4.2
21 November
St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery
South Polar Mineral Territories
Lunar Surface
Father Bertram Meagher
St. Benedict’s Monastery
1012 Monastery Rd.
Snowmass, CO, USA
Earth
Dear Bertram,
It’s not common to find myself less curious than you, but your question takes me by surprise, and turns my gaze outward to problems not contemplated. Your so-called “mystery at ESL1” pulls other issues along in its wake, because you’re right: some hornet’s nest hanging from that high limb has been knocked loose, and the buzzing (now I stop to notice) is loud. What’s got them stirred up, you ask?
Let’s think: they already have enough electrical power to run a country, enough antimatter to blow one up, and enough production capability to rival a midsized city. One might think these things excitement enough, but Esley seems to take them in stride, as American children once yawned at their own exceptionalism, untouched by the black swans of true misfortune. If rumors can be believed (and you seem to have heard this before me, which again is unusual), Igbal Renz may have turned down a Nobel Prize. For what, exactly? Of his many discoveries and inventions—sprung from his own brain or else wrested from underlings and improved sufficient that his primary credit can still be straight-facedly claimed—which one stands out so much above the others as to merit such an honor? Is it the robot waiters and butlers that set him on this wealthward trajectory? The launch vehicles so brilliant at combusting their fuels and navigating a lumpy atmosphere that no one is quite sure how their calculations even work? “Deep belief motion control networks” seek the nadir of uncanny so skillfully that people no longer even find it creepy. Is that excitement enough?
Far be it from me to fawn over a man so accumulative of wealth and so unconcerned with charity. But! Fair to say he is not sitting on a pile of dollar bills two trillion high, and miserly refusing to consider the good they might do. Rather, the sweat of his brow, not so different from the sweat of my own, or any other labour addict’s, has, by some strange luck or coincidence, so enriched the world that fifty-one percent of his garage startup is now worth that much. And pieces of that enterprise are harder to distribute as alms, and easier to see why it mightn’t occur to him, for it would mean relinquishing control of his kingdom and placing himself at the mercy of shareholders with (let’s face it) smaller dreams. Would that be a net win for the world? Or worlds, really? It’s not for me to say. Could he share more of the wealth with the workers whose labour actualizes it? Of course, but already his terms are more generous than the other Horsemen’s, so he can pluck away the world’s most talented and industrious, or at least the most avaricious of the talented. Could he slow the behemoth’s growth by paying out profits to nonprofits? Perhaps, and perhaps he should. There is no Nobel Prize in the accumulation of wealth, but surely being that wealthy, or even adjacent to wealth on that scale, must be terribly stirring, even if one must live (as we do) in metal tubes sheltered by magnetic umbrellae, and be fed by goo dispensers and sewage. So perhaps it is fair to give the Economics prize to those who have found their way to such colossal wealth, rather than those merely finding equations to describe it.
Or does the Swedish Academy look favorably on his (slight, but measurable) cooling of a sweltering Earth with that million-miles-distant parasol, thinner than a hair and broader than most of the countries of Europe? Could that be it? Or the cunning mechanisms that built said shade from the atoms of asteroidal rock, or that extract electricity from it? The unsavory aspects of his personal life are a lot to live down, or for the Nobel Committee to overlook, so we can assume they think highly indeed. They do not give out a prize for mathematics (which is certainly the backbone of a deep belief motion control network), so I’m assuming he was considered for Physics or Chemistry. Does that narrow it down enough to guess?
The antimatter stockpile itself is a possibility, for Esley Shade Station (or, more properly, the hub of the Shade itself) must surely produce antiprotons and antielectrons with one thousand times the efficiency of any purpose-built Earthly accelerator, and also, I glean, some number of antineutrons as an apparent side effect. The “wave impact amplification decelerator,” as they allegedly call it, permits the fashioning not only of stable antiatoms larger than antihydrogen (quite a trick in its own regard!) but also, somehow, stable molecules of dissimilar antiatoms. The details are closely guarded, and threats released that the whole apparatus will convert to gamma rays if unauthorizedly inspected. From any other organization one might interpret such bluster as only that, but is Renz Ventures given to exaggeration?
Notably, and perhaps as a direct result, there seems to have been some sort of hostile takeover up there, hazy of detail but involving the guns of frightened governments. And frightened they should be, of such a destabilizing force as Igbal Renz! One imagines the competitors crushed under his ascent, their stakeholders crying each other to sleep at night for what might have been, if only that man had trod his heedless tread on some other corner of the global (and more-than-global) economy. There are no models or graphs for such catastrophe. There is no peaceful coexistence with an innovation wellspring that so distorts the space-time around it, and thus it is no wonder he lives so far from those who might wish him ill.
One suspects he turned down that prize for the simple reason that he fears a trap. That golden medallion, if not itself spring loaded, could well become the honest bait around which a dishonest trap might quite plausibly be sprung, which drops him into jail for sparsely defined crimes against humanity. Renz has been a reckless player, but his recent moves show a paranoia I can only think well founded, for envy runs strong among the envious.
Perhaps I do fawn, and perhaps I should stop, for there are many sins, both mortal and venal, embedded in all of this. Igbal Renz may yet burn in Hell, as could any of us, if our souls are so willfully out of alignment. Again, it’s not for me to say, and perhaps even Our Father Who Art, having given such men the will to choose their own actions, is still hanging back to see what might happen! Strange things were afoot already in cislunar space, and one is never sure which rumors are crazed ravings and which are mere summary of the still-stranger facts. My simpler point, Bertram, is that whatever set those Esley hornets abuzz must be more exciting than all of that.
And as I pause to consider the enormity of such a statement, I find I do not have an answer to your question, or any plausible speculation thereto. Have they found a rip in the cosmic vacuum? An exceedance of lightspeed? A simple equation for human happiness? The last specific I heard of Esley was a whisper, stale but credibly sourced, that Igbal had been communing with metaphysical Beings and making serious mathematical inquiry into magic words of the Kabbalah. I shit you not, Bert: spoken phrases to, I suppose, vibrate the air in some quantum-mechanical manner? I’ll give him this: if such a thing were true and possible (which I doubt both highly and lowly), it would be someone like him who’d discover it. But it sounds to me like a harmless hobby for a man who, fond of hallucinogens and with no real religion to prop him up, fears eternity. I do not think that’s the source of their peculiar excitement, nor their even more peculiar silence.
Have they found aliens, perhaps? A voice, in foreign accent, blip-blip-blipping against the blank white hiss of the cosmos?
What has them stirred up, indeed? I shall give the matter further thought, and keep my attention to whatever eaves a man in my position might be positioned to drop. But one partial guess at least is easy to put forward: something is happening up there, or about to happen, that shocks to action men and women far more jaded than you or I could ever be. And in an unsettled time in a barely settled space, that idea sends shudders down my spine.
And so I return to my labours a bit more pale and drawn, for we still have a murder to solve, and a thousand chores besides.
Yours,
Brother Michael Jablonski de la Lune