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The broadcast opens with the Anchor pacing in the room, a Geiger counter in hand. They explain that they’ve been expecting TERI, and that they were checking radiation levels in the bunker. There has been some seepage, but they are safe because of the suit they are wearing for protection. The date reads August 7, 2048. The Anchor laments the fact that they have been in the bunker since 2045 — so long. The forcefield is still in place.
The Anchor explains that the protocol involving the questions and the algorhythms came from a gestural calibration program that a Fourcaster named Marc Downie (a professor, a maker, and artist) created, and that it is the best way to resonate with the SPORE device. The Anchor reveals that they had been down in the bunker when the event occured, which is how they survived. In other words, it was sheer luck. Following this revelation, the Anchor asks the following question: “I love animals. I am a vegetarian. When the snowy owl went extinct, it hit me harder than I expected. It broke my heart, and I mourned. What do you mourn? What have you lost?” Some answers from 2019 include: friends to cancer, my dog, my uncle, and the passenger pigeon.
The Anchor then conjures three glyphs. The player note that they are all identical to one another: an image of a mushroom cloud. After some trial and error, they instruct the Anchor to perform a billowing gesture with their arms and torso. This prompts a different musical sequence for each glyph position. They figure out that they must “play” these sequences in order. The Anchor thinks the song is about rain. The participants direct the Anchor through the sequences, producing the song “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring.” The room flashes white and the player retrieves the final object from the third podium: an old iPhone. The phone is dead, but the Anchor notes that there’s an inscription on the back that reads “pjagoda.” Another ghostly shadow appears, and then a second one. The Anchor informs the participants from 2019 that the exposure duration is running out, and that we are almost done. They are ready to leave this room, and they will see TERI one more time to activate the SPORE together.
Following the broadcast, another Anchor memoir streams. It reads:
August 7, 2048
The past can foreshadow a future. But what makes up a past exceeds the future that actualizes, the one we end up getting. The future calcifies into one stream, but the past is boundless potential.
What potentials actualized to give us the event of 2045? The nuclear “accidents” were only the beginning. I didn’t even know how many nuclear reactors existed in northern Illinois before that day. It took only one to set off the chain reaction that spread the radiation, poisoned the water, and initiated the panic. Amidst a string of relentless climate disasters, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The political brinksmanship that followed only exacerbated the situation. They never even agreed on a cleanup plan before the mutual transnational threats accelerated. Nuclear arsenals came into the scenario. And then, without warning, it was over. No record of the precise sequence of what happened. Except for you, TERI, that was the moment I was left alone.
And now, years later, I am still alone in this bunker. I was working here when the event happened. Did any of the other Fourcasters survive? David Archer. Heidi Coleman. Kristen Schilt. Kara Keeling. Benjamin Morgan. Ashlyn Sparrow. Marc Downie. Sabina Shaikh. Pedro Lopes. India Weston. Peter Forberg. Théo Evans. Look, I am forgetting their names even now. Sometimes, when I lie alone, I repeat their names in my head, as many of the names as I can remember. A litany. I think their names and imagine, if only for a moment, that this act will conjure them again, from the past.
I do not speak aloud anymore. I use the TIP technology that I created in my lab in the Terrarium, somewhere above where I am now trapped. I called it the Telepathic Interface Protocol. We never had time to refine it. But it was one of the many inventions the Fourcasters created. The artificial intelligence program, TERI, was another: the Terrestrially Engineered Rhizomatic Intelligence. The most important invention (now anyway) was SPORE. The Story Propagation and Ontology Reorientation Engine.
What can I say? We loved our acronyms.
SPORE is our one and final hope. It sits in the next room. It breathes. It lives. Maybe I was wrong when I wrote, more than a year ago, that waiting is a purely human phenomenon. The SPORE also waits for the right day. It speaks to me. I feel it communicating, resonating with and through my body. I’m not sure that I will survive long enough to see it and to activate it.
From this wasteland, there is nothing more for us to say about the past. But maybe the past has something to say to us. I have waited for them in this limbo. They must come soon. I imagine the words of a former time, arriving like an incantation that brings the SPORE, and perhaps even my hope, back to life.
