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Paul hurried out of the classroom as soon as the lecture finished. The baseless optimism of his peers always grated, but this afternoon it left him feeling carved out and raw. Like zoo animals born in captivity, his classmates accepted their cage as the extent of the known universe. Learning about the planet their grandparents and great-grandparents had left—cities choked with smog, DDT-soaked wetlands, rivers so polluted they caught fire—was simply a thought experiment, like imagining the alien flora and fauna of the distant worlds they would never live to see. They regurgitated information, memorizing the scientific names for doomed species from a place lightyears away, but they didn’t really care, not the way that Paul did. This intergenerational game of telephone they all had been born into was their only chance to try to fix the mistakes that came before them, and they didn’t even realize that they were playing.
“No one tries to understand what went wrong; they all think that they're going to be the one to create something fantastic and new that saves us.” Paul had made his way to the archives and into the back room where Julian was working. Usually he slipped in quietly, only making his presence known with an arm around Julian's waist or a kiss pressed to the back of his neck. Today, however, he began unleashing his tirade before he’d even fully closed the door.
“There is nothing new under the artificial sun,” Julian said blithely, continuing to reorganize a shelf of digital records and not bothering to turn to look at Paul. Most of the time Paul envied Julian’s practiced nihilism, but now it felt needling and cruel.
“That’s precisely why we have to look at the lessons of the past. We’re a closed system. A living time capsule.” Paul surprised himself with the vehemence in his voice. He hadn’t realized until now that he was making a case, building towards a thesis statement that he could still only see the hazy outline of. “Take the genetic pedigree program, for instance. It gets hailed as some great innovation, but it’s really just eugenics in Groucho glasses.”
He had Julian’s full attention now. He had stopped shelving and was leaned back against the stacks, watching Paul pace as he got more worked up. “The fact that you can even make that reference shows that there’s a larger issue here,” Julian said. “The history you want to examine is a piecemeal assortment hand-picked more than half a century ago by the very people whose errors you hope to undo.” Julian gestured broadly at the archives around them. “Look at what they thought to preserve—Adam Smith and the nuclear family and the fucking Marx Brothers. Can you imagine what we were denied in exchange?”
Paul deflated. He had been hoping for Julian to help stoke the flames of his anger, but the cool rationality of his argument made them fizzle instead. He slumped against the wall, his shoulders rounding and his gaze downcast. Julian sighed and crossed over to him. He wrapped his arms around him, pulling Paul forward so that his head rested against Julian’s chest, tucked beneath his chin. “Don’t get into a sulk about it. I never said you were wrong. You just need to think bigger, that’s all. Outside of the system. What’s the one thing this existence demands of us?”
“Continuity,” Paul answered. They might play-act at leading real lives, but the details were irrelevant so long as they managed to usher in the next generation, to keep the cycle going.
“Exactly,” Julian said. “From birth we’ve been groomed for nothing more than procreation and survival. But Pablo”—he cupped a hand beneath Paul’s jaw and tipped his head up so their eyes met—“we don’t actually owe anyone anything. Past, present, or future.”
He was right, Paul knew, of course he was right. It was the horrible, gruesome truth that he had spent his life trying not to look directly at. For as long as he could remember, all he had wanted was to do something that mattered, but nothing ever could. Nothing except—
"So we kill ourselves,” Paul said, his voice coming out steelier than he felt. “If the only thing that matters is that we survive, then it’s the one act that can truly have meaning beyond our lifetime.” It must have been the same conclusion his father had reached, Paul thought. That was a more palatable explanation than the possibility that he’d simply given up.
“You get within striking range of brilliance with these ideas of yours, and then it's like you force yourself to pull up short,” Julian said, his tone chastising but fond. “You just said it yourself: the only thing that matters is that we, the collective we, stay alive. Suicide isn't the crux—”
“Death is,” Paul said. Goosebumps traveled up his arms and along the back of his neck as the realization of Julian’s full meaning hit him.
“Yes,” Julian said. He wore a relieved expression, like he was both pleased and surprised that Paul understood. “The point is for someone to die. Who says that it has to be you?”
Slowly an idea took form, so great and so terrible that Paul began to shake, a fine tremor running through his limbs that Julian no doubt would feel. He could picture it clearly: the specimen room off of the biology lab, where the vials of embryos from Earth lived in a deep-freeze, the only insurance policy that existed against catastrophic accidents, against spontaneous mutations and genetic drift, against change itself. He stared at Julian in front of him, seeing him superimposed with the image in his mind. “Who says,” he started, as he watched an illusory cryogenic tank open and the vapor from the liquid nitrogen spool out and coil around Julian like laurels, like a crown, “that it has to be a person at all?”
For a moment, Julian almost appeared to hesitate. Then he broke into a grin so wide, so infectious, that Paul could feel it creeping onto his own face. He saw how they looked as if watching from outside his body—two mirrors perfectly aligned, reflecting the same image back to each other in a cascade of endless repetitions, an infinite echo.