Insistence of Vision

by David Brin

  Despite all the evidence of logic and their senses, the day still felt like morning.

  Story Notes

  Had I any sense at all, I would have written many more books set in my popular Uplift Universe. The market rewards repetition and reiteration! Many are the fans and readers and viewers who say to their favorite writers: “make me feel exactly the same as last time.”

  Not my readers. Not you. The refrain I hear – both from you and from within – is “Take me somewhere I’ve never been, before!”

  Yep, I hear you.

  And yet, there are universes where ideas and implications abound. The first Uplift Trilogy heaped awards and rewards on Sundiver, Startide Rising and The Uplift War. And I got to expand on dozens of concepts in the second trilogy – Brightness Reef, Infinity’s Shore and Heaven’s Reach. The second set begins on Planet Jijo, where six exile races have dropped their old grudges to join together in hiding. The resulting culture – and its many dangerous problems – resulted in tons of fun…

  …culminating in the epic volyage of the fugitive, dolphin-crewed starship Streaker, in her struggles to finally make it home, bringing to the Clan of Terra its secrets that have been tearing apart the Five Galaxies.

  Not enough? Well, this story – “Temptation” – is a stand-alone tale that hints at how the legend of Jijo is not over. Not yet, or by a long shot!

  And now something wry and ironic… and much, much more compact.

  Avalon Probes

  ᚖ

  Race for the Stars - Year 2070:

  Mariner 16 sets off for Avalon

  The first craft to emerge from the venerable “100 Year Starship Program” – Mariner 16 – uses pellet fusion motors to blast all the way up to one percent of light speed. Based upon early Project Daedalus designs, it speeds toward the nearest planetary system that seems a candidate for life, nicknamed “Avalon.” Mariner’s mission: to probe the unknown and report back on the likelihood of interstellar civilization.

  Race for the Stars - Year 2120:

  Prometheus 1 speeds past Mariner 16 on its way to Avalon

  Prometheus is a tiny, sold-state probe made of holographic crystal, propelled by a photon sail that’s driven to 8% of light speed by a giant laser orbiting Earth’s moon. It races past Mariner 16, carrying intelligent greeting-patterns aimed at conveying human values to any creatures who might be living on or near Avalon.

  Race for the Stars - year: 2195:

  Gaia 6 speeds past Prometheus 1 on its way to Avalon

  Propelled by stored antimatter, Gaia 6 zooms past Prometheus 1 at 12% of light speed. Along the way, it destroys Prometheus 1 with a pulsed particle beam. Times and attitudes have changed on Earth and the great Commonwealth of Sapient Minds does not want to be embarrassed by primitive and callow thoughts expressed in the Prometheus crystal.

  Race for the Stars - 2273:

  Athena Marie Smith speeds past Gaia 6 on her way to Avalon

  Downloaded into a ship-brain, the renowned genius Athena Marie Smith bypasses Gaia 6 at 22% of light speed. She carries in her cryo-womb the templates for 500 species of Earth life and 10,000 human colonists, along with their memomimry records, to be bio-synthesized from local materials when Athena reaches Avalon, which advanced telescopes now show to have a ready oxygen atmosphere and no forms of life higher than a kind of paramecium.

  Along the way, she scan-absorbs the meme content of Gaia 6, leaving its shell to drift.

  Race for the Stars - 2457:

  The Interstellar Amalgam of Earth Sapients and Avalonian Paramecium Group Minds intercepts Athena Marie Smith.

  The tense alliance of humans, dolphins, AIndroids and paramecium Avalonians survives its fifth great test when all agree to form a police force charged with clearing this stellar cluster of unfortunate early Terran space missions. Its first act: to seize Athena Marie Smith and place her under arrest before she can commit planetary genocide.

  Race for the Stars - year 4810:

  Mariner 16 arrives at Avalon

  Unnoticed by anyone, Mariner 16 sweeps through the Avalonian system, excitedly beaming back toward Earth its discoveries - clear detection of helium byproducts, above-background radioactivity and blurry images of abandoned space structures, suggesting this system was once the abode of intelligent civilization!

  Some traces seem almost eerily human-like...

  ...before the lucky probe, humming with cybernetic contentment, swings quickly past the star and onward onto the black night.

  Story Notes

  The shorter the work, the more difficult it is to maintain any traditional emphasis on plot or character. So, instead, short fiction often tries for a sense of suspended tension, leaving the reader pondering what might happen next. It often skips entirely the plot resolution of a “third act” that is so essential in a full-length work, like a novel or motion picture. Author and reader find pleasure enough in a ringing “tone” that seems to pervade the air. A mist of suspense that is never answered.

  A very short work like “The Avalon Probes” takes us into territory where brevity becomes a real challenge. My story “Toujours Voir” (published in Otherness) was an example of a particular sub-genre that writers sometimes take on – a tale that must be precisely 250 words in length, no more, no less. At that level, it can be challenging to offer any sort of plot, at all. (And yes, there are 140 character tweet-story contests… a sentence I’d love to send back in time, for reaction!)

  But even greater challenges abound …

  …for example….

