Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  “Gravity poses no obstacle, Samantha. Large artificial biomes, such as your ‘generation ships’ can function and are often employed, but one fact remains and it is an important one. All species arose within a natural, planet-bound biome. We are genetically predisposed to not only favor it, we also require it. Species that abandon their natural biomes over successive generations often sicken and die.”

  “So, back to my question, then.”

  “Terraforming lifeless worlds through the alteration of orbital mechanics, atmosphere, water-supply, the presence of moons, and so on, are the principle means of colonization. Such candidate planets exist in numbers uncountable.”

  “That’s what you’re doing with Venus?”

  “Yes. We are preparing for humanity a sister world that will be home to a biota brought to it from Earth.”

  “And Mars?”

  “Details on the Mars Reclamation Process will be forthcoming as the Protocol proceeds.”

  “Uh huh. Right.” She crossed her arms, studying the newsfeeds. “So, a post-scarcity galaxy out there.”

  “Yes, Samantha.”

  “Ah, Iain, you were right after all.”

  “A brilliant writer whose death was mourned by many,” Adam said. “I should point out, his innate optimism has done much to support our belief in your species’ potential.”

  She barked a laugh. “Oh man, billions and billions of readers?”

  “Hundreds of billions,” Adam replied. “The human imagination is a most valuable currency.”

  “And not a dime in royalties. So, you could write me a nice check too, couldn’t you? With my billion or so boot-legging readers, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Momentarily stunned, she had nothing to say. On the newsfeed, a drone camera was showing a mass of mostly unclothed refugees in some denuded African landscape. They were pouring out of a relief camp, burdened with foodstuffs. There was dancing, and dark faces laughing, teeth like pearls. “You said they wouldn’t starve, didn’t you?”

  “I did. They won’t.”

  “All right, Adam. I’ll do it. I’ll speak for you. But first, you need to do something for me.”

  “Of course.”

  “A big thing.”

  “I am at your disposal.”

  “Hmm. Since bootlegging stories and novels is fine with you, what’s your take on copyright, intellectual property, and trade-marks?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “The Big Bang, what a sweet theory.”

  SAMANTHA AUGUST

  Washington Post Editorial, June 1st

  The End of the World (as we know it)

  Jacob P., an itinerant heroin addict in Milwaukee, never felt so helpless. He had been getting by. He wasn’t looking to change his life. The hole he’d found himself in was dark, cramped, and, when he was high, as comforting as a womb.

  And then the drugs stopped working. That elusive kick, the one he had experienced that very first time, the one every addict chases, was no longer there—not in his head, not in his body. The hunger was gone. So was the need. It was as if he’d forgotten his first love. These days, his only love. He didn’t want it anymore, wasn’t even interested in it. How did that happen?

  More pointedly, now what?

  Government leaders of the G7 met yesterday in Ottawa, in a cordoned-off block just up from the banks of the Rideau Canal. The usual mob of protestors crowded the barriers, but something had changed. No one quite knew what they were protesting, and the police presence was minimal, with none of the usual riot gear and crowd-suppressant paraphernalia. Many of the banners and signs being held up showed nothing more than question marks, and this muted plea could not have been more poignant.

  In the banquet hall of the Chateau Laurier, seven of the world’s most powerful leaders met in sessions closed to the media, but even this nod to security had a hollow feel. What was being discussed? Easy answer: our unseen but surely felt overseers. What was being decided? Probably nothing.

  Or is that being too facile, in the face of such fundamental changes to who we are and what we do? Day by day, moment by moment, we are all being confronted with how things have changed. That sudden road-rage on the beltway? Pointless. Take a deep breath and settle down. Whatever you were thinking to do won’t happen, and your foot flooring the pedal, your eyes seeing the car ahead in a red haze, all of it achieves nothing. The damned car doesn’t speed up. The engine doesn’t even rev higher. You are shut down. Instantly. Definitively. Just one more driver in the line.

  How’s that blow to the ego feeling?

