“What we first saw here,” Kaori will grandstand later in the movie, where she looks out over the crowd of her devotees, “is the evidence of the power of this machine, yes. Even more than that—it’s proof of what we can accomplish together.” And cue the welling of the string-heavy soundtrack, the close-zoom to her eyes, where you can almost see a reflection of stars.

*   *   *

Our world, our country, wasn’t perfect, but I guess it was ours.

What I’m trying to say is that the United Arab Emirates plugging up the runaway tap that was rising ocean levels and funneling millions and millions of desalinated water to new farmland was awesome. So were the trees spliced with genes from deep-earth organisms that munched on carbon and turned it into rock so that Canada blossomed with towering pine forests that filtered the air. These beautiful trees that you’d swear were planted by angels, and you could stand nearby, cram your eyes shut, and almost hear them sing as they breathed out clean air. Scientists in Kyoto had pioneered the tech to regrow a human heart in just under thirty-six hours. A joint, resource-sharing pact by Brazil and Australia replanted the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef. The Commonwealth of Great Basin Nations, though it was still a new country trying to figure out its way, opened its borders to Greek refugees when almost no one else would take them. And the labs in Mumbai scrubbed childhood lymphoma and other horrors from humanity, while others in Kenya resurrected elephants and tigers from extinction. The Pan-African Union, on the continent that had been robbed of its resources for centuries, closed off an enormous oasis within the Democratic Republic of Congo as a nature reserve—where all the creatures that had no say in what we did to this giant rock could actually roam free without us killing them for their tusks or skin or just to get our jollies.

I repeated all this to myself at night, sometimes, after I’d heard about another bombing. Another shooting. Thoughts and prayers and now we turn to traffic.

We had gene-spliced drought-resistant crops but the whole city of Jakarta had to be evacuated before the island of Java sank. I threw out a half-eaten pretzel after coming home from the mall once, and my mom flipped out. Because when she was a little girl on São Miguel before her home island sank, her family would get boxes of clothes and supplies from cousins in America. They’d open the box, she’d said, some mixture of joy and sadness clogging her throat even after decades, and the things inside had smelled like America. Like fake lavender detergent and vanilla ice cream. And plenty. So how dare I commit the sin of throwing out good food.