Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

11 Vaccine Season ^{Hannu Rajaniemi}

THE SMALL AUTONOMOUS BOAT SKIPPED OVER THE GRAY WAVES. THE ENGINE howled in mid-air with each jump. Every jarring landing made Torsti taste the protein bar he’d had for breakfast. The overpowering fish smell in the boat didn’t help.

For the thousandth time, he imagined what would happen when he arrived at his destination. He would jump out of the boat and run down the pier. His grandfather’s lanky form would reach down and embrace him. One shared breath and it would be done. Torsti would never have to be afraid of losing him again.

A cold spray on his face brought him back to the bucking boat. Jungfruholmen Island lay up ahead.

It was early autumn. From a distance, the blazing leaves of the trees made it seem like the island was on fire. The boat sped past the granite wave-breakers that guarded it, toward wave-polished coral-hued cliffs crowned with twisted birch and pine. A familiar pier jutted out of the stony half-moon of a beach.

In a few minutes, the boat bumped against the pier gently and came to a halt. Torsti climbed out carefully and secured his loaned vessel to a metal ring with a length of rope. There was no sign of Grandfather. The windows of the squat sauna building by the pier were dark. What if I am already too late? he thought. What if he is already dead?

A path covered in rotting leaves and pine needles wound into a patch of trees, up the cliff and toward Grandfather’s cottage. Torsti followed it, shivering in the wind.

The hiisi’s churn was just past the trees, in the middle of a large hollow. It was a gaping hole in the rock, fifteen feet in diameter. After a ten-foot drop, bottomless dark water lapped at the spiral-grooved walls. A stream of meltwater from a glacier had drilled it into the granite by rotating gravel, millions of years ago.

Torsti’s stomach tied itself into a cold knot. He had been five years old when he first came to the island with his parents to celebrate vaccine season. On a summer evening, with the red smear of the sun on the horizon, Grandfather had brought him to see the churn. In hushed tones, the old man had told him that the churn was actually an ancient portal to the stars. If you threw a rock into the spiraling grooves in just the right way, alien machines activated and opened a wormhole to wherever in space and time you wanted to go. He had closed Torsti’s fingers around a stone and told him to try.

Torsti had taken an eager step forward and looked into the churn. The vast depths had looked back, like the entire island was a monstrous eye and the churn its pupil, inhuman and black and fathomless, like Death itself. The stone had fallen from his hand and he had run away in tears. Even now, seven years later, he remembered the shame of it.

And I remember you, the churn seemed to say. I haven’t changed. I am the past. I am the future. I’ll get you in the end.

“No, you won’t,” Torsti muttered under his breath.

Branches rustled, and his heart jumped. A tall figure loomed on the other side of the churn. It wore dark overalls, gloves, and some kind of helmet. In the shadows, its face looked skull-like.

Then it stumbled on a pebble and set off a small avalanche into the depths of the churn. It let out a muffled curse in a familiar voice.

“Perkele,” Grandfather swore. He was wearing a battered face shield over a cloth mask, but his bushy eyebrows were unmistakable.

This is it, Torsti thought. He tried to will his legs to move, but the terror of the churn still held him in its grip.

Grandfather raised a hand. “Don’t try to come any closer, boy,” he said. “I mean it.”

Torsti stared at him helplessly. The old man huffed and adjusted his mask. This wasn’t going to work, he realized. The vaccine replicating in Torsti’s upper airways was engineered to be infectious, but just like the old Pandemic One virus it was based on, it still needed close contact to spread, especially outdoors.

Very slowly, Torsti took half a step forward.

“Stop right there,” Grandfather said, “or I’m going to run.” His voice was thin. It was hard to see his expression behind the mask and the plastic face shield, but his eyes were wide. He is afraid, Torsti thought. He has never been afraid of anything.

“I’m going to rest here for just a moment,” Grandfather said. “You stay right there.” He sat down on a boulder and massaged his leg, not taking his eyes off Torsti. “Did your mother send you?”

“No!” Torsti said. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Well, I think it should be obvious. I don’t want to catch your damn vaccine, that’s why.”

