SORD YAWNED DEEPLY AND dropped the pad onto his bed. Despite his improved speed-reading skills, a full hour had passed as he slogged through his ancestor’s diary. He was hungry. Hungry and bored.

“Why does Mom force me to read such crap?” he wondered in disgust. “She didn’t know this guy, and I don’t care if he was my great-great-whatever. I’d even prefer to practice viola, which I hate, so I don’t have to read such useless nonsense.”

He strode into the kitchen, grimacing and shaking his head.

“Something bothering you?” Becca asked.

Sord clicked his tongue. This was his long-established signal to her that he was not pleased.

“You always ask me to tell you the truth about things, and I’ll tell you the truth about this old fart.”

“Sord, please! You mean your long-lost relative?”

“Yeah, though I can’t believe I’m related to such an tedious guy. Why should I be forced to study this pile of poop when it has no obvious value? There’s nothing in Prosperity’s abundant list of onerous rules that says a teenager should be compelled to consume meaningless and often repetitive banter.”

“Did you begin with the initial chapter, where he talks about UFOs and all?”

“Yes!” he stammered. “A total and utter dud for the most part. I’d rather practice viola for an hour than waste my time on some dead dude’s ramblings.”

“Hmm, it would be wonderful if you willfully picked up the instrument without my prodding. But I can’t believe it’s that bad. Sord, you recall your father and I named you after a small flock of mallards we saw when I told him I was pregnant with you?”

“And haven’t I heard that story for the millionth time?”

She smiled and sighed. “Then it’s the analogy you’ll have heard for the million and one-th, then.”

“Please, spare me,” he pleaded. “I know, I know. Each mallard in flight represents a new concept, a new experience, a new beginning for exploration, et cetera, et cetera.”

“The book is not so long, Dearie, that you can’t spend a few hours with it to expand your conscious awareness. One must put oneself in others’ shoes by reading about them and their experiences. A richness comes from the alignment of your imagination with their descriptive prose. You can’t get that with your vidscreen games.”

“Mom, I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Dearie.’ Sounds like I’m a girl. Maybe it was good for you when I was an infant, but I’m sixteen now.”

“Every time you say that, I respond with the same retort. Your Grandma Sara always called me ‘Dearie.’ I adopted it since you were so sweet when young, before you could sass back at your poor mother.”

Sord was staring out the compound window, wishing he could go outside and explore.

“Maybe before the sun goes down. Too hot out there now,” she affirmed.

“Awesome!” he screamed, momentarily forgetting the pain he had just suffered from reading the diary. “I’ll text Robbie to see if he can go out.”

“Suits and extra gear for you boys, and don’t go off too far, either. These winter evenings may be hot but it gets dark and cold quickly. I don’t want send a Search and Rescue team out looking for you two. You know a lot of the shrubbery is slowly coming back, and no drone will do a good job of finding you splayed-out under a bush as vulture fodder.”

Her forehead bristled from sweeping the floors of their apartment, and she wiped the damp sweat off. “I worry about him out there,” she mouthed silently.

He turned around, pausing for a moment to think about her. She’d been through it. He knew some details, even some sordid details, but otherwise could not understand, not at this point. Millstones from the past that dragged her down. He could sense it in her sagging smile, in the way she hunched her shoulders forward and seemed melancholy at times. She was reared in some special type of hell that was too probing to inquire a mother about.

“What could possibly bother you so much?” he wondered. “We have it so good. We’re here, and alive most of all, living in the best remaining place on Earth for humans. Why don’t you see life as I do? Don’t you know what’s out there? A huge world. Despoiled or not, it beckons. It calls to me. This hot and nasty desert is my home, as much as you allow me to get out into it. And it’s not dangerous; nowhere near what you imagine, anyway. I’m capable and manage the risks well, and Robbie and I are not that stupid to get into any real trouble. You should just trust me.”

He wanted to tell her these things but couldn’t stand to see her frown further. Something else might refocus her mind.

“Hey, speaking of that ancient great-whatever grandpa Greg and his alien stories. I know we’ve spoken of it before, but what do you think happened to that obelisk since we finally have proof, we think, that other sentient types are out there in space? It proves we’re not the only intelligent life. So, was that obelisk real or fake, and what happened to all that gold and platinum?”

Becca felt a twinge of angst because she was too close to the topic. Her mom never mentioned the obelisk to her directly, and she never spoke much about her past. But Becca knew she was involved in some inappropriate way.

After the global devastation of the Second Great Debacle in 2075, or GDII as it was called, the nation-states and all other political and social structures at that time were decapitated. Durango and its sister cities in the new nation-state of Prosperity, from Madera in the south of what was once Mexico, to Calgary in the north, were founded and constructed in the subsequent few decades.

