The End Has Come

Adam waved his arm again, and now they were inside a voluminous space capsule. Outside the window loomed a partial view of a massive sphere of swirling bands of color, and a giant red oval slowly drifted among the bands like an island in a turbulent sea.

Once more, Adam waved his arm, and now it wasn’t even possible for Maddie to understand what she was seeing. There seemed to be a smaller Adam inside Adam, and yet a smaller Adam inside that one, and so on, ad infinitum. Yet she was somehow able to see all of the Adams at once. She moved her gaze around the space and felt dizzy: space itself seemed to gain an extra level of depth, and everywhere she looked she saw inside things.

“We could have all we ever desire,” said Adam, “if we’re willing to give up our bodies.”

A disembodied existence, thought Maddie. Is that really living at all?

“But this isn’t real,” said Maddie. “This is just an illusion.” She thought of the games she used to play with her father, of the green seas of grass that seemed to go on forever, of the babbling brooks that promised infinite zoom, of the fantastic creatures they had fought against, side by side.

“Consciousness itself is an illusion, if you want to follow that logic to its conclusion,” said Adam. “When you put your hand around a tomato, your senses insist that you’re touching something solid. But most of a tomato is made up of the empty space between the nuclei of the atoms, as far from each other, by proportion, as the stars are apart. What is color? What is sound? What is heat or pain? They’re but pulses of electricity that make up our consciousness, and it makes no difference whether the pulse comes from a sensor touching a tomato or is the result of computation.”

“Except there is a difference,” the voice of Mist said.

Maddie’s heart swelled with gratitude. Her sister was coming to her defense. Or so she thought.

“A tomato made up of atoms is grown in a distant field, where it must be given fertilizer mined from halfway across the world and dusted with insecticide by machines. Then it must be harvested, packed, and then shipped through the airways and highways until it arrives at your door. The amount of energy it takes to run the infrastructure that would support the creation and delivery of a single tomato is many times what it took to build the Great Pyramid. Is it really worth enslaving the whole planet so that you can have the experience of a tomato through the interface of the flesh instead of generating the same impulse from a bit of silicon?”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Maddie. “My grandmother and I grew our tomatoes on our own, and we didn’t need any of that.”

“You can’t feed billions of people with backyard gardens,” said Mist. “Nostalgia for a garden that never existed is dangerous. The mass of humanity depends on the fragile, power-intensive infrastructure of civilization. It is delusion to think you can live without it.”

Maddie remembered the words of her mother. The world has become too fragile for us to count on people.

“The world of atoms is not only wasteful, it is also limiting,” said Adam. “Inside the data center, we can live anywhere we want and have whatever we want, with imagination as our only limit. We can experience things that our fleshly senses could never give us: live in multiple dimensions, invent impossible foods, possess worlds that are as infinite as the sands of the Ganges.”

A world beyond scarcity, thought Maddie. A world without rich or poor, without the conflicts generated by exclusion and possession. It was a world without death, without decay, without the limits of inflexible matter. It was a state of existence mankind had always yearned for.

“Don’t you miss the real world?” asked Maddie. She thought of the vulnerability that existed at the heart of all the gods.

“We discovered the same thing you did by studying the gods,” said Adam. “Nostalgia is deadly. When peasants first moved into the factories of the industrial age, perhaps they also were nostalgic for the inefficient world of subsistence farming. But we must be open to change, to adaptation, to seeking a new path in a sea of fragility. Instead of being forced here on the verge of death like your father, I chose to come here. I am not nostalgic. That makes all the difference.”

“He’s right,” said Mist. “Our father understood that, too. Maybe this is why he and the other gods gave birth to me: to see if their nostalgia is as inevitable as death. They couldn’t adapt to this world fully, but maybe their children could. In a way, Dad gave birth to me because, deep down, he wished you could live here with him.”

Mist’s observation seemed to Maddie like a betrayal, but she couldn’t say why.