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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
HUMAN LEGACY PROJECT
by Christian Cantrell
This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
PART ONE
We almost never meet in person anymore. It's far too dangerous. If they were watching just one of us, it could mean the end of the entire project. Almost half a century of work would be gone in the time it took to pull a trigger or laser-paint the building for an air strike.
But there are times when we have to take the risk. The project operates almost entirely autonomously now, but sometimes it needs our help. If we have the skills it needs, we take care of it. If we don't, we recruit. If we need more money than what we have, we find ways to get it. Computers provide the automation, but humans provide the ingenuity. We never know when we're going to be needed, where we're going to meet, or what we're going to be asked to do. We make no attempt to contact each other while we wait. The project contacts us.
This time it happens through my handset. Handsets are issued by the government to ensure that everything you do is tracked. There are underground rooms of supercomputers that search for patterns in the data collected through handsets: conversations, messages, photographs, purchases, locations, background noises. Possibly even molecules "sniffed" through some of the newer models. It's illegal to tamper with your handset or to leave your apartment without it. It doesn't have an off button. Your handset is your identification, your lifeline, your link to the People's Party and their link to you. It's for your own protection.
But it's just a piece of hardware like any other piece of hardware, and just like any machine that blindly executes whatever instructions it's handed, it can be hacked. In this case, the ability to inject bytecode is made possible by the addition of a $2 mod chip. It still uses the federal networks, but it uses them in ways that the People's Police can't see. Networks inside of networks, protocols on top of protocols. Our darknet uses nondeterministic encryption algorithms that are programmed to evolve. If we weren't already on the inside, we wouldn't even know how to crack them.
The meeting is tomorrow evening at the National Pride Museum, of all places. I guess the theory is that it's better to know you're being watched than to have to wonder. And it's not a building that the PP is likely to destroy. We're supposed to meet between work and curfew, a transitional period when a minimal amount of chaos is tolerated. We can't do it any earlier because if we all miss work at the same time, that ties us together. We might get away with it once, but probably not a second time, and certainly not again after that. You have to watch out for patterns. Anything you do from which a pattern can be established will eventually end up flagged.
It's possible to meet after curfew if you know what you're doing. Most people would consider an illegal gathering at night to be tantamount to suicide, and it is. But that's the point. It's so stupid that the PP doesn't expect anyone to try it. They let their guard down in subtle but exploitable ways. The PP gets tired, board, distracted, hungry, and horny just like everyone else. That's when they slip up. We've met at night before and we'll probably do it again, but not this soon. No patterns.
I'll have to leave for the museum directly from work. My office is far outside the city, but that's good. The more movement on the way there, the better. I'll take two trains and a bus, and then I'll take a long, leisurely stroll through the crowded streets. I'll stop at a drugstore to get a drink. I'll cross a street, go in the opposite direction, then walk around the block. It will take me over an hour to get where I'm going, but at least I'll know that I got there alone. My handset will be in my front left pocket which is lined with an aluminized mylar mesh. My last reported location will be my office.
I work for a company called Novelty Household Goods Co., Ltd. which, we are told, is headquartered in Xiamen, China. American and Chinese business is so tightly integrated now that it doesn't matter who you work for. Our economies are almost indistinguishable. I'm a chemical engineer, but I've never done any actual engineering for NHG. I'm more of a researcher. Since all of our products are manufactured in Sierra Leone, it's impossible for me to do any hands-on work. My job is to make sure that we're using the cheapest materials and processes humanly possible. I have federal quotas I have to meet. Since incomes don't go up, prices must come down. The illusion of wealth is one of the cornerstones of The Party.
I've asked several times to go to Sierra Leone, but my requests are always denied. In the space marked "Reason For Travel," I write that I can do my job better on-site, that I might be able to locate new manufacturing locations in western Africa that are closer to suppliers and/or natural resources which could lead to lower production costs. My manager tells me it's the Federal Travel Commission that keeps rejecting the requests, not him. He urges me to stop trying. The real reason I want to go is because the project has people there I'd like to meet; the real reason I'm not allowed is that the government thinks I won't come back.
As far as the government is concerned, I'm a chemical engineer, but my real job is Technical Archivist for the Human Legacy Project. I joined the HLP over 20 years ago, before it was labeled a terrorist organization and banned. I was recruited during the transition from Phase One to Phase Two. The HLP had just started hollowing out a mountain in Ogden, Utah where they were building concrete bunkers for data storage. Since data formats were becoming obsolete every five to ten years, the HLP decided to create their own. That was the only way they could ensure there would always be hardware around that could read them. They had people building the drives, but what they needed was the physical storage media itself. That's what I was hired to do: design titanium alloy platters capable of storing the entire legacy of the human race for no less than one thousand years.
My title is still Technical Archivist, but my role changed when we went underground. I went from working on chemical etching to biomunitions. Biomunitions is the science of violently destabilizing organic compounds. Biomunitions is my legacy. I'm the man who figured how to turn humans into bombs.
