Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (13 page)

              Sofia wrote a short note about the two discoveries she had made in Crane’s office and hid it in an envelope with everything between two pages of an atlas at her grandmother’s house.

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The Earth Two Foundation achieved enormous public visibility with its campaign to colonize Mars and some of its leaders personally defended that if that colonization were successful, the Fourth Planet should become the United States’ fifty-first state as soon as the number of settlers reached fourteen thousand. Despite the Foundation being private and not linked to a government position, international clamor against that idea arose.

              It was curious, but the principal denier that Americans had ever landed on the moon, Loon Neaver, better known as Moon Never, led the domestic movement to prevent the federal government from appropriating the solar system. He said the government wanted to create a multiplanetary empire where white Anglo-Saxon or Germanic protestant male warrior ethic would be dominant. He even went as far as comparing the federal government to Germany’s Aryan project of the 1930s and 40s. Explaining to him that it had been that very “Anglo-Saxon” man who had defeated the Germans, along with the help of the Russian’s unsurpassable capacity for suffering, was pointless since the truth that drove him was armor plated against facts.

              At first, no one paid attention to him, but at some point, a famous professor at MIT, Maon Yksmohc, linked to New England’s left and older than Sé de Braga (which is to say older than dirt), bought a ticket for that trip.

              As great transnational corporations suffered defeats on Earth, explained Yksmohc, the federal government intended to take them to artificial worlds which, in truth, would be dependent on the United States for survival. They would thus do whatever the government wanted them to. That those corporations “would do what the federal government wanted” was, he clarified, a rhetorical affirmation since the government and the great transnationals were the same thing. On Earth, a large part of the soil we stand on, a large part of the water we bathe in and all of the air we breathe is for everyone. There is an excessive offer and they occur naturally, which is why they are not for sale. In these new worlds, they will have a price. The air that people breathe will have to be bought, if they want to breathe. This ancient man with an elephantine memory gave the example of patients with pulmonary diseases who used oxygen at home. They could stop eating, stop paying rent, stop paying for other medications but they would rarely stop paying for their oxygen. On Mars, militarist capitalism would snap up everything without restraints and bare its fangs.

             
Worse—access to information itself will be more easily controlled given the long transmission time for radio signals from Mars to the Earth. It will be possible to interfere, to filter and to censor.

              When it is of interest to the United States government, Mars will be a planet in equal standing with the Earth. When it is not, it will be one more state in the Union or simply an exploratory colony. The Fourth Planet will be followed by Saturn’s Titan, Europa or Ganymede, Jupiter’s moons, and, in an even more distant future, perhaps Venus. The Earth, with eight billion people, will have one vote in a planetary confederation. Countries like Brazil, India, Germany or Japan will want to have access to a permanent place on the UN Security Council. They might even get it, but that council reports to one planet – Earth. When there are other inhabited planets in the Solar System, we will need interplanetary consensus and Mars will be no more than the first of those planets.

             
The noisy European left differed with Yksmohc’s group, principally the German and French intellectuals allied with the more radical ecology movements that wanted to preserve Mars as it was. Thus, they were against any adventure destined to introduce exogenous species on that planet.
Isn’t what we’ve done to the Earth enough? Do we need to destroy everything?

              The ancient elephant ignored those critics. He thought they blocked Europe’s entry in the race to Mars and, thus, reduced multilateralism, giving a free hand to the American federal government. It was a modern version of that old interwar period pacifism that had been proven worthless by defending the West’s universal disarmament while Germany rearmed itself. Only in French culture and in its continental satellites did they dream of constructing dams against the Pacific. During the Cold War, Yksmohc said, “We were saved by guaranteed mutual destruction and by some Soviets good sense, like Vasili Arkhipov, in the face of American adventurism, like during the Cuban crisis. Whoever launched the first atomic bomb would die just like whoever replied with the second. If there had been a Martian refuge reserved for the United States, free from the threat of mutually guaranteed destruction, perhaps the Cold War might not have ended well.”

              Things soured completely when the most conservative wing of the Republican Party, groups of independents on the right, and liberals on the left connected to science began to support the rapid colonization of Mars. That right wing enthusiastically supported the idea of a pioneering, frontier culture, and the freedom that true man desired far from a controlling and suffocating State had a second chance as it was now no longer limited to Earth. A new west, freer and more adventurous, could flourish and it would include the Red Planet. Reagan had won the Cold War with his Star Wars project and his abandoning détente, which had led to the Soviet elite giving up and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The end of guaranteed mutual destruction is what had not only made the Cold War end, but also in the best way possible—with the West’s victory. The Pentagon’s project to resume a space-based anti-missile system would reduce Korea and potential aggressors to their irrelevant dimensions.

