To Geddes
"Surveying for Habitable Interstellar Star Systems"
Julian Hartsock. “To Geddes.” Precipice: The Autobiographical Ramblings of Julian Hartsock. (Chapter) A & A Publications, 2123.
by P.E. Rowe
OPENNESS (Proper)—(Hartsock, Julian Q.) 97th Percentile:
Openness—i.e. Openness Proper—(OP) is the psychometric score assigned to an individual’s proclivity to seek out new experiences or ideas. People exceptionally high in Openness tend to be creative thinkers who are immediately capable of generating numerous new ideas or solutions to problems; however, people high in Openness often struggle with routine work that does not involve creativity or problem solving and can also struggle choosing from among the diverse ideas they generate. They also gravitate toward art and representations of beauty, whether in stories, music, architecture, or all of the above. Open people crave change and can be radical thinkers likely to upset pre-existing states of order or equilibrium.
A score in the (97th) percentile, coupled with the distribution profile of psychometric measures herein, suggests an extremely creative introvert, perhaps even a savant, prone to spending time alone developing new ideas or solutions to new problems. Professions where serious and necessarily solitary intellectual work would be ideal. The exceedingly rare constellation of Conscientiousness (Industriousness), Openness (Intellect), and G, all measuring above the 96th percentile, coupled with an OP in the 97th percentile suggests the subject should seek professional engagement in an environment where idea generation is highly valued (such as a think tank, a university, or an entrepreneurial enterprise).
Yes, Openness both describes and explains quite a lot about my personality, especially as MM³ described the trait in their literature. I couldn’t help but generate new ideas. My struggle was implementing them all. And Beauty is a God to me. Gladstone et al. rated me even higher on their scale (99), but their narrative (as usual) was scant; their feedback read as follows: Exceptionally high OP contributes to unique grouping of factors.
The future began with a story.
It sounds too ridiculous to be true, but it is, and I never told anyone the story behind the story at the time, because they wouldn’t have believed me. They’d already dismissed it as false. The story may seem familiar to some, but what’s unfamiliar for anyone who’s heard it, is that it wasn’t a fabrication, a hoax, or an exaggeration as everyone assumed. The story was true. For those unfamiliar, it went like this.
A group of American backpackers were hiking in the Andes on a post-college graduation trip in 2058. They were a group of friends from California with wealthy parents, and in exchange for their permission (and funding) for the trip, one of the stipulations was that the group hire a guide for the duration, both to ensure the routes they hiked were safe from dangerous weather conditions or alpine hazards and from kidnappers, the cartels, or otherwise unsavory types who could get a group of reveling young Americans into undue trouble in short order. The guide they hired was an Argentine outdoorsman about ten years their senior named Jorge Domani-Acuña, whom they referred to as JDA in their pre-trip correspondence, and they continued to call him JDA in person when they arrived in Chile.
On the second week of their trip, the group took an afternoon hike outside the small mountain town of Pisco Elqui. It was an overcast day. The hike was a mild, three-mile walk to an overlook above a spectacular river basin in the valley. About halfway to the overlook, JDA calmly turned to the Americans and told them to stand back from him because he was about to be struck by lightning.
The Americans didn’t know how to react, because JDA hadn’t shown any signs of being a practical joker, and of course, how could he know he was about to be struck by lightning, especially on an overcast day with no rain and no thunder? Then suddenly, the American graduates began to step back from JDA, as they themselves began to feel “an electricity in the air.” Over the course of the next thirty seconds, JDA’s hair began to spark and stand on end, before suddenly, the Argentine guide began to levitate. He hovered in the air about ten feet above the trail hyperventilating for nearly a minute before finally, the young man was struck with a bolt of lightning so fierce that it ruptured the eardrums of the two Americans standing closest to JDA.
When the Americans had recovered from the shock of the blast, they found JDA unconscious and pulseless on the trail. They tried for fifteen minutes to revive him to no avail, nor could they call for help, because the electricity in the air had fried all of their electronic devices, phones included.
When the authorities investigated, all four of the American hikers told the same congruent, uniform story, and the autopsy was consistent with a lightning strike and no other trauma. Even though the story was unbelievable, the most powerful corroborating evidence was the sudden simultaneous overload of so many electronic devices. Without video, the world was left with only the accounts of the hikers, and though it became a given that JDA died by lightning strike, the consensus was that the recent graduates were lying about everything else, most especially JDA’s pre-monition and the levitation. They were ridiculed and denounced for making a spectacle out of the poor Argentine’s death, presumably for attention. It was the simplest explanation.
