Chapter 27
Chapter 27: Age Without End
The girl had never heard the song called Grandmother’s Bridge.
“Then why did you pick it as your codename?” the boy asked when he finished singing.
She thought for a while, then shook her head. “It’s been too long. I don’t remember. Maybe it was assigned at random.”
Probability has its strange graces. It makes hydrogen bloom in a newborn universe, sends ten thousand dice up at once and brings them all down sixes, births humanity and breaks it, and steers a starship home a century after it left.
It also snuck a nursery rhyme into a girl’s codename.
She tried humming the tune the boy had just sung. “Not bad,” she said.
Rock and rock, rock your way to Grandmother’s Bridge.
Eighteen hours later they returned to the ship and kept combing the Earth. Even with the seas risen and the continents drowned, the blue planet still wore sixty million square kilometers of land. They searched for fifteen years. In the fifteenth, Grandmother’s Bridge suddenly found a basin.
The girl—no, the woman she’d become—pointed to a coordinate on the holo-map. “We swept this spot over and over—nothing. But that relic you dug out of the warehouse—the very first-generation artificial human sensor—picked up a signal from here. Faint, but worth a look.”
The artificial human was still in the shape of a teenage boy, busy synthesizing something at the console. “Got it. How about we head out tomorrow?”
“Oh, give it a rest. How many years have you tortured that formula?” Grandmother’s Bridge rolled her eyes. “What’s so great about fizzy sugar water? The greenhouse substrate could barely fill a flowerpot and you had to plant a jungle of coffee beans.”
“You don’t get it,” the boy said, solemn as an oath. “Salted Coke is divine. Cures what ails you.”
“Divine my ass. The sludge you brew is only good for scrubbing toilets.” Grandmother’s Bridge kicked him. “Move your ass.”
The kick made him stumble. “Grandmother’s Bridge, you’re twenty-eight this year, right? Is this menopause?” He was immediately chased around the cabin, yelping, “Stop! I just swapped this shell—if you hit me your hand will hurt!”
They’d grown easy with each other. With no society left to model, the artificial human had no idea how a woman in her twenties was supposed to act—certainly not like Grandmother’s Bridge, who could go ten days without washing her hair and spent her time charging into the sky and diving underground like a gleeful madwoman.
She suited up, herded the boy into the skimmer. Qian Duoduo nudged the snoring Zhao Meiyou. “Wake up. They’re going offship.”
“Huh?” Zhao Meiyou blinked blearily, drool soaking Qian Duoduo’s shoulder. “How long’s it been?”
“Fifteen years.”
Zhao Meiyou snapped awake. “I slept that long?”
“Don’t panic. Time doesn’t flow the same for us and them.” Zhao Meiyou tried to stand, his leg dead asleep; Qian Duoduo caught him. “They’re heading down. I’ve got a feeling they’ll find something.”
The two on the ship had found nothing for over a decade—not even a patch of hospitable ground to seed a new civilization. Grandmother’s Bridge was already weighing an offworld migration.
Zhao Meiyou, however, was staring at the half-synthesized reddish-brown liquid on the workbench. “You’re kidding. It still hasn’t cracked salted Coke?”
The databanks held no recipe for salted Coke. There were only a few crates of century-old molecular meal kits from Mickey D’s sealed in fist-sized tins. Heat them and they’d swell into a feast. The artificial human had stumbled across them by accident. Turned out that even expired, they were addictive as sin. The boy ate them and couldn’t let go, forever scheming to reverse-engineer their formula.
“Should be close,” Qian Duoduo said. “Two years ago it nailed a decent fried-chicken combo. Grandmother’s Bridge tried it. Said it was great.”
“Then why’s it still synthesizing fried chicken?” Zhao Meiyou pointed at the half-empty bottle of cooking oil on the bench.
“I didn’t really follow.” Qian Duoduo looked puzzled. “It said the flavor was the Colonel, not Mickey D’s.”
They followed the woman and the boy down to the surface. The skimmer set down in a place that looked like a basin. They hiked a long time through the mountains. Suddenly the woman stopped. “We’re here.”
It was an ordinary hilly stretch. A cliff loomed in the distance; nothing looked off. Grandmother’s Bridge peered at her scanner and waved the boy over. “Right here. Coordinates 29753. Drop the Mountainsplitter.”
A ribbon of numbers slid over the boy’s lenses; a black dot winked at the horizon. A gigantic parcel dropped true, hit ground, auto-unpacked, and loosed a squall that scoured sand from stone. The roar rolled like a cavalry charge.