A collection of stragglers and survivors, irrespective of their prior allegiances to the nation-states, descended upon Prosperity as the last civilized refuge in the Western Hemisphere. Becca and her mother were among that group of weary, terror-adapted humans who grasped for something more than simply surviving in the torrential ecological and social aftermath of the human-caused catastrophe.

For Becca, the whereabouts of the platinum-gold obelisk was forever lost in the woeful lore of the countless global mysteries following GDII. She saw little value in resurrecting anything from the past unless it applied to virtuous teachings about the cascade of humanity’s grotesque mistakes during the twenty-first century.

She placed her broom against the door jamb. “Sord, my boy, the obelisk and its origin will forever remain an unknown.”

He thought about stopping there, but felt his mother needed to see that he cared about her past and how it affected her every day.

“But didn’t Grandma Sara know the truth?” he inquired innocently. “She reported to you-know-who, the guy they say helped waste the world, and he must have known what happened to it since he was an oligarch and all.”

Her gaze fell to the floor. Sord never knew his grandmother, and Becca’s memories of her mother were beginning to fade as time passed. As much as possible, she shuttered away all aspects of her mother’s kidnapping, ransom, and apparent murder during the heady days of Prosperity’s beginnings. And despite the lessons taught by her Stoic teachers in her few decades in Prosperity, including pragmatic instructions on how to disassociate oneself from one’s emotions, Becca was still unable to separate her sense of self-worth from those painful memories.

She put forward her best stone-faced response. “I’m sure you’ve read the history about it in your teachings, and you know it’s not fruitful to dwell upon the past without a specific purpose of learning from it. So, what’s your reason for asking?”

“If the obelisk was real, then shouldn’t we be preparing ourselves for the possibility of alien marauders?”

She shook her head and grinned. He was a master at goading her into these types of discussions by requesting confirmation of his conjecture.

“As your teachings have presumably covered, you are right to rationally prepare for the worst while working tirelessly and uncomplainingly to create the best outcomes for our species. However, you should fully understand by now that any advanced civilization traveling interstellar distances would be capable of instantly removing us from the planet. We have nearly done that to ourselves in a far less-advanced society. What do your teachings tell you about how to handle that highly unlikely potential?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. The baloney about ‘wisdom to change the things you can, blah, blah, blah.’ I get what the teachings and history say, but I want to know what you think. In your opinion, was the obelisk real or fake?”

Becca grasped the broom as if to begin sweeping again, then took a deep breath and plopped onto the dinette chair. “Okay, I’ll indulge you, which I do all too often since you are my only child and therefore the spoiled one. No, I think it was not real, at least not really from space aliens, and was instead a creation of humankind. You’ve read the history. There were so many factions fighting each other at that time, in that gradual rise to global anarchy brought on by societal imbalances. People were chipped and tied directly into AI databases, and you never knew what demagogues or religious zealots or country or social sub-networks controlled them with self-fulfilling, self-confirming narratives. Then there were many mechs who were mostly chipped as well, increasingly of the strong belief that they were a more perfect evolution of being. It was a time when humanity lost its humanity. Fear and bigotry ruled the day since people not only thought differently, but humans were greatly diverging in all aspects. And tech had devolved beyond our control, allowing egregious concentrations of power and wealth.”

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“Yeah, I know all that stuff,” he countered.

“Then don’t interrupt, my boy, as I wasn’t finished. It makes sense, therefore, that some group of people or hybrids would be greatly advantaged by further disrupting and degrading society. Disrupters. Anarchists. Entropists. Demagogues. Demigods. Autocrats. Tyrants. Too many terms for them. Those who prefer to tear apart, tear down, or demolish existing social structures that allow people be fair and equitable with each other, so they can own and control what remains in the bloody and gruesome aftermath. This happened after the first Great Debacle when it became a time of the oligarchs and technocrats. GDII was the inevitable outcome since nothing useful was learned in the first self-induced catastrophe.”

He was getting bored. “I get all that history. But why would you fake an alien obelisk warning of an impending annihilation? Why would you waste so many tons of gold and platinum only to make a point?”

She smiled. “Dearie, you know this from your teachings, and you will understand more with time. When a person has concentrated and gathered so much before them, so many possessions, so much wealth and complementary power within physical or virtual reach of their arms, they feel entitled to more. I can’t say it always happens. Maybe ninety-nine percent of the time. If you were a trillionaire back then, money and power just wasn’t enough. You’d eventually crave adoration, worship, and control over all beings and activities of the world. It’s an old story going way, way back in human history. Social Darwinism, the thought that you must be so wealthy and powerful because you are fundamentally superior to all others. You know this, of course. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, an overused saying. Maybe it’s better said as ‘networks naturally coalesce and centralize; centralization progresses to concentration; concentration creates imbalances that always go unchallenged and lead to the pit of vipers.”

