I. Jane

ON MONDAYS, her mom always calls her from the moon.

“Get to work okay?”

“Nope.”

“No?”

“Sorry to say this. I’m dead.”

“That’s nice, Jane. That’s a nice reaction to your mother caring about you.”

“Like, really dead. Super dead. Burned up on reentry to Earth. It was gruesome.”

“Someday you’re going to feel bad about this conversation.”

“I already feel pretty bad about it.”

“I’m serious. You’ll understand. When you have a kid of your own.”

“You realize I’d have to actually meet a guy in order for that to happen?”

“It’s a long way from our little satellite. All I do is worry about you, and I have to deal with this?”

“Mom. I’m okay. Are you?”

“I’m fine. Just fine.”

“Very convincing,” Jane says.

Then it’s quiet on the line. Jane listens to the crackle of white noise—cosmic background radiation—a faint reminder of the big bang. A single event 13.7 billion years ago, working itself out.

From Monday to Friday, Jane lives here. Two hundred forty thousand miles from her mom. It’s a weird distance. Not cosmic. Not even galactic. Just far enough. The size of the local situation. Radius of their private little system.

Today marks the middle of the off-season. Three months since the last of the tourists packed up and shuffled off to various subdivisions on Europa. It’ll be another couple months before the cycle begins again, early birds trickling in. Until then, weeks of solitude, broken up by occasional stragglers, bargain hunters, retirees on cut-rate packages looking for a hot meal and a clean restroom.

Come to Earth! the looping promo video says. Jane wishes she could turn it off, but the remote’s broken. She stretches, sips coffee, watches it for the ten thousandth time.

 

COME TO EARTH! Yes, that Earth. A lot of people think we’re closed during construction, but we’re not. The gift shop is still open for business.

Admittedly, it’s a little confusing.

First we were Earth: The Planet. Then life formed, and that was a great and good time.

And then, for a little while, we were Earth: A Bunch of Civilizations!

That lasted until the AI in charge of geoengineering got out of whack. Which made the oceans crazy hot. Which caused weather patterns to go berserk. Which led to fish stocks collapsing. Followed by the terrestrial food web also collapsing, and from there it wasn’t long before nation-states began to dissolve and the entire world order destabilized.

A lucky few escaped and went out in search of new worlds to colonize. Or so we’re told. The record-keeping that far back gets pretty iffy.

Then, for what seemed like an eternity, we were Earth: Not Much Going On Here Anymore. And that lasted for a pretty long time. Which was then followed by a really long time.

After a couple of eons, humans, having established colonies on other planets, started to come back to Earth, for vacation. Parents brought their kids, teachers took their students on field trips. Retirees arrived by the busload. They wanted to see where their ancestors had come from.

But there was nothing here.

Kids and seniors, parents and teachers, every one of them came with hope. And they all went away deflated. That’s it? they would say, or Earth was okay, I guess, but I kinda thought there would be more?

So, being an enterprising bunch, some of us got together and reinvented ourselves as Earth: The Museum, which we thought was a great idea. We pooled our resources and assembled what we could find.

To be sure, there was not a lot of good stuff left after the collapse of Earth: A Bunch of Civilizations!

One of us had a recording of Maria Callas singing the Violetta aria in La Traviata. We all thought it sounded very pretty, so we had that playing over the PA system. There was also a television showing episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. People, long gone, laughing and clapping together. And the main attraction of the museum was a painting we had by some guy of some flowers. No one could remember the name of the guy or the painting, or even the flowers, but we were all pretty sure it was an important painting at some point in the history of paintings and also in the history of people, so we put that in the biggest room, in a wing of the museum called Early Cultures (located by the elevators on the second floor, near the restrooms).

But parents and teachers, being humans (and, more importantly, being descendants of the same humans who messed everything up in the first place), thought the whole museum was quite boring, or even very boring, and they would say as much, even while we were still within earshot and we could hear them saying that to each other, about how bored they were. That hurt to hear, but more than that, what was hurtful was that no one was coming to Earth anymore, now that it had been scaled back to what was, in all honesty, no more than a small and somewhat eclectic collection of, well, stuff.

