Great Teachers MAke Us S The trans jovian accelerator
It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder why. You might shake your head. Why devote so much to retread well known ground? The joy of it is we can do it & so we do.
There’s a persistent population of outsider weidos in Jovian orbit now. Plenty of room for us & the sky’s the limit, just as soon as it gets built!
One of the attendees is holding forth at a party. He’s giving some presentation of wit. It’s followed by others taking turns to make esoteric points with varying amounts of wit and humor. I find it falls short of my standards as entertainment. It is not at all clarifying about their cult status or the eventual disposition of the doomed geodesic dome city io 17. I’m investigating to see where it all went wrong, to decipher the whole sad story. Since my exotic amusement consists of this voyeurism of the antique past, I’ve trained to regard the subjects with great charity. They are not in performance, they are in private, privately few people are above reproach. Yet these first generation colonists, religiously convicted swiss, by all accounts, never do anything but perform. None of it makes sense & they’re all extremely likable.
Here’s how it works- I have a light-swarm, a halo of drones that I’m cortically fused with. They create a full field of view & the agents that we host grab digital & network data. Taken together the lights can calculate likely scenes either as fact or pastiche as a memory that I experience vividly and briefly. Looking for answers.
So far, I’ve spent q2 exploring the initial colony. This is a small city supported by hydroponic infrastructure. No building is greater than 8 stories and most of the structures have a sort of gothic revival look with split timbers and stucco looming overhead just about everywhere. It’s got a bauhaus element ad well so all the roofs are glass slabs aimed at Jupiter through a few meters of atmosphere and sapphire. The combination is unpleasant. The streets are cobbled, but with geometrically inane cubic iron shapes. It isn’t a good place.
The interiors are better. Less contrived, they’re a lot of long hallways, spacious, cubic rooms. All slightly finished metal extrusion. It’s an old sentimental feeling & I’m really immersed in the lives these people, the early departures. Had. I’m enchanted with the era in general, postwar earth, the Ruins Restored era has always inspired me. A sentimental era & I’m here, among its discontents. Their ruins at least. What’s left of them. I was prepared to have sterner judgements about these people. Instead I like them.
I remember dozens of weddings, informal, lots of laughing. I’ve seen a few home births - nothing shocking there, nothing even off-putting. It’s all very quaint and domestic, but with a constant veneerer, it’s quite kitschy, reminiscent of 20th century media.
They constantly entertain & rarely eat hydroponically grown food. They import supplies consonantly. In fact, they’ve got visitors and shipments coming through at all times. They’re fabulously incompetent separatists.
Two things that they never seem to do: go to church & speak any alpine languages. They’re highly incompetent swiss and abyssymal cultists.
I’m saying it’s a puzzle and it’s getting very interesting.
My process so far has been to go from room to room, familiarizing myself with as much of the city as I can traverse in any given day. When I come upon a room that interests me, something about it captures my attention, I focus on it. The machines index the place to biometric records, video footage, lexical regressions and all personal metadata. Then they form that i to a chemical interaction, which is what my EMIC does to my hippocampus. I wander through apartment blocks every day going through doors. When I open one and focus, I’ll have a memory of being in that place with those people. I’m doing this to determine who here was right & who was wrong. I’m here to rob these peoples’ grave & to judge them. So far they defy scrutiny. trive
Really, i mean that. I’m always trying to carry forward what i learned from Chet. She was an archaeologist, from earth, forensic pathology.
She had the whole system figured out. She laid it out for me once we’d breached jovian quarantine & were at the port. The quarantinne wasn’t well staffed even then, so we waited some time to be allowed in. Loitering in the dark, abandoned galleria. “They’re scared, or they should be. I anyone who can get out will get out. Even if it means going catholic. But it’s what they’re scared of, isn’t it? Everyone’s afraid of luna. We have to be. They destroyed the earth…
“Not destroyed, preserved, saved!”
