# Last Beautiful by Robin Sloan
# Available under  a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 US License
# see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
# Canonical work here: http://robinsloan.com/last-beautiful
# I'm Matt Katz and I converted this to plaintext for this very silly idea
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I rode my bike to the beach on the last of the beautiful days.
Timon had to lure me out of the house. As a rule I’m unimpressed by the sun, and I have this theory that beautiful days are totally overrated. We all go crazy when the clouds part and the ground shimmers. Everybody gets totally distracted and scrambles outside like it’s some big game of musical chairs--or musical picnic blankets.
I’m not cranky! I just have a deep faith in the future, you know? There are beautiful days behind us and beautiful days to come--so relax, and play some video games.
But it turns out my faith was unfounded, because on Saturday, March 27, the music really did stop.
The next morning, Sunday, the sky over the city was gray-green. Monday was worse, and the week that followed was a cage of dark clouds that trailed curtains of cold rain. There was lightning. It went on like that, week after week, month after month, all across the city, the peninsula, and the headlands--the sun simply refused to shine. And today, about a million of us are still stuck living in a weather non sequitur.
Something fundamental has changed; something important is broken.
But I’m not just talking about the sky.
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The thing that sucked about the last beautiful day was that I didn’t get to spend it with Kate Trudeau.
Back at the beginning I lied: it wasn’t Timon’s coaxing, exactly, that got me out of the house. Rather, it was the understanding that Timon is friends with Lacey Pell, and Lacey is friends with Kate Trudeau, and Lacey was definitely coming, so Kate Trudeau was maybe coming. I mean, they’re really good friends. She was almost definitely coming.
If this sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. But I’m in a quasi-anti-relationship with Kate Trudeau, which means that we made out twice, hooked up once, got angry at each other 3/2 times, and were currently traveling through some sort of romantic netherworld. Don’t look back, Orpheus.
There’s a spot in Golden Gate Park where you’re cruising down the green-cosseted road and you make a sharp turn--there’s a windmill on your right--and suddenly, there’s the ocean, so big and bright it messes up the color balance of your eyes. It’s wide and white and waves are crashing and you can’t believe it’s been there all this time. And, especially if you are coasting towards the possibility of Kate Trudeau, it feels like the newest, biggest, greatest thing in the world. Like: wow, who invented this, and why didn’t I know ’til now?
But Kate Trudeau did not in fact come, so I spent the whole day pretending to be interested in Lacey’s new job and playing quarter-hearted frisbee with some dude named Chad. Really, I was barely there; my head and heart were out canvassing other beaches, other streets.
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In the damp drizzled weeks that followed, photos from that last beautiful day gathered a strange power.
It didn’t matter if they’d been snapped on Nokias or Nikons, because they all had one thing in common: they were scarce. These were images tightly circumscribed in space and time, and with every gray day that passed, they seemed more and more magical.
People posted their collections like little online shrines. Every golden photo had a long wispy beard of comments, all memories and longing. There were a lot of ellipses.
I got a little bit obsessed with these albums. One of my favorites was from my friend Catherine; it showed a sunny picnic in Dolores Park that, honestly, looked way more fun than frisbee with Chad. In one of her photos, I saw my old coworker Jay Gupta taking a picture of his own, way down on the park’s green slope. So then I found his album, and sure enough: there was Catherine with her camera, high up on the hill.
That’s what gave me the idea for Last Beautiful. I registered the domain (dot-org, because dot-com was taken) and installed a photo-wiki thing. The idea was that you could import all your pictures, pin them to a map of the city, and connect them with others to make big collective panoramas.
One big picture of one last beautiful day.
Now, my secret hope was that, by bringing all of the images of that day into one place, I’d be able to find Kate Trudeau.
So it was kind of an archive slash community slash stalking thing.
The photos came in a flood, and the sheer scope of the imagery was staggering. It was the view from a thousand picnic blankets spangling the earth from Precita Park to Crissy Field. It was long snaking sequences that traced bike trips across the city, with the sunlight shifting from yellow to white to red-violet along the way.