I hadn’t heard the story until about thirty years after it happened, when, by chance I bumped into one of the hikers at a hotel in D.C. She had changed her name after marriage and had built a respectable career as a lawyer in the political sphere. And she’d learned the hard way thirty years earlier to run from the story and never mention it again, but after hearing about it from a third party, I brought it up to her, assuring her that I truly wanted to hear her perspective. It took a tremendous amount of convincing to even get her to acknowledge the event had happened or that she had in fact been there, but I was surprised, when she finally did talk about it, that she stuck to the original story, said she would swear by it till the grave. I was so surprised, that I sought out the other three hikers, and all three behaved the same way when I met them—reluctance to talk and then confirmation of the story. They had every reason to recant at the time and didn’t, and after thirty years, they still hadn’t.
JDA had predicted the strike and levitated for nearly a minute. Even now, you probably don’t believe it happened, and no matter how I tell you the story, you still won’t believe it. Even when I tell you that this is what makes me different, more than intelligence, more than the incredibly vast resources and wealth I’ve compiled over my lifetime, more than the risks I am willing to take. This. People didn’t believe the hikers then, and they still don’t now. But why?
Most would probably say that they don’t believe the story, because it’s impossible, such a thing violates the laws of physics. But that’s simply not true. Nothing can violate the laws of physics, definitionally. So that didn’t happen. But in order to even say something like “that violates the laws of physics,” you have to believe a few things that amount to gigantic intractable barriers to understanding JDA’s story, the most prominent of which is that we “understand” the laws of physics. And we may have some understanding, yes. But when 99.999% of people hear this story and say, “What these people say happened couldn’t have happened,” I say, “If that happened, which is possible, however unlikely, then there is a gap in our understanding of the laws of physics,” which is not only a plausible proposition, it is a certainty.
I went to Yanagisawa with a story of a gap in our understanding, and the lunatic changed everything forever.
This was in the third year of the Osaka project, and we were just starting to understand the data we’d been collecting from the Florida Space Ladder, and there was a strange anomaly none of the physicists could really explain. I didn’t initially connect what was going on with our lift data and the story of the hikers, but both these things were bubbling up in my consciousness around this time. The data anomaly was something everyone at A & A ignored, because it wasn’t costing us any money, but it bothered me not knowing. We kept meticulous records of the cargo, up and down, mass, weight, size, destinations, origins. And it turned out that over the course of each of the first three years of the space ladder’s operation, we’d used less energy getting objects into orbit than we’d calculated was necessary. And it was consistent over all three years. We’d moved roughly the same amount of cargo, and though it was a tiny discrepancy no one would have noticed per lift, over the course of a year, it became quite a discrepancy—one of the physicists calculated it was about the weight of two standard sized bank vaults, a rather interesting unit of measure. It was a drop in the bucket when placed in relief with the total weight of yearly cargo, but I couldn’t get over it. Bank safes don’t just leap into orbit. So how did that happen if the laws of physics hadn’t been violated?
I didn’t hear about Susumu Yanagisawa until we started working in Japan. All the Japanese physicists knew of him and joked about him. He was a kind of living folk tale among the deeply academic—the fable of the student who studied too much turning into a crazy, reclusive troll who lived under a bridge. Don’t stare at the sun. Don’t share your data with strangers. Don’t study for too long or you’ll end up like Yanagisawa. I had to track this guy down.
It turned out he was in Osaka, just across the city. He wasn’t living under a bridge after all. He’d just given up on physics. He’d taken a modest job as a high school math teacher and played chess in the local park on weekends on a board he drew out in chalk on the concrete. Often, when there was no opponent, he’d play both sides of the board. Hell, I thought, I was no grandmaster, but why not go see about a game?
He destroyed me. Embarrassingly so. Multiple times. Ten, fourteen, and twenty-one move mates. I couldn’t decide whether it was more important to level-up my chess or my Japanese at that point, because as much as the Japanese engineers on the project had laughed when I told them I’d played chess with Yanagisawa in the park, I didn’t need to talk to the guy to know there was a crazy serious mind there. I could see it in his eyes.
I opted for chess.