“Destroyed.” She reiterated. On this we never had accord, she was from Earth. It meant something more to her. “And they have the high ground, space, they have the mass drivers. They’re ready to pull the trigger on anyone, and they’ve proven evilly audacious. Titan, of course, the Sultan’s play every angle, they’re behind most of the atrocities we’re about to see. They have their agents everywhere, their espionage is far ahead of the rest of them, and their people are veterans, proven in war. They might even take the system, in their dreams. Their gadgets give them grand illusions but their toying with the extraterrestrial, that’s what frightens. We’d known there’d been other civilizations, but to meet one? To engage them, to open the door? It certainly provoked the Lunatics. We experience all of Venus’ creativity, but we worry they’re becoming something inhuman, and we worry it’s better. We’re scared if ceres because the next threshold they crack may introduce some unheard of peril, or worse, a fantastic treasure. Triton frightens them because they’re troubled by what they could become. They see what they fear in humanity. Dread it.
“Nobody worry’s about mars.”
“We worry that it’s the best we can do. And I don’t say Jupiter, the jovians, because you can never think they’re separate from Triton. Anyway we’re all most scared of the Lunatics & Sultans & fairly so. So we want to get out, go somewhere where the two local psychopaths aren’t in conflict. If they think their community’s got the stuff, they can try their luck out in Keppler or Centauri or the unknowns. It’s what qualifies as a community that’s chilling. These people, drawn together with irrespectable ambitions. But we accommodate. Settlements for ethnic supremacists, religious separatists, all the posthuman varieties, but all ambitious. Driven. I say by fear. Solar system’s a bust. Earth’s destroyed. Well, and why? Is it because of how we are, as a people? Or is it a circumstance of environment. That is what scares them about the Jovian and about Triton. That we’ll prove out the death-drive, that on other worlds, people might turn out different.”
We argued over these points, particularly in light of the then current affairs. We were uncommonly caught up in the implications of the interspecific war. It was the topic of discussion everywhere at the time, we were desperate for anything streaming from the war, so we knew specificcpeople involved in the war and we discussed how we felt it was going. Then the steward came and unlocked the passages through which we presently walked to what remains of io.
On the ionian side the structure was somewhat less forgotten. Rather it seemed the focus of some intense conflict. “Cult. Religious, you can always tell - they have signs of these showdowns at the threahold, they won’r allow apostates to abandon the project, hardliners emerge. She trails off dreamily, examining the mummified remains of her subjects. Resistance becomes virtuous. We’ve observed enough to chart some trends. Personality cults last at most 4 generations. The children are more severe than the parents, the grandchildren more neurotic, the great grandchildren dissipated with irony. The last one is basically feral & held in check by the remains of the old guard. Speaking of.” She gestures at the remains of said old guard. “Be attentive, the exact disposition of affairs at the last, is what we’re here to find. There were two survivors of Io Gar-Eden 16. Now two lineages, both want to assert ownership of the old family home, it’s up to us to decide who’s family will inherit. I search for some kind of a story in the wreckage & then decide based upon whichever claimant i find most sympathetic.”
“Not based on forensic evidence then?” This left me somewhat perplexed as that was the work I HAD SIGNED on for.
“Oh absolutely! We rigorously decipher the events as they unfolded, describe a narrative, test its likelihood, iterate, conclusion. We can both stand arms akimbo & and mutter- “ I have a pretty good idea of what went wrong here.” Nod knowingly.
“But then we also adjudicate?”
“Just so! And that’s the matter that i can teach you. I had an idea of what this place might be.” She gestures broadly, her lights expanding into the vast geodesic dome, full of tragedy and bad intentions. Once briefly a community and just as abruptly a ruin. “We can reconstruct a civilization, minute & brief as it was, and use them to describe pathologies, to diagnose the civilizational organism. We’re like ghoulish renaissance doctors, robbing graves to see how people are made. This is the work we’re going to do & crucially, which you-“ she makes a point to point at me, presumptuously, “will be documenting.”
Which cheered me up, in point of fact- as I’d been mainly bewildered to that point. Now I’m given direction.
The location and condition of the Threshold: It’s a 2 square meter, kidney-shaped arrangement, It’s powered side is at Jupiter L3 jovian quarantine, formerly Jovian Colonial Nexus. Unpowered side is found in a fenced off dais at the center of the radially organized colony. This is the 16th Gar-Eden deployment & occupies 100 square kilometers of the southern equatorial region of Io. By all appearances the other generational annexes have all been deployed, which vastly increases our search radius. I estimate a tour duration of at least 18 months. Requisitions have been aubmitted, pending approval prepare resupply corresponding to Theshhold dimensions attached as attestation 1.1 “threshold specifications: Sultan Ogilvie Developments publication
#A23Ks9HUKS1 2233 Edition.
