I

You’ve never seen something like this before.

No one in your class has. You’re standing on the observation balcony of the timedeck, all twenty-four of you, staring out through six layers of reinforced carbon-mesh plexiglass. No one speaks. No one even picks up a datapad.

Somewhere to your left, lost in the long single-file line of seventeen-year-old wannabe valedictorians, someone coughs. The noise feels like sacrilege.

It used to be so blue.

II

You wonder what it would be like to stand on it. The planet. You know you can’t, really; your teacher wasn’t very clear on the details, but you’ve been covering time-view mechanics in AP Physics E. You’re stuck in this place, at this moment, and it’s the only accessible time-view point for several thousand years on either side. There’s an extremely complicated proof explaining why this is the case, but the full explanation involves at least one partial differential equation, so your Physics teacher just assumes you’ll take his word for it.

He’s probably right, regardless. If it were possible to set foot on the planet’s surface, someone would have done it already. Someone would have answered the questions, the Big Questions, the ones that really ought to have overthrown the Second Millennium Problems and the unexplained quantum processor barrier and the stable superconductor search. The ones you, and everyone around you, are thinking at this very moment.

One: How did this happen?

Two: How do we stop it?

III

You know the following information from your classes:

AP Physics D: Given your understanding of open-loop time dynamics, stopping it ought to be possible.

AP World History: Given your understanding of planetside governance and global corporate politics, it may not be.

IV

Even though it’s impossible, you imagine yourself on the surface anyway. The planet isn’t really black; it just looks that way because of the smog that chokes the atmosphere. Beneath the inscrutable cloud layer, there must be remnants of the past: ancient buildings, metal frames pitted and scarred from weathering and acid rain. Dirt, which the roots of grasses and flowers and towering trees once clung tightly to, now a dry, bleached whitish-gray.

Corpses. Are there corpses down there?

There may not be any animals to speak of. Most of them are already dying, in your time, though perhaps a zoo or two has survived long enough to mark the passing of its inhabitants: a bio-dome, carbon-mesh plexiglass a half mile across, now blackened by smog and cracked down the middle to reveal the bones eroding away within the bracken. Perhaps it’s the one you visited last week, for this very same class.

(Last week, some three and a half thousand years ago, that is.)

But even if there aren’t any animal remains, certainly there must be human ones. You wonder how long humanity lasted under that ugly black cloud, how they struggled and strove and who was the last to die. Maybe some of them got out. Thirty-six hundred years is a long time; maybe there are humans still alive and kicking on some exoplanet light-years away, or maybe there’s a generation ship, its inhabitants in cryosleep, slowly drifting away through the cosmos.

Still, though. They wouldn’t have taken everybody. A society that could have taken everybody would have stopped the disaster in the first place. There are corpses down there. In all likelihood, there are billions of them.

You stop imagining.

V

Remember, everyone, says a voice behind you. We only have forty-five minutes on the timedeck, and your worksheets are the only thing you’re being graded on today.

It’s your Climate Sciences teacher. (Regular Climate Science, not AP; only the country’s most prestigious high schools offer AP Cli. Not enough people to teach it; anyone who’s qualified has better things to do than workshop lesson plans for high schoolers. But you’ll deal with the hit to your GPA—this is important.)

The teacher’s voice is soft, but it carries. Every sound carries here.

You want to turn around and yell at her for breaking the moment. When you do turn, she’s staring up at the ceiling and gripping a datapen so tightly her knuckles are white.

You don’t yell. You’re glad you didn’t.

When you take your datapad out of your backpack, the light from the screen feels wrong. It’s too harsh; too bright. You lower it, then bring up the worksheet. But you don’t write yet. It feels like a violation, here, to do something as mundane as writing. For thirty long seconds, it feels like you’ve even forgotten how to read.

(Thirty seconds for you. Thirty seconds back home. For the planet below, no time passes at all.)

You drag your eyes back to the worksheet. You scroll a bit, aimlessly. There are five questions on it; twenty points each. Some look longer than others. Maybe those should have been worth more? But who are you to judge; you’re not teaching the class.

Then you realize what you’re doing, counting up points while you stare at the corpse of a planet below.

VI

Someone asks you if you have a spare datapen. You hand them yours, wordlessly, without looking. They wander away, take a seat, start writing.

VII

VIII

Your Climate Sciences teacher asks you why you aren’t writing. This worksheet is a field study, and field studies are worth twenty-five percent of your grade. The class has five field studies, so each is half a letter grade.

You stare through the timedeck’s window.

This worksheet is worth half a letter grade.

You think, for a moment, that letter grades are worthless here. How many of the billions of corpses below were scientists? How many more, in the thirty-six hundred years since you? How many of them were brilliant, top of their class, graduates summa cum laude? How many of them ran the same numbers? How many of them failed to make a difference?

I lent someone my datapen, you say. I’m not sure where they went.

IX

You do your calculations with your teacher’s datapen. It feels heavy in your hand, almost alien. But you can still do the math with it.

You could probably do the math without it, even. Run the numbers in your head. This is a standard-load class, two prerequisites: Algebra II, freshman Chemistry. The concepts are straightforward, introductory. They’ll make you feel like you can answer the First Big Question, at least in part, or at least that’s what you were promised at the very beginning of the year.

The First. But not the Second. No one’s sure about the Second.

And they won’t teach you everything, not here. The real numbers can’t be run in thirty minutes, by hand, without an internet connection on an observation deck locked in time.

X

Open-loop time dynamics says: the moment you leave here, the timeplane changes. It folds around you, for you, based on how your experience and your observations inform your future actions: the will-have-been.

What the next group sees will not be exactly what you saw. It might be better. It might be worse. There’s another extremely complicated proof explaining why this is the case, and it’s another one your Physics teacher wants you to take his word for. You’ve never wanted to take your Physics teacher’s word for things, and now you don’t want to take your Climate Science teacher’s word for them, either. You want to know. You want to write the proof yourself. You want to understand to exactly what extent change is possible.

That’s why you need to succeed, here and now—so that they’ll teach you. So that they’ll keep teaching you until you have the tools to fix this.

More than once, you find yourself wiping tears off your datapad with your sleeve.

XI

You finish the worksheet early. Most of the class does, too. You stare through the plexiglass, silent, together, down at the haze and the smog and the dark.

You try not to think. You’ve done enough thinking for the day. But you can’t keep your mind from spinning, and you can’t pull your eyes from where they’re fixed on the planet below.

Then the warning bell sounds. Your time here is up.

You depart the balcony, not quite single file, heads turned over shoulders for one last look. Everyone is eager to leave, and everyone wants nothing more than to stay.

XII

Someone walks up to you, turns your backward gaze away from the window. They take your hand to press your datapen into your palm, thanks for letting me borrow it, and your dampened sleeve brushes against their dampened sleeve.

XIII

When you step off the timedeck together, neither of you lets go.

Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors