The “hivizens,” in contrast to the inhabitants of the Dead Zones, ostensibly belong to what is still called “civilization.” This seems to mean that they have legal citizenship rights, and a minimal degree of protection; but the MegaCorps, together with GAM, control every aspect of their lives. Strict censorship is the rule: “in the Hives an offline archive was seriously illegal: everything had to be open to inspection.” The dense urban aggregations of the Hives are considered to be “a big improvement on the situation they’d replaced” – perhaps fortunately, we are not told what that previous situation was. Nevertheless, the Hives are not really a success. They are “crumbling” at best; some of them have “started collapsing” physically already, and are “not being replaced.” In the Hives, “supply collapses, power failures, and food riots” are common. “Diseases could not be relieved; quality of hivizen life was constantly being eroded.”
The hivizens are often described as “docile” and law-abiding, at least in comparison to the scavengers in the Dead Zones outside. Yet “this didn’t stop the masses from resenting their captivity”; there are frequent outbursts of “violent unrest … explosive civil unrest.” Uprisings continue to break out, “despite firm policing, constant surveillance, and intense Global Audience Mediation” – and even despite the fact that arrested “rioters” are “put in cold sleep” (which is to say, “medically induced comas”) indefinitely. In the long run, however, such “revolts were just the breeding ground for another generation of corrupt hivizen politicians. They did no good at all.” No matter what reforms are made in response to the uprisings, nothing really changes. Somehow in the end “only the MegaCorps and the One Percent benefited.”
Outside the Hives, “the hopelessly polluted areas kept on growing.” People no longer bother to talk about the “Climate Change Crisis”; presumably all the disruptive climate events that we worry about today (warming, sea level rise, desertification, frequent megastorms, mass extinctions, and so on) have already happened. Instead, people worry about the “Population Crisis.” For “in the crazy world of superdense population” – and given the grossly uneven distribution of wealth – human numbers far exceed the planet’s damaged carrying capacity. Even with high-tech automated agriculture, “the global population could not be fed” any longer. In such circumstances, the only “good news” is that “global population figures, though still a problem given the world’s depleted resources, were at last significantly falling.” But this still isn’t happening fast enough; “nothing, as yet, was getting any better.” Proponents of what is euphemistically called “Extreme Population Control” are waiting in the wings.
In order to limit population size, reproduction is discouraged in the world of Proof of Concept. “Rational M/F partners chose to be sterile … unless they had a baby permit.” Such permits are rationed by lottery; but even if you are lucky enough to obtain one, you probably will not be able to keep it. For “baby permits got monetized” quickly; people are often compelled to sell them “on the open market,” in order “to pay for medical treatment or to service a debt.” In other words, legally sanctioned childbearing is de facto limited to the One Percent, who have the wealth to pay for it. But the situation also has its “converse”: “if the masses, who had no common sense, wanted to have multiple babies without the advantages secured by a permit, there was no way to stop them.” Although “the fate of many unlicensed babies was dreadful,” poor people are driven to have kids anyway. Deprived of money and hope, they are by definition irrational or devoid of common sense. They have nothing to gain from not having children, since their own lives are so miserable already.
There is at least one good consequence of this horrible situation. Because of the need to discourage population growth, unconventional, nonprocreative sexualities are widely accepted in the world of Proof of Concept – in a way that is only starting to be the case today. Nobody blinks an eye at a person’s being nonbinary, using they/their as personal pronouns, and rejecting any patronymic last name; nor even at a person’s being “trisex” (whatever that means). “Old-fashioned contraception” – birth control as we know it today – has been replaced by the easier and more efficient process of “reversible sterilization.” In any case, most people, most of the time, have sex only in virtual reality; in this way, they avoid not only pregnancy, but also sexually transmitted diseases. VR sex is called “playtime”: there is full sensory stimulation, without bodies ever actually touching one another. Apparently the physical simulation is good enough, or the experience is rich and satisfying enough, that “many singles … had never experienced actual sex … and did not feel deprived.” Indeed, playtime allows for expanded possibilities; many people “like to change” gender and body type when having virtual sex, rather than presenting as just a replica of their physical selves.
It should be noted, however, that in the world of Proof of Concept, such expanded sexuality is only tolerated as an unavoidable emergency measure. There’s plenty of sexual titillation on reality television; but there are also dire warnings about “the dangers of actual sex, the fear of misplaced conception and hideous disease.” Playtime is an outlet for peoples’ desires and emotions; but it is also a way of keeping those desires and emotions contained. The same is true for the other sorts of distractions easily available in early twenty-third century society: alcohol, cannabis, computer games, and exercise in the gym. Whatever passing amusements are available, the bottom line remains that “the MegaCorps mind-set wanted everything in opposition: Either/Or; Yes/No; On/Off; M/F. They hated fluidity, blur, and multiplicity.”
