Eschaton - Season One

by Kieran Marcus

  “Well, like I’ve been saying, Mr. President,” Tyson said. “I don’t know that this is the end. Things may look pretty bad right now, but we’re no dinosaurs. We have something the dinosaurs didn’t have, and that may be our biggest advantage here: our brains. Our intelligence, our creativity, and our diligence and tenacity can help us get through this together. The operating word here is ‘together’. If we continue fighting against each other the way we’ve been doing it since the dawn of history, chances are that we will just finish off what the burst started, that we will perish. But if we stop fending for ourselves individually and we join forces to fight for our survival rather than wasting our energy to fight against each other, then we have a chance. A good chance. A chance to start over, to build a new kind of civilization from scratch. So maybe that is the good news in all of this: that the universe finally slapped some sense into us and we get a chance to start over, a chance that otherwise would never have presented itself. I like to think that for our species the best is yet to come. Of course you and I won’t live to see this brave new world. To build it will take centuries rather than decades. But you have to start somewhere, at some point in time. Maybe that time is now.”

  Dixon looked at him. “You’re asking for a lot, Dr. Tyson. Your vision of the future is bold, and your faith—for lack of a better word—in man’s ability to overcome their petty differences and to altruate and cooperate rather than fight and compete is optimistic. Very optimistic. “

  “I’m aware of that, sir,” Tyson said and shrugged. “But I believe that our spirit and our survival instinct in combination with a dire situation the kind of which we’ll be facing in the coming decades and centuries will embolden us to change our ways for the better. It is often under the greatest pressure that man rises to his best.”

  “Yeah.” Dixon snickered. “It is also often under the greatest pressure that a man is crushed.”

  “I see.” Tyson rose from his chair and slowly walked over to the window to look out into the night. “So it’s ‘Dixon can’t do’ this time, is it?”

  Dixon scowled. “I didn’t tell you that story so you could use it against me.”

  “Bullshit!” Tyson said and turned to Dixon. “I think it’s exactly why you did it. You’re a politician, you can’t fool me, hehehe. You didn’t tell me that story for my benefit or my entertainment. You needed an audience, but the real reason you told me that story was that you needed to motivate yourself. You’re tremendously proud of both your father and your grandfather, and rightfully so. But all of a sudden you find yourself, your country, and your planet in this dire situation. You want to rise to the occasion. You want to step forward and lead. You can’t help it. You’re a Dixon, it’s in your genes. Now if only you had some kind of plan. A plan not just for the country but for the world. A plan not just for the next ten years but for the next ten centuries.”

  “Yeah, well,” Dixon said and emptied his glass. “I don’t.”

  “Well, Mr. President, this might just be your lucky day, hehehe.” Tyson walked over to his desk, grabbed a file and handed it to Dixon. Then he walked back to the window and leaned against the sill, crossing his arms. “I’ve been working on this for twenty-three years.”

  Dixon looked at the file. On the cover it read, Project Exodus – A Strategy for our Long-term Survival by Dr. Jamal Tyson. It made Dixon laugh.

  “Project Exodus,” he said. “What is this, Dr. Tyson? Your plan to build an ark and sail away to the stars in search of a new home?”

  Tyson didn’t reply. He just tilted his head and shrugged.

  “Oh you gotta be kidding me!” Dixon said. “Are you out of your mind, you crazy son of a bitch? This is insane!”

  “Maybe, hehehe. But maybe a little bit of insanity is exactly what we need right now. Although it’s not really that insane if you think about it. If you think big. History is littered with great visionaries who were deemed lunatics in their time. Project Exodus is the equivalent of a teenager thinking about moving out of his parents’ house. It may be early, but it’s not premature, and it will happen sooner or later anyway. Humankind’s future lies not on this planet. We came from the ocean. We took to the land, we took to the skies, we took to the solar system. It’s not in our nature to stop there. All too often, the next leap in our ancestors’ evolution was not taken out of boredom but out of necessity. Out of evolutionary pressure. Adapt or go bust. Even without that gamma ray burst our fate was already doomed, but before tonight, everyone I know would have told you that we probably still had a couple of hundred million years before mother Earth kicked us out of her basement. But there you go.”

  “That’s very nice and all,” Dixon said, leafing through the file with greater interest than he cared to admit. “But how is that great plan of yours going to help us now, with the country on its knees and millions of people dead?”

  “The most important thing you need to do right now, Mr. President, is lift people’s spirits. There are plenty of capable men and women who can rebuild our infrastructure and put the country back on its feet. Nobody needs you for that. What you need to do is not to tell people what to do but to tell them why. Give them a sense of purpose. Don’t tell them we’re rebuilding this nation so we can deal with the decades-long misery of the aftermath. Tell them we’re rebuilding this nation so we can take the next leap in our evolution and ensure the survival of the human race for the next hundred thousand years. Even if you and I will never get to enjoy the fruits of Project Exodus in our lifetime, there is no better time to start than now. And there is no better person to do it than you, because … you know.”

  Dixon looked at him. He knew what Tyson wanted to hear, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it.