Qian Duoduo and Zhao Meiyou stared at a machine unlike anything they’d seen in Megalopolis—like one of the Eighteen Arms from an old opera writ in steel. The artificial human conjured a control panel into the air, punched a string of commands, and the thing moved with outsized grace.
It’s hard to say what it felt like when the Mountainsplitter woke. Megalopolis is tall and vertical; it makes lives feel narrow, cramped. Zhao Meiyou had almost never seen weather like this—lightning, gale, cloud. Maybe only myth has words for it: a world of chaos, Pangu lifting his axe—light rising to become sky, shadow settling to become earth; eyes parted into day, eyes shut into night.
After a skull-splitting thunder of hill and bedrock tearing apart, the ridge was peeled back like a lid. A whole hunk of cliff went with it. What the woman had been hunting lay exposed.
There was a basin within the basin: a depression that ran to the brink of the escarpment, where a vast complex lay buried.
Not temples—buildings that only looked like temples.
And inside those halls where gods should have sat were factory floors and laboratories.
Grandmother’s Bridge didn’t look surprised. She led the boy along the sacred way toward the main hall. “Stay with me. Bring the projection up.”
The artificial human cranked its core to full. Within an arm’s span around it, holograms rippled to life; walls and roofs long collapsed rose again in blue light, and on a level plain stood red-gold pillars climbed by crystalline conduits and circuitry—at a distance they looked like sutras writ in a living script.
They entered the central hall. The woman studied the statue before her. “Found it.”
A Buddha in gold.
The Buddha sat in lotus posture, serene and fine-featured. The artificial human swept the statue and, from its database, pulled what little it could. “This was an artificial human factory in the twenty-second century. Some labs here ran experiments—instilling Buddhist doctrine in artificial humans and observing their brainwave responses… Beyond that, the files are sealed. Very high clearance.”
Grandmother’s Bridge contemplated the Buddha. “I have a question.”
The boy was flicking through data. “What?”
“Don’t you want to know how Earth got ruined in the last hundred years?”
“That’s not hard. Build a model, run it. We’ve got too many historical samples.” The artificial human dumped a pile of records onto a screen. “But there’s one thing you’ve got wrong.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Earth that was destroyed. It was humanity.” It corrected her. “Humanity died out with the crust still unperforated.”
Grandmother’s Bridge considered, then nodded. “Fair.”
“In any case, this place was buried by design, not war.” She looked around at the hall. The murals were still shockingly vivid—whatever pigments they’d used had outlasted a century of dirt. “Can you use the circuits braided into those columns?”
“Looks like it.” The boy tried for access, and to its own surprise slipped right in. When the pathways linked, the hall blazed to life. Something inside the artificial human went click.
Grandmother’s Bridge heard it. “You okay?”
“Fine. Running a little hot.” The boy steadied itself. The data storm across its glasses hiccuped, then smoothed. It lifted a hand and pointed at the Buddha.
“It’s a supercomputer.”
Grandmother’s Bridge was not impressed. “So I figured. You don’t build a shell this big unless you’re hiding a core. The question is: can you read what’s on it?”
“…Not a big problem,” the artificial human said after a moment. “But it’ll take time.”
“How long?”
“Not sure. The outer firewalls are weak. If you only want the top-layer stuff, it’ll be quick. Crack it all, and… years. Maybe many.”
“No rush.” Grandmother’s Bridge decided at once. “What’s on the outside?”
The artificial human hesitated. “You sure you want to open it? Feels like a trap.”
It turned the stream into a floating screen. As it had said, it was a folder.
The title was brazen.
2180–2208: Orion War Records
Grandmother’s Bridge froze, then said, “Delete it. Wipe it clean.”
The boy tossed it into the secure shredder without a second thought.
“And purge every video record of that folder from your storage.” Grandmother’s Bridge spoke a string of code—the artificial human’s highest-level override—and forced the command through.
With humanity gone, things like that are nothing but tinder. She meant to rebuild a civilization, and one war always breeds the next.
The boy had said something true. You could make a decent guess at why humanity died. Given the world she’d left a century ago, the path from there writes itself.
And she needed no “facts” to bless her guesses. The ship still held tech that could read lives back out of brains. She couldn’t look at those files. Couldn’t leave a live match lying around.
The boy finished the wipe, blinked, an odd thinness in its voice. It looked up. “Do you want me to crack the mainframe?”
“Back to the ship. I’ll write you a safety program.” Grandmother’s Bridge said, “We’ll filter for safe categories first. Crack those. The rest can wait.”
