White and Other Tales of Ruin

Peter was right. The forest coated the hillside way down into the valley, and at its edge sat his house, its grounds and the winding driveway leading down to the road. Thankfully the animals and gargoyles were well hidden from this distance, so the scene took on a sense of magnificence and innocence, untainted by an old man’s paranoid foibles. It was also possible too to see just how isolated this place was. Roads criss-crossed the countryside here and there, but the patchwork of fields which Doug was used to in the more farm-oriented lands to the south was all but absent here. The land was retained entirely by nature.

“I’ll take a turn now,” Peter said, stooping to scoop Gemma into his arms.

“Peter, come on, you’re not the young man you used to be.” Doug reached out and tried to take Gemma from his arms, but the old man’s expression was one of such hurt that he stepped back and raised his hands in supplication. “Just don’t overdo it, “ Doug said. “I can’t see me and Lucy-Anne carrying the both of you.”

They continued uphill, Doug and Lucy-Anne walking either side of Peter so that they could constantly touch their daughter, hold her hand, chatter away in an attempt to wake her up.

“How much further?” Lucy-Anne asked after another few minutes.

“We’ve no destination,” Peter said. “Tell me when you’re happy to stop, and we’ll stop.”

She nodded. “I want to walk forever. If another footstep will give us another second, I want to keep walking.”

Doug knew what she meant, but he was also aware that she was not serious. They could fight for another few seconds, or they could sit and talk and eat a final meal, drink a last glass of wine.

He would never make love to his wife again; never feel her sigh on his cheek as she came; never have a play-fight with her while Gemma attacked them both with her array of teddy bears; never eat a TV dinner; never swim from a sun-drenched beach out to a yacht; never appreciate a good painting, a thrilling book, an evocative piece of music … he would never hear music again …

Doug lived for music.

“Here,” he said. “We stop here. We’ll live what we can here, there’s no point going any higher or any further.” He gave Lucy-Anne a hug and kissed her neck.

Peter eased Gemma to the ground, stood and flexed his back, groaning and cursing. “Bright girl, maybe, but she’s a heavy one too.”

As if on cue, Gemma woke up and began to talk once more.

She told them about viroids, nucleic acid strands with no protein coating, and how they cause stunting in plants. She divulged the basics of chaos theory, especially relating to weather patterns and spread of infectious disease. Then after a pause she was back onto nanotechnology, and how the silicone-based had transmuted into a biology-based technology over the past few years. And how self-replicating nano-machines had been created, manmade viruses which had one major advantage over their natural counterparts: they could function perfectly well on their own. They consumed organic and inorganic materials alike, breaking them down, rearranging their constituent parts, creating more of themselves. They did not need a host to replicate.

And they were unstoppable.

Peter opened a bottle of wine and poured three glasses, but only he drank. Doug and Lucy-Anne tried to quieten their daughter, but Gemma only waved them away, told them she was fine and then continued her bizarre monologue.

And the strangest thing was, her eyes were sparkling as she spoke, her hands formed shapes in the air as she illustrated her thoughts and ideas, and she smiled as she revealed another complex truth. It was her talking, Doug realised. It was Gemma saying these weird, wondrous things, his daughter, his little girl. It was not long before all three adults knew for sure what Doug had suspected all day: that Gemma had not known any of this before now.

She was learning and imparting at the same time.

“Gemma,” Doug tried again, “how do you know all this? Who’s telling you? Gemma, you’re making Mummy and Daddy sad.”

She stopped. Instantaneously, half-way through a series of equations that had lost the adults the moment she had begun reciting them. She looked at Doug, and behind her enthusiastic face he saw his tired, scared daughter. “I don’t want to make you sad, Daddy. I really don’t. But some things have to be said.”

She looked away again, facing south, as if challenging their approaching doom with examples of what humanity had achieved and learned in its too-brief time on the planet. The fact that the doom was a fruit of humanity’s mis-directed labours did not matter, any more than the cause of wind or the sound of clouds mattered. “There’s nobody else to say them,” she whispered. And then she started again.

The association of reflex points on the feet and remote organic functions …

Fractionation, and how liquid air can be divided into its component parts at minus one hundred and ninety-six degrees centigrade …