  Or when the buzzer sounds and the school-day is finally at an end. The sixth grade bully, the one usually waiting for you down a block and at the mouth of the alley you take to get home, well, he’s still there. But the cold look in his eyes is gone. His old man can’t beat him up anymore, so he has nothing to pass on to you. And as you walk by, he surprises you with a nod.

  Back in Milwaukee, Jacob P. isn’t thinking about the exclusion zones (it seems that’s what they’re called, though who coined the term is unknown). He isn’t thinking about the G7 and those helpless world leaders reduced to discussing the volatile market and its imminent crash-and-burn, with all matters pertaining to security, military co-operation or the lack thereof, peacekeeping, and trade embargoes, all out the window. Jacob P. isn’t thinking about the sudden over-abundance of food and fresh water miraculously appearing in refugee camps all over the world. He isn’t thinking about the strange absences of infectious diseases, or answering the question: when was the last time anyone had a cold? Jacob isn’t thinking about his next fix, either.

  A thirty-nine-year-old ex-addict for whom the label doesn’t even carry the usual trepidation and distrust anymore, Jacob P. is climbing out of the hole. Turns out it wasn’t such a nice place after all.

  There comes to us all a time when we need to leave the womb, our world of private comforts, whether those involve intimidating another driver on the beltway, or beating up a little kid after school. And that father who used his son as a punching bag? He’s got a real punching bag now, hanging on a hook in the garage. He drives his fists into it with metronome precision and a lifetime’s worth of frustration and anger, but all that fuel inside is fast burning up, and his eyes are wide, looking at a future both unknown and unknowable. Just one big … question mark.

  There were about eight thousand protestors to the G7 Emergency Session. They stood at the barricades, until a light rain sent most of them home.

  The G7 leaders departed, not one of them inviting comment, or even so much as appearing in front of cameras. Their entourages of officious-looking aides, secretaries, and minders still scurried about, but there wasn’t anything to show for it. Bodyguards stood around with nothing to do and no reason to be watchful. The whole event had all the self-importance of a pantomime. What now? What next?

  Daily Mail Editorial, June 3rd

  PRISON EARTH!

  So this is how it ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. Cowed into submission by aliens lacking the courage to even show their bug-eyed faces (or what passes for faces for these galactic communists), we might as well start lining up for our manacles and tattoos, shuffling up the ramps into the bellies of cattle-car transporters that will wing us into space to mine gold on the moon.

  But it’s likely nobody will complain much. Better taking a pick to moon-rocks than living in the gilded cage Earth has become. If you can call it living. Free market capitalism is being snuffed out, like one last flickering candle, and what’s coming promises to be dark, interminable, and miserable.

  Our spirit is being crushed. We have been made meek, but alas, we shall not inherit the Earth.

  Resist. Refuse. Never bow. Never kneel. Plant your feet. Make them come down here and drag us up those ramps. And while they’re doing it, spit in their bug-eyed faces.

  Financial Post Editorial, June 7th

  When Sweating the Small Stuff Is All That’s Left

  Overseeing a fin
ancial apocalypse must make for entertaining viewing on the monitors of the alien spaceship hovering unseen over our heads. If they’re a betting species of extraterrestrial, the wagers must be heating up as we totter ever nearer the precipice of global meltdown.

  The military industries have virtually shut down worldwide, sending tens of thousands of skilled workers to the unemployment line. The end of oil exploration and the closing of the Tar Sands and all fracking operations are finally impacting the global oil reserves, and this rumored new power system isn’t doing much to allay fears as universal dread of oil scarcity ripples through the markets.

  Compounding the volatility, the very question of national sovereignty is now at risk, as borders become porous in the wake of an end to all forms of coercion. Locked gates can be climbed over. Barbed wire fences can be cut. The mass movement of populations has risen to a flood that threatens to engulf the Developed Nations, further burdening infrastructure in countries already struggling to emerge from the last market crash.