“Why not?” That was the question that had been haunting Torsti for two years, ever since his mother had told him that they wouldn’t be visiting Grandfather during vaccine season anymore. He was surprised by how fierce his voice sounded. “Why did you stop talking to us? What did we do to you?”

Grandfather ignored him and took a phone from his pocket. He tapped at the screen laboriously—typically, he hadn’t had the opto interface infection either, and had to use all his devices by hand.

“Doesn’t look like you are shedding that much,” he muttered. “Thank goodness for kids’ immune systems.” Then he looked up, narrowing his eyes. “If your mother didn’t send you,” he said suspiciously, “then how did you get here?”

This wasn’t the Grandfather Torsti remembered from the vaccine seasons past, the one who had played hide and seek with him and built a castle from sticks and pine cones in the secret grove on the eastern tip of the island. This was someone else.

“I skipped school,” he said, swallowing back tears. “Then I took a train to Hanko. There was a fisherwoman Rnought introduced me to. She lent me her boat.”

“Why on earth would somebody do that? Who the hell is this Rnought?”

“It came out last year. It’s a serendipity AI to speed up vaccine spread. If you already caught the vaccine, it matches you up with people who want to be immunized and can help you with something, or the other way around.”

One of the benefits of living in Helsinki was catching every new vaccine days or even weeks earlier than the rest of the country, and Torsti had gone to the big launch party at the Senate Square with his parents. And the new vaccine was so popular that the fisherwoman had jumped at the chance of helping Torsti get to Jungfruholmen, in exchange for a verified transmission.

“Sending a twelve-year-old out to the sea on his own, just like that.” Grandfather said, shaking his head. “Everyone has gone mad. When I was your age, we couldn’t always trust the machines to save you. That’s what’s wrong with this world, it’s too safe.”

“No, it’s not,” Torsti said. “It’s not safe. People still get old. People can still die.”

“Unless they get this bloody vaccine, is that it? A vaccine against death?”

It wasn’t a fix for death, not really. Torsti knew as much. But it was the next best thing. It was the last in the long series of vaccines the Global Immunity Foundation had been releasing for decades. Backed by a group of billionaires, they had invented transmissible vaccines to stop Pandemic One—a controversial move at the time, but necessary when more than half of Americans and countless others around the world had refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19. After an initial uproar, the Foundation had been hailed as heroes after they stopped Pandemic Two in its tracks, saving countless lives. In the two decades since, the Foundation’s vaccine releases had been coming out on a regular basis: first, updates against emerging coronaviruses, flu, dengue, pre-pandemic zoonotics. And eventually, protection from the big ones, non-transmissible diseases—heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

Now each vaccine release was a global event, a cause for celebration. At Senate Square, this one had rained down on a cheering, dancing crowd from dispersal drones amidst a bioluminescent fireworks display. Pre-infected choirs had sung it onto onlookers from the steps of the Helsinki Cathedral. The new vaccine was a senolytic: it trained your immune system to kill the zombie cells that accumulated in your body with aging. You wouldn’t live forever, but you would stay healthy much longer—no one knew how long. There were still mice alive from the first experiments, decades ago.

Torsti had clinked glasses with Mom and Dad when their phone sequencers confirmed their infections—champagne for his parents, Pommac for him—and then hugged and kissed passersby, all in vaccine season masks—feathers, crowns, and horns, but always leaving the mouth and nose uncovered. And then, all of a sudden it was as if he was watching the revelers from behind a pane of glass, cold and distant. How could they celebrate when there were those who would be left behind?

Like Grandfather.

“Is that what this is about, Torsti? You don’t want me to die?” Grandfather asked.

Torsti stared at him. Grandfather really didn’t understand. But maybe it was unfair to expect him to. Unlike Torsti, he hadn’t grown up with Mom coming home and talking about her job at the Long Reflection Committee. Over and over, she had explained what a special time this was in the human history. Things no longer hung in balance, existential threats—pandemics, bioterror, rogue AIs—had been overcome. It was time to look toward the deep future and decide humanity’s destiny.

Torsti had loved it, and had devoured everything the Committee published that Mom let him read. He had even started contributing ideas to the Committee’s open simulations that mapped out possible futures, millions of years ahead. He had spent countless hours wandering through the virtual worlds, until his parents disabled his opto. And even then, his imagination kept going, conjuring images of things to come.