  “Come on, Mr. President, I know you’re thinking it. Why not just say it?”

  “All right, all right,” Dixon said and sighed. “Dixon can do.”

  “That sounded like an apology, Mr. President. Make it sound like a battle cry!”

  “Dixon can do!”

  “Better, but I’m still not feeling …”

  “DIXON CAN DO, GODDAMMIT!” Dixon shouted and jumped to his feet.

  “All right!” Tyson said and raised his hands. “I hear you, Mr. President.”

  Through the open window, the two men suddenly heard a noise arising in the distance. It was different from the earlier shouts of panic and fear, higher pitched and more homogeneous, as if thousands of people were no longer shouting over each other but in unison.

  Tyson turned to look outside. “Hehehe, what do you know,” he said. “Come look at this, Mr. President.”

  Dixon joined him by the window. The surrounding streets and buildings were still dark, but in the distance, about a mile away, they could see a solitary source of light. People were running towards it down Pennsylvania Avenue, cheering and shouting. It was the White House, lit up in all its glory, shining like a beacon of hope in a sea of anguish and despair.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Dixon said.

  “Hehehe, somebody must have finally found the light switch.”

  “It’s probably just the emergency generators. The rest of the city is still dark.”

  “You gotta start somewhere, Mr. President,” Tyson said, putting his hand on the president’s shoulder. “You gotta start somewhere.”

  1.3 Meitner²

  LONDON, ENGLAND – JANUARY 1, 2114

  “Good morning, Huxley,” Meitner said in a soft, silky voice like she did every morning at precisely 5:57 a.m. “Time to get up.”

  Like every morning, Huxley Pendergast turned around, pressed his sleep-worn face into his pillow, and replied with an inarticulate grunt.

  After another minute, with a tone slightly more endearing than before, almost a beguiling whisper, Meitner cooed, “Good morning, Huxley. It’s 5:58. Time to get up.”

  “Go away,” Huxley grumbled with no apparent intent to comply.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Huxley,” Meitner said. “You e
xplicitly told me not to. It’s time to get up. You have work to do.”

  “I don’t care!” Huxley snapped in a hoarse, drowsy voice and pulled the duvet over his head, painfully aware that it was an exercise in futility. It was a very special duvet; not so much because it had been a gift from his best friend Higgs for Huxley’s twenty-second birthday, but because of its highly advanced features. The duvet’s nanofabric was ninety-three percent translucent and ninety-seven percent audio-transmissive, providing virtually no protection from Meitner’s tenacious nagging as she switched on the super bright LED lights in Huxley’s bed- and living room and raised her voice impatiently.

  “It’s 5:59! Get out of bed, you fat, lazy bastard!”

  Huxley silently cursed François Duvet or whatever the name of that Edward Teller of the bedclothes industry who had invented this vile piece of linen might have been. Off the top of his head he could think of at least a dozen practical uses for such a revolutionary fabric, but a duvet was clearly not one of them. This was, if anything, yet another corpus delicti of the age-old wisdom that not everything that could be done should be done, and as such it belonged in the same category as nuclear weapons, cloning Neanderthals, and permanent phosphorescent tattoos. Or, for that matter, programming your VPA—your virtual personal assistant—while you were in a state of moderate inebriation and telling her to keep an eye on you; to watch what you eat and how much you drink; how much you work and how little you work out; when you go to bed and—worst of all—when you get up. Huxley was convinced that the vast majority of people’s New Year resolutions, as honest and well intended as they might have been, only ever came into being with the obstetric help of alcohol. It was easy enough to declare your determination to live a better, healthier, more structured life when you were stranded somewhere in the no man’s land between your third drink and midnight when it didn’t matter if that brave new life was minutes, hours, or days away. To live—and deal—with the truth once the truth serum had metabolized and left your body was evidently an entirely different matter.

  When Huxley still showed no intention of getting out of bed, Meitner, wholly oblivious to his musings, proceeded to the next step in her algorithm. She turned up the volume of the speakers and started to sing at the top of her virtual lungs.

  “GOOD MORNIN’, GOOD MORRRNIN’, WE’VE TALKED THE WHOLE NIGHT THROUGH, GOOD MORNIN’, GOOD MORNIN’ TO YOU! GOOOOD MORNIN’, GOOD MORRRNIN’ …”

  “All right, all right!” Huxley shouted in a futile attempt to drown out Meitner’s singing. He frantically kicked away his insidious duvet, swung his legs out of his bed, and rolled his two hundred and forty pounds across the room to his workstation. In wise anticipation of his own laziness, he had programmed Meitner’s wake-up routine in a way that would only allow him to turn it off manually by hitting CTRL+ALT+ESC on his computer keyboard. In hindsight he congratulated himself on having discarded the idea of having Meitner only stop singing if he took a cold shower. Too much was simply too much.