  Under any other circumstances, wars would be erupting everywhere, hotspots flaring up in a cascade of death and destruction. Instead, we have all become witnesses to a collective repositioning of our entire species, as might come after a natural catastrophe of global proportions, with not a skinned knee to show for it.

  Now the species waits, pensive, desperate for the first sign that order is coming, that whatever lies ahead will be better than how things are now. For decades, free market capitalism has been the dominant driving force of human civilization. The old battles between the collective and the individual were consigned to history, a footnote to the triumph of freedom. But how much of our hard-won freedom meant the freedom to do wrong?

  More, it seems, than we had imagined.

  The signs are there for those willing to see it. The Monetary economic model is in its death-throes. Whatever wagers are being thrown back and forth in that orbiting spaceship, they don’t match our value system, and make no mistake: it’s our value system that is being rejected here.

  The history of humanity has never before experienced anything like this. And should we succeed in emerging on the other side, we may well find ourselves unrecognizable to ourselves. Indeed, we shall have become the aliens in our own world.

  Guardian Editorial (guest writer), June 7th

  Barbarians At The Gate

  By H. L. Toynbee

  (PhD, Classics, Cambridge University, OBE)

  In the 3rd and 4th Centuries the borders of the Roman Empire were crumbling. In the deep forests of Northern Europe, in the windswept wilds of the Balkans and in the mountain ranges of the Caucasus, entire peoples were on the move. Pushed by Attila and his ever-expanding Hunnic Empire, the many tribes that would one day make up the cultural identities of Modern Europe began flooding into Roman territory, seeking protection, seeking new homelands.

  Many of their tribal names remain with us: Franks (France), Lombards (Lombardy), Angles (England), Saxons (Saxony), while others have morphed over time (Goths, Vandals) into what some might call modern sub-cultures, characterized more by behavior than filial identification.

  Rome could not hold them back. The Empire’s internal infrastructure, already stressed by political chaos, environmental degradation, religious upheaval and regional uprisings, simply broke apart. In the West the collapse was sudden. In the East it was more drawn out, ending with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.

  History offers us many lessons. Mass migration of populations is nothing new. The privilege of hindsight allows us to focus on the long-term revivification of culture and civilization that resulted from such vast shifts in peoples and their places, the renaissance of new blood and new ways of living. Civilization only rarely vanishes; more often it simply transforms, evolves. The English deem themselves British, quintessential inhabitants and natives of the British Isles. Of course, the original Angles came from Denmark, Germany and Saxony. And genetic studies now point toward an even earlier and far more eastern origin—somewhere on the steppes of modern-day Georgia and Khazakstan.

  How we define ourselves is an ongoing process, and the notion of nativity is essential to that self-identification. Headlines and frontpages of other newspapers proclaim, strident with panic, the onset of barbarians at the gate, interlopers landing on the shores of our fair isle. If Roman Britain had its tabloids in the Fifth Century, they would have cried much the same thing.

  All over the world, in country after country, borders crumble, and populations on the move seek out new lives in foreign places. Cultures clash, but these drum-beats of fear and xenophobia no longer lead to bloodshed, and this fact alone stands stalwart and bold, announcing unambiguously that a new age is upon us.

  From one empire’s fall, many others rose in its place. What lies ahead? No one can know, but whatever comes, we shall live it, day by day, moment by moment. History’s tide is our companion, and neither politics nor wishful thinking can change that. Sixteen hundred years ago, we were the barbarians at the gate, and how did that turn out?

  National Enquirer, June 7th

  OSWALD WAS AN ALIEN!

  John Wilkes Booth the First Alien Assassin?

  Scientists want to clone Abraham Lincoln to find out!

  Doctor John Milkos of J. VanderMeer University has formally requested that the Smithsonian Institute make available a cellular sample extracted from the body of Abraham Lincoln, which he will then clone so that he can interrogate the American President on the alien conspiracy of Assassinations of American Presidents.

  “The secrecy has gone on long enough,” Milkos said. “We need full disclosure. Those aliens must be brought to justice.”

  Evidence is still pending on the alien nature of Harvey Oswald, but Dr. Milkos believes the genetic proof is forthcoming. “It’s widely surmised,” he went on, “that this new evidence of alien occupation on the moon is where we’ll find the vault containing the secret archives detailing all that they’ve done to manipulate us Americans, all the way back to the Mayflower landing.”

  The Smithsonian Institute had thus far refused comment on the scientist’s request.

  The McKenzie Gantry Show (Fox News)

  Interview Transcript with guest Barbara Backlow,

  Moreland Institute of Global Strategy.

  GANTRY: Welcome, Dr Backlow. Now, for those viewers who don’t know much about the Moreland Institute, can you give us a quick breakdown on what you do?

  BACKLOW: Thank you, McKenzie, and of course. Our institute is an economic think-tank specializing in identifying global economic trends and then devising strategies for positioning the United States to benefit and thereby capitalize on those trends. We have advised the past four administrations and continue to work closely with both Democrats and Republicans.

  GANTRY: When you talk about ‘trends,’ you’re meaning what’s coming, what’s waiting for us. I guess that’s turned into a bit of a dog’s breakfast these days, hasn’t it?

  BACKLOW: There’s been a dramatic, even fundamental, shift in the paradigm, that’s true. Not just in economics, although that is naturally where we’re concentrating on at the moment. We can talk about specific markets that have been impacted—

  GANTRY: Impacted? You mean trashed, don’t you?

  BACKLOW: We prefer the term ‘Externally Deviated.’

  GANTRY: ‘Externally.’ By that you mean the aliens.

  BACKLOW: An outside agency, yes, a force beyond our ability to control or predict.

  GANTRY: And by ‘deviated’ you mean what, exactly?

  BACKLOW: Well, deviated from normal operations, would be a simple way of putting it.

  GANTRY: In other words, trashed. Got it. So there’s the obvious markets or industries we’re talking about here, right? Oil, for example. Fracking. Oil-sands. But now there’s reports that even coal mining has been shut down. We’re looking at an energy crunch, aren’t we?

  BACKLOW: That seemed the immediate conclusion, yes. Now, with news of this new energy
source, this Emissionless, Fuelless Engine, we at our institute are taking a step back from our original dire projections—

  GANTRY: You’re backpedaling. Well, that’s hardly surprising. I mean, if that engine actually works, and can do, well, everything that a regular oil-burning combustion engine does, it’s a game-changer, isn’t it?

  BACKLOW: Well, yes and no. By that I mean, the entire manufacturing industry needs to re-tool in order to ramp up production, and secondary and tertiary—I mean, related industries—ones that make use of oil, such as plastics, and oil-based equipment, well, they have to get in line now. Which makes for a lot of jostling in terms of which industries take precedence over others. To be honest, it’s a bit of a free-for-all at the moment. We don’t yet know how this will play out. The challenge for many industries at the moment is in keeping afloat, in, uh, managing the transition while still staying viable.

  GANTRY: So you believe the EFFE is real, then? The Emissionless Fuel-Free Engine.

  BACKLOW: Oh yes it’s real, and since the specifications are open source, it’s all down to which companies are first to get the things built. That will decide who becomes the front-runner in terms of manufacturing.

  GANTRY: There’s news now that the Chinese government is already past the prototype stage and into real manufacturing. But what about us in the Free World? What’s going on here in America? Why aren’t we already pumping the damned things out?

  BACKLOW: Well, first off, there’s really no such thing as a prototype version. The only challenge with this new energy source is in engineering the interface between the engine and what it needs to do. The Chinese reports are unconfirmed, by the way. As for here in America, the first engines off the line will probably come from the aerospace engineering sector. Boeing, Lockheed, or maybe even one of the outliers, like Kepler.

  GANTRY: If the Chinese get a jump on us with this one, they’ll flood the market—we’ll all be driving good old American cars with Chinese engines in them.

  BACKLOW: Unlikely, McKenzie. Even if the Chinese are the first to go into mass production of the EFFE, those engines will be ear-marked for internal distribution first and foremost.