GRANDFATHER DIDN’T REALIZE THAT THE VACCINE WAS JUST THE FIRST STEP. THE Committee scenarios were clear. If you extended your life by just a decade or two, the next set of longevity technologies would come along—not just to prevent aging but to restore youth—and so on. Longevity escape velocity, it was called. If you made it just a little bit further, you could travel to the stars, live as long as the universe itself.

Grandfather was letting all that go, because he was mad at Mom, for some reason Torsti could not understand. And that made Torsti angry, angry enough to do desperate things.

He opened his mouth to explain, but there were so many words that they just sat heavy in his chest, all jumbled up and stuck together, like a pile of twisted iron nails.

“No,” he said, finally. “I want you to live.”

“Well, that’s very touching,” Grandfather said, not understanding the difference. “But as you get older, you’ll understand that there are some decisions people have to make on their own. I have made mine, and I have to live—and die with them.” His voice broke, just for a moment. Then he continued in a harsher tone. “I don’t need a silly little boy coming here to take that away from me, just because he doesn’t understand how the world works.

“Now, I’m going to send a message to your mother.” Grandfather tapped at his phone laboriously. “We have our differences, but I don’t want her worrying herself sick. I’ll take you back to the mainland in the morning. With two boats it should be safe. You can sleep in the guest bed in the sauna, I already set it up—I’ll disinfect it all afterwards. And here’s a bunch of surgical masks.” He set a small pile of flat blue objects on the rock next to him. “I want you to wear them.”

He stood and started back up the path. “Come now. Since you’re here, you can help me chop some firewood. It gets cold at night.”

“You knew I was coming,” Torsti said. “How?” He had left his phone at home, and the ubiquitous surveillance of the old days had been banned at the start of the Reflection.

Grandfather shrugged.

“You have to be prepared,” he said. “Your Mom messaged me and told me you had gone missing. We don’t talk much, but some things you always share with family. I called an old friend at the Foundation, asked for transmission data. They barcode the viruses, you know. They don’t talk about it, but you can actually trace the contacts with the phone sequencers. It is still so early in the season that you left a pretty clear trail.”

He knew, Torsti thought. He didn’t have to let me come this far, he could have told Mom much earlier. He wanted me to come.

He followed Grandfather up the path toward the main house, keeping a respectful distance. Fallen leaves whispered beneath his feet, and he breathed in their earthy smell.

There was still hope.

THEY WALKED AROUND THE MAIN HOUSE TO THE FIREWOOD SHED. GRANDFATHER hauled out an armful of logs to the chopping block, and then his phone rang. He twisted awkwardly, trying to get it out of his pocket. Torsti moved forward to help, then remembered himself. The old man let the wood clatter to the ground, swearing, and pulled the device out.

“It’s your mother,” he said, frowning. He tapped it and held it up toward Torsti. “I think she just needs to see you are all right.”

Mom and Dad peeked at Torsti from the tiny screen. Mom’s eyes were tired, and her chestnut hair clung to her head, unwashed. Dad had an arm around her shoulders, tugging at his braided beard as he always did when he was anxious.

“Torsti,” Mom said. “I know I said you should have more adventures, but this is not what I meant.” She looked so small, so far away on the screen, so different from the full-sized opto projections he was used to.

“I’m fine, Mom. I’m coming back tomorrow.” He glanced at Grandfather, who was holding the phone. The old man’s eyes were squeezed shut as he listened.

“Tell… tell your grandfather thank you for me,” Mom said.

“I will.”

“Bring back some of that islander bread,” Dad said, a fake cheer in his voice. “We’ll see you soon.”

“Can I talk to your grandfather a bit?” Mom said.

Torsti nodded and waved.

Grandfather walked away, holding the phone to his ear.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “No, it’s no trouble. Of course. You both take care now.”

Grandfather ended the call, wiped the screen surface with a small alcohol pad and pocketed it. His face shield was clouded with steam. Sniffing, he swept his shirtsleeve across it.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s chop some firewood.”

