Benjamin 2073 by Rjurik Davidson

Author:Rjurik Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

“We’re done.” Thien kept scanning his account to see if he was wrong. But he wasn’t. We weren’t getting credits from the department anymore. Grimley had cut us off. Time had run out.

“We’re not done. I’ve got funds,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you, Ellie? Can’t you see? People don’t care if we repopulate the thylacine. They care if their water is fresh, if there are beautiful beaches for them to lie on, and snow to play with. They care about themselves. That hasn’t changed.” As he talked, Thien stormed into his room.

I stood at the doorway, watching him shove his clothes into a bag. “I don’t care if they care. That’s never how progress happens. It’s always outliers, those who don’t follow the crowd, who drive things forward.”

“That never ended well. Galileo was put on trial, remember. And I’m not letting you end up with nothing to show for a decade’s work, doing some shitty job that you hate and without a credit in your cloud. No!” He dragged his bag through the centre. “Damn it, Ellie. You need to get back to your exercises, your treatment. Look at you: You look more and more like a pile of bones. And I’ve seen your sores.”

“Where are you going? It’ll be an hour before the copter arrives.”

“It was ordered hours ago.” He stomped out with his bag.

“Who ordered it?! You didn’t!”

He turned back to me, looked over the couches in our lounge. “Ellie, get your stuff. We’re done here.”

“If you think I’m leaving, you know nothing about me.”

The copter touched down twenty minutes later. He climbed aboard and it swept up into the sky like a wondrous giant Frisbee. After he left, I wandered away from the centre, down the crest of the ridge and to the forest that we’d designed. My exoskeleton creaked and whirred softly as it carried me deeper into the bush. My batteries were running down, so I sat on a moss-covered log and watched the eucalypts sway in the breeze. Moss, that little green carpet of growth—what a wondrous thing! The smell of forest engulfed me: the damp earth, the slightly rotting undergrowth, the freshness of healthy plants. We rebuilt the Tasmanian forests and wetlands and grasslands native to the thylacine, but it was like trying to recompose the DNA of the long extinct Australian megafauna. We could only recover certain aspects, certain plants, certain animals, but the dependencies and relationships were altered. It was like building the structure of a house, knowing you could never fill in the walls or roof or the fittings or electrical and computer systems. And then, because the interrelationships were different, new connections and dependencies sprang up and you ended up with an entirely new ecosystem all its own.

That was one of the reasons Grimley was right. We were always moving forward, not backward. Everyone except me, it seemed. Later that night, I lay in bed drifting in and out of a personal crisis. I was the one who was wrong, I knew.

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