For some, that Saturday had been a boozy backyard party, with a cigarette hanging on every lip. For others, it had been a grand expedition with the kids, with chocolate-chip It’s-Its and matching Exploratorium t-shirts.
Everywhere, in every kind of picture, there was an effect that I loved more than anything: at a certain hour on the last beautiful day, cotton threads and gray whiskers and chestnut hair all blazed to life, backlit and burning like golden filament.
Maybe the same effect had occurred on the beach with Timon’s fuzzy beard and Lacey’s long hair as the sun came down. I hadn’t noticed at the time.
# # #
It was in fact the photos from Ocean Beach--so many photos from Ocean Beach--that told the tale.
On the horizon, always visible just over someone’s shoulder, there was the hazy silhouette of a ship making its way slowly towards the Golden Gate. If you found the right pictures and put them in the right order, you could watch the ship crawl closer, frame-by-frame.
Then it exploded.
Not a movie-style explosion with tendrils of red-black fire. Instead it just lit up; in the images it was suddenly overexposed, a bar of white light that might have looked like sun on the water if you didn’t have the filmstrip to tell you that just a moment ago it had been a blue-gray vessel.
The explosion--or whatever it was was--must have been soundless, or maybe the sound was lost in the roar of the waves. I’d been on the beach when it happened, and I’d noticed nothing.
# # #
So I found her.
A batch of photos uploaded by someone called elton_82 revealed at last where Kate Trudeau had been hiding all this time.
There she is. Your girl--well, your quasi-anti-girl, the girl you made out with twice and were kinda mad at but were still, on some level, trying to make yours--is in the background of a photo snapped on Fillmore Street, bending to peer into a shiny shop window, holding her hair back from her eyes with two fingers.
Kate Trudeau is window-shopping alone on this, the last of the beautiful days.
There are actually three photos that include her, taken in slow sequence because elton_82 apparently wanted to get exactly the right shot of his mom and dad. (Nice work, Elton.) In the last one, Kate Trudeau is standing, looking down at her phone with a serious face. Her camisole is riding up and her belly is exposed; it’s a span of pale gold shining through the lens of Elton’s iPhone and, actually, it’s about the same shape as that mysterious ship.
# # #
I posted the photos of the explosion anonymously on Wikileaks--all three hundred of them. Two days later, the Chronicle picked up the story and did some actual reporting.
The ship was the NOAA Ka’imimoana II. It had been conducting an experiment involving deep ocean currents and Copenhagen resonators. Apparently the currents were too deep and the resonance was too... Copenhagen? Anyway, everything went wrong and there is now a very, very small black hole in the mouth of the San Francisco Bay.
The government made a $525 Climatological Adjustment Payment to everybody in the city. One helpful commenter on the Chronicle’s site pointed out that the amount was just $14 shy of a one-way ticket to Costa Rica.
# # #
When I saw that band of belly on my MacBook--it was 1 am and thunder was rattling the windows--something fell into place in my brain, like the long straight Tetris piece that flashes and clears the screen.
The last beautiful day had really, really scared me. It had demolished my deep-rooted belief in open-ended possibility--my faith in a future of boundless beautiful days and boundless chances to meet Kate Trudeaus, and mess things up with them, again and again.
But now, with the last beautiful day more-or-less perfectly reconstituted, all the way down to the grainy curve of a beautiful girl’s hip, here was something even scarier: I had learned nothing. The world had presented us all with a weird white-hot lesson in the finite-ness of things... and I had used it as an excuse to waste a ton of time.
Outside it’s dark and gray and bitter cold, and I think there might be a tornado forming over Bernal Hill. But I’m going to ride my bike to the beach. I’m going to bring my frisbee and invite Timon and Lacey and Chad and yes: Kate.
We’ll miss these days too when they’re gone.
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# This derivative work is easier to parse for sentences due to two tiny alteration.  I changed 1.5 to 3/2 and a.m. to am
# This derivative work is licensed under a  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ but that's ridiculous.  I suggest you use robin's perfectly nice story the way he wrote it.