The Anthropocene

A SolarPunk story by Arveliot

They had made New Mexico lush and green. There was no room left in the world for something as wasteful as a desert. 

The path Roland Thatcherson followed was a wide gravel trail, cutting through a grassy meadow like a solder line on a circuit board. The hard pack was still wet from recent irrigation, and try as it might the wind couldn't pick up any dust. The grass bent and swayed, and waves rippled along the long kilometres to the horizon like the churning of the ocean. The air was sweet and cool and wet, and the whistling gale drowned out the distant hum of the desalination plants.

"Hey, I just got the first basic deposit!" someone called from up ahead. Roland turned away from the grassy field to follow the new noise to its source. It didn't take long, a small gaggle of classmates rushed a head of red hair holding a phone up in the air. And like carrion birds on a carcass the class swarmed, eager to devour something to distract from the long walk.

"Twelve hundred bits!" the same eager voice exclaimed, voice cracking in excitement. Holly Caulder, no one else Roland knew could manage quite the same high notes. And among other things, Holly's excitement meant the class had a new birthday to celebrate. "One each month, for the rest of my life!"

Universal Basic Income started at fifteen, the age where a minor becomes an adult. Not that being an adult let someone vote or leave school until eighteen.

Out of habit, Roland's hand was wrapped around a similar device, thumb rubbing the fingerprint scanner. Despite having ten of those payments, Roland's account was nearly empty.

"Roland," Jamie said, physically accentuating the greeting with a playful punch to the shoulder. Roland was surprised to see Jamie had pulled away from the class as they gathered around Holly.

"Did you buy it?" Jamie asked, in an excited whisper. "Is our plan still on for tomorrow? Are we really going to rob a train?"

Roland cringed, and put a finger in front of Jamie's lips. "Not so loud!" Roland rasped, pointing to their class. "We're not exactly alone."

For a moment — like a single frame in a movie — Jamie blushed, mouth pursed, lips against Roland's finger. But the moment passed, so quickly Roland could believe it hadn't happened. Jamie laughed without remarking on it, and swept an arm towards the class up ahead. "They couldn't hear the professor shouting at them over their own racket," Jamie said. "So, did you buy it? You were saying you might not have enough."

"I had enough. We'll talk about this later, I promise," Roland pleaded. "I just don't want to talk about it at school. Even if we're on a field trip.

"Talk about what?" a voice asked.

Roland whirled around — mouth open and cheeks uncomfortably warm — to see their teacher standing right behind them.

Professor Bates had a wry, knowing grin. A staple for the professor, as much as the unkempt hair, and spectacles in a world where corrective laser surgery was considered a human right. The glasses glinted in the sun, and obscured where the professor was looking. Roland's breath halted midway, and only a stuttering stammer came out.

"Ooh, it must be nefarious," the professor said. Bates looked from Roland to Jamie and back, with that same wry smile, as if ten steps ahead in a game no one else knew they were playing. "But I'll pry it out of you later. We're here."

"Here? What's here besides wet grass and trees?" Roland asked, looking around.

"Trinity," the professor replied, cryptic as ever.

"Oh!" Jamie exclaimed, as the professor jogged ahead. "I forgot. Holly was born on the new year. And this is the beginning of the third century, isn't it?"

Roland didn't answer. Up ahead, a triangular obelisk jutted out from the ground. Perhaps four metres tall and made of dark-grey rock, it stood alone in the green meadow, at the centre of a small clearing of bare gravel.

Like a tombstone.

"And here we are!" Professor Bates said. With little more than a few waves, the professor herded the class into a wide semicircle around the obelisk, arranged so that every member of the class could see the plaque set into the centre. The inscription was badly weather-worn, but the top-half was still legible.

Trinity Site
Where
The World's First
Nuclear Device
Was Exploded on
July 16, 1945

"Today marks the three-hundredth year of the Anthropocene. Historians mark this era from the day the first nuclear device was ever used. By the old Gregorian calendar, the year is 2245 AD," Professor Bates announced. "Happy New Year, by the way. And happy birthday Holly. I heard you just started collecting basic."

