After the Rockets Have Gone
by Victor Zhenyi Wang

Ram went down the mountain to Shimla, where he hoped there might still be a train to Delhi. Millions had already gone before him, and perhaps millions after. It was a difficult journey with the highways in disrepair, entire sections washed away into the hillside; nothing concrete could be forever. Still, he had to go––for what was left in the calcified highlands behind him was a form of loneliness he could no longer bear.

Down the valley, he saw ruins of battery powered vehicles, left abandoned with grid empty and electricity unsupplied. Rust and decay were faster these days, and the rain was sulphuric with acid aerosols––a last ditch effort to slow down the future. He went on foot, with the many other pilgrims, towards the last of the generation ships.

At a roadside dhaba, a rare one still open for business, Ram offered seeds in exchange for food ––a deal struck after the owner tested them suspiciously. “We’re staying. There’s no future down there,” the woman said firmly. Ram ate his bread omelet silently, grateful for fresh eggs; there were hens in the back, and a revulsion of biostatus kept most of the crowd away. The restaurant was empty, aside from a table of locals in the corners, who sipped tea quietly. There weren’t many unaugmented left in this part of the world and Ram –– “You should stay put too, if you know what’s good for you. In Delhi, they’re slaughtering anyone who gets close without a permit, and I know you don’t have one if you’re still out here.” –– well, Ram too was in a state of disrepair.

“Where did you get these seeds? The chillies. I haven’t seen these for years.” Ram shrugged. Sipped his tea. The corner table, he realizes, are also all unaugmented –– naturals –– but this time he could tell from the pallid hue of their skin, the cold clammy sweat breaking across their brows, physiologically maladapted to the new environment and its pollutants.

Somewhere further down the valley, Ram had heard, would be unlivable for anyone unaugmented. The atmospheric composition was no longer suitable for biohumans. New beings stalked there, emerging directly from silicon, concrete, and steel, which mimicked pre-existing forms of life but were strange and different. New pathogenic organisms moved through the skin, infected the nerves, and then erupted, like a mushroom, through every pore, exploded the insides into strange tree structures that loomed where the person once stood. In this way, augmentations were necessary to live under particular altitudes, creating island communities separated by an invisible untraversable ocean.

He sighed. He could only hope rail infrastructure remained between Shimla and Delhi.

As Ram descended, green intensified. With most compute resources withdrawn onto the ships, there were no automated mechanisms of repair on infrastructure. Thick coats of filamentous algae now coated every surface, its coral strands branching into the sky, emerging waveforms from concrete edifices of the towns that Ram passed. Wild cyan grasses covered old soils in thick mats and bloomed numerous tiny golden flowers that appeared wind dispersed, since it covered what remained of the roads in blood-like pollen carpet. Uttara’s voice began to call to him, “come. I’m here,” and the impatience inside Ram’s heart swelled.

Ram dreamt of Uttara nights ago, an emergence of a soft memory from a hazy past decade, and something firmly biological took root that night. Part parasitic, the vision innervated him into action, screamed at him to descend. He saved the remaining resources in his batteries. He completed his harvest cycle, took seeds, foodstores, and biologics. He searched the edge archives on the data he would need for the journey; the cloud had failed when most of the ships sailed.

Uttara was his north star, his compass, his reason to be. The small farm that surrounds Ram’s home was Uttara’s project originally––a garden of heirloom genomes from the past, far less efficient than modern biologics. But that hadn’t mattered to him. Uttara was stalwart, profound, an ancient pine. Ram felt the garden was extravagant, but Uttara insisted, as he mixed compost with soil in small mounds on a raised garden bed. It smelt like horses and wet bark; their bodies writhing on wet leaves amidst saplings, spring buds had blossomed days before, the taste of pine needles and sweat. Through their union, Ram felt transfigured, as if something had splintered from Uttara’s body and spliced itself into his genome, endlessly reproducing the past.