In practice, what it meant was that Torsti chopped the firewood, at Grandfather’s amused direction. The handle of the axe stung his hands with every blow, and more than once he ended up having a log stuck to the axe blade and then bashing it against the block, lifting the whole thing like a giant, clumsy hammer.

“No, no, no,” the old man said. “There’s a trick to it.”

“What is it?” Torsti asked, huffing. There was a painful blister in the middle of his left palm. The surgical mask he now wore was moist with his breath.

“You have to catch the edge,” Grandfather said. “You go with the grain of the wood. It’s pointless to fight against it. It should feel like the wood wants to split. Come on. Try again.”

Torsti carefully positioned the birch log on the block and swung the axe. This time, he hit it just right, with the tip of the axe blade, and the log flew apart in two pieces effortlessly. He looked at it, surprised.

“See?” Grandfather said. “That’s the problem with everybody, these days. They don’t know the tricks anymore.”

Torsti looked at him. It felt strange to talk to someone wearing a mask that completely hid everything except the eyes. In a way, it felt more distant than seeing Mom on a screen. What is your trick, Grandfather? he wondered. Which way does your grain go?

“Where did you learn that?” he asked carefully.

“Well, now. It would have been in the time of Big Corona, back when your mother was little,” he said. “Not the virus, of course, not Pandemic One. The Coronal Mass Ejection Event, the solar flare. Nothing but wood to keep the heating going, back then. Had to learn quickly how to chop it.”

“What was it like?” Torsti asked, starting to gather the split logs into a pile. He knew the facts, of course. A massive blast of charged particles from the Sun had slammed into the Earth’s magnetic field, frying every electric circuit. But it felt like this was something Grandfather wanted to talk about.

The old man’s eyes were distant.

“Oh, it was a mess. You had satellites falling from the sky. No Internet. No electricity for six months. It was worse than the Pandemics. At least then we had ways of talking to each other. The Big Corona really isolated everybody. It was in the middle of the winter, too. People hoarded firewood. Even now, I keep too much of it around. Not good for my carbon credits, but once you go through something like that, your habits change.”

“I was in my forties. But it was only then that I learned how to be a grown-up. There is something about protecting your family that changes things. Not that anyone understands that, these days. After it was over, I made sure I prepared. Learned first aid, bought this place here, made sure we had canned food for years. Maybe I overdid the protecting with your mother a little bit, that’s why she grew up so wild. But you do what you have to do.”

His mask twisted, just a hint of a smile beneath.

“You know, we had this old chest of drawers, mahogany, from your great-grandmother. One night I took it to the back yard and chopped it into pieces. It kept us warm for a night, but your grandmother never forgave me for that.”

He sighed. “She loved the northern lights, though. We saw the best ones ever, the night it happened. We were all in a panic, trying to find candles in the pitch black, and then she told me to look outside. The city was all dark, and the sky was ablaze, with every color you could think of. We took your mother and went outside, stared at it for hours. It was the most beautiful thing she had seen in her life, she said, and because of the way she looked at it, it was.

“That’s what I miss now, her way of seeing things. I see the aurora here, in the winter, sometimes, but it’s just lights in the sky.

“We can’t really know, but that was probably what killed her, us going out there. The cancer wave that came afterwards, all those particles, messing with everyone’s DNA. I got lucky, roll of the dice. Your mother was fine, the Foundation rolled out the cancer vaccines by the time she started school. But your grandmother… “Grandfather looked away, at the choppy sea beyond the trees. “She drowned on dry land, in the end,” he said quietly. “Her lungs filled with fluid.”

Torsti stared at Grandfather. He didn’t know much about his grandmother, but her paintings and drawings were all over the cottage, small landscapes and quirky manga-style cartoons. He felt the terror of the churn’s black water rise in him again. To get rid of his disquiet, he chopped at the last log, hard. It flew apart violently, and the axe got stuck in the block.

“So that’s why,” Grandfather said.

“That’s why what?” Torsti asked.

“That’s why I don’t want your vaccine. I don’t need to see the future. AIs and space colonies and Dyson trees and all the things your Mom spends her days thinking about for the Long Reflection Committee. Lights in the sky, nothing more. I don’t need to see it.”

