Editing Until the End of the World (section)

===Act 2===
Eugene and Winter, who teamed up and went to [[Coober Pedy]], Australia, to wait for Claire and Sam after losing track of them in Tokyo,{{efn|Because Sam had been traveling as Trevor McPhee, who was wanted for stealing opals, and most opals are mined around Coober Pedy, Winter figured Sam's trip had probably started somewhere near there and he would come back through eventually.}} pick up the trail when Claire uses her credit card to place a video call nearby. When Eugene sees Sam in town, he punches Sam and they have a brief fight before they are arrested. While Winter tries to bail them out, Burt arrives looking for Sam and the camera, but Chico is able to subdue him. The next day, Sam only takes Claire with him when he takes off to fly to the compound where his parents are hiding and his father has built a secret lab, but the others are able to follow thanks to a secret tracking device that is still on the bag Chico gave to Claire when she first transported the money to Paris.

While Claire and Sam are in the air, the satellite is shot down by the U.S. government, and the resulting [[nuclear electromagnetic pulse]] interferes with the functioning of unshielded electronics and wipes their memory units. The engine of Sam's plane stops, so he has to execute an emergency landing. He and Claire walk across the desert until they are found by Sam's friend David, who has Eugene, Winter, and Chico in the bed of his hand-cranked diesel-powered truck. David takes everyone to Sam's father's lab, which is sheltered in a massive cave. Burt eventually arrives and everyone settles in to wait and see whether communications with the outside world will be restored. Eugene, who was writing a novel about Claire and her adventures before it was erased from his computer by the NEMP, begins rewriting it on an antique typewriter.

The process Henry developed requires the person who recorded the images to watch them while being monitored in the lab before they can be transmitted to someone else's brain. Sam, who has a strained relationship with his father, attempts to do this immediately after arriving,{{efn|David had taken the camera from Claire and left with it while Sam was in jail, and the viewer is not told where it was during the NEMP and why the recordings were not wiped.}} but he fails because he is too tired, which leads to an argument with Henry. Claire tries the experiment with her recording of Sam's sister with phenomenal success, and Sam later succeeds with his recordings. Although Edith is at first exhilarated to be able to "see" again, the ugly, pixellated images she receives contribute to her growing despondency. On [[New Year's Eve]], the same evening the group have intercepted a mundane radio broadcast that indicates human civilization has not ended, she "just let[s] go" and dies quietly.

After Edith's burial, Winter, Chico, and Burt leave the compound to go home. Henry begins working on how to use his technology to record human dreams, but the [[Aboriginal Australians|Aborigines]] who have been assisting him disagree with this and abandon him. He continues by experimenting on himself, Sam, and Claire, and they eventually become addicted to viewing their dreams on portable video screens. Eugene finds a catatonic Claire and takes her away from the lab, driving her into painful withdrawal when he refuses to replace the batteries for her screen. He finishes his novel, in which he writes her as being healthy and happy, and gives it to her, using the "truth of the words" to cure her of the "disease of images". Meanwhile, Sam wanders away from the lab and is ultimately cured by David and an Aboriginal ritual, and Henry is taken by the CIA while lying in the lab's dream-recording chair.

Eugene and Claire break up for good, but remain friends. Henry later dies in 2001, with Sam visiting his grave. While in San Francisco, Sam sees his wife (who has since remarried) and son from a distance, realizing that he has lost them forever. On Claire's 30th birthday, Eugene's book comes out and he, Winter, and the French bank robbers call Claire, who is in the middle of a six-month stint as an ecological observer on a space station, to sing her "Happy Birthday".