Another Now

by Yanis Varoufakis

  It took only a small additional mental stride from lecturing Thomas to offering her friends an explanation of her difficult decision: ‘The very things that the Other Now’s laws and institutions have revived, protected and made great again – a world of transactions, of exchange values and of markets – are the very things I wish to escape. So why would I ever cross over to what sounds like my worst nightmare?’

  Power to do what?

  Listening to his difficult friend, Costa was reminded of one his favourite episodes of Star Trek. In it, the crew of the USS Enterprise chance upon a centuries-old spaceship in which they discover three cryogenically preserved humans. It transpires that in the early 1990s these three people had been suffering from incurable illnesses and had paid vast sums of money to be frozen and sent into space in the hope that, one day, they would be found, reanimated and cured by the advanced medicine of some alien species. Having been revived – and indeed cured – one of them, Ralph Offenhouse, formerly a rich industrialist, is informed by Captain Picard that he has been discovered by twenty-fourth-century humans living in a society in which technology provides for everyone’s material needs. The accumulation of riches and possessions, which had so preoccupied the man throughout his life, is now considered infantile. The challenge is not to enrich oneself but to improve oneself. Mortified, Offenhouse tells Picard that he has it all wrong: ‘It was never about possessions. It’s about power.’

  ‘Power to do what?’ asks Picard.

  ‘Power to control your life, your destiny,’ Offenhouse replies.

  Picard looks at him patronizingly and tells him, ‘That type of control is an illusion.’

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ points out Offenhouse.

  Costa recounted Picard’s conversation with Offenhouse and then said to Iris, ‘You’re staying, and I bet this is why. Because in a true utopia, such as Star Trek’s twenty-fourth-century abundance-communism, Offenhouse’s way of thinking has no place. But in the Other Now, it absolutely does.’ Momentarily unsure of himself, he felt he had to ask, ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Iris. ‘If your wormhole led to Picard’s world, I’d leap through it without hesitation. But even though the Other Now is undoubtedly a far, far better place than ours in many respects, I refuse absolutely to go there.’

  As a feminist freedom junkie, Iris knew the past was a horrible place, especially for women, but that was not a good reason to praise the present. Similarly, the hideousness of Our Now was not a good reason to leave for the Other Now, even if it constituted a remarkable improvement.

  ‘I applaud Esmeralda, Akwesi, Eve, Ebo and the other OC rebels for eradicating capitalism before it evolved into the Technofeudalism we live under over here. And I do not criticize them for preserving money and markets and those other financial instruments to get things done. Until we live in a world where material needs have been eliminated by Star Trek replicators on every wall, things like money and auctions will remain essential. Until that happens, the only alternative is the Soviet-like rationing system that vested horrid arbitrary power in the ugliest of bureaucrats.’

  ‘But if, as you say, you think it a far, far better place, why would you not cross over to it?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘Because I prefer,’ Iris answered, ‘to stay in Our horrid Now than live in a much better version of it that only makes the prospect of a Star Trek communism feel further away.’

  Iris was making the point that, once upon a time, she had disdained other leftists for making – that sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better, that improvements only hinder the generation of the forces that bring radical change.

  ‘I did not waste my youth fighting against Thatcher’s campaign to reduce all values to prices only in order to migrate now to a place where markets are even more stable, sustainable and admired – loved, even. When we reconfigure societies to put exchange at their centre, Thomas, we violate our nature. Humans thrived by hunting together, cooking communally, making music and telling stories around a blazing fire at night. Sure, the societies that replaced these communal practices with market exchanges unleashed great powers, allowing them to overwhelm others that did not. But there was a price to pay. Market exchange dissolves what makes us human. It is why our souls feel sick. By allowing exchange value to triumph over doing things together for their own sake – for the sheer hell of it – we end up crying ourselves to sleep at night. It’s what depresses us and enriches the self-help gurus and big pharma. I am, I admit, fascinated, impressed, awestruck even, by what the OC rebels have achieved in the Other Now, particularly the democratization of corporations, money, land ownership and markets. Except that democratized markets still prioritize the transactional quid pro quo mentality that undermines the sovereignty of good and, ultimately, our fundamental well-being. Democratized market societies, freed from capitalism, are infinitely preferable to what we have here, except for one crucial thing: they entrench exchange value and thereby, I fear, make impossible a genuine revolution that leads to the final toppling of markets – and thus to the emergence of Picard’s society, Costa. In any case,’ she concluded more light-heartedly, ‘anyone who believes that happiness lies elsewhere is a fool.’

  Costa and Eva looked at each other. They required no telepathy to know what the other was thinking: that raging against the system was Iris’s only way of being, her loneliness vaccine. The Other Now was too pleasant, too wholesome to rage against. It would have made Iris’s life intolerable.

  The crossing

  ‘It is almost time,’ said Costa. ‘In less than fifteen minutes the wormhole will begin to lose its integrity. Iris, I think you have made your position clear.’

  ‘You cross if you want,’ she said pompously. ‘The lady is not for crossing.’

  ‘What about you, Eva?’ asked Costa.

  ‘Face it, Eva,’ interjected Iris. ‘You are the epitome of Homo systemicus, adapting to any system of authority and ready to do its bidding. If we lived in the Soviet Union you would be a party apparatchik while I languished in some gulag. Never a shrew, but entirely tamed, like Desdemona you preserve your purity by your complete submission to whichever system prevails. Your only saving grace is your love for this young man,’ she said, looking at Thomas. ‘It makes little difference to you if you stay or go. But crossing over will offer him his best chance of a decent life.’

  Eva was appalled that she agreed with Iris. Were it not for Thomas, she would have been in two minds. The Other Now sounded fascinating, but Our Now had been kind to her too. Thomas was, however, the clincher. Being with Costa had, for the first time in years, brought him calmness and purpose. Crossing over would extract him from a world of pain, not least the monster that was his father. Moreover, over the preceding weeks Eva had begun to think of Eve as a sister and Ebo not just as a brother-in-law but as a force for good. And then there was Kosti, whom she was dying to meet, if only to compare and contrast him with Costa, Cleo and also Mari, Kosti’s partner. Not to mention Siris, of course – heavens above, she would be losing one Iris to gain another, possibly a fiercer one! In the Other Now, Eva realized, she would have that which she lacked here: an extended family, including a half-sister for Thomas.

  ‘Well, Costa, I will go if you will,’ said Eva, knowing that if he went, Thomas would gladly follow.

  It had also been clear to Costa that, from the moment he laid eyes on it, the teenager had been dying to dive through the wormtunnel – as long as Costa went first. Costa realized it was up to him, not Eva. Mother and son would cross over if he did, not otherwise. Like Iris, Costa also believed that the Other Now would be a better place for Thomas and so for Eva too. But how could he tell them he wasn’t going? How could he extinguish their best hope of a worthwhile future by declaring his determination to stay to ensure HALPEVAM never fell into the bastards’ hands?

  That’s when he decided to lie. Predicting that Thomas would only walk into
the wormtunnel if he were to go in first, Costa played along.

  ‘I shall step in first,’ he told Eva and Thomas. ‘You two follow me immediately. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t forget to hold hands tightly. OK?’

  Anxiously, they promised to comply.

  ‘What about HALPEVAM?’ asked Thomas.

  Costa explained that he had installed a failsafe device that would unleash an electromagnetic pulse so powerful that it would destroy every piece of technology in his lab once they had crossed over.

  Thomas was delighted and instantly agreed. Eva felt she had no choice. Iris looked at Costa suspiciously for a while and then stood, bade all three of them a stern farewell and set off towards her room.

  Thomas ran after her and threw his arms around her shoulders. Eva rose and made her way over to them. She hugged Thomas and then extended the embrace to include Iris as well. The three stood there for a long moment, tearless but all choked up.

  Costa broke the silence. ‘If we are to cross over, we have to go – right now.’

