The Diaspora: An Epilogue

Note: This epilogue is intended to attach to the end of my Diaspora anthology, but they needn’t be read in any particular order.

All news was old news, and very little of it was good.

On the bridge of the CRS Delaney’s Foresight Yvette sat with silence for company, silence, a newsfeed, and a glass of mezcal. Above her the endless rock of her ship had been hewn into its most sensible form, great solid blocks of stone in heavy Mexica design. Symmetrical lines radiated up in chasing intricacy into the vaulted heights above. In the center a gigantic sun stone hung halfway up the wall, imposing in its gray weight. Fearsome. In front of her, as on every ship, was an automated bar that would always keep her glass full but never let her get properly drunk–she cursed herself for that bit of foresight. Behind her, a wide table of red wood stretched the length of the room, with seats for thirty. A table for discussion, negotiation, and ultimately agreement. But there would be no discussion here, nothing to negotiate; her course, unlike all the others, was as set as the lines of stone that hung above her.

In retrospect many parts of the Foresight made little sense. Being the flagship of her fleet it certainly needed to demonstrate the formidable technical achievement each ship would represent. It needed to show the world that yes, indeed, the Delaney Corporation could build a starship, outfit it for an unfathomable journey, and do it all in well appointed style. And if demonstration didn’t make the point, well, maybe they could put some fear in the hearts of their detractors with a little imposing ornamentation. It worked for the Catholic church for a thousand years, why shouldn’t it work for her? But once you got past the bridge and its soaring, Aztec designs, the staterooms and their spanning windows out to the stars, the gardens with their floating barges and tumult of greenery, past all the bits the news crews would walk through on ‘exclusive’ tours, past all that the Foresight was mostly unhewn rock. Unhewn rock carrying a truly incomprehensible amount of momentum, momentum that now was adding years to their trip and was slowly chipping away at Yvette Delaney’s life.

She certainly hoped the foresight of her whole endeavor held up better than the design of her flagship when exposed to the clarity of hindsight. The Foresight was undoubtedly overbuilt, a great oblong asteroid several kilometers long and covered in meters of ice all just to haul her and a skeleton crew along. The actual colony ships would be mostly hollowed out and filled with all sorts of things much more valuable than the rock that carried her through space, machines, materials, people. They’d decided to make her ship match the fleet’s size spec mostly to serve as a demonstration. Of course, anyone who was even remotely qualified could see in their designs that their thrust systems would get the job done. But that left a whole lot of people who weren’t qualified. Unqualified people who would need persuading if they were going to be convinced to part with whatever little scrap of resources they held onto and turn it over to her program in exchange for a berth. So the Foresight was over built to show them, yes this is real, and yes we’ll even send our leader out on it to show how serious we are. Now the true price of that demonstration was coming due, not the countless amount of money the ship had cost, but time.

The ship’s thrusters would get the job done eventually, slowing them down from cruising speed. Eventually. They couldn’t run too hot or they’d push the risk of malfunction into unacceptable levels. So even though they were still traveling through the outer reaches of the Oort Cloud the ship was turned, thrusters towards home, gently decelerating the great mass bit by bit to land them in orbit around the Sun in about five years’ time.

Five years’ time. What a cruel irony. The ship’s AI was set to wake her and the engineers when the ship began its deceleration phase to ensure all was in order. The engineers woke up, ran their checks for what they were worth, and slipped quickly back into cryo. But Yvette couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. She told herself she stayed awake because she still had valuable work she could do, even though they were still light months away from home. Really it was the irony that kept her up. How many had she condemned to this fate? Maintenance crew baited and deceived, left alone on a little simulated farm to live out five of their own precious years. And for what? They were the most effective tools for some repair jobs on the ship, that much was true. But why keep them awake? For speed, that was the answer. An awake crew member could respond to an emergency much faster than one coming off the ice, so the answer was simple: build that into the maintenance system. An easy call, at the time. An easy call when it was all just numbers on a spreadsheet. But now that Yvette had lived several solitary months in the comparative ease and luxury in the staterooms and gardens of the Foresight, she could see just how cruelly calculated the whole plan was.