He got up. “Let’s gather these and get the fire going for you, hmm? It’s going to be cold at night.”

THE SAUNA SMELLED OF DRY WOOD IN A WAY THAT SEEMED TO RETAIN ITS WARMTH. It had a small front room with a low bed where Torsti had slept during previous island visits. It had one of Grandmother’s drawings, a tiny watercolor and ink of the view out toward the sea from the sauna window, framed by the wavebreakers.

“You’ll have to stay outside while I get the fire going,” Grandfather said. The old man went into the sauna itself and kneeled painfully by the stove, assembling kindling and wood into careful layers.

Reluctantly, Torsti got out of his way. He walked to the pier and looked out to the sea. As Grandfather had predicted, the wind had picked up. The trees on the cliffs danced, and heavy waves crashed against the breakers. It looked just like Grandmother’s painting, a window into the past.

So much would be lost when Grandfather died, entire worlds Torsti had never known. I have to find a way to do it, he thought. I have to bring him to the future with me. If I leave, I might never see him again.

It is just lights in the sky, Grandfather had said.

That’s the problem, Torsti thought. He can’t see the future. But maybe I can show him.

He went to the boat and picked up a coil of sturdy rope from its storage locker. Then he gathered a few round pebbles from the beach and went back to the sauna. Grandfather came out, dusting his hands.

“All right,” he said. “If you add a few logs before you go to sleep, you should be warm and snug now, even if the north wind blows.” There was a regretful look in his eyes. “It’s too bad we can’t actually use the sauna together. Shame to waste a good löyly.” Then he frowned, seeing Torsti’s expression. “What is it, boy?”

“I want to show you something,” Torsti said. “Let’s go up to the churn.”

THE HIISI’S CHURN LOOKED EVEN DEEPER AND DARKER IN THE FADING LIGHT. Slowly, Torsti walked right to its edge. The fear moved in him now, as if the deep water was reaching out from the churn with a cold hand and squeezing his heart.

He laid the coil of rope down on the ground and tied one end carefully around a boulder. Then he drew his hand back and tossed the first stone into the churn. It bounced off a wall and vanished into the black water.

“What are you doing?” Grandfather asked.

Torsti threw another stone. This time, the angle was better, and the stone actually caught on the grooves, spun around the churn bore before falling into the water.

“I want you to travel with me,” he said quietly. “Remember? It can take us anywhere.”

Grandfather watched him, eyes unreadable, almost invisible in the dim light.

“So let’s go to the future. A thousand years from now.”

He threw another stone. He was getting better at it now, and now the stone slid along the grooves almost a whole circuit. His palms sweated. The images from the simulations flashed in his head. Squeezing them hard like the stones in his hand, he forced them into words.

“Look,” he said, motioning Grandfather to come closer. “Here we are. Not many people live on Earth. Maybe you are still here, on the island, but when we come visit you, it’s from the artificial worlds in the asteroid belt, every one of them unique and different. I—I might have wings, since I live in a low gravity world, and I have to wear an exoskeleton to walk around. Mom is no longer just thinking about the future, she is building it. Dad is a mindweaver, trying to get big group minds to get along, helping them to find the balance between the parts and the whole. We still celebrate vaccine season. But now it’s just a ritual for family, like Christmas used to be.”

He threw another stone. This one was better: the round stone bounced and followed the grooves, almost all the way down.

He looked at Grandfather. The old man sat on a rock now, leaning his chin on his hands, watching Torsti.

“It’s a million years from now. Everybody comes back to Earth during vaccine season, once a century. There is no disease anymore, so the vaccines are memetic: ideas, entire systems of thought, ways of being, different kinds of consciousness. Mind vaccines against despair and war and fear.”

He looked up at the pale October stars. “The wormholes open in the Lagrange Points, and they come. Some—some come in ships; tiny ones, living spores that carry minds in molecules that then grow in soil and turn into bodies and minds; large ones, ones made from dark matter or with a black hole in the heart that can cross between galaxies. Others are already here, in virtual realities inside diamond machines; but they make bodies to visit Earth and the people here, because it’s vaccine season. So they can remember where they come from.”

