Synchronicity
1
At age twelve, as the Herschel autognostic probe was still wading across the rubble of the Oort cloud, Carlos Esteves wrote the essay that earned him his eventual fifteen minutes of fame: “A day at the beach in Proxima 4.” Truth be told, it wasn’t just him. Two hundred other children from all over the civilized world—better yet, those from countries that financed the Project—received similar honors: to send a little piece of themselves towards the future, to be able to walk the ground of a new world, and—in Carlos’s case—build an ephemeral sandcastle by the tides of another ocean.
People still lived in the glorious days prior to the twilight of all technology. By then, the hole in the ozone layer covered the entire Australian continent, and melanomata blossomed on anything resembling Caucasian skin. In all honesty, playing at the beach—on sandy shores so polluted they’d induce deadly anaphylactic shock on anyone who laid down on them—had become a thing of the past, part of a tradition now seen only on old videodiscs kept by grandparents going through nostalgia crisis.
Carlos’s essay was a good one, written by him alone and without parental guidance—or so the jury/censor AI determined—and revealed that which could be called a deep artistic sensibility, by describing in minute detail the way the pincers of the exploratory probe would arrange small pebbles and shells—assuming there would be any on Proxima 4—in order to erect a sand building, like a stronghold, so as to show alien civilizations they weren’t facing a simple machine, but a creative conscience capable of producing something larger than the sum of any of its parts.
Carlos accepted his diploma surrounded by the few New Expo aquaria—which still displayed a sad few representatives of Earth’s biosphere—, was applauded by family and teachers, and patted on the back by the President. All good-byes were said, and dressed up in his School uniform with filtering mouthpiece raised so he wouldn’t breathe in the necrotic stench of the Straw Sea, Carlos boarded the MagLev bound for Genève and the Jean Piaget Institute.
The journey through darkness took less than a day, but Carlos had been partially doped with several therapeutic hypnotics and barely noticed it. The train dove into the tunnel outside Lisbon, a tunnel made of vacuum to facilitate inertial acceleration, and crossed Europe almost always underground—thus avoiding any sabotage attempts by the Genetic Front for Racial Unity—eventually resurfacing above the clouds and Fortress Europe into a different fortress—this time an economic one—its access restricted to a chosen few, specialized research personnel and other plutocrats.
The Piaget Institute resembled a bunker, wrapped like an onion in increasingly aggressive layers of tanglewire, micro assault tanks, decapitating frisbees that hummed like swarms of wasps, exploding nanobots, and many more delights a paranoid society loves to surround itself with. True, there were gardens around the bunker, but these were for exclusive use by the untouchables, the immensely rich who promenaded on the cobbled pathways, parasols unfurled and faces covered in protective cream, the cobbles on the ground themselves sheltered by multiple UV filter plates.
But Carlos had been chosen—even if temporarily. He was there at the invite of Microsoft, bearing uniform and suitcase all paid for by the Gates Empire. The translation implant rooted to his left auricle droned on about what sounded like topographic directions in a sweet, maternal voice, only the system was malfunctioning and gave out information in excellent Mandarin instead of Portuguese. The laureate youth wouldn’t allow even that to intimidate him, though. There were more children coming from the mouth of the underground station, children with functioning implants, and wherever one of them went, the rest would surely follow. Carlos took a deep breath of mountain air purer than that of Lisbon and went about following his fellows, ID card held on high so he could show anyone demanding it that he had full right of passage.
Phase one of the Project consisted of VR training. Lying in the dark and paralyzed below the cervix, Carlos first piloted the simulation of the arachnid that would explore the coastal areas of Proxima 4. Since no one really knew the precise contexture of those otherworldly shores—the only assurance was that there was water, and oceans—Carlos instead visited the flooded moors of the Netherlands, and learned—under software assistance—to use six legs instead of two, and perform with the operating pincers and scoops in order to build the famous sandcastle in his project. For hours on end, and displaying increasing skill at his work, he built sixteenth-century strongholds beneath the walls of knocked-down dykes near the disemboweled carcasses of ancient oil tankers. He used mud, lumps of tar, strips of seaweed, and small bits of vulcanized rubber. The true nature of the materials didn’t matter. The fundamental thing was being able to choose whatever was at hand.
