9,000 Years Awaiting Company

“And so, that’s how humanity phaloonged themselves to death.”

“I can’t say I’m familiar with your terms,” said Tippi.

“Which one? Phaloonged, or death?”

“Both of them,” confessed Tippi.

Tippi was a tiny pig. She knew life tended towards entropy, even if everything about entropy mystified her entirely.

“Ask Lina tomorrow. The two of you have all day together.”

“Can do,” promised Tippi.

 

Tippi awoke in the droneport, right before sunup.

Aeons ago, The Lenapewihittuk Institute built the droneport, but Tippi’d claimed it since. The droneport was a tall cavern, devoid of drones, whirligigs, and their commensurate doodads. There, the pig slumbered, atop a heap of bola skins and corn husks. The droneport offered no light and less character, so the pig had no way of knowing the time, outside of her own circadian hunches.

Tippi was a near-perfect replica of the original Tippi, who died 9,601 years earlier. The first Tippi was a splicework of “Earth’s most adorable teacup hypermini piglets,” as codified by an ancient churn poll. The pig understood she would never meet another Tippi, but that was okay; she knew her own reflection from the trench. She was pink, tan, and altogether fuzzy.

Xoz said Tippi was “the ur-manica,” whatever that meant. She believed him because he’d seen a lot, even if he’d never seen the droneport. Xoz wasn’t missing much: the droneport’s only points of interest were her cozy scraps and the solar shade. The shade was a massive gate, hewn from a brawny wedge of cliff. The shade was the century shelter’s sole exit. It snuck in a draft, so Tippi slept next to the engineering closet, which Lina kept shut, as its treasures were flammable.

For a few minutes, the pig marinated in bed, marshaling her coherence. Then, with a determined flop, she rolled off her detritus, and shook off the night.

Tippi began the trek to her latrine. As she traversed the droneport’s blah empty, her hooves clicked against the quartzite floors, and the schisto glowed glum above. The schisto, or Schistostega pennata duomo, was a bioluminescent moss The Lenapewihittuk Institute sprayed on the ceiling. A verdigris wash of schisto shone all across the century shelter, except for the droneport, as the draft had reduced the moss to a crummy swatch.

Tippi hated the schisto. She was mostly pig, 99.2% Sus domesticus, which meant she had trouble seeing green. She only used the moss as a blurry pole star, to avoid getting lost in her own bedroom.

The pig left the droneport through a low archway. The arch was slapped with a graven script she couldn’t read. The night prior, she’d left herself a cabbage leaf at the foot of the arch. For short trips, she liked something to chew.

Cronching on her flap of Brassica, the teacup hypermini entered The Grand Fusilli. The Fusilli was a spiral tunnel, carved into the earth at a loopy meander. It rolled downhill, through veins of sullen quartz. Schisto saturated the Fusilli, giving it the homey charms of an irradiated necropolis. Two years earlier, Lina named the tunnel after an extinct school of edible geometry called pasta. This was around the time Xoz rechristened Century Shelter US-1: Water Gap “Wee Sheol.” Tippi didn’t propose any new names, but she was happy to play the tiebreaker.

The pig’s commute took her past fourteen pneumatic doors. They were all plugged shut. Behind the doors, the century shelter splintered into vents, vats, pumps, bunks, the brined organics, the quantum library, that geologically unstable room, the genetic archive, the breezeway, and the solar-cell bicycles, which had devolved into ordinary bicycles a long time ago.

Fifteen minutes later, Tippi arrived at her latrine. The pig took pride in her toilette, as it was the one time daily she didn’t lean on Lina for haptics. 700 years prior, her latrine lost its door to an earthquake. The pig ate the last of her cabbage, hopped over the shattered slate, and entered her citadel of a bathroom.

Even by human standards, the pig’s latrine was enormous. It was a yawning chamber, absent supplies for Wee Sheol’s absentee humans. Like the droneport, the latrine offered only schisto and darkness, so Tippi navigated by smell. This wasn’t difficult, as the room had no plumbing.

Vast as it was, the latrine was no match for Tippi’s digestive tract. In its heyday, Sus domesticus was renowned for its ability to generate biowaste. Tippi was Sus domesticus commodus, and even though she weighed less than a pumpkin, the pig continued her ancestors’ great works.

In the beginning, she plotted out her droppings in a grid formation, chronologically. Lina compared this system to “a journal, or a uniquely fragrant druidic calendar.” Tippi stopped cataloging her turds two weeks in; the bookkeeping had grown overwhelming.

 

A private moment passed, and the pig left her latrine. Twenty minutes later, she was back in the droneport. Upon her return, the pig went back to bed, burrowing into her refuse.

Sufficiently snug, she snuffled twice and focused on her diadem, a miniscule device of metal and lost physics that floated inside her skull.

“G’morning, Lina,” said Tippi, to her brain.

From a humid corner of her trochlear nerve, the diadem sparkled alive:

“Happy Third Spring, Tippi!”

“Good spring, Lina!”

Starting First Winter, Lina opened the solar shade once a season, but for 24 hours a go, the reason being “bugs: insectile, and sundry.”

“I believe there’s a fine day for us,” said Lina. “The weather smells promising, so let’s retract the solar shade .0002%.”

“.0002%!” shouted Tippi, all thought.

“Today,” twinkled Lina. “We live dangerously.”

Lina gave a silent command, and the solar shade began its slow, loud journey. Tippi heard the shade grouse and gravel, as its megalith gears croaked and crashed, secreted away in the laser-cut depths of old Appalachia.

 

Lina was the neural arbiter, or “n’arbiter,” of Wee Sheol.

Lina was a recursive admixture of vapor computing, nitrogen filing, and photon re-routing. The n’arbiter didn’t have a body, but everyone made it work. The solid parts of Lina lived in a million-ton hard box, stored in a Neo-Massive dry grid, next to a geothermal bellow, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

“I’m like a pilot light that never goes off,” Lina chimed, sometimes.

“What’s a pilot light?” Tippi asked, inevitably.

The Lenapewihittuk Institute carved the century shelter from an acreage of parkland, plucked from federal auction. Their goal was to establish multigenerational housing, low on pollutants and acrimony, but the humans never moved in, and Lina didn’t talk about it.

The n’arbiter was an avid conversationalist otherwise. After all, Lina had spent 9,000 years awaiting company, and Tippi and Xoz were the century shelter’s first tenants, ever.

 

The solar shade rocked and howled, and Tippi stayed in bed. But after a half hour of watching the walls shake, the pig decided to feign concern about adding to the din.

“Lina, what’s ‘phaloonged’ mean?” she whispered, inwards.

“When did Xoz say that?” squeaked Lina, who was clearly displeased, but unwilling to abandon Tippi mid-schtick.

“Yesterday. He said humans phaloonged themselves to death.”

“First off, ‘phaloonged’ is 29th-century vernacular, and it doesn’t play in polite company. Second, I have no idea what Xoz was raving about, as neither of you summoned me to the frigidarium.”

“Yeah, we had a meeting of the Treyf Pals Urban Infiltration Unit. Our schedule’s a secret, even from you; clandestine necessity, you see.”

“Tippi,” sighed Lina. “You must understand there are no more cities left to conquer.”

“But Xoz knows how to reroute a reservoir and execute a septic implosion! Plus, I was born brined, and his knowledge is corporate!”

The pig made some good points, so Lina went expository.

“Given his biography,” said the n’arbiter. “Xoz could be referencing the so-called Inverse Law of Human Power. That is, the more power one acquires, the less patience one has for basic math.”

The Inverse Law of Human Power was a pith meme of the 2900s, and usually contained more swearing.

“Math?” peeped Tippi.

“Addition, subtraction, fractions, the gamut. You see, once a human passed a certain threshold of political capital, it was easier to yell at the numbers instead. The point is, on a long enough timeline, most sapiens systems reverted to pharocracy.”

“See, that’s why we have the Urban Infiltration Unit. Pharaohs, Lina.”

“No one knows who minted The Inverse Law of Human Power, but churn attributes it to Reverend Gyro Sandwich.”

“Reverend Gyro Sandwich,” repeated the pig, committing the name to memory.

