The Edge of the Abyss
"I learned a long time ago as an astronomer that the first thing you check if you think you’ve discovered a world-changing event is the telescope, then you check your eyes, then you sound the alarm."
Julian Hartsock. “The Edge of the Abyss.” Precipice: The Autobiographical Ramblings of Julian Hartsock. (Chapter) A & A Publications, 2123.
NEUROTICISM (Withdrawal) — (Hartsock, Julian Q.) 42nd Percentile:
Withdrawal (NW) is the psychometric score assigned to an individual’s proclivity to suffer from anticipatory anxiety or experience negative emotion surrounding uncertainty or potentially threatening or complex situations. Individuals with moderate NW are unlikely to avoid or withdraw when presented with social or professional challenges. They occasionally experience sadness or grief but not exceedingly so and usually with a quick return to emotional baseline. Most people with moderate NW aren’t particularly sensitive or worried about social rejection. They also handle risk relatively well.
A score in the (42nd) percentile, coupled with the distribution profile of psychometric measures herein, suggests a moderately stable personality unlikely to evade potentially uncomfortable situations. This NW score, combined with a moderately high EA (Extraversion-Assertiveness), suggests that despite extremely low scores in EE (Extraversion-Enthusiasm), the subject would be functional to moderately comfortable in groups, whether social or professional and will handle responsibility without experiencing abnormally high stress levels.
MM³ had this roughly correct. I’ve never run from a crowd or responsibility; they just came with the territory I had to live and work in. Gladstone et al. had me rated slightly higher at the 48th percentile, and their narrative was scant; their feedback read as follows: Moderate NW suggests low proclivity toward anxiety or passive avoidance.
There’s an ancient story of a farmer in the Alps of Italy who encountered Hannibal as the Carthaginian general’s army was famously passing over the glacial peaks on their way to Rome. The farmer came down from the hills into the city, telling wild tales of hundreds upon hundreds of cavalry riding elephants over the nearly impassible mountain paths. Though his story was accounted unbelievable, he didn’t seem like a raving madman, so he was brought before the proconsul to report his experiences to the state on the off chance there was truth to his tale.
The proconsul asked the farmer about numbers of soldiers, animals, weapons, locations, and every imaginable logistical question to discern whether it was possible Hannibal could be attempting to invade Rome from the north. The proconsul, still disbelieving of the farmer’s story, asked how the farmer and his family had survived this invasion of their land.
“They did us no harm, noble lord,” the farmer replied. “They had no cause to. I gave them all of my stores and answered every question they asked truthfully.”
“Why did you not mount a defense of your lands?” the proconsul asked.
The farmer said, “I have neither scythe nor rake that can fell an elephant, noble lord, hard as I may try.”
“You expect me to believe,” the proconsul said, “that Hannibal invaded your land with his army, ate through all your provisions, and somehow allowed you to flee his army and warn of his approach?”
“Noble lord, you mistake me,” the farmer said. “We do not flee Hannibal or his army at all. The Carthaginians seemed good-natured men who treated us quite well. I walked away from my farm when their horses, mules, and elephants ate the last of our winter provisions. We do not flee Hannibal, sir. We flee the winter.”
The story, though almost certainly apocryphal, has always stuck with me. Almost every time I see a story of displacement, contemporary or historical, that farmer comes to mind. That same decision has been made so many countless times by so many people over so many generations, it may well be the most consequential question in life. Over the hills walks an army of elephants. The world changes, and the farmer thinks, this we can endure, and he is correct. But can we survive the winter once the world has changed? This is an entirely different question.
Not for a second in the early years of A & A did I ever think it would come to this, certainly not for me. When you have more resources at your disposal than any human who has ever lived, it’s hard to imagine anything walking over the hilltops that could change your perspective on the coming winter. And then elephants. You couldn’t have thought it. Where to begin?
I didn’t notice it in others. It happened to me first. I’ll never forget the moment. We were about five years into the Florida Space Ladder project, and things were on track—even slightly ahead of schedule. Engineering contracts and production processes were getting dialed in, but we hadn’t begun construction. The news of what we were up to hadn’t gone public yet. Beyond the tight circle of space industrialists, I was still utterly anonymous to all but the small number of A & A’s employees who all referred to the first tower as “the Clearwater Project.” It was almost a secret code at the time among the few young professionals in what was then a small city, you know, “Oh, that’s Julian Hartsock. He’s with the Clearwater Project.” But no one outside of A & A knew what it was.