Cruel, yes. Cruel but necessary. Always necessary. She always had to believe it was necessary. Her colony program would take many lives, to be certain. Construction accidents, casket failures, transits gone awry, and beneath it all years of lives ground away by the passing of time. Not to mention the good the money they spent on the program could have done were it left on Earth. But money had long ago lost its meaning; it was always a shared story and the story simply stopped making sense. The number in the Delaney Corporation accounts didn’t matter–it only ever went up anyhow–resources, people, ideas, those were what mattered. Those were what came into short supply, out in space or back on Earth. If humanity merely adjusted its story and said ‘There need not be scarcity, or hunger, or disease.’ then they would have the money to make it so, but would they have the ideas? No one person could change the story though, not even Yvette Delaney.

Besides, what if they did all that, built a utopia, only for a supervolcano to erupt and undo so much of their good work, they were already overdue for one of those. Or for the climate to collapse faster than expected, or a sun flare to come sterilize the Earth, or some idiot with a CRISPR kit to create a perfect pathogen. Colonies on other planets and moons wouldn’t be enough, the solar system was still a system. Connected. No, to truly mitigate risks like these the cord had to be cut, a new system around a new star. Or better yet, a great many new systems, around a great many new stars. So the cruel calculus ran on.

Of course there were naysayers. Yvette could not be sure they weren’t infinite in number in fact. But she could handle a naysayer, indeed more than any human being alive she’d been built for it. Bred, trained, tuned, and tweaked. She was made to carry the unwieldy momentum of her family’s company into the future. So try who might, activists, lawmakers, board members, family members, once she had set her course there would be no turning her from it. Because it was right. They simply didn’t see how precarious mankind’s position truly was. Danger lurked around every corner. The naysayers would talk about how much better used her funds could be, lives, peoples, species saved if only she would take up their cause. Then you fucking do it, I have my cause. None of it mattered when the only thread of consciousness in the universe hung in the balance.They all lacked the foresight. They’d say she was abandoning Earth, and they were wrong. She was doing her part to save it.

In the fullness of time she may be proven wrong, Yvette had to admit. Out in the stars they may find other thinking minds, kinder minds, wiser minds. Or maybe they’d build the minds themselves, successors actually equipped for the harsh realities of their universe, not the crude sacks of biological hardware humanity had to get by on. Maybe she’d be proven wrong, but her newsfeed certainly didn’t make it seem likely.

Her tab chimed, another tranche of news came in. Now only eighteen months old. All of it the same. Despite what her detractors said Yvette Delaney did care. She saw the injustices in her world, and saw how they could be righted. Once her colony program was funded and functioning, she was set to take her journey, she’d tried to rewrite the story. The money didn’t matter, and when you had as much as the Delaney Corporation it only ever grew. Money to change the laws to let the fortune grow. Money to pay the fines when the laws were too slow to change. Surely it would be enough to create the world these people wanted if they were given the chance. Apparently not. Resources weren’t very scarce in the world any more, and certainly neither were people. But ideas, good ideas that actually solved a problem, those were still hard to come by, no matter how much money you had.

When she left she’d told her teams to spend the fortune her family had spent so long amassing. End the hunger. Cure the disease. Save the black rhino and the bonobo and the humphead wrasse, whatever those were. See if we can do some good. As she checked her company accounts and stock prices, clearly it hadn’t worked. If anything she had more now than when she left, compounding interest ticking away as she’d slept on her way to Proxima Centauri, and ticking away some more as she returned. The naysayers would call it greed, say it wasn’t enough, they were wrong again. At a certain point a fortune became hard to spend. At least hard to spend wisely. Her teams had enough funds at their disposal to corrupt markets, send currencies into hyperinflation, and completely monopolize resources across the planet. It was a terrible amount of power for any group to have, even one she trusted. She could see the investments they’d made, they’d done some real good. But still the numbers in their accounts continued to rise, prudence and hundreds of years worth of institutional momentum overpowering her explicit orders. Maybe this was how capitalism would end, all the money in the world would wind up in one account, useless, currency a self-defeated concept. They’d be right back to square one. Yvette smiled at the notion, but doubted it would be so easy. Or so clean.

In truth it was momentum that caused most of her problems. The momentum of the ship, and all of its heavy rock added years to her journey. But even that paled in comparison to the momentum of the Delaney Corporation. Her great-grandfather had set the stone in motion so very long ago, right place, right time, and now several hundred years later she was no less trapped by the force his empire carried than the tonnes of rock that surrounded her. The corporation barrelled along scooping up everything in its path, another story that had lost its meaning over time; only Yvette, knuckles white, stood a chance of changing its course, directing its energies into something productive. Without that deflection, destruction really was the only logical endpoint. And despite all that, despite her position and her power, despite the fact she was literally made for her position in womb, in classroom, and in laboratory, deflection was the most she could manage.

