Federations

[If you must know the details, here’s what happened at street level. On any given block, on any given day, the Union’s citizens simply slogged through their lives—highs and lows, pleasure and pain, the ups and downs of existence. Like the individual atoms of a gas, people bounced and jostled against each other in chaotic disarray. But if you totaled up the haphazard motion, a cumulative order emerged: an overall direction of flow. Keep adding day by day, year by year, and you discovered a prevailing wind, constructed from seemingly erratic breezes.

The prevailing wind was the question, “Is this all there is?”—an anxiety that the Union was spinning its wheels. Diverse voices offered answers to the question—politicians and priests, artists and orators—but they only added wind to the gathering storm. While many individuals were perfectly content, the Union as a whole bridled restlessly.

When the clamor for “renewal” grew loud enough, members of the Union’s executive council appointed a subcommittee which spent eighteen months in hearings on A Plan for the Next Millennium. They produced a file of recommendations, one of which was to investigate the costs and benefits of contacting unknown civilizations for the purpose of “productive interaction.” Teams of scientists spent ten years constructing AI-driven sensors for determining where such civilizations might be found. After several more years of data gathering, the computers generated a list of “regions of interest” which could be reached without much new development in communications and transport.

But basically, the Union’s Zeitgeist was lonely, bored, and horny, so it turned to its version of the Internet to arrange a few blind dates.]

The initial list contained several obvious losers . . . such as a “technocratic utopia” inhabiting a single Dyson sphere around a red supergiant. The Union was surprised that Didge had included such a civilization. “It’s a total backwater: the people haven’t even gone interstellar!”

“But,” Didge said, “a Dyson sphere that size has more habitable land than a dozen normal star systems. Plenty of room for intellectual and physical diversity.”

“Until the central star goes nova, which could happen any second. Then the whole damned civilization will want to move in with us.”

“It’s a utopia,” said Didge. “It must have a pleasant personality.”

The Union made a scoffing sound [which is to say, the media indulged in days of derisive editorials and jokes on late-night broadcasts]. “Utopias are so self-righteous: always trying to rewrite your health-and-safety codes. No grasp of the concept of acceptable losses.”

“If you don’t like utopias,” Didge said, “you should have put that in your dating preferences.”

“It should go without saying,” the Union grumbled. “And what about that cybernetic über-web at the top of the list? You know I’m not into that assimilation stuff.”

“Now who’s being self-righteous?” Didge asked. “There’s nothing wrong with bonding meat-life and machines into efficient cyber-organisms. You shouldn’t criticize things you’ve never even tried.”