EARTH ONLINE

The Boston Public Library opened at nine, and by nine there were already seven or eight people waiting at the doors. All of them were old. On weekdays it was always the old ones — the retirees, the widowers, the regulars who came less to read than to be somewhere with a roof and a chair and the soft, papery hush that the city outside did not have.

Cole Mercer logged them in one at a time. Left hand on the keyboard, right hand on the mouse. Card, scan, click. Card, scan, click.

"This one's almost a month overdue," he said, not looking up. "Still not finished?"

The woman across the counter laughed and shook her head. "My son reads slow. Is a month a problem?"

"The first month's free. After that it's ten cents a day." He paused, then added, evenly, "If it's lost, you pay replacement cost. That one's eighty-two dollars."

Her smile dropped. "Eighty-two— fine. Fine. I'll make the little brat finish it tonight." She turned and marched off.

"Lost it, more like," said a crisp voice beside him. Zoe, twenty-three and the youngest person on staff, watched the woman go with open contempt. "A card's fifty bucks, the book's eighty-two. She's never coming back here."

"Probably not," Cole agreed, and scanned the next card.

Marlene Walsh, who ran the front desk, drifted over and clapped him on the shoulder. "Cole. Go check on our prophet, would you? He wandered into the back corner on three — blind spot, no cameras. Just make sure he isn't doing anything."

Cole nodded and went.

The central branch was three floors. The third was history and humanities, and the back corner was thirty rows of shelving away from the desk. He found the man cross-legged on the floor by the tall windows, six books fanned out around him in no order at all, none of them open. He had both hands buried in his hair, working it into a worse ruin than it already was.

Cole crouched and started gathering the books. "Mr. Hale. There are tables. You can read at a table."

"Read," the man whispered. "Read what. Read what."

Cole glanced at the brick in his hand. "The Vanishing of the Maya?"

The prophet's head snapped up. His eyes were threaded with red. "You know," he breathed. "You know why they vanished?"

"No," Cole said mildly. "Do you?"

That was all it took. The man scrambled up, suddenly alight. "They offended the One who reveals Himself. Their god was a false god, a counterfeit — and when you offend the true God, you die. The Maya died. All of them. He is the only one. He is eternal."

Cole had heard a version of this a hundred times. The library was open to the public, and the public was strange; Mr. Hale wasn't ill, exactly, only fevered, and you couldn't turn a man out for being fevered. So Cole gave him the line he always gave.

"And where's the true god now?"

The prophet's face froze. It always did. It was the one question that emptied him out — he'd come almost daily for a year, casting little fortunes to pick which seat to sit in, and every time someone asked who is your god he'd go quiet and slink out an hour later like a wilted thing.

Cole smiled faintly and stood, books in his arms, and turned to go.

Behind him, low and certain, the man said: "He's there."

Cole's feet stopped.

He turned. Mr. Hale stood at the window, pointing past the glass at the thing that hung in the sky over downtown Boston — the black tower — and he was smiling a smile that belonged to no sane face.

"He's almost here," the prophet said.

Cole looked at him for a moment. Whatever makes you happy, he thought, and walked back to the desk.

---

The Spire had been there for six months.

Cole's bus home cut through downtown, and he sat by the window with his earbuds in and watched it the way you watch weather. It was a four-sided pyramid, the shape of the ones at Giza — except it wasn't gold. It was black, and it didn't touch the ground. Its base was wider than the financial district, so that the whole core of the city sat in its shadow, and it floated there, a hundred meters up, casting no shadow at all because the cold light just passed through it.

It had appeared overnight. Cole had been new at the library then; he'd left the apartment in a rush without checking the news, stepped onto the street, and found the entire city losing its mind. No buses. No cabs. Every car on the road pointed inward, toward the center, toward the enormous black shape that had not been there when he'd clocked out the night before.

For two days nobody went to work. People packed their cars and fled for the countryside — get away from it, whatever it is. Then the government held things together the way governments do, and after three days Cole got the call to come back in, and a week after that the people who'd run came trickling home because the tower simply hung there and did nothing.

