The Overstory

by Richard Powers

use us for fuel, or keep us in infinitely entertaining zoos as secured as the one Adam now checks into. Futures where humanity goes to its mass grave swearing it’s the only thing in creation that can talk. Vast, empty expanses with nothing to fill the hours but remembering how he and a handful of green-souled friends tried to save the world. But, of course, it’s not the world that needs saving. Only the thing that people call by the same name. A man behind the impenetrable glass in a crisp white shirt emblazoned with a civic emblem asks him for something. Name, maybe, serial number, apology. Adam frowns, distracted, elsewhere. He looks down. There’s something on the cuff of his neon jumpsuit. Round, small, brown, a little globe covered with sticky burs. He has come directly from one bleak brick holding facility, been pressed into a van, driven and unloaded straight into this wasteland of cut stone and concrete. There was not the slightest chance for such life to exploit him. But here he is, carrying this free rider. So it turned out for him, for all five of them, all of blinkered humankind, used by life as surely as this bur uses his jumpsuit cuff. And in that moment, it starts up, the quiet torture worse than anything the state can inflict on Adam. A small voice so real it might come from the bunk above him whispers the start of a story that will plague him for longer than his imprisonment: You have been spared from death, to do a most important thing. .