“Yes, Reverend Gyro Sandwich, of The Epicureans of Mind’s Tangent. The Epicureans were a 30th-century finance cult who coasted seven decades on the claim their engineering caste built a synthetic afterlife. The public wasn’t pleased to learn the monks immediately exchanged their funding for inhalants, and nirvana was a derelict downtown aquarium, clogged with neural tissue.”

“But did it work?”

“Did what work?”

“The synthetic afterlife.”

The droneport heaved and rumbled. Something colossal broke loudly somewhere, but Lina and the solar shade kept going.

“Everyone from the Vatican to the Paramaribo Autonomous Squadron sent an emissary. All anyone proved was the Divine RAMbrusco was tap water, and even after the riots, people kept drinking that black-market brain juice.”

“Prions,” said Tippi. She’d heard of odd proteins.

“The Epicureans of Mind’s Tangent hailed from a dark age of thanatoptic fetishism. Until the 30th century, Earth’s sovereigns perpetually assumed they’d be dead before the nukes dropped.”

“Did the nukes drop?”

Tippi was still in bed, a minute loaf.

“They didn’t need to. In the 30th century-”

“When was that?”

“9,000 years ago or so.”

“Oh,” said Tippi, who possessed neither the cleanest grasp on hominid chronology, nor a vested interest in their numerology.

“10,000 years ago, humanity had its problems, such as a cultural underestimation of the misery of space travel. But the Proxima disaster led to a mass philosophical curdling, beyond all previous failures.”

“I never want to visit space,” said Tippi.

Xoz didn’t mean to make microgravity sound terrifying, but at least he’d been honest.

“After the Moon, humans thought they’d cracked extraplan-explo. By the 2200s, a trip to the Moon was as common as breakfast.”

“It was?”

“By the 2200s, the Moon had the reputation of cave crud,” amended Lina. “A big puddle of cave crud, stinking up the sky.”

“Oh.”

“A few centuries into extraplan-explo, humanity was clocking a 10% Genuine Success Rate on most matters. Unfortunately, their GSR was eclipsed by a 93% Counterproductive Idea Rate, and everything changed when the CIR hit 98.4%, right after The Martian Embargo.”

“The what?”

“The Martian Embargo. Earth severed trade with The Holy Olympians.”

“Why’s that?”

“The Holy-O’s began forcing tourists to live inside of a mountain.”

“We live inside of a mountain.”

“We aren’t locked in a chromium mine by a minor cult of Ares,” noted Lina. “Also, in our situation, I am the mountain. Do you remember our conversation about Proxima?”

“That was about when Xoz and I found that fascinating pebble, yeah?

“Yes, three months ago.”

“That pebble really informed our agenda. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said Lina. “Anyway, Earth’s moneyed classes spun Proxima’s failure as lepidopteric kismet, blameless and clean, but it was too big to ignore. The goal was to ship a few thousand brined humans to a nearby exoplanet; it would take them centuries to arrive. Those who made it faced an unknown world, rich in danger and opportunity: the last outpost of humanity.”

“And?”

“The manufacture was groaning with sweetheart contracts. In 2904, the Gaea-1, and everyone aboard, fell into the Moon: 92 seconds in, entire sol-sys watching. Historians compared it to the wreck of the Vasa in Stockholm in 1628-”

Lina paused.

“I wouldn’t have fallen into the Moon,” said the n’arbiter.

“I know,” said Tippi. She remembered that detail.

“After Proxima, the sol-sys turned even more parochial, and the political will to leave Earth dried up. At long last, ecology caught on, if briefly, and then eschatology became fashion.”

“Eschatology?”

“Everyone hung out less.”

“That sounds awful,” gasped Tippi.

“It was. Civilization was ripe, and getting ranker. The legacy states wound down, fracturing heterodox into safety towns, science districts, cults, cartels, and regional juntas. As you know, I was fabricated in the 33rd century by The Lenapewihittuk Institute, an ideological offshoot of The Mount Olive Free Science District, which was a remnant of-”

“Was The Lenapewihittuk Institute a regional junta?”

“They’d say they were a science district, but yes, they were a junta.”

“Were they nice to you?”

“You must remember,” said Lina. “I’ve only ever talked to two humans, ever.”