They spent ten years combing the complex. They made many strange finds. The most useful were remnants of twenty-second-century tech. The arkship recorded plenty of civilization, but a field team’s clearance is a field team’s clearance; you don’t get the crown jewels.
With those scraps and another decade of searching, they finally found a site on Earth fit for a foundation.
On groundbreaking day, Grandmother’s Bridge—forty-eight—went down with the boy. They brought three things: Mickey D’s fried chicken, salted Coke, and Marlboros.
The boy had finally nailed the formula. As for the cigarettes, Grandmother’s Bridge had found them in a teammate’s luggage. A hundred years ago, the ship’s life-support had glitched, the sleep pods with it. He died on the way home.
She stood under the sky and smoked a whole cigarette. She looked at the artificial human eating chicken beside her. The boy didn’t age. He had the same face she’d seen when she Awakened from her pod.
She ground out the butt, snatched the salted Coke from its hand, took a long pull, then, like an ancient pouring a libation, upended the rest onto the dirt.
She tossed the cup. The boy squawked. She ignored it, and said, brief as a command: “Begin.”
The arkship locked the coordinates from orbit and dropped the colossal machine. Thunder rolled. It was myth starting up: a hundred immortals stooping to attend. Grandmother’s Bridge stood in wind and lightning, hair streaming, not moving an inch. A tongue of flame bloomed at the artificial human’s fingertips. It lit her a fresh cigarette.
The first city on the wasteland began in the smoke that unfurled from a woman’s mouth.
When the smoke burned down, Grandmother’s Bridge swept sand from her visor. “I’ve picked a name.”
The boy looked at her. “Well, it’s about time.”
She grunted, settled her helmet back on.
The air had improved, but her body had long since paid the bill. She was entering the age where you count years.
“This city is called Megalopolis.”
Before work began, Grandmother’s Bridge and the boy ran the numbers. The machines they could build—and their tech—couldn’t shoulder a whole city.
After long debate, they decided to awaken some of the sleepers.
So, at forty-eight, long home from the stars, Grandmother’s Bridge met her companions out of their pods for the first time. The team had been trained for this. Once they’d seen the state of Earth, they voted to divert part of their resources to manufacturing artificial humans to build the foundations of Megalopolis. In parallel, the plan to raise human newborns would start.
Another decade, and a city took shape on the plain.
On Grandmother’s Bridge’s fifty-eighth birthday, the woman won election as Megalopolis’s first head of government. She barely slept. Late that night, coming back from a celebration, she told the driver to stop.
A 24-hour Mickey D’s was lit up on the corner. Grandmother’s Bridge hadn’t eaten this stuff in ages. The cigarettes only grew more frequent. She walked to the kiosk, ordered a fried chicken combo and a large salted Coke.
“You should get the meal,” said a voice from the ordering machine. “Better value.”
Her hand paused over the screen. “You?”
“Me, me.” The voice was still as cocky as a teenage boy. “Long time no see, old hag.”
“Long time.” She flipped to the combo menu. “I thought you were overseeing the nuclear plant.”
“Why so cold, old hag?” Mildly aggrieved. “We’ve been in each other’s pockets for almost forty years. Not even a how-do-you-do?”
Once Megalopolis had a skeleton, the artificial human had its permissions dialed down. The arkship’s advanced tech had been moved to new servers. As the emergency pilot spun up in a crisis, it should have retired, shut off, and slept. But for the sake of memory, they left its core online.
“I heard about your work.” Grandmother’s Bridge fished a cigarette from her inner pocket. “You’ve diverted a fat chunk of your bandwidth to keep every Mickey D’s in town running. How much fried chicken do you need?”
“Have a heart, old hag. Artificial humans don’t even eat.” The boy protested from the speaker. “If I hadn’t tested those pantry tins for you back in the day, I’d never have opened one!”
Grandmother’s Bridge was too old to remember petty trivia. She thought it over, found her footing. “One extra-large ice cream. Chocolate sauce. I’m not paying.”
“What?! Be reasonable! Your government’s water and power rates are killing me. Do you know how hard it is to keep these broken little shops alive?”
She grunted. “And a red-bean pie. And a chicken wrap.”
The screen froze for a moment; then the pick-up slot thunked and spat out a tray: fried chicken, salted Coke, chicken wrap, red-bean pie, ice cream with chocolate. It also added a heap of wasabi packets with malice aforethought.
Grandmother’s Bridge knocked on the kiosk. “No utensils.”
Silence. She was deciding whether to say something consoling when a skimmer howled down the street. The boy hopped off and shouted from the door, “Old hag, cool it! Humans your age can’t eat junk like this!”
