The year is 2089.
After a much-delayed and haphazard global effort to confront climate change, the world, finally decarbonized but several degrees warmer, had hesitantly started to look forward again. The cost of the change, though, had been staggering.
While dealing with large-scale destruction – from rising oceans and temperatures, drought and frequent violent storms – was slowly turning into a still dramatic but no longer existential background activity, people’s minds were still in full tempest. Many low-lying cities had been forced to stormproof themselves, occasionally reinvent themselves, or, in some cases, move, while many more had simply disappeared into the rising flood. Others had turned into empty, bleached carcasses, abandoned in the salt-baked neodeserts, their former inhabitants’ hopeless odysseys another dark stain on humanity.
On one of the handfuls of densely populated islands in the large bay of Neo-Tokyo, Haida Summer is struggling with an ambitious and far-ranging graphic novel charting this century’s tango de la muerte between technology and ecosystem, repeatedly confronting humanity’s mixed track record of technical advances leading to unexpected and all too often disastrous consequences. Prominent in her mind is the wilderness that once was, and like many in this fragmented, steamy city of global refugees, she dreams of breezy forests, cool mountains and peaceful open landscapes, while pondering what impact the imminent developments her partner Takeshi has been working on will have in the coming days, months and years. Basic research had kept advancing by saccades, as funding had been diverted again and again to deal with increasingly common and increasingly dramatic crises.
Nevertheless, almost ten years earlier, Anne Gernot, already then emeritus researcher at the center for subatomic engineering, and Takeshi Ikeda, her postdoc specializing in quantum fabrication, had managed to propose a technique to produce and accumulate large amounts of dark matter particles, and - most importantly - allow them to interact and form “nuggets” of dark matter. The uses of these very high-density, very compact and invisible materials were still highly speculative, but several unlikely potential investors from fields as diverse as the high-tech industry (including military - the possibility of ballistic shells like depleted uranium but much denser, or very high-density bullets with strong penetration power had greatly sparked their interest) and luxury fashion design and jewelry (invisible but very expensive, heavy rings and bracelets as well as - more prosaically - counterweights in high end watches’ complications) had rapidly contacted them and expressed strong support for taking the next step. To the joy of the researchers, substantial venture funding had followed.
At the heart of the proposed technique was the concept of gently heating cold pools of trapped dark matter particles, so that bubbles containing a gas of slightly hotter dark matter particles could percolate through them, within which the dark matter particles would then condense, forming heavier, larger clumps that would settle to the bottom of the heavy liquid. One night, Takeshi had dreamt of watching, from below, bubbles in water streaming towards the sun-lit surface, while that same night, Anne dreamed of swimming in choppy, dark water, whose density slowed and hindered her motions. When they shared their dreams over tea on the following morning on the cafeteria terrace, they realized that they had stumbled upon the two crucial insights needed to take the next step: simultaneous percolation and phased sloshing of the dark matter gas within the magnetized iron container that Anne had conceived and designed over 30 years earlier, and which had led to the first trapping of dark matter in 2050, only ten years after the discovery of its nature. The challenges she had had to overcome in realizing such a device had pushed several technologies far beyond their state of the art and had required her collaborators and her team to range far beyond their expertise. Today, finally, having faced and tackled even bigger obstacles to build it, their follow-up device was going to be turned on, and for the first time since the beginning of humanity, since the beginning of the Universe, in fact, a material that did not consist of any of the atoms that humans had discovered, produced or hypothesized would be fashioned.
There had of course been strong concerns, powerful resistance even, and attempts to stop the construction once the project became known. But the courts had not followed the opponents’ arguments. Overnight, in a last minute effort to halt the start up of the device, a sizeable and very vocal crowd had gathered outside the entrance gates in spite of the weather. Over the months, physicists had patiently explained that, based on known physics and astrophysical observations, nothing unexpected should occur, but this had only fanned the glowing embers of opposition and fed the ranks of the Anonymous Citizens Movement, a powerful political force that had simultaneously appeared a few years earlier in many countries, out of nowhere, and that was led by the charismatic “piccolo player”, who had taken on the intentionally anonymous name of John Doe. His appeal was similar to that of earlier doomsday prophets, arguing that humanity was approaching the end of time, but he differed from them by his message of the power of ritual behavioral imprinting, reaching, if not this generation, then at least the future ones who could be molded towards a technology-free, harmonious coexistence with nature, once the current ones would have naturally (or otherwise, as he was often charged with secretly wishing for) freed the stage. Public rallies were generally raucous, with telepresenced live harangues overlaid with recontextualized, amplified and emotified media snippets.
This situation had ended up severely straining Takeshi and Haida’s relationship. Haida’s novel’s most recent chapter had taken on increasingly dark tones in the last weeks; rather than a utopian future Earth which humans were working to return to its pre-industrial equilibrium, with a gradually decreasing human population and an again sprawling and slowly recovering ecosystem, her image of the future was shifting towards a renewal of the destructive industrial habits of the end of the previous and the early part of the present century, with its disregard for the impact of humanity and its technology on the environment. Although Takeshi had tried to assuage her fears, John Doe’s local collaborators adroitly played on the AR media’s numerous personalized delivery Ispaces, and thus his and his ratiobots’ admittedly longish arguments struggled and eventually failed, to be heard.