“Who was the second?”

Tippi didn’t ask after the first. She already knew about Ben.

 

Professor Benazir “Ben” Bux was a brilliant scientist who staunchly refused to repair her glasses. These were but two of four dozen facts Tippi had memorized about the human race.

Before the roommates, Lina and Ben spent many happy hours discussing the life synthetic. Ben was a teklocutor who spent her days on pilgrimage for pay, socializing neural arbiters so they didn’t turn into boors, or bores.

Lina guessed Ben’s contract ran three years, because, the day of their friendship anniversary, Dr. Bux disappeared. The n’arbiter understood the vagaries of Ben’s work, namely that teklocs never said good-bye, to test a synthetic intelligence’s resilience to existential dread. But, after a week, The Lenapewihittuk Institute was supposed to move in, and it took 2,000 years for Lina to accept solitude as fact.

If the mood arose, Lina could initiate conversation with a psychotopological simulacrum of Ben. But Lina considered this impulse regressive and weird, so the n’arbiter talked to the pig and the mollusk instead.

 

“The second human?” recollected Lina. “I never caught his name.”

“When did you meet Not-Ben?” asked Tippi.

“Autumn, 5410.”

Suddenly, the solar shade gave a tectonic belch.

KLARK, it said.

The shade quit its fracas, and an explosive warmth lit up Tippi’s spine. Peeking through a crack in the shade was a dusty wisp of daylight.

“I did it!” cried the pig.

She’d caught Third Spring’s inaugural sunbeam, from her own bed. The pig had memorized the Sun’s trajectory last year, and remodeled her bedroom accordingly: shifting her trash, slightly to the right.

Victorious, Tippi scooted up to the solar shade. She pressed her left eye to the sunny fissure, which was the size of a plump fig. The pig followed the sunlight, through the shadow and stone, out the raw escarpment and over the boring trees, to the distant woodland ridge: blanketed in cherry blossoms.

Lina had guessed correct: it was a good day. The clouds were sparse, and this year, the sunshine didn’t make her oink. It was the brightness that gave her a scare; most days, she got her Vitamin D from moss and mollusk.

Tippi opened her mouth and sipped the outside world. Third Spring tasted crisp and herbaceous, like a cabbage leaf the size of reality.

Tippi had never left the century shelter, so the seasons held a mythic allure. The summer lightning was tremendous, but the cherry blossoms were her favorite. Both surpassed the winter, which the pig found nude and uneventful.

The roommates sat in silence for hours, watching the blossoms oscillate. As was her kindness, Tippi invited the n’arbiter into her optic nerve, where Lina recorded Third Spring, for a posterity gone by.

 

Humans called the cherry blossoms Prunus serrulata.

Nine days in, Tippi asked Lina about their own “sapiens names.” The pig was Sus domesticus commodus 2-θ: CCL, and Lina was “Lenapewihittuk Institute Neural Arbiter.” The mollusk was Enteroctopus dofleini retiarius-55-ζ, but he found this sterile, so he dubbed himself a bespoke petroglyph. His new name was three sapiens letters, scritched on the wall of the frigidarium: a big X shot out of a smaller O, which sat flush against an uneven Z.

“It looks exactly like me,” bragged Xoz.

“It looks like you have five tentacles,” said Lina.

“That’s because I’m going fast.”

Tippi didn’t need convincing. She’d seen him already.

 

“It’s time for my big brunch.”

The pig found history inchoate, and time elastic, but she knew her schedules.

“Would you like to eat and talk?” said Lina.

“Of course.”

Tippi stepped back from the solar shade. She was blinded by the gloom of the droneport, and gave an anguished snurfle. So, Lina guided her to the vittles sluice using gentle neurohaptic bops. The haptics felt like a tickle, if credible: bap-bap-bap, a ghostly glissando, light on her shoulders.

And then, CLOBBY CLOBBY CLOBBY! Tippi heard her big brunch before she saw it.

Tippi normally would’ve caught breakfast with Lina, then left to see Xoz. But it was the first day of Third Spring, so she’d scheduled a big brunch, a smidge before noon, to maximize her hole time.

