Sleep and the Soul, page 20
2062
“You want us to donate a year’s worth of our entire deep space launch capacity?” Ben Kershaw’s image glitched for a second, as if the connection was manifesting his private response to this impertinence.
Latifa said, “Ideally, yes – but even a quarter of that might be enough to persuade some of the other players to join in.”
Kershaw said, “We’re ten years behind schedule on the Mars habitats. If you want us to toss up a few cubesats for the kids in your village, that’s one thing, but we can’t just put everything aside for a huge, speculative project like this.”
Latifa had read the articles of the trust he administered, and she understood that he was legally obliged to adhere to the late beneficiary’s wishes. But she was sure there was room to read between the lines. “If there’s a methane burst in the next thirty years, do you really think a nascent Mars colony would survive the turmoil back home?”
“Only if it’s well enough established,” Kershaw replied. “Which is why we’re committed to avoiding more slippage.”
“What about avoiding the disruption itself?” she suggested.
“Can you really promise that your device would do that?”
“No,” Latifa conceded. “But all the climate models show it lowering the risk by at least a factor of four.”
“That’s assuming the real thing works the way you hope it will, based on a prototype one ten-thousandth the size.”
“Yes.”
“So once you allow for the possibility of screw-ups, the odds don’t look so great.”
“What if you gave us a tenth of the launches?” she suggested. “What’s a few weeks, in the scheme of things?”
“A few weeks, and you want us to foot the bill!” Kershaw reminded her sharply.
“Other companies have agreed to contribute,” she countered. “And not just the wire makers. Aerospace engineers, robotics manufacturers – many of them working with you on the Mars project. They must think this is worth doing, for some reason.”
That only seemed to irritate him further. “I’m speaking to you as a courtesy, out of respect for your work on superconductors, but do you seriously expect us to transport thousands of tonnes to L1 for you, purely as a public relations exercise?”
Latifa said, “Methane or no methane, millions of people won’t make it to the end of the century without some major intervention. I don’t know if things will get bad enough to interfere with your Earth-to-Mars supply chain, but ... isn’t the whole rationale for what you’re doing that we need to shift everyone to a more robust state?”
“Our operations have been carbon neutral for decades,” Kershaw replied. “If you want to guilt someone about the excess ppm, go after the old polluters.”
Latifa doubted that even a battalion of lawyers could prize another dollar out of those rotting carcasses. “It’s not about guilt. You have the power to do this. No one else does.”
Kershaw said, “The only power I have is to comply with the foundation’s charter. I have discretion for some charitable works along the way – but anything that actively delays the moment we become a multiplanetary species would be a clear violation of my fiduciary duties that would send me straight to prison.”
2064
“Remember when that mining company payload crashed on the moon, in ’43?” Emily asked Latifa.
“Not specifically,” Latifa admitted. “There were so many crashes in the ’40s, they all blur together. Do you mean the Israeli one?”
“No, this was Australian.”
“You must be so proud,” Latifa teased her.
“Someone’s planning to salvage it,” Emily replied.
Latifa had clearly forgotten some crucial details. “How do you hit the moon without turning to scrap metal?”
“Very slowly. Their descent engines almost gave them a soft landing. A few wires came loose, a few bolts snapped. If it happened back home, you could fix it in a day. But now some people are crowd-funding a couple of robots to repair it, in situ. While bringing along a few modern additions.”
She sent Latifa the details. “Between the old mining rig and the new fabrication system,” she said, “I believe they could construct most of what we need for the Scatterer.”
“And get it to L1?”
“There’s ice at the site,” Emily stressed. “But they could also launch with a solar-powered railgun.”
Latifa skimmed through the document. “We’d need to change the superconductor.” The regolith was missing the minerals required for a viable pathway to their original choice.
“So maybe the total mass goes up twenty percent. But compared to our chances on Earth ... ”
Latifa’s mind balked; it sounded like trying to create a whole spacefaring civilization on a barren patch of rock, with two robots, a fancy 3D printer, and a toy excavator. But they wouldn’t be trying to grow food or build cities; they just needed to sinter a very large quantity of wire, and hurl it out of a shallow gravity well – along with enough accompanying rocketry to slow it down when it reached its destination. The fancier, complicated parts of the Scatterer could still be built on Earth, and sent up with the robots needed to assemble the pieces.
“This is all very enticing,” Latifa said. “But assuming the salvage goes to plan, who exactly will end up controlling these facilities?”
“Everyone who contributes will have a say,” Emily explained. “The coordinators are a group of space enthusiasts with dozens of projects of their own in mind, but the actual choice will belong to their backers.”
“I doubt we have the funds to buy a controlling share,” Latifa replied.
“I’m sure we don’t,” Emily agreed. “Which means it will come down to persuasion. Six million people have already pledged donations, and I don’t think there’ll be any trouble meeting the target. But then it will be up to us to convince them that the best use of their shiny new space factory will be spending a few years making wire to help blur the sun.”
2065
Latifa rose before dawn and walked into the village, masked against the dust blowing in from the desert. The food truck was late, and there was already a queue fifty meters long leading up to the distribution point.