  “Thank you,” Meitner said with her voice down to a bearable volume after Huxley had pressed the right combination of keys. “Good morning, Huxley. Today is Monday, January 1st, 2114. You have five jobs due today. You have seven bills due today. The current temperature is nineteen degrees Celsius, with a humidity of eighty percent. Today’s maximum temperature will be twenty-seven degrees Celsius with a humidity of eighty-five percent. No significant precipitation is expected until 5 p.m. when there will be a seventy-five percent chance of thunderstorms. Would you like me to read the news headlines to you?”

  “Not now,” Huxley said yawning as he scratched his head with one hand and his crotch with the other. “I need a shower.”

  “Hot, medium, or cold?” Meitner asked.

  “Medium lukewarm-ish.”

  “Your shower is ready.”

  “And order me some breakfast at Java the Hut, will you?”

  “The usual?”

  “Yes.”

  “Delivery?”

  “No, I’ll pick it up,” Huxley said and got into the shower.

  Half an hour later, Huxley walked up the stairs from his basement flat, turned around the corner and made his way up Craven Road towards Paddington Station. It was still almost ninety minutes before sunrise, but the roads were already as gridlocked as they were at most times of the day apart from that small 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. window when the never-ending flow of traffic was actually flowing rather than oozing through the streets. Like most twenty-second-century metropolises, London was open for business 24/7/365 which is why even at 6:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, walking was a quicker and more reliable way to travel short distances than driving, although the pavements were by no means any less crowded than the roads. But even large groups of pedestrians had a lower viscosity than cars and mopeds. Initially, the advent of driverless cars as the widely accepted standard means of personal individual transport had greatly improved the flow of urban traffic. But in a city like London with its many narrow streets and impatient pedestrians, it hadn’t taken people too long to figure out that walking into traffic no longer posed a significant risk. All modern cars were programmed to avoid collisions, not only with other cars but also—and especially—with pedestrians, who quickly adapted to take advantage of this safety feature by simply crossing city streets whenever they felt like it, regardless of red lights or traffic. The cars would inevitably slow down or even stop, and people could flow around the piles of sheet metal and carbon fiber like water around rocks. It was an irony that a system that was designed to benefit urban vehicular traffic proved to be even more beneficial to pedestrians as it allowed them to finally reclaim their inner city streets.

  Without paying much attention to what was going on around him, Huxley let the steady flow of pedestrians gravitating towards the station wash him along. He wasn’t a particularly social person and he didn’t like people very much, but for some strange reason he rather enjoyed being part of a crowd; nameless, faceless, pretending to be just another mindless drone like all the others while silently, secretly, contemplating the marvels of life, the universe, and everything. Huxley felt superior when he joined a stream of commuters, ant-like automatons whose sole emotion seemed to be misery as they made their way to or from work. He knew they made more money—a lot more money than he did as a home based crowdworker who was constantly struggling to find enough micro-salaried jobs that would add up to anything resembling a living wage—but were these people happy? They sure didn’t look happy when he observed them on their daily rat race, and Huxley found it difficult to imagine that they would feel any happier when they were where they spent the vast majority of their waking hours: at work. Did these people ever smile? People only ever seemed to smile in public when they were at a theater, a concert hall or a sports event, or when they were on a train or a bus watching a movie or reading a book; when they were looking at something that would distract them from the squalor of their miserable realities. He couldn’t imagine the vast majority of worker bees ever smiling when they were at work. The fake, wooden smiles of shop assistants and sales clerks when they were trying to sell you something you didn’t need didn’t count, because those were part of a sales strategy, not manifestations of genuine joy. These people were all but cogwheels in a giant machine, spinning endlessly without ever going anywhere. Huxley was part of the machine too, a part no less and no more vital than any other, but at least he was not a cogwheel. He liked to think of himself as the oil. At least he got to flow around and see different parts of the machine every day. None of the parts he had seen so far had ever made him want to stay in any one place.

  As he was crossing Westbourne Terrace, a slight vibration in his eep—his electronic earpiece—indicated that Meitner was asking for his attention.

  “What is it?” Huxley asked.

  “Higgs Martin is requesting to speak with you.”

  “What, in the middle of the night?” Before Meitner had the time to figure out the meaning of this question, Huxley said
, “Put him on.”

  After a clicking sound, he was connected to his friend. “Call me in the middle of the night, this better be good.”

  “Yo, sensei,” Higgs said, using the replacement word for ‘dude’ that had become fashionable with the Japanese conquest of western popular culture in the middle of the previous century. “Your gatekeeper’s sassy attitude is quite something, I have to tell you.”

  “Meitner’s attitude is supposed to keep annoying people off my back,” Huxley said, “but apparently it’s not quite working.”

  “Ha! I see what you did there, Hux.”

  “I know you don’t like strong women, Higgs. You like brainless bimbos, but they don’t make efficient VPAs.”

  “So sassy,” Higgs said, “I love it! Anyway, Happy New Year, bro.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Huxley grumbled.

  “Did I wake you up, sensei?” Higgs asked.

  “No, I’m out getting breakfast. What about you, though? Why are you up so early?”

  “I’m not up early,” Higgs said, “I’m up late! Heading home from Ozone’s party at the moment. Sensei, you should have come. It was fearsome. I had sex with two girls and a guy!”

  “All at the same time?”