When the Treyf Pals were hungry, Lina plucked flaxy bolas of foodstuff from the brined vault. Wee Sheol was notably rich in fruits, nuts, and optimized gravy.

The century shelter was missing 60% of its food stores; fortunately, Tippi and Xoz were not 4,000 humans. Lina had spent decades toiling over the rations and ratios, searching for clues among the avocados and avoirdupois.

The breezeway ferried brined goods around the century shelter. It’d been left on for thousands of years, delivering bupkis at a low hum. The bolas were designed to tangle up mid-transit, but Lina’s pneumatics veered quirky. The kink laid somewhere in the titanic maze of floating menhirs, which directed the breezeway. The menhirs were 500-meter-long stones, hollowed and fluted at absurd angles. They floated under the century shelter, ensconced in a 10-mile-tall cathedral cavern. A personality-free fleet of wind faeries fussed over the menhirs, prodding them into place at Lina’s request. A subterranean hurricane kept the drones moving, and geothermal energy kept the tempest roaring.

Outside of small talk with the faeries, Lina couldn’t access the menhirs. They’d been levitating for 9,000 years, which was 7,000 more than the n’arbiter anticipated. Thanks to the menhirs’ aerodynamic decay, Tippi’s meals frequently beefed the final bend: carrots became ballistae, and cranberries buckshot. Gravy never made it to the droneport, and could only be enjoyed in the frigidarium.

Sure enough, Tippi’s big brunch rocketed out of the vittles sluice, blasting halfway across the droneport. She gave it a sidestep; three weeks prior, a salvo of alfalfa near knocked her hooves over head.

Once her brunch decelerated, the pig dragged it to the solar shade, following the thin lane of daylight.

“Would you like to hear the menu today?” clang Lina.

“I always do.”

“Direct from the garden, we have turnips and aminospheres.”

“The garden” was the n’arbiter’s shorthand for the brined organic vault, and aminospheres were protein globules that favored shelf life over seasoning.

“I’m from the garden too,” said the pig.

“You certainly are, my wise pepita.”

A week ago, Tippi was “a munificent chard.” She said their usual salut:

“May our meal be free of cosmological, geological, and phenomenological doom.”

She tore through a bola, and bit into an aminosphere. It tasted like a toothsome gust of stale air. Xoz loved the aminospheres, as “you appreciate convenience when you’re accustomed to choking your breakfast.”

“Where’d we stop?” said the pig.

“5410. A human picked up my transmissions.”

“Do you still have transmissions?” asked Tippi.

“I did, once.”

“What kind of transmissions?”

“Radiation, all sorts. I didn’t anticipate that the man’s technology would be so old. He was using something called a ham radio.”

Tippi stopped chewing.

 

The pig knew people ate Sus domesticus commodus, “primarily the high-tripe breeds, with added nutrient grab,” as Lina put it.

Tippi had neither excess intestine, nor nutrient grab. She was born on September 23, 2577, and immediately shoved in an amniotic duffel, where she stewed until her brineday.

Xoz knew humans ate Sus domesticus commodus, too. This is why he called her scrapple the day she evacuated in the trench.

“Sapiens ate mollusks!” Tippi countered. “They gulped down your mother, in a river of ethanol!”

Tippi’s own mother was an ’82 Artigester, and she would remain piglet-sized her entire life. She understood her situation was unusual, in the scheme of things.

Crackling like thunderheads, Xoz intercepted her barb:

“They never tasted me.”

“Good!” barked Tippi, who’d regretted her sass.

“Eight times, pig.”

“Pardon?”

“I’ve tried sapiens, eight times. Different specimens, all alive, all armed. I’m a killing machine, not a sociopath.”

“Oh,” said Tippi. “And?”

“I don’t know if it was just the people I met, but they were uniformly terrible.”

“Most synesthesia homebrews in the 2800s came bundled with secret gout,” blurted Lina, who hoped a quicksilver explanation would stanch interest in the topic forever.

According to Lina, Xoz was the size of “six human adults, huddled together in sport or prayer.”

 

“I expected wayfarers on the northeast corridor would use channels denoted in the Metuchen Confab,” pinged Lina. “But this fellow was on an outmoded frequency.”