They all cheered, including Roland, who did it without reservation and with some enthusiasm.

"So, since we're standing on ground zero of this era of our world's history, let's review. Can anyone tell me what the Anthropocene is?" Professor Bates asked.

A hand shot up in the air, and the professor pointed to it. "Anthropo is human, and cene is a geological term for an era."

"Close, and close enough to be useful. It means the Human Era, and to help make things simple historians decided the era deserved to start with a bang." The professor pointed to the Trinity obelisk. "Splitting the atom was proof the world really was ours, for better and for worse. And we didn't understand the scope of our influence right away. Roland, how many years into the era did it take to get a scientific consensus about our influence on the climate?"

"Fifty years," Roland replied. "The IPCC report."

"Right on the money. So, fifty years to realize we had a problem, another thirty to really get into gear dealing with it, and then what happened at the hundred-year mark?"

"The Final World War," Jamie said.

"And why do we call it final?" Professor Bates asked. "And explain why."

"Because we can't do another one," Roland answered. "We wasted the planet's oil and fissile material. A Cold War, a two-decade depression, another Cold War, the Final World War, and the Blighted Century that followed."

Quieter, bitterly, Roland added, "We used up everything we'd use to get into space, and filled the sky full of satellite shrapnel."

"Right on the money," Professor Bates said, with another one of those confusing expressions the professor was fond of using. "We don't have the resources to do a Fourth World War. The Blighted Century was a hundred years of scarcity because all the infrastructure and tech we depended on was spent. Most of you have great-grandparents who lived through that. But you all know the rest, everyone kept a farm, we started re-engineering the world with projects like the one we're standing in. And it worked; as of four decades ago, the planet started cooling down, and the acidity of the oceans is below where it was during the Final World War."

"But why here?" Jamie asked, waving an arm in the air. "Why are we here today?"

Bates smiled at them. But to Roland, the professor's smile had no joy in it. Not even humour. "Because we lost two things during the Anthropocene that we're not getting back. Does anyone remember what those two things were?"

"The natural world," someone else called out.

"That's one. And well done for remembering that. You have no context for knowing what a natural world is, after all. Forty years into the Anthropocene and forests were another kind of farmland, trees a harvestable crop. The last old-growth forest burned during the Blighted Century. And even though the world is far greener now than it was three hundred years ago, none of it is natural.

"We engineer the world's ecosystem. That's the whole point of calling this era the Anthropocene. We manipulate the climate, the acidity and the temperature of the oceans, the gases in the air we breathe, and what grows on the surface. Like this grassland we're surrounded by, it's less natural than the fabrics your clothes are made of.

"The Final World War. Final because we can't do another one. We spent most of the planet's oil and fissile material on a Cold War, a two-decade depression, another Cold War, the Final World War, and the bad century that followed. Most of you have grandparents or great grandparents who lived through that. These last four decades are the first since the Anthropocene began that the world's actually started to cool down. It's an incredible achievement, but we gave up a lot of things to make it happen. Have any of you ever heard the term 'the natural world'?"

Roland gave a head-shake, as did most of the class.

Professor Bates laughed and waved a hand at the scenery. "Of course you haven't. There's no such thing, that's the whole point of the Anthropocene. This field around us, this Iceland-sized pasture, it's as engineered as the homes you live in. This place gets less than three hundred millimetres of rain a year. These grasslands exist because we pump a hundred cubic kilometres of sea water over the Rocky Mountains, use gigajoules of electricity to desalinate it, and then water these fields using roving irrigation. And we do it all over the world. The Sahara, the Gobi, Greenland and Canada's most northern islands, Antarctica, they're all gardens we made to capture carbon and zetajoules of sunlight, just to cool our planet down. We might have paved the world in green, but we paved over the natural world as surely as if we did it with asphalt."

