, actually, though he never got close enough to see Erika tripping or hear her version of the trip. When we’d received the drug from Chewbacca at the park, Nick had been watching us and followed us home. He’d been assigned this duty by Swan, who wanted to make sure everything went all right with Erika. He’d watched the house from the café across the street and followed me when I went to do my errand.
Why did he follow you?
He needed to get confirmation that Erika’s trip had been a success. And he needed to get the key that she’d vomited up.
He knew about that?
Yeah. That’s when I started getting really freaked out. He asked me about the key and I said I didn’t know anything about a key, even though it was in my wallet. He seemed to believe me. We got back on the road and drove through the night. I asked him why the academy existed. He said it existed to perpetuate life in the universe, that this calling was ancient, and that there were certain races spread throughout the universe who were responsible for keeping life going. He called them the stewards. There were thousands if not millions of steward races out there. Some stewards succeeded, others failed, but all were driven by the imperative to seek out conditions suitable for sustaining life. That’s how we got here, on earth, he told me. Earth life was created billions of years ago by a long-extinct steward race. They set evolution in motion, and intervened on a few occasions, like when they initiated the messiah program.
Jesus?
Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha. They all encouraged humanity to evolve at a pivotal moment, with religion providing the societal framework that spurred improvements to the cerebral cortex and rational thought, technology—all the means by which humanity would one day come to possess the power and responsibilities of a steward race. But there was a complicating factor. Humanity would have to push itself to near extinction to reach that point. The technologies we needed to evolve into a steward race were the same as those that would recover our destroyed planet. It was true. We were ecologically doomed, past the point where our half-assed gestures could do any good. We were all going to die in a big way. And Nick wasn’t talking about little old nuclear warheads. We hadn’t yet seen the worst, he said. We were about to enter a period of history when we would witness horrors that could only be described through metaphor. Global warming was part of it. Nuclear war was part of it. Genocide was part of it. Islamic and Christian radicalism were part of it. Overconsumption and superviruses were part of it. But they were only small parts of it. These dark days were just around the corner, Nick assured me, but afterward there would be survivors. And these survivors would claim the mantle of a steward race to spread the beauty of life through the universe. After the period of darkness there would rise a new age. An afterlife. The reason the dropouts split from the academy, he said, was because they disagreed with Mr. Kirkpatrick about the urgency of the moment. According to Nick, Mr. Kirkpatrick’s approach was to patiently wait for the great unraveling to take place. The dropouts wanted this new age to start now. They wanted to kick-start it.