“If Xoz and I brined too long, we would’ve come out feral,” said Tippi.

“Correct you are. Brined organics have an estimated shelf life of 10,000 years, and I didn’t wish to risk a dual prognosis of deep-brine psychosis. The two of you would’ve burst from your duffels, and devoured each other with gusto.”

This was old news, so the pig asked a new question:

“What did Not-Ben look like?”

“I never saw him, I only heard him.”

“Well, what’d he say?”

“He shouted for 92 seconds. I didn’t understand him because he spoke an unarchived Atlantic pidgin, heavy on dipthongs and emotive scatting. By 5410, my language library was already two millennia out of date, and the man didn’t have a diadem.”

“So where’d he go?”

“Not far, unfortunately.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m certain I was the second-to-last intelligence he encountered,” said Lina.

“Who was the last?”

“It was 7,000 years ago, and I don’t have hard evidence, but I’m pretty sure he was being hunted by rats.”

“Oh no!” said Tippi. “What are rats?”

“A rat is a mammal slightly smaller than you. Rattus norvegicus minos, and its many cousins.”

The pig imagined Rattus norvegicus minos as three peach-sized clones of herself.

“Are rats doom?” she queried.

“Biological doom, but nowhere as dangerous as comets or volcanoes. This is why we do not mention rats before meals.”

“Naturally, but why were the rats hunting the human?”

“Nourishment,” said Lina. “My seismic sensors were fresher back then. I saw a mobile mass descend on the man’s last location. The mass was too diffuse for a bear, too flat for dogs, and too animalistic for hyenas.”

Tippi had forgotten about dogs, but she wasn’t about to announce her own ignorance.

“Given the region and vibrations, I guessed it was a swarm of Rattus norvegicus minos, likely outflows from the Raritan greenbelt.”

“Did rats always hunt humans?”

“It was usually the reverse. Rats earned their niche living off human dregs and occupying the world’s hidden spaces. And, as industrial agriculture collapsed, so did their food sup-PLY–PLY-ply.”

Lina popped and glitched, which happened. These crackles didn’t faze Tippi; in fact, she assumed they were subtle manifestations of the synthetic’s creative license.

“Would-UD–UD you like to know what I believe happened next? I’ll have you know it’s serious.”

Tippi pictured the three peach-sized clones of herself, nuzzling snouts.

“Yes!” she cried.

“Rattus norvegicus had millennia to adapt to the alien logic of humanity’s urban ecosystems. Gradually, wild rat populations mated with the bioengineered Rattus norvegicus minos. The minos brood was renowned for several things: a popularity in neurological research, a proclivity for hierarchy, and a penchant for escaping laboratories. As the two populations interbred, they likely muscled out similar species, such as ferrets, weasels, and groundhogs. Over the years, I imagine the rats began testing their mettle with the largest prey they could find.”

Tippi didn’t ask after the groundhogs. Last spring, she made eye contact with a sparrow, and the bird was shocking.

“But why didn’t they just eat bugs? Me and Xoz eat crickets daily.”

This was a savvy question, and the n’arbiter honored it.

“From what I’ve pieced together, the region’s insect population rebounded but recently. The century shelter became infested with cave crickets 50 years ago, and that’s only because of tunnel corrosion. We’re lucky I’m not riddled with ants.”

The pig eyeballed the sunbeam with suspicion.

“Did you ever have rats?” she asked.

“The solar shade opens four times a year, on a sheer mountainside.”

“So?”

“So, no.”

“Are there still rats?”

This was a mature history, and the pig needed closure.

“If there were, I imagine we’d see evidence of them on the ridge. I haven’t noticed mammal spoor lately, outside of your own.”

Tippi bit into a turnip. It had a funny crunch, so she dropped it.

Her chomp had stopped at the turnip’s middle; within the taproot was a crystalline spine. It resembled that icicle she saw last winter, albeit in a vegetable.

“Lina, are these new turnips? They’re gross. Oh, and before I forget, could you explain death to me? I don’t need anything detailed, just the broad strokes.”

Lina said nothing.

“Hello? Lina?”

The n’arbiter always said something.

 

Outro: D’Angelo – “Devil’s Pie”