I’d turned to implants, mostly because I didn’t understand what it meant to be an executive. For years, I still did things the way I’d done them as a student. There was something about taking on a project and micromanaging every aspect of it. I had to do the math, because I thought I was the only one who could do it right, and because suddenly my work was no longer strictly theoretical, I felt like I needed to double-check everything or the space elevator would come crashing back to Earth in a cataclysm of Olympian scale. I thought implants had a long enough track record. I thought the doctors, regulators, and technologists were trustworthy when they swore on the decades-long performance history demonstrating safety and efficacy.
I was at a taco stand called Jimena’s, which you could usually find at the corner of Pierce and Myrtle in those days. I was getting lunch and was approached by a young man who appeared to be homeless, and he asked me if I’d buy him a taco. I was overcome with the most visceral sensation of disgust that was so fierce it radiated down the left side of my body into my leg. It was such a strange neurological phenomenon I couldn’t help but notice it. I’d never been very judgmental, not by temperament or upbringing, but this wasn’t judgement, it was a visceral emotion that happened to me. I wondered where the hell it came from that another human being could disgust me so much that my leg ached. I bought the man a taco despite the sensation, but it rattled me to my core. I wondered if it was a sudden form of insanity. It wouldn’t be for months that I connected the implants with that strange experience. The first place I turned was psychometrics, which I’d been fascinated with since I’d started reading about the brain after my concussion. And I started thinking about ways I might track negative emotions to see if my brain was undergoing serious changes over time.
When I dove into the psychometrics literature, I found an obscure paper from a hundred years prior that had been all but ignored by the psychological community of the time—small wonder: some questions are so uncomfortable people can’t bear to ask them, much less absorb the answers. Her question turned out to be the same as mine, and it was a simple idea. Could something tilt the psychology of humanity, collectively, in such a way that humanity itself would change in a catastrophic fashion? She was asking this question in the context of the advent of smartphone adoption, which to us would seem a strange connection, but most people alive today have never met a person who didn’t have constant direct contact with the computational force of technological feedback. For people of the early 21st, it would be the same thing as meeting someone who only rode a horse for transport. This was the first time computers were portable enough to be on their person, and purveyors of information at that time were figuring out that activation of the amygdala kept users engaged. This obscure psychologist hypothesized that overactivation of the amygdala as a result of chronic smartphone use could shift the entire population, making enough people less empathetic and compassionate, that this critical mass of unbalanced people would lead society down a dark path. She tracked how adoption of smartphones affected people’s empathy using a crude psychometric test of three factors the psychologists back then called the “dark triad” of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Her results were unconvincing initially, I suspect because her timeline was too short, and her subjects were all adults with limited neuroplasticity. Her deeper question, though, was the same as mine: were there elephants there? What the hell is coming over that hill? Because something was on that horizon.
A generation later, following a literal pandemic, there was a pandemic of anxiety, depression, narcissism, personality disorders, crime, and general indifference to human suffering. People who had grown up in the previous century didn’t recognize this new world, and they struggled to relate to the young adults who’d grown up in the new one. But no one made the connection, and even if they had, what could be done about it? The elephants had marched too slowly over the hills and had already eaten the winter stores.
What now, I thought, if the same thing were happening again with implants? How much nudging would it take to move populations without their knowledge of it, with an additional century’s worth of understanding of the human brain? I began to look into a very dark side of human psychology, the effects of crude propaganda by governments and corporations, studies that made the hair on my neck stand on end. Those months I was researching this question, despite the effort I made to wear my usual face at work, were some of the darkest days of my life. It is hard to fathom what large masses of seemingly normal people have done and found twisted ways to justify.
I worked with an AI called Abel to develop a tracking program, a subtle way to aggregate population-level data on a metric we came to call MT (Misanthropic Tendency), which we tracked in chipped and non-chipped people going back to the earliest commercial products almost five decades prior. I gave Abel, who’d been programmed as an anthropologist of all things, the colossal task of combing through nearly fifty years of marketing and research data, wellness surveys, anything where a response was given that might catch a signal when we overlaid the dark triad factors—a staggering amount of calculation after we’d dialed in the algorithm. The results were horrifying.
I could see the hills no longer, for every inch of the horizon had been occupied by elephants.
