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The Anchor is not immediately visible when the transmission comes back online. The date reads August 6, 2047. One year and one day have passed in the bunker. The Anchor emerges from the gloom, a cat’s cradle strung between their fingers. They express immediate relief that TERI has once again made contact. They had apparently expected the connection the day before, exactly one year after the first one, and had despaired when it had not occurred.
Participants from 2019 suggest the Anchor try the second podium, but the force field once again prevents their approach. The Anchor then learns that only one day has passed in the year 2019. This disparity of time’s passage is notable but remains mysterious. The ensuing procedure is similar to the first transmission: the Anchor has algorhythms to share, but must ask a question first. The question is: “Even before this global tragedy, the event, we lost the forests. I miss the smells of the trees, the campfires we once sat around each summer in the town where I was born. What do you hope to still have in 2049? What could you not imagine living without?” Some answers from 2019 include: circuses, the stars (without light pollution), bubble tea, flowers and rain, dogs, beaches and the ocean, singing, and my family.
The Anchor, satisfied with these answers, conjures three glyphs in the air. Once again, viewers guide the Anchor with the help of sound cues to reproduce the shapes with their body. They succeed in mimicking the shapes, but the forcefield still holds strong. The Anchor then asks whether the shapes can be combined. Viewers prompt the Anchor to make the three shapes with their head, torso, and legs all at once. This combination generates the white flash.
The Anchor moves to the second podium and retrieves the plush dinosaur that sits upon it. We learn that it is named Braid. Another ghostly shadow appears in the room with the Anchor and the transmission once again cuts without warning.
Following the live broadcast, another Anchor memoir streams. It reads:
August 6, 2047
“It’s 8:15, that’s the time that it’s always been.”
Why should I speak? What could another story even accomplish? The scale of this emergence exceeds human comprehension. Maybe this is a world in which narrative fails us.
The Fourcasters did not do enough. We did not do enough. So many people thought nuclear energy would solve the problems of climate change (and maybe in another world, it did). In fact, solar energy and wind farms had far greater potential for reducing CO2 emissions.
The bigger problem was that they forgot the past. They forgot Kyshtym and Chernobyl and Fukushima. For those who only cared about the United States, they even forgot Three Mile Island. Perhaps they never even learned about Hanford, in order to subsequently forget it. And then of course they forgot about the warheads, even when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset their Doomsday Clock, closer and closer to midnight. Today of all days, on August 6, I cannot forget that possibility. This was the day of the atom bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. This was the day on which the world recognized itself as a global world. This was the day the rules changed. We received a glimpse of deep time for which we could not have been prepared.
“Enola Gay, it shouldn’t ever have to end this way.”
And then the accidents began. Of course, accidents are not accidental. Every technology conditions and gives birth to its own accidents. These accidents were horrific in their expression and scope.
No one could yet know it in 1945, but in a flash, the whole world became Fukushima. The future erupted, sending ripples back into the past. Time swung off its hinges. Temporal shrapnel. Future cause leading to past effect. Hysteron proteron at a global scale. That was August 6, 1945. And then almost a hundred years later to the day, we finally understood the cause of that incomprehensible event.
There is probably nothing more to say about the past of this world when I cannot see a future, any future. A life without a future is unbearable. So, all I do in this room now is mourn and wait. Even in a less confined space, so much of life is spent in waiting. In the twenty-first century people built mobile devices to help them wait: not to experience time but to endure it. I remember: we would pass time on screens and time would pass us by. We would kill time, execute it. I think to myself sometimes that waiting is more essentially human than even thought or emotion. Machines can think. You, TERI, produce emotional responses. But you don’t wait, not really. You only respond or break down. Machines are fast, waiting is slow. You perform the tasks I assign to you as quickly as possible, without waiting. But human beings wait for so many things. We wait for better times. We wait for progress. We wait for the passage of history. We wait for love. We wait to grow up and then we wait to die. We even wait for artifical intelligence to finish the calculations and reconfigurations with which we entrust them. We wait for the climax of a story.
Waiting is quintessentially human. It’s the shape that our desire takes. For this reason, I will wait here, in the Terrarium, for their summons. When they return, as I know they must, my waiting will come to an end, at least for a time. Or perhaps I conjure them like the algorhythms that I prompt but cannot see. Regardless of their origin, we collaborate across space and time.
“It’s never ever gonna fade away.”
