STAY AWAY IF YOU KNOW WHAT IS BEST

DANGER AHEAD ... FOR YOU!!!

They're old metal signs, set a half-mile apart along a hilly field just beyond the 12-N radius. The writing — clumsy, ugly capitals — is in white, the sort of officious white that Singh remembers from police chalk-lines and parking deliniation. Serious white, he thinks, fiddling under the truck's dashboard. A white that invites a second opinion.

He locates the right button, presses it, and the truck's AI — Christine, he calls her, a reference he's confident she doesn't get — appears in sprite-form on the passenger seat: a tiny, sour-faced girl with a head of wild curls. The truck's power is limited, so she appears slightly translucent about the edges, a girl made of glass. Singh clicks his fingers to get her attention, points toward the signs and their serious white lettering.

"What do you think?"

"What do I think of what?" Her voice is petulant, her lower lip pushed outward.

"The signs, Christine."

The sprite rolls her eyes. "Who cares about signs? They don't mean anything now. We're 12.4 miles from ground zero. No one lives here, and anyone who did live here died a decade ago. The only danger around these parts is terminal dullness. There's no point in stoppi… oh fine, get out then! If you don't plan to listen, don't switch me on!"

She's right, Singh thinks, as he climbs over the low, wire fence that bounds the field. There's no chance of finding anyone alive this close to the Mumbai plant. Except there's something undeniably lively about that writing — those wild exclaimation points bespeak a humanity that a mere hologram like Christine can never understand. KEEP OUT KEEP OUT KEEP OUT!!!!!!!

He can almost hear it, a defiant yell across the desert!

It sounds like people. It makes him hope.

The grass beneath Singh's feet is hard and dead and crackles like crisp packets. Above his head the sun's half-drowning in a lather of clouds, its upper hemisphere tinged bruise-purple. As he walks, Singh thinks back to Mumbai 2080 and the explosions that started all this: the nuclear apocalypse, the fall-out plagues, the burning cities, the ever-expanding desert, and his one man odyssey across the deadlands of middle India with nothing but a smart-mouthed sprite to keep him company. He was still young when Mumbai went supernova, he remembers, a student in his final year of anthropology studies. The good old days, when life was life and the dead slumbered peacefully and distantly between the covers of his textbooks.

At the cusp of a hill Singh discovers a tree, or the remains of a tree, the withered white skeleton of an oak, its leaves no more than husks that turn to ash when he touches them. Suspended between two lower branches is a clutter of wood and tin, a lonely strand of knotted rope dangling from its edge. Rubbish, Singh thinks, just a pile of rubbish that got blasted back here ... but then he leans closer, notices the bones, the scraps of material, and finds a final sign buried amongst the wreckage written in those same, stern white capitals.

DANGER HERE ... NO GIRLS ALLOWED!!!

"You've really got to listen to me more often," says Christine, behind him. She's projected herself to the very limits of the truck's range, and her image wavers in the heat like a mirage. "I knew you wouldn't want to see this. Children dying. It's not healthy for you, and I'm meant to be keeping you sane."

Singh shakes his head. "I feel better now." The moment he says it he knows it's true. There's a mad hot energy in him now that wasn't there before. It's not hope or despair but a sense of — a sense of connection, he decides. A communication through the ages on pieces of old tin. That's a lesson he remembers from his student days: the dead can speak as clearly as the living. I hear you, he silently tells the bones. And adds, as an afterthought: Sorry I brought a girl.

He doesn't bury them; the earth in these parts is hard as rock and, anyway, he doesn't have a shovel.

"You're clutching at straws," says the sprite as he gets back into the truck. The expression on her face is difficult to parse; it's part sympathetic and part disgusted and part something else he can't quite grasp, a technological impatience with the human condition, perhaps, or just plain boredom. "Poking about in the ruins of a treehouse — you're finally losing it, aren't you?" she presses him.

Singh sighs, starts the engine. "It's a human thing," he explains. "Leaving a mark. Our deaths only matter if someone knows about it. We don't live long so we have to … we have to make our own form of … we have to make our own legacy. The tree house and the signs, and things like books and buildings and art and …"

"Like a dog pissing against a tree," says Christine.

Singh looks for a long moment into the sprite's dark eyes, and observes in their ingenuous depths the simple impossibility of explaining immortality to an immortal. He shakes his head, dredges up a smile and eases the truck into gear.

"Let's keep going," he says. "There's more I need to see."