“Get in the habit of narrating as you go. All said and done, we’re meant to wander around here, snooping through ever doorway we find all the while musing on -“ in a portentioius tone: “what does it all mean?” So narrate as you go. That is the heavy part of the work. The machines collate impressions, your lights record scenes and capture dimensions.”
Instinctively i check my lights, they’re meshing gallantly with my hud, the extra dimension of perception is really captivating with this fidelity. I’ve only previously managed a pair of sensory-assistive drones, the range and coverage of 15 is less overwhelming than I’d anticipated. It’s like a second perception where i see myself from overhead at 8 or 12 different ranges and directions. I can feel my EMIC blazing through calories though, so I’ll a put a rush on the provisions requisition. Predictive recreations with as yet indeterminate fidelity. The mind wanders to avoid what it doesn’t care to comprehend.
“I see you’re thunderstruck and so I’ll narrate for you.” She raises her voice, as if it could possibly matter, given our sensory inputs, “I will describe: Central dome is arranged as to be reverential to the old home. It’s another frugivorous “budget model” put on the Io rebuild waiting rolls & left to follow their religious calling In a functionally autonomous geodesic dome colony. I’m seeing similarities with Io 3 & 5 immediately. The militarized barrier, signs of a showdown, the passing off of child through the threshold children… Remains… remain. No attempt to recover the dead from the confrontation suggest a retreat to the suburbs for the last generations. It’s all very redolent of 5 specifically. Cannibal cult phenomena. Curiously - the culty characters are the uniformed authority.”
I ask how she can tell. I’m not experienced enough to tolerate the carnage on display here easily. She’s graciously analyzed it to a point of banality with which my senses can engage. The fidelity is tuned to where i can take in the 5 corpses littering the Dais & the little park it sits within. Two of them are wearing the livery of some sort of security service while the bodies of the others are heavily bloodstained, their clothing in tatters and their limbs dislocated. They very clearly struggled to fight through an unyielding press of people. Valiant in their way. My lights discern relatedness to the blood of two of the corpses. Relatedness to the clients. I interrupt her explaining how the cannibals have cosmetic distinctions from non-habitual cannibals. “What about the clients?”
“What about them? Who are they? You only need to know the names. That’s fair play in our work. They’re Eulissis & Fantasica.”
And their people’s blood is spread around here.
“Right, which means their families suffered horribly to push them through the threshold at the appointed time. Truly desperate they were, to fight so earnestly. This is very gruesome. I believe poison gas was employed here. It further excuses both sides abandoning their dead.”
Wait! Could the poison still be present?
“Frugivorous - they led the hydroponic life. Algae, a lot more algae than they expected too. The hydroponics haven’t failed in any of these havitats, but they never autonomously produced enough nutrition without large algae supplementation. Io 8 was very well situated, it had animals. But I think the algae and the fruit and the human products don’t combine to a poison that lasts 100 years. But also do not worry. I was worried at 8. The animals. But it’s no worry at all, the place was depowered & exposed to Io’s atmosphere for a few days last year. That’s all been resolved and we’re back to fresh air and pleasant breezes. Budget atmosphere, no weather. Such a dreary choice. They must have been very afraid.”
“You say afraid again.”
“Inertia. People stay put as long as they can. they got to be afraid to move. To come to this place, the shoddiest colony sold by the most malevolent Sultan during the most tumultuous time. You see it is criminal. Io will be revised. These people will have a claim to a portion of its surface. We decide which survivors are most deserving.”
I know about this. My favorite thing about the jovian colonial project is how it fell so far behind schedule.
“Do tell. Present!”