Yanagisawa didn’t know who I was. He might have been the only person in Osaka who didn’t, but it was clear that to him, I was just the crazy gaijin from the previous Saturday who’d come back for more punishment. And I kept coming.
After a month or so of constant reading, playing bots, and thinking about strategy, I was beginning to understand the game a little. I can’t put it another way than to say I started to get a feel for the board. Strategies became sensations and intuitions. Little by little each weekend, the mates that had once come in double-digit moves turned into drawn out battles.
The fifth week I was there, I was playing him to a stalemate for a good half hour, which I’m sure he eventually would have figured a way through. But during a long pause in play while he was considering his next move, I uncrossed my legs, got up, picked up the chalk, and on the sidewalk I wrote out a calculation for the energy gained per lift on the Florida Space Ladder. The equation was just descriptive, and nobody outside of our development team in Clearwater could have known a thing about the context for that calculation, but I knew a physicist of his caliber would see something interesting there.
He got angry.
“Nani sore,” he grumbled, and he started to make the stereotypical Japanese noises of exasperation that I always found slightly amusing.
After a few minutes splitting his attention between the board and the equation, he began to sweat. Then he tipped over his king and walked out of the park. It wasn’t the result I’d been hoping for.
The following weekend, I went to the park hoping he’d be back, but he wasn’t. But all over the sidewalk, there were smudges of chalked out equations that people had trodden into incoherence, and I knew the seed I’d planted was growing and gnawing at him.
I didn’t see him at all over the following year when I was splitting time between Clearwater and Osaka, and I thought I’d never hear anything about it again.
I couldn’t figure out the mystery. The physics was beyond me, even though I knew enough to know there was something mysterious going on between electricity, magnetism, gravity, and even time.
Then in the fourth year of the Osaka project, Yanagisawa published the hyperspace paper online. It dropped like a bomb in the physics community. And to be in Japan when it happened was interesting. My Japanese was still not great, but I could tell all our engineers were talking about it—in comes the child prodigy turned hermit and drops out of thin air like a wizard, destroying everyone’s conceptions of almost everything, and as it played out, characterizing the problem as “almost everything” wasn’t hyperbolic, wasn’t exaggeration, if anything it sold his theory short. Yanagisawa’s treatise rambled from black holes to magnetism to the center of suns to fusion reactors and artificial gravity. I had to read the thing five times to be confident I understood the outline. Then, on a hunch, I went down to the park and drew a chessboard on the sidewalk. The following Saturday, he was there with a chess set ready to go. He’d been waiting.
“Jurian Hartasaku,” he said when he saw me approach, and then he gestured for me to sit.
His English was bad, but my Japanese was good enough to speak with him a little. I think he was trying to figure out what my endgame was, and not on the chessboard, mind you; I had no endgame against a master of Yanagisawa’s caliber and never would. We played two fairly competitive games that he won before I picked up the chalk. I’d been thinking about the magnetics in particle colliders for decades by that point, and he knew immediately what I meant when I’d finished.
He asked for the chalk, and when I handed it to him, he stroked his chin for a minute and wrote the following on the sidewalk:
X > 27km
Meaning the accelerator had to be at least twenty-seven kilometers to finally answer that question posed by our space elevator and by the unfortunate demise of the young Argentine mountain guide.
Then Yanagisawa pointed to the sky, and I think he meant that the only place to practically construct a particle accelerator that big would be space. I took the chalk and wrote:
$ = ?
Then I took my opportunity to knock over my king and walk off theatrically to talk to some actuaries at A & A who could turn that question mark into a number.
It’s important to note, at this point, with the clarity of history, all this was so speculative that even to Yanagisawa and me, it amounted to a curiosity. It just happened that the curiosity was a billion times more significant than Columbus wondering about whether the Earth was round. We weren’t thinking on those terms. We were just looking at shadows and thinking that they weren’t standing exactly where they were supposed to be, and it was interesting. And getting an answer to that curiosity? The actuaries at A & A told me the floor was a trillion dollars.
Well, there went that bright idea.
At that point, A & A was still going to be paying for Clearwater for about six more years before making our first dollar, and even with the Japanese government going all-in on the massive Osaka Space Lift, A & A wouldn’t gross a trillion dollars total for another five years if everything on the ground and in space went perfectly. A trillion dollars for a particle accelerator, and the ring drive wasn’t even an idea at that point—this was just to answer an odd point in theoretical physics. A trillion dollars.
