The White-Hole Situation

The Sedative Nature of Privilege

Sometimes it only takes the slightest disconnect to wake a person from years of slumber. It could be a voice on a phone, a sentence in a book, a sudden crash and all at once that person sees what they have never seen before, although it's been there all the time. Usually the person goes right back to sleep, as September did after the Clamshell Distortion, as she did again after the Flatiron Deluge, as she might well have done after the white-hole situation. Who's to say why she didn't. Third time's the charm? Is there serious data on that?

One certain fact was that her life was easy, her world was easy, it was a place and time of tremendous privilege. It hadn't always been that way, of course, but the centuries wore down the past like water wears down stone, and the I.B.U. ("every song is a theme song") was like water to the stone of human history. Like everything else, the system did not spring out of the head of a god one day but began as a seed and grew and changed. It became more and more useful, more and more necessary. Problems led to solutions, and solutions to more problems, and round and round again and again in a cycle that ended with a total surrender.

Technology was the final god, if there ever was one. It came up with notions that could only be dreamed about before. If the universe itself began with a bang, the legend was that the I.B.U. ("and girl you know it's true") started off with a whine, the singular whine of mosquitoes. For ages that annoying creature had carried diseases responsible for more human fatalities than all other animal beings combined. Technology had the bright idea to eliminate the mosquito through genetic engineering, and technology succeeded brilliantly. The extinction of the mosquito led, of course, to the usual unforeseen side effects. It wasn't long until the global bird population crashed, and with it the bird flu (a plus) but a host of accompanying minuses as well.

Humans could live without birds and they did. They could live without mosquitoes and they did. But humans are not the key life form on their own planet. Viruses and bacteria are, and those guys loved mosquitoes, even more than they loved birds, and they also loved themselves, so they moved on, as is the nature of things. Viruses experimented and in the end settled on attaching themselves to dust particles. Bacteria moved on to plant life, specifically the trees and the grasses, and both took on a career in the air, traveling with the wind, and coating everything within reach, which was literally everything.

New diseases flourished, leading to new solutions, new recipes for disaster, and eventually the populations of animals, including humans, fell prey to one thing or another and diminished drastically. The whole time, however, the smartest of the smart and the dreamiest of the dreamy kept on working on the I.B.U. ("and here we go again"). Originally known as the Solution Machine, then the Ultimate Problem Solver, then a host of other attempted nicknames before it settled on the I.B.U. ("the mother of necessity"), it tirelessly and ceaselessly cranked out inventions. Dedicated to cleanliness, if not godliness, the nodes were invented to scrub the ground and the skies of all things judged to be dirty, including dirt. The nodes communicated with one another seamlessly, through a vocabulary of vibration not that different from the governing rules of ants, but they developed vastly more varied abilities than their formerly abundant role models.

The I.B.U. ("in our hearts and in our minds") did a bang-up job, but to be honest it took a very long time to eventually reach the nirvana it had originally set out to find. Part of that was intentional. The system considered its own well-being as well as that of its humans. To rush certain goals, such as the tremendous de-population, or the rezoning of habitats, or the deconstruction of urban centers, or the re-routing or elimination of rivers, creeks and streams, or the re-freezing of the ice caps, or the re-alignment of the magnetic poles, would have caused too much of a disturbance to the flighty, sensitive creatures under its protection so it took its time, and planned out a project more than a couple of centuries in advance.

By the time September was born to lovingly engineered parents, the I.B.U. ("humble and true") could rightly take a bow. September had never known want of any kind. She had never had to do any more than ask for anything she desired. She'd been led to believe that life on board a starship would bring challenges and conflicts enough to round out her personality and provide her with the elusive quality of character, but it didn't really, truth be told. Ever since her return from the DeNovo she'd gone back to lazing about the sun deck, chatting remotely with friends and soaking up the solitude and the beauty of a perfectly clean sky. All those off-world adventures, such as they were, faded into the back of her mind.

She had witnessed death and violence, but somehow it had never touched her. Her crew had survived every encounter neatly intact, if a bit sweaty and lacking in sleep. The ones who did die were never really close though on occasion some of the crew on the bridge did get blown to bits when the shields went down or the hull got breached, but she had never felt like she had ever been in real danger herself. Maybe she was just too placid, too calm, too bovine to notice the risks she was taking, the edges she was barely balanced upon, but it never felt that way, and feeling was her specialty. She could always sense the fear in others, their anxieties, worries and concerns but she had never really felt her own. She wondered about it now. Am I even alive? she asked herself. Am I even human? What kind of person am I, to never know fear, to never suffer, to never, never what? To never be awake?