Chapter 30: The Dream

That night I dreamed of 2027.

I don't know what triggered it. Maybe the conversation with Edward Bartlett had unlocked something, some door I'd been keeping shut since the night I walked through the dark city in my sleeping clothes and told Edward Leete that everyone I knew was dead. Maybe it was just time. Maybe when you've spent months learning what the world could be, your mind eventually insists on dragging you back to what it was.

I was in the Lumen conference room. The big one on the fourteenth floor, the one with the glass walls that looked out over SoMa. A meeting was happening. I could see my colleagues around the table — faces I hadn't thought of in months, people whose names I'd once known as well as my own. Kevin from engineering. Priya from product. Marcus, my co-founder, at the head of the table, talking about Q3 projections. A slide deck glowed on the screen, and the numbers kept rearranging themselves, but nobody seemed to notice.

I tried to speak. My mouth opened and nothing came out. I looked down at my hands and they were translucent, like frosted glass. I could see the grain of the conference table through my fingers.

Nobody was looking at me.

I stood up and walked around the table. I passed behind Marcus and touched his shoulder and my hand went through him like smoke. He kept talking. The slide changed. I walked to the glass wall and pressed my palm flat against it, and the glass was cold, and outside the city was carrying on without me, and I was terrified.

I went out to the street. Market Street, the real one, loud and bright and full of people moving fast with their heads down. I stepped into the crowd and they streamed past me without adjusting their paths — not avoiding me, but passing through me. A woman in a business suit walked directly through my chest and I felt nothing, no contact, no warmth, just a faint blur like static, and she kept walking, her heels clicking on the concrete, and didn't break stride.

I tried to grab someone's arm. My hand passed through. I shouted and no sound came out. I was in my city, my world, my time, and I didn't exist in it anymore.

Then I saw the window.

It was in the side of a building on Mission Street, where there shouldn't have been a window at all — just concrete and a faded mural. But there it was, the size of a door, glowing with warm amber light. I pressed my face to it and looked through and I could see the garden. Adaeze's garden. The terraces falling away toward the city, the towers soft and green against the night sky, the stars thick and low. I could see Edward's chair, the one he sat in when we talked in the evenings. I could see the kitchen light on. I could almost smell the jasmine and the soil and the particular warmth of a world that was alive.

I pushed against the glass. It didn't move. I hit it with my fist and felt nothing — no impact, no pain. I was a ghost even to this. I pressed both palms flat and tried to will myself through, and the edges of the window began to contract, slowly, like a closing eye.

I turned and Sawyer was there.

She was standing on the sidewalk about ten feet away, looking at her phone. The same Sawyer — same build, same jaw, same way of standing like she owned whatever ground she was on. I ran to her. I said her name, or tried to — no sound came out, but I screamed it silently, and she didn't look up. I reached for her face and my hand went through her and she turned and walked away, and I stood in the street and watched her disappear into the crowd of people who couldn't see me.

Then Edward Bartlett was sitting on a bench across the street.

Not the Edward Bartlett I'd met — the old man with the kind eyes and the garden with the espaliered pear trees. This was a young man, maybe thirty, with dark hair and the coiled energy of someone who hasn't yet learned patience. He looked up as I approached, and for one moment I thought he saw me. His eyes focused on mine. My heart lurched.

"Do I know you?" he said.

I opened my mouth and this time sound came out, thin and distant, like a voice through water. "Yes. You know me. You're going to know me."

He frowned. And then his face began to change. The years fell across it like shadows — thirty, forty, fifty, sixty — his hair going silver, his skin creasing, his eyes deepening, and with each passing decade his gaze lost focus, sliding through me, until the old man sitting on the bench was looking at the place where I stood and seeing nothing at all.

I ran. The streets were narrowing around me, the buildings leaning in, the sky pressing down like a low ceiling. The noise of 2027 was everywhere — horns, construction, a siren, the hum of a million screens, a low machine-drone that I'd once mistaken for silence because I'd never known its absence. I was looking for the window. I knew it was still there somewhere, getting smaller.

I turned corners and the streets folded back on themselves. I passed the same Walgreens twice. The same billboard. The same corner with the same man sleeping on cardboard who I'd walked past a thousand times without stopping. The city was a loop, and I was inside it, and I couldn't get out.

I found it. The window. It was small now, the size of my hand, set into a wall at the end of an alley that hadn't been there before. Through it I could see the garden, the stars, one sliver of amber light. I pressed my eye to it and I could see Edward — my Edward, Edward Leete — standing in the garden looking up at the sky, and I knew with the absolute certainty that only dreams provide that if this window closed I would be trapped here forever, invisible, in a world that had already forgotten me.

