2312

Extracts (2)

to simplify history would be to distort reality. By the early twenty-fourth century there was too much going on to be either seen or understood. Assiduous attempts by contemporary historians to achieve an agreed-upon paradigm foundered, and we are no different now, looking back at them. It’s hard even to assemble enough data to make a guess. There were thousands of city-states out there pinballing around, each with its presence in the data cloud or absence from same, and all of them adding up to—what? To the same mishmash history has been all along, but now elaborated, mathematicized, effloresced—in the word of the time, balkanized. No description can be

instability nodes, when many pressured stresses rupture at once—in this case the withdrawal of Mars from the Mondragon, its counterimperial campaign on Earth, and the return of the Jovian moons to the larger interplanetary scene. As the first settlements beyond Mars, the Jovians were hampered by path dependency on earlier, less powerful settlement technology, also the discovery of life inside Ganymede and Europa, as well as Jupiter’s intense radiation. Later more powerful settlement strategies, and terraforming efforts on Venus and Titan, caused the Jovians to reevaluate their stations, domes, and tented Luxembourgs as inadequate. Even with Io permanently off-limits, the three other Galilean moons constituted together an enormous potential surface area, and it was the resolution of their inner conflicts and their common commitment to full terraformation that threw the volatiles markets into disarray and triggered the nonlinear breaks of the following two decades

they were now their own unavoidable experiment, and were making themselves into many things they had never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long-lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since, dogs when we had been wolves. But also, despite that individual diminution, finding ways to accumulate knowledge and power, compiling records, also techniques, practices, sciences

possibly smarter therefore as a species than as individuals, but prone to insanity either way, and in any case stuck in the moment—a moment now lost to us—when people lived in the almost-forgotten technology and culture of the Balkanization, the years just before 2312—

except wait: that is yet to tell