Roland had no idea what asphalt was, but the professor carried on before that curiosity could be satiated.

"What's the other thing we gave up, during the Anthropocene?" Professor Bates asked.

This question was one Roland was very familiar with. "The stars."

Professor Bates pointed at Roland, but the glib grin the professor usually wore faded when they made eye contact. Thoughts of the stars, of the nights spent trying and failing to see them — even with a telescope — left a bitterness that had Roland's hands shaking. It must've shown on Roland' face as well, since it left the professor tongue-tied for a moment. "Yes, space. Twenty four years into the Anthropocene, we landed on the moon. It was a monumentally expensive undertaking, and for a while it stopped. We went back about fifty-five years after that, and built a settlement. Rumour has it the country that went there built a mass-driver, which prompted the others to use their nuclear weapons and destroy it. Between that, and the atmospheric detonations, we also turned a hundred thousand satellites into roving shrapnel that makes seeing the stars difficult without specialized equipment."

"Is that why we're here?" Jamie asked. "The Trinity monument is sort of a tombstone for what we lost because of the Anthropocene?"

"In a way, yes. We cut down the rest of the natural world because we needed the space to engineer the climate. We also gave up our dream of being a space-faring people, to keep Starship Earth habitable. Nature and the stars, it's not what anyone expected we'd give up to get to where we are."

Roland wasn't as convinced as Professor Bates about how lost the stars really were.

*****

Tens of thousands of lights etched the inky black of night in long, thin lines. East to west, or north to south, the effect looked like a grid drawn in the night, or a net made of light. Like someone had taken a fine white pen to the sky and scribbled over the stars.

Roland sat behind a telescope, adjusting the brightness of a computer monitor to better match the darkness. On the screen, numbers scrolled across in rapid succession, the end result of complicated calculations that would look like gibberish to most eyes. They had looked that way to Roland for quite a while.

"Which piece of debris are you tracking tonight?" Jamie asked.

Roland turned the nearby monitor towards Jamie. "The big cloud."

To most people, that answer would have been indecipherably cryptic, but Jamie had been a part of this project of Roland's since it had begun. But even as familiar with their debris-tracking programs as Jamie was, it was still illegible to Roland's friend. Roland wanted to make it easier to read, but rendering the numbers in a legible program would take computing resources the equipment didn't possess.

Jamie frowned. "That's what's left of the old International Space Station. But why track that? It was one of the first objects we added to the models."

"I'm running a predictive model tonight, rather than a tracker," Roland said, tapping the computer with a pen. "I want to see if the algorithms we wrote up produce accurate results. Figured we should test it against the best piece of data we have."

"Oh. That's clever," Jamie said, sitting down in the nearby chair. "Hey, how much processing power is this eating up?"

"Almost all of it," Roland admitted, pointing to the small block on the nearby table, and then to the phone plugged into it. "But it should be less intensive on a per-item basis once we can track most of the larger objects out there."

"So if we can scale up your hardware capabilities, this project should work," Jamie said.

Roland felt a hard tap on the shoulder, and turned to see Jamie with a strangely pensive expression. Happy, but in a bittersweet sort of way, like the happiness needed a good cry. "What is it?" Roland asked.

"I just wanted you to know I was smiling," Jamie said.

"Oh," Roland said, frozen and frightened like the last time a brown bear had crossed the yard. Jamie had this way of bringing out the intensity of a moment, making the joys brighter and the fears sink into the bones. That smile left Roland both wanting to kiss it, and run away.

"And hey, you brushed off my question when we were at the Trinity site this morning," Jamie said. "Are we still on for tomorrow?"

Relieved to have an excuse to focus on something other than Jamie and the pressure cooker of accompanying emotions, Roland glanced around to make sure they were alone. With no one else in sight, Roland tapped the computer.

"I'm still game if you are," Roland said, spinning the computer screen around so it faced Jamie. "The wire I bought is the last piece we need. Just make sure your bike is charged, and you're at the meet by five-thirty. Bring a backpack, just in case it doesn't all fit into the side car."