And who could blame them? After the collapse of civilization, education has just never been the same. Nowadays, by the time kids are done with their five years of mandatory schooling, they are eight or even nine years old and more than ready to join the leisure force as full-time professional consumers. Those with money, anyway. The ones who could afford to having long ago scattered to far-flung regions of the cosmos. Wherever they are now, they have continued this tradition from their days on Earth—credit accounts opened, spending tracked, constantly earning points in their lifelong loyalty rewards programs. And humans do love their rewards programs—especially those humans who are rich enough to be tourists coming back here to Earth.

Eventually, one of us realized that the most popular part of the museum was the escalator ride. Although you would think interstellar travel would have sort of raised the bar on what was needed to impress people, there was just something about moving diagonally that seemed to amuse everyone, and then one of us finally woke up and said, well, why not give them what they want?

We did some research, on the computer, and also in the few books we had left, and the research confirmed our hypothesis: More than anything else (even loyalty rewards), humans love rides.

So Earth: The Museum was shuttered for several years while we reinvented ourselves, developed merchandise and attractions, things we’re naturally good at, and after a long while we were able to reopen as Earth: A Theme Park and Gift Shop, which did okay, but before long we realized the Theme Park was kind of a hassle, really, since our engineering was not as good as we’d thought—we kept making people sick (or in a few cases severely misjudged g-forces)—and word got out among the travel agencies that Earth: A Theme Park and Gift Shop was not fun and actually pretty dangerous, leaving us no choice but to drop the Theme Park portion. Which is how we became Earth: The Gift Shop.

Which was all anyone ever wanted anyway. To get a souvenir to take home.

We do have some great souvenirs.

Our top-selling items for the month of October:

1. History: The Poster! A colorful poster showing all of the major phases of human history. From the Age Before Tools, through the short-lived but exciting Age of Tools, to the (yawn) Age of Learning, and into our current age, the Age After the Age of Learning. Comes in standard (24" x 36") or expanded (30" x 42").

2. War: The Soundtrack. Take a journey through the history of armed conflict. A three-minute musical interpretation of the experience of war, with guitar and drum solos. And for karaoke lovers, sing-along versions with lyrics in a dozen Earth languages.

3. Science: The Video Game. All the science you need to bother with. Almost nothing to learn. So easy you really don’t have to pay attention. Ages 3 to 93.

4. Art: The Poster! Beautiful painting of a nature scene. Very realistic, almost like a photograph. Depiction of cool, flowing water, very wet-looking water, and lots of green (green was a big color back in the day; many of Earth’s plants were green). Twenty percent off if purchased with History: The Poster!

5. God: A Mystical 3D Journey. Twenty-two-minute DVD. Never-before-seen footage. Comes with special glasses for viewing.

6. Autumn in a Bottle. Sure, no one can go outside on Earth anymore, because it’s 170 degrees Fahrenheit and the atmosphere is poisoned with sulfur, but who needs fresh air when there’s laboratory-synthesized Autumn in a Bottle? Now comes in two scents: Mist of Nostalgia and Fresh Pine.

7. Happiness: A Skin Lotion. Experience the emotion of happiness while also being moisturized. From the makers of Adventure: A Body Spray.

Other strong sellers for the month include: Shakespeare: The Fortune Cookie (which can also be purchased as a ringtone, T-shirt, coffee mug, or key chain) and, for the wee ones, Psychologically Comforting Bear, a talking stuffed animal that teaches children four key ethical and philosophical concepts about mortality and suffering, in a cheerful male or female British accent (extra concepts sold separately).

And coming for the holidays, get ready for the latest installment of Earth’s greatest artistic work of the twentieth century: Hero Story: A Hero’s Redemption (and Sweet Revenge), a computer-generated script based on all the essential points of the archetypal story arc that we humans are hardwired to enjoy.

Which brings us back to our original point. What was our original point? Oh yeah: Earth: The Gift Shop is still here. Not just here, but doing great! Okay, maybe not great, but okay. We’re okay. We would be better if you came by and shopped here. Which is why we sent you this audio catalog, which we hope you are listening to (otherwise we are talking to ourselves). Earth: The Gift Shop: The Brochure. Some people have said the name Earth: The Gift Shop is a bit confusing, because it makes it seem like this is the official gift shop of some other attraction here on Earth, when really the attraction is the Gift Shop itself. So we are considering changing our name to Earth (A Gift Shop), which sounds less official but is probably more accurate. Although if we are going down that road, it should be pointed out that the most accurate name would be Earth = A Gift Shop, since basically, if we are being honest with ourselves, we are a theme park without the park part, which is to say we are basically just a theme, whatever that means, although Earth, An Empty Theme Park would be an even worse name than Earth = A Gift Shop, so for now we’re just going to stick with what we’ve got, until something better comes along.

