With a thunderous roar, the plane tilted up and soared into the sky, its silver profile warped by the shimmering air spewing from its engines.

Even from across the bay, a mile away, the takeoff was so loud that the group of spectators covered their ears.

The plane shrank in the sky and eventually vanished. The crowd dispersed, chatting among themselves excitedly. One family tarried.

“I can’t believe people used to live here while thousands of those things came in and went out every day,” said Noah, a lean, muscular man. He swept an arm at the abandoned buildings around him, with trees poking out of ruined rooftops and great blue herons gingerly stepping through the marshy patches that had once been lawns and streets. A few beavers sunned themselves on half-submerged walls. “How did they not go deaf?”

“My grandmother grew up around here,” said Isla, his wife. “She told me it was the smell that she remembered. The fumes would carry all the way across the water.”

Next to them, their daughter, Hannah, who had just turned ten, gazed longingly at the empty airport and said nothing.

“And we complain about one flight a week,” said Noah, laughing. “But, no more. That’s the last flight out.” He turned to Isla with admiration. “It wasn’t easy, but you did it. You shut it down.”

Isla smiled. “I wasn’t the only one. But yeah, I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. This was the last active airport in the Commonwealth. We’re finally free.”

“The water looks nice,” Noah said, gazing longingly at the sparkling water in the bay. Summers here were so short.

“I’ll race you!”

Isla grabbed her bag from her bike and ran toward the changing rooms on the edge of the rocky beach. What could be better than a bracing swim in the sea after a long bike ride and watching the end of an era?

“Do you want to join us, sweetheart?” Noah asked Hannah as he also got his bag from his bike. “Or maybe you’d like to go check out the marshes? The beavers do really interesting construction in coastal waters.”

“No,” Hannah said. “I don’t feel like swimming or exploring.” She glanced at the sky, as if searching for something. “I’ll just stay here and browse on my terminal. You and Mom go have fun.”

Noah hesitated at the dejected profile of his youngest daughter, knowing she was thinking of one particular passenger on that last flight. “Listen,” he said, “it wasn’t up to Kai. Her parents decided they wanted a different life for her and for themselves.”

“I know,” Hannah said. She took out her terminal and put up the privacy shades.

Noah sighed and went to join Isla in the clear blue sea.

#

At first, Hannah and Kai talked every day. Through a telepresence drone (size of a cat, with eight legs and an omnidirectional camera rig), Kai showed Hannah around her new house in Cape Town. Hannah wasn’t used to the complicated controls, and Kai got impatient with her for not being able to keep up.

“It’s hard to see where I’m going,” Hannah tried to explain. “The window on the screen is so small and I have to switch between camera feeds all the time.”

“That’s why you should get a VR rig,” Kai said. “Even a really cheap one will be better than your old terminal.”

“You know my parents won’t allow it,” said Hannah.

“Yeah, I know,” said Kai. “Not gonna lie, but I don’t miss the arguments between our parents, especially not the death glares your mom used to give mine whenever we returned from a vacation outside the Commonwealth.”

Kai tried to slow down so that Hannah could keep up. But even after Hannah got used to the clumsy keyboard controls for the drone, playing tag or hide-and-seek this way wasn’t nearly as fun as they hoped. It just wasn’t the same as when they were together in person: you could hear the little creaks in the floorboards, sense the subtle changes in air pressure, feel how your friend was creeping up on your super secret hiding place, and it was all so exciting that you wanted to scream and laugh at the same time.

Gradually, the hangouts shifted to every other day, and then just once a week. Hannah didn’t know any of Kai’s new friends or the new sights she was seeing, and Kai got tired of explaining. It felt like Kai was shrinking away, like the plane vanishing into the sky. Hannah even stopped looking forward to the chats—they felt more like chores.

“Staying friends with someone who’s very far away is hard,” Isla told her daughter. “Telepresence just fools you into thinking it’s easy. Make an effort to listen to Kai, to learn about her new life. If both of you try real hard, it can work.”

One day, after a two-week break, Kai showed Hannah a video of her vacation. The camera—Hannah assumed that it was taken from a telepresence drone—began high in the sky, looking down at a mighty flowing river, no, an ocean, of hundreds of thousands of wildebeests moving across the Serengeti.

The herd, at once graceful and powerful, slowly ebbed over the land, a giant ink stain spreading from its own will, a flock of birds pressed flat against the earth, a monumental amoeba shapeshifting … comparison after comparison flashed across the mind of an enraptured Hannah.

Abruptly, the camera swooped down, dipping, diving, plunging into the herd until it was at the level of the pistoning legs, the huffing muzzles, the sharp horns and intense, amber eyes. The noise of millions of hooves striking against the ground, even filtered through the tinny speakers on Hannah’s freecycled terminal, was terrifying. It was the most breathtaking sight Hannah had ever seen.