Now Grandfather stood close. I’m not doing it right, Torsti thought. He still can’t see.

He gritted his teeth, strained to see the deep future and hefted the final stone.

Grandfather took his hand.

“Torsti,” he said gently. “It’s all right.” There was a smile under his mask. “You are a good boy, you really are. I know you can see these things, I know you can. You will do things I never imagined. And… it’s enough for me just to know that.

“Now, let’s go back. It’s getting cold. I’m going to make some food, and tomorrow I’ll take you home.”

The churn’s hollow voice mocked Torsti in his mind. You can imagine all the futures you want, boy. But they are not real. Only endless dark is real. Your Grandfather knows that. Nothing will exist. Only I will remain.

“No,” Torsti said. “I am going to show you.”

He withdrew his hand from his Grandfather’s and threw the last stone. It hit the grooves of the churn perfectly, spinning around the bore, rattling like a ball in a roulette wheel.

Then he jumped in after it.

For an instant, he was suspended in mid-air, could almost touch the walls of the churn. Maybe it is really a wormhole, he thought. Then the water rose to meet him and pulled a cold hand over his head.

Torsti had never learned to swim, in spite of Mom and Dad’s attempts. So he just lifted his arms and floated, disappearing beneath the surface. Water filled his mouth and lungs. It was like breathing in cold space. The dark filled him, and suddenly it was like he was hollow, a container for the universe itself.

He saw the future. Artificial worlds strung around stars like strings of pearls. Wormholes connecting galaxies like synapses between neurons. Currents of dark matter redirecting the movements of superclusters, slowing down the expansion of the universe, preventing the Big Rip that threatened to leave each photon alone in its own bubble. And then, new universes, budding off from the first one, entire new realities with their own laws and constants and life, a forest growing from a single seed. A multiverse, made from minds and wonder and surprise, no longer dead and cold, lighting up, inside him.

We are the vaccine, he thought. We are the vaccine against the dark.

And then it all blinked out.

THE COUGHING BROUGHT TORSTI BACK. IT FELT LIKE BEING CHOPPED AT WITH AN axe, right in the chest. The universe came out of him in tiny big bangs of phlegm and cold brine.

Finally it stopped, leaving him freezing and shaking all over, but alive. Torsti opened his eyes. His Grandfather’s silhouette loomed over him, against the evening sky.

“Don’t try to move,” the old man said, crouching next to Torsti on the granite. He lifted up his phone, pointing the camera at Torsti, and the screen lit up his face.

He wasn’t wearing his mask. His thick silvery hair and salt-and-pepper beard were dripping, and he had a pained look on his face. The lines were deeper than Torsti remembered, his cheeks were hollower.

“Grandfather,” Torsti wheezed. “I saw it.”

Relief spread over Grandfather’s face, smoothing the wrinkles.

“Thank goodness,” he said. “You stupid, reckless boy. What if I hadn’t been strong enough to haul you up that goddamned rope?” He held up his phone. “The Hanko Medical Center AI said you were going to be fine, but I almost didn’t believe it. You should be glad I still remembered my rescue breath training. How are you feeling?”

Torsti’s ribs hurt, but he felt better with each breath. Slowly, he sat up. He was soaked through and shivered in the wind. Grandfather wrapped his coat around Torsti, and then hugged him tight, wiry arms around the boy’s shoulders and back.

“I saw it in the churn,” Torsti whispered. “The future. I really saw it.”

Grandfather pulled away and looked at Torsti.

“I believe you,” he said. “You have it too, don’t you? That way of seeing. And I never realized. What a strange thing.”

His voice was thick. Then he held up his phone, clearing his throat. “Well, I guess I’m going to see the future too, now. This damn thing confirmed transmission.”

“I’m sorry,” Torsti said. “I took away your choice.”

Grandfather sighed.

“You did no such thing, boy,” he said. “You can’t take what wasn’t there in the first place. My choice was made long time ago. I just wasn’t ready to admit it.”

He helped Torsti up. “Let’s go to the sauna,” he said. “All these vaccines or not, you don’t want to catch your death.”

They walked down the pine needle path together, toward the sauna and the warmth.