  Eva and Thomas broke away from Iris. Costa looked Iris in the eye and said, ‘See you.’ Then he followed Eva and Thomas into the lab, closing the door behind him.

  Eva and Thomas stood next to him, holding hands in readiness for the crossing as instructed. Costa smiled and walked casually into the perfect blackness on the wall. Eva and Thomas followed him immediately. The lab was suddenly empty and, but for the whirring machines, silent.

  The madness of Hephaestus

  Costa did not bother Iris that night. He had no idea if she had cottoned on to his plan to sneak back into Our Now, but by the time he emerged from his lab several hours later, there was no sound. He assumed she was asleep and went to bed quietly. He would save the ambush for the following morning – around 10 a.m., he thought, an hour before she was due to leave for the airport – giving them enough, but not too much, time together.

  Iris betrayed no surprise when he appeared in the kitchen the following morning, where she sat drinking her coffee.

  ‘It’s impossible to destroy HALPEVAM safely from afar,’ Costa ventured sheepishly. ‘I have to do the job myself, in situ, thoroughly and over time.’

  As Costa gave his explanations, Iris stared at him with an expression of sympathy mixed, unmistakably, with pity. Costa was, to her mind, merely the latest in a long line of male engineers who fantasized about breathing life into mechanical creations for some deluded higher purpose. Her list began with the Greek god of technology, Hephaestus, paused at Dr Frankenstein and ended with AI, or artificial idiocy as she called it. None of them had led to anything but ill in the end. Goodness knows what horrors HALPEVAM will beget, Iris had thought when Costa first explained his towering project to her. Her love for him, however, prevented her from sharing her thoughts.

  And yet Iris’s contempt for the defective sex was balanced to some degree by scorn for her own. She almost chuckled at the thought of Eva’s equivalent inventions – the terrible economic models that Medusa-like turned the mind of any student who studied them to stone. Oh, how she would miss her! Iris’s Brighton sanctuary had always offered her the essential freedoms – quiet and independence – that Virginia Woolf had argued were the prerequisites for any writer or artist. But that room of her own would be terribly lonely now that Eva was not on the far side of the wall.

  Costa’s explanations and self-justifications had by now morphed into his usual diatribe: the terrible uses that big tech would put his inventions to given half a chance, the importance of not leaving any trace of his blueprints online, his paranoia that, even if he destroyed HALPEVAM, ‘they’ could reconstruct it by reading his engrams, and so on.

  Eventually she interrupted him. ‘For you, dear Costa, I fear something altogether closer to home.’

  ‘And what is that?’ he asked.

  ‘That your soul is too pure, too delicate, to bear the burden of having lied to young Thomas.’

  Costa did not reply. But he knew Iris was right. His heart could withstand the solitude of his lab, the fear of big tech and the loneliness that Kosti’s family had made him so aware of. But it could not also endure the weight of the lie he had spoken and acted upon so effortlessly. The thought of Thomas’s disappointment broke his heart.

  Iris’s phone rang; her taxi had arrived. Costa helped carry her suitcase downstairs.

  Accustomed to farewells, they went through the motions of pretending it was no big deal and of promising to be in touch soon. Costa stood on the pavement for a moment, watching as the car drove silently away, a poor substitute for the goodbye he would never be able to say to Eva and Thomas. And then he rushed back upstairs to get on with the elimination of any trace of HALPEVAM’s existence.

  No turning back

  A month later, Costa put up his lab for sale. His work at an end, he intended to move to Crete permanently in the New Year. He was sixty-four. Not a bad age to retire. Maybe that wooden boat off the southern coast of the island could be his salvation again: a conduit to Another Now of his own, where his lying to Thomas might one day look nobler, less damning. Maybe he could coax Iris into visiting him, to reminisce about Eva, to imagine together how Thomas was flourishing in a world without banks, oligarchs or share markets. Then again, maybe not.