But…
Now I had a gnawing feeling in the same way Yanagisawa did when I drew that first equation on the sidewalk. There was something about that missing energy, the story of JDA and the levitation, and intuition told me to do something about it.
I couldn’t throw a trillion dollars at the project, but I could throw a little money at a team of theoretical physicists to sit in a room and toss the idea around for a few years. And I could loan them some engineers on occasion. I had more than a few of these secret projects that very few people knew anything about. What was one more? I could even drop in from time to time to participate in the discussion.
I offered Yanagisawa himself a seat at the table. He turned me down.
By this point I had been blustering behind the scenes for about five years about Apogee and the Florida Space Ladder being a gateway to the heavens, but realistically, I’d never truly thought I’d live to see humans in other solar systems, not unless aliens stopped by and picked us up on their way home. There were beautiful images of exoplanets coming in from NASA and the Europeans. The new data coming out of L2 was enticing, sure, but I found it difficult to believe we’d ever do anything other than see clearer and clearer images of an unreachable place, much like the early opticians of the renaissance trying to get a better look at the moon. At best we could migrate out into our solar system and build a few mega-cylinders orbiting the moons of the gas giants. That was all.
Then came the images of Geddes.
She was like a mirror image of Earth. Her spectroscopy had intrigued the Indians enough to point Surya Kaanch at her for over two months. Sure, they were composites of data and CGI, but it was the image. The oceans, the puffy white clouds, the green!
Humans had to go to Geddes, trillion dollars be damned. Enter Florence Tolland.
There are several extant accounts of the Osaka meeting that brought Flor into the fray. It is probably true that this was a turning point in history, and the story gets told as though I turned it. For whatever reason, I’ve been given credit, I think, perhaps because the narrative is simpler that way, or perhaps the various narrators have told the story that way to somehow curry future favor with me or my organization by portraying me as an effective leader. Here’s what really happened.
A & A’s board in the first fifteen years was a country club. Its members were lawyers and business leaders with weight on their resumes and a desire to sign off on as sure a deal as could be found on Earth. A & A was that. We had a clear, executable plan, and we hit every benchmark, largely because our goals were attainable and our logisticians the best we could recruit from everywhere in the world, and they all wanted to come, because it was the biggest, most important project ever. Hands down. The board just had to sit back and watch a winning idea happen and wait for the money to roll in. As sure a bet as you can have in business.
Flor was placed on the board at the recommendation of my Ohio legal team, and quite frankly, I’d never liked her all that much. She hardly talked to me, and most of the time had a sour look on her face every time I opened my mouth, and at the Osaka meeting, she looked openly hostile and didn’t say a word. I thought the presentation had gone well enough, in that I hadn’t gotten nearly the level of pushback I’d been anticipating setting a rather aggressive and exciting new direction. Flor pulled me aside afterward, handed me a card with an address, date, and time on it, and said, “If you’re a minute late for that meeting, Julian, I’ll murder you.”
Well, okay then, I thought. Say two words to me in a decade, scowl at me, and threaten to murder me? Doesn’t get much better than that.
The address on the card was for a Korean barbecue restaurant, so at the very least, I was getting a decent meal out of it, or so I thought.
When I arrived, I was seated in a private room and kept waiting for about a half hour drinking tea before Flor finally showed up. And when she showed up, I immediately understood why she’d taken the meeting outside A & A’s Japanese offices. That level of dissent couldn’t be seen in that building. She hadn’t even sat before she started tearing into me. It went largely like this, and believe me, I remember this almost verbatim, because I don’t think I’d been spoken to like that ever—certainly not since I’d become the world’s richest space tycoon.
“If you ever,” she began, “and I mean ever go into another board meeting without clearing your agenda with me again, I will destroy you. The only reason you get to be this hot young international business magnate is because the people in that board room let you wear the hat, and thus far, you’ve been content to sit in the chair like a good boy and just wear the hat. You are a scientist, and a brilliant one, sure, but you’re not a businessman and you’re not qualified to run a corporation the size of A & A if you can walk into a board meeting like today’s without a clue as to what was going on in that room. You probably thought that went well, didn’t you?”
“Certainly not the travesty you’re making it out to be, Florence,” I told her. “I thought I would get a bit more pushback, honestly.”