"I'll be there," Jamie promised. "Just wish we could do this without having to steal supplies. It bugs me a little, you know?"

Roland understood. Understood Jamie's reluctance, shared it even. But Roland wanted this too much to give it up. "It would take a decade just to buy enough CPU chips on basic. And by the time we find work that pays enough bits to make a powerful computer legally, we'd be in our thirties, likely drowning in adult responsibilities like growing a garden, monitoring the carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere, or if you're lucky, building the new hyperloop routes."

"Come on. Adulthood isn't purgatory," Jamie insisted.

"No. But I don't want to let go of this dream." An ache of a yearning pulled Roland's gaze back up to the night sky cut apart by the orbiting junkyard of their past. "I mean, there's got to be a way to get back up there. And if we do, we can find a way to start collecting it. Maybe our project could help someone do that."

"I think it's a beautiful dream," Jamie agreed. "I'd love to be up there."

Roland's fear was that it would never be anything but a dream.

*****

It wasn't dawn yet in the grasslands that had once been Jornada del Muerto. Dawn had only begun to chase away the night, and a placid fog settled over the fields as the water ripped from the soil settled in the cool night air. The distant whine of the desalination plants made a strange foundation note to accompany the spastic chatter of morning birds.

Roland sat on an electric motorcycle, and watched the clock on the screen as it crept towards six in the morning. Every half-minute, a tap of a boot against the bars connecting an antique sidecar. A reassuring tap, to test the bolts holding the sidecar in place.

"How much longer?" Jamie asked.

"Sprinklers kick on in another minute," Roland said, with a finger pointed at the nearby water tower. "Between that and the fog, we should have plenty of cover from the surveying drones. Turn those LED strings on, the ones we put on our wheels. They'll help us see each other during the ride."

Roland reached down to flick on the lights, and the dark mist gave the blue ring an eerie, surreal glow, like the neon of retro cyberpunk films.

"And you're sure that shorting the maglev line will stop the train?" Jame asked.

Jamie's hands shook on the handlebars of the motorcycle. Eyes wide, gaze flickering.

"We've done the simulations," Roland said, slow and confident. "The track sensors will think it's a power surge from the solar farm. Because the fog burns off quickly, there isn't a slow buildup of solar power like there would be during a sunrise. So we run a power line to the maglev tracks to fake that power surge. Then the train brakes, they take fifteen minutes to run a diagnostic, and it starts up again when they don't find anything wrong. In that fifteen-minute window, we get in, grab what we can, and get out."

"Right. Easy," Jamie agreed.

"Thirty seconds," Roland said, reading off the bike's onboard computer. "You know I asked Professor Bates. There hasn't been a real heist since the dark years after the Last World War. I even had to look the word up."

"Not the way I ever imagined making history." Jamie shifted on the seat, and kicked the stand. "But I can imagine it making history. At least we're doing something."

"Fifteen seconds," Roland said, and put on the helmet hanging on the bike's handlebar. With a tap of the glove's knuckles against the helmet's hard ceramic shell, Roland gave Jamie a thumbs up, and started counting down.

Jamie nodded, and copied Roland.

Roland's hand was spread, showing all five fingers.

Thumb went in.

Pinkie tucked under the thumb.

Ring finger.

Middle.

Roland gripped the handlebars and pulled the throttle. And smiled.

The instant torque from the solid-state batteries launched Roland from nothing to a sprint in a heartbeat. The tire dug a finger's-width into the gravel road as it catapulted the bike forward. The engine screamed in a gleeful, high-pitched whirl, up one octave and then down. Roland's sight turned into a blur of grey mist, punctuated only by the safety lights on the sides of the road.

Roland let out a triumphant scream that no one else would ever hear. The bike climbed past a hundred kilometres an hour. The wind howled, even through Roland's sound-dampening helmet.