I manifest my thesis with curated evidences. It is a series of lectures, charts & persuasive arguments that reference Ming’s Law: computational power has finite boundaries. in period-specific costume I explain that the hubris of the Sultan’s was such that they thought they could beat Ming’s law. The Baryon-Scribers they put together to revise the jovian moons could either run at full processing power, or they could run their machine intelligence - which was what made decisions about how to proceed. Well the machine-minds looks the problem and then went about recreating themselves a few thousand times by revising a fair amount of juliter’s rings. This was all according to plan. The machine mind was intended to hyperfixate on making the jovian moons habitable. The assumption was it would run from moon to moon, remolding them one after the other, once it had taken stock of the situation and recreated themselves to the requisite standard. The Sultan’s thought they could defeat Ming’s law. They thought it would expand its range, by duplication. Von Neumann style. They thought they’d expand the mind along with operational range. Instead they diminished the mind as a consequence of over-replication. The network resources supporting the mind began consuming most of the bandwidth. That was when the mind was engaged. It’s solution to ming’s law, it turns out, was to take in it’s surroundings, anticipate everything in the jovian orbit, form a plan of action, and then set itself to mindlessly execute the action. The mind would re-engage when it reached some pre-decided limit. That’s what it did with the self replication. It took in the size of its task and decided the best way to go, and then it went. No talking to it, no reeling it back. It commits to its operation… “and that’s enough for these people”. I interject this, in the present to reference the people around us. “This is their context” My presentation goes on explaining the unfortunate revelation that the machine mind’s calculation drove it to revise jupiter itself. That it committed to turning jupiter into something else. Not quite a sun, but similar. It would emit most of its radiation in harmless spectra and expel atmosphere toward its moons. There’s a smugness in my presentation that I instantly regret. I use the Baryon-Scriber fleet’s 100 year mission to revize jupiter as a sort of punchline, but here “It’s terrible what was done to these people.”
She agrees. “It’s terrible.” They took their chances. Fear. They came here during a bad time. The Atlantic. The war.”
Did you flee?
“How old do you think I am!”
She doesn’t want to talk now and dutifully identifies the bodies, making records & marking for revision. It’s something of a thrill to have admin credentials, to be allowed to authorize public revisions. Human remains no less. I follow her lead and take in the scene.
First I notice she is sullen and irked & that I should avoid her. Second I do my job.
The center of the community is where we’re standing. I spread the lights out and take in the neighborhood. It goes off in 2 km in every direction from this point. Around this center there’s small houses and communal structures. Further from the center are multipurpose multistory blocks. They make it to 8 stories and there’s an interesting architectural flourish. I resolve to let her stew & head out on a hunch to see the curious figures in the moldings, the pretty fittings on the fasteners. What’s more, there are roads. Proper roads for automobiles. It’s been a goal of mine to see one, to drive it if possible. The cars in the center are in a sad state, however. They appear to have burned up in the melee that took those people’s lives. I give a lot of attention to them and the lights close in. The cars aren’t interesting models, but interestingly, they appear to have burned up at different times. Weeks or months apart, in different conflicts. This sort of desolated sense extends to the structures. They’re meant to be pleasant and to draw the community together, with their openness and accessibility. These are the theaters, schools, churches & other public buildings. And here they are defaced, broken & in the case of the school, smashed into by two separate car attacks. The destroyed cars are still wedged in the wreckage of the building. Everything is carbon composites, it’s the most basic ediation. Still better than what’s available now in a lot of places. Further from the center there’s less signs of any trouble. In fact they’re extremely pleasant. The multistory buildings are made to resemble some kind of bavarian dreamworld. They are big townhouses with timber and plaster, very gothic and charming. Friendly signs hanging over doorways simply denote surnames, addresses. There are mailboxes.
It’s genuinely interesting that there are mailboxes.
I spend the rest of the day probing the whole dome to take stock of the addresses. Indeed every door was linked to an address. Or rather a surname. The density suggests that the first colony was at capacity. The names themselves suggest alpine origins for the community. Favrits & Schmitties in abundance. The central facility which was the church functioned as a post office. My lights recreate it with modest fidelity. In my hud i can see uniformed people navigating the streets. They carry postcards. That’s all they carry and that is replicated with high fidelity. The drones are certain of it. I imagine a lot of postcards must be lying around for them to be so certain. I resolve to find some. I’ve never seen a postcard. I’m breaking for lunch early because I’m getting lightheaded. I’m on 10,000 calories for this tour so I treat myself. Banana pudding. 10000 calories worth. I accept that I’m really embarrassed about my comment to her.
I want to study the post office-church. It’s opposite the center from me, off toward where she is still finding human remains among the wreckage of the cars. I check her narration & am displeased to see that she’s found 9 more people burned up in those cars. Children predominately.
