To Paradise

At the top of the building where I worked, there was a greenhouse. This was not the greenhouse that had been named for Grandfather—that was atop a different building.

The greenhouse at Larsson Center was not a working greenhouse but, rather, a museum. Here the university maintained a specimen of each of the plants that had been engineered at RU for use in antiviral medications, dating all the way back to 2037. The plants were grown in individual clay pots and arranged in rows, and although they didn’t look all that remarkable, they each had a label beneath them listing their Latin name, and the name of the lab that had developed them, and the drug they had contributed to. The bulk of botanical research had been long ago transferred to the Farm, but there were still a few RU scientists who collaborated in the development program.

Anyone could come visit this greenhouse, though few people ever did. In fact, few people ever came up to the roof at all, which was mysterious to me, as it was very pleasant. As I mentioned earlier, the entire campus is under a biodome, which means it’s always climate-controlled, and near the greenhouse there were a few tables and benches so you could sit and look over the East River, or at the rooftops of the other buildings, some of which are dedicated to growing vegetables and fruits and herbs that the cafeteria uses to make food for the employees of the university. Anyone who worked at Rockefeller could buy lunch at the cafeteria at a subsidized rate, and I often brought my lunch up to the roof, where I could eat alone but not feel self-conscious about it.

It was especially nice to sit on the roof in the summer. You almost felt like you were outside, except better, because unlike actually being outside, you didn’t have to wear your cooling suit. You could just sit there in your jumpsuit and eat your sandwich and look at the brown water beneath.

As I ate, I thought, as I often did, about David. It had been almost a month since I had seen him last, and although I was trying my best to forget him, I still saw things every day that I thought he might be interested in hearing about, and it took a great effort to remind myself that I wasn’t going to see him again, and that I should stop making observations and storing them to share with him. Though then I remembered that Grandfather had said that you don’t have to make observations only so you can tell someone else; that making them just for the sake of making them was a good thing. “Why?” I had asked him, and he had thought about it for a moment. “Because we can,” he had said, finally. “Because it’s what humans do.” Sometimes I worried that my lack of interest in making observations meant I wasn’t human, though I know that wasn’t what Grandfather had intended.

I was thinking about this when the elevator doors opened and three people, a woman and two men, stepped off. I knew instantly from how they were dressed that they were state employees, and I could tell that they were in the middle of an argument, as one of the men was leaning toward the other, and they were all whispering. Then the woman looked over and saw me and said, “Oh, Christ—people, let’s try someplace else,” and before I could offer to go away, they got back in the elevator and left.

Grandfather had always said that the people who worked for the state and the people who didn’t were united in their desire to never encounter one another: The state didn’t want to see us, and we didn’t want to see them. And for the most part, it didn’t happen. The ministries were all in one zone, and the state workers had their own shuttles and grocery stores and clusters of apartment buildings. They didn’t live in just one zone, though many of the senior members lived in Zone Fourteen, the same as many of the senior scientists at RU and senior engineers and researchers at the Farm and the Pond.