VOLUME #1 | Excerpt from "Rewilder"
WRITTEN BY TY LOOMIS, AS SEEN IN ISSUE #4 AND VOLUME #1
Illustrations by Sam Rheaume
The Rewilder flies over the place once called Utah and is almost alone. Peco sits in his charging station, solitary blue eye swiveling around the cockpit. He is a NipponAI Mark X, male designation. The Rewilder refrains from sparking conversation with the orb–he believes it is an unhealthy habit. Emotion, he thinks, should be reserved for things that have it.
They set down at 39° 31’ N, 110° 12’ W, to check on last month’s planting. The Rewilder breathes through his helmet. Peco hovers from his centrifugal motors, spinning fast enough to warp the dust around his body into a congress of twisters. Man and orb approach twelve-foot saplings and record data. One fell to winds, ripped out by its roots. The others have survived. Peco data-taps the bark of each tree with a needle and his partner stands, arms crossed, looking but not looking at the readings across his heads-up display: CO2 absorption nominal, O2 output nominal.
Dusting a lake with an algae solution, the Rewilder messages three characters to Molly: “Hey.”
Nightfall, and the Rewilder meets someone online who says they’re lonely and would not mind keeping him company. The Rewilder knows it might be a man, a bot, a teenager, or anything other than the beautiful Latina he sees in his goggles, but he does not care. Her avatar presses a hand against his chest and he feels the heat and touch replicated by the sense nodes on the back of his skull. He slides between tumescent polygons, and somewhere on Earth she feels his push. They end after an hour and the Rewilder logs out without getting her contact code–rinsing off his chest and stomach in the shower.
“It’s been a century since Mother Earth belched twelve trillion tons of methane from clathrate deposits across the sea floor,” remarks the morning news, as the Rewilder eats Soylent Solution No. 9 topped with artificial honey. More dismal facts follow: indoor UV-farms producing truncated yields for the past three months with no apparent cause, reports of neo-tuberculosis outbreaks in West Dome’s crowded sublevels. He can’t help watching the anchor’s lips move as she relays this, fixating on the motion and not her words.
The Rewilder enters the gym and finds the sight of the treadmill frustrating; he suits up and leaves. Gravel crunches under his boots, panting fills his helmet. He thinks the air looks clearer than it has been in weeks. Staring straight up, the sky is almost blue. He jogs from the residence cube into the canyon where granite walls guard a muddy river. A quarter of his oxygen is depleted in the time it takes to reach the bank. Breathing hard, he looks down and sees a humanoid footprint in the mud. His eyes follow the tracks downriver. The Rewilder leaves faster than he came.
