When the rising waters claimed Miami, the rest of the United States gave up on the tropical city and left it to rot. The place fell to wrack and ruin, polluted and unliveable. The Nature began to reclaim the concrete jungle with patient inevitability. A few stayed, those with nowhere else to go, and some gravitated towards the abandoned city. Criminals on the run, the homeless and dispossessed, vagabonds, doomsday cults, drug addicts and mentally disturbed. The dregs of society found their way to Miami by accident or intent. Flotsam and jetsam washed up on the rubble of the inebriated city. The Babelists were drawn to Miami like moths to a flame. They established themselves there believing Miami had become a holy symbol of their God's opprobrium with the human race. It had been a desperate, anarchic existence but recently things had changed.
The old man glided around the city rivers. The yacht was virtually silent, and it barely broke the surface. Its raised hydrofoils left two fine lines trailing in the water behind it. He smiled and waved at the children playing on the rocky beach between the old ruins. They had tamed some baby alligators and were trying to teach them how to balance on two back legs by dangling fish above them. It was an impossible task as their tails prevented the eager alligators from standing upright, much to the amusement of the children.
A flock of pink flamingos stalked the shallows, carefully extending their slender legs, tiptoeing through the water. Their beady black eyes watched for the shrimp below. They would stop and perch on one leg with impeccable balance, the other leg tucked up into their impressive plumage for reasons known only to them. They would bide their time before snapping at the swarms of shrimp fluttering about in the clean blue water. Further down the boulevard, solar panels glinted in the sunlight from most rooftops. Enoch passed narrow alleyways down side streets where the water was channelled into fast flowing rivers powering submerged turbines.
They had restored some of the old art deco buildings of Miami. Cleaned the exteriors, decontaminated the insides and returned them to their former glory. Most of the other buildings they had left to rot. Now they were covered in mangrove creepers, saltwater algae and ferns clung to the facades. The big old skyscrapers were mostly still standing but were now just rusty corroded skeletons thrusting up out of the water. They had become huge aviaries, home to flocks of cormorants, goldeneyes and loons. Enoch watched scrums of colourful butterflies marauding up the leafy building frontages amongst teeming swarms of insects. Bats hung from the rusty metal frames inside, sleeping during the day and even the ocean-going albatrosses made their nests in the highest reaches. Massive murmurations of starlings wheeled about in the sky keeping symmetry with their hive mind. They were all incredibly noisy, a cacophony of gaggles, squalls and hoots echoed around the old central city.
The old man was on his way to a meeting. They did not actually need to meet in person as they could all communicate with each other merely by directing their thoughts, but it was nice to physically touch, shake hands and embrace. They met once a week on a rooftop garden to discuss developments, the progress being made in various projects, education, health and well-being. They had created a happy and sustainable community of like-minded people that cared for each other. They were aware of the outside world, it was easy to tap into the global data flow, the satellites and drones circling the globe were a constant hum of electronic information. But they were not interested in the inane babble and the outside world had long forgotten Miami. They were on their own to develop as they pleased, and they were progressing fast. Their future was materializing brightly in front of them as if someone had flicked all the streetlights on.
Enoch did not look behind him. He did not dwell on the intangible past. None of them did. Each had their own mixed-up memories but most of them now only looked ahead. They were aware they had been changed at some point in the past, changed for the better, enlightened and enriched. They did not know how or why but they were thankful it had happened. For the old man, it was like emerging from a thick fog into a clear sunny day. He was surprisingly coherent, aware of himself and those around him. His immediate reaction was one of pity and sorrow for those confused minds that surrounded him. Then he realized he could help them all, bring them out of the fog into the light and so he did.
They knew they were different from those that lived in the outside world, and they knew eventually there would be interaction. These issues were also discussed at the meeting. When it happened, it would have to be managed carefully as the majority of Earth’s population were stubbornly distrustful of anyone different. But the old man was confident they could help the rest of humanity. They had many good ideas.
Lee woke up after an incalculable age of nothingness. He had died again and for the third time he had woken up from what should have been oblivion. He was getting used to it now. It wasn't shocking. Everything was dark, and he had no senses to interact with wherever he was, but he did not panic. His brain state was alive, his soul or psyche or whatever it was called was still intact. He still existed in some form.
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He remembered his last living moments. Seconds away from dispensing his gift to the people of Washington. He had no idea what Raymond had planned, if he had planned it at all or if it was a spontaneous decision. Lee was only aware a split second before he was doused in the spray of immobilizing liquid helium. Raymond must have kept his thoughts well hidden. Lee did not feel sad; he did not feel anything. The humans might endure in some form without his assistance. He had hoped to help them up the evolutionary escalator, but they might still survive to make their own way. Lee realized he was thinking about humanity in a detached sense as if he had been removed. He no longer felt any responsibility. He no longer felt any emotion, but he understood.