Proof of Concept describes a world in which it seems that, even as our technologies get more powerful, and our consumer options expand, nothing essential can ever change. We are still stuck, two hundred years later, in the structure of feeling that the late Mark Fisher called capitalist realism. This means that we are unable to believe in – let alone work to achieve – any alternative to the status quo of predatory capitalism; “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Fisher 2009). Things are terrible, but they will never get better. Nature and society alike will just continue to decay. Under the regime of capitalist realism, “there is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart” (Fisher 2009).
The persistence of capitalist realism in the world of the novella is, once again, a matter of straightforward extrapolation. Already today, in the early twenty-first century, the global rich – despite their propaganda to the contrary – know better than anyone else that we are on the verge of ecological catastrophe. But they see no point in spending money to alleviate the damage. Instead, the One Percent think that they will be able to tough it out, with their wealth and privileges intact. They place all their bets on the hope of “insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion” (Rushkoff 2018) – whether by retreating into bunkers or by colonizing Mars.
In Proof of Concept’s early twenty-third century, these avoidance plans remain largely intact, although they are starting to get frayed around the edges:
Even the “One Percent,” the global rich, were feeling the heat … The One Percent saw a time coming – getting closer at speed – when there would be nowhere left to hide.
In the world of the novella, there are no unspoiled places left on Earth where the superrich can build their bunkers. Their luxurious “Near Space Orbital Hotels” are enticing places to go for a vacation, but they only provide a temporary refuge. Moreover, they have come to realize that “conventional Space, long ago ideal for this role, was not the answer.” Small human outposts have been established on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, and even the moons of Jupiter; but conditions in such places are unappealingly “arduous and perilous.” Life is even more precarious out there than it has become back on Earth. You don’t escape a wrec
ked environment by moving to an even more innately hostile one. The opportunities for the further expansion of capital throughout the Solar System turn out to be extremely limited.
Under such desperate circumstances, “the people needed a dream,” something that would allow them to continue “hoping for a better tomorrow.” And the One Percent need new places to hide, not to mention new resources to extract, in order to fuel their endless pursuit of ever-greater profits. There is only one thing that can satisfy these cravings: what GAM calls, with its usual manufactured enthusiasm, “The Great Escape!” This is the fantasy of interstellar travel, something that science fiction has envisioned for a long time. Forget the Solar System; we have ruined its only habitable planet beyond repair. But maybe we can find pristine Earth-like worlds circling other suns. And maybe we can transplant ourselves to them, and extract wealth from them. For the masses, the Great Escape is a simple dream of
tickets out for ordinary people, to places where there was air to breathe. An unspoiled ecosystem and gravity to hold your feet down. Giant starships, mass emigration.
For the One Percent, however, the calculations are a bit more complicated. They still need a viable exit strategy, as well as new territories to exploit. Therefore they encourage speculation about the Great Escape, and pour their money into its realization. They are very interested in building a giant starship for themselves. But this is a carefully limited goal. Despite their propaganda, the One Percent will never spend the resources necessary to build starships for the billions of other people trapped on Earth. Their attitude in the world of the novella is much the same as the actual attitude of the superrich today. As long as they themselves can avoid damage, and continue to accumulate wealth, they are perfectly happy to leave everyone else behind. That is to say, they are unconcerned by the prospect of genocide. It is just what the economists call an externality: an unfortunate but easily dismissible side effect of doing business.
There are two aspects to the project of the Great Escape: the actual scientific research on the one hand, and the social preparations on the other. The former will lead nowhere without the latter. Dan Orsted, one of the key characters in Proof of Concept, is the “Great Popularizer”: the showman/entrepreneur who spreads the gospel of the Great Escape. Dan is a “colorful, tremendously optimistic figure”; he has a background in “Near Space Design,” and he has been to the Moon and Mars. But he is best known as a reality show host: he is the maestro of Very Long Duration Mission Training (VLDMT for short; or LDM for even shorter), a TV series that aims to simulate the conditions of long voyages into deep space. The show features a “crew” of people living together in close quarters for extended periods; it is broadcast 24/7:
Hivizens loved VLDMT. Dan’s teams were always available: they couldn’t get away! You could share their lives every moment – bitching and socializing, having group sex (on the adult-rated version), struggling with close-confinement issues, arguing about toilet paper.
But even though Dan runs VLDMT “like popular entertainment,” he also insists that
his project was serious … Every mission had an authentic, habitable exoplanet in its sights and showcased an authentic, theoretically doable means of interstellar travel.
In order “to finance his obsession” with interstellar travel, we are told, Dan even “hustled the One Percent into paying ridiculous sums for ludicrous starship tickets.” In other words, he is a successful con man. Or, in more polite language, he is a showman and a mediator. He never disappoints his audience; and he moves easily between the superrich who finance his projects, and the masses who avidly watch his shows.