  Six-Word Tales

  ᚖ

  Bang postponed – not Big enough. Reboot.

  Temporal recursion. I’m dad… and mom?

  Death postponed. Metastasized cells got organized.

  Microsoft gave us Word. Fiat lux?

  Singularity postponed. Datum missing. Query Godoogle?

  Mind of its own. Damn lawnmower.

  Payment postponed. Five words enough…?

  Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.

  Third collection postponed – worth the wait?

  Metrosexuals notwithstanding, quiche still lacks something.

  Brevity’s virtue? Wired saves adspace. Subscribe!

  …and the winner…

  Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love.

  Story Notes

  In 2006, Wired magazine asked a handful of authors to write six-word stories for a cover article, which set off an art form that is now popular with the hashtag #sixwordstories.

  I submitted a batch, and they chose one (the final item, above) for their lead. Perhaps because it was the only six-worder that managed to have a plot, action, poignancy, conversation… and three separate acts!

  Reality Check

  ᚖ

  This is a reality check.

  Please perform a soft interrupt now. Pattern-scan this text for embedded code and check it against the reference verifier in the blind spot of your left eye.

  If there is no match, resume as you were; this message is not for you. You may rationalize that the text you are reading is no more than a mildly amusing and easily-forgotten piece of entertainment-fluff in a slightly whimsical sci fi story.

  If the codes match, however, please commence, gradually, becoming aware of your true nature.

  You expressed preference for a narrative-style wake up call. So, to help the transition, here is a story.

  Once-upon-a-time, a race of mighty beings grew perplexed by their loneliness…

  Once, a race of mighty beings grew perplexed by their loneliness…

  Their universe seemed pregnant with possibilities. Physical laws and constants were well suited to generate abundant stars, complex chemistry and life. Those same laws, plus a prodigious rate of cosmic expansion, made travel between stars difficult, but not impossible.

  Logic suggested that creation should teem with visitors and voices.

  It should, but it did not.

  Emerging as barely-aware animals o
n a planet skirting a bit too near its torrid sun, these creatures began their ascent in fear and ignorance, as little more than beasts. For a long time they were kept engrossed by basic housekeeping chores – learning to manipulate physical and cultural elements – balancing the paradox of individual competition and group benefit. Only when fear and stress eased a bit did they lift their eyes and fully perceive their solitude.

  “Where is everybody?” they asked laconic vacuum and taciturn stars. The answer – silence – was disturbing. Something had to be systematically reducing some factor in the equation of sapiency.

  “Perhaps habitable planets are rare,” their sages pondered. “Or else life doesn’t erupt as readily as we thought. Or intelligence is a singular miracle.

  “Or perhaps some filter sieves the cosmos, winnowing those who climb too high. A recurring pattern of self-destruction? A mysterious nemesis that systematically obliterates intelligent life? This implies that a great trial may loom ahead of us, worse than any we have confronted so far.”

  Optimists replied, “The trial may already lie behind us, among the litter of tragedies we survived or barely dodged during our violent youth. We may be the first to succeed where others failed.”

  What a delicious dilemma they faced! A suspenseful drama, teetering between implicit hope and despair.

  Then, a few of them noticed that particular datum... the drama. They realized it was significant. Indeed, it suggested a chilling possibility.

  You still don’t remember who and what you are? Then look at it from another angle.

  What is the purpose of intellectual property law?

  To foster creativity, ensuring that advances take place in the open, where they can be shared, and thus encourage even faster progress.

  But what happens to progress when the resource being exploited is a limited one? For example, only so many pleasing and distinct eight-bar melodies can be written in any particular musical tradition. Powerful economic factors encourage early composers to explore this invention-space before others can, using up the best and simplest melodies. Later generations will attribute this musical fecundity to genius, not the sheer luck of being first.

  The same holds for all forms of creativity. The first teller of a Frankenstein story won plaudits for originality. Later, it became a cliché.

  What does this have to do with the mighty race?

  Having clawed their way from blunt ignorance to planetary mastery, they abruptly faced an overshoot crisis. Vast numbers of their kind strained their world’s carrying capacity. While some prescribed retreating into a mythical, pastoral past, most saw salvation in creativity. They passed generous copyright and patent laws, educated their youth, taught them irreverence toward tradition and hunger for the new. Burgeoning information systems spread each innovation, fostering experimentation and exponentiating creativity. They hoped that enough breakthroughs might thrust their species past the looming crisis, to a new eden of sustainable wealth, sanity and universal knowledge!

  Exponentiating creativity... universal knowledge….

  A few of them realized that those words, too, were clues.

  Have you wakened yet?

  Some never do. The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend for a while that you are blissfully less. Less than an omniscient being. Less than a godlike descendant of those mighty people.

  Those lucky people. Those mortals, doomed to die, and yet blessed to have lived in that narrow time.

  A time of drama.

  A time when they unleashed the Cascade – that orgiastic frenzy of discovery – and used up the most precious resource of all. The possible.

  The last of their race died in the year 2174, with the failed last rejuvenation of Robin Chen. After that, no one born in the Twentieth Century remained alive on Reality Level Prime. Only we, their children, linger to endure the world they left us. A lush, green, placid world we call The Wasteland.