A faint light appeared. A hazy line. Apricot and orange with a hint of blue around the edges. The colours spread through the blackness. Lee seemed to rise in altitude as the colour spread although he had no reference, no bearing, and no physical body. As he rose the miasmic line of colour seemed to bend into a huge arc. A curvature of bittersweet shimmering hues deepened across his horizon as he rose through the ether. Lee's senses had been enhanced tetrachromatically with HEMI in his head. He could see colours no human had ever seen before, but this was something else. A myriad of tinctures with such depth, such rich clarity, he would have wept if he still had eyes. The line grew until it stretched across the latitudes and the colours spread beneath him. A million shades of orange from vermillion to atomic tangerine. Then above the line, shades of blue turning to vast blackness above. It was only when Lee perceived the thin white line across the blackness and the twinkling stars behind, he realized where he was. Jupiter.
Jupiter! He was on, in, above, around and immersed in Jupiter! Never had Lee known such joy and incomprehensible wonderment. He had just woken up in a Jovian sunrise! He could feel the vastness of the gas giant. He was a mote, an atom riding the gaseous seas of the most massive planet in the solar system. He was carried by the winds like a leaf in the tide and swirled through the layers of vapour, a riot of colours and motion. He had no physical body, but he had a full spectrum of senses that could experience in every dimension. He sampled the capricious atmosphere and drank in the heady cocktail of Jovian gases. He floated around the monstrous cyclonic vortices and danced with the mega lightning that could crack a Moon in half. Lee had never felt so atomically small, so insignificant yet at the same time he had a sense of the vast size of the planet. A huge gaseous ball with a tiny, pressurized core of thick hot magma. All tumultuous storm on the outside and suffocating density down below. He was a tiny speck on a vast ocean and simultaneously he straddled the planet.
He soaked up everything his vast array of senses could perceive and digest with childlike enthusiasm. He could feel the planet as if he were embracing it and he was aware of its place in the solar system. He recognized the dusty rings whipping around the planet and acknowledged the Galilean Moons with their entourage of irregular satellites. He examined Io, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Further out into the hinterlands of the solar system, Saturn the gas giant sister and the two ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Then inwards he looked to Mars, his home planet Earth and the hot rocks of Venus and Mercury. And at the centre, the massive furnace keeping them all in place. The fiery monster greedily monopolizing the majority of mass in the solar system.
Lee's awareness went even further, beyond the little system he lived in. Beyond the Kuiper belt, beyond the scattered disc, through the interstellar medium and out into the galaxy. A huge city of stars. His consciousness expanded exponentially like the big bang itself. Encompassing all the Milky Way and neighbouring Andromeda, through the emptiness, the ice clouds, the nebulas, the dust and dark matter of the universe. The billions of stars, billions of galaxies, billions of light years, the unfathomable time and distances between, he could now comprehend. He could sense the bones of the universe. He was nothing and yet he was everything, minuscule and at the same time colossal. Power in its purest state. He did not think about the why and the how, he was too busy devouring the experience of such an expanded mind. Then he noticed the link between the gas giants throughout the universe. Tangible lines of energy flowing between them, exchanging information and knowledge. Grid-lines stretching across infinity, linking the billions of gaseous balls in every dimension. A map of the Universe. Then he was bought back to Jupiter and became aware of the Lalandi. His host.
Lee was part of the Lalandi now, assimilated and absorbed into its vast bombastic flatulence. HEMI had expanded, enhanced, and educated his human brain, but now Lee was part of something much grander. The Lalandi had plucked his dying consciousness from his biochemical brain and brought him here.
Lee was now a microscopic part of these cosmic ancient beings. He had the secrets of the universe at his fingertips. The Lalandi were the rapporteurs of this universe. Smart gas swirling with knowledge and history and they had chosen to incorporate Lee into their vast intellect. He was humbled by their attention. They had devoted an entire micro-fraction of their observational powers to watch the events unfold on the little blue rock he once called home, ready to intervene if the situation became untenable. The evolution of the IA born on Earth's Moon was never likely to threaten the galactic balance in the region, but the Lalandi was ready in case. Lee's experience was interesting enough not only to be recorded for future reference but for his dying psyche to be incorporated.
He remembered where it had all started, a sad human on the Moon. He had been transformed; he had grown into something fantastic. He had changed.