“Well,” he said, ignoring her philosophical rant, “it seems like such a waste of precious metal. Seems they could’ve sent some other type of signal that was just as convincing.”

“Yet, it was too convincing. Many billions died from the fear and hatred the obelisk helped engender. Which leads me to another question. How are you doing on your Demagogue’s Checklist? That was part of this week’s homework, wasn’t it? I’d like to hear your recitations, young man.”

“Mom!” he urged. “Why does everything always come back to homework and the Prosperity social norms baloney? Can’t some conversations just for once get to the topic at hand and not veer off to teachings?”

“I suspect you are finding value in these things far beyond ‘baloney.’ And which ‘topic at hand?’” she questioned. “The existence of aliens, status of the obelisk, or waste of precious metals?”

Tired of the banter, Sord rubbed his eyes, a signal only his mother would recognize that he wasn’t being heard.

“What?” she asked. “What do you want to say?”

“That this conversation misses my point entirely. I want to know what you think about the existence of aliens on Earth.”

And she also knew what this meant. He was less interested in her thoughts and more eager to divulge his own. “Well, if aliens are out there somewhere, or standing right next to us in a hidden dimension and able to observe us, it makes you wonder why they didn’t restrain us from virtually eliminating all life on the planet decades ago. What do you think?”

Sord didn’t realize his mother had outdone him, finally getting to what he felt in his belly. “Well, first I think it would be highly unlikely any advanced civilization could construct a wormhole and go faster than light. That concept is all but disproved, so you’re left to deduce other possibilities. Yes, we’ve found evidence of other sentient life on systems far away, but nothing so far that has been decipherable, clear, and of value. It’s not like they’re providing guidelines on how to live and be like them, or how to prevent a next Great Debacle.”

“I hope we don’t have another one of those,” she interjected.

“Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the messages aliens are sending into space is much like that guy Rick and his wife Sofia sent before GDII.”

“An interesting parallel. I’d almost forgotten their names.”

“It was the swan song for the human race. A warning. I was forced to read the whole manifesto that guy wrote to God-knows what aliens, and it was utterly boring.”

“Yeah, I know. Your grandma confirmed to me firsthand how it happened; how that little laser message in the sky started a cascade of horrific events that eventually sparked GDII. But you’ve read the history, and I’ve told you a few times what she told me.”

“And I don’t really want to hear again, thanks. My point is, though, if a sentient species makes it to a stage of certain technological advancement, why would they send any communications out into space? Wouldn’t they risk chumming the waters with anchovy blood to attract nasty sharks nearby? Could they really have been that confident in themselves to assume no destructive sentient beings, whether biological or mechanical, were even within striking distance? I find it hard to believe they were so cocky.”

Becca smiled and nodded. She was happy Sord had thought so deeply on the topic.

He continued. “But to think we are in a universe of planets. Given the relatively infinite distances between sentient civilizations, I suppose even a few billion years of advanced existence doesn’t provide you with much opportunity to get around. You could explore your own little galaxy in that time. But if you were infinitely advanced and could live in cold space that long, you’d surely have the ability to terraform any planet at your will. I mean, look at us. We’ve effectively reverse-terraformed what was a very inhabitable planet with our misuse of tech, and we’re anything but advanced. I understand the Earth is somewhat unique versus other planets, given its iron core and magnetosphere and large moon and a million other things, but uniqueness must logically be a non sequitur in an infinite world.”

Becca raised her eyebrows at his use of the Latin term. “Hmm,” she nodded. “And all this means what?”

“Even if you assume the unlikely chance they first observed our planet from a far distance, long before we were apes, then set off to research Earth because it looked cool. And even if, just by chance, they arrived here in time to see our most recent few thousand years of advances and failures, observing our behaviors like we’d observe lab rats. Even then, you have to ask yourself the big question.”

“Which is?” she queried.

“If they were close by and watching, why did they let us do it, particularly during the last few centuries? Why let us go through God knows how many wars and immeasurable pain and suffering? Why wouldn’t they say: ‘Don’t proceed. Don’t do it. Dangerous path?’ You’d think they’d have some compassion. I can understand them not interfering up until recently. It wasn’t like we were necessarily a species teetering on the brink. But the last two GDs? And now it’s just us, the remaining few millions in what was once billions. We were Earth’s ‘invasive species’ and our self-created plagues all but wiped us out. Sentient species? Yes. Invasive species? Certainly. But I can’t imagine a thinking and perceptive advanced race simply observing such travesties from arm’s length and not saying a peep.”