“It’s even better in full-immersion VR,” said Kai. “And now imagine if you were actually there. Makes you feel tiny, insignificant, doesn’t it?”

Hannah could tell Kai was quoting an adult, probably one of her parents. She remembered Mx. Vee always going on and on about how important it was for people to travel, to experience the wonders of the universe and therefore know how humans were just a tiny piece of the world, not masters of all they surveyed.

“How close were you to the drone?” Hannah asked. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was too overwhelming.

“Drone?”

“The drone you shot that video from.”

“I didn’t use a drone,” Kai said, looking a bit offended. “I was holding the camera myself. It’s not the same if you aren’t there, in person.”

“You were flying among the wildebeests?” Hannah gaped.

“It’s the latest thing,” Kai said. “The tour guides strap you into a little hovercraft, like a minicar, and then the AI takes over to fly you into the action. It’s very safe—the AI basically makes the hovercraft move around like a member of the herd and they’ve never had an accident. Everyone in my safari group did it. The hardest part of filming was avoiding getting the other fliers in the shot—kind of ruins the mood, you know?”

Hannah imagined herself swooping among the wildebeests, diving with a pod of whales (Kai said her mom was taking her to Hawaii for this), dodging angry polar bears (Christmas next year) … She didn’t like this sensation that was making her heart feel all wrinkled and nasty; she was envious of her friend.

“You can’t just imagine the wilderness,” said Kai. “You have to experience it to love its hidden spirit and to know what it means to be human, to be alive.”

Kai was probably quoting again. But the words rang true to Hannah.

#

“… a summer cruise with the Chiromas,” said Noah, looking at his daughter with a glint in his eyes. “Ekon Chiroma says it’s much better than what passed for whale watching back when Mommy and I were kids. The sailboat is really quiet so it doesn’t bother the whales, and we’ll move so slowly that we won’t risk hurting them. The bike ride to the Cape will take a couple days, but it’ll be worth it. Doesn’t that sound great?”

“Thanks, Dad,” Hannah said. She swallowed nervously. “But I wasn’t thinking about whale watching here. I meant … maybe we could fly to Hawaii? Kai’s family will be there in the summer.”

“Ah,” said Noah. Silence fell around the dinner table.

Isla broke in. “You know there are only four passenger airship flights to Hawaii per year from here—”

“Why do we have to live this way?” Hannah demanded. “You always tell me airplanes are terrible, that flying somewhere in a plane is probably the worst thing you can do to the environment as an individual. But airships are supposed to be clean, aren’t they?”

“It’s not just about pollution,” said Isla. “Honey, remember learning about the ecological damage done by invasive species stowing away on ships? We limit transcontinental and intercontinental traffic to and from the Commonwealth, even for sailing ships and airships, because we want to minimize the impact from our actions on every part of the planet.”

“That’s right,” added Noah. “Even if all our machines ran on fusion, on wind and the sun, we’d still harm the world if we forgot that we share it with everything; we’re not its masters.”

“But Kai’s family doesn’t live like we do,” Hannah said. She tried to keep her voice steady but wasn’t succeeding. “They fly around, and Kai is not a bad person. She’s not.”

Isla sighed. “Kai’s family, like a lot of people, don’t agree with us. In fact, that’s why they left the Commonwealth. I’m not saying they’re ‘bad’ people, and they probably believe they’re helping the world, but they’re still wrong. You’re too young to understand.”

“What’s the point of saving the world if we never get to live in it?” Hannah was shouting now. “Kai is right. If we never get to see the whales, the elephants, the Tasmanian tigers up close, then they’re not real to us. We won’t ever feel the hidden spirit of the wilderness. Why don’t you just put everything in a museum!?”

She got up and ran out of the room.

#

“Shhh—” Noah held up a finger against his lips and gestured for Hannah to look in the direction of the pond.

Taking a walk through the muddy fields and woods outside the town wasn’t exactly Hannah’s idea of a good time. She would have preferred to stay inside and play on her terminal. But she was trying to be a good sport—her parents had, after all, agreed to get her a VR rig so that she could have an easier time visiting Kai (the rig was freecycled, of course, but still).

It took a long time for Hannah to see what her father wanted her to see among the swaying reeds: a mottled brown bird, about three feet tall, with a squat body and a long but thick neck (“mandolin-ish,” she thought). The bird had stretched out its neck with the beak pointed straight up into the sky. It didn’t move, only slowly swaying back and forth with the reeds. The pose and plumage blended so perfectly into the vegetation that Hannah would never have seen it but for an eye, round, cartoonishly startled, flickering back and forth between the pair of human observers.