A revelation of this magnitude is quite a secret to hold, but I told no one. I’m not sure what I would have said. I needed to figure out whether some group of nefarious actors was knowingly doing this to humanity or whether it was something we were all unwittingly doing to ourselves. I suspected it was the same as the smartphone revolution, an organic appearance of a product that changed the landscape and the behaviors that followed were an emergent property, complex and unexpected beyond the control of any group of actors, however powerful or intelligent. My AI counterpart was not so certain. Abel had no evidence or knowledge but did not dismiss the possibility of AIs having a guiding hand in the severity and direction of the movement in human psychology. But he agreed on one thing, this was elephants, and he expressed the concern that if the dynamic progressed unchecked, his designation—anthropology—may become an entirely moot point within a generation.
Within a few weeks of that discovery, the news broke on the Clearwater Project. The world found out we were building a space elevator, and in the span of a month, my face became one of the most recognizable faces on the planet. From that moment on, I was in it. Everything changed.
During the chaotic five years that followed from the time the world learned of the Florida Space Ladder and its completion, I hardly had a moment to think seriously of its ramifications on a personal level. Between my day-to-day obligations within A & A and the media circus outside the company, nearly every waking moment was accounted for. The off times I got asked about the phenomenal power and influence I was building for myself, I had scripted responses by PR professionals at the ready—a mixture of deflections, canned humility, and assurances that checks on my outsized influence were being put in place. I got good at regurgitating them. In reality, I was scared shitless of the prospect of one human holding the reins of the sky like no man has since Phaethon, and I was even more terrified that those reins would be in my hands. Oh, and by the way, Julian, the elephants. It occurred to me often that the burden of these world-breaking problems might be a bit much for one person to bear, but I genuinely struggled letting anyone in, because I understood the cost of the burden, and I understood there were few people who were both capable enough to help and trustworthy enough to bear the cost of helping in secret without thanks or recognition.
As segments of the space ladder rose higher and higher into the Floridian sky, so did the astronomical expectations and opportunities. Luckily for me, I was blessed with excellent people at every level at A & A, due largely to the magnitude of the project itself. As soon as word got out about what we were doing, all the best engineers, contractors, and scientists were drawn to the project by its sheer scope and prestige. The city of Clearwater’s population quadrupled and that was in the five years before the Space Ladder opened. Once it was operational, the entire area blew up to previously unrecognizable proportions, matched probably only in American history by San Francisco during the gold rush. It was around this time that I started getting offers of every imaginable kind from business leaders, presidents, kings and queens, you name it. Anyone thinking of setting up shop in space for any purpose came to me at some point. I had tea in Nagoya with three Yakuza elders, which was perhaps the most memorable of these meetings, and they were actually among the more persuasive factors that led to the Osaka Space Lift moving forward, entirely diplomatically and respectfully, mind you. One simply didn’t get a project approved of that scope in Japan without cooperation at all levels. But it was during these many meetings that I realized the degree to which I was going to be in a unique position to marshal resources in such a way that if anyone could do something about the elephants I’d been ignoring it was going to be me. My anthropology AI, Abel, and I had been tracking trendlines both in people’s psychology and society more broadly, and just like the two centuries prior, a period of unprecedented upheaval seemed just over the horizon. I still didn’t know if anyone but me knew what was truly shaping the future.
During the final years of the first space tower’s completion, one of my logisticians, Ibere Cassavant, began to catch my attention. The complexity of the engineering process was so difficult it’s even difficult to explain how complex it was. It would be a bit like coordinating a dance of a thousand people, only the dance is continuous, with each dancer performing their own individually choreographed piece over ten hours and then handing their role off to the next shift. The dancers could never slip, never collide, never touch toes, and if one element was missing for any reason, the entire dance had to stop. It was Cass’s job to ensure the dance never stopped. Originally, he was one of a team of thirty logistical engineers who ran the construction process. But it became clear over the course of the first several months that any time there was a problem the project leader turned to Cass to fix it, and inevitably when we investigated the root of the problem, it was because someone who didn’t fully understand what they were doing hadn’t cleared something critical with Cass before proceeding. So the board put him in charge, and from the moment they did, the dance never stopped until we were toasting the completion of the Florida Space Ladder at Apogee. We grew quite friendly over those five or so years.
I almost confided in Cass several times. I thought he was among the very few people who was capable of both keeping a world-breaking secret and doing something about it, but there was an imbalance of power I wasn’t comfortable with. He seemed a little too eager to please. But Cass had a lot of friends in Florida, especially at NASA, and one day, at Roland Merrill’s beach house, Cass introduced me to a post-doctoral astrophysicist named Tanner Gunnison—the Tanner Gunnison who, a few years later, became known as the self-described “loneliest man in the universe.” I knew him as “Gunnie.”