To Roland's left, a blur of green light passed alongside, and then ahead. The green hoops of Jamie's illumined bike were barely distinguishable in the dark haze of the mist, and left a long trail of flooded light behind.

Roland didn't need to go this fast. With the sprinklers on for thirty minutes, crossing the twenty kilometres to the small bridge could be done at half the speed Jamie was leading them at. But Jamie, despite the reservations they spoke of before they started, loved the thrill of the speed. There was a phrase to describe Roland's friend, one that only Professor Bates knew, one that confused every other adult that ever heard it.

Adrenaline junkie. Not that Roland had any idea what either of those words meant.

The bike's dashboard timer climbed past nine minutes just as they crossed the bridge. A blur of green light cut across Roland's sight as Jamie carved the turn, the sound of the spray of gravel matching the heavy fall of water from the sprinklers. Roland gaped, amazed, and worried for a moment that the bike, and Jamie along with it, might crash.

But the hazy green lightning bolt whirled around to Roland's left, and disappeared. Roland squeezed the brakes hard, watching the battery level rise as the power-regenerating brakes drank the bike's momentum. At a near crawl, Roland followed Jamie under the small bridge, where they'd wait for the train.

"Good grief, Jamie," Roland said, coming to a stop alongside. "Who taught you to drive like that?"

"Far as I know, no one drives like that. It's a lost art," Jamie replied, guiding the bike into a recess beneath the bridge. "It took a while to find instruction videos in the archives. No one's really been racing since the first century. Anyway, I'm still waiting to see that cable you spent your life savings on. Been driving me nuts with how you've kept it so close to your chest."

Roland sauntered to the sidecar and fished out a bundle of heavy cable, holding it up in the air like a newly won trophy. "I don't know what kind of amperage rating I need to short the train, since I couldn't find the plans for anything like them. So I spent nearly every bit I've made on basic, and got enough copper to make the ultra-high-capacity power lines. They're in the history archives, so it's not restricted information."

"Are you sure that's enough?" Jamie asked.

"It's the same rating as the cables that carried power from the Three Gorges Dam. It's overkill." Roland began to lay out the thick cable along the ground.

"What's overkill?"

"One of the professor's expressions." Roland shrugged, and kept working. "Hey, check my bike's alarms. How long until the next timer?"

"Ten minutes." Jamie accented the unspoken point by sitting down on the cement, making a show of getting comfortable. "Hey, do you think anyone's still up there?"

"Up where?" Roland asked, confused.

"Up on the moon. Back in the first century, when we were still sort of tribal. One of them, the one that existed on this continent, they built a base on the moon, didn't they?" Jamie pointed towards the horizon, and Roland didn't doubt that Jamie was pointing straight at the moon. Even as a kid, Jamie always seemed to know where every visible planet in the solar system was. "So if they developed it enough, do you think people could still be living there?"

"Two hundred years in a limited biosphere, with no hope of ever being resupplied?" Roland looked from left to right. "That's two hundred years where their solar panels needed to keep working. Where their ecosystem needed to avoid diseases or contaminants. Where every plant they have needed to avoid dying. We all know how tricky gardens can be over a long time, every kid grows up with it. Imagine trying it in a place where the first fungal infection in a potato could kill your only source of food?"

"True. But what if?" Jamie asked, defiantly.

Roland scoffed, and wanted to laugh. The idea of living in a place other than Earth was absurd. Every kid who had ever lived knew as much. Life was too complicated, required too much work to maintain, to just transplant a piece of it and carry it off into the void. Everyone on Earth, growing up with parents and grandparents who remembered scarcity, knew how hard it was to manage an ecosphere.

But another thought worm from Professor Bates popped into Roland's musings. Something about how people don't dream anymore. And Jamie was here, with Roland, chasing a dream. It didn't seem right to laugh at it, no matter how nonsensical.

"What if..." Roland agreed, following Jamie's gaze. Not seeing the Moon, not with the fog and the rising sun, but knowing it was there.