So again we say: Come to Earth! We get hundreds of visitors a year, from near and far. Some of you come by accident. No shame in that! We don’t care if you are just stopping in to refuel, or if you lost your way, or even if you just want to rest for a moment and eat a sandwich and drink a cold bottle of beer. We still have beer! Of course, we prefer if you come here intentionally. Many of you do. Many of you read about this place in a guidebook, and some of you even go out of your way and take a detour from your travels to swing by the gift shop. Maybe you are coming because you just want to look, or to say you were here. Maybe you are coming to have a story to tell when you get back.

Maybe you just want to be able to say: I went home. Even if it isn’t home, was never your home, is not anyone’s home anymore, maybe you just want to say, I touched the ground there, breathed the air, looked at the moon the way people must have done a thousand years ago. So you can say to your friends, if only for a moment or two: I was a human on Earth. Even if all I did was shop there.

 

JANE GOES TO INVENTORY the merchandise. The new stuff comes from some warehouse on Neptune, packed by robots. Jane swaps out last week’s promotions and puts up this week’s, resets the displays, dusts the snow globes. Special deal for Labor Day weekend: Buy two postcards from the American epoch and get a third one free.

When she’s done, she steps back and looks at it. It’s beautiful. Or random. What does she know? Future college student, gift shop girl. She just unpacks the boxes. There’s research. Work, by archaeologists and theorists. People who study and dig, construct timelines, figure things out. But what if they got it wrong? What if she’s the last girl on the planet, minding the store, and she’s selling all the wrong stuff?

After inventory, Jane climbs up to the rooftop to look through her telescope, a present for her seventeenth birthday. Definitely not in the budget. But her mom was so excited. And Jane was excited to see her mom excited.

She read the user’s manual that first night, cover to cover, studying everything about the device. According to the manual, on a perfectly clear night, it is possible to have an unbroken line of sight, all the way to the moons of Jupiter. Jane tries to imagine such a night, tries to believe in the idea. Could tonight be the night?

She’s sitting under a makeshift biodome she made out of old heat shields from the scrapyard. She’s got a foil package of two American Empire Pop-Tarts and a canister of diet orange soda that the vending robot sold her. On her lap is the course catalog for Jupiter Community College (Fall 3020 semester), open to the page on Ancient American Archaeology—what she plans to study once she gets out of this little shop—and a letter from the school confirming enrollment. Dear Jane, we look forward to seeing you on campus very soon. It’s dinnertime and she’s got about six hours of inventory left to do, no customers, and she’s the only living girl on the planet. Not exactly ideal conditions for scoping the wonders of the universe. But she looks anyway, checks to see if her dad, of all the places in Creation, might just happen to be standing right there, right in exactly the spot where she’s pointing her skinny little telescope. Right at the end of her needle of vision, her needle pointing out into the haystack of empty space. She scans the skies. Come to Earth, Jane says. To anyone listening.

She turns her sights back down to Earth, swinging the scope over toward the park. Normally, she wouldn’t be able to see much past the diner, but every so often the winds are just right, enough to clear out the sulfur clouds, not yet a dust storm, and for a few minutes she has a clear line of sight into the park, all the broken-down rides, the fake-historic attractions, sweeping along with her eye until she finds it:

A model town. America, a long time ago.

Jane looks at what she can see of the little houses, the street signs, the shops and cars and office buildings. Imagines what life could have been like: How big was the town? What did these people see when they looked up in the sky? Did they ever imagine this could happen, in a few centuries’ time? Humans, gone. Home, abandoned, left there empty, like a husk. In its place, a theme park. That, too, abandoned.