He had a lot of questions for me that first day when Cass introduced us. I think the space ladder was roughly half complete at that point. Mostly Gunnie wanted to know about logistical operations in space—what plans we had for mining in the asteroid belt, and, unsurprisingly, he was very curious about space stations. I kept in touch with him and was not surprised when he was selected as the first director of the Europa Outstation.
I invited him fishing a week before the mission launched. He was surprisingly even-keeled about leaving Earth for a decade.
“I do have nearly three years before I get to my post, Jules,” he said. “The excitement would be a bit premature.”
Once we’d motored out a bit and the engine was off, I asked Gunnie if he had a neural implant. He said he did.
“They’re letting you keep it in?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“What if something goes wrong with it out there, some malfunction?”
He looked puzzled. He sniffed out my curiosity for what it was immediately.
“There’s clearly something more to this than I know, Julian,” he said. “So spit it out if there’s something I need to know.”
“You’re going to be out there for a long time, Gunnie.”
“Yeah, but I could have a kidney stone or appendicitis just as easily as a chip malfunction, probably more likely.”
I shook my head.
“Oh,” he said. “Like I said, Jules, spit it out.”
So I told him about the elephants, and I asked him what he thought I should do. It was a lot to spring on anyone, but Gunnie had the first piece of useful advice on the matter.
“You aren’t the first person to think the world was going to end, Julian. It’s a common problem for people in power—hell even people with no power. Christ himself was an apocalypticist. They had a theory at the turn of the last century called Y2K, you ever hear of it?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s because it never happened. A lot of very smart people thought all the computers would fail because the change of the century on the date line in every program had only two digits in the year column. Corporations spent billions preparing for Armageddon. Really smart executives bought ranches in rural Montana for the end of times. Nothing happened.”
“I took my implants out,” I told him.
“I guess that gives me a week to think about it.”
I thought he was joking at first.
“I’ve had mine since I was in grad school,” he said. “I thought I was just getting more cynical because, you know, isn’t that what education is supposed to do to you?”
“It certainly did for me, Gunnie. And I was too young for implants back then.”
“You’re a smart guy, Julian, plugged in better than anyone I know,” he said. “Tell me something. What do you think it would do to the economy if everyone who had them had to take out their chips? What would it do to your operation? How do you think Cass would keep that production of his in line if suddenly every last one of his engineers, laborers, and bots were out of synch?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would it even be possible to finish the Space Ladder?”
“I don’t know.”
“See that’s your problem, Julian. You don’t know what you’re looking at. You think you see the end of the world. Odds are good, since Armageddon hasn’t happened yet, that you’re just seeing a shadow, maybe the reflection of Y2K. I learned a long time ago as an astronomer that the first thing you check if you think you’ve discovered a world-changing event is the telescope, then you check your eyes, then you sound the alarm. I think you need to consult some neurologists.”
Gunnie was always good for sound advice. I kept in touch with him while he was on the outstation, exchanging encrypted videos, some serious, mostly friendly talk, keeping him up to date on things happening back on Earth.
About the time Gunnie was arriving at Europa, we were christening Apogee. It was a very strange time in my life. Publicly—there’s no other way to say this and I regret the pun—but I was literally and figuratively on top of the world. The man with the golden key to space. Anyone who wanted anything to do with commerce in space had to pay A & A for the privilege. And I personally held the patents governing the magnetic lifts and holds that made it possible, which meant I could license the use of the technology personally, which is how I planned to raise the capital to dominate the first few decades of space commerce. At that point, I never envisioned humans leaving the solar system in any meaningful way. But with space open, I thought the best way to deal with the elephant problem would be a space colony distant enough from Earth that its citizens could dictate their own terms. I thought I might be able to make the case against implantation and offer an alternative off-world society, and I naively thought enough capable people would buy this argument that we could forge a parallel culture. I put Cass in charge of developing deep space technologies for A & A, autonomous building systems, deep-space solar arrays, self-replicating bot farms, and most importantly, mega-cylinders that could house agricultural and industrial infrastructure as well as residential cities that rivalled any of the comforts of Earth. I was thinking of building a complex somewhere out in Gunnie’s neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the elephants charged on. Most of the modern jobs were now requiring implantation. The few remaining skeptics were getting ostracized rapidly. I saw the term “Purist” capitalized during the second year of the Osaka Space Lift’s construction for the first time. Even the tone of the AI reading the article was sneering and derogatory. Our data on MT was leveling off slightly, but it was still high and captured a world population that regarded humanity itself with great disdain. Streets were as violent as ever, even with constant monitoring. Corruption ran rampant in government, corporate, and legal institutions. I assigned Abel to start tracking the tone of every article, book, or news segment covering “the Purists,” and to keep me informed of the way both the media and the population were speaking of them. I had the sense that it was just a matter of time before things turned ugly in the ways they always did when humans were othered.
