The Big Disruption

  He had waited two years for this, had added his name to the sign-up list just as soon as it appeared. Sure, the philosophy thing was cool — a new community crafted on visionary, healthy principles of living and a high-quality population — but really, he just wanted to live on the moon, without gravity and monthly internet bills.

  And now he was here.

  But where to start? There was so much to see on the new moon campus that he wasn’t sure where he should direct his attention. There was the squid, waving its arms in an endless tank that stretched from the space elevator landing dock all the way to the colony’s first building. There was his new company badge, fluorescent and sparkling, occasionally lighting up as though it were communicating with his new environment. And then there was the girl, the tour guide named Jennie, dressed all in white, just like the rest of them, standing before them with a wide smile.

  The group followed Jennie through the hallway, past two large doors that led to the outside, emitting small gasps as they discovered their new home — a gray, rocky landscape, groomed to make way for pathways and a gentle river that wound its way around the campus. A series of white two-story buildings sat within a smattering of shallow craters. At the center of it all was the volleyball court, sand freshly combed like a Zen garden, waiting under the dark sky for a new set of players to arrive. Behind the court, a neon cactus with arrows sprouting from its trunk pointed in various directions — to the apartments, the mines, the gym, and other destinations. But instead, Jennie led them to the river — a narrow, canal-like body filled with a thick, turquoise liquid that Jennie said was resistant to evaporation.

  One of the gondola cafeterias was there waiting for them. Everyone climbed aboard and began to pile around the different food stations as the gondola floated through campus. A muscular, good-looking gondolier made his way down the boat, taking drink orders and offering up the chef’s special moon cookie. For a moment, the man reflected that he had never seen a waiter so well-suited for his job. The smooth gestures, his discreet, attentive style — it was like the man had been born to do this.

  But it was a passing thought that interested him little, and the man waved the gondolier away as he approached. The man was really only interested in speaking to Jennie. He had seen her somewhere before but couldn’t manage to place her. He watched as she fingered her hair, then removed her white moonjacket. Underneath was a white T-shirt. There was something painted across her chest — a moon and a sun, each encircling her breasts. Below them, in black block lettering:

  Ask me about interplanetary feminism.

  That did it — this girl was the hot hippie receptionist who used to work in Building 7!

  “I think we’ve met before on Earth,” he said, as she passed by him on the gondola’s noodle stand. “You’re a campus tour guide, right?”

  “I was a campus tour guide,” Jennie said. “I’m now a moon orientation manager.”

  “So, uh, like giving tours of the moon?”

  “Totally different,” she said. “My job’s to ensure that you all have a holistic perspective of the moon. First, because we’re building a totally new society here and trying to reverse centuries of patriarchal constructs. And second, because you might get lost if I don’t show you around.”

  The man was confused; he didn’t know how to answer.

  He shuffled back to where the rest of his group was sitting.

  “You know,” said one of the other recruits, who had just seen him with Jennie, “we have Social Me up here. You can talk to her that way.”

  The man was well aware. As a member of the Genie team, he had been part of Social Me’s terrestrial testing pool two years earlier. Unfortunately, the testing period had been short. Once Anahata went to the moon, they had disabled the service on Earth, claiming it had encountered a technical glitch that could only be overcome in a thinner atmosphere. No one believed the excuse, but almost everyone immediately applied for a spot on the moon colony.

  The gondola floated past the collection of Svevonius plants — an Anahata creation, still in beta, that dispensed shots of pure oxygen from purple and green stamens — and halted outside a large door marked “Anahata 1.”

  The group disembarked and entered a huge atrium filled with light. On a white table were twenty devices — one for each moongineer. Jennie stood in front of the table and turned toward her group.

  “The Anahata Space Project is about building a new world of wonderful people doing wonderful things. So, part of your role, like mine, is to help Anahata understand just what that looks like and how it should evolve. But the other part is less experimental. You are also here to work on top-secret projects. We have no worries of corporate espionage or snooping journalists here!”

  “Now, Anahata wants to give you everything on the moon — but in a way that ensures we don’t go the way of the Roman empire. We believe that all good things — chocolate, kombucha, and all the hot girls on Social Me — are best used in moderation.”

  “Social Me?” asked the lone female engineer in the group. The man didn’t like her — she had hogged the armrest during the entire ride in the space elevator.

  “I heard that women are only here on the moon to be the supply for Social Me…like, only here to meet the men’s needs,” she said, crossing her arms.

  Jennie laughed. “Of course not. We have women doing all kinds of things here, like human resources and marketing and legal stuff and teaching and — ”

  “You mean like you?” the female engineer said. “But weren’t you on the Social Me team? Now you’re just a guide.”

  The smile left Jennie’s face. She opened her mouth to speak but was interrupted by something like a camera flash. The man’s company badge pulsed with purple light, and an image of white text wrote itself across the pitch-black sky.