Silence followed for the next few minutes, leaving little but Roland's wandering thoughts to mark the passing time. So it wasn't until those thoughts wandered back into the moment, and considered the wealth of copper in the wire now lying on the ground, that Roland leapt up and dashed over to the train line.

"Blimey. Jamie, what's the time left?"

"Ninety seconds," Jamie said, laughing so much it was hard to hear the words. Roland only figured out what Jamie said when the train finally came into view. Jamie, still laughing, waved a warning finger. "Relax, Roland. Haste oft trips on its own feet."

"Right," Roland grumbled, pushing a power panel open and plugging one end of the heavy power cable into it. With a hand on the cable, Roland followed it to the other end, where about two hundred millimetres was unshielded.

Roland picked it up about an arm's length before the bare end, and held the unshielded wire above the tracks. "Jamie. Count me down."

"One minute, four seconds," Jamie replied with a laugh.

Roland's shoulders sagged, and carefully lowered the cable back down. In a low squat, familiar from a lifetime of gardening and cooperative sports, Roland waited.

After an eternity, Jamie finally gave another warning. "Thirty seconds."

Roland waited, cable in hand, as Jamie counted down. "Twenty... ten... five... four... three... two... one."

Roland dropped the cable onto the track. There was a hard clack from somewhere nearby, and, a heartbeat later, the squeal of the train's brakes.

Roland pulled the wire free, turned around, and dashed back to the power box to unplug it. By the time the box was latched shut and Jamie helped wind the cable back into the sidecar, the train's lead car was passing through the tunnel.

Roland took a deep breath, and held it. The blur of passing cars slowed, slowed too much to be called a blur, and just as the last car came under the bridge, stopped. Roland waited, breath held, for just a moment longer before letting out a triumphant cry.

Jamie tried to look unimpressed, which was hard when you wore a grin from one ear to the other. "It was supposed to stop right in front of us."

"I dropped the cable a tenth of a second too early," Roland admitted.

They looked at each other for a moment, just a moment, before they gave up trying to be cool. "That was awesome! Unbelievable!"

"Exactly like in the simulation, not even twenty metres off!"

"That was the coolest thing I've ever seen!"

Roland stopped jumping after a minute, and stepped up to the car door. "I just realized that I didn't bring bolt cutters."

"For what?" Jamie asked.

"You know. If they had put a lock on the door. Like they did in the old days."

"Not sure you'd know what a lock looked like," Jamie said, and reached for the door handle. "Come on. You said the valuable stuff is always kept in the back car."

"Yeah. In case the train derails, the autopilot decouples each car and slams on the brakes. So the back car is always most likely to survive a crash," Roland explained, following Jamie in.

It took a moment to adjust to the dim light inside the train, but when it happened, Roland found himself staring at unimaginable wealth.

Shelves lined the car, each stuffed full of sucrose-plastic bags, carefully labelled, with the familiar nozzle in one corner to connect to a standard 3D printer. Hundreds of bags of preform silicon, copper, gold, and more. Other shelves were stacked full of computer parts like terabit solid-state drives, processing units, specialized sensors, rare metals, and more.

There was a millennium's worth of basic payouts on each shelf.

"This is, it's amazing," Jamie said, running from one shelf to the next. "We could build a thousand computers like the one you need, and they'd never notice any of it was gone!"

"They must build the global weather-modelling computers with this," Roland whispered in awe. "The modelling used to cool the world, when we stopped stumbling in the dark trying to reforest deserts without knowing if it would work. I can't."

"Can't what?" Jamie asked.

Roland wasn't sure. Seeing this bounty of the world's wealth was, to Roland, a nearly religious experience. "I can't take this, Jamie."

"Why not?"

"It's just... how much have we spent to make all of this? Did we mine it, or recycle it from the garbage pits of the first century? There's so many people who had a hand in making this treasure," Roland said, trying to explain the ache and shame. "How many people's work are we stealing from by taking this?"