The bird looked so funny that Hannah giggled. “What is it?” she whispered.

“An American bittern,” Noah said. “They are stealth hunters, blending perfectly into the water’s edge until it’s ready to strike at a fish or frog. That one is a female. The nest is over there, in that strand of cattails.”

“Can I see the babies?”

“Maybe,” Noah said. “We can take my telescope the next time. We shouldn’t use a drone; it will bother the mother.”

Hannah wondered if the wildebeests were bothered when Kai flew near them—Kai said it was safe, but she meant the humans. She never said what the wildebeests thought about the safari.

The pair continued their walk. Hannah wasn’t used to the soft, wet earth, and her boots got stuck from time to time.

“When I was little, I never got to see a bittern,” Noah said. “There were asphalt roads and parking lots everywhere. For cars. The parking lot for my school was bigger than the whole town of Clamrock.”

It sounded to Hannah like a fairy tale. “Why would you need that much space for just two trucks?” There were two trucks in all of Clamrock, reserved for things like market days or when a family needed to build a new house.

“Ha. There were almost as many cars as people in the Commonwealth back then. Let’s see: Grandma and Grandpa each had one, and then later, Aunt Chloe and I each had our own car, too. We drove everywhere. Even if it was just to get a scoop of ice cream.”

Hannah looked at her father like the bittern.

Noah laughed. “We never saw any wildlife. I took a whole class in high school on biology, and the only animals we got to touch were dead ones, cat corpses injected with colored plastic to make dissection easier.”

Hannah tried to imagine such a life and couldn’t. Even though she wasn’t into hiking and camping, the town of Clamrock was filled with animals: songbirds that started singing long before sunrise; frogs croaking among the grass lining the bike paths; skunks and raccoons living in the backyard; bats and doves roosting in houses people built for them. They were so common that she sometimes forgot they were there, only noticing them when they got in her way.

“People like your mother and me, we didn’t want to live that way anymore. There were enough of us that we could start a new way of life, one where people put down roots and stayed put, and didn’t treat the whole planet as a place to be conquered, to extract things from.”

Hannah felt this as a rebuke of her friend. “I don’t think Kai’s family is like that. Every time they fly somewhere, they always donate the same amount to conservation groups. Kai told me that the safaris give the tour guides and reserve wardens jobs, not to mention all the factories and workers building the drones.”

“And people think the church had outlawed indulgences,” Noah muttered under his breath. Then, louder, he said, “Tourists always think they’re the reason the world continues to exist—I’m sorry, that’s not fair. I shouldn’t say that to you when Mx. Vee isn’t here to defend themself.”

“I felt amazing when I saw the video Kai took of the wildebeests,” Hannah said. “How much more Kai must have felt, actually being there. Mx. Vee is right. You can’t love nature as something abstract: everyone has to experience it.”

“You’re absolutely correct,” said Noah. For a moment he looked a little frustrated, a little sad. Then, he went on. “I’ve never been among the wildebeests, or stared a lion in the face. But, I’ve seen other wonders. Look at these trembling aspens. Did you know they’re all actually part of a single tree? Listen, can you hear that buzzing trill? That’s a golden-winged warbler, one of the prettiest songbirds you’ll ever see.”

As he gestured and talked, his expression grew animated, and his whole face glowed. “See that fern, curled at the tip like a monkey’s fist? That plant is descended from ancient ancestors that looked pretty much exactly the same during the time of the dinosaurs. And that bright orange blob over on that fallen branch? That’s witch’s butter, which makes your tongue tingle like little elves dancing on it.”

Hannah followed her father’s finger as it pointed out the hidden spirit of the wilderness. He seemed enraptured, like Ali Baba standing at the opening to the cave of treasures. She had heard him go on and on about the little discoveries he made during the day, but this was the first time she understood his excitement, at least a little bit.

“I’m sorry, Hannah,” Noah said, his voice breaking. “It’s my fault that I haven’t done enough to show you the wilderness around you. Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘The edges of the wilderness lie close beside the beaten roads of the present travel.’ You don’t have to fly around the globe and destroy the very beauty you pursue. I don’t know if you’ll be convinced to live the way your mother and I have chosen, or maybe you’ll always agree with Kai. You’ll have to make your own choice someday, when you’re older. We knew, from the start, that every generation must recommit to our vision. But know this, daughter, the wilderness is right here, right now, where you stand.”

For a long time, father and daughter didn’t speak as they went on walking. Hannah’s hesitant steps grew more confident as she got a feel for how to walk through the mud.

“What is the name of that?” she asked, pointing to a tall, gangly bird wading through the shallow shore of the pond to the right. “What’s it doing?”

Noah began to explain.