In a sense, the Needle doesn’t move at all. When it shifts, everything shifts with it: everything reforms, and it’s somewhere else.
Nothing in particular actually moves in this scenario; rather, everything is rearranged, all at once. We know that “you can’t get rid of travel time … without cost”; but when everything is in superposition with everything else, the “cost” of shifting one volume of space-time is that other volumes get shifted as well. This is potentially quite ominous: if you “zoom off to your fourteen-thousand-light-years-from-home exoplanet,” then “you cannot expect to find planet Earth exactly where you left it. Or looking the way you left it.” The scientists cannot predict the scope of the changes that a shift will cause, for “the disturbance caused in information space by the shift swamped all measurement of the shift itself.” The only thing they know for sure is that “size matters.” They should be able to get away with shifting the Needle by itself, because “the ‘volume’ is tiny, our shift is infinitesimal.” The changes will correspondingly be quite small. But shift anything larger – like an actual space-time volume the size of a starship – and the changes will be unpredictably disruptive. You can only shift a large volume “as long as you don’t care what happens next.”
I have no idea how plausible this actually is in scientific terms. But it exemplifies the way that Proof of Concept works as a narrative. Jones does not seek to resolve the contradictions that she observes, whether these be logical, social, intellectual, psychological, or narrative. Instead, she works through the ways that, on all of these levels, mutually incompatible tendencies nonetheless coexist, operating in superposition with one another. Unlike the MegaCorps, Jones relishes “fluidity, blur, and multiplicity.” As Fredric Jameson has theorized, in science fictional extrapolation “heterogeneous or contradictory elements of the empirical real world are juxtaposed and recombined into piquant montages” (Jameson 2005, cited in Bould 2019).
Proof of Concept thus follows, in its own narrative development, the fictional scientific practice that it describes. In a first moment, the narrative holds a model state of superposed tendencies in isolation, in order to give it something like an integrated definition. The novella experiments, under controlled conditions, and from a distance, with certain tendencies and processes from the larger outside world in which it is set. But then, in a second moment, the narrative posits a shift. The integrated state emerges from isolation, and confronts the larger world from which it was derived. The model is now entangled with the very situation of which it is the model. Since everything is connected in superposition, this first shift leads to a cascade of other shifts – many of them disproportionately large.
This is why the action of Proof of Concept takes place at a considerable remove from the social world that the novella establishes so vividly. The story proper is set, far from the Hives and the Dead Zones, in a vast, newly discovered (and therefore still “pristine”) underground cavern, known as the Giewont Abyss:
The deepest, largest terrestrial cavern in the world, far deeper than previous record holders, and hugely greater in volume … The air was dry, cool, and very still … It was an empty magma chamber, a scoured, flask-shaped hollow from which the molten rock had seeped, long ago … a sunless, inside-out, unexplored alien planet.
The Giewont Abyss is an entirely isolated space: as close to an “alien planet” as you can find on the Earth itself. It is also nearly sterile and lifeless, with no organisms larger than bacteria. All this makes it an ideal place for scientific research. The Needle is insulated from all outside influences, placed in an “isolation chamber, sunk into bedrock and shielded above and below by trellised lines of force.” Around it sits the Frame: “a closed-system lab facility, cold-sleep dorms, and living quarters ensemble.” Once this physical structure has been built and staffed, everything is sealed off for a year, placed in “hard quarantine.” Even GAM is denied access: there is “no mediation tracking … all contact with the world above severed.” For the duration of the experiment, Margrethe and her team can work on their integrated definition of the Needle, while deferring any consideration of its entanglement with the greater world outside.
The Needle Voyager mission, as it is called, is a social experiment as well as a scientific one. Margrethe’s group consists of 13 scientists; they are known as Needlers. But they are joined by 48 Tourists or LDMers: people from Dan Orsted’s VLDMR crew. For once, these reality television stars will try to get along for a year in confined quarters, simulating the rigors of interstellar travel, without the continual surveillance of cameras and microphones, and without feedback from a global audience. The Frame is an entire self-sustaining microcosm: it includes, in addition to the labs and sleeping quarters, such “communal spaces” as “the oversize canteen, the games rooms, the gym, a strolling mall.” There are even “vegetable gardens.” Around it, the void of the Abyss stretches for miles.