Thinkers had been raising the alarm about rogue AI for generations, given what Yvette saw from her research team’s work she wasn’t convinced they had much to worry about at least not yet, but what about a misaligned corporation? If she’d really poured company resources into the colony project like she’d wanted the board would’ve deposed her overnight, installed some far flung branch of her family tree with the right last name and a more pliant demeanor. Or worse yet, a misaligned corporation was just a small part of a market whose only logical endpoint was overgrowth and destruction. The growth of markets couldn’t continue the way that it had for the past couple hundred years, expanding out into the solar system had barely whetted the beast’s appetite. They knew it couldn’t go on like this, and yet they did. The whole system was smart and adaptable, it would defend itself against attack, and it would always continue to grow. Worst of all people wouldn’t even see it as a threat, after all they worked in the factories and laboratories and board rooms and senate chambers, everyone just doing their part to get by. Just doing their part to usher in the end. The misaligned markets were the threat, some day it might come out of some new clever codebase, but this was already all around them, began rolling when human beings got their first hit of compounding annual interest.

Yvette saw all this, the shareholders couldn’t have so much change without potential profit, so she’d applied herself like never before, somehow managed to turn a business of one-way tickets into a profitable venture. Not profitable like the rest of the business, but profitable enough. Still they’d questioned her every decision right up until the day she went to the cryo facility in Puebla to begin her journey. Then they sat back and counted their annual returns.

They fought her hardest on the councils. The colony program was a Delaney venture after all, why should they cede any decision making power? Because it’s the future of humanity you idiots. But she’d still herself, make them believe it was to get a better deal out of other corporations, governments, research institutes, anyone who had something of value to contribute really. But it was a ruse. No corporation could barter its way into a seat at the table, even if she let them believe that they had. No government could compel her to add a Voice of the People to the councils, indeed none had really tried, that was her idea like all the rest.

Diversity of outcomes, that was the name of the game. In each new star system the negotiations would begin anew. She spun on her stool, savoring another smoky sip, to look at the long table behind her. She could picture the jurors, stumbling out of cryo, sick, disoriented, strangers looking upon a new world. On some worlds, undoubtedly the Delaney Corporation would be laid low. Yvette couldn’t imagine her niece Atzi doing anything other than active sabotage of company interests with her council seat. On others, with her most ferocious progeny at the table, all power may be consolidated under the Delaney name. But then would it continue to be a corporation? With only a few core company representatives aboard it would soon just be governance by a different name. On still others, a balance may be struck that could never be found on Earth. Even the mind of Yvette Delaney, racing along its lightning tracks, couldn’t foresee all possible outcomes. But they would all be different, and that difference was the key.

Most importantly, she hoped, somewhere a new system could take root that wasn’t hellbent on growth at all costs. If all the ships departed armed to the teeth with Delaney company men set on keeping the corporation growing, she’d merely have kicked the can down the road. Exponential growth could strip a solar system of resources in a blink of galactic time, and humanity would spread, destructive, now diversified and wholly unstoppable. This was the only chance to get it right. Stop the cancer before it spreads to the lymph nodes. Somewhere out in the cosmos on one of the myriad ships, she could only pray, the right combination of planet, people, and ideas would come together to let them establish a new home for humanity untethered from the demands of where they came from, a place where systems could seek balance, a homeworld where the future remained bright.

Unlike the future she saw on Earth. When she first woke up and saw the waiting tranche of news updates–a touch over five years old at the time–she was relieved that no worst case scenarios had played out while she slept. The climate was damaged yet resilient, it wouldn’t crumble overnight no matter how much careless irresponsibility they threw at it. A new pandemic had arisen and been fought off while she slept, not a engineered pathogen like she’d feared but another zoonotic crossover–which had plenty of history of being plenty deadly, the response was admirable but still insufficient, costing a few million lives and countless heartache before control was reasonably established over the disease. Warheads had stayed in their silos. Space debris had somehow avoided a runaway impact scenario in low-Earth orbit and humanity still shuttled up and down their gravity well without trouble. Relief had washed over her when she first awoke on approach to Proxima Centauri.

