The Portal in the Forest (8 page)

Nope. That didn't happen. My intelligent
colleagues adapted. The food harvests dipped for a year, but then
shot up the next, as a global initiative switched major crops all
over the world toward genetically engineered plants that
thrived
on the extra light - forty-two percent more than
usual, and climbing.

From that perspective, things actually
started to look up. The added heat and light were just more energy
for the human race to capture and use. Fossil fuels crashed in
favor of solar, which now never, ever had dull moments - when the
Sun went down, the Moon and the stars took over energy duty. With
almost all of our energy being produced cleanly, and the atmosphere
undergoing severe weather changes, the global temperature actually
began to drop back down for a time.

It was enough time for us to prepare. Thanks
to the heat, war ended as a thing. It was simply impossible to
field troops, and energy and food had become practically free, so
what was left to fight over? More than that, we had a global threat
on our hands, and the human race banded together to overcome.

The weird thing about all this, though, was
that the light wasn't the right color. It was growing more and more
blue
, regardless of source, and we simply had no idea
why.

I was stationed in one of the pleasantly
temperate Antarctic stations for several years. I'd never really
had family per se, and I'd certainly never had more than passing
relationships. I'd mostly been a loner that observed the world and
felt isolated from it. So, my sudden placement with thousands of
intelligent and capable colleagues was a shock. I made
friends.
We debated philosophy, argued about the cause of
the Blue Brightening, and played clumsy games of volleyball. We
drank alcohol like our military staff - to excess - and then
regretted it utterly. We even raided the Biology Lab's dorms with
water balloons. They retaliated by stealing a month's supply of
pudding from our cafeteria.

All in all, I'd have to describe it as the
slowest and most pleasant apocalypse imaginable.

Over the years, and ever so slowly, that
pleasantness began to unravel as the level of incoming light from
the rest of the universe reached double, and then triple. The
surface became a scorching azure desert that was all but unlivable.
Our temperate Antarctic outpost became a savannah, and then turned
tropical, until, finally, all the plants except our genetically
engineered super-crops died.

It was strange to look back on half a life,
and on a youth spent unhappy and apart from the world as it was,
only to find that world gone. Of the seven billion people alive at
the start of our decades of heating, almost all had moved
underground, into space, or onto the new cities on the now
strikingly sapphire Moon.

The first colony to successfully set up on
Mars soon had terrifying news for us: it wasn't blue out there, and
it wasn't brighter out there. The technology we'd sent out into the
solar system hadn't been malfunctioning. With their very eyes, the
first interplanetary pioneers confirmed it.

There was nothing wrong with the universe at
all. There was something wrong with
us.

The theory had already been proposed, of
course. Now a civilization of scientists, we'd had plenty of time
to guess. Politics had split along ideological lines, but, now, we
had proof: the Slow-Time Bubble theory was correct. For unknown
reasons, the Earth and the Moon, both, had been encompassed in a
slow-time field that was growing ever stronger. The universe wasn't
brighter; it just had more time to shower us with light, and that
light had been growing more and more blue-shifted due to the time
dilation.

It took another thirty years for us to figure
out why. In the meantime, we watched the Mars colonies rapidly
expand, terraform, cover the red planet with humanity, and then -
just as quickly as they had come - they were gone. An expedition
sent there found nothing but a world of silent monolithic cities
that were hundreds of thousands of years old.

Except we weren't that bad off, not yet - the
Mars colony should only have aged a few hundred years to our two
decades. The opposite of our fate had happened to them - they had
been caught in a fast-time field, the Sun and stars had faded to
weak red-shifted darkness, and they'd all starved, died, and faded
away in the blink of an eye.

Strangely enough, the fast-time field had
departed with them, and the
reason
behind both our
predicaments revealed itself from an impossible vector: our
food.

Specifically, a bacteria living in the roots
of our genetically-modified crops. Somehow, a bacteria had evolved
with time-slowing properties - the cellular organism itself existed
in dimensions higher than three plus time. Its internal structure
literally branched off into higher dimensions, and an emergent
property of its shape was to bend the fabric of time. We had no
idea whether this organism had evolved on Earth, or whether it had
fallen from space, but it was here.

And as we'd planted more and more of it
globally, the bacteria had grown in total number, and our problem
had worsened exponentially. Mars had had the opposite problem; with
its own genetic crops, adapted to live in a much different
environment, they had unwittingly bred a new kind of bacteria that
had sped up time instead of slowing it down. Just like that,
ambient cellular life had wiped away a planet… and, when those
crops on Mars had died, so had their fast-time bacteria. It was
strangely ironic that Mars, the Red Planet, had died in a lethal
red shift, and now Earth, the Blue, was dying in its respective
color, too.

We knew what the cause was, now… but the
problem presented itself: how do you cleanse an entire planet of
all cellular life?

Nothing we had could fight it. It didn't
respond to antibiotics, and our three-dimensional nano-machines
simply couldn't interact properly with the multi-dimensional
bacterial cells. The only solution, we found, was the oldest answer
in the book: fire.

We'll come back once the Earth is cleansed.
We'll come back… and we'll start anew… we'll just escape to the
Moon for a time, and then it'll all be fine. I'm boarding the ship
in an hour - or, I should be, when it gets here. The people on the
Moon are supposed to be sending the fleet to pick up the two or
three billion people still here, but there's been no contact yet.
I'm not sure what we're doing about food and supplies for everyone,
but I'm sure we'll figure it out. Humanity's evolved beyond
selfishness, cruelty, and repugnant survival instincts.

That's what I tell myself, at least. I got to
live a mediocre life, and I got to feel at least partially like a
person for a time - partially included - and, for that, I'm
thankful. The crowd is growing restless out here in the blasting
blue sands, all waiting in their hermetic suits, but what's an old
man to tell them? There are children out here, so many children,
and telling them that nobody's coming would only be cruel.