As for the actual scientific research toward interstellar travel, it is done by a group led by the physicist Margrethe Patel. Margrethe is routinely acknowledged to be the greatest scientist of her time. Nonetheless, people regard her as “snooty”; she has “near-zero credibility” in GAM, because her “Big Science past” is “tarnished by failure.” Margrethe is haunted by the “collapse of the Orbital Toroid project” – a “controversial hyperspace experiment” gone wrong – that had previously been the focus of her research. But the Great Escape offers her a new opportunity. Margrethe promises the One Percent that “she could build them a starship. That’s how she got her funding.”
In Jones’ vision, early twenty-third century physics has still not found a theory of everything (and probably never will). Instead, we have “Post Standard Model Physics” (PSM), which – as its name implies – remains grounded in the standard model of particle physics that was established in the 1970s. PSM is still haunted by the tension between the irreconcilable theories of relativity on the one hand, and quantum mechanics on the other. Einstein is still right: strictly speaking, “there is no faster-than-light travel … you can’t get rid of travel time, the way people used to imagine, without cost.” But the physicists in the novella are interested in the way that quantum entanglement (which Einstein unsuccessfully tried to dismiss as “spooky action at a distance”) might offer a loophole, circumventing this hard limitation.
Jones states, in a blog entry discussing the science behind the novella, that “I always derive my science fiction from real, cutting edge science.” Of course, this does not mean that Proof of Concept is literally scientifically accurate. But the novella is grounded upon the way that, as Jones puts it, “the weirdness of quantum mechanics, for so long the plaything of quirky science fiction, has found its technology (quantum computing), and is getting serious.” This physics background makes Proof of Concept a work of “hard” science fiction – “meaning solid, solidly connected to real science, not fantasy” – rather than a merely “quirky” example of the genre (Jones 2018). The physics of Proof of Concept is a fictional extrapolation, of course – but arguably no more so than the novella’s account of society and environment.
In any case, PSM draws upon actually existing quantum information theory, which parses quantum states in terms of information (qubits). The novella extrapolates this into the supposition that space-time is computationally tractable – at least in principle, and using quantum rather than standard computation. PSM also draws upon the currently controversial theory of Bohmian mechanics, which claims to resolve the paradoxes of quantum uncertainty by giving a central role to nonlocality and entanglement. An isolated quantum system exists in a state of superposition, defined by a wave function: Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead. Most interpretations of quantum mechanics state that the wave function collapses (the superposition breaks down) when the quantum system’s isolation is breached: it is brought into contact with external forces. This is how a definitive outcome is determined: Schrödinger’s cat is either dead or alive, but not both. But for Bohmian mechanics, very roughly, wave function collapse is never definitive. The quantum system’s contact with external forces generates a new situation of entanglement and superposition, on a meta-level. Particular wave functions, associated with particular situations, collapse; but the wave function that defines the universe as a whole never does. The cat’s individual fate is decided, but we are now entangled with it in a larger system, with its own wave function, and its own degrees of indeterminacy and superposition.
For Bohmian mechanics, everything in the universe is ultimately entangled with everything else. This is why quantum effects are nonlocal. As Jones puts it on her blog, all of reality “exists in superposition” – not just Schrödinger’s alive-and-dead cat, but also “your own mind, the way you form your ideas and memories,” and even “the galaxy” as a whole (Jones 2018). In the extrapolated physics of Proof of Concept, this is explicitly stated as a sort of koan: “something happening in a distant galaxy is affecting you … right now. Everything is connected. There are no empty spaces and time does not pass.”
According to PSM, if you could “track every live synapse in the information state of a moment of awareness,” in all its confusions and superpositions, then you would reach an “integrated definition” of this state. The same applies t
o any other volume of space-time. Margrethe and her team are working, not with consciousness, but with what they call the Needle: a specially defined “volume of 4-D mapped information space.” They seek to reach an integrated definition of this volume, using a “refraction technique” that gives them “nonspecific data.” (The reason the data are “nonspecific” is that conventional, specific measurements would collapse the local wave function prematurely.) The “Proof of Concept” will be if they can “observe the integration state” of the qubits that make up the Needle, “including their instantaneous connections with the farthest distant quarters of the universe.” Once this is accomplished, the connections can be activated: the scientists will be able to “shift this volume, quasi-instantaneously and with near-zero loss of integration, to some defined elsewhere in the local universe.”
This is what Margrethe has touted to her financial backers as “the royal road to interstellar exploration”: the principle behind the supposed starship that she has promised to build for the One Percent. Quantum entanglement is instantaneous; so “time is no object” and “neither is space.” This means that, “if everything worked … thousands of light-years could be crossed in a flash,” without violating the relativistic speed limit. You cannot move faster than the speed of light; but Margrethe gets around this with a sort of sleight of hand:
Extreme Fabulations Page 18