  Thanks for asking your important question about diversity on the moon. The Anahata Space Project is a pure meritocracy. If there’s a disparity between the numbers of men and women among our engineering workforce, it’s because women don’t excel in science and engineering fields and there’s not a large pipeline for us to hire from. That’s why we’ve contributed to nonprofits that work to help women understand science better from a very young age. We are also speaking out publicly about how important it is that society fix this problem. In the meantime, we have hired many women to work in areas where they can achieve great things.

  “Well, that’s your answer,” Jennie said flatly.

  “Tell us more about Social Me!” a male voice called out.

  “We love Social Me!” shouted another.

  That seemed to perk her up.

  “Oh, you’re going to love Social Me,” Jennie grinned. “I actually invented it. I mean, I’m, like, the founder of Social Me.”

  Jennie began to clap for herself but was cut short by a tall man in the front, waving his hand.

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  A frown settled on Jennie’s face for a split second before vanishing. She pointed the tall man down the hall, then turned to the group.

  “Now let’s talk about the devices you see behind me. They’re moon mobiles, and they have something very special on them. We call it the Manager. It’s essentially a task management application, but integrated into all aspects of your life.”

  Jennie grabbed one of the devices from the table and floated it before the crowd like a game-show hostess. As the device passed before the man, his badge vibrated and pulsated again with a purple light. A second later, he was surrounded by images of himself wearing white moon clothes, engaged in everyday activities like eating, sleeping, coding, and composting. No matter what the task, he appeared quite happy and content.

  “The Manager is always running as you go about your day,” Jennie said. “When you have breakfast in the morning, it logs that you had breakfast. You will get points for that activity, as our own research demonstrates that engineers who eat breakfast are m
ore likely to come up with a revolutionary idea.

  “Next, you go to work and complete a task. Based on what the task was, you earn more points. For example, a product launch or patent filing earns more points than a small code submission. These points are then redeemed against certain premium activities, which you can request and cash in via the Manager — like playing World of Warcraft for an entire weekday or meeting up with a girl on Social Me.”

  “I hear it takes one thousand points to get a date with Jennie,” the man’s friend whispered. “This guy I know, Sven, he’s filed like forty patents since arriving here, and he spends it all on her.”

  The man looked at Jennie. She caught his eye and grinned just for him. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on her app.

  “So all that stuff we get at Anahata on Earth for free is now suddenly to be earned and paid for?” the female engineer harumphed.

  “Everything you had on Earth for free is still free here. Like food, massages, and personal trainers, just to name a few. But on the moon we also offer ‘extraordinary experiences’ — things that all of us would like to do but, if not done in moderation, could be really dangerous for the individual and the project as a whole. It’s like we’re giving you legal heroin — but making sure you can’t have it all the time. After all, no one wants you to become a drug addict, end up in a lunar gutter, and force all of us to do a really awkward intervention.”

  The female harumpher kept harumphing. The man hoped she wouldn’t be assigned to the same team as him.

  “Now, of course, different people want different things,” Jennie said. “So, while you may want to spend all of your points on Social Me, someone else may want to never have to lift their arm when they eat cereal in the morning. So that person will want to spend all their points on a personal feeder. Or maybe someone wants to have a go at playing on the moon crane for an hour. Not a problem — just submit twenty moon points to the Manager.

  “Using the Manager, you can trade services or ask for a task to be performed for you — at the price you’re willing to offer. You can outsource what you hate and earn extra points by doing what you love. We’ve gotten rid of money and liberated people in the process. It’s a revolutionary economic approach.”

  “But you said the app is constantly logging what we do. Doesn’t that mean Anahata is essentially following us all the time?” the female engineer asked.

  “It’s entirely your choice whether you opt in to use the tool,” Jennie said. “Do you really think we’d get away with designing an app for engineers that wasn’t opt-in?

  The crowd laughed.

  “Of course, it does mean you won’t be earning points,” Jennie winked.

  “Also, if, like me, you think a mobile app is so last century, you can choose to have the Manager installed in your body via a small, elegant incision.” Jennie turned her palm and pointed at an invisible spot above her wrist. “Right here.”

  “It all sounds like a sci-fi dystopia,” the female engineer grumbled.

  Jennie smiled.

  “That’s an excellent point,” she said. “We’re trying to get the balance right between community management and dystopia. We think you’ll find this all works really well, but definitely give us feedback via the online form. After all, this is Anahata, and what do we do?”

  “We solutionize and iterate!” shouted the new moongineers.

  EPILOGUE

  F rom behind the observation glass, Gregor watched the new recruits as they floated past his office.

  “It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” said a voice behind him.

  Gregor turned briefly to acknowledge Bobby. Although it was already late afternoon, Bobby was still wearing his white pajamas. Atop his head, as on Gregor’s, sat a white beret — the latest improvement on Anahata’s internet sombrero.

  Gregor’s gaze moved to the full-length screen on the opposite wall. He silently commanded his beret to flip past live camera footage of the cafeteria and a moonball game, then paused on one of the child prodigies sitting in his moon apartment. The boy was playing a video game, his hand reaching up now and then to pick at the pimples scattered across his cheeks.

  Bobby took a step closer.

  “Which one’s that — Jonas? He looks a bit different to me. New haircut?”