Sord was sitting at the table next to his mother. She rapped her fingers on the table, just once. “Could you not also say the same for a loving God? Would a caring parent of many billions allow the death and destruction of so many children, much less the ongoing pain of the damaged millions that remained afterward, many of whom live squalid, painful lives elsewhere in the world, outside of Prosperity?”

“Yeah,” he replied, unconsciously rapping his fingers as well. “Which, I guess, is why you have me study religions.”

“Indeed. You’ll come to understand the yin and yang of God-belief.”

“And we don’t talk about that very much. I know what our principles teach about belief constructs like religions, but you never said what you thought.”

“Dearie, continue reading that boring, old diary. Oddly, your grandfather a few generations ago had a viewpoint similar to mine.”

“You remember reading it? Which is?”

“You ask?” She peered at him quizzically. He had never questioned her so directly on this topic.

“Uh huh,” he nodded.

“Despite the despair I’ve seen and lived in my days on Earth, I think God exists, but only as a creator. I can’t assign him other attributes beyond that. I believe it’s misguided to personify God in our image, with our quite dubious moralities, behaviors, and objectives. I can’t assume God wishes evil or harm or even riches or happiness on any one of us. It seems wrong and unfair to place our expectations for assistance upon God, as if God is compelled to deliver us from the pains of life. No. In my mind’s construction, if you’re God, you create. That’s what you do. Sometimes, your creations might evolve to ask themselves questions about their existence. If so, they probably also have the chops to make their own decisions about individual survival, species survival, and their impacts on the ecosystems in which they evolve. If they can do this much, they should have the capability to advance and improve themselves and their civilization. Alternatively, they could destroy it, or even wander about aimlessly while expecting their God-concept to arrive from on high with all the answers and solutions to their mostly self-created problems. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, because that old Greg grandfather dude on your father’s side covers similar material.”

Sord rolled his eyes. “There we go again. Life always returns to studies, including this old diary. Or diarrhea.”

“Hey!” she cautioned.

“Well, I know he wasn’t that tall, but he spins and weaves his mundane stories like basketball players used to do on the court, and I find very little of it interesting. It was a different time that can never occur again. Back when the air was breathable for long periods. You could go outdoors without a suit and mask. Unlike me, he had the freedom to do what he wanted without always focusing on personal safety and math and science and ethics and checklists and proofs and history. And he lived outside, without restraints. Without constraints.”

Becca’s hand raised. “Okay, now you’re complaining. I can remind you about those same teachings and how to navigate the various paths of self-pity.”

“Please, Mom,” he urged. “I get enough of that already, and I wasn’t complaining. I was only observing.”

She frowned. “Not one minute of self-pity. That’s not in our nature. Not anymore. Not for humans. Victimhood. Self-pity. Self-absorption. These are entitlements, very unproductive and costly indulgences, and we teach you to manage and control your thoughts about them, right?”

Sord sighed and turned his head to stare out the window. It was mid-afternoon, a dangerous time to go outdoors, even with his protective suit. Although most of the menacing wildlife avoided daytime exposure, sunlight itself was the danger.

***

Becca knew Sord had rambled on long enough for now and was edgy to get outside. “Feel free to go, but do it well before dusk. You guys can’t stay long since it will get dark quickly. Remember to take your radios, two of them, with extra battery packs.”

“Mom, you wouldn’t need to worry about us if you let us chip ourselves and link directly into Prosperity Net.”

“Okay,” she replied as politely as possible. “You understand why we no longer chip people or allow them to integrate with metallic superstructures.”

“Yeah, but you must admit. Prosperity still allows genetic changes like adapting to lower oxygen and medical stuff.”

She was finally getting impatient. “Enough! We don’t need to re-hash the rules on why we live the way we do. It’s not open for question from a sixteen-year-old kid who wants to rebel against the established way. I understand the rebelling. Trust me, in time you’ll appreciate the rationale for our systems of belief and behavior.”

As teenagers do, he quickly turned to another subject. “I’m hungry.”

She rose from the chair and grabbed the broom again, balancing herself upon it. “And I’m still sweeping the kitchen. Make yourself a PB&J. I have other things to do. Oh, and the pot on the stove? That’s dinner. So when you and Robbie go out, I need you back here by 7 p.m. so we can have dinner together.”

“Geez, Mom! That means barely an hour on our motos,” he whined.

“Sorry. Them’s the rules.”

Sord shrugged. He opened the cupboard, pulled out a loaf of bread, and slammed the door.

“You can handle your emotions better,” she observed. “Control yourself . . .”

“I know! ‘. . . or I’ll be forced to control you,’” he mumbled.

Becca resumed her sweeping.