As the decade progressed and the ring drive morphed from outlandish but interesting concept to possibility to conception to reality, so many other applications in space were getting their sea legs under them. For the first time, I started seriously considering other solar systems. That idea had many complex engineering implications, though. I told Cass the same thing so many times when he showed me new projects that he got accustomed to prefacing each update with, “I know this will all need to get smaller and more portable, Julian. That work has already begun, but here’s where this system is today.” And then he’d show me a hydroponic lab they were testing on Mars or the Moon.
When we finally sent an AI operated survey ship to Geddes, the only thing I saw in media for weeks was speculation about colonization, and of course, I thought that too. In fact, up until that point, it had been my plan—build a new civilization on Geddes for humans, proper humans—the old kind who thought with their brains and didn’t fully hate one another. Everyone else had that same idea too. I grew very depressed by the thought that no matter how far anyone tried to run, the elephants would be there. And to make matters worse, we were learning physics was not on our side.
The ship had limitations.
Geddes was a transit of several months. For a small crew and a handful of passengers, a few months would be a pleasure cruise. With a manifest the size of a new colony, the ship needed to be the size of a city, and the ring drive couldn’t push a city to a new star. This issue was bubbling up right around the time A & A was beginning to test the ring drive with human crews. Each of the five functioning FTL ships had shown a perfect operational record, all the animal tests had gone smoothly, and the human pioneers, already numbering over fifty, had come back bearing tales of wonder and no ill effects. I thought, hell, I have the means, why not fly out and see Gunnie. Things were certainly lonely out there. Plus, I’d never been to Jupiter. I also thought it would be a nice touch to offer a seat to my favorite executive chef on Apogee if she wanted to come in exchange for her willingness to cook us the first five-star meal ever served in Europa’s orbit. She was thrilled but not nearly as happy as Gunnie, who was more than a bit shocked to see a ship pull up alongside his modest little outpost.
“Holy hell, Julian, you crazy bastard. What are you doing out here?” he asked over the radio as the crew began the docking process.
“I had a wildly successful fishing trip yesterday and needed someone to help me eat them, amigo. Figured it’s been a while since you’ve had a fresh meal.”
“Please God, tell me you’re not joking.”
“Well, I am, but I also brought fish,” I said.
“Oh. I’m going to have a heart attack,” Gunnie came back after a second.
“And a five-diamond chef.”
“And a stroke,” Gunnie said.
“And a bottle of fourteen-year-old scotch.”
Gunnie must have forgot he had the mic keyed for a moment, because all we could hear was, “Ah ha, ha, ha,” and a long sigh before his transmission cut out.
“The pilot’s an AI, but the human commander was wondering if that’s enough of a payoff to get us a berth.”
Gunnie was silent for a good thirty seconds.
“You didn’t actually stroke out on me, did you, Gunnie?”
“No,” he said. “I was crying.”
“So if it’ll help to get it all out of your system at once, I have some good news. I talked with Ashley Harvin over at NASA before coming out about getting some relief out here for you in the coming weeks, now that you’re a skip and a jump away from Apogee. If you’re interested, that is?”
“Will you just dock your spaceship already, man. My mouth is watering.”
“I’ll see what we can do to get us locked on ASAP.”
Gunnie came aboard the Mirror once we got locked on. I told him I was looking forward to the tour of Europa Outstation.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s such a great idea, Jules. I got about a decade’s worth of recycled fart and body odor wafting around in there, and I have no idea how I smell anymore, so fair warning.”
“We brought some other presents from Apogee that can help with that—nano-filtration system upgrades. Ashley had a list.”
“Oh, that’s good news,” he said, as though it only then occurred to him that we’d just been on the ground in Clearwater an hour before.
I gave him a tour of the Mirror, introduced him to Deneen, the chef, and we spun the outer wheel so we could sit for a proper meal in artificial gravity and Deneen could cook.
Gunnie didn’t ask me what I was really there about till he’d eaten his fill. He was in heaven, savoring every last morsel of the insanely delicious meal.
“You didn’t bring me a chef,” Gunnie said as he tasted the first bites of dessert—a chocolate soufflé that was almost too rich to be believed. “You brought me an artist.”
“She is that,” I said.
“Whatever this is all about, Jules. I’m going to enjoy this and would kindly ask you not to divert my enjoyment of this meal by thinking about your troubles until I’m at least two scotches deep.”