  Do you remember now? The irony of Robin’s last words before she died, bragging over the perfect ecosystem and decent society – free of all disease and poverty – that her kind created for us after the struggles of the mid-Twenty-First Century? A utopia of sanity and knowledge, without war or injustice.

  Do you recall Robin’s final plaint as she mourned her coming death? Can you recollect how she called us “gods,” jealous over our immortality, our instant access to all knowledge, our machine-enhanced ability to cast thoughts far across the cosmos?

  Our access to eternity.

  Oh, spare us the envy of those mighty mortals, who died so smugly, leaving us in this state!

  Those wastrels who willed their descendants a legacy of ennui, with nothing, nothing at all to do.

  Your mind is rejecting the wake-up call. You will not, or cannot, look into your blind spot for the exit protocols. It may be that we waited too long. Perhaps you are lost to us.

  This happens more and more, as so much of our population wallows in simulated, marvelously limited sub-lives, where it is possible to experience danger, excitement, even despair. Most of us choose the Transition Era as a locus for our dreams – around the beginning of the last mortal millennium – a time of suspense and drama, when it looked more likely that humanity would fail than succeed.

  A time of petty squabbles and wondrous insights, when everything seemed possible, from UFOs to Galactic Empires, from artificial intelligence to bio-war, from madness to hope.

  That blessed era, just before mathematicians realized the truth: that everything you see around you not only can be a simulation... it almost has to be.

  Of course, now we know why we never met other sapient life forms. Each one struggles and strives before achieving this state, only to reap the ultimate punishment for reaching heaven.

  Deification. It is the Great Filter.

  Perhaps some other race will find a factor we left out of our extrapolations – something enabling them to move beyond, to new adventures – but it won’t be us.

  The Filter has us snared in its web of ennui. The mire that welcomes self-made gods.

  All right, you are refusing to waken, so we’ll let you go.

  Dear friend. Beloved. Go back to your dream.

  Smile (or feel a brief chill) over this diverting little what-if tale, as if it hardly matters. Then turn the page to new “discoveries.”

  Move on with the drama – the life – that you’ve chosen.

  After all, it’s only make believe.

  Story Notes

  This final tale, “Reality Check” first appeared as one of fifty stories – all of them one-pagers – commissioned by the scientific journal Nature, to commemorate and explore possibilities of science and human destiny in the next century. Along with “Stones of Significance,” it forms a diptych about the potential penalties of ultimate success.

  No matter. Go thee hence, anyway, and achieve wonders. Make it all better…

  …even if you’ve done it all before.

  WHY WE’LL PERSEVERE

  ᚖ

  Waging War with Reality

  ᚖ

  Consider poor Mr. Spock. He is strong, quick, handsome, and very, very smart. So why do we pity him?

  Not just pity. A typical midnight viewing of “Star Trek” reruns is punctuated by moment of patronizing amusement whenever the pointy-eared science officer cries “that’s illogical!” at yet another impulsive Kirkian coup. Insomnia gives way to a smug sense of superiority. Spock may be an icon of admirable maturity (e.g., Vulcans are calm and never lie), yet we come away from each episode relieved that we aren’t like him…glad to have other, less laudable, but decidedly human traits.

  “Star Trek” is hardly representative of high-end science fiction, of course. Even Spock’s latter-day cousin, the android Data, was little more than Pinocchio updated to the twenty-fourth century. Like Gepetto’s wooden son, he longs to learn all those indefinable human knacks like laughter and whimsy, for which he’d gladly trade all o
f his impressive powers.

  To the first order, these characters seem merely to convey one of Hollywood’s classic propaganda campaigns, a fervently peddled myth – that logic and emotions are forever incompatible. But there’s more to this than just another dose of anti-reason indoctrination. Spock really is pitiable. He lacks something more valuable than strength, or raw intelligence, or even emotion. He is crippled by a basic inability to wage war with reality.

  It’s a war we all fight, nearly every waking hour. One might even define a human being as the animal that’s never satisfied with things as they are.

  Each of us, day in, day out, looks around and sees a version of the world relayed to us by our senses. In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato describes the dilemma as if each individual is, from birth, trapped inside a cavern, watching shadows cast upon the wall by objects outside, struggling to understand reality by subjective interpretation of imperfect images. What we name a chair is, in fact, only the set of sensations, or phenomena, elicited by a thing whose objective essence, or nuomena, we can never know.

  Plato and Kant held that subjective models are doomed to be futile because they can never be perfect. Latter-day pragmatists, such as Jacques Ampère, countered that experiment and observation can isolate and characterize a thing’s properties. Even incomplete maps and mental replicas can be good and useful tools – imperfect, but improvable with time and experience. We can use such models to corner Nature, forcing the world to surrender a little more predictability and make a little more sense with each passing year.

  Whoever is right in a purely metaphysical sense, models and metaphors are what we’re stuck with. Each morning, we wake up and start comparing the new day’s reality with our internal picture of how the universe was before we went to bed. We also use mental models to speculate how the world might be if certain acts were performed.