“Long time.” Grandmother’s Bridge lifted her head out of the fog of smoke. She broke the red-bean pie in half. “Here. Share.”
“Stingy to the grave!” The boy was apoplectic. “I want the chicken!”
At three a.m., in a fast-food joint, a fifty-eight-year-old woman and an underage boy—the pioneer who founded a city and the one who led it—got into a brawl over a drumstick.
It was one of their few meetings in the twenty years that followed. When the last instant came—when her life unfurled like a lantern show—Grandmother’s Bridge did, for a heartbeat, think of that night.
Under the light, the boy looked at her, just as he had a hundred years ago, when a storyteller held a city in his voice atop a high-rise. Gold code flitted across his lenses: a line from an old poem.
Thinking back—smoke-swept waters for a thousand miles;
dusk hangs heavy over the vast Chu sky.
Grandmother’s Bridge, the first leader of Megalopolis, was born in the twenty-second century. She left Earth with a survey team, crossed deep space, and returned a hundred years later. The rest of her life she gave to rebuilding human civilization, laying the foundations of the city. But when her body, exhausted, could no longer endure another round of cybernetic surgeries, she entered palliative care.
A year later, at seventy-eight, she died.
In her last days, the artificial human came to see her, arms full of flowers coaxed from the greenhouse. She wore a hospital gown. Reading glasses slid down her nose as she looked at the boy in a suit and tie.
“First time I’ve seen you dressed.”
“First time I’m almost going to a funeral,” he shot back. “Too bad you won’t see it.”
She tucked a strand of white hair behind her ear, smiling lightly. “I’m old.”
“Oh.” He made a small sound. “Want me to read you When You Are Old?”
“Spare me.” She sighed. “If you’re so idle, take me to the roof. I want to see the moon.”
“The moon?”
“They tell me the air’s bad for me. I haven’t been outside in a month. But I remember the arkship’s orbit. This time of year, you can see it.”
“Serves you right,” he muttered. “You hated suits, and you smoked like a chimney. What is this—your third artificial lung?”
“I know.” Her eyes brightened with a sudden, childlike gleam he hadn’t seen in years. “So—will you take me?”
They slipped past security with a bit of mischief. The boy carried her wheelchair up to the roof.
Above them, the moon burned, and the first stars had pricked through the dark. She tilted her face upward. “Did I ever tell you—my first visit to the United Government, a century ago…”
“You saw the Morning Star,” he interrupted. “Yes. You’ve told me eight hundred times. It’s Venus. You can see it now, north.”
“Like an old friend,” she said softly. “Back at last.”
“What kind of friend only waves goodbye? Never hello.”
“It’s fine. In a way, we’re kin.” Her voice slowed. “I remember reading once, when I was little, that every atom in the human body comes from an exploded star.”
“Death is only matter changing form. We’re all stardust.”
“One mote of flesh. Age without end.”
They stood together under the sky. The beauty was unreasonable, unearned. And she, who had lived her life on reason, allowed herself one romantic delirium: that the atoms in her heart and those in his artificial core had flared, long ago, from the same dying star.
Now they had found each other again. And she, at the edge of light, became something paradoxical: both gone and still here. Time folded and refolded until the present thinned to a thread.
Between sun and sea she saw a glimpse of forever.
“Grandmother’s Bridge,” the boy said at last, lowering his head, using her full name. “Why are you telling me this?”
She had always been taller than him. Now, sitting in her chair, she let him bow his head again. She smiled—mischief at the lips, peace in the eyes.
“No reason.”
He clicked his tongue, drew breath. She cut him off.
“Do I look much older?”
“Not really.” He searched his archives and cast an image in the air. “When you stepped out of the pod, you looked more like a little old lady than you do now.”
And in that instant her face was exactly the same as the day she rose from a century of sleep: a girl with an ancient soul. Ancient, and newborn.
“That so?” She winked. “Then I can rest easy.”
“Megalopolis is just a patchwork, slapped together. What do you mean, rest—” He stopped. She cut him off again, whispering so softly it was almost lost.
“Good night.”
In his archive, the images kept turning. He saw her again, dripping as she climbed from the pod, gel clinging, fluid streaming from her hair. She looked up and said only one word: “Morning.”
The artificial human raised his head to the stars. Something inside him clicked.
At last he spoke, in a storyteller’s cadence:
“From here on, for years to come—fine days and fair vistas, all for nothing.”
He knew the girl had not died.
She had only entered age without end.
Author’s note:
Every atom in your body came from an exploding star — Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing
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