But I really thought they wouldn't turn the
satellite cleansing system on with us still out here. At least let
us get back underground, so we don't see it coming! You sick sons
of bitches! And they're running, the crowd is running, intent on
going east, moving east to escape the cleansing, ever east… how
long can they run? Minutes? How long can they walk? Hours, days,
weeks? I'm an old man, I can't join you, but you keep walking, keep
going, and never give in… show those sadistic bastards that human
willpower doesn't -

***

I looked up from the book, my thoughts frozen
by the sheer magnitude of that unimaginable cruelty, and the scope
of what had happened to humanity here. For once, the threat had not
been outright lethal, but the existential crisis had still been
inhuman. This time, people had done it to themselves…

"What happened here?" Danny asked, seeing my
face.

I kept down a surprisingly powerful sob. "Um,
nothing relevant," I told him, looking up. There was no blue shift
that I could discern, so the bacteria must have been cleansed. The
Moon was just coming up over the horizon, and I thought I saw
numerous city-like patterns dotting its silvery landscape. But how
long had they been there? How long had the cleansing system been
running? Had something gone wrong with the return plan, or had they
chosen never to come back out of shame and horror at what they'd
done?

I looked ahead of us, to the east.

The Sun was gigantic, and red, dominating the
sky. Had the slow-time bacteria cost the Earth billions of years?
Was the Sun going red giant, and expanding to consume the
planet?

I peered to the side, studying the Moon. The
patterns there looked grey and lifeless. Had humanity departed for
the stars? Or had they petered out on their dusty new rock?

About out of willpower, I shook off my
questions. I'd never get answers, and those people - if they were
still up there - would hardly help us.

Not after what they'd done.

My bare foot had become sliced and bloody,
but I could hardly stop to deal with it. Looking back at our group,
I noticed some stragglers. "Come on," I shouted tiredly. "Nobody
gives up!"

Most of the straggling children sped up a
little, but one struggled along, visibly limping.

"Danny," I said grimly. "Keep the pace."

He nodded.

I stood in place, huffing, and took a moment
to bandage my foot with a strip torn from my shirt. The kids all
seemed worried that I had stopped, but Danny barked at them to keep
moving.

Eventually, the limping boy - Ryan, if I
remembered right, maybe nine years old - caught up to me.

His entire face was bright red from exertion,
and dripping sweat. The wall of fire was louder here, and more
audible without the group's crunching footfalls. I watched him
until he reached me.

"I hurt my ankle," he gasped.

"Hold onto my arm," I offered, taking the
pressure off his hurt leg as much as I could. We began staggering
forward. "We're going to make it, don't you worry."

He had no breath for a reply. I could feel
the heat on our backs growing, and searing breezes began ruffling
our clothes.

"I don't wanna die," he said, unprompted.

I looked, and saw tears flowing down his
face. "You're not going to die."

He gasped with resigned terror. "We're not
going fast enough."

I set my jaw, my thoughts on the people that
had died on this world. "I'm
not
going to leave you behind."
Out of options, I bent down, and had him climb up on my back. "We
are
all
getting out of this godforsaken place."

I huffed forward, tapping into reserves I
never knew I had. He was no baby, and heavy on my back, but I
ignored the pain in my feet and the heavy weight in my muscles and
pushed on - until I looked further ahead, and saw a scattering of
children lying where they'd fallen from exhaustion.

I couldn't carry them all.

"Get up!" I screamed, still a hundred feet
away from the first fallen child.

She pushed herself up weakly.

"That's it! That's it, get up!
Get up!
Keep going!
"

Stumbling forward, she began to walk again,
her head low and her eyes hollow.

Which reminded me - I'd have given anything
for a few iWorkers. Those things would have walked the children
right to the limits of their endurance without an issue.

And thoughts like that, I'm sure, were what
led that world to its fate…

"You!" I shouted again, approaching a prone
ten-year-old boy whose name I desperately wanted to remember. "Get
up! You're not going to die in this oven. All you have to do is
walk another mile or two and you can fall down and rest as long as
you want."

He still didn't move.

Finally reaching him, I pushed him with my
shoed foot.

He groaned.

"Get up, goddamnit!"

Trembling, he took my hand, and started
walking again after another push.

Ahead, two more children lay stretched out on
obsidian, and, ahead of them, I saw four more collapsed in various
positions.

Even if I did get them up, we were moving too
slowly. I could feel the blazing heat at our backs, and I dared not
look. "Get up!" I screamed, desperate. "Please, just get up!"

The first one we reached, a girl, tried to
get up - and fell back onto her wide plate of black glass.

It was about then that the horrible tree of
approaching decisions manifested itself to me. I'd burned all our
spare time, and the cleansing wall was nearly upon us.

I couldn't save them all.

Was this what the people on the Moon had
felt, unable to feed billions of people?

They had to be left behind…

I could carry one… but the others had to be
left behind…

I already had one boy on my back. Did he
deserve to live simply because he had faltered first?

Could I possibly live with putting him down,
and picking up another child?

I became aware of an added wetness in my
sweat - tears? I hadn't cried in so long, and now, here, forced to
make the worst decision… it was simply happening, somewhere fuzzy,
somewhere outside my cold and calculating survival instincts. Part
of me knew the tragedy - but I couldn't directly feel that part of
me, not anymore.

I could save one. Which one? One clung to my
back, screaming as the corona at the base of the wall of fire began
dancing toward us. Six children lay sprawled out before me and
ahead of me. Should I choose by age? Youngest, or oldest? Gender?
Boy, or girl? Or should I choose the smartest, the most capable I'd
seen?

No.

I refused to accept it.

It was a crappy, terrible solution, and it
would hurt them all badly, but it might just -