"Roland, we're not hurting anyone," Jamie insisted. "We just take exactly what we came here to grab. Take just what we need to make your computer. Look at all of this, they're practically hoarding."

Roland shuddered. To even hear the word, used in any context beside storing the food you grew, was akin to hearing Jamie swear. Hearing it associated with what should be community resources made Roland flinch and eager to find reasons to disagree.

But there was just so much wealth in this train, that the stain of Jamie's accusation couldn't be washed away. "Yeah," Roland said, and snatched a bag of processing chips. "Just what we need."

Together, Jamie and Roland counted out the resources the project needed, and carefully made sure what they took met those requirements without going far beyond. Barely a rounding error compared to the wealth being left behind. A dozen bags in all, their whole score fit into Jamie's duffel bag.

Jamie went through the door first. Last one out, Roland stepped down to slide the door of the train car shut. "Still another six minutes before the train's self-diagnostic finishes, Jamie," Roland said, hoping to be gone before the train started moving again.

But turning around, Roland saw Jamie's hands raised up, the duffel bag forgotten on the ground. And just in front, a third motorcycle.

Someone was sitting on the bike, a black object in hand. In Roland's imagination, it was a gun, or a taser, a baton, or a knife. But the rider was wearing the tan shirt and dark brown pants of a park ranger, looking as surprised as either of them. The ranger who was slowly trying to stitch words together into a coherent sentence.

"Are you two kids, uh..." the ranger trailed off, looking at the object Roland was convinced was a dangerous weapon. "Are you robbing this train?"

Roland realized the object was a phone. The ranger had to look up the word, because a robbery hadn't happened in any of their lifetimes. Roland looked over to Jamie, too terrified to know how to react. "I— Yeah. I guess we are."

*****

The room Roland and Jamie now sat in was a concrete cube, with the north wall entirely taken up by a one-way mirror. The air was stale, the concrete bore long cracks all across the face of the walls, and the single vent beside the hanging lamp only worked in short, choking spurts.

Almost as if they hadn't used an interrogation room in so long this was all they could find.

Roland had been sitting at one side of the single table, beside Jamie, for most of a day. An assortment of officials had been in and out during that time, more sightseers and gawkers than people with serious questions. Even the federal interrogator, all bluster and grandiose titles at first, quickly fell into taking the sequence of events with a measure of awe.

Like they had captured a pair of creatures previously thought to be extinct.

"What do you think happens now?" Jamie asked.

Roland shrugged, long hours finally wearing down on the adrenaline rush of being caught. Right now, the whole experience just seemed tedious. "I don't think they know. This whole day's made me feel like an exhibit at a wildlife sanctuary."

"You too?" Jamie asked with a laugh.

"I think they'll reclaim the materials for the computer, and tell me I can't program for at least another five years. They might even stick us in a remote work camp, to tend to a desalination plant."

"They'll want to be harsh, make an example of us. Scare off anyone else who might get inspired by our story," Jamie agreed.

"They'd be right to. If someone else tried what we did, someone could have gotten hurt."

Jamie looked appalled and frightened at the thought. "No way. We planned that out thoroughly. No one was getting hurt on our account."

"The next people who do that won't plan it," Roland said. "They won't have a reason to, not like we did. They'll do it because we showed them a way to act out. They don't have what we have. Something, I don't know the word for it."

At that, the door opened, and the very last person Roland was expecting walked in. Unkempt hair, glasses, and a smile without humour. More the smile of a cat as it stalked mice. "The word you're looking for is 'ambition'," Professor Bates said, taking the empty seat across from them.

"What's an ambition?" Jamie asked.

"It's part goal, part wish, and part dream," Professor Bates said, setting a small metal tube on the table. Strangely, the professor seemed very keen to keep the object out of sight of the one-way mirror. "It's another word we've forgotten."

"You make it sound like we lost a lot to get to our future," Jamie said accusingly.