  On the day he was supposed to fly to Athens, where he was to transfer to a domestic flight to Heraklion, he changed his mind. Instead, he caught a plane to London. The land of quiet desperation was better suited to his new project. It was not enough, he had decided, to wreck HALPEVAM. If he had been smart enough to tap into CREST, to build the damn thing, big tech could do it too. His duty now was to create gadgets that constantly sabotaged theirs. He would have to be careful, though. A fixed address of any sort would eventually be traceable. He would have to be permanently on the move, always one step ahead of them, dedicating his life to being their worst enemy.

  Once the plane had taken off from San Francisco, he opened his laptop to pass the time. Unthinkingly, he created a new file and started typing. Ten hours later, as the plane was approaching Heathrow and the flight attendants asked him to stow his computer for landing, he found he had written a couple of chapters. Before switching off, he scrolled back to the first page to give the book a title: The Madness of Hephaestus. It would be a memoir.

  AFTERWORD

  The Send button stared at me invitingly. Pressing it would end a year-long journey that felt like it had begun decades ago. One keystroke would have transmitted to Iris’s publisher the book she had instructed me to write – the very one you have been kind enough to plough through, dear reader. But something wasn’t right. Today is the anniversary of her funeral. It felt wrong to do so without first securing her blessing. And so it was that, earlier this afternoon, a red carnation in hand, I made my way to the cemetery.

  The white marble headstone looked older than a year. I LIVED AS BEST I COULD, THEN I DIED read the blunt inscription that Iris had composed. I found it hard to accept that this simple slab, with this simple phrase carved on it, was enough for a person for whom a whole world, its alternate included, had proved insufficient. The thought of the red and black coffin rotting under my feet saddened me. As I laid the red carnation on her grave, its small splash of colour provided some comfort.

  Stepping back, I looked around for the plane tree where a year ago I’d spotted Costa and walked over to it. Leaning against the tree, I turned for a last look at Iris’s grave before heading home to rid myself of the burden she had placed on me. That’s when I saw her. I was so startled to see Iris walking towards her own grave that it took me a few moments to notice Costa walking a couple of steps behind her.

  Convinced I was losing it, I sat down, leaned back against the tree and waited for the hallucination to pass. It did not. Costa was carrying a bunch of red carnations. He caught up with Iris at the graveside and handed half of them to her. Side by side, they looked down at the grave, placed t
heir carnations on top of mine and briefly held hands. Costa stood there like an ancient stele, while Iris leaned towards the headstone and ran her fingers across the inscription. I stood up, thinking I would make a run for the car park, but the rush of blood made me dizzy. Costa caught sight of me as I staggered and made his way to me.

  ‘I knew it must be you,’ he said. ‘The carnation on the grave, I mean. How are you?’

  Speechless, I walked slowly with him back to the graveside, where Iris still stood. She looked at me, squinting with puzzlement, until apparently to her complete surprise she recognized me.

  ‘Yango? Can it be you? My god, it’s so good to see you!’

  ‘Iris?’ I managed to whisper.

  ‘Yes, my old friend, by golly how many decades has it been? You’re looking well!’

  Turning to Costa, I realized he was watching me, waiting to see when the penny would drop. Suddenly it did.

  Relieved that I was not seeing a ghost, I grabbed his shoulders with both hands, stared into his eyes and demanded to know why he had not told me that Siris had followed him that night back into Our Now.

  ‘It was all my idea,’ Siris confessed. ‘I asked him to keep it from both Iris and from you. And for goodness’ sake,’ she said, turning to Costa, ‘have you been referring to me as…Siris?’

  ‘It’s just a nickname I came up with to avoid confusion,’ Costa replied apologetically.

  The three of us made our way to a nearby tea shop and when eventually we were all sat down and the tea had been poured, she proceeded to explain everything: how after the OC rebellion broke out, she had sold her Brighton home and made her way to New York to join the rebels; how Kosti had caught the first plane from San Francisco to join as well, putting the money he had made shorting Wall Street into the cause. ‘As for Eva,’ she added, ‘we knew of her because of the work she had done for the OC rebellion, and eventually we made a point of meeting her well before the damned wormhole business opened Pandora’s box.’