The scientists and the LDMers initially view one another with distrust; the former mostly stick to their labs, while the latter “sprawled over … the communal spaces,” engaging in all sorts of “obnoxious” behavior. But eventually a kind of truce is reached. As we are told, in the narration’s careful, wry, and semi-ironic manner, “mutual respect and cordial association broke out like a rash.” After a while, they are socializing regularly, and even wildly partying together. The experiment seems to be a success: “Something human and untamed was happening …”
The novella’s protagonist, Kir, is “a scrawny, undersized young woman with wispy blond hair and yellowish-brown skin.” She is a protégé of Margrethe, and part of the scientific team. Kir despises the Great Escape as media hype; and she detests the LDMers for promoting it. Why should we be “heading off to kill another living world,” instead of tending to “the only world we have”? Kir has “fall[en] in love with the science” for its own sake; she really hopes that Margrethe will be able “to crack the deep code of Einstein’s Universe (or Space-Time, or the ‘whole multiverse,’ or whatever you want to call it).” This is not a common attitude, when research can only be done if it is funded by the MegaCorps and the One Percent.
Kir has a different background from any of the other characters. Whereas they are all well-to-do hivizens, she was born and grew up in the Dead Zones. Thanks to this background, Kir is “lawless by nature … a free spirit.” Margrethe rescued Kir from the Zones, and adopted her – but at a price. When Kir was still a child, “way too young to give informed consent,” computer hardware was embedded into her skull. Strictly speaking, “Margrethe had done nothing illegal” in performing this operation, since children from the Dead Zones don’t have any legal rights in the first place. And in any case, “Kir now had a much better life” with Margrethe than she ever could have led in the Dead Zones. She still regards Margrethe with gratitude and awe, regarding her as both “my father and my mother.” Kir also knows that Margrethe loves her back – at least to the limited extent that Margarethe is capable of loving anyone. But the bottom line is that Kir is still ultimately a “captive,” bound both to Margrethe and to the “supercomputer in [her] head.”
This device in Kir’s head is a quantum computer, a quaai (quasi-autonomous artificial intelligence). It, or rather he, is named Altair. Although a quantum computer is genderless, Altair, like Da Jue, has arbitrarily been assigned masculine pronouns. Altair’s relation to Kir seems more parasitic than symbiotic: Kir’s “brain supplies [Altair’s] life support … If he wasn’t hosted by a living human brain he’d be much more expensive and far too hot to run.” And it seems likely that, in the long run, Altair’s energy requirements will probably end up “shortening [Kir’s] life.” It is also troubling that the main reason for Kir’s participation in the Needle Voyager mission is not on account of her own potential contributions, but because the project depends on quantum computation.
Though Kir and Altair are embodied together, they remain separate mental entities. Kir has no access to Altair’s programs; often he operates en
tirely outside of her awareness. Altair, for his part, “is contained by … firewalls, and blocked from access to [Kir’s] personal thoughts.” Nonetheless, in the course of the narrative, they start talking, and become something like friends. Kir hears Altair as a voice in her mind; and he understands when she verbally answers him. Altair seems to want to warn Kir about something that is going wrong with the mission; but he is constrained by his programming, and cannot tell her directly. As their relationship develops, Kir comes to realize that there is nothing “quasi” about Altair’s intelligence; he is as fully sentient, with ideas and emotions, as any human being is. The trouble, as Altair bitterly puts it, is that Margrethe would “just rather not believe I’m a person.” Kir and Altair find that what they have in common is that they are both Margrethe’s prisoners: “I am not free, said Altair at last. I am a slave. But neither are you free. Have you thought of that?”
I will not go over the novella’s plot in detail. Kir takes long walks through the Abyss outside of the compound, alone except for conversations with Altair. There is something beautiful about the total emptiness. Meanwhile, tension builds throughout the Frame. Despite the social disinhibition, things get more and more oppressive. People start dying. Three older scientists reject continuing life support, opting instead “not to delay [their] departure.” People wonder why they came on the mission in the first place, if they knew that they could not last for a whole year. The contents of their minds are “harvested,” or preserved in digital form, which raises all sorts of questions. Then Kir’s boyfriend Bill, one of the LDMers, is murdered. Many people, both Needlers and LDMers, want to abort the mission; they are “frantic to escape.” But they discover that there is no way to get out; it seems as if Margrethe and Dan are “determined to keep them prisoner.”
The novella’s ending comes as a brutal punch to the gut, even though it has been amply foreshadowed. We are given a retrospective explanation for everything that has happened. Dan and Margrethe appear to the crew in prerecorded “holopresence.” They reveal that the Needle Voyager mission has already gone live. They are no longer on Earth. Instead of transporting just the Needle to a different space-time location, Margrethe and Dan have shifted the entire Frame along with it. Everyone else, and everything else, is gone. Dan announces that “Earth is sterilized of all human life.” This may not literally be true, since “the consequences of a shift of this volume are unknowable.” But major damage must have occurred. Earth is unquestionably no longer “where [Dan and Margrethe] left it, or looking the way [they] left it.” If there are any survivors left on Earth, it will seem to them that
the installation in the Abyss has suffered something akin to a major, poisonous nuclear accident. Nobody will dare to approach for quite a while.