She sees a light on in one of the buildings—and imagines what it would have been like to live there, a thousand years ago, with her mom. With the dad she barely knew, the guy who has existed mostly in pictures. What it’d be like to have one of those strange, crude little things that she reads about in her archaeology books. A house, or an apartment. Some primitive version of a home, wood and plaster, a concrete foundation. What it would be like to live that way, fixed to a point on the planet, instead of on a junky space platform (scraps her mom had collected from an old Russian satellite) in geosynchronous orbit above the Earth. She and her mom, the last two Earthlings, sort of. They weren’t born here, but their ancestors were, from a place that used to be known as Los Angeles, long before “The Great Terrestrial Exodus,” first from the surface to space stations, then from there to the rest of the galaxy.

Jane watches one house in particular. The light in an upstairs room (probably a bedroom, she knows, from her studies) goes on for a moment and then shuts off, on some timer. Jane feels a brief flicker of wonder—what if she could live in that house, even for a day? She stays up on the roof, waiting to see if the light goes back on.

 

MY WIFE AND I HAVE a kid now and another on the way and—the idea is, the hope is—we are, at least in a technical sense, adults.

We always assumed we would have known more, accomplished more, that by the time we got to this point in the ride we would have turned into different people, better people. That was the idea. That was the hope.

The voice says:

Welcome to America: The Ride.

For your safety, please stay seated and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle.

And please keep your attention focused in a sideways direction.

The voice is telling us the proper way to enjoy this, which is not to look back, because looking back is the easiest way to get hurt. Or, worse, to convince yourself that you want to get off. It’s also not proper procedure to look forward, no matter how tempting it is to do so. We sit facing west while our tram car moves north, and we do our best not to look in the northerly direction, although we are encouraged by what we feel to be a subtle, gentle, but unmistakable angle of incline in the track below us. We are moving up a slope, building toward something, to a higher place. Some of us worry about what this means. Some of us worry about whether an upslope now implies a downslope to come, but some others of us say that it doesn’t have to be so, that we are not bodies in flight, our arc through the sky pre-carved by gravity. We are on an engineered system, an amusement, a transportation. This was designed by our best human minds, assembled by our best hands, and constantly improved by our innovation and creativity. There is no reason to assume that there must be a high point to it all, that we will eventually have to convert all of this elevation and potential energy into speed and kinetic energy, that what we are storing thermodynamically must eventually be given back, paid back like an entropic or economic debt.

The voice reminds us again to keep our hands and feet inside at all times and to keep our eyes looking sideways, at the sweep of history, which we are a part of, which is what we paid for, half price for children (although, as they grow, they will eventually turn into full-fare passengers, and we worry about the mechanics of how that incremental fare will be collected, whether we will pay it for them or they will pay it themselves, whether we will still be around).

The sweep of history, having this unspoken feeling of forward and upward momentum while being entertained, all of that goes into the ticket price, and the voice of the woman who narrates the ride, she reminds us that it is our purchase of these tickets that makes the ride possible. We are the customers, but we are also the underwriters of this entertainment. We are consumers of this experience. We are tourists in our own creation.

“We’re moving,” our daughter says, clapping her hands in excitement. “Let’s go! Where are we going?”

She is not a baby anymore. Our wife starts to cry.

“How did that happen?” our wife says. She starts to turn her head back, hoping she might still be able to see the point in the track where our baby turned into a kid who could say things to us, but we stop our wife from looking back, reminding her that the voice will be angry.

Our car moves down the track. We are picking up speed. We are approaching a house. Our daughter asks us if that is our house and we say we aren’t sure, but something tells us that it is. We are headed for a collision, but then a set of double doors opens and we find ourselves inside the living room of our house.

“This feels like home,” we say to each other, but we also hear other people around us saying it, and for the first time in a long time we are aware that we are not on this ride alone. In fact, there are other families in the neighboring cars just ahead of us and just behind us, sitting so close we could reach out and touch them if we wanted to. We look up ahead and see that it is all families, all the way down, this tram being an endless procession of small car units, all of us connected by the central drivetrain powering the ride, subdivided but linked, having our own versions of the same experience. There is a lot of murmuring now as we hear a lot of us saying, “Is this home? Where are we?” and we start to wonder what we are, exactly, whether up to this point our definition of “we” has been too small. But just as we are starting to wonder about how large “we” are as a group, the nature of “we” and the mystery and the wonder and the pluses and the minuses of it, we hear someone say, “I don’t know about this.” We have an “I” among us, and everyone turns to see if they can figure out who it is, but just as that happens, the tram uncouples from itself and breaks in two, and one part of us goes off on one track and the other part goes off on a different track, and the uncoupling happens again and again and again, until we find ourselves alone, together, as a small family unit. Moving in our single transport vehicle, on our own ride, wondering what we are missing out on, what other riders are getting to see.

