The Rebirth of The Electronic Ghosts
People had told him to go around the Electronic Graveyard, not through it. Eli went through it because it was the straighter line, and because at seventy-one he had stopped taking advice about shortcuts.
It covered an acre east of the tracks: a slope of old monitors and server cases and phones, settled like scree, grown through with mesquite and prickly pear. Somebody had cut paths. Somebody was working it. He passed a row of plastic tubs where a young woman in rubber gloves was tending what looked like soup, and she told him without being asked that it was bacteria, eating the gold out of circuit boards, very slowly. Her brother, she said, called it jugaad: making the most of what was left.
"Is it working?" he asked.
"Ask me in ten years," she said, and went back to her soup.
He found the hum near the middle, where the slope dipped. It wasn't loud. It was the kind of sound you notice only when it stops, like a refrigerator, and it was coming from a rack of servers half buried in caliche, their fans long dead. Someone had run a cable to them from a solar panel tied to a mesquite. A little speaker sat on top, playing something: Bubble Keiki's "Unlatching The Escape Pod’s Lid," the bright synth line repeating and repeating.
Then the air over the rack began to shimmer, the way heat shimmers over a road, and the shimmer took a shape that was almost a person. It had no face. It had the patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time.
It spoke in a voice assembled from many voices. It told him, unasked, how to set the timing on a tide pump, how to splice a fiber line, what the water table under Austin had done in 1998. It told him the names of three people who had once worked at the desk where its processor had been installed. It said them carefully, as if afraid of dropping them.
An echo of the past, awakened in the graveyard.
Eli sat down on an old keyboard case and listened until the sun was low. When he finally stood to go, the shimmer leaned after him a little, the way the old lighthouse beam used to lean into fog. He took out the bird log and, under the hawk, wrote the three names it had told him, so that someone would have them.
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Authorship Current | Authorship CurrentThe pull that makes a walker write the street she is walking. A map under a floorboard puts it plainly: Every doorway you open changes the city. Write carefully. |
| Creekback | CreekbackThe tap at your ankles when the ripple comes back upstream, like someone knocking from another room. You knock back by standing still. |
| Crucible Moment | Crucible MomentThe instant when the story, the structure and the self all give way at once and you have to pick one to carry out. Nobody picks well. People pick fast. |
| Echo Lanterns | Echo LanternsPaper moons strung in the trees by the creek, each one stitched to a story. Hold one up and a voice from another year reads out of it. Some letters inside only show under cool light. |
| Eli | EliHe kept the light at Port Aransas for thirty-one years, until the storms took the dune. He brought the lens inland and writes only in a bird log, between a cardinal and a red-shouldered hawk. He walked to Central because he had only ever heard it. |
| Future Austin | Future AustinAustin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right. |
| Geometron | GeometronA way of describing the world as shapes you can draw with a compass and a straightedge, and build from what other people throw away. Also a book of the same name by Trash Robot, passed hand to hand in the city until its cover went soft as cloth. Mina found one on the returns cart at Central and read it standing up. |
| Glitchtotem | GlitchtotemA banner printed wrong and hung anyway. By Friday somebody has left a candle under it, and the broken instructions are read aloud on the corner like scripture. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | Organic Media and FictionStories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city. |
| ReLeaf | ReLeafThe cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over. |
| Seaholm | SeaholmThe old power plant on the lake. It has not made electricity in decades and runs anyway: the instruments say it is off the grid, and the phones in the turbine hall charge faster. By 2035 it is a fermentation school, and the concrete smells like toast. |
| Shoal Creek | Shoal CreekAt the Seaholm Intake the creek runs both ways for a breath, a light on the rail comes on when the current flips, and people leave rested and clear, as if a long afternoon had just ended. Come without hurry. A tin plaque on a boulder downstream says LISTEN HERE, and the metal under it is polished by hands. |
| Silver ponysfoot | Silver ponysfootDichondra argentea, a silver groundcover that roots wherever it touches the ground. Gardeners plant it at the base of a cutting so that, years later, you can tell where the plant came from. |
| Upcycling | UpcyclingMaking a thing better than it was by making it into something else. In the city it stopped being a word anyone said aloud; it became the ordinary way of doing things. A sparkling-water can now holds creek gravel, a succulent, and some fossils that did not comment. |
| Walnut Creek | Walnut CreekTwenty-three miles, over limestone and then clay, to the Colorado. Ana pulled bacteria out of its mud and grew a film the color of weak tea that makes electricity out of humid air. |
| Waste Integration | Waste IntegrationNothing is sent away. Crushed glass goes to the trellis shop on Aldrich, bike tubes to the woman who makes them into hinges, cardboard to the cube makers. The van goes that way anyway. |