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When the team first came out of the woods on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, they
found a lone homestead. There were several bags of produce sitting on the
grass several meters away from the entrance. A young woman was begrudgingly
starting to carry them inside. They offered to help, which she accepted,
explaining that the delivery drone kept using the wrong precise coordinates,
but she couldn’t get it changed so that it always dropped them off right on
her porch instead. After they were finished, Romana declared that she had
officially become the team’s navigator, having won the bet with her mother.
When Leona questioned it, Romana pointed out that they never specified the
threshold for being at the right place at the right time, or helping the
right person. That could have meant anything, from saving the world, to
carrying groceries. She decided that it meant the latter, and since Leona
never argued about it before their little tiny baby mission, she
didn’t have any room to argue now. Romana was the navigator, and probably
deserved it for successfully executing her foxy trick.
“Well, then, where are we going?” Ramses asked. They had spent all day at
the homestead, completing chores, and enjoying the beauty of nature. Now it
was a year later, and they were back in the timestream.
“Oh, uh...” Romana acted like she hadn’t even thought about it yet. She knew
that she wanted the job, but now she was the dog that caught the car. She
stood there awkwardly for so long that everyone just sort of faded away and
moved on to other things for a while.
Mateo approached her later when everyone else was out of the room. “I
thought you were doing this for your mother. I thought the whole reason you
made yourself navigator was to get us back to her.”
“Ramses isn’t ready,” Romana replied. “I’m not ready,” she added in
admission. She sat down on one end of the couch.
“I get it. That was a very mature choice.” He sat down on the other end, but
more in the corner, so he was facing her.
“Yeah, but I still should have made some choice today,” she argued.
“That wasn’t very mature of me. I looked like an idiot.”
“This is a beautiful planet,” Mateo pointed out. “There’s no reason why we
can’t stay here for a bit. In fact, I think I’ll go for a swim in that
lake.”
“After what happened to Proxima Doma as soon as we left, I’m not so sure
that that will be true for much longer. Castlebourne practically went to war
too. Maybe we’re cursed.”
“Those two problems were inevitable, and far beyond our control. Proxima
Centauri is more unstable than anyone thought, and if you hadn’t helped all
those refugees find safety on Castlebourne, maybe they wouldn’t be at war,
but they would be oppressed. They carried their problems with them. That’s
not on any of us.”
“I just don’t want something to happen here, that’s all,” Romana said.
“Is that why you couldn’t come up with an answer?” Leona asked as she was
coming back into the common area.
“We left Doma just as things were falling apart,” Romana pointed out. “Had
we stayed, we could have helped.”
Leona shook her head. “Centauri’s poles flipped, sending a massive coronal
mass ejection towards the planet. The cataclysm was over in a matter of
days. Everyone who died did so within that period. If we had returned a year
later, there would have been nothing for us to do.”
“I don’t have to wait a year,” Romana contended.
“You still couldn’t have fixed it,” her father tried to explain. “The fact
is, we’re on the other side of The Edge. We don’t have much information on
what happens in this time period. We’re kind of flying blind here, and I
think we’re all feeling that. It’s perfectly reasonable to see this as the
calm before the storm. It’s unsettling. But I say, let’s just enjoy it.
Let’s not leave Bida until we come across a reason to. That’s how it’s
always been.”
“That’s not why I asked to be the navigator,” Romana said. “I was trying to
put us in the driver’s seat for once.”
He chuckled. “I don’t think it works like that. Even without the powers that
be forcing our hands, I don’t think it works like that.”
“I’m not sure I’m worried about the storm. I might be worried that there
is no storm. I’m worried about purposelessness. I guess I’m not
suggesting we caused all those issues on Doma and Castlebourne, and
wherever. But I’ve read about your past exploits. You used to be busy every
single day. You didn’t have breaks. You didn’t have vacations. Doesn’t it
feel like things have slowed down? And don’t you think that’s weird?”
“It’s not weird, it’s by design.” Now Marie had come back. She walked over
and turned on her fireplace, presumably for ambiance. It wasn’t like they
got cold anymore. She sat down in an armchair. “When our ancestors were
banging rocks together to make fire, every day was interesting for them too.
Everything they saw was new, and they had to constantly solve problems.
Sometimes, their solutions led to more problems. For millions of years, this
didn’t stop. Those ancestors didn’t concern themselves with yearly taxes.