PART TWO
The origins of the Human Legacy Project can be traced back to the origins of humans themselves: the Omo River in southern Ethiopia.
When the cost of manufacturing in China began to rise, an American anthropologist named Avia Denegal was the first to predict the industrialization of Sub-Saharan Africa, and hence the gradual extinction of dozens of nomadic tribes. In particular, she was interested in the people of the Lower Valley of the Omo called the Suri, Mursi, and the Me'en. There were no more federal research grants by then, so she sold everything she had and paid her own way to Kenya. From there, Avia traveled north with one of the last humanitarian groups still operating anywhere on the continent of Africa.
Just past the Kenyan border, Avia thought she saw her first dead body: tight black skin stretched over a tiny skeleton beneath a cloud of flies, sprawled in the sparse shade of a clump of brush. Someone from the caravan jogged over and knelt beside the body, then looked up and motioned. They didn't have time to stay with the boy until he regained his strength, so they brought him along. Avia was the only one without specific duties, so she volunteered to care for him. The doctor rode in the van with Avia and the little boy and frequently reminded her, with a grave and meaningful expression, not to get attached.
But by the time they reached the small village near where the Omo river empties into Lake Turkana, not only was the boy eating, walking, and speaking, but he had already picked up several words of English. He stayed with Avia as the rest of the caravan continued north, and was even strong enough
to help her with her equipment.
The boy learned to speak English astonishingly quickly as well as the various Surmic languages spoken by the surrounding tribes. He became Avia's translator, and he and Avia were welcomed into villages and clans up and down the river. The boy did not know how old he was, and prolonged malnutrition made it impossible to tell. Avia guessed that he was between six and nine years old. He explained to Avia that his parents became very cold one night, and when they went to sleep, they never woke up again. The boy liked the name of the river — the Omo — and told Avia that he was taking it as his new name. Omo Denegal.
Avia taught Omo how to read and how to operate her equipment. He was as curious about the Surma people's culture as Avia, and he would often conduct his own research. He maintained his own files on Avia's computer, and they read and commented on each other's work. Omo was fascinated by the technology that Avia brought with her, and when the solar array she used to keep her equipment charged stopped functioning, he fixed it. Avia came back from washing her clothes in the river and found the device entirely disassembled and laid out on a tarp. Omo was cleaning each individual component with supplies from a first aid kit, and when he put it all back together, it functioned better than it had when it was new.
Avia decided to leave Africa sooner than she had originally planned. It was difficult for her to admit to herself, but she had become more interested in Omo than in her research. Omo had consumed every article, paper, and piece of literature she had access to, and he had pushed her to her limitations in mathematics and other sciences. At night, he would ask her questions about the sky that she couldn't answer. Avia had never seen so much passion and potential in anyone, and she felt an obligation to help him pursue it. She had always believed that her gift to humanity would be her research — the preservation of dying cultures — but she now knew that the most important thing she had to give the world was Omo.
The Ethiopian government was happy to let Avia take Omo out of the country. She had some money wired to a bank in Addis Ababa which helped her obtain the necessary documents and approval with no delay. But they didn't leave right away; Avia decided to spend an additional few days in the city to help prepare Omo for the shock of New York City.
Avia went back to teaching full-time at the university in order to pay for Omo's home schooling. He had two separate teachers who shared the task of preparing him for college. Avia and Omo spent their weekends in museums or the library, and occasionally took short trips to Boston or Washington, DC to tour historical sites. Omo was reading an average of a book a day in one of three different languages in addition to keeping up with his schoolwork, auditing two college courses, and teaching his own online class in African Culture.
As a young teenager, Omo was admitted to the university where Avia taught, and by his second year, he was teaching or advising as many courses as he was taking. He primarily studied anthropology, sociology, and mathematics. Omo enjoyed the university, but frequently complained to his mother that the curriculum did not do a good enough job of synthesizing disciplines. Between his second and third year, Omo wrote a paper that described the process of plotting and quantifying cultural evolution and showed how it was possible to use mathematical formulas to model human behavior on a macro scale. He proved how his models accurately described cultures of the past and the present, and speculated that they could therefore be used to predict civilizations of the future. The paper was published in several journals and was so well received by the university that he was offered the opportunity to form and teach an entirely new class: Introduction to Cultural Mathematics.
In his fourth year, Omo began focusing on astronomy, physics, cosmology, and astrobiology. In particular, he was interested in the possibility of combining physics and biology with cultural mathematics to enable not only predictions of the existence of extraterrestrial life, but to derive actual details of alien civilizations. He became obsessed with the Fermi paradox which states that given the age and vastness of the universe, it's highly probable that there is a large number of technologically advanced species in our galaxy, yet despite extensive effort and research, we have never uncovered a single piece of credible evidence. Man has put observatories on the far side of the moon that can image extrasolar planets and see all the way back to the beginning of time, explored the depths of Jupiter's ice moon with autonomous robotic submarines, detected all the subatomic particles that make up matter and define its quirky behavior, and derived a map of the entire universe using the radiation generated by the big bang, but nobody had ever seen or even detected a radio signal, probe, stray laser, or artifact of undisputed extraterrestrial origin.
