Pines

of all the vegetation. He quickened his pace, now clawing his waythrough the bushes and saplings that comprised the forest understory, Jenkins following closely behind.
    When Ethan arrived at the base of it, he stopped and looked up.
    For a moment, he didn’t understand exactly what he was staring at. Down low, the beams were wrapped in several feet of dead and living vines, the brown and the green camouflaging the shape of the structure, blending it so seamlessly into the color of the forest that if you looked at it askance, it disappeared.
    Higher up, the color of the steel beams showed through—rust so deep it verged on red. Centuries of oxidation. Three oak trees had grown up right through the heart of it, twisting and turning as they climbed, some of the branches even providing support for the girders. Only the framework of the lower six floors still stood—the corroded skeleton of a building. A handful of beams near the top had bent over and curled like ringlets of auburn-colored hair, but most of the steelwork had long ago collapsed into the center to be subsumed by the forest floor.
    The sound of birds coming from the ruin was tremendous. Like an avian high-rise. Nests everywhere Ethan looked.
    “Remember when you told me you wanted to be transferred to a hospital in Boise?” Jenkins asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, I’ve brought you to Boise. Right into the center of town.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You’re looking at the U.S. Bank building. Tallest skyscraper in Idaho. That’s where the Secret Service’s Boise field office is located, right? Up on seventeen?”
    “You’re out of your mind.”
    “I know this looks like a forest floor, but we’re actually standing in the middle of Capitol Boulevard. The statecapitol is just a third of a mile through those trees, although to find any trace of it, you’d have to dig.”
    “What is this? Some kind of trick?”
    “I told you.”
    Ethan grabbed the man by his collar and pulled Jenkins in close. “Start making sense.”
    “You were put into suspended animation. You saw the units—”
    “For how long?”
    “Ethan—”
    “How. Long.”
    Jenkins gave a slight pause, Ethan realizing there was something in him that almost didn’t want to hear the answer.
    “One thousand eight hundred fourteen years...”
    Ethan let go of Jenkins’s shirt.
    “...five months...”
    He staggered back.
    “...and eleven days.”
    Looked at the ruin.
    Looked at the sky.
    “You should get off your feet,” Jenkins said. “Let’s sit.” As Ethan eased down into a bed of ferns, Jenkins glanced up at Pope and Pam. “You guys give us a minute, all right? But don’t go far.”
    They walked off.
    Jenkins sat down across from Ethan.
    “Your mind is racing,” he said. “Will you try not to think for a minute and just listen to me?”
    It had rained here recently—Ethan could feel the dampness of the ground through the pair of brown fatigues they’d dressed him in.
    “Let me ask you something,” Jenkins said. “When you think of the greatest breakthrough discovery in history, what comes to mind?”
    Ethan shrugged.
    “Come on, humor me.”
    “Space travel, theory of relativity, I don’t—”
    “No. The greatest discovery in the history of mankind was learning how man would become extinct.”
    “As a species?”
    “Precisely. In 1971, a young geneticist named David Pilcher made a startling discovery. Keep in mind this was before RNA splicing, before DNA polymorphism. He realized the human genome, which is essentially the entirety of our heredity information, which programs cell growth, was changing, becoming corrupted.”
    “By what?”
    “By what?” Jenkins laughed. “By everything. By what we’d already done to the earth, and by all that we would do in the coming centuries. Mammal extinction. Deforestation. Loss of polar sea ice. Ozone. Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Acid rain. Ocean dead zones. Overfishing. Offshore oil drilling. Wars. The creation of a billion gasoline-burning automobiles. The nuclear disasters—Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. The two-thousand-plus intentional nuclear bomb detonations in the name of weapons testing. Toxic waste dumping. Exxon-Valdez. BP’s Gulf oil spill. All the poisons we put into our food and water every day.
    “Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of