“They say teleportation drove the swiss mad. They never recovered, supposedly. But usually their colonies don’t fail. Almost never really. I’m telling you that I’m suspicious.”
What do you mean drove people mad?
“Idiom. From Earth. We had those, you see. We had entire cultures and languages and people. The swiss were generationally isolationist. During the war they broke off contact. Or they tried to. They were especially anxious, demographically, about escaping. Fear! They didn’t come here to die. They came to live. Not all the cults are so. I am wondering about the cult status.”
“I’ve got information relevant to you. She reads my narrative and devises an assertion.
“Possibly not a religious cult. That is not unheard of. They may have followed a leader. There is always that. Or they came together because of some? Thing? In this era, these colonies - as a rule they’re religious separatists. The reason it’s a rule is the religious exemption. I have a presentation myself. I’ll show you sometime, about how cynical was this exemption rule. Anyway to say, the authority of the time was either the asian superstate, and the sultans. The Superstate denied extra-lunar colonization, except for religious exemption. If your faith was incompatible with the state’s principles, you could be excused. You also might be forced. Remember, I said it was cynical. So, you are very afraid. Afraid enough to overcome inertia & what do you do? You see you can claim religious exemption, buy a place on a world that isn’t burning up in war, disaster and every other apocalypse. Nightmares. My grandmother didn’t remember the war. Thank you. She said her mother had very little to sag about those times. What is can tell you is that everyone nowadays.” She is crying, I am moved. “They seem to think the war was somehow the end. That it’s what destroyed the earth. Stole the earth, whatever. They don’t want to hear about the last hundred years of fear & peace and hope and glory.”
“They’ll always be there. I haven’t been to earth but my parents work with someone who obsessively simms it. Every day will be repeated. They say it’s true.”
“True or not. True or not. Earth deserved a future. I’ve been there. I go there for long stays actually. It’s a museum now, very pretty but with no future. Just a possession now. I don’t expect understanding. Only, I don’t take jokes about it. Plus I just came from it. Before I was here. To see my grandmother. My grandmother simmed her own mother through the recreation of the Atlantic explosion and the wars. She was sick that they had to endure it a second time. Apparently many important questions remained about important details of those years, and so they had the scribers rigged to recreate every day from the deluge to the Catalina surrender. They wanted to roll it back and observe from on high. Take in all the horrid details. Preposterous of them. Wicked and cruel. On the bright side we were all sorts of dinosaurs on this trip. One day in the cretaceous.” She is pleased and smiles, reminiscing. But to the matter at hand, postcards are unique. The narrative grows more compelling, but the data hates an outlier. What i suggest id this course of action. You take the north half, i take the south. We make our way & draw our own conclusions for a few days until we’re provisioned. Then we’ll meet back here to share findings and draw conclusions. I suggest trying to find themes of generational antagonisms. It’s a useful methodology, I’ve found.”
I said very well and left her to the southern half of the colony. The northern half being 13 square kilometers of rusticated, over-designed urbanity. My hope being i don’t find any more corpses. Not for a while. That is my hope.
When we reconnect: They paid for optimized amenities in their housing. They brought a lot with them. A lot of very nice things in fact. But small things. That could fit through the threshold. I’m feeling aristocrats, but i jusg don’t see it in what i’ve been finding. The postcards in particular are. Well I’m still figuring out what i think. They might mean a lot more work. This is a bigger job than I expected.
Month 2
My drones have compiled enough of the ambient detail to manifest holograms of prior events with respectable fidelity. I use this mostly to attend weddings and birthday parties. After a month in the colony’s native kernel I’ve found that I really like these people. The first ones, the founders, who fled earth & bought this parch of Io to settle. They’re a cult, ostensibly, but there is very little evidence of any religiouns observance, let alone a monolithic or unified practice. It’s why I fell in love with their weddings. Once I could generate reasonable approximations & identify individuals, I looked for the religious components of their lives. There were none. They never preached or prayed collectively. As close as they came were their weddings. I’ve attended as many as my drones can recreate. Very few have been similar, none have had a very explicit religious component. They mainly resemble cocktail parties.
The people of the original colony lived out their days in cubic rooms in rectangular towers under the Jupiter’s rapidly dissipating red spots. Such a