“That’s because they’re keeping their intentions hidden and their powder dry.”
“And you?” I asked her.
“Oh, you’ll know when I come for you, mister. All those friendly faces in that board room kissing your ass for the last ten years? Sharks, absolute cutthroat bastards. Mark my words, Julian, after today, the only question on their minds now is when they’re going to cut your throat. You just told them your intention is to transition the safest trillion-dollar bet anyone has ever made into a multi-trillion-dollar long shot that you’d have to be insane to think is a good idea.
“Right now, I’m the only friend you’ve got in that room.”
I had never been that wrong about anything so consequential, and to be fair, time proved that I wasn’t wrong about the substance of it. How I handled the matter was the problem. And it took me a while to believe it. I actually went back to my lawyer in Ohio who’d recommended Flor in the first place. I was contemplating firing her.
“Have you lost your mind, Julian?”
I explained the situation and how she’d spoken to me and how she’d never said a useful thing to me in over a decade.
“She just said the most useful thing she could possibly say to you right when you needed it. We put her on the board to keep you from going off the rails. Let her do her damn job or you’ll find yourself cut out of your own company faster than even you’ll know what happened.”
The data points were starting to add up.
I asked Flor for another lunch meeting, and I explained where I was coming from—the legitimate potential for interstellar travel, scientific exploration, mining—who knows—even colonization someday. She’d already understood all that. What I didn’t understand was that the board was playing a different game than the one I was. I wanted to spearhead those benchmarks of human progress and they wanted three things: money, power, and more money. And, their game was in maneuvering to get those three things. I only existed in their world insofar as I could provide those things, and I damn well wasn’t going to do it by taking a company that had been the smoothest of sailing for a decade and setting a course downwind toward rocks, reefs, and raging weather; I found metaphorical over-simplifications to be a feature of Flor’s communication style. When she finally did speak, she made sure she was understood, metaphorically if not literally.
I asked her if she played chess.
“What, outside the board room?”
I laughed. She didn’t.
“That’s your biggest problem, Julian. You don’t even know what game you’re playing. And yes, I play chess.”
So I took her to meet Yanagisawa. She turned out to be a demon. We showed up about an hour before the Japanese master did, and she easily bested me in three games before I got a decent enough foothold to even offer a challenge in the fourth. Yanagisawa showed up toward the end to observe. Then she offered to play him. Her Japanese, which she’d learned in the five years since A & A’s Osaka Project was announced, was nearly as expert as her chess. And, as luck had it, Yanagisawa was a bit smitten. I couldn’t blame him. She was a better player and better looking than I was. They played a match that lasted nearly two hours before Yanagisawa finally got the edge.
When we got up to leave, I left him an equation on the sidewalk.
“Have you tried to get him on the payroll?” she asked me.
“Yeah, but he’s a firm no. If he does anything, though, he’ll just publish it. We’ll see it when everyone else does.”
The next paper came about six months later: “Black Holes, Hyperdensity, and the Physics of Sub-Space.” That was the one that changed the game.
In the board room, with Flor’s coaching, I managed to pull the hat back down over my head and go sit in the corner. All that crazy talk of trillion-dollar space supercolliders was just a bit of “scientific over-exuberance”—she literally made me say those words. It wasn’t though. We just couldn’t say the quiet part out loud until I had a realistic course to put in front of them that made the bet palatable to the other board members.
Flor also helped me to realize that being chair of A & A’s board was a bit like being a king on the chess board. Only make a move when necessary, never arbitrarily, and never more than one space at a time. Let the queen make the real moves, smile like the rest of them, and just wear the hat.
When I look back on that Osaka meeting, with the knowledge I’ve learned since, it’s so embarrassing it’s sickening. But I talk about it in gut-churning honesty because in so many of the stories of history-making in geopolitics or business or science, we don’t talk about the times the figures we lionize happenstance their way out of becoming absolute donkeys by way of sheer luck or the sound advice of others. Better to own being a donkey for a day than to deny it and become one on a permanent basis.
