The invitation for the annual end-of-year trip arrived with a condition and a warning attached. The condition was to read, prior to boarding the plane, the newly released National Security Strategy (NSS), and the warning was that the plane would be going through the infamous Symplegades a.k.a. the Clashing Rocks. By reading the invitation, I understood that the destination was near Tbilisi, Georgia.
As I was boarding the plane at Boston’s Logan airport, a very pleasant Isaac Asimov said hello, offered that I scan his digital card, and, full of unenthusiastic, depressing excitement, said: “Have you met the captain? His name is Nitup, born on December 12, 1979, and he is the only pilot allowed to land near the ancient Colchis. He renamed the plane ‘Argo’, and I think he is going after the modern golden fleece.”
“If I knew that he was the pilot, I wouldn’t have joined,” Margaret Atwood and David Stockman said with one voice, without providing any explanation. “Wait until you hear the name of his co-pilot,” William Gibson said. “What’s his name?” Atwood asked, only to get the reply: “His name is Ix, and the rumor is they recruited Nagodre as their first officer, since we will be flying over the Black Sea.”
As we were taking our seats, we found Ray Bradbury reading a travel guide to the island of Patmos. Naturally, curiosity surfaced in everyone’s mind. “Has the destination changed?” Stockman asked, only to get a smile from Bradbury. “David, wasn’t it you who, between pages 404 and 576 of your book Deformation, brings up the four horses of the Apocalypse?” and he continued: “How could I comprehend the new geostrategy unless I have a good understanding of the island of Patmos?”
“You are amazing as always, Ray,” Atwood said, only to continue: “Conquest and warfare represent the first two horsemen of the Apocalypse, once the first seal of the scroll is opened.”
However, Ray Bradbury’s focus on geostrategy needed an explanation: “William, I need your insights in understanding the convergence of AI superintelligences. I am still puzzled by your foresight in your book Neuromancer, especially when I consider the fact that it was published in 1984. Can you help me please understand the implications as we are about to go through the Symplegades?”
Gibson seemed delighted by the question. “My dear Ray, the overlay between digitization, commodification, and reality signifies that cyberspace is as real as physical space. The fragmentation of power as envisioned by the NSS is supplemented by the megacorps, as discussed in my book. Of course, the megacorps are in the realm of cutting-edge technology, where identity and consciousness comingle. The result is a bifurcated reality between humans and AI. The Symplegades always colluded to crash anything that attempted to go through them.”
“That’s helpful, but the way I see through the lenses of your book and the NSS, the issue is political and economic power through the crashing, conquest, and division of assets,” Bradbury said.
At that moment, all eyes turned to Issac Asimov. “OK, I get it. You want to know if psychohistory, which is at the epicenter of my book titled Foundation, is related to what we are discussing. After all, Hari Seldon, the protagonist, can infer the forthcoming collapse of the Galactic Empire through the math used in psychohistory. Assuming then that the first seal of the scroll is opened, a forthcoming collapse of a major power could lead to the liquidation and division of its assets. Recall, as Margaret pointed out, that it starts with a conquest and warfare.”
“Wait a minute, Isaac,” Atwood intercepted, “Your Galactic Empire collapsed due to systemic decay, bureaucratic stagnation, economic decline, and loss of technological knowledge, but your protagonist Hari Seldon is exiled to Terminus, where he becomes the founder and hero of the titular Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is to reduce the length of barbarism that follows the collapse of the Galactic Empire. Wasn’t that accomplished by Seldon’s plan to preserve science and scholarship?”
“That’s correct, dear Margaret, but such shortening and preservation doesn’t preclude the liquidation of assets due to the collapse. My main regret after the completion of the Foundation series is that psychohistory failed to place your own protagonists, Stan and Charmaine, into the scenery of the Terminus during that period of barbarism. Please help us see the complete picture from your book The Heart Goes Last,” Asimov said.
“As I was waking up on August 20th, 1979, the radio was playing a song by Bob Dylan from his album that was released on that day titled Slow Train Coming. The title of that song was ‘When You Gonna Wake Up?’, and I still vividly remember the line from that song saying, ‘you got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making the rules.’ I was blown up by that song. What a genius combination of the Apocalypse and Isaac Asimov, I said. A place where barbarism reigns supremely. Then, I started dreaming about the day when I would be writing about a land where the lawful are locked up and the lawless roam free. You see, my protagonists were barely making ends meet. Need for survival pushes them to join Consilience, where, for the sake of a job and a home, they must swap their freedom and be incarcerated every other month. People trade freedom for safety, safety for love, and love for certainty.”
“This is marvelous, Margaret,” Stockman said, and he continued: “It also seems that at the end people choose to trade sound systems for fake assets and derivatives. Gibson, at that stage, could have put his protagonist’s (Case) foreseen auctions in the dark web of markets, where territories are priced like used cyberware, where the US grabs the squeezed market’s data ports, China grabs its infrastructure, while they both want to annex its energy ruins. Auctions are going at cheap prices. When deformation is taking place, and the systems break down, assets misprice. When assets misprice, predators circle. Collapse is nothing but a clearance sale. Following conquest and warfare, the third horseman brings economic hardship, before the fourth horseman, on a pale horse, brings with him Hades. While I believe that we are years away from a global collapse due to unsustainable debts, collateralization of overvalued paper assets, overleveraged financial instruments with questionable collateral behind them, let alone speculative capital, the signs are pointing to a narrow path outlined by psychohistory. Lack of discipline in fiscal, monetary, and corporate affairs will always lead us to a predictable outcome of exiling Hari Seldon. But wait a minute, we have among us Ray Bradbury, who has set aside his travel guide to Patmos to listen to our conversation, but has not told us yet how his great book Fahrenheit 451 fits into this.”
“My dear friends, Orwell was afraid of a society where they banned books. Huxley said that he foresaw a society where there was no need to ban books, as in that era, no one would read. My protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman whose job is to burn books. You see, in a society dominated by the frenzy of mass media, a person can escape through reading, but books can hide in them parcels of truth and barbarism, where the lawbreakers making the rules cannot tolerate even elements of truth. Montag became disillusioned by his job and started collecting books, which ultimately became his liberation force following the pale horse of a nuclear war.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “For all those years that I have been taking this special end-of-year flight, I never opened my mouth. I always sat silent, trying to learn and absorb from the great minds of my fellow travelers. But this year’s invitation came with a thumb drive and the instruction to open its two files as we are entering the Symplegades. The map shows that we are about to enter the infamous Clashing Rocks. Let’s open the files.”
Happy New Year!