The sun rose red, but no less fierce than ever. As she stood in the sweltering throng, she swayed on her feet, suddenly uncertain about everything she was doing; it took her several long minutes to reason her way back to solid ground. She’d been confused by the heat and her lack of sleep, but it was still a good lesson: she ought to be able to explain to any villager plucked from the crowd why the dust all around them couldn’t spare them from discomfort, but the distant Scatterer would.
Back home with her rations, she called her cousin Fashard, who was handling logistics for her in Chaman. “Can we send a second truck out each day? There were people going home empty-handed.”
“That’s all the food we’re allowed to take through the border now,” he replied. “A second truck would have nothing to carry.”
“All right.”
Latifa sat down at her workstation. The feed from the salvage mission had already started.
The image showed a cratered terrain raked with shadows; the old mining rig, still in its landing capsule, was a small white blotch just off-center. The altitude display in the corner was dropping precipitously, but then the descent engines began firing and the digits slowed. The numbers were hard to take in; Latifa had her assistant replace them with a plot of altitude against time. Now she could see the curve leveling nicely, and when the down-facing camera went dark, she was perfectly relaxed, because it was obvious that the craft had come to a smooth halt.
As system checks began running, some kind of advertisement appeared as an inset. Latifa was amused at first; the landing would have a significant audience, and the project’s coordinators might as well milk it for every cent.
Then she unmuted the sound.
“Vote now to build the Time Portal,” a warm female voice implored her, while the inset showed CGI of a strange gimballed machine rising up from the lunar surface. “So much has gone wrong in our timeline, but this is your chance to put it all right.”
She watched the ad to the end, but then followed the link to a site that reiterated the same spiel at a more leisurely pace. A group called The Repurposed World was lobbying the factory owners to construct a device that they claimed could be used to launch four brave chrononauts back in time – armed with suitable knowledge, and the necessary cultural and linguistic skills, to send Earth’s history swerving away from the present, searing disaster toward a far happier outcome. The first traveler would warn the Americas to prepare to fend off European conquest; this seemed like a rather geographically dispersed mission for one person, but their early arrival among the Incas was meant to plant a seed for a continent-wide transformation that would unfold over the following century. Similarly, the second traveler had all of Africa covered. The third would knock some sense into James Watt, dissuading him from trying to use coal-fired steam engines to compete with the venerable solar-powered version from Africa, and encouraging him to opt for electrolytic hydrogen instead. And finally, Svante Arrhenius would be offered some Ghost of Christmas Future visions, to keep him from reporting his discovery of the Greenhouse Effect in the original, rose-tinted language that had promised “more equable and better climates.”
Bemused, Latifa went to the site where the votes were being tallied. Most people had been holding off until the salvage payload had actually landed, but now some hundred thousand ballots had been cast. The Time Portal had received sixty thousand, the Scatterer thirty thousand, and various other projects had claimed the rest.
Was this a prank? A scam? A sincere endeavor?
She’d been worried that she’d find the Scatterer up against the Mars crowd, trying to garner even more resources for themselves. But whoever was behind this insanity, they were outpolling her two to one.
#
“This machine can’t work,” Latifa explained. “It really is that simple. General relativity isn’t a mysterious grab-bag of random possibilities; it’s a rigorous, well-tested theory. It tells us exactly what different configurations of matter will do to the shape of space-time – and a spinning basketball hoop won’t send anyone back in time, even if you build it on the moon.”
“My opponent is as closed-minded as she is self-serving,” Mira Wolf replied. “She’s been nurturing her absurd folly for years, hoping to rescue something from the ruins of a failed career in the nuclear power industry. This is absolutely symptomatic of the mind-set that got us into this mess: look for a technological solution, and when it doesn’t work out, just try to repackage it as something new.”
Their host was nodding enthusiastically. Latifa had never heard of Ryan Sullivan before, but fifty million people across the planet streamed his talk show. He’d introduced Wolf’s vision of The Repurposed World to the actual world a few months before, so it had seemed like the best way to counter her message would be to ask for equal time to address the same audience. Latifa’s goal was to present a concise, lethal rebuttal to the premise behind the Time Portal, and she believed she’d done that in the first five minutes. But the show just kept stretching on and on, with Wolf and Sullivan demonstrating an apparently limitless ability to adorn the whole matter with fresh verbiage — and the live viewer count, astoundingly, showing no signs of flagging. Latifa had always feared that civilization would be brought down by people with thirty-second attention spans, but now she was beginning to suspect that the greater danger came from those who could sit through three-hour vodcasts, robbed of the ordinary human reflexes that should have compelled them to switch to something new instead of marinating in the stream of inanities.
“The question, surely,” Wolf insisted, “is whether we should be satisfied scrabbling around for some half-baked, techno-delusional fix, or whether we should plunge a sword deep into the bones of the system of oppression and injustice that underlies humanity’s plight. Deep into the bones of history itself.”
Latifa said, “No – the question is what’s actually possible, right now.”