After Yanagisawa’s black hole paper, Flor and I spent every Saturday in the park playing chess with the master. I finally got him to open up about the physics while we were playing, speculating about theoretical ways to generate hyperdense materials and what we could do with them if we could ever stabilize them reliably. The energy requirement to do so would be outrageous, but I re-envisioned the supercollider project to start following the Osaka Space Lift’s inauguration. That move alone cut the prospective price nearly in half. A little bit of patience got us nearly halfway there. We also started a foundation to fund projects in academia that made use of the Earth-based colliders that could start piecing smaller elements of the puzzle together. That served the dual purpose of getting some of the science off the ground and figuring out which minds in the field were worth a damn. When the time came, we’d have a list of what we needed done and by whom.
In the background, Flor was slowly and methodically chopping off the heads of the backstabbers who were truly coming for me, all the while building alliances with the board members willing to let the bet ride. I wore the hat; she was the player. That’s the reality of everything that happened at A & A after year fourteen. But just as at the outset, I saw something that others didn’t. I had an intuition about the physics Yanagisawa was revealing. I knew we could build something with it, and as luck had it, when the solution came to us, it happened to be magnetics. It was going to take a decade, but I knew I’d see it in my lifetime, far sooner than anyone would have predicted. Unfortunately, we don’t always know how long we have, for a lifetime may be guaranteed but its length is another matter.
When Yanagisawa disappeared, I didn’t think too much of it, because it was like him. He’d done it several times before. He’d get so deep into an idea that he’d disappear for six months and reappear several weeks after the paper was published online. So I waited and kept an eye on his portal. I started to worry around the five-month mark. No paper. No chess. No word from Yanagisawa himself. Flor contacted his school and found out that he’d died following a protracted seizure that was one of the many medical issues he’d never spoken about with us. We found out from his journals that the main reason he didn’t take my offer to do physics at A & A was the stress. He put so much pressure on himself when it came to theoretical ideas that it was detrimental to his health. That was what everyone had missed about him, what he’d never told anyone. Apparently, though, he really enjoyed being around the kids, found it relaxing somehow. There was no pressure in it.
Flor and I had to go to his school to finally track his family down. No one at his school had any idea who he really was. He’d never told anyone about me, so they were dumbfounded when I came looking for him.
“Yanagisawa Susumu San?” the principal said. “Heh? Jurian Hartasaku? Honto ni?”
He couldn’t believe it when I told him the caliber of physicist his tenth-grade math teacher had been. I put it to him like this.
“I’ll give you a complete list of the physicists I think were probably more important than Susumu Yanagisawa,” I said, “Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. End of list.”
“What did he do that was so important?” the principal asked.
“You’ll find out in about ten years,” I told him.
He gave us Yanagisawa’s mother’s address. She lived, in all places, in a small city in Shizuoka Prefecture called Hamamatsu. You couldn’t make this stuff up, really.
It took Flor and I a couple hours to get up there by shinkansen, the old line. It was an idyllic ride up the countryside—mountainous, lush green landscape, and when we got up to Shizuoka, terraces upon terraces of sculpted tea crops in linear hedges lining hillsides for as far as the eye could see. A remarkably beautiful place.
The city itself, though, was much like any other Japanese city. Clean streets, concrete buildings, busy intersections.
His mother was a sweet older woman who had no idea who we were, even after I told her our names and our business. He hadn’t even told her he’d been working again, and when I told her everything we’d been working on, I detected a poorly repressed sense of resentment, sort of like I might have been the bad influence that had led Susumu astray after he’d finally kicked his bad physics habit. And maybe that was true. The thought had certainly occurred to me now that he was gone. I’d never really considered how unwelcome it may have been for me to waltz into his life and casually drop an equation in his lap, never pausing to ponder why he’d taken a job as a high school math teacher in the first place. I kept trying to impress upon his mother the gravity of his work without telling her exactly what he’d done, but it was clear that between my being vague and Flor’s translating, it just wasn’t getting through.
“What was so important? All these equations he would do?” his mother said.
Finally, Flor and I agreed that we owed her the truth.
“Your son provided the theoretical basis for interstellar space travel. If people ever end up on planets around other stars, it will be because Susumu Yanagisawa provided the foundation.”
“Eh,” she said, and shrugged. “We cannot even manage one planet.”
I asked her if I could have his journals.
“What would you want with Susumu’s journals?” she asked.
“To read them, study them, put them in a museum in the future.”
“If you publish anything,” she insisted, “publish it for free and for everyone. I know he believed it should all be this way.”
“We wouldn’t have it any other way,” Flor told her.