“By all means,” I told him.
By the time we’d finished eating and Gunnie was enjoying his scotch, we’d come around the moon and were staring at Jupiter in all its majesty. A familiar sight for Gunnie, an unfathomable novelty for me, even spinning as it was in the window. Each time it came around I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
True to his word, after his second scotch, Gunnie poured a third and said, “Now, Julian, what have you come to discuss?”
When I explained where I thought things stood, he had several questions, which I did my best to answer honestly. He was extremely skeptical, which was exactly what made him such an excellent resource.
“There’ll be no fish wherever you go, Julian. Geddes, wherever else you think you might sneak off to.”
“That’s true.”
“Scotch?” he pondered. “Maybe malt whisky eventually, but not scotch.”
“No, no scotch.”
“I know you don’t appreciate the magnitude of that problem personally. But you see what I’m getting at.”
“The Earth is awesome,” I conceded. “Our perfect cosmic garden.”
“Your problems are solvable, Julian, but you’re going to have to deceive nearly everyone involved. You can’t go to Geddes, which I’m guessing you’re smart enough to realize. Everyone on Earth knows about Geddes now, and if they know you’ve built a colony there, they’ll show up by the millions whether you like it or not. Then you’re dealing with the same problem you have on Earth, albeit a bit delayed.
“What did the neurologists say?”
“It’s more what they did when I showed them my data,” I told Gunnie. “I consulted two of the world’s top doctors, and both of them had their implants out within the week.”
“Isn’t that your solution right there?”
I shook my head. “Thing is, after looking deeper into it, they both said the same thing: there’s nothing wrong with the implants themselves; it’s an inevitable result of the connection. It’s a psychological thing. You can try to offset it pharmacologically, but they were pessimistic.”
“So what are they going to do? Keep working without their implants?”
“They don’t know, but they’re scared as hell. They’d probably get on a ship if I offered them the chance. Not sure. Just guessing.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“No, I know, Gunnie. You’ve got your own perspective and I respect it. That’s why I’m here asking.”
“You really have to be sure. You’re talking about leaving Earth, potentially forever, I’m assuming. I hate the idea.”
“I know. I’ve read your essay.”
He grimaced and shook his head. “I feel better about it if you’re going—no offense. I wouldn’t be happy to see you go. But for the ordinary people who sign on, a mission like that has a much better chance of success if you’re involved, perhaps the best chance.
“What about the limitations, Julian?”
I pulled up plans for a transit ship on a screen above the table and sat as he pored over the details.
“God, I’ll need to think about this, Jules. I feel like there’s a solution, but it’s not going to be an easy one. I know that.”
About a month later, after NASA had made arrangements for temporary relief at his post, I sent the Mirror back to Europa to pick up Gunnie. He showed up at my house a few nights later with an encrypted data file. He told me I shouldn’t be talking about it, even with him, even in my own home, to figure that I was being surveilled—by our government, by other governments, by corporate spies. What he would say was that in the days he’d been back, he was shocked by the shift in people’s demeanor. It wasn’t subtle, the way people stared at each other dagger-eyed, suspicious, angry. He said he was even more concerned about how directly AI were seemingly taking control of industry, of government, even of my enterprises in space, or my company’s anyway.
“You’re on to something, Jules,” he said. “It’s strange. I walk down on the beach, and the air is just heavenly. What a world we live on. It’s just a shame we can’t sort ourselves out.”
That night, I dove into the files. Gunnie was something else. He’d pulled specs from the Ake, the Mirror, and two of the other FTL ships. He’d anticipated several of Cass’s projects in his cargo calculations. The problem, he stated in his summary, was that we needed to take a lot of people if we wanted to build a colony. The complication of thousands of people and the necessities of life en route meant tons of food, living space, systems that recycled water, air, waste. The added mass was prohibitive, maxing out our colony numbers in the low thousands at the ring drive’s current scale. His solution was elegant and solved multiple problems: stasis. He was aware of animal research in Europe and Western Canada that was surprisingly advanced. But he included a link to a hidden site in Cambodia that was completely off-book. I have no idea how he knew about it, but he did. He suggested Cass and I pay them a visit and see what we could learn.
He finished his file with another essay of the quality Gunnie was known to write while spinning around Europa. Stasis, he said, would give me the cover I’d need to require an implant-free manifest. All I’d have to do was concoct a story about implants being contraindicated for anyone entering stasis. That way we’d have a full complement of Purist passengers and it wouldn’t seem suspicious. He also asked a question I hadn’t considered yet. “What type of person is going to go with you, and do you really want to forge a parallel path for humanity without being seriously selective about the type of person such a mission would accept?”