Omo began to research the Drake equation which attempts to predict the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way. He then integrated cultural mathematics to refine the equation such that it was able to predict the number of technologically advanced civilizations currently capable of receiving and sending radio or optical signals. Even his most conservative estimates put the number in the thousands. He captured his findings in a paper which was received enthusiastically by exobiologists, but was largely ignored by the rest of the scientific community. The university felt that it had been patient with Omo, but now requested that he shift the focus of his research back to more traditional scientific disciplines. Any paper or article containing the term "extraterrestrial" carried the very real danger of discredit and even ridicule — not just for the author, but for any institutions he or she may be affiliated with. Omo responded by leaving the university and accepting a position at the Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, in Mountain View, California. He was, in his own words, about to embark on the third and most profound phase of his life.
He headed up a privately funded project called ROSA, or Radio and Optical Satellite Array. ROSA consisted of 16 identical satellites built by a small team of aerospace engineers essentially out of off-the-shelf components. NASA and the European Space Agency had been out of the business of manned space flight and exploration for many years which had given rise to a new industry of cheap commercial satellite delivery. All 16 satellites were launched into orbit over the course of four days using a remote-controlled SSTO, or a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, capable of taking off from a runway in the Mojave desert, launching itself into orbit using air-breathing engines, releasing a satellite from its cargo bay, and returning to the same runway from which it launched — all in less than an hour.
ROSA was designed to detect incredibly minute narrow-bandwidth radio waves and pulses of photons as brief as a billionth of a second in duration from transmitters or laser beacons — telltale signs of extraterrestrial technology. They focused on 16 Earth-sized planets whose spectroscopic analysis confirmed the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, methane, and water, and who occupied the habitual zone of solar systems with relatively young Sun-sized stars at their hearts. The data gathered by the satellite array was transmitted back down to Earth where it was broken up into chunks suitable for distributed parallel pattern analysis. The chunks were placed into the PCC, or Public Computing Cloud, which was comprised of the combined processing power of billions of network-connected devices from supercomputers to hand-held devices to wristwatches.
After a full decade of tuning sensors and refining pattern recognition algorithms, the project had still failed to uncover even a single credible lead. On the ten-year anniversary of the project, Omo submitted one last paper on the Fermi paradox before announcing that he was leaving the SETI Institute. The paper claimed that organisms which use natural selection to acquire the intelligence they need to create advanced technologies inevitably end up using that technology to compete with themselves through increasingly complex forms of warfare, genocide, despotism, and wealth distribution, thus diverting resources away from scientific research, exploration, and general social welfare. In order for any species to evolve rapidly enough to gain the intelligence needed to construct advanced technology, lifespans would ne
cessarily be relatively short (as in the lifespan of a human, for instance, as opposed to an oak tree), and in order for a species to be able to embrace and build on technology, it would have to have incredibly adaptable neurological pathways. The combination of short life spans and psychological amenability tends to result in cultures which lose the ability to connect with their ancestors, and hence the ability to think beyond themselves and their own lifespans. The result is a form of both inter- and intra-species competition that inevitably leads to environmental, economic, and social decay.
In short, the paper claimed, there is an inherent and self-imposed limitation on all intelligent organisms' potential.
Omo's paper was passionately debated among academics, and was even widely discussed (in abbreviated and simplified form) by the mainstream media. After Omo's mother died and Omo moved back to New York, he was invited to address a panel of world leaders at a summit in Washington, DC. At the end of his talk, a representative from India stood up and asked the question Omo had been waiting for since the day the paper was published: how do we break out of our own cycle of destruction? That was when Omo officially announced the formation of the Human Legacy Project.
PART THREE
The National Pride Museum is almost empty. The school buses have already pulled away and the tour guides are back behind the front desks, picking at their boxes of government rations and rolling their eyes at the security guards' advances. The museum is only open for another hour, so whatever it is that we are here to do, we'd better do it fast.
I walk past the life-sized dioramas depicting salient events in US history: Christopher Columbus and his men selflessly bestowing the gift of fire upon a tribe of dumbstruck natives; American and British gentlemen in short pants and long coats shaking hands over the Declaration of Independence; a white man and an African immigrant working side-by-side in a cotton field while their wives gossip in the shade of the front porch, rocking and fanning themselves, a sweaty pitcher of lemonade between them; a Chinese engineer explaining the mystical inner workings of a Model T to a confused but attentive American engineer; a cosmonaut and an astronaut taking the first triumphant bounds across the surface of the moon together; a prominent balding party member balanced on one knee as he offers a warm plate of food to a dirty homeless child with one hand, and extends a handset to her grateful parents with the other. If you stop to read the fine print on the plaques, you'll see that these scenes do not depict actual events, but are creative re-imaginings inspired by the modern peaceful global alliances we all enjoy. The tour guides do not read the fine print, and the fine print gets finer every year.
Human Legacy Project Page 1