Long before Susumu Yanagisawa became a household name worldwide, about eight years before the ring drive’s maiden voyage, I commissioned a statue of him in front of the main entrance to A & A’s Japanese headquarters. It was him, in bronze, seated cross-legged on the sidewalk, his face fixed on a chess board, opponentless and deep in concentration. I insisted that Flor position the board. I went back and forth for weeks considering whether we should inscribe one of his equations beside the board to signify who and what Yanagisawa was. Ultimately, knowing the stress the physics had caused him, I thought it better to leave him in peace, just the great thinker, his chess board, and the only opponent worthy of Susumu Yanagisawa’s uniquely creative mind.
I came back to the statue to pay my respects whenever something happened that mattered: when we first fired the collider; when we began to fabricate hyperdense materials; when we completed the first ring; when the Ake flew from lunar orbit to Jupiter in six minutes. It was a ritual of sorts, even if we were in Clearwater at the time. We’d take a shuttle from Apogee to Uchukaigan and then take the lift down to A & A headquarters in Osaka. Flor and I would sit across from him and usually we’d talk about how little we knew of him, and usually that would get me talking about how little we actually knew about anything.
Now at the dawn of hyperspace travel, the main barrier to taking the drive interstellar had been the question of the hazard to a human crew. It would be years still before the effects of sub-space exposure to biological matter—or any matter—were well understood. All the ships would be piloted by AI, which meant they’d have to make all the decisions about the exploration of a system. Even then, after fourteen decades of electronic computation it was still a challenge to teach AI what to value and prioritize in exploring a solar system. So we sent out the Ake and subsequent ships to the edge of our own solar system, again and again, each time wiping their memory clean, and using our solar system as a model, developing algorithms for locating planetary bodies based on size, composition, moons, likelihood of metals, hydrocarbons, liquid water, and other ingredients for life. We’d restart the AIs at different distances, different approach vectors. At times, they got confused and couldn’t find Earth for weeks, especially if we instructed them to ignore EM signals. But after a few months training, they’d figured it out. Then it was off to see the neighborhood.
By the time we were ready for extra stellar missions, we had five ships ready to go. We didn’t expect to see anything new. What we expected to see, though, was a new type of staggering resolution of our closest star systems: Alpha Centauri, Procyon, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Indi, and Tau Ceti. When they all came back within weeks, we made the decision at A & A to publish all the data, including images and video, open source for all of humanity to explore and discover. It was enough data to keep every astrophysicist on Earth busy for their lifetimes and then some, and its public release was a fitting tribute to Yanagisawa San.
Both Flor and I were on Apogee a year later when Ake returned from Geddes. The first of our automated fleet of ring ships had spent the bulk of its two-month exploration time surveying the second planet of the Geddes system. Geddes II was an interstellar oasis whose surface was half covered in liquid water, was ninety-eight percent the mass of Earth, held an atmosphere that wasn’t just breathable but nearly identical to our own, and hosted an abundance of plant life. She was breathtaking. Beautiful. As green as the Garden of Eden. It was a staggering and emotional day—the culmination of a thousand years of science and ingenuity and seeking and new ideas. It was a surreal honor to bear witness to it with hundreds of other scientists and engineers who had made it happen. I spent the entire day suppressing the powerful urge to shed tears of joy for everything humanity had accomplished.
After all that, Flor and I ended up at Susumu’s statue again. For us Floridians it was nearly midnight, but when we arrived in Osaka the sun was high overhead, early afternoon. I kept glancing over at his statue as it reflected the sunlight so brightly I eventually had to put up my hand to shield my eyes. I so wished Yanagisawa could have been with us that day. It was clear and hot, too hot to be out in the open sun. But Flor went out there from under the shade, crossed her legs, and sat across from him on the scalding pavement, and the sight of those two—Florence the warrior and Susumu the mind—staring each other down again in friendly competition from across a chess board, it was too much to take in. I couldn’t keep my emotions in check anymore, doubling over in tears right in front of my own building. I hadn’t wept like that since my mother left. It was the weight of it all, the pain and unknowing howl of a child being born. Our eyes were opening. A miracle of a story every bit as unbelievable as levitation. Out there was a second Earth. We had pictures. Soon everyone would see it and believe in Geddes as though it had never not been a fact as certain as gravity. One day, we would go.
The future began with a story.
With an OP in the 97th percentile, even when I couldn’t see how it ended, regardless of the struggles along the way, I always believed that our story would end well.