Now we wish we had paid more attention at the beginning of the ride, had not been listening to the voice telling us to keep looking sideways, at the murals and the dioramas and displays of the ride’s retail partners. But it was hard not to get swept up in the sights and sounds. They make it so easy to be carried along. We did not even have to move, just take out our ride-issued vintage credit cards and hold them near the edge of our car in such a way that they could be swiped through the point-of-sale devices installed every fifty feet along the ride, millions, billions of transactions occurring every instant, so that we could instantly own a part of this experience, if we wanted to, to have souvenirs of all types, cultural, historical, hats and glowing wristbands and cups with crazy straws. It was part of our duty as riders to help support the sponsors that make the ride possible, and it allowed us to participate, each according to our means and personalities.

We pass through the house, seeing our living room, our three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, our kitchen, and we exit back out into the light and what we see is a thousand different tracks, or a million, or four hundred million.

“The ride is broken,” our son says, and we say, “Hey there, when were you born?”

“In the house,” our son says, “you guys seemed really freaked out about something and I didn’t want to bother you so I’ve been quiet for a while,” and he doesn’t seem too hurt, already so grown up and used to being the younger kid, and although we feel like we just met him a moment ago, he has been with us for some time now and we already love him. He is ten, our son, and we look at his hair and his nose and his shoulders and we admire him. Our daughter, now thirteen, seems to have known he was here all along and is waiting for us to catch up.

“What are you looking at?” we ask our new son.

“Cars.”

“They’re nicer than ours,” we say. “Our car is old, huh?”

“Yeah. But I like our car. It’s the best one.”

All of the cars move along their individual paths, some up into the mountains. Some turn into boats and float onto lakes, some take off like airplanes as we watch in envy, some derail, some hit trees and we watch those who can walk away get out and start fighting or crying or both, and we wonder if they will ever be able to get back on. Our car continues smoothly along its track, not the fastest, or the slowest.

We notice now that the ride is not what it used to be, less finished, more like under construction. We see a sign explaining that the ride is now owned by American Entertainments, LLC, whose parent corporation is a subsidiary of a company called The Planetary Amusement Corporation, which is owned by a Martian-German joint venture, New World Experiments GmbH, owned by a consortium of Europa-based Korean investors.

You have been chosen as potential partners in an affiliate marketing and peer-advertising campaign … the voice says as we continue to roll on through history.

You’re now passing through: Japanese internment camps during the Second World War.

On your left, coming up, you will see Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, in the 1920s.

And if you look over to your right, you’ll see the banks of the Mississippi, and watch your feet, lift them up to stay dry, as your vehicle is now converting itself into a watercraft known as a “riverboat,” a form of transportation vital to the nation’s commerce throughout the nineteenth century.

Backwards we go, through American lore and mythology, merchandised to perfection.

We see new ground being broken, dig sites surrounded by chain-link fences, men working in hard hats, large colorful banners proclaiming that The American Experience will be relaunched in the fall. This is a part of the ride that seems like we are not on a ride anymore.

We have crossed some line into the backstage area, employees only, where the gears and the machine room and the electrical cords and all of the nuts and bolts of the mechanical ride are evident. Even the voice has dropped some of the theater from her voice and now talks to us directly.

“The narrated portion of the ride is over. You are now entering an experimental phase, still in testing, where riders can experience America for the first time in 3D.”

Our son and our daughter both get excited for a moment at the idea, until the voice tells us that we do not qualify financially for that portion of the ride.

“You are welcome to stay in the car, although what you will see will be a 2D version of what should be a stereoscopic experience.”

We are given a choice of whether to go on or get out, and we decide to go on, although the voice now also tells us that we need to take some of the things out of the car, as we have taken on too much weight, so our son drops his sack lunch over the side of the car, and we drop old clothes that the kids used to wear, and our daughter drops a doll whose hair she used to brush when she was a little girl, at the beginning of the ride.

We see cars who have God with them, in voice form and as a kind of hologram, and we watch God from afar, and wish we could hear what God is saying to the people in the cars lucky enough to have God.