I screamed. No sound came out. The window shrank to a point of light, a pinprick, a star—

I woke up gasping.

The room was dark, or almost dark — the soft amber glow of Adaeze's room. I could smell the garden. I could hear the wind in the living walls. And I knew where I was, and I knew when I was, and the relief was so enormous that I couldn't contain it. I made a sound that wasn't crying exactly but wasn't anything else, and then the door opened and Edward was there.

He didn't ask what happened. He sat on the edge of the bed and I reached for him and he held me, and I pressed my face into his chest and breathed the smell of him — soil and green things and the particular warmth of a living body — and I said, "I was back. I was back there and I couldn't get out."

"You're here," he said. "You're here now."

"I was a ghost, Edward. No one could see me. I was in my old world and I was invisible — I could see this place through a window, the garden, the stars, you — and I couldn't reach it. It kept getting smaller."

"It's not small. It's here. It's real. You're in it."

"I know." I held onto him. "I know it's real."

He held me. The room was quiet. Through the window I could hear the neighborhood settling into its night sounds — the sounds I'd come to know as well as I'd once known the sounds of traffic and sirens and the hum of the refrigerator in my SoMa apartment. Growing things. Wind. Water. The distant murmur of a city that was, itself, at rest.

"Edward," I said.

"Yes."

"I'm not going back to sleep."

"Then let's go outside."

We went out to the garden. The stars were extraordinary, the way they always were, thick and dusty across a sky that no longer had light pollution to compete with. I thought of what Helen had told me about the silence out there. Every star a question mark. Every silence an answer I wasn't sure I wanted. Adaeze's chair was there. The terraces fell away below us toward the city, the towers glowing softly, the bridges between them lit with amber. Somewhere far below, someone was playing music, faint and sweet.

I sat in the chair and Edward sat on the ground beside me, his back against the wall, his hand resting on my knee. We didn't talk for a long time. The dream was still in me — the silence of my own voice, the faces that looked through me, the window closing to a point of light — but it was fading now, the way dreams do, being replaced by what was real: the garden, the stars, the warm hand on my knee, the city that people had chosen to build.

"I want to finish the book," I said.

"You will."

"And after the book," I said, surprising myself. "I want to serve. In the industrial army. I know I'm twenty-seven and most people start at twenty-two, but—"

"There's no age limit," Edward said. "People serve when they're ready."

"What kinds of projects are happening? Right now, in the world?"

"Everywhere. River restoration in central Asia. Reforestation across the Sahel — that's where I served. New infrastructure in the Arctic communities. Coastal rebuilding in Southeast Asia. And there's always the mega-structures, the cities that are still growing and changing." He looked at me. "You're serious."

"I want to carry stone," I said, and the words surprised me as much as they surprised him, but they were true. I'd spent my old life building things that existed only as code and metrics and quarterly reports. I wanted to build something I could touch. Something that would be here in a hundred years, the way Edward Bartlett's paths were still here. "I want to go somewhere far away and do something hard and come back different. The way you did."

Edward smiled. "You already came back different."

"Then I want to do it on purpose this time."

"I want people to understand. Not just what it was like for me. What it was like for all of us. Everyone who lived in that world and didn't see it. I want them to understand that we weren't evil. We weren't stupid. We were inside something we couldn't see, and the thing we were inside was killing us, and we called it normal."

"Write that," Edward said. "That's the ending."

I looked at the city. I looked at the stars. I looked at the man sitting beside me, this man from a century I hadn't chosen, in a world I was still learning, who had waited for me to be ready and who was here, now, in the garden, in the dark.

I thought about a woman named Adaeze who had carried stone up a hill. About a president who had gone all the way. About a comedian in Sao Paulo who had made me laugh until I couldn't breathe. About a grandmother in Lagos who had insisted that the eating spaces face the water. About my mother's voice saying "I'm here." About Edward Bartlett telling me to put the guilt down. About Helen, patient Helen, who had taken me in and explained the whole world to me, piece by piece, in a garden chair made by her mother.

And I thought about the people reading this. You, in your time, in whatever century you live in. I thought about what I would want you to know, if I could tell you one thing.

It didn't have to be the way it was. It doesn't have to be the way it is. Whatever you're living in, whatever system has convinced you that suffering is natural and inequality is inevitable and that the way things are is the only way things could be, I am writing to you from the other side to tell you: it's not true. It was never true. We had everything we needed to build this world, and we wasted centuries not building it because we couldn't imagine it.

And then one day enough people imagined it at the same time, and they built it, and here I am, sitting in it, in a garden, under the stars, in love, at home.