"We did," the professor said. With a flourish, Bates set the device upright on the table, and pressed a button. "Now, let me start by saying I don't think I've ever been prouder of any of my students. The two of you did something amazing today. It just remains to be seen if what you've done is kick an old engine into gear, or crack the foundation of your world."

Roland looked to Jamie, relieved to see neither of them understood the professor. "Won't you get into trouble, talking like that?" Jamie asked eventually.

"They can't hear us right now. This is a signal jammer." Professor Bates tapped the device in the middle of the table. "And this two-hundred-year-old police station still relies on wifi. The cameras and audio equipment won't work for a while. So for a few minutes at least, I can talk honestly with the two of you."

Professor Bates smiled wider. "The two of you are up to your neck in shit, you know. Even if you committed a crime that didn't hurt anyone, took so little material the receiving site would have written it off as a clerical error, and drove yourselves to the authorities, they can't let you off easy. And you're right, Roland, it's more about making sure someone less careful never tries your stunt."

Roland slumped down, defeated. "What are they going to do to us? Prison? Worse?"

"What era do you think you live in?" Professor Bates laughed. "A pair of first-time, juvenile offenders, going to prison for a non-violent offence? What you have is a plea deal of six years each, on a project. And you'll only be collecting basic for those six years."

"Oh no," Jamie shook, on the verge of tears. "Six years, and known criminals. We'll never do more than be on basic, will we?"

"Perhaps. But I talked them into letting you serve your six years with me," Professor Bates said with a wink. "I dropped by to see your parents, Roland. And I took a good look at the simulator you're making. It's a piece of art, and it could knock a decade off my own project."

"Your project, Professor?" Jamie asked.

"To get us back up there." Professor Bates pointed up, towards and past the ceiling.

"But you've said it yourself, we can't. We spent most of our oil and fissile material in the first century."

"Rocket fuel isn't made of petrochemicals, and the only difference between a hyperloop train and a mass accelerator is the direction it's pointed in. Being stuck on Earth is a myth, but it's an important one to the world." Professor Bates leaned forward, and very quietly added, "And it's one the world won't let go of easily."

The professor looked from Roland to Jamie and smirked, as if enjoying a private joke. "One more lesson. What we gave up to get our shit together as a species. When we started engineering the world's climate in order to cool it down, and clean it up. We had to erase the things that divided people, make sure the generations to come would see us as a single entity. We decide to forget certain concepts, like excessive individuality, nations, your right to property. You can hear it best in language, with all the words schools and parents stopped teaching. It took about six generations, but we managed to stop using words like he or she, mine, possession, property, ambition, audacity, and more. None of us think of things as ours, unless we're using them. That was deliberate, it helped make sure we all focused on fixing the mess our ancestors made."

The professor paused for a moment. "Don't judge them too harshly, because it worked. And we might all be dead if it hadn't. But we spent six generations living the myth that Earth is all we have, and I'd like to disprove that."

"What do you mean?" Roland asked. "You want to go back to that moon base?"

"Someday. But I'd like to start, Jamie, by putting you in space. In the next five years. I can get you up there, Roland can make sure it's safe, and you can bring something back down and prove it can be done." Professor Bates held up a hand, palm out. "So, do you two want in? Or are you going to strangle your ambitions in their infancy? I can respect you saying no, it's a choice our ancestors once made to save the world."

"I'm in," Jamie blurted out, almost before the professor had finished speaking.

It bothered Roland that he'd asked so little about Jamie's dreams before now. "I'm in," Roland echoed.

Professor Bates tapped the table. "Then raise your right hand, and repeat after me."

Awkwardly, Jamie and Roland did as their professor asked. "This hand is mine," Professor Bates declared. Roland repeated it, tripping over the unfamiliar word.

Professor Bates followed with a tap to the chest. "This heart is mine." And when Roland repeated it this time, the words came out without a stutter.

"My dreams are mine," the professor finished. "And the world will not take them from me."

"My dreams are mine," Roland repeated. For the first time, he thought of something as his, and his alone. "The world will not take it away from me."