Departure(52)
This is even more jarring than the monologue in Titan Hall. These are my darkest thoughts, the secrets I’ve kept, the fears about what my life would become if I didn’t turn things around. Truths this deep are impossible to fake. This guy knows me. He is me. He pauses, letting me process his words, and when I give a slight nod, he continues.
“How far did you get in Titan Hall?”
“To the second chamber. The Gibraltar Dam.”
“Okay. So you know about Q-net, Podway, and Orbital Dynamics. The opening of the Gibraltar Dam is when things got . . . more complicated. The press and history books called it our great mistake, the Titan Blunder.
“The dam opened in 2054, on the fortieth anniversary of the Titan Foundation’s birth. It was the marvel of the world, a political and technical triumph that would carve out a new nation—Atlantis. We believed it would usher in a new era. Here was a new country, stretching from Israel to the Strait of Gibraltar, from Athens to Alexandria, from Rome to the ruins of ancient Carthage, a nation at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. A nation that could unite the world. It was our crowning achievement: a microcosm that could demonstrate the potential of human civilization. We wanted it to be the ultimate example of what a peaceful, prosperous society could be, and we wanted to export that way of life north, south, east, and west, across the globe.
“The world rejoiced. The jobs from the building and opening of Atlantis pulled Europe out of a prolonged recession. Atlantis was a new world, a sort of New America at the heart of the old world, and from around the globe it attracted hardworking, determined immigrants hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families.
“The first orbital ring, Titan Alpha, had been completed five years before, and settlers were arriving there every month, populating the first permanent human colony in space. The Podway was spreading around the world, linking us physically. Q-net was ubiquitous by this point, making free high-speed Internet a reality everywhere. These four initiatives—the Titan Marvels, as they were called—were little more than ideas when I brought them to Oliver at our first meeting. There were one hundred Titans when Atlantis opened in 2054. In forty years, that small group had radically transformed the world. And there was one last marvel, a secret project we thought would have more impact than any other.
“The last marvel is one Oliver was already working on when we met. Did Sabrina tell you about her research?”
“Only that it was related to progeria syndrome.”
“Sabrina had one sibling, a younger brother. He died of progeria when she was in her teens. She dedicated her life to finding a cure. Oliver had been funding her research for several years when we first met in 2014, though he had little interest in progeria. His deal with Sabrina was simple: he agreed to fund her research until she found a cure, provided she would then turn her attention to a project he was keenly interested in.
“People who’ve had a lifetime of success think differently from other people. They assume they’ll succeed. They plan for their success. This was certainly the case with Oliver Norton Shaw.”
I can’t help but glance out the conference room window at Shaw, who would have been in his sixties in 2014, and is over two hundred years old today.
“At our second meeting Shaw posed a simple question: What if we’re successful? What if Q-net, Podway, the orbital colonies, and Atlantis become a reality? What then? How can we ensure that the march of innovation continues? The inevitable answer was: Establish the right culture and recruit the right people at the Titan Foundation. But that’s risky. Cultures can change. You can’t count on great minds in every generation. One lost generation might destroy everything we were building.
But what if the world’s best and brightest never died? What if the one hundred Titans lived forever? Imagine a world in which Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Washington had never died—imagine what their innovation and continued leadership could have done for humanity. Shaw envisioned such a world, a new Renaissance with no end.
“Sabrina found the cure for progeria in 2021. She completed her anti-aging therapy in 2044. Shaw, who was in his early nineties then, eagerly volunteered to be the test patient for her therapy. It worked, and we administered it to all the Titans in the following years. Shortly before the opening of Atlantis each of us underwent surgery, returning to our physical state at the moment we became Titans. We did so more for the shock value at the unveiling than for our own vanity, though there was some of that.
“At the opening of the Gibraltar Dam and Atlantis we all walked onstage, revealing our fifth and final marvel: Titanship itself. It was our vision for redefining the core of human existence. Our proposition was simple: Dedicate your life to making the world a better place, and if you reach high enough, if you work hard enough, if you inspire one of the one hundred Titans to give up their place, you will become a Titan yourself, immortal, frozen in time from the day you earn that status. We envisioned it as a meritocracy of the world’s best and brightest. Dream big, work hard, live forever—that’s the promise we held out to the world that day. Never again would humanity’s greatest works be left unfinished. Never again would our mortal limits claim a mind before its time.
“In the years after 2054, if you asked any child, anywhere in the world, what she wanted to be when she grew up, she wouldn’t say an astronaut or president. She’d say, ‘A Titan.’ ”