They wouldn’t even understand the concept. Taxes were a solution to the
problem of regulating the exchange of goods and services. The exchange of
goods and services was the solution to the problem of high population and
limited individual skill. The human race kept progressing, adding
complexity, increasing the complications. In some ways, advancement made
life easier, but it certainly didn’t make it simpler. We think of the Edge
as some division between the common time traveler era, and the unknown ever
after, but the truth is this has been in the works for a while. What the
Edge really did was become the final move in a fundamental shift in how we
advance.”
“What are you saying?” Not even Leona seemed to understand.
“I have been looking into it,” Marie went on. “That is what I’ve been
spending my time on. The reason we’re no longer so busy is because almost no
one is. Even new colonists don’t have to work hard. They send their
automators ahead of time, they usually arrive via quantum terminals, they
don’t start with low tech. We’re not advancing into complexity anymore, but
for the first time in history, we’re advancing into simplicity. We’re
trimming all the fat, and thriving with fewer things. An IMS unit has
everything you need to survive except for gravity. A centrifugal cylinder or
coin can get you that, or even just a hammer hab. Even the seven of us
stopped needing a ship. So you have that, a synthesizer for replacement
parts, maybe a virtual environment or two, and some means of generating
power. That’s it. That gets you everything you need. You don’t even need a
community anymore, as we see here on Bida.”
“How do you explain Castlebourne then?” Ah, it was Angela’s turn now.
“Castlebourne is contrived complexity,” her sister argued. “No one
has to live the way they do there, under those domes, having those
adventures. That’s actually why they’re doing it, because real life has
become too boring. There’s no struggle anymore. I admit, I can’t explain why
they prefer those simulations to virtual constructs, but they still serve
the same purpose. They’re there to keep you occupied, and from going insane.
And the best part about them is that they’re relatively safe. Since they are
designed, they’re controlled. No one in Zombiedome is in any real
existential danger. The largest remaining population of undigitized humans
was on Doma, and now that’s done with, either via death, or the holdouts
giving in and finally digitizing their minds.
“We solved death, we solved boredom, and the only reason we are bored
right now is because we don’t think we’re worthy of the free time. Mateo,
you’re the first of us to have this pattern, and while you didn’t always
know why, it was clear to you that there had to be some kind of reason. You
don’t know any other way to live, because you’re still holding on to that
higher calling. But it doesn’t exist anymore. Things do change, but they
happen over longer time scales now. The days of the one day mission are
simply over. The most interesting thing happening right now are the Ex Wars,
and the reason we regretfully bowed out was because we all realized how
useless we were. We can’t do anything, and that might be scary, but
we need to stop trying.”
“So, this is it?” Olimpia asked from the doorway to her unit. “We have
reached the end? There is just nothing left for us to do? We’ll just hole up
in these belts, and have fun in simulations?”
“No, no, this can’t be true,” Mateo reasoned. “There are still some things
we know about the future. That Everest Conway guy. We met him out of order.
We haven’t met him for the first time yet,” he said with airquotes.
“And we went on that unremembered mission with that guy named Amal. What was
that? When was that?”
“Maybe that will never happen,” Marie offered. “Maybe we undid the futures
they came from by meeting them out of order, and stepping on a butterfly
together.”
“Or maybe we’re just in a lull,” Mateo decided. “Let’s go with that instead.
I don’t really want bad things to happen, but I don’t want to be
aimless either. If we were to be like that, why are we bothering to skip
time anymore? I’m sure Ramses could find a way to suppress our patterns
permanently.”
They all looked over at Ramses’ door, half expecting him to waltz back in
too, but he was likely working on something important. When he didn’t show,
the rest of the team seemed to agree that they didn’t want to talk about
this anymore. It was pretty depressing, and while Marie’s thesis was
interesting, they fittingly wished that it was more complicated than that.
As Mateo said, they didn’t want bad things to happen so they could swoop in
and fix them, but it would be weird if they just did what the general
population was doing, and just had fun all day. They were decidedly
different than the masses. They were special. There weren’t many time
travelers around here, so it kind of fell on them to represent. They did
decide on one thing, though. If by the end of the day, nothing happened that
specifically kept them on this planet, they would leave, even if Romana
couldn’t think of anywhere better to go.
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