The Will [on hold]

3000s - Episode 3

3098

Two pairs of eyes, charcoal and emerald, gazed up at the globe on the screen.

It was still far away, the younger genius with the charcoal eyes mused dourly to himself. Much farther away than he would have liked. He had hoped to set foot on that sparkling new earth in his time—but alas, it would at least be several centuries till that space could be traversed.

The elder genius with the emerald eyes did not think of such things. He looked at the Glorious globe and he saw, instead of a far distant planet, a reflection of this selfsame earth on which he stood. It was not far away at all! It was right here; it was perfectly within sight, and within reach. Earth was Glorion, and Glorion was Earth. The main distance between these two worlds was not physical, but moral. By the time the men of this earth were morally prepared to set foot on that planet—centuries into the future, once the Protopian project was successfully completed, at which point many advances in space travel would have certainly been made—those light years would be as easily traversable as millimeters.

From a practical standpoint, he thought, those millimeters would thankfully still provide the necessary physical distance. Just enough distance to ensure that whatever disasters might befall the Glorious guinea pigs would leave the moral stragglers on Earth entirely unharmed.

But the temporal distance till then was yet quite far. Protopia had only just been born.

Protopia: the prototype of Utopia. A great stretch of land set aside for a community that would be morally engineered by the Collective Genius. It had not been difficult, for the Genius, to obtain that stretch of land. Just this morning, they had been granted the official legal rights to it. They had needed only to spin a few lies to the government and request a vast expanse of bare but livable land for research purposes. They had advised that dangerous substances would be tested here, and so it would be in everyone’s best interest to stay far away.

That dangerous substance was really, of course, an idea. A vision. A vision that had been conceived in one ingenious mind, and brought to life by the son of that genius.

The son looked at the Glorious spot on the screen with his hard charcoal eyes. Still, all that he could see was distance.

“Your uncle would have loved to see this,” the elder genius reckoned. “The birth of Protopia. It’s a shame he passed only a few months too soon.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” the younger contested. “He always swore that he was with us, but really I think he was deeply against us. He only knew that staying in our camp would keep him in the know. He only ever wanted knowledge. He only ever wanted not to be kept in the dark. So he pretended to support this thing, when really he detested it with a passion. He knew that if he went against us, he would be on the opposite side of the divide. In the camp that must operate without our lofty visions, our superior intelligence. Because we ought not tell them anything.”

The elder lifted his gray brows, his green eyes considering this genius before him. He looked and spoke no differently than the adolescent boy who’d once stood at the front of this room and first presented the inner circle with the Glorious discovery.

That was the day when the divide had been born. And in these past decades, that divide had since spawned animosity and deep, intractable disunity. From beyond these walls, this was still known as the Collective Genius. But within, the genius was strictly and sharply divided. There was the Protopian camp, and the so-called ‘Antitopian’ camp, which wanted nothing to do with these visions of moral eugenics. The camp that found these visions doomed, and wrong, and too unfair and dangerous for the morally engineered guinea pigs.