2312

Extracts (18)

to form a sentence is to collapse many superposed wave functions to a single thought universe. Multiplying the lost universes word by word, we can say that each sentence extinguishes 10ⁿ universes, where n is the number of words in the sentence. Each thought condenses trillions of potential thoughts. Thus we get verbal overshadowing, where the language we use structures the reality we inhabit. Maybe this is a blessing. Maybe this is why we need to keep making sentences

texts are written for people to read later. They are a kind of time capsule, a speaking to one’s descendants. Reading this text, you see back to an older time, when the tumult and disorder may be scarcely believable to you. You may be on the other side of a great divide, your life indefinitely long and headed for the stars. Not so we the living, thrashing around in our little solar system like bacteria filling a new rain puddle. This puddle is all we’ve got. Within it some jimmy the doors to the secrets of life; some tend a patch of dirt for enough food to live. You know all that I know; what can we the living say to each other in that situation? In many ways it’s easier to talk to you, generous reader, unborn one. You might live for centuries, this text one tiny part of your education, a glimpse at how it used to be, a little insight into how your world got to be the way it is. Your author however remains stuck in the tail of the balkanization, desperate with hope for the beginning of whatever comes next. It is a very limited view

Who decides when it’s time to act?

No one decides. The moment happens.

No. We decide. How we decide is an interesting question. But even if we don’t know the answer to it, we decide

although the events right before and after the year 2312 were important and signaled changes latent in the situation at the time, nothing tipped decisively then, there was no portal they passed through saying, “This is a new period, this is a new age.” Events set in train were mired and complex, and many took decades more to come to fruition. That the Mondragon would unify much of Earth, that Mars would recover from its qube-inflected withdrawal and rejoin the Mondragon—none of that was clear to us then—things could have shifted into quite different channels and

of course the disparities between individual and planetary time can never be reconciled. “What is to be noted here is less the unification of these disparate temporalities than rather their surcharge and overlap.” It’s the surcharge and overlap that create the feel of any given time. “Out of this jumbled superimposition of different kinds of temporal models History does in fact emerge”—as a work of art, like any other work of art, but made by everyone together. And it doesn’t stop. Things happen, events, accomplishments; wins and losses; Pyrrhic victories, rearguard actions; and though there can be crucial events, the plot does not end in a year like 2312, but rather several decades later, if that

what we see when we contemplate the formation of the triple alliance of Mars, Saturn, and Mercury, or the intervention of the Mondragon Accord into the balkanized Earth, or Mars’s return to the Mondragon, is a kind of unstable interregnum, a shift in the spinning of the great merry-go-round as the weights are redistributed and something new begins, and a shuddering thus torques the system for years, before finally slipping into some newly stabilized rotation

On Venus the backlash against the plot to spin up the planet caused a long and bitter civil war, largely invisible to the rest of the system, fought with knives and depressurization, and only resolved in the latter half of the twenty-fourth century with a general referendum of the entire population, which decisively chose to renew the bombardment of the equator and initiate the spectacularly destructive creation of a hundred-hour Venusian day

the so-called invisible revolutions on Earth led to the recreation of its landscapes both physical and political, all of which followed the Reanimation. In that same period the integration of qube and human existence was another invisible revolution, a struggle vexing the minds of every engineer, philosopher, and qube who ever attacked the problem

on Mars it became clear that a small working group within the official government had been infiltrated and influenced by a cadre of qubed simulacra, who were summarily kidnapped and sent into exile, after which a profound reconsideration of their governance brought them closer to their democratic system as described, and reentry in the Mondragon Accord followed

with majorities on Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Titan, Triton, and even Luna declaring the intention to fully terraform their worlds, all volatiles and nitrogen in particular became much more expensive; inflation struck the entire system at once; and by the end of the twenty-fourth century the Saturn League had amassed a titanic fortune

all the invisible events make the history of that time hard to write. And all the events continued to occur against the most intense resistance of time, material, and human recalcitrance—human fear, in fact, seizing with a desperate grip various imagined props out of the past that were somehow felt to hold the world together. Because of this, there is still and always the risk of utter failure and mad gibbering extinction. There is no alternative to continuing to struggle