Wolf shook her head, smiling with a kind of grim satisfaction. “And there it is! In the end, all you have to offer us is a defense of the status quo.”
#
“So what do we do now?” Latifa asked, surveying the grid of her colleagues’ grim faces.
“I know Lisa Stein,” Jurgen offered tentatively. “No disrespect to you, Latifa, but her Nobel was for quantum gravity; if she declares that this time machine is a joke, no one can tell her to stay in her lane.”
Hakeem said, “I’m pretty sure Wolf would tell Einstein to butt out, without a moment’s hesitation.”
“We should have started our own cult,” Daiyu joked. “We could have said we needed a lens at L1 to signal the aliens and summon them to save us.”
“Or at least market-tested the idea,” Lindsay replied.
The panel went quiet, as if they were seriously considering this proposition. But Latifa was sure that there was no point wishing they’d taken the low road, any more than there was in wishing that Columbus had been met with cannonballs. “We can’t just rebrand ourselves to appeal to the reality-averse,” she said. “We’d never win them all over, and we’d risk losing everyone else.”
“We don’t need an absolute majority of votes,” Daiyu reminded her. “We just have to get more than any other project.”
“So how do we bring down the Time Portal’s share?” Jurgen asked.
Emily said, “Go after their supporters, with other projects that push the same buttons. Splinter the vote, by stealing the essence of what it is Wolf’s offering, and doling it out in half a dozen other packages.”
“And what is it she’s offering?” Latifa asked.
“A certain kind of placebo,” Emily replied. “A gesture so grand that it makes no difference that it’s completely ineffectual.”
There was silence again. Then Hakeem said, “What about ... a black box for the planet? A repository of data, stored safely on the moon, that chronicles the Earth’s decline in every masochistic detail?”
Emily smiled. “I love it. And in ten million years, when the cockroaches invent spaceships, they’ll get to have their own Ozymandias moment.”
“Maybe something about Gaia?” Jurgen suggested. “Gaia’s tomb? No, Gaia’s sanctuary ... a sort of spa retreat, where she can hang out on the moon for a thousand years, waiting for humanity to die so she can reclaim the biosphere.”
Latifa groaned. “No one would vote for any of this nonsense.”
“No one who cares who lives and dies, in reality,” Emily corrected her. “But if they’re tempted to pretend that they could jump through a hoop and rewrite six hundred years of history, I think there’s still a chance of luring them into an adjacent fantasy.”
Latifa said, “Maybe. Or maybe they’d just circle the wagons, and strengthen their commitment.”
“Hmm.” Emily looked troubled. “That’s possible. But do you have a better idea?”
Latifa said, “The best schism cleaves close to the root. What if a rival project offers to build the very same time machine, but use it just a tiny bit differently? The Repurposed World is selling Paradise on Earth ... but even among people who’ve convinced themselves that’s possible, no one actually agrees about what it would look like, or how we should get there.”
2072
When Latifa invited the whole family to visit her, the deafening chatter, the wailing babies, the sheer mass of people in her place of habitual solitude, threatened to overwhelm her. But she let herself float through the noisy crowd, accepting the barrage of sensations as the price of her belated return to the fold.
Her grandchildren had forbidden her to cook, and they all brought dishes of their own, filling the burrow with mouth-watering aromas. Latifa tried to treat the comparative feast in the spirit in which it was intended: not as an arrogant display of the family’s wealth, but a gesture of hope that, before too long, everyone might eat as well as this again.
When the time came and she switched on the feed from the Scatterer, Fashard moved through the room gently hushing the guests.
“Are you quite sure it won’t work backward, focusing the rays and burning us to a crisp?” Fatema asked, deadpan.
“Nothing’s impossible,” Latifa replied. “I swear there were a few seconds, sometime last decade, when I really did wonder if I might accidentally foment a Marxist revolution in the Qin dynasty.”
As the current began to flow through the coils, Latifa watched the instrument readings with as much equanimity as she could muster. The system would work, or it wouldn’t; no intervention in the form of directives from Earth could make the slightest difference now.
The growing magnetic field, and its effects, were utterly invisible, but between the detectors deployed across the structure, and an array of radio frequency antennas, the software garnered enough information to paint a false-color aurora, shown in profile, blossoming against the stars. The plasma was gathering in front of the device, then rippling out in concentric waves, just as Emily had predicted thirty-six years before.
“If we go outside, could we see it?” Latifa’s first great-grandchild, Haroun, enquired.
“The sunlight’s too strong, coming from behind it,” she replied. “And we don’t have the right kind of eyes.”
He laughed, maybe half-understanding. Latifa bent down and kissed him, then wrapped her arms around him.
DREAM FACTORY
1
“Any pets?” Justine asked, glancing up from the checklist on her phone.
“No,” James replied, hopeful that this might count in his favor, though it was hard to read his interrogator’s demeanor. She’d said she was a law student, and he could already imagine her in a courtroom, calmly trapping duplicitous witnesses in the web of their own lies. Her two current housemates, both philosophy majors, were sitting on the couch beside her, but whatever they were doing on their own phones seemed entirely unrelated to the interview.