But now, years and a thousand tranched updates later that relief was replaced by a rock of dread. Avoidance of worst case scenarios for a couple decades meant nothing, the problems were still right there and people still refused to see them. Humans can adapt to almost anything and get on with their lives, even a guillotine hanging above them. Her teams at her instruction had invested trillions in sectors across the globe to improve the outlook for humanity on Earth, and their impact had been immense, but it wasn’t enough. Never enough. There wasn’t enough money in the world to change the fact that humans are animals, and animal populations will expand until they can’t anymore. Global population had stabilized a while back at just under fifteen billion, people heralded it as a change in the wisdom of humanity. See we can control ourselves, our better nature can win out. Fools, Yvette thought, they’d just framed the outcome to justify it in hindsight, sure fifteen is better than twenty billion, but what if the better number was five, or one…or less? Even if their numbers hadn’t grown their appetites had, and bit by bit every life lived was dragged back just that much more.

She called up the map of the diaspora fleet on her tab. Dotted white spokes reached out in all directions from their home system on a three-dimensional diagram, the furthest already approaching their first target stars. Somewhere out there, there must be a life worth living. Her experience on Proxima Centauri b wasn’t too reassuring on that front. They had a pretty good idea of what they’d find when they got there, but datasets from decades-old lightsail probes do precious little to prepare you for the reality of a tidally-locked rock cooking in the heat of its sun; they’d landed near the terminator to capture some footage of her planting a flag in the rubble with the star hanging dramatically low on the horizon and taken off. They’d capture plenty of data from the ship to satisfy the scientists, but they were here for symbolism not science. The other planets in the system didn’t hold any more promise, but somewhere out there, Yvette had to believe, the right elements would combine. Of course, they wouldn’t find another Earth just sitting out there, not by a long shot, but all they needed was a place to start. Between technology and adaptation and tenacity they could make a new home, a new place to grow, a place where they could truly apply lessons hard-learned on Earth. Yvette had to believe.

But who knew what they’d find? Planet’s brimming with promise? Systems tailor-made for space-based civilization? Life? Life just getting started? Life mature and impossibly alien? Life fully lucid and communicating right back, greeting them as they coasted in out of the darkness? Yvette took another sip and let herself daydream, it was her only refuge anymore.

Her tab chimed. More news, this time with a request for response. Despite an 18-month light delay her board now knew she might be awake and wanted her input now that her first spec’d colony fleet was complete. Build more, she sent back and that was it. Build more ships until they couldn’t build any more. People would call them lifeboats or escape pods or marvels or death traps. People would revile her and idolize her and villainize her in a million different ways. Let them, all the money in the world wouldn’t solve the problems they faced clinging to one planet, so let her be the evil despot or the brilliant visionary whatever she needed to be that day for that audience. Just so long as they could keep building. Build to lower the population of Earth. Build to give them more chances out amongst the hundreds of thousands of stars of the Milky Way. Build to bring along Earth-life in all its forms for a second chance. Build to escape the sins of their past. Build to strengthen the thread of hope that pulled them into the future.

Yvette Delaney would stay awake, until she got back to make sure that they did, years taken out of her life that had known far too much privilege counted for precious little in front of what she saw. She’d foster her program, keep its momentum rolling in the right direction. With half of her resources she’d build ships, and with the other she’d try and salvage what she could on Earth. She’d grow the program and invest the profits in Earth until they tore her from power or died trying. A fitting penance for a life that had caused so much destruction.

Her tab chimed again. She set her glass on the bar and refilled it with a couple more fingers of mezcal. She took a sip and savored the fire as it slid down her throat. A video newsfeed appeared on her screen, the latest ship in the fleet CRS Delaney’s Folly had just turned on its thrusters and left its parking orbit. I can’t believe they let me get away with that name, she smiled at the thought and took another sip. The thrusters would be visible in the northern hemisphere for months to come as the ship slowly began building its momentum, a beacon for those who cared to look up and see it. In the fullness of time, the Folly may prove to be the most presciently named ship in her fleet, but as she sat on her bridge thinking of its thrusters visible to all that would look up and see them shining in the morning light she didn’t think so. The knot of dread still sat hard in her stomach but as the engines continued to blaze at her across time and space something very much like hope wedged its way in.