On the day of the test, Anne, who usually woke very early, had slipped by the protesting crowd and had just reached the center with the goal of carrying out the last critical checks on the device when the center’s alarm abruptly and loudly went off, at exactly 7:15 am. In the next second, a flash of light from the area of the experimental apparatus, immediately followed by a very loud deflagration which knocked her off feet, briefly lit up the thin rain and the swirling, low flowing clouds from the tail end of the unseasonal typhoon. By the time the fire could be extinguished, it was clear that the damage was extensive, but far worse, that the production target for dark matter had leaked radiation which was only partly contained by the fire brigade’s efforts. Once the media carried the story, the center’s closure was a foregone conclusion, and naturally, John Doe’s movement was elated, particularly since no involvement from their movement could be proven. The fabrication of dark matter, and more generally, the whole technology of the invisible, had effectively been dealt an initially crippling, but ultimately deadly blow, as the involved scientific community came to slowly realize in the following years.
It had, in fact, precipitated a societal phase change similar to the unmixing of oil and water. The Great Fragmentation, the splintering of the world’s nations into a patchwork of a few technophiles and many more futurophobic blocs in the subsequent decades, often even within the same political families, brought to a halt what had become global, interconnected research, and emphasized national or even local, belief-based priorities; the world had become too complex too rapidly, knowledge drowned in a sea of chaff, and the Anonymous Citizens Movement was but the first of the rising tide of similar small and large-scale anxiomaxing demagogical voices. Abetted by the worldwide demographic shift towards a preponderance of neotelomered centenarians, risk aversion had come to paralyze the world, and science was only one of the collateral seizures.
At the age of 85, Anne despaired of ever again finding a similar opportunity in her lifetime, and indeed, it wasn’t until early last year, in February 2200, that one of Takeshi’s students, now herself a very senior and respected scientist and carrying the torch that he had not hesitated to bear and pass on from Anne, was able to again put together the political, financial and technical support to make another attempt, which - matching the renewed optimism at the start of the 23rd century - ended up succeeding. After almost a century of sclerosis, societal shifts had been surprisingly rapid in the last two decades; their mutual interdependencies had ended up making all groups hostages to each other, and this stasis had not been without horrible destruction and suffering, initially from secular conflicts surrounding access to water, for bare survival or industry, which spared no group.
But having to deal with the newly mutated viral and bacterial strains whose natural ecosystems had been disrupted, worsened through hybridization with hacked variants of benign species, forced humanity’s hand. These hybrids immediately found new niches - in spite of all the advances in nanobionics - initially among the displaced, the densely populated, and the weakened, but soon spread to every pocket of humanity through their interactions. Dealing with the hydrowars and the polydemics revitalized science, but accompanied by a deeper understanding than that which led to the stop-and-go, even if increasingly concerted, tackling of the causes of climate change in the mid-21st century or the wholesale rejection of technology in the 22nd. This new scientific Renaissance led in fact to a renewed awareness and understanding of the paleolithic balance of innovation with societal needs and the availability of scarce resources, and thus a system of resource allocation and reuse rules that were technologically implemented in a simple, transparent and to a large extent egalitarian manner, and consequently perceived as just. Far from being unsophisticated, these advanced approaches often reproduced and improved on evolutionary processes, with control at the molecular, atomic, nuclear or even sub-atomic level, but with a deep appreciation of repercussions of all design choices and a careful, public weighing of impacts. Switchable radiotheranostics or gemoptimized autonomous algal silvionts, yes; atmospheric multispectrally selective nanomist, no.
Humanity, at least that part of it which had managed to shake off the worst forms of Originalism, emerged able once again to look towards the heavens. After millennia of being the stuff of dreams, the stars were finally almost within reach, and the Solar system the first stepping stone towards them, with a mostly automated solar observation outpost on Mercury’s terminator beginning operations and the first manned research stations in the outer Solar system, on Europa and Titan, being gradually built up. A flurry of expendable, fully autonomous discovery devices now pepper all objects down to planetesimals and form the uncounted voxels of a system-wide multispectral observatory of the Universe, the Panopticon, of which the planned dark matter-based gravitational nanointerferometer will provide a clear view back to the Origin itself. A base station at the South Pole sees heavy use as an acclimation region for the construction workers, technicians and scientists to the Jovian and Saturnian moons.
This outward push owes everything to the appearance of the techneco movement that took root about a century earlier, at the same time as the Great Fragmentation, slowly grew through the Dry and the Bulbous Decades, and then rapidly spread among the survivors. Haida had already had a finger on the pulse of this development; as a consequence of her realization that neither of the paths she had described for humanity’s future could be the whole answer, but also of her experiencing first hand how Takeshi dealt with the setback and with Anne’s despair in a mixture of determination and humility, hope and resignation, her novel incorporated an unexpected twist that immediately upon dissemination triggered wavelets of discussion in the chatterverse and the innumerable rivulets of polystreams, and that remained influential among small groups of artists, thinkers and researchers for the over 100 years of the Gloomiest Century. In fact, some art historians even trace a direct line from the current highly popular paleotech synverses fad, so characteristic of the New Dark Age, to
the visions she wove into the last third of her novel, art not only predicting, but actually shaping the future.