  “No haircut, but we’ve made improvements to him and the others over the past few weeks.”

  Gregor ran his fingers along the rim of his beret as if he was playing the piano. Jonas paused his video game, stood, and crossed the room to his small kitchen, where he removed some apples from the bowl.

  “You’ve convinced the engineers to eat fruit?” Bobby asked.

  Just then, the apples went flying into the air, orbiting the space above Jonas like a collection of small planets. One by one, they fell into his hands, touching his fingers for a split second before shooting up again.

  “You’ve taught him to juggle!” Bobby clapped. “Was it nontrivial to execute?”

  “Not really. Teaching them to juggle was harder than getting their faces to host preteen acne, but much, much easier than creating their souls and an illusion of free will.”

  “Yeah, I bet that was tough.”

  “We also built in fighting capabilities, just as you asked.” Gregor tapped his beret again, setting Jonas off in a series of lethal kicks to the air.

  Bobby clapped again.

  “Think of the things we can do,” he said. “Destroy dictators! Tear down capitalism! Infiltrate the corrupt stunt double industry!”

  Gregor nodded and tapped again. Jonas removed his shirt and unscrewed the metal plate embedded in his chest. He extracted a series of purple and green bolts and chips from inside his chest cavity and began to polish them with a nearby cloth.

  “Gregor, this may well be your finest work. You’ve thought of everything. Our child prodigy even repairs himself!”

  “Some challenges remain,” said Gregor, holding up his hand to pause Bobby’s enthusiasm. “For example, we’ve made our prodigies technically and physically capable of almost anything, but emotionally, we can’t seem to push them into adulthood.”

  He gestured at Jonas. “This one has an IQ of 184 but the emotional intelligence of a fourteen-year-old. It seems the smarter we make them, the more they regress emotionally.”

  Bobby shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it. For now, sentience is simply a means to an end. What we need is an army.”

  “Yes, the army. You’ll be pleased to know that over the past month we’ve managed to embed five of our child prodigies in Galt’s engineering team.”

  “And no one’s caught on?”

  “Not as far as we can tell. Once we created the cover — that the young geniuses were recruited from poor foreign countries — then we could hide all sorts of shortcomings, like their lack of school records, or the occasional failing of our English translation tool. It was all much easier than we expected. We signed their names to some open source projects and waited for the Galt recruiters to come after them.”

  “Galt!” Bobby laughed. “They seemed like such a threat once.”

  “They were a legitimate threat,” Gregor nodded. “But they went too far when they tried to reduce all communication on Flitter to just three syllables.”

  “Reduction will one day be so last century,” Bobby said. “In the future, all people will want to do is expand — to find more ways to talk about themselves, to be and become themselves. More words, more sounds, more pictures. Less thinking, but more of everything. In the future, we will all be very, very large. Galt will be so tiny, no one will even see them.”

  A gong chimed the hour, and Gregor switched to a camera trained on the colony’s entrance. It was time for the squid’s evening feeding, a special moment Gregor and Bobby shared each day.

  Gregor zoomed in, and the squid’s body filled the screen, its heaving mass seemingly threatening to break the glass. The men watched as its horny beak tore apart two fish a
t once. It seemed much happier now that it had a larger space to roam.

  “I’ve been thinking about Project Y expansion,” Bobby said.

  “It’s an obvious next step,” Gregor nodded. “But there will be some resistance. We’ll have to convince people that our way is the right way.”

  Bobby sighed. “I know the world needs stupid people, but sometimes I wish we could just get rid of them.”

  “We don’t need to get rid of them. We just have to convince them,” Gregor said. “What if we open-sourced the project and made it freely available so that everyone can benefit? People like things that aren’t controlled by corporations.”

  “But if it’s free, people won’t believe it’s any good,” Bobby said. “And if we open-source it, then that means people can do what they want with it. And you and I both know that the best society is the one that Anahata controls — not the one that it simply inspires.”

  “We could go to other planets,” Gregor suggested. “Neptune or Mars could be doable.”

  Bobby brightened and started to answer but was distracted by a blinking message on the screen.

  “Oh, it’s Arsyen,” he said. “You remember him — the product manager who took over Pyrrhia. I’ve added him to my World Leaders Mentorship Program.”

  Bobby tapped his beret, and Arsyen’s image filled the screen.

  “Hello,” said Bobby, waving at the screen. “What’s new?”

  Arsyen shook his head. “People complain, always complaining. And there is crazy woman, my ex-girlfriend. She say I am capitalist-pig king who destroy country. She and her dirty students want to kill me.”

  “You will not be recognized as a great leader until you are assassinated,” Bobby said. “That is the price of freedom.”

  Arsyen frowned. “I give no freedom. Why would I do that?”

  “That’s a good question,” Bobby said. “Let’s cover it in our next session. Anything else I can help you with?”

  “Yes, I have idea — big idea,” said Arsyen, grinning. “I want you to make new Anahata here in Poodlekek. Clean place, with volleyball and croquet courts. Juice bar. Pretty online sales girls. Together we make Silicon Poodle.”