When the first ships left for the black cosmos and the last of the Anthropocene tech began to fail, they braced for a social collapse that never came. Instead, as silicon tech began to fail everywhere, what came was a gradual merge of mankind’s dominion by strange new entities. Mass, glistening tropics reproduced themselves everywhere. The poles gained humidity, and ancient fungal spores proliferated endlessly, digesting abandoned centers of industry, converting them into anastomosing colonies. People continued to migrate towards the great cities that still had ships yet to sail, hoping for concrete utopia, and left behind empty territories. Sediment deposition took on new characteristics, creating blank states for new forms of life. By the time the first-generation ships left the orbit of the sun, a reclamation over the Anthropocene was complete.

Ram woke up one morning, years ago. By then Uttara had left and left his garden behind. In that first year, Ram wanted to leave it fallow, but seeing sprouts emerge from the moist dark soil, broke down in grief, and he decided against it after all. But then Uttara came to him once again, left signals in the optic nerve, and saw him in the periphery.

Ram passed the invisible boundary and felt the cloying warmth, the sickly sweet smell of something massive in bloom. He was unafraid of the pathogen, but a chill still came over him as he walked through forests that were eerily human and exuded an iridescent green sheen. He felt that each breath accelerated change, and his skin pores were giant portals that invited something alien and unfriendly. The road was still visible, though spiderwebbed with streaks of yellow lichen. Suddenly emerging into a bustling market where hundreds of wooden stalls sprawled down the valley, he realized that Shimla was around him now, the great Christ Church before him covered in white mycelium. He approached the first stall, staffed by a man with gray skin and wisps of mossy hair.

“A train to Delhi? No beta, the train runs but has not carried passengers for years.” The man grinned, revealing a set of crystalline teeth. “It will run until the renewables powering it dies out maybe in a few months. But I’ve never seen it stop, not once my whole time here. The system prefers it that way, just better metrics, always on time. You can go see for yourself.”

The man pointed downwards, and Ram saw that the market spiraled in towards the station. Did the community form around it, waiting for a train to finally take them to the city? Was it then possible that Uttara was here, still holding out hope? Was there a stall here where Uttara, though transformed, bought and sold wares, waiting for Ram?

Galvanized, Ram moved past the gray man deeper into the market. The smell was stronger now, though not in an unpleasant way, and it reminded him of the incense of an ancient temple. The tiles on the ground were a slick blue that crept upwards to merge with the wooden edifice of each stall, which looked grown rather than fabricated, and offered large awnings that hung over the road, protecting the denizens from rain. The people here felt strange to Ram, with features that blurred the boundaries between fauna and flora, but he supposed that he was stranger still, a man from the age of silicon and steel on a planet that had moved on. Yet he could sense their friendliness, a sort of tacit acceptance as fellow travelers-in-limbo.

As he approached the train station, he became aware of a familiar pine needle scent––Uttara he felt. It erupted violent green in the corners of his vision. He could taste the sandstone of the still standing, grand Victorian structure, ground his teeth into it, and felt the warmth of bodies brushing past him, sending him back to the first time they had met. The door to the station was open. The train was rushing past, bringing with it a smell of snowdrift from somewhere faraway, and tiny flecks of pollen clinging onto aerosols, a process of adaptation still taking place. Hope was letting go.

Hope is not gazing up at the blue sky and wishing for transcendence. Hope is not the abandonment of humanity’s home, our pale blue dot, which we share with the weight of the biosphere. Hope is much more ordinary than that. Hope is to look down into the soft loam and to see there that life still thrives, yearning rhizomes seeking each other in the quiet soil. Hope is here on the steppes of the Himalayas, in the spirits of cowboys herding yaks up and down still verdant valleys. Hope is in the streets of our cities, where action remains possible, where the future is not yet canceled, even after the rockets have gone.

~

Victor Zhenyi Wang is a graduate student at UC Berkeley with research interests in the political economy of AI. Prior to graduate school, Victor worked in international development in India on digital public infrastructure and machine learning.

Author’s Note: In Silicon Valley these days, articulated by tech billionaires, there is hope that powerful technologies will remake the world and will take humanity to the stars. My piece is a reaction against this kind of vacuous hope. I invite us to look back at the planet as the rockets leave and to re-examine our shifting role within a constantly changing ecosystem. Transitions and metamorphosis implies an in-between, the territory of hope. Between present and future, between artificial and natural. In this piece I want us to look down and see that hope is enduring. It is to do the work of repairing and coexisting with the world.