It’s easy, for the guys in the Artifact Recovery Branch. They just need to find a dead spot along the Line and pick up the stuff, and that’s it. Nobody sees, nobody knows. Time Raiders, they call themselves, and are so smug about it.

Oral Tradition is quite another story. You have to actually get there and interact, talk to the actual people. Time Raiders my foot. What’s a vase, a piece of hardware, an old book, without the cultural milieu? And that’s what we do. We collect stories, ideas, and beliefs, then weave them together to re-create the milieu. We flirt with the Paradox and the Shift every day, up and down the Line. And there’s been no Shift yet. We are good.

And yes, we do call the subjects zombies, sometimes, and there’s old hands in OT that will tell unlikely tales of bopping their grand-grandmother or what else, but it’s all an act, to keep emotions at arm’s length. Oral Tradition work is hard. Because they are people. They are our ancestors. Poor relations, maybe, country bumpkins that live in the wooded hills of the past, but you can’t but feel a sense of kinship. It’s so hard because it is so personal.

And yet you can’t do away with emotions.

I was in Shanghai in 2137. Side-job, pick up local color. Filler, basically. Autumn of ‘37. The evening air was hot and wet. You can tell you’re in the Thirties by the warmth and the humidity. We were on top of Oriental Pearl Tower, Three Degrees’ latest song in the background, drinks on the house. Waves made the pylons of the tower tremble, as we observed the sinking skyline of the Bund. The proud Paris of the East was going Venice, had been for a while, ever since the River Flood Discharge system had failed. Chongming Island was gone, Pudong Airport was gone. The floating islands had been scared away by the freak monsoon weather and now the Bund was about to go. About one hundred high-profile digerati milled about, drones trailing, socials aflame with updates. Meme-fying and live-feeding the catastrophe.

Then the Custom House tower disappeared. It was not the waves, not really. The acidic waters of the Pacific had eaten at the foundations of the building for a decade, weakening the concrete, oxidizing the iron. The waves just tipped the balance, and the Custom House folded like a house of cards, disappearing under the water. It was fast. Definitive.

I knew it would of course. That was the reason I was here, to pick up the heat-of-the-moment reminiscences. But that didn’t make it any easier. What struck me was the silence. Because for a long moment, that I measured in ten heartbeats, nobody spoke, nobody breathed. Only the electronic voice of the girl in Three Degrees, and the bass, pounding. Distant. Forgotten.

Then the columns in the front of the Bank of Taiwan snapped like matchsticks. There was a collective intake of breath as the facade of the building collapsed, grey spray flying. Then everybody was talking at the same time.

But we already had a number of those social and live streams. I was here for the personal stuff. 

“We’ll never make it,” a young woman said.

She was tall, slender, in a simple black cheongsam. Timeless, in a way. Beautiful, maybe. She was holding an empty flute glass in her fingers. Blue nails, matching makeup.

“I beg your pardon?” I said, coming closer. It’s rare to have a zombie start a conversation. Rare and precious.

She looked at me like I was an apparition, and for a moment I had this wild, impossible idea she could see through me like she had X-ray eyes, and know me for what I was: an interloper, a gatecrasher. “I was talking to myself,” she said.

I waited, leaving her room to speak.

“You ever heard about Cyanobacteria?” she asked.

“I think I have.”

It was part of the weltanschauung. The belief the climate catastrophe would be terminal for our species, because it had been so for the bacteria in the Proterozoic, two and a half billion years before. A toxic meme, if ever there had been one, an enduring gift of the previous century’s passive guilt mindset.

“The Cyanobacteria poisoned their world, committed species suicide,” she said, in a soft voice. “Species can be too successful, see?”

We moved aside, making room for a couple trying to drive their drone over the collapsing buildings. 

“You think we have been too successful?” I asked her.

“We, like them, poisoned our world,” she said. She placed her glass on a passing tray, folded her arms. “Beyond recovery.”

“But we are no bacteria,” I said.

She shrugged. “You think that makes a difference?”

“Yes,” I said.

Yes, I wanted to say, such was the emptiness in her eyes, it will be hard and it will be horrible and millions will die, but we will survive. And adapt, and then thrive once more. We will still be going in five hundred years. We’ll embrace change and promote diversity, ditching the old self-destructive idols we once worshiped, those that led us astray. 

“It makes a difference,” I said. Damn the rules. “We have been focusing so much on how we adapted our world to ourselves, that we forgot how much we adapted ourselves to our world.”

“This is different.” She looked at me. She was so alone, and lost, and resigned.

“This is not the first time,” I said. “You—we belong to a species that survived two glaciations. A species that was born in the grasslands of Africa and expanded to the Arctic circle, to the Mongolian steppe. To the ocean’s shelf. To Mars. Ours is a species that survives. A species that thrives on change. That learns and passes its knowledge on.”

“This is different,” she said again. As to underscore her words, the pyramid of Sassoon House, black in the advancing twilight, leaned to one side, pouring tiles in the sea before being engulfed in a tall wave. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” she whispered.

“Why is it different, this time?” I asked. I could justify my Flirting with the need to collect first-hand insight on the Collapse mindset that had almost extinguished us.

“There’s eight billion of us,” she said. “And we keep pouring poison into the system.”

I looked at her. “If you know what’s wrong, why don’t you change it?”

She turned away, and looked at the sea, black water under black sky, the lights of the drones like distant fireflies. She shrugged. “You can’t change people,” she said.

“Three hundred thousand years of history disprove that belief. Change is the only constant in the history of our species. We should embrace it, not try and stave it off.”

She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “You have too much faith in humanity,” she said.

“What if it’s you that do not have enough? We are Homo sapiens, not politicians.”

She chuckled, and her cheeks acquired a hint of color.

“My friend,” she said, nodding, “would not like such talk.”

I looked at the guy, surrounded by a bunch of hanger-ons. Some politico I was supposed to know. I would have liked to tell her we had lost the memory of such individuals, that she should not waste her time. “What if he doesn’t?” I asked.

She stared at me. There was no longer fear, there, but curiosity.

“Are you preaching anarchy?” she asked, with an impish smile.

“I am not a preacher,” I replied. “And I’d rather preach survival, if I were.”

“You can’t change people,” she repeated. It was the core of her belief. Her faith.

“People can change,” I replied. “We were cannibals far longer than we were fire-builders. But we have a big brain, and science, and art.”

“The economic system would collapse.”

It was my time to shrug. “We built it, we can build another, a better one.”

“That’s the spirit!”

I turned. My friend’s companion was standing too close, smiling the aggressive smile of one who’s in control. He gestured towards the darkness, where the drone lights illuminated a chunk of the Gutzlaff Signal Tower, like a broken finger pointed at the sky, rising from the waters.

“We will rebuild the Bund better than before,” he said. He squinted at me. “Are you an engineer? A designer?”

I shook my head. “A historian.”

He snorted. “Fascinating subject. Useless, but fascinating.”

Another wave crashed at the base of the tower. The structure creaked, people screamed. But I knew it would be all right.

I smiled at the young woman in the black cheongsam. “Remember,” I said, “We don’t have to be cannibals.” 

She smiled back. Her man frowned. I kissed her hand, and I went down to the jetties, taking the stairs. I had all the time in the world. Oriental Pearl Tower would not collapse. Not today.