Lanier regretted his vow to scale the first leg of the high switchback before resting. At the second bend of the mountain trail, doubled over, hands gripping his trembling knees, he sucked in jagged volumes of air and puffed them out, sweat dripping from his brow. He hadn’t done much hiking or even exercise for years, and unless he truly wanted to end this life, to overexert on his first long hike was a foolish luxury. The miracles of Hexamon medicine could only do what he had allowed them to do; that is, keep him reasonably vigorous for his age and disease-free and unaffected by excess radiation, of which he had an abiding horror.

His breath coming back to him, the pain in control now, he looked down from the precipice trail at the valley floor three hundred meters below. Flocks of sheep—maybe they belonged to Fremont, the young owner of Irishman Creek Station—flowed across the mottled green and sun-yellow grasslands, echoed by great rain-heavy gray and white clouds crossing their own intense, dust-blue pastures. Overhead, an eagle soared, the first he had seen this season. The wind this high was cold and bracing even in the November springtime; a thousand and more meters up the mountain there were still patches of snow, dotted with the inevitable filamentary scarlet fungi the shepherds and farmers called Christsblood.

He finally allowed himself to sit on a rock. His shins ached. His calf muscles threatened to knot. For the first time in months, maybe years, he actually felt pretty good, justified somehow for existing.

The wind called his name. Startled, he turned around, looking for a hiker or shepherd on the trail below or above, but saw no one. Satisfied the sound had been an illusion, he pulled a goat-cheese sandwich from his backpack, unwrapped it and began to eat.

The wind called him again, this time more clearly, closer. He stood and glanced up the trail, frowning. The call had come from that direction, he was sure of it. Stuffing the sandwich back in its wrapper, he marched around the second bend and a hundred yards up the trail, boots grinding into the pebbly surface and sliding on succulent grass still damp with dew. He was alone on the trail.

Singing to keep his rhythm, he paused to catch his breath and let the clean air pass into his blood, clear his mind of cobwebs gathered from months of sitting indoors.

He needed to riddle his situation.

While pitying his fellow humans, he had also come to hate them. It seemed that in their agony, more often than not they flailed about in a way that made things worse. Sometimes, those who had been treated cruelly—losing homes, family, cities, nations—had reacted by treating other survivors even more cruelly.

Lanier’s favorite reading of late had been the twentieth-century philosophēr and novelist Arthur Koestler, who had thought humankind fatally flawed in design. Lanier had few doubts.