Six months on, the Spires were practically a tourist stop. For the first while there'd been crews in white hazard suits hauling instruments under the thing, taking readings. Now they came once every three days. The cafés in its shadow had reopened. On the bus, two teenage girls were arguing about whether it was even worth a photo anymore.

Cole watched it slide behind the buildings and disappear, and thought about what to eat.

---

That night he opened his laptop and a chat window blinked.

Victor: Sorry. Slammed lately. Probably can't play for a while.

A week old. Cole had sent the last message Monday; it was answered now. Busy, then — genuinely busy.

MeltSugar: No worries. Some other time.

He opened the bridge client anyway, and found Victor, impossibly, online.

Victor: One hand? I've got a minute.

They'd met online a year ago and played ever since. Bridge was a two-on-two game, a game for people who liked thinking, and Victor was at least as good as Cole — which was rare. Mid-hand, Cole spotted a line to game, and before he could take it Victor laid down the king of clubs and killed it.

Cole paused. A misplay? Victor didn't misplay. Then he counted the tricks on the table again and understood.

He's going for the slam.

The corner of Cole's mouth lifted. He played his card.

Half an hour later the hand was done.

MeltSugar: GJ. Sharp as ever.

Victor: GJ.

Then, after a long pause:

Victor: You once told me you work right next to one of the towers.

MeltSugar: Yeah. Couple hundred meters. Why?

Victor: Stay away from it for a while. There may be a problem.

Cole thought of Mr. Hale that morning, hair in ruins, finger leveled at the Spire — he's almost here — and laughed out loud despite himself.

MeltSugar: Don't tell me you're a tower-truther too. I work next to the thing. Staying away isn't really an option.

Victor didn't push. They talked a little longer; then he said something had come up, and they said goodnight, and logged off.

---

Cole worked late the next evening — Zoe had a date, and he told her to go, he'd shelve the G-section alone. He left at ten and caught the last bus.

It was almost empty: the driver, Cole, and a middle-aged man snoring two seats back. His phone was dead. He propped his chin on his hand and watched the city go by, the shuttered malls, the cold November dark, the neon smearing past, and then the bus turned and the Spire swung into view.

He looked at it the way he'd looked at it a thousand times. And then, against the black of it, he saw a small dark thing — a bird, maybe, an insect, too far to tell — flapping up toward the tower. He watched it idly. Watched it reach the Spire's edge and keep going, stupid and straight, into it —

— and hit something.

And drop.

Like it had flown into a pane of glass that wasn't there.

The bus turned again and the Spire was gone behind him. The next stop crackled over the speaker. Cole stayed pressed to the window long after there was nothing left to see, his heart going hard in his chest.

The towers have no substance. That was the official line, the one most people only half-believed: optical pollution, a mirage, light bent into the shape of a tower. You could see them. You could not touch them. Nothing could touch them.

Then what had the bird hit?

"…Saw it wrong," he told the empty bus. He shut his eyes and tried to let it go, and could not, and lay awake most of the night with the image looping behind his eyes.

---

He overslept. Seven-thirty — he had eight minutes to make the eight o'clock bus. He dressed fast, grabbed his bag, crossed the room.

The instant his fingers touched the door handle, music began to play.

A clean, bright, looping melody, no words, the kind everyone on Earth knew without being told.

Jingle bells, jingle bells…

Cole turned, startled. Nothing in the apartment was making it. The carol kept playing, and it wasn't coming from any one direction — it was coming from everywhere, from the walls, from the air, from outside.

He crossed to the window faster than he'd ever moved and looked downtown.

The Spire was lit. Color crawled across its black face in time with the music, shifting on every note, and when the last note fell the colors died and the tower went dark and silent again.

Then a voice spoke. A child's voice — high and clear and ringing, the sharp bright pitch only a small child has.

"Ding-dong! November fifteenth. Earth has gone online."