Triggers

Yes, there were unpleasant memories, too, but it came to her—it came to everyone—that there was no need to add to their number. How much better it was to share contented, positive, happy memories—and the best way to ensure that most of the new ones recorded from now on were just that was to help rather than hurt, to share rather than hoard, to support rather than belittle, and, of course, to love rather than hate.

“Mr. Secretary?” said a uniformed aide coming into the conference room aboard Pteranodon.

“Yes?” replied Peter Muilenburg.

“We’re on station above Pearl Harbor and circling. The commander invites you up to the cockpit. He says the view should be spectacular.”

Muilenburg got out of his swivel chair, walked past the long table, and exited the room. He took the staircase to the upper deck, entered the cockpit, and stood with one arm on the back of the commander’s chair and the other on the back of the copilot’s.

The sky was brightening. He watched from high above as the sun climbed up from the gently curving ocean horizon, spilling color and warmth and light all around.

“Beautiful,” Muilenburg said, when he’d seen his fill. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” replied the commander. “Perfect day for an operation, isn’t it?”

The secretary of defense replied, “I’m aborting Counterpunch.”

“But sir!” said the navigator, who hadn’t been looking out the window, hadn’t yet gazed upon the dawn, hadn’t yet seen the light. “The president said you have to go through with it.”

Muilenburg shook his head, “As my son would say, ‘Let’s not, and say we did.’ ”

“Peter,” said the commander, turning now in his seat, “you don’t have a son.”

“True,” replied Muilenburg. “But someone I know—or, at least, I know now—does.”

Susan had never heard the term before, or, if she had, it hadn’t registered; it was nowhere in her memory. Indeed, it was, she discovered, absent from most people’s memories: the Singularity. But some knew it, and so now she did, too: the moment at which machine intelligence would supposedly exceed human intelligence, sparking lightning-fast technological progress that would leave plain old Homo sapiens far behind.

But what the partisans of the Singularity had glossed over was that machines were not getting more intelligent as time went on; they had zero intelligence and no consciousness, and no matter how fast they got at crunching numbers, they were still empty.

And yet the predicted surge had come: the vast, all-encompassing, world-changing whooosh of accelerating power. It was a chain reaction, an unstoppable cascade. But rather than machines, it was human beings amplifying each other, the wisdom of crowds writ large, the society of minds spreading far and wide.

To know everything, to understand all, to appreciate the totality of nature, of literature, of mathematics, of the arts. And to be free, at last, of duplicity and mendacity, of concerns about reputation, of establishing hierarchies, of all the game playing that had gone with petty individuality. It liberated so much of the intellect, so much energy—and it brought peace.

Susan Dawson didn’t regret the old life she’d lived—a life she, and everyone, would always remember—but this new existence was so much greater, so much more fulfilling, so much more stimulating.

And it had only just begun.

Epilogue

It’s an odd coincidence, the gestalt thinks, that here, at the end of November, if you start the day with sunrise in Washington, DC, the last place to see the dawn, twenty-four hours later, is a group of storied islands.

But odd coincidences abound in geography. For instance, those islands, out in the Pacific, happen to straddle the equator, and they are on the same meridian as the crater at Chicxulub, formed when an asteroid slammed into Earth sixty-five million years ago, triggering the worldwide climate change that killed the dinosaurs and paved the way for the ascent of mammals.

Finally, though, the archipelago Charles Darwin arrived at in 1835 is being kissed by the nascent day. Here now great tortoises—those from each island boasting a distinctive shell—are rousing from their sleep, their blood warming with the arrival of the sun. Here now the calls of finches—those from each island sporting a distinctive beak—herald the dawn. Here now black iguanas, the world’s only extant marine lizards, slip into a sea stained orange and pink by the rising daystar.

And here now all those who call the Galápagos home, as well as the visiting biologists and geologists and science-oriented tourists, join in, the last group to fuse with the collective. It is appropriate, judges the gestalt, that the place that taught the human race the most about evolution is the site of the completion of humanity’s transcendence into its next stage of existence.

Darwin’s closing words from The Origin of Species swirl through the collective consciousness: