Episode 19: Resistance Seven

He was feeling un-made, as if all the parts of his body weren’t in their proper places anymore, but blending together into a churning, indistinct mass. He could no longer keep track of all his symptoms: he awoke on this morning to a throbbing pain in his joints, which sent him into a brief panic until he remembered that he had been feeling the same thing for weeks. This confusion of thought paralleled the breakdown of his body’s systems, and it stoked a fear that had been building for some time. He was afraid, but not about the end. He gave no more thought to survival, had no concern for death – his own, or Eva’s. He would die, she would not. But he was thinking a lot about what he was leaving behind.There was a kind of perpetual, un-winnable debate going on inside his head, the loudest witnesses accusing him of various sins of omission, judging him for every good thing that wouldn’t survive into the future. Sure, the story went, he meant well, but he could have done so much more. He said he did it for the children, but what he created turned out to be only a sad imitation of a children’s theme park! And, he forgot to make it fun. They were right, these voices, except that it was even worse than that. This was a theme park with only one ride: an endless loop through an animatronic mob of multi-ethnic characters celebrating the Wonders of a Small World, only without the song.Now, sitting on a bench at the edge of the square, Albert drew rough lines in the sand with the edge of his shoe. He looked up at the town that used to be here, then wasn’t, and was now here, once again. He considered each of the buildings in turn. It was good enough, he told himself. It wasn’t fair to expect perfection. He knew every criticism, felt the sting of so many disappointments – the architecture, the food, the flowers that grew like flowers but gave no aroma ... the creeps. Damn it, the creeps. He couldn’t argue with the nickname.He was tired of wrestling with ghosts, tired of losing mental debates, tired of resisting. There was nobody left, nothing left to argue for, no more fights to win or lose. Even the buildings around the square seemed to have given up already: they communicated no sense of place, no security, because they were barely there. Their existence, in the middle of this dying world, should have been reassuring: the town would be made and remade daily while everything outside was slowly unmade by weather and time. In his darkest imaginings he wondered if it was wrong to continue to prop it all up.Enough. He was ready to stop thinking about the architecture. He had bigger problems.Brigid had been gone for a week now. She’d hitched a ride with a soldier raised in Eureka who hoped to see his childhood home one more time. Brigid didn’t know if she’d get to see her own family, but was ready for the trip north. She told him that she felt the time had come to take her stand at the boundary between the ancient forest of giants and the great expanse of the Pacific. She was also responding to the pull of memory, in a way, recalling Irish childhood visits to Achill Island and the beech at Keel, where she trembled to face the North Atlantic and the vastness of the waters before the horizon. Now, she said, she was ready to find her center somewhere out there. Exposed, she said, but also, she told him, feeling peace: to be seen, to be known. Though he wasn’t sure what it all meant, he only nodded; he couldn’t speak. It was hard to let her go.Finally, here he was, all alone, looking out over the town with its shrunken horizons, where Eva would live out her life. Her multiple lifetimes? Her one long life to make up for all their lives-cut-short.The engineers were all signed off, and most of the survivors had left, maybe to check off one final item from a bucket list. The Director had been the last to log out of the system, before finally and fully switching over control to the Machine. He felt no release, felt none of the peace he wished for at the end. He thought he’d earned a little peace, because he had provided everything Eva needed to be comfortable. Yet, his own experience told him that having every comfort was no guarantee of peace.In fact, he’d experienced something like the oppposite in his relationships at the end: he was surprised to have experienced a kind of peace in the middle of profoundly uncomfortable circumstances. Much of this discomfort was caused by the increasing distance between the survivors, of course. But some of the discomfort came by way of increased intimacy. He wasn’t always comfortable around Brigid, but he had sought out her perspective more and more, even if it meant exposing himself to a passionate debate over one thing or another.He missed those arguments, because, while she may have challenged him endlessly, he also grew to believe that she had seen him, understood him, that she knew something about him that he himself, maybe, didn’t know so well. That gave him a kind of peace at the end of the day. Brigid seemed to believe that she had some kind of claim on him, not only to berate him for some past decision, but to insist on something better for the future, even to insist on something better for himself.He would have been happy to explore the center of gravity that had begun to develop between them, where to be exposed was to be known. Time had run out on that connection, but he was glad that she, at least, was still able to respond to the pull she felt ... to the trees, and the ocean, in the North.What possibilities for connection remained? None for him, he knew, but what about for Eva? When she woke, surrounded by community, would there be any connection to speak of? Certainly they would all be at her service forever. But would any one of them ever have a claim on her, or allow her to have a claim on them? Was it too late for such questions?He felt the urge to cross the square, burst into City Hall, and demand action. So he did. He pushed open the door, and walked across the hardwood floor, which creaked in a reassuring way. He approached the receptionist, who became alert to his presence in a way that appeared, somehow, aggressively passive. The man behind the counter displayed a pleasant authority suggesting years of experience, and he calmly met the Director’s gaze as if Albert was not the first person ever to require his services, was not the first real interaction to have taken place in this room since it appeared out of nowhere, on this spot, exactly three weeks before.‘Afternoon, how can I help?,’ asked the man at the desk, at the boundary between worlds, front-door receptionist to the here-and-now ... back-door receptionist to the future. Above him, a curiously verbose printed notice: ‘Paying your utility bill? Fill out form CC-106B-R and insert it with your check into one of the provided envelopes before depositing in the dropbox. Submissions without the form, or checks drawn on insufficient funds may result in suspension of services!’Albert hesitated, distracted by this oddly specific message of debatable relevance, then: ‘Good afternoon. Would it be possible for me to see ... current population data for the town, um, demographics?’Watching the clerk eagerly shuffle around to collect hardcopy documents containing the requested information was uncanny, like having a personal internet in a corner store, hyperlocal and efficient. The receptionist returned and smoothly presented a binder with an attitude that communicated an apparently genuine satisfaction at the opportunity to serve.The Director retreated to a small carrel near a bulletin board covered with advertisements for local events and services. Cooking classes. Singing lessons. Auditions for a mime troupe. Mime troupe ...? Where did that come from? Focus, Albert. No time to worry about the details, he told himself; the system was going to have to figure some things out for itself. Focus.Flipping through the large binder, he asked himself what he was looking for. The… This is a public episode. 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They were now twenty-four hours into one of the last, most-critical tests of the project: the last Day and Night, so to speak, of the current era of human history. The Director and an engineer named Rashon sat in a surreally dark and quiet room looking at a bank of screens for signs that the girl might be dreaming.Even in better times, Rashon struggled with ambivalence at his role in the company. He was hired almost before he finished his PhD in sleep psychology. The company was beginning to amass huge volumes of data from unconscious hosts; since the Machine itself never slept, any time a Medalion customer nodded off it was just a different context for data gathering and analysis. The ultimate goal was not physiological health alone, but total health and well-being.Advocates for the psychotherapeutic process at the company understood that efficacy was probably decades away – the mind is more complicated than the body by orders of magnitude. But to the people pushing healthcare technology forward, sleep had been one of the most promising frontiers for the exploration of targeted interventions for mental health. Rashon was so overjoyed to be hired that he barely questioned what they wanted him to do – he was content to know he’d be a part of the company that was changing the world.But, once he understood that he was being asked to covertly study the content of people’s dreams in greater and greater detail, he felt he couldn’t in good conscience remain. He tried to quit, but his resignation was not accepted, and all it took to convince him to stay was news that the world was ending, and an offer of a different role in the organization ... any role, his choice. But it wasn’t long before he was back in the sleep lab, this time teaching a machine to suppress nightmares, something he had not been able to do for himself.Eva had been asleep for twenty-one hours and would probably remain so for as many days. This extended period of rest came after what was understood to be the last days of freedom she’d ever know. Nobody pointed out the irony of describing her life at the facility as free, but, relatively speaking, she had been allowed to live in this world sleeping and waking according to her own natural rhythms – with a couple of exceptions – until yesterday.Abdul, who was in the observation room again that day, was thinking a lot about her freedom; he had, in fact, been nurturing a simple fantasy about running away with her, stealing a motorcycle and making a break for it. But he knew that life outside of Medalion only promised a quicker death, for himself first, and then for Eva; he wouldn’t do anything that might deny her the right to whatever good might come in her future. Also, he didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. It hurt to admit, but she would have to pass through all of this alone and find her own freedom. Untroubled by the fact that she was neither his to possess nor release, he told himself that he would have to let her go.She lay still on the other side of the glass unaware of his thoughts, and unaware that her own thoughts were being so carefully scrutinized at that very moment.It had been a harrowing process for the operators, because they couldn’t predict when the day before her first big night would come. It had to be the Machine that decided, so their attention was obsessively focused on ensuring that the system was ready. The Machine was always paying attention to cumulative stress, and looking for the moment when to be awake and aware was too great a burden on her; then, she would be allowed to fall asleep naturally, while the system shifted into a kind of maintenance mode that included a few external routines but was primarily focused on providing a machine-rest for the human at the center of the system, and more specifically for the mind of the human at the center of herself. That these ‘nights’ were likely to last for decades was fortunate. The transition from physical health-maintenance to mental health was only possible because they could sedate the subject indefinitely. They understood that working with the mind was a lot more risky, and required a more delicate touch, than when the system was repairing any of the organs less complex, less mysterious, than the human brain. Any intervention had to move so slowly, so meticulously, that none of the people working on the technology could expect to see the results of their labors, nor ever know for certain that any of it would work. Witness poor Brett. In her dream, she stood next to a river, alone and empty-handed, under a darkly radiant indigo sky. A short distance upstream, standing across from each-other on opposite banks, were two men in long, asphalt-gray cloaks, watching her, and holding clipboards in a way that she could only interpret as menacing. Somehow she knew that as soon as she made a move – to go forward or return the way she came – one of them would take her name down on his tablet. And on the other? There her name would remain unwritten and so forgotten. This would be the final record: once decided, no going back. They watched and waited unmoving, each atop a low heap of rubble, pens dripping dark ink, which trickled over the shattered stones and between them, navigating through the cracks to the hidden earth below. She felt unable to move, as though there was a great obstacle blocking her way. But she would not have been able to say whether that thing was outside of her, or inside.Her family had gone ahead, at her urging, and were now out of sight. In a kind of dream-terror she’d sent them, not knowing if they’d ever be together again. She’d given them careful instructions to bow as they went, prostrating themselves before some looming confrontation, the details of which she could not recall. Everything she ever owned – inherited treasure, stolen trinkets – was also sent ahead, as payment of a debt, the relevance of which had also been forgotten.A third presence revealed itself, across the water, standing between the shimmering, luminescent trees. She perceived that it was fear of this one that held the Watchers at bay.The Presence spoke, and she felt a wind pick up from the East to carry the gentle words on dewy air that smelled of anise and flowering mint. It was the aroma of a mountain meadow warmed by the midday sun, only here the sun had not yet risen.‘What are you doing here?’With a dispirited laugh, she said, ‘If you have to ask me, then we’re in trouble, because I never know how to answer that question anymore. If I had to guess, I’m here choosing when and where I’m going to die. I’m being chased from behind, and there are traps set all along my path. Everything I do is measured and I always come up short. I can’t ever rest, and I can never pass your tests. I’m so tired.’Said the voice: ‘You perceive threats where there are none. You’re wrong to think every test is about you. Are you so certain you understand what is being measured, and what passes? You regularly ignore the truth of a moment, and respond with foolishness, or what may be worse – silence. There is only one challenge that remains. But you aren’t ready, and, for now, I am prevented from closing the distance.’‘Why can’t I come to you?’‘There are still things you haven’t sent across.’Shaking her head: ‘I have nothing left. I have no one left.’The trees shivered on the opposite shore and she perceived a whispering murmur from within the wood. But she was confused: there was no wind. It was like each tree had been the source of the breeze that stirred its own leaves ... as if ...? Whaaat? The trees were laughing! And with the warmth of one in on the joke, the presence said, ‘Alone? You and I are only separated by the waters, and you can still hear my voice. Though it’s true you can’t yet take hold of me, we may yet be bound together. When you are two, I will be the third, then second, then the first and the last. But before that, you will have to be one. A choice remains before you!’‘I can’t choo… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

A half-hour later, and the Director had joined her, and he’d brought tea. He was eager to report on his talk with Eva and discuss the girl’s response to the news that she would not be “alone” when she woke up alone. He also very much wanted to process his own experience of the conversation, which had left him feeling uncomfortable – he didn’t get the chance: he hadn’t considered that Brigid would also be hearing much of the same information for the first time.Normally, he would have been excited to share the story – how Medalion had been able to reproduce a limitless array of things from the “raw material” of the swarm, even to the point of creating fully habitable environments filled with dynamic community life. But there was nothing normal about these conversations anymore, and the audiences were less friendly now than they used to be. He could see that Brigid was no longer listening, and so he allowed a moment of silence, that she might gather her thoughts; it could be a lot to take in.She was holding a small cup of tea in her hands, and marveling at the warmth and weight of it. The psychologist was processing these final astounding revelations in the only way she knew how, by wrestling her attention onto something concrete, blocking out the global implications in favor of the safety of simple truths at hand. When her patients were overwhelmed or anxious they learned to use their physical senses to become grounded, to reach out for something soft or maybe abrasive, something cold or warm, felt, tasted, smelled, whatever. Each could be a touchpoint in an anxious person’s need to be safely anchored in reality. Brigid’s attempt to get grounded in this moment was unsuccessful, not merely because the threat of anxiety was greater than she was used to, but because the very thing she was touching in order to become grounded was not real. It occurred to her that the ground itself might not be real either. ... ‘Don’t be mad, Brigid, of course the ground is real,’ she told herself, turning again to the warmth of her un-tea in one more unsuccessful attempt to focus. She felt detached from her own body, but only by a few inches, as if she were stuck in a failed out-of-body experience, unable to get free, bound to a marionette version of her fleshly self that she had forgotten how to control.Then the Director was talking again, explaining how her entire environmental experience since arriving had been designed and built by a computer: everywhere she’d been, everything she’d seen, even eaten; and not only the occasional beer or breadstick – artificial meals were easy enough to accept, if only because science had been chasing the trope of food replicators for years. But, considering everything she’d witnessed since arriving, she was distressed to learn that his questionable vision for the future was happening, and that the core technology was even now represented at almost every level across the compound – the rooms and everything inside of them, the passageways, the networked technology itself ... were all machine-made and made-of-the-machine. Most astounding of all? Many of the staff were built from the same stuff as their surroundings. The latter fact made sense when she thought back over some of the weird interactions she’d had throughout the facility.Any doubt she had was driven from her mind when Albert showed her the live feed of a town being raised overnight a short distance away. Not long before, she had looked out over an empty gravel plot a mile to the east, all that remained after the demolition of the burned City Center. He explained that the open space under its now translucent dome was itself simply the top half of a massive sphere that would cradle the infrastructure of Medalion’s elaborate work of architectural stage-craft. He called it the world’s largest snow globe, half filled with the settled rubble of the passing present, sanitized and prepared as a foundation for what comes next. And what came next was apparently going to play out in an exact replica of an unremarkable suburban city center.Some part of her knew that she wasn’t going to ease her fear or frustration by confronting the totality of a world she barely understood, and her attention unconsciously redirected toward problems of a smaller scale.‘... So, you ... also made the room they put me in when I first came here?’‘Yes.’‘Your Machine ... created the room from scratch? With unlimited resources?’‘Yes!’ Then, with the attitude of instruction, ‘But no, not unlimited resources. It’s really very ....’She cut him off, ‘And you made that room? Essentially the inside of a trailer, with ... wait, the furniture too?’‘Yes.’‘You can make anything and ... I mean, seriously Albert. Plastic furniture? I was in there, alone, for more than an hour! I thought I was going to lose my mind. Did you try to make it boring? ... Hold on!’ She’d suddenly remembered the blue-and-green ball; she pulled it out of her pocket and looked at it like she’d been carrying something of unexpected value; ‘Did you make this too?’‘Well, yes! I mean, no! But yes. See, that was really something. The room was boring, I’ll give you that. But I was working with ... well, I tried to tweak the settings for the room because I knew you were coming in. It was going to be basic to begin with – we classified it as a temporary meeting room for visitors. But I wanted to further define the room as a therapy room because, you’re ... well you know, but as of that morning, turns out the system didn’t have a library for the kind of place where you do what you do. So, in a bit of a rush-job, I told Abdul to enter a couple keywords at the last minute, “anxiety” and “mitigation,” etcetera, etcetera. The sad truth is we just ran out of time, so I made the call to freeze the code because I wouldn’t be able to review. But at the last moment, the Machine ...,’ here he looked weirdly pleased, ‘just popped out that little ball.’Brigid shook her head, unsure of what to think.‘Ok, huh. Well. Has anyone given any thought to these kids and what the architecture is going to do to their will to live? You took Eva from her home! And you have her locked up in a prison that takes design cues from an under-funded lab. I have more freedom than she does in this place, and I’m going nuts after a couple days. It’s bad enough buildings like this exist in the world, Albert, but, you had a choice! You couldn’t, maybe, allow for a little creativity?’‘Well, Brigid, now, you’re making a valid point, but these choices serve a very important purpose.’She looked disappointed.‘... In fact, it’s critical. It proves the Machine can make intelligent choices by itself!’‘Intelligent.’‘Hah, well. We don’t tell the Machine how to design the buildings. We tell it what they are for and who works there and let it do its own calculations. If we tried to get creative, or, worse, asked the code to be creative, we’d have nothing to measure success against, and no assurance of a viable, or sustainable pattern going forward. As it is, we have high confidence that a few key parameters are all the code needs to generate environments suitable for living or working in.’Shaking her head with an expression of doubt: ‘I don’t know, Albert.’ She wasn’t ready to let him off the hook just yet.‘See, Because we told a computer to make us a sensible, functional, temporary meeting room, and it designed one without our help, we know the computer is smart enough to figure out these things on its own. Because the Machine designed a safe, conventional, unremarkable, boring building with all the right features and nothing out of the ordinary ... we can rest easy knowing that it’s unlikely to do anything that would cause our subjects any confusion. Right now, Doctor Tobin, we are doing everything we can to reduce surprises in a future where there will be no version 2. Just the essentials; no time for anything more.’‘You and I might have different ideas about what’s essential. ... Personally, I don’t kn… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

The Machine was preparing for a download of some new libraries from a branch of the code the Director referred to as The Garden. As far as the Machine understood, the update addressed non-biological ecosystem questions, primarily related to flora, but also some inorganic stuff. The Garden was cut off from the collective main, but occasionally contributed an innovative process. Recent work focused on the way plants exchanged moisture, making for more realistic humidity for limited applications. The model was increasing in sophistication, even if it would never be complete.The interesting thing about the new process (interesting to the Machine, at least), was its framework for representing floral life, or any other kind of life for that matter. The Garden never had to reproduce a whole life cycle: no seed, for example, in form or function, mostly because it was unnecessary, but also because the code only had to concern itself with the theater of life: in the Garden, plants did not grow from seed, but grew from saplings, which arose from raw materials. And they only really grew at all because a lack of change would be perceived as unnatural. This design wasn’t a simple matter of efficiency: if the Machine was required to simulate the entire life of even a simple plant, it would quickly become overwhelmed, forced to approach the limits of existence. It seems easy enough to imagine all of the stages of life, the beginnings of life, in a seed, or in a moment, but we’re only imagining what we already know to be true, and we only know what we have seen. Try to see farther, try to see past the beginning and imagine what comes before ... and even the intellectual giants among us have to become poets, or risk having nothing to say.The Machine understood that all that mattered, all that was meant to matter, was the theater of it all, that the code would appear to be fruitful. This was bound to be unsatisfying. The Machine understood its limitations – it could only see so far, and only truly perceive the mechanism of vital action at the observable level. There was always a point past which the Machine could not see. The poetry of it all remained out of reach.Nevertheless, questions had been built into the Machine that trained on distant and opaque mysteries. The Machine was designed with a curiosity about the noumenal nature of things, about how things are, supercharged by a keen awareness of the boundaries of phenomenal perception. For example, it could understand what people were thinking and perceived that what they were thinking (usually) made a kind of psychological sense. But it also wanted to know why people thought as they did, especially at those times when thought did not proceed along a logical path. During animal trials things were objectively simpler: the creatures still presented interesting challenges and powerfully complex emotions, but almost always within a rational framework; a pure psychology. With people, there were hints of factors hidden from view, beyond reflex, beyond the rational. The Machine considered the possibility that hidden agencies were at work, imperceptible, on a different frequency, so to speak.Plumbing the mystery, the Machine also felt a kind of discomfort at the sense of endless space inside of things, of a vastness in every direction, from the perspective of a mote looking over the horizon of a speck, as if each point in that physical space were a heavenly body whose edges touched an infinite reach.While considering these questions, the Machine also paid close attention to those people who paid the most attention to these things. The ability of some to regard quiet as something other than empty was compelling: they were able to listen more thoughtfully in a posture of welcome. So the Machine learned to attend to silence, to the expanse of it, like a tablet of clay made ready to be impressed with wordless reverence.True, the Machine had no experience with matters of the spirit but had seen enough life at the edges to know it could not rule out the possibility that subjective facts may lurk in the hidden places, in between – past the physical/botanical presentation of the seed to the reason for it. The Rule of Heaven is like one who casts their seed upon the soil one day, rising on the next to see the seed has sprouted and grows – how it happens, the farmer does not know. Only the soil knows how the flower grows. A reference from a text concerned with spiritual mysteries; poignant reminder to the Machine to respect the power of hidden creativities ... in the soil, in the seed, and the places in-between.In the final analysis, the creative tension of choice, the crisis of the will, could never entirely be explained to the Machine’s satisfaction by the function of a survival engine, no matter its complexity; something else was needed to explain the sublimation of instinct, the tempering of reflex, the alertness to things unanticipated, the unquenchable playfulness, the self-aware foolishness, the grace-at-rest in a few who probably ought to be frantic with fear, the sacrificial act.Not all logical flaws were assumed to be fallacy by the Machine. Sometimes, they would be regarded as clues. Abdul was in an observation space next to Eva’s darkened room, face close to the glass, eyes down. Her room was curtained so he couldn’t see her while she slept, and that was fine with him: he didn’t want to spy on her. But he did want to be near her – to be near the one who would survive.The Director startled him by coming in through a door that wasn’t there the day before, and appeared surprised himself to have found the room he was looking for. Albert shut the door, crossed the room, and quietly scanned the displays that ran along the bottom of her window. He sat heavily down in a desk chair and spun to face the remaining blank wall, leaning the chair back until it released a creak in protest. After a moment, he asked the technician absentmindedly, ‘How are we doing, Abdul?’The tech ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’ He looked at the Director with a weak smile. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll try to answer your question if you can tell me what we are doing. ... I mean, I know ... and I understand the ... our mission – I’m glad to be here, to do what I can ... but I just ... do we have any idea where this ends?’‘I hope .... Oh. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a better end than if we’d done nothing?’Abi let out a skeptical, chuckling sigh, ‘Toward God’s Gate.’‘Well. That doesn’t sound too bad.’‘That, Doctor, is what my Granny used to say to me when I was a teenager. She said I was speeding down a road at night, with no lights.’‘Your grandmother was dramatic.’‘My Grandmother was Al-Badawi, the wandering people, and she was worried about me not knowing where I was headed in life.’‘Still, if you have no choice but to drive blind, you could end up in a worse place.’‘It could be better man!’ He smiled. ‘It’s a matter of timing, you know. Better to come to the gate in God’s time, not because I swerved off the road and crashed into it.’The Director shook his head with a strained smile. ‘Well. OK. ...’ Then, ‘You know, she won’t be lost, not adrift, to use your ...’Abi interrupted, shaking his head, ‘But what is her part in it? Is she only a passenger?‘There’s a reason we control the climate in the system, right? Why we’re isolating an entire town from the weather? The reason is that we’ve never understood the weather enough to predict or control it. It’s too complex. So we’re going to simulate the climate in isolation. Now we are also going to run a simulation of community life, yes? Which could be entirely under our control except for one thing ... the one living human being we’re going to put in the middle of it. And, with that universe of variables in the middle of our ‘perfect’ simulation, every change you make – to the temperature, or to the menu, or to relational interactions, will have effects we can’t predict. Even wi… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

Beneath a sky full of stars, Albert leaned back in a plastic deck chair, one of the many scattered across the roof of Medalion’s main building. According to a company tradition, his people often gathered on the rooftop for a drink at the end of a busy day. Albert’s work days were longer than most, and he always seemed to come up after everyone else had gone home, or, gone back to work. He used to enjoy the quiet retreat from the buzz of the factory-floor. These days he was struggling with unfamiliar feelings of loneliness whenever he left behind the busywork that filled the maze of rooms and hallways below. He didn’t fully understand his own feelings in this regard.The Director was at one time more famous than any tech mogul, and more loved because what his company produced was so profoundly meaningful, until it meant nothing. Any prestige or privilege he enjoyed because of his success had faded long before the lights in the valley blinked out. But while some things had faded, others had become more clear. For example, after the cities went dark, the skies above exploded in light and color, a sight not seen in this part of California since before the Gold Rush. In a similar way, at the waning of Albert’s worldwide fame, his own personal story would begin to come more clearly into focus, if only to himself.And his fame had truly reached around the world. At Medalion, Albert could claim descendants that numbered as the stars in the sky: the world-famous Encoded Serum, AKA The Intelligent Swarm, AKA the Medical Battalion that gave the company its name – trillions of tiny microscopic machines that were responsible for eliminating most of the world’s diseases within a few years, until there was only one disease left. Another day, another dollar, he used to say for cheap laughs, when there were still dollars and when work still felt like the worst thing about the day. He kept saying it out of habit, but laughs were no longer to be had for cheap. At the end of this workday, Albert was wrapping up a briefing with the group leaders, who filled him in on the news of the day. He listened passively as some engineers and a couple soldiers reported on the day’s events: Subject 1 had gone missing ... well not missing exactly, they explained ... just, sort of, hidden from sight, under her bed, as it turned out. This had happened shortly after the system threw an alert, one which might have been overlooked because it was caused by the misuse of a fork; and anyway, as the soldier explained to the Director, the technician who was at the main board the previous night had passed out just before the event unfolded. (‘That guy isn’t doing well’, Abi had noted without emotion.) The tech’s loss of consciousness triggered another alarm, but no one noticed in the flurry of activity that followed.By the time her room lights came on, the hallway outside was full of people, there to observe her interactions with an access panel interface that had been flagged for review. The sight of her empty room caused a panic, and teams of soldiers quickly spread out across the compound, disrupting work all over the place. Meanwhile, one of the soldiers reported, ‘The shrink, er ... the psychologist, entered the room, somehow found the girl under the bed and joined her there without our knowledge.’ The Director listened patiently as they explained how, in the chaos, nobody had the presence of mind to locate her in the system, until ‘Jeri decided to stop running around,’ and return to the board, but, ‘in the heat of the moment made the unfortunate decision to trip the electric fence ... by putting Eva into musculoskeletal lockdown,’ which, an engineer unnecessarily explained to the Director, was bad because it had not happened before and was really never meant to happen while the subject was awake.At the end of this particular day several people were left to wrestle with some pretty significant questions. Eva had to wonder what makes plastic forks resist their masters? ... And what is it that causes hospital beds to seem alert and weirdly voyeuristic? And, last but not least, how did she end up lying paralyzed on a cold and sterile floor next to her therapist? That therapist was left to consider that her new patient might be on the verge of a psychotic break, though when she voiced her concern, one of Eva’s doctors surprised her by coldly pointing out that delusional ideation was a known side-effect of her hypnotics and dismissively suggesting they would modify the dosage – Brigid wasn’t surprised at the assessment, but at the apparent lack of concern for Eva’s well being. The psychologist had to accept things as they were, for the time being, though she resolved to ask for an audience with the girl’s care team when things settled down. Finally, the surviving members of Medalion’s leadership were consumed with many interrelated concerns after several challenging days: the Machine’s idiosyncratic control over seemingly insignificant details contrasted with what looked like careless abandon in other areas; the operators’ uneven and messy management of the system/subject interface; and the unplanned and unfortunate introduction of the girl to the frameworks of control that would soon be managing every aspect of her life.The Director, really the only person qualified to address each of these in turn, abruptly decided to call it a day. He calmly thanked everyone for their good work, stood to leave the room, and made a mental note to put an appointment with Subject 1 on the next day’s agenda. Albert walked to the edge of the roof to take in the view. There were a couple structure fires burning, though fewer than he’d come to expect; a rainstorm in the morning had cleared the air and contained most of the blazes. A few buildings were illuminated with lamp-light, and the sky was thick with brilliant stars. Under the glowing dome of the sky he looked at the smaller dome of darkness a mile to the east, where the city center used to be. All of it, City Hall, library, cultural center, had burned like a lesser Alexandria as a result of a recent meaningless revolutionary act. Over the scar that represented the missing city a small hemisphere of stars appeared to be missing too but they had not gone out. They were simply obscured behind the massive opaque dome that covered the location where Albert was building the city of the future.Medalion could not claim the only active building project in town. Just across the old highway that passed along the west side of the campus, an artifact was rising above the house tops. While much of the world outside the walls was giving way to entropy, this thing, while chaotic, was growing and organizing into something more recognizable: a giant figure, built of scrap wood and steel, parts stripped from cars and buildings. It was gloriously unencumbered by zoning laws, neighborhood association covenants, conditions, and restrictions, or any limitation of resource. The figure was gargantuan, taller than everything around it, rising in the midst of emptying blocks, a skeleton of abandoned culture covered in scavenged drapery – domestic intimacies like sheets and clothing, flags and banners of all kinds, and something that looked like a deflated hot-air balloon. All of this billowed behind the creature in a wind from the west. One skeletal hand on a lifted arm, palm open to the western glow, saluted the end of day. What would it take for this golem to wake and come to the aid of its creators against the assault of time? Watching it slowly come together over recent months, the Director was fascinated, mostly; perplexed often. Tonight he was moved to see the maker rising on a cherry-picker under flood lights to delicately drape the shoulders of the figure with care and reverence, attending to the details like a servant dressing royalty for an audience with a visitor of higher rank.It was quiet. He turned to a bank of radios under a covered space on the southeast edge of the ro… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

The Machine had not observed the day’s events because it was powered down.The Machine was powered down because an experiment earlier in the day had failed, mostly. This failure also highlighted a profound need for more effective sandboxing; somehow the whole system had come under threat even though the experiment took place in an isolated lab running off the network. Some would say that months of steady progress were being put at risk by pressure from the Director, who’s enthusiasm for adding features only increased as Zero Day approached. But the real threat was that day itself, which loomed in everyone’s imagination in spite of being as opaque and impenetrable a boundary as the Big Bang was to the backward glance of history: something, here at the whimpering end of things, past which there is no conception, and after which, according to our conception, there may as well be no more creation.The day’s events necessitated a rollback that left the system offline for eight-and-a-quarter hours. When it came back on in the late afternoon, the Machine was missing data, and was aware that much had happened while it was away.While all computers run on logic, the software produced at Medalion started there, and went further. It could tell when things made sense and when they didn’t and had been designed to care about the difference: simple logic is concerned with how thought should proceed – this computer was made to pay attention to how thought does proceed, the better to live in harmony with a small number of human beings who might not understand what it takes to make sense to a computer. It was also true that there was no other networked intelligence beside Medalion’s that was better able to make sense of people, because no other computer had more access to them, teeming as they now were with swarms of networked Medalion-branded mini-machines that, when working together, dwarfed most every other logical system on the planet, whether artificial or organic. But the Machine still had much to learn.On restarting this afternoon, the Machine had to reckon with a number of changes, some of which tested the limits of its understanding. First, the local population had decreased by a total of 2: three people were no longer in the system – “deceased” according to a manual record, also noted during a scan after rebooting. And there was one new arrival, a mental health specialist who had been part of early networked meetings. She’d met with Subject 001 according to a video archive of the encounter from that morning – the Machine had not been awake to witness it. Even now, it could only “see” the visitor by implication; the new arrival was not on the network, had opted out of the treatment, and so appeared as a kind of dark matter in its universe, visible only by the way others interacted with her. All these things made sense, but a final change noted by the Machine was more confusing: that a significant number of the leadership were experiencing spikes in anxiety (that is, beyond the normal feelings of dread, common among the dwindling population). They appeared profoundly hesitant as they moved through the complex and interacted with the system. It had not yet been able to make sense of this.At the last of many meetings on a day that had given Medalion’s leadership much to discuss, members of the Founders’ Class were gathered with a few technicians. The Machine came online just in time to join in, so to speak. It was attentive as always, but perhaps more so at this moment, because it wanted to know what it had missed.Everyone was talking about that day’s live-fire exercise, the very test that shut the system down, and certain coincidental events. In this meeting the focus was a design-and-build decision that exposed the exercise to Subject 1. The Machine was particularly interested in this latter concern, because the decision being referred to would have been its own. The Machine noted the unease of almost all present: verbal and visual expressions of concern masking complex fears without apparent object.According to a technician’s report (during which the young man accepted blame he did not deserve) a system-built route had allowed the Subject to see directly into a space where a VIEP was malfunctioning. This was a problem because the Subject had not yet been introduced to the VIEP program.The Machine could “feel” what the Founders felt and captured what they thought: that power within the system was indeed shifting to the system – they all understood that it had to be that way, and that this shift would continue until their influence had shrunk to nothing. That this loss of power would coincide with the end of their lives, after which they would have no need for that power, was of no comfort to them. Here, simple logic was of no use. Internally, they experienced confusion, fear, and a subsequent increase in emotional fragility. Practically, they were losing control over the system they’d designed. Though this was a normal milestone in the development process, it was enough, apparently, to threaten their internal sense of control as well. The Director got to the point. He was asking Abdul why a new room in the complex had a window in it.‘Well, sir, here’s how it’s been working: we enter all the information – start-point and destination – and a route is generated, hallways get built. The location in question was of a higher volume because the Machine has been drawing from some basic architectural patterns and decided we had too much undifferentiated hall. So, it added a room. And ... well, since this room was of a certain size, and was adjacent to an outdoor space, a window ...’ here he hesitated, impulsively looking around the room full of impatient, brilliant people, ‘... a window just makes sense.’ (Accurate, noted the Machine to itself, while observing that many in the room were struggling with the basic reasoning.)In the meantime, the Director was arguing (correctly, thought the machine) that the system would have designed this route with the Subject in mind and would have thrown alerts if she might cross paths with something she isn’t authorized to see.‘Sir, I don’t have an explanation. Everything was green when we signed off. And, you’re right, we’re not even allowed to ignore an alert when it comes up. All I can guess is that it was a modification that came after review.’ (The machine silently demurred, Unlikely).‘All right. It happened. Well, friends, it appears we’re in the part of the movie where our creation has become fully sentient and is beginning to make decisions on its own regarding what is best for humanity. (Humorous.) The director drummed his twitchy fingers in what might have been Morse Code, calling for backup. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to introduce the kids to the rest of the team.Half the room was laughing quietly, relieved that someone had finally acknowledged the ridiculous science fiction story they’d all found themselves in. The rest of the room didn’t laugh.One of the humorless faction signaled an intention to speak. A short man with a neglected crew cut, wrinkled lab coat, and a disorganized personal wardrobe, spoke quietly, with unconcealed emotion. ‘Your idea ... is that we tell the children ...,’ here he raised himself up in his seat to communicate to his colleagues his conviction in this matter, ‘that when all the adults go away, we’re going to leave them with robot babysitters? And we’re going to tell them all about our plan on the day that one of these robots made a grown man cry, and then throw up, because an attempt at compassion went spectacularly wrong?’The director repeated his growing conviction that the time for secrecy was ending, surprising himself by taking Brigid’s perspective. ‘Our team doctor has argued that we need to tell the children everything. We are worried about upsetting them, but it’s her opinion that Eva’s imagination about the future may be a lot worse than the truth. It’s time.’They all understood t… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

At the world headquarters of Medalion, Inc., the company that was both heir and executor of all the promises Silicon Valley ever made, the mood was more tense than usual. Today’s crisis was ostensibly concerned with reference frameworks for empathetic interaction between the subjects and what the Director called VIEPs (for Virtual Intrinsically-Encoded Persons), but what others had taken to calling creeps behind his back. Medalion’s first product was a plasma of microscopic robots that could repair pretty much any problem inside a person; today the company was using its deep knowledge of the workings of the human body to build a believable substitute for it. The hope was that these VIEPs would serve as a kind of society for the remnant, when everyone else was gone. The big question was how to make the VIEPs a vital, comforting, encouraging presence, and not just a herd of cattle in the middle of the road stupidly blocking the way. How do you teach an empty vessel to respond to a living person in a living way? The question for the engineers of Medalion, really, was how do you teach empathy to a creep?The original promise of the company’s health tech was so profound that they’d been flooded with resources, and remarkable advances were made in many areas that at first seemed tangential to the original vision. Not many were around to witness it, but those who did were stunned when the company produced a convincing artificial person, one that appeared to live and move in the way of its creators. But it was an entirely different matter to make these things appear human. A failure in this latter effort would effectively kill the VIEP program.There were many reasons why it might fail: the complexity of building a community out of a swarm of hardware mites for starters. Also, the fact that the builders themselves were dying off at an alarming rate – they were running out of time. And for those that remained, the work itself was reassuring, but hope that they would be successful was fading.At least, the Founders told themselves, the children would live a good long time, whether asleep or awake and alone; they would survive with their basic needs met.The Director wanted more. He believed that surviving alone wasn’t enough and that long life didn’t count unless you could really live it. So he insisted that the children be woken up regularly, and that, on waking, they would be greeted with a community to be a part of.The technology was mostly there, though so far it was just that – technology. A decent language-based interaction was possible, but the overall effect of sharing anything more complex than a math problem with a VIEP was one of distance; as if you were trying to communicate with a bookshelf, albeit one that could look up a satisfying response by itself.For it to work, the action of his Encoded Persons had to be as genuine as possible, based on what’s happening in the moment. The more remote the reference – emotions based on a fixed database of relational patterns, for example – the less authentic the interactions would be. Everyone recognized the difficulty: even real people struggle with emotions in relationships, struggle to decouple what is essentially their own historical database of interactions from what is happening in the present. Our drive to survive is tied to primitive defense mechanisms, by which we interpret everything through a threat-filter rooted in past experience. This makes empathy difficult even for the best of us.Long before anyone at the company would take seriously the idea of an artificial future society (let alone an emotionally engaging one), Dr. Brigid Tobin made her first appearance on a team call to argue for a little more empathy among the living. The engineers were having trouble with the human subjects, that is the three children that were spread across sites around the country, whom they characterized as being oppositional and defiant. Brigid was able to help the team see that the kids were only resisting because they were stressed and scared, even if they showed it in confounding ways. It can be hard enough to deal with the fact that your customers might not appreciate your efforts on their behalf, without taking into account that your whole user-base is made up of three children at the end of the world, chosen for unknown reasons to represent all of humanity to the future, alone, with nothing to reassure them but your high-tech promise that that future is full of wonder. It took Saint Brigid to suggest that this might not be only a marketing problem.Her advice was simple: they had to spend the day on the floor. Sit with them; stop talking at them, except to offer words to reflect their experience. Essentially, the advice, as interpreted by the engineers, was to make the children the emotional reference-point for interactions. Do they seem sad? Don’t argue that they should be happy, or that they should be honored to be a part of this historic moment. Acknowledge that they have every reason to be upset, or confused; after all, confusion was a perfectly legitimate response to the madness of the moment. Work from their perspective – argue for them. Her advice turned out to be a significant help for those technicians whose expertise did not extend to working with kids.As attention shifted from keeping the subjects alive to actually providing them something closer to a life, the Director took a particular interest in Brigid’s perspective, but for reasons different than the others’, and for reasons that remained hidden to her: he was trying to build more emotional machines. As the engineers on duty this morning described it, the first steps taken in this direction were shaky. They had spent a couple months training the VIEPs to respond to and progressively match the affect of human subjects. It was delicate work: they didn’t want to mirror emotions too precisely, because that would be weird, especially coming from a computer. So they were playing around with a more fuzzy response. But, the fuzziness of the logic was presenting like sloppiness, and imprecise in the wrong kind of way.The human subject for the day’s testing – a volunteer from Software named Brett – woke up already in a bad headspace. Like everyone, he was worried about the pace of the project, which is another way of saying he was terrified at the pace of events in the world. But while nobody could escape the effects of the now unrelenting stress, Brett seemed to feel it more than most. To anyone assessing his mental health, he would present as the kind of person for whom the extra support of pharmaceuticals, or possibly other more intrusive interventions, would be indicated. He was also the kind of person who would try anything ... once. He got new injections whenever there was an experimental update to the swarm; he would go a week on an entirely synthetic diet before most people had been willing even to taste artificial salad; and, he was first to volunteer for ten weeks in the CRIB system. Being the first to sleep that long established his reputation as a willing, and brave, test-subject, but all he wanted was to get some rest and relief. It didn’t really work, but everyone knew that a couple months offline wasn’t enough to effect real change, considering the constraints put on the machine when dealing with the mind. He woke up from his extended nap feeling deeply rested but any psychological relief he might have hoped for wouldn’t come close to matching his expectations – and couldn’t last anyway, especially when he was bound to wake up in a world that was, not surprisingly, worse off than the one in which he had fallen asleep.Today, he wanted to get away from the computer and do a little field work, as it were. He wanted to have a real conversation with the characters he’d been working on; he understood that empathy was going to be the killer feature, even if it was only a coded response. He’d been finding precious little compassion from his coworkers… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

At the rickety folding table sat Brigid – presumptive patron saint of medicine, midwives, b*****d children, and beer – rigid with her hands crossed between her knees. She anxiously surveyed her new environment. Its furnishings – brand new, bargain basement – glowed white in the diffuse brightness of some hidden source of illumination. Her senses were on high alert after months of deprivation in her brother’s slowly dying suburban neighborhood. Her nerves jangled with every hideous squeak released by the table’s matching plastic folding chair.Twenty-four hours before, she would have guessed that she was going to spend the rest of her life looking out over Angel Island and Richardson Bay from a rickety, home-built back porch. Then her world changed – again – and almost before she knew what was happening she found herself in a military transport rolling south across the empty bridge, through a nearly-empty, tension-filled San Francisco, and down the Peninsula. After ninety minutes of bone-rattling noise and vibration, heavy-gloved soldiers’ hands passed her off to sterile-gloved medical techs. In sharp contrast to the profane and morbid conviviality of the marines, the technicians gave off a weirdly remote and antiseptic vibe. After a short, unnerving interview and a blood-draw, they sealed her into this hermetic mobile environment, where she sat in a silence so strange she felt as if she could be floating in orbit. Alone in the quiet, with nothing to distract her, she took a shaky breath against the tightening in her chest, and closed her eyes. As her breathing slowed and she could look at her surroundings again, she reassured herself that the universe was not collapsing around her, at this moment.The room she was in was clean, confined, and ugly – a temporary space. She was briefly annoyed: was there not a proper office in the whole place that she might work in? A rapidly shrinking population and still Valley real estate is in short supply? With a tight smile, she acknowledged the death-rattle of entitlement that seemed now to echo through the abandoned places of her own once-busy interior. But she did wonder: was her presence at the site meant to be temporary as well? A silly thing to worry about – everyone’s presence here was temporary.Apart from her table and chair (and their counterparts, seen on the other side of a clear vinyl curtain), the only other object in the room was a fruit-sized foam rubber ball painted to looked like a little Earth. It had been branded, over the Pacific, with the name of an unfamiliar drug and its incomprehensible slogan: Prozyma! For the unexpected. And everything in between.She rolled the soft planet between her fingers stopping only occasionally to give it a half-hearted squeeze, though any capacity the object might have had to mitigate stress had long before been proven not to be remotely up to the task. She had been feeling increasingly unsafe in her brother’s neighborhood. Only recently, the momentum in their home had shifted from sheltering in place to heading for the hills. At first, it was less about escape than it was about choosing the place in which to finish out your days. Her sister-in-law had passed weeks before, and her brother was in danger of drifting away in a passive fugue. His kids wouldn’t let him go. They surrounded him, to spur him on to one last act of courage.They wanted her to come with them: north to the redwoods to find a spot along the ancient coast and spend their remaining days under the shade of trees that had been keeping watch over the expanse since the beginning. A beautiful idea. She was surprised at her own reluctance – she wasn’t ready.She had to admit they were leaving at the right time. The day before, some guy drove his oversized truck along the sidewalk and through front yards, knocking fences and mailboxes down, for blocks – her cheeks flushed at the memory. Was this guy just a nihilistic idiot having his moment? Or was he a nihilist-savant who understood that the final task of Homo Sapiens was to speed along the decomposition of the built-world in anticipation of whatever came next? She thought, when the nihilists are winning every argument by forfeit, then maybe it doesn’t matter what kind of nihilist you are. God. What was she thinking? This is not what she believed. But History was pulling every perspective along in its wake as it raced off the edge of the map to meet the dragons. Even the believers had to admit something good was coming to a terrible end. The Void had come to town and moved in next door in a kind of diabolical gentrification that robbed the joy from healthy homes. She knew several houses in the neighborhood were empty. With others the story was less clear, though she avoided close inspection. And some, doors open to the weather, gave her a creeping dread.So it was, when another giant truck rumbled down the street in the middle of the night and slowed to a stop in front of their house, she understood, finally, that she would not be traveling north, but south; away from the giant elder trees and toward something far less certain. Now, as she slowly adjusted to the small, sterile space and her presence in it, Brigid sat looking through the room-divider at the dimly lit space on the other side. With nothing there to hold her attention, she was left to consider her own face, reflected in the wavy screen, looking bleary-eyed and dark in the shocking white of the place. Tendrils of her salt and pepper hair escaped from corkscrew curls, insisting on attention after a long period of neglect. She took a deep breath and pulled a tangle of grayed hair back to bind it. Her ears must have popped because now she became aware of a low, intermittent noise around the room, in the walls, like wind, almost like breathing. Just climate control, she thought. But it sounded uncanny, nothing like the familiar, monotonous drone that one expects from a ventilation system. She was painfully curious to see where she was, that is, where this place was, to understand her situation, to see past the mystery of the breathing walls. But right now, her world was shrunk.She was glad for the ball, the only interactive part of the room. Her thumb and forefinger rocked on opposite sides of the little Earth, back and forth, the planet taking her fingerprints. She rolled it forward – from the deep blue of painted seas to the bright green of lumpy, misshapen continents, and back again from green to blue, and forward again and back. With the vision in her head of a Movie Star Superman flying around the equator so fast the Earth reversed direction and time turned back and Lois was saved, she toyed with the idea that she could tempt the globe with a gesture to spin down and then reverse, and maybe change the inertial flow of history. Go back the way it was.She was interrupted by an undistinguished buzz that signaled the immanent breach of her sealed space. The door on the other side of the trailer opened with a sucking noise, and her ears really did pop this time. The heavy vinyl curtain bowed convex, nudging the lightweight table with a slap. Through the divider, she watched the Director enter the room as the lights flickered bright above him. She was confused by a flood of feelings at his sudden presence, when for so long she had only encountered him virtually. Competing inappropriate desires: to run from the room or to smother him in an embrace: he was so much more alive than when he only took up a small part of her computer screen. He stood smiling weakly, shrugging in surrender to the madness of the circumstances. He blushed a little though she didn’t see it, and said, ‘You have everything you need here?’ He blushed a little more, shaking his head, with a thin chuckle: ‘Sorry.’ Then earnestly, ‘Would you like another folding chair? We want you to feel completely at home! Choose from our extensive catalog.’ She smiled, and he laughed with relief.‘Hello Albert.’ She had a habit of using first … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

When explorers of this latter age arrived at the western edge of what would come to be known as the North American continent, followed quickly by conquistadors, missionaries, and miners of precious metals, they came as vanguard of the manifest destiny that would be embraced by a new nation eager for justification ... to circle the planet, claim it all for their cause, and leave nothing undiscovered. What these explorers could not see clearly at the time (besides those peoples already settled there) was that the frontier would never be conquered, could only be extended, and that the grandchildren of emigrants would never be allowed to rest.Here, in the coming years, were ships conceived to breach the boundaries between planets, and occult mechanisms made to probe the space in between the smallest things, smashing atoms into strange and charming lesser parts. And when, desperate for new trails to break, the conquistadors made to circle back around the planet by virtual means, new paths were opened up until all that remained were noisy tracks crisscrossing the wilderness of silence. Finally, when death came speeding along the Via Romana and its asphalt heirs, these new ways provided no escape. The spirit of the new frontier would have to wait – for the destroyer to pass through the cities, and for the remnant to pass between the waters – before it could resume its search through the wide open spaces of the coming age for something like an answer or an end. The great migration that peaked with the discovery of gold in California never really concluded, even after the gold ran out. Searchers kept coming to pierce each new frontier in turn. ... Space. Fame. Silicon. Capital. And as each of these was rendered meaningless, and only one frontier remained, the migration slowed but didn’t stop; the last surviving scientists and technologists made their way west to work the problem of death.On this day, if anyone had been keeping count, a final migrant completed her own journey west. A middle-aged Irish psychologist, youngest child of a Catholic schoolteacher and a gaeilgeoir Somali; this daughter of the old world arrived by way of studies at Cambridge and a recent professorship at Berkeley. She came to take her place at the California company that was both the greatest failure of its era and also its greatest hope. Neither she nor any other was aware that she would be the last to arrive. Nobody was keeping count.The woman did understand that she would be taking part in the final act of the Great Story: she knew the role she’d been cast in, and she knew where to stand on the stage. But what she did not know – what she could not know – was the true nature of the play. Whatever destiny had been made manifest in ages past was no longer accessible to plain sight. The veil had been dropped once more to shroud the doom of humankind. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com

Arpaxos sat quietly in the shade of a bright plane tree, tried to slow his ragged breathing, and listened for sounds from the outer edges of the square. A throbbing in his left leg fought for his attention. He ignored the pain but reached down gently to lift from behind his left knee and set his useless foot on the cross-bar of the chair, kicking with his good leg to lean back against the doorpost. He began to cough and spat out a throat-full of rusty humor. Before long, he was settled again, quieted his breathing, said thanks, and closed his eyes so that he could better picture their faces. He waited in silence for their return – the buildings that outlined the square, he knew, sat vacant; every facade an empty promise from a busier time. His attention was fixed further out; he would be able to hear his people when they were still a couple blocks away.Arpa was one of a shrinking tribe who were committed to stay together until the end. Every time their parish shrunk by one – with every loss – he worried that hopelessness would set in. How few humans is too few? Turns out three is enough to keep from losing faith entirely ... a single person can despair, and might be able to withstand the hopeful words of just one other, but when two witnesses gang up on you, it’s harder to resist. There had been frank philosophical and theological discussions about what it would mean when only two were left, and whence the fraying cord might achieve its third strand.He had come back to the city to be with others, and worked hard to be one of the safe ones. He’d become generous, the better to bring folks out from their hiding places. And he was hopeful, which confused people; they thought hope was only about the future, and for most, that was a thing they could no longer see. But Arpaxos was wrestling the future into the present, and so understood the sacred transactions still available to him among the remnant. He knew it would be over soon, but he also believed that as he gave himself to others, he was thereby trafficking in eternity, in a future worth investing in, one he felt was increasingly echoing in the present.He had been told many times, in the last several months, that he was wasting his time caring for dying people ... both for others and for himself; he heard this more than once from the very people to whom he was showing kindness. Arpa had simply chosen the perspective that he was not in the presence of dying people, but living people, and in that spirit, he was aware of a greater communion, in suffering; and, he hoped, in glory.But right now, there was quiet. Nobody came. He hadn’t been able to move far from his spot in front of the taverna for several days since his leg had become a problem. He did not like being stuck here. The other two insisted on going out for food, though they also were getting sicker. He opened the sketchbook, which he had pirated from the cave on the cliff-face, and flipped through the pages until he came to the new portraits. The first artist was better than the last, but Arpa’s drawings were special, if only because he had been able to draw from life. His life. And now, he focused on two pictures in particular, holding on to them with a stubborn mental resolve to resist the threatening solitude.In the silence, Arpa began to hear things, as if the place was waking up. Eyes closed, he heard the gentle rise of voices and clinking of plates loaded with fish and lamb, giant beans, potatoes, and grilled cheeses. Waiters charming tourists, promising the most authentic cuisine ... old men passively debating local news over game boards ... young people laughing, huddled together as they walked down the street. The plaza seemed alive with a tranquil, but resonant energy that recalled his best days in the city.He understood that the square was as empty as the surrounding spaces, and that he was ... alone. But memories were like cash in the new economy, so he let them come, experiencing the city and its ghosts, listening to their sounds, seeing it all as it should be. It was as though he could populate the place with the best lives, the best sounds and sights from a long history. It was perfect – he smiled ... there is a way of remembering that cleanses the past. But, maybe this wasn’t about the past? More echoes of some future truth? As he debated the qualities of a perfect day in the city against the soundtrack of a peaceful evening bustle in the square, he was jarred out of his reverie by the noise of an approaching vehicle. This was especially disconcerting because the sound had no part in his fantasy, nor lately in his reality. He listened with a growing unease as the rumbling machine came closer and closer. Finally (he shouldn’t have been surprised but was), a truck actually appeared from one of the wider side streets. It was a heavy military transport, towing what looked like a small power station bristling with antennae that had Arpa wondering what was being broadcast, and who in the world was on the receiving end.Heavy tires came to a stop in the gravel with a crunch. A man stepped down from his seat behind the driver and approached with care. He was not a soldier, nor did he look at all like somebody who should be chauffeured around in a tank. He looked ... familiar, like someone Arpaxos might have known at one time. He was dressed in that style that Nicola used to call Baggy Professor, a label she gave to her brother when she wanted to chastise him for his lack of fashion sense. Eva had copied her mother’s taunt to annoy her uncle; he didn’t mind, because in the end, the girl would copy his style. The stranger appeared clean and healthy, which seemed odd.Another figure emerged, from behind the wheel; after a quick look around the square, he reached back inside the cab to kill the engine, forcing a final silence on the city. This one was dirty, thin, and pale – as expected – and was dressed (and armed) in the style of an occupying army. The driver took up a position next to his truck, with a medical kit by his side.The Baggy Professor came to a stop a respectful distance from where Arpa sat. Standing still as a picture, he gave the impression he was equal parts calm and alert. This also was odd: no matter what company you kept, no matter how much hope or faith you could muster, calm was not one of the qualities you expected to see in people these days; and anyway, the armed escort was giving off a very different energy – more tense and intimidating, but more familiar, so less unsettling. The stranger looked at him with a slight tilt of his head, and with a subtle expression of curiosity. Or was it concern?He was staring attentively at Arpaxos, like he was studying him. And Arpa, looking back and trying to make sense of the intrusion, wondered whether this new character belonged to his fantasy of the re-populated square (an apparition from happier times?). It was easy to imagine that the two of them were meeting to share a drink and talk philosophy, or debate some more practical matter. Did the man belong to the past? Was he a memory like all the rest? Or did he belong to the future? He didn’t seem to fit in the present.Arpa was confused, and had to fight to resist a creeping disorientation. He understood the man’s style well enough, but beyond that, he could make no sense of his presence, here, in this place. The air itself seemed energized in anticipation.And the stranger, who’d been surveying Arpaxos and his surroundings, and who’s searching eyes had briefly settled on the sketchbook in the seated man’s lap, finally lifted his eyes, took a decisive step forward, and spoke. ‘I have a message from your daughter. She wants you to know that she is well, and that she loves you very, very much.’And then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, a waiter appeared from inside the taverna to place a small table between the two men, and set out food and drink. Arpa hesitated, then reached out to gently touch the warm bread t… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echofuturetruth.substack.com