“Sixty million,” I say. “And that’s just Boston and Providence. New York’s up to over a hundred million now.”
“Oh, I know the numbers,” Mom says. “It’s just one thing to read them on a screen, and another to actually see it with your own eyes.”
“The whole Eastern Seaboard is like that,” I say. “One metroplex blending into another. We got too many for little old Earth. The colonies are mostly empty, still.”
“What’s it like up there? Do you ever get to spend any time on those planets?”
“I’ve been to most of ours, and a lot of the Chinese and Russian ones. It’s different. Wild, barren. Harsh places to live.”
“I used to put our names in the hat for the colony lottery every year, you know,” Mom says. “Until they shut it down. I can’t believe they stopped the colony flights.”
“We’ve lost more than half of our colonies to the Lankies, Mom. I think Team Red didn’t fare much better. You don’t want to be a colonist right now. Those things show up in orbit, everyone on the planet is dead four weeks later. You can’t fight back, and running and hiding won’t do you any good. They just gas every city, like a bunch of rat nests.”
“Maybe we deserve it,” Mom says darkly, and looks out of the window again, where the city of Nashua is sleeping a restless slumber. Even little Nashua, with its million and a half residents, has a sizable public tenement on its outskirts, unmistakable clusters of tall, starkly utilitarian residence towers bunched together on the shittiest real estate in town. “Maybe we should all be gassed like rats. I mean, look at what we’ve done to this world, and now we’re spreading out to others.”
“Everyone wants to live, Mom. They’re just a little better at spreading out than we are.”
“You think they’ll come all the way to Earth?” she asks. Her expression tells me that she’s not particularly afraid of that prospect.
I consider her question, and shrug. “Probably. I don’t see why they’d stop, now that they’re on a roll.”
I gaze back out at nocturnal Nashua, one ant hive among tens of thousands on this continent alone, stuffed to capacity with human beings who are just barely clawing out an existence. I imagine a Lanky seed ship in the sky above, raining down pods of nerve gas onto the city streets below. The Lanky nerve gas acts so quickly that people fall over dead just a few seconds after inhaling a milligram or two, or getting just a microscopic droplet onto their skin.
I want to disagree with Mom, but part of me concurs that a Lanky invasion of Earth would be a mercy killing of our species. We’ve spent most of our history trying to exterminate each other anyway. This way, we’ll at least have some dispassionate outside referee settling all of humanity’s old scores permanently. No more generational feuds, no more ancient grudges, no more pointless revenge carried out against people who inherited some old guilt from their great-grandparents. We will all just go down the path on which we’ve sent so many species ourselves, and we’ll just be a note in someone else’s xenobiology textbooks, listed under the header “EXTINCT.”
It’s not the first time I’ve wondered if there’s a point to our struggle against the Lankies, but as we glide through the night above the sea of barely fed, discontented humans in the city spread out underneath the maglev track, I conclude for the first time that there probably isn’t.
We both fall asleep in our comfortable seats before the maglev reaches the Concord-Manchester station. When I wake up again, the world outside is a tapestry of green and white, and the sun is just peeking over the horizon. I check the moving map display on the wall of the compartment. It’s almost seven o’clock in the morning, and we’re on the last leg of our trip, fifteen minutes from the stop at Liberty Falls. We’ve slept through Concord-Manchester, Hartland-Lebanon, and Montpelier.
Mom is still asleep in the seat across from mine. Her head is on the padded headrest, and she looks peaceful and relaxed. There are more lines in her face than I remembered, and her hair has gray streaks in it now. Mom’s only forty-five years old, but she looks like she’s pushing sixty. When you have access to private hospitals, your life expectancy is over a hundred years, but welfare rats tend to die at younger ages, due to the cumulative effects of bad nutrition and the stress of day-to-day life in the tenements. The public hospitals have long waiting lists for anything more serious than a nosebleed. When Dad died of cancer, they just gave him a bunch of DNA-coded painkillers to make his transition to recyclable biomass easier.
I reach out and touch Mom on the shoulder to wake her up. She opens her eyes slowly, and looks around.
“Are we there already?”