All Our Wrong Todays(96)
The goal of the company will be to make the technology open-source, available to all for free. But Greta will convince us to be at least initially cautious. There are too many out there who will perceive what we’re doing as an existential threat. So we will have to take them off the board.
Greta will have a plan. She believes that money is arbitrary in that it has power only because people collectively grant it power, like a mass hallucination that’s come to life, a golem of infinite zeros. We will embrace that arbitrary power and use it—to buy up any company that could threaten us. This will require several trillion dollars. But a machine that produces unlimited energy is also a delivery system for unlimited wealth.
Greta will turn out to be a visionary bare-knuckle bruiser of a corporate CEO. As we prepare to launch the Engine, she will work out the kinks in her long-term strategy by delivering to market a steady flow of the designer trinkets with which Lionel equipped his home.
My mom’s interest in all of this will be political. She will have a simple outcome in mind—no more war, ever. She will see the Engine not in terms of unlimited energy or unlimited money, but as a machine for unlimited peace. She wants every person on the planet free to feel what she feels, curled up in an armchair on a sunny afternoon reading a novel written in another age—to have no cares. She will strive to turn this age into another age, a bad dream from which humanity finally woke up.
She will become our driving political operator. You might not think a career in academia would prepare her for that, but it turns out that academics are goddamn crazy and getting anything done in the university environment is so convoluted and asinine and theatrical that my mom will find actual politics to be kind of relaxing in comparison.
Lionel will have no interest in further involvement. He will care about only one thing—spending whatever time he can with Emma Francoeur. He will outlive Jerome by eighteen months and die with Emma at his bedside. I will never ask her how she feels about it all. She is very private and it will be none of my business anyway.
Lionel will live just long enough to hold his Nobel Prize.
Penny and I won’t have much of a role in any of this. We won’t want one. Penny will give birth to our child and we will raise him together. With our share of the Engine’s limitless financial resources, we will buy a building and tear it down and rebuild it. And then we will buy another building and tear it down and rebuild it. And we will do that again and again and again, for as long as the money keeps coming, which means forever.
I don’t believe I can ever be forgiven for erasing my friends from existence, but the best way I know to honor them is brick by brick by brick. Every time we pour the foundation of a new building, I will write the names of those I lost in the wet cement. Deisha. Asher. Xiao. Hester. Megan. Tabitha. Robin. Penelope.
We will remake the world, Penny and I, one building at a time. Penny likes things that she can touch and I will find I do as well. I will discover that what makes me happiest, beyond Penny and our child, is to make things. A building. A family. A life.
It won’t be fast, changing the world. But we have time.
136
As I’ve mentioned many times, I come from the world we were supposed to have. But lately I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Whether or not it’s true.
When I consider it now, despite my breathless descriptions of its multivalent wonders, I’m struck by how recognizable it all was. What I mean is—people lived in buildings, had jobs, bought things that were advertised to them, followed fashion trends, enjoyed entertainment projected on screens, ate food, drank liquids, had sex, fell in love and broke hearts, made babies and raised them as they saw fit, voted in elections, sometimes broke laws, and tried to contribute meaningfully to a civilization they believed was always open to improvement but fundamentally worth propagating. The whole enterprise, top to bottom, would’ve been immediately, intuitively understood by anyone from this 2016. Or, and this is my point, our common 1965.
The world I come from was an accelerated version of the human civilization that developed through the twentieth century, hinging on the calamities of the Second World War, and rocketing ever faster on a track laid in the two decades between 1945 and 1965. And then it just kept on going, the technology getting more sophisticated, more seamless, more comprehensive, more integrated, more . . . more. But it wasn’t imaginatively different from the future dreamed up in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima.
It was in fact specifically those dreams made real. If the technology had existed for neural scanners to map a virtual projection of humanity’s most fervent hopes, to give them something glittering and buoyant and comforting to wake into following the grisly pandemonium of the wartime nightmare, it would’ve looked exactly like the world I come from. And it did—activated by Lionel Goettreider on July 11, 1965.
It was like our collective imagination stopped revising the idea of what civilization could be, fixed a definitive model in place, and set to work making it happen. It was the world we were supposed to have. And so there was no reason to consider any other world. Another pretty good working definition of ideology.
So, okay, what’s the alternative? If the world isn’t supposed to be a dazzling acceleration of the postwar generation’s techno-utopian fantasies, then . . . what? Between futurist manifest destiny and apocalyptic ruin, is there another way?