As always, Gunnie gave me a lot to consider. It was getting too big for me alone.
In the following months, Cass and I investigated the science coming out around stasis. The literature wasn’t all that extensive for humans, but there was a robust body of work done on animals that demonstrated genuine efficacy, which was pretty shocking to my mind. Even more shocking was what we found when we went to Cambodia to follow up on Gunnie’s lead. Absolute horror.
The facility itself seemed out of place, hidden in the countryside. The labs were located inside a medical building with modern architecture, very much out of step with the local villages on this obscure corner of the map. Among the people at this company, there were very few locals, all in low-level positions away from the labs, which were run by foreigners of various ethnicities, including quite a few westerners. They also had bots running most of the day-to-day lab work.
Initially, Cass and I were surprised by how mundane everything seemed. I’d told both Cass and Dr. Kaylee Daltzberg, the physician I’d hired to evaluate medical efficacy, to be prepared to witness some medical atrocities—at least that was the vibe I’d picked up from Gunnie. Essentially all we saw in the front-facing part of the business was row after row of animals preserved, seemingly either dead or in stasis. Though, if the electronic readouts on the stasis beds were to be believed, they were all alive and well.
Finally, after we’d seen all there was to see of the public face of the company, we were escorted behind the scenes by their chief medical officer and the CEO. I had to caution Cass with a stern look as he went white and nearly cursed at the first sign of the long medical freak show we were about to endure. It started with a headless human body that looked like a prop out of a horror film.
Dr. Daltzberg and their physician engaged in their own discussion on the specifics of the various procedures that went into the stasis process. I wasn’t conversant enough in the terminology to follow perfectly, but I gathered that they’d been unable to perform human trials on ordinary people and had genetically modified and cloned bodies that they could perform research on. As we moved further into the back wing of the research labs, we saw how thorough they had been, experimenting on bodies of different ages, sizes, and cranial development. There were microcephalic subjects who were being tested for pre- and post-stasis cerebral damage. All this was a precursor for the final stop on the tour, when we were brought into a room they called their cook-lab, where we were met by a room filled with wall after wall of devices the size and shape of coffee makers, which we were told, were the artificial wombs where they grew all their research subjects.
Cass barely managed to make it out of the building without vomiting or betraying his utter disgust for the entire operation. I told the CEO to be prepared for me to buy the company. As soon as we got back in the car, Cass lost it.
“Bloody hell, Julian,” he said. “I see a nightmare and all I can think to do is run. You buy the nightmare.”
“How else were we going to get hold of the technology?”
“Florence would murder you if she knew about this.”
“She’ll know, Cass.”
“Cloners, body snatchers, A & A cannot be associated with these people.”
“First of all,” I told him. “Those were not people, they were monsters. And second, buying them is the surest way I know to shut them down.”
Cass went on to Osaka while I flew to California with Dr. Daltzberg. On the trip back, we discussed the tech itself and how far along it was. She estimated it would be less than a decade before it would be confirmed safe for human use. They’d already demonstrated efficacy past the most difficult trial points, largely because they’d discarded any normative ethical framework and forged ahead using Frankenstein methodology. There was plenty yet to learn, but she didn’t anticipate any major roadblocks, provided we got the technology into legitimate hands to manage the process.
I went solo on the final stop of the trip. The goal was to figure out the final piece of the equation Gunnie had very wisely suggested I answer before giving up on Earth: who would come with us, and would we even want to be members of such a club.
There was a rather large community of Purists in Loma Linda who were no strangers to being the outsiders. The Adventists had been outside the mainstream for a couple centuries now, and though they were perhaps best known for their longevity, most in the mainstream knew little more of them than that. They were Purists by a modern definition, in that they shunned genetic and neurological enhancement, but as Jonathan Carmichael, my contact in the community, explained to me, Purism came second to biblical principles. I’d known they were Christian, but I hadn’t been aware that Adventists were biblical literalists. Meeting a living literalist was a first for me, as far as I knew, and I’d grown up in the former bible belt.
Even having worked very hard over the years studying psychology, behavior, body language, there’s no way I’d have guessed there was anything distinctly different about Jonathan Carmichael. He’d have blended equally well in Clearwater, New York, or Oklahoma City. He had a distinct easiness of manner about him that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. What I figured out later was that most people I met were eager to get to know Julian Hartsock. Most wanted to benefit from the potential relationship or wanted to learn what I had done so that they could apply lessons to their own lives. Jonathan was eager to get to know me—the human, the man—Julian the fallible. He had nothing to gain from proximity to me.
