Departure(41)
The study, along with Future Me, fades away, returning us to the stone-floored room which seems to have no beginning or end.
“The rest, as they say, is history,” Future Harper says. “In late 2014 Mr. Stone pooled his personal fortune with Mr. Shaw’s, and they made several fateful investments. The first was in a completely unknown start-up called Q-net, which would go on to revolutionize the Internet. The second, Podway, was a mass-transit start-up that had purchased the patents of a failed mining company. The third, Orbital Dynamics, had a big dream: to launch humanity’s first permanent settlement in space, a city in the shape of a ring orbiting Earth. In the years that followed the launch of the Titan Foundation, Shaw and Stone focused all their energy on these three companies, working in private. Publicly, the Titan Foundation was judged an overhyped failure. Behind closed doors, however, they were making progress on the first three Titan Marvels—and attracting powerful devotees, wealthy and powerful individuals who would become Titans and join with Stone and Shaw to make their visions a reality. The world stood in awe when Q-net launched, providing instantaneous data connectivity around the world. The Titans provided access to quantum network patents to anyone willing to build chips, and in the years that followed, superfast free Internet around the globe became a reality.
“The Titans weren’t through knitting the world together. They next set their sight on moving people, not data. The Podway first united Europe, then Asia, and finally the world, enabling safe, convenient, cost-effective mass transit. The Titans were shrinking our world, and their next marvel would bring us closer together in a way no one imagined.”
Small white dots fade into the room’s black background, and a view of Earth from space rises from the floor, giving us the sensation we’re walking through the sky high above. A ring-shaped space station hangs in the distance.
“For years the world watched the night sky as Orbital Dynamics’ first twinkling ring formed. To the world, Titan Alpha was something we hadn’t had in a very long time: a shared dream, an audacious goal that tested humanity’s collective ability and intellect. We stared up at the stars, for the first time seeing them as not a mystery but a destination within grasp. We had a new land to conquer, to colonize, and the people of the world, from every nation and race, united, rising to the challenge.”
The space station fades, and we’re once again on Earth, standing on a sandy beach. A massive dam, larger than any I’ve ever seen, stretches out before us. It must be a thousand feet high, and miles long. At the far end of the dam a green mountain range rises. To our right, on this end, a gray-white cliff juts above, throwing its long shadow across the breathtaking structure. In the center of the dam, five towers rise. I focus, not believing my eyes. The towers are shaped . . . like the fingers of a hand. They curl slightly toward the dam, a giant’s hand of glass and steel, reaching up out of the concrete monstrosity. About halfway down the concrete dam a waterfall spills forth, looking puny in proportion to the dam. The foamy water falls hundreds of feet to the basin below, which is perhaps a few miles wide. A river snakes out of the left-hand side, winding through the rocky green and brown basin. The sound of the waterfall is hypnotic, and for a moment I almost forget where I am. The projection is that good.
“The final Titan investment wasn’t in a company at all. The Gibraltar Project was the Titans’ most ambitious initiative to date, and the largest construction project in history. At the time their plan seemed laughable: to build a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar and drain the Mediterranean Sea, leaving only a river through a vast, fertile new land that joined Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The technical hurdles were unimaginable, but as Titan Stone says, the greatest hurdle wasn’t technical at all: it was political.”
Future Me walks into the scene, making tracks in the beach next to those Future Harper made. My future self stands next to her, a mirror of the Harper and me standing here in this time. The bridge looms behind them, and the wind tugs at the loose strands of her hair.
I feel a little nervous as Future Me begins to speak.
“In the early years of the foundation, the Gibraltar Project was really a stretch goal. It was the marvel Oliver and I talked about the least, something we saw, frankly, as almost too grandiose. And to some extent it was outside our wheelhouse at the time. My background was in technology, Internet start-ups in particular, so the first Titan Marvel, Q-net, was really familiar to me. Podway showed us that we could build something in the physical world on a grand scale, but I think the launch of the first orbital colony really gave us the confidence to get serious about Gibraltar. By that time we were hungry to do something really big, on a scale that would top our first three acts. Gibraltar was about the only thing left.
“Nothing had ever been done on this scale. We studied the Panama Canal and the Three Gorges Dam, both the technology and the politics involved. And year after year, Oliver and I kept hammering away at the project, twisting arms. We made this decision halfway through that we were going to start talking about the project as though it was already happening. We called the nation we’d create Atlantis; its capital, which we put right in the middle, just outside Malta, would be Olympus. Our idea was to tie in to mythology, the stories people have been hearing for centuries, to make it seem more real. Life imitates art, I suppose.
“We had these artists’ renderings of the dam, and we had them do some of the new capital city. We brought them to every meeting, and slowly the pieces started falling in place. We got lucky—a lot. It felt like fate. The nations along the Mediterranean shouted us out of the room at our first meeting. I mean, they saw their entire way of life—everything from fishing to tourism—disappearing. But over the years, as the economies of Spain, Italy, and Greece weakened, they actually became the project’s biggest supporters. They saw in Atlantis the opportunity to gain a new, prosperous neighbor on their southern border, and jobs, almost limitless jobs, in the construction process. For Germany and northern Europe, where the standard of living and birth rates had stagnated, here was something they had sought for a long time: new land, close by, with a great climate. My father was a career diplomat, and I had always stayed out of politics, but in the Gibraltar Project I found the chance to join my business experience with all the diplomatic knowledge I had absorbed as a child.