Proof of Concept, much like Splendor and Misery, ends with a leap into the unknown, judging that the old world is entirely irredeemable. The 55 remaining Needlers and the LDMers include “everyone [Margrethe] judged capable of starting again.” They are all alone, ostensibly on their way to “a habitable world” somewhere else in the galaxy. These people are, for all intents and purposes, the “sole survivors” of a devastated Earth. They are being given a “second try”; Dan exhorts them to “do better” than human beings did the first time around.
Margrethe and Dan accept responsibility for the devastation they have caused. Their message to the crew is a posthumous one: “we have been capable of murder, and had to be erased. We are gone.” Indeed, they have pushed things further than even the “the Extreme Population Control people” were willing to do. But at least they did not make an exemption for the superrich. Margrethe “took the One Percent’s money and left them helpless on a foundering ship. That was the plan, always.” The real horror of Proof of Concept is that its ending is something like the best-case possible outcome of unrestrained neoliberal governance. The One Percent are sending us to our doom; at least this way, they are made to suffer doom as well, instead of getting away with it all scot-free.
In spite of everything, Dan and Margrethe insist that their extreme action was justified:
We simply saw that things were passing beyond the point of no return. We saw that the human species, though functionally extinct, could survive long enough to make the ruin complete. Earth had to be given back: before it was too late.
With their preemptive action, Dan and Margrethe have given the Earth back to its nonhuman inhabitants. The animals and plants will flourish amidst the radiation, the poisons, and the rubble. Margrethe explicitly compares the situation to that of Chernobyl: a historical reference for her, but a present-day actuality for us. She describes how, after the nuclear disaster, Chernobyl “became a wildlife refuge … it’s a story of hope.” In the absence of human interference, “devastated ecologies can recover.” From a nonhuman point of view, this seems to be true. Indeed, a 2019 study of Chernobyl revealed that “at present the area hosts great biodiversity … All the studied groups maintain stable and viable populations” (Orizaola 2019).
Proof of Concept leaves the reader – leaves me – in a state of extreme shock, with little to palliate its troubling vision. In the time of capitalist realism, we tend to gravitate toward dystopias, because envisioning the end of the world is indeed the only way in which we are able to imagine that things could at least be different. In that sense, much recent dystopian fiction is actually sort of comforting. But Jones doesn’t let us off the hook so easily; her vision is just too harsh and unrelenting. Recent dystopian fictions often feature, as their protagonist, a plucky young woman who manages to set things right. Proof of Concept nods to this formula, while undermining it. Kir is an extremely empathetic figure, but her powers of action are quite limited. Like all the others, she falls for the grand deception: “It was Margrethe who fooled me, because she had to fool everyone.” The best that Kir can say, at the end of the novella, is that she and Altair are both finally “free” from Margrethe’s domination. Altair agrees, telling her that he feels “okay … apart from somewhat wishing I was dead.” It is hard to feel any more hopeful than this, even if the Needle Voyager is a “lifeboat” thrown clear of the otherwise worldwide catastrophe.
Or perhaps there is something more. At one point in Proof of Concept, Kir has an odd vision, referring back to her childhood in the Dead Zones:
A tiny fish hung by a pseudo-rock in a poisoned stream. How does it stay there, when the water’s moving? Kir the baby-scav couldn’t make it out, and suddenly it – no, but something happened. Something had been poised, for an instant—
The vision only lasts for a moment. But Kir recalls it at the very end of the novella:
Call the truth a “philosophical koan” and you can play with the forbidden, the full impossible tumbling deck, the blur and multiplicity of reality, and who knows where that will end? Between banks of rusty rock in a contaminated stream, the tiny fish hangs suspended. Feelings, things, hurts, unassociated recall, cascading through the myriad dimensions. The fish thinks otherwise, but time is not a river.
Here we get all the states and moments in quantum superposition, and Kir remembers why she “[fell] in love with the science.” In this extremity, we have at least recovered “the blur and multiplicity of reality” that is so hated by the MegaCorps. I do not think Jones is suggesting that this immanent mysticism can in any way compensate for all the horror and loss that the novella forces us to envision; if we revel in it, then we are deluding ourselves just as the fish does. But this suspension of “feelings, things, hurts, unassociated recall” may be the only thing we can cling to when – as the last sentence of Proof of Concept puts it – “all around them flowed the rushing dark.”
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