Jonathan gave me a tour of the city and did his best to unlock what I was after without asking me directly, and he quickly figured out that I wasn’t too keen on divulging my real motives. He was happy to introduce me to the city, though.
After several hours, I had the sense that Jonathan could be trusted, and I asked him whether he could keep what I said to him in confidence if I asked him to. He affirmed that he would take what I said to him to his grave.
The first thing I told him was where I’d just returned from—the biotech horror show. Then I told him about the implants, the march of the elephants and the rapidly deteriorating situation for those of us who believed in human beings playing a lead role in the future. I told him I was interested in meeting Purists to see what made them tick.
“Oh,” he said, his body language betraying a genuine disappointment. “Purists. Yeah.”
“Did I misread something?” I asked him.
“Julian, if you were looking for fellow travelers, you’re not going to find any here. We’re not Purists for the reason you might be or others are. We’re made in God’s image. We don’t tinker with the design as a rule. And we don’t generally fret about the end of the world, given that we view this life as the waiting room, so to speak. I guess what I’m trying to express is my regret that we can’t really help you find what you’re looking for. It’s quite a story, though.”
That night, Jonathan invited me to a concert given by the private Adventist high school, which I was very reluctant to attend. Listening to a high school band and chorus butchering biblical songs was not what I had in mind for my evening, but Mr. Carmichael was insistent, and he promised me I wouldn’t be disappointed. He was not wrong.
Before the music even began, I noticed that there was something very different about the people, especially the kids. They seemed to genuinely be happy—to be alive, to be together, to be a community. I scoured my memory for a healthier group of people I’d encountered and came up short. The music, too, reflected what could be seen in the complexion of the group. They sang on pitch, in time, at a steady tempo, respecting melody and harmony alike. They played with discipline and skill, quite expressively. It was difficult for me to believe these were high school students.
“I can’t help but think the walls are closing in on people like you,” I told Jonathan after the concert was over.
“They always are, Julian. Always have been. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more helpful.”
“To the contrary, Jonathan, I’ve got a better idea now of the magnitude of the issue.”
“For what it’s worth, Julian, if you’re interested in my opinion, I imagine it’s difficult for you to find people who disagree with you openly, and no matter how smart we are, no one of us is smarter than the sum.”
“Please,” I said. “I’d welcome your opinion.”
“It strikes me that you’re motivated by all the wrong reasons. It’s not like we don’t see what you see. Just intuitively, the problem with merging our consciousness with machines seems dangerous, and that very well could be the deadliest threat to humanity in history. But the truth is that civilizations, countries, cities, communities, just like the bodies of the people who inhabit them are always in the process of simultaneously creating and destroying themselves. I’d like to think that if we end up spreading out across the galaxy, it’s not because we either made our planet unlivable for humans or because we failed to fight for our world when that unfortunate day came to pass. If you don’t have the resources to lead such a fight, no one does.”
It was a level of honesty I was no longer accustomed to, and at first, I was resentful but gradually grew ever more grateful for it.
When I arrived back in Clearwater, Cass had already dropped off blueprints for Precipice, a ring-driven ship capable of carrying a complement of nearly two hundred thousand passengers in stasis, along with a cargo area with enough volume to support such a population to replication point in simulations. Cass was seriously motivated.
I was now having doubts. For the first time in the whole saga—decades since I first sensed the pulsing beat of elephants pacing across the earth—I asked a question I’d never thought to ask before. What ever became of that farmer? Did the proconsul throw him in a cell for telling wild tales? Did he starve on the streets of Rome? Would he have been better off staying in the mountains and relying on the generosity of distant neighbors to get him through the winter?
I had a million questions. Certainty was a far-off place. I’d met people in Florida who’d evacuated hurricanes and their next-door neighbors who’d stayed. Same information, same storm, different decision.
The Mirror was scheduled to deliver Gunnie back to Europa Outstation the following week. I decided I hadn’t properly taken advantage of owning a spaceship. I asked Gunnie if he’d like to take a tour of the solar system with me. I needed a longer view of things, what the universe looked like past Pluto, for instance. My story was now bigger than elephants and more consequential than a single approaching winter.
What could keep us from the stars?
With an NW in the 42nd percentile, I was neither overly prone to withdraw nor blind to the possible need if it arose. It was time now to clear the road and be ready if we determined it was best to go.