              What if freedom’s enemies, the enemies of the US and its allies, want to come to an agreement on how to divide Mars? Well, then, we’ll talk to them, but we won’t do it here, in the United Nations or at any other Earthly forum.
Matters pertaining to Mars will be discussed on Mars. Show up there when we’ve arrived and you’ll find us as partners for the construction of a new hope. If someone gets there wanting to build a mosque, count on us to lay the first stone.

              The filter was perceptible: it wasn’t who wanted to go who would, it was who could.

              Anticipation of massive investment in biological sciences, reducing human suffering in the face of disease and discrimination was what enthused some on the liberal left, close to the science, who added to this the idea that radical southern Christians would lose their long held influence if humanity gave life to another planet, decentralizing it from the Earth.
Making our life extraterrestrial is almost as good as discovering extraterrestrial life.
As Crane had foreseen years before, support from the public at large for the race had its true origins in American society’s initial internal division and in the political victory of the perspective that expansion beyond our frontiers was ripe and if it wasn’t done by the United States, it would be by the Russians, Indians and Chinese.

              Sofia and Mariah paid no attention to the confrontation filling the media in the initial phase of this debate. “Circus”, Sofia said. “This has nothing to do with us, but it does with those who sell illusions.”

              In their innocence, what neither Sofia nor Mariah knew was that a meeting had taken place among Trinity’s three leaders, known by their code names: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They didn’t know because Trinity was a heterogeneous organization, powerful enough to have ambitions of changing world history in the twenty-first century, but it was also as illegal as it was secret.

              The Father represented a group of geniuses and diverse biotechnology businesses—food, agriculture, chemical, medical, and the very new area of guided animal evolution;

              The Son represented an array of interests in mining and electronics industries and aerospace, energy and high tech industries, as well as high finance;

              The Holy Ghost was a dissident faction of the American Secret Service and Special Forces community, initially a very small minority that had grown relentlessly since fundamentalist Islamic attacks on American territory, especially after the destruction of the Capitol Building in Washington in 2021. He dominated three government agencies and had infiltrated many others. It was Trinity’s armed wing and had made great strides taking care of the Foundation.                                                       

              The Holy Ghost was born well before Trinity. Its history reached back to a young British soldier and mathematician, disciple of Touring, later naturalized as an American, claiming that whoever wants to do something relevant has to emigrate to the Promised Land, or to Paradise, expressions with which, facing the totalitarianisms and European devastation after the war, he designated the United States. He had fought against the Germans in the Second World War and had prepared himself to attack the Russians in Berlin. He was even responsible for a skirmish between Anglo-American and Soviet forces that resulted in nothing because the Russian and American commands had identified this young man’s actions as intended to set off a conflagration. Both decided they would not be manipulated into starting a war by an Englishman. After his American naturalization, he had a career in the Secret Information Service, heading up the T Cabinet, dedicated to preventing the philosophical, political and technological extinction of the West, focusing principally on the risk of a historical discontinuity emerging.

              He managed to bring the monitoring of seven discontinuities into the Secret Services’ area of responsibility: information escaping national states’ control, implanting a Planetary State before achieving the American variant of Western culture’s irreversible dominion, the autonomization of machines in relation to man, a new black plague, the physical impact of an asteroid, contact with alien civilizations and the coming of the Antichrist. It was the former and the latter that made him relevant.

              He identified the need to headquarter the administration of Internet dominions in the United States before his colleagues’ partners, thus, avoiding its flight to dematerialized locations. He pointed to European secular fundamentalism in the long term and Muslim fundamentalism in the medium term as being the principal candidates for engendering the Antichrist. In those days, the West’s consensual enemy was Soviet Communism. The T Cabinet was the first to predict that the principal external threat to the US in coming decades would arise in a radical subgroup in the Islamic world and that this threat would last for several decades, until China and India, under pressure within their own borders, had conclusively crushed it.

              Earlier, in March 1983, Reagan had made a presidential speech in which he announced the orbit-based Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, or Star Wars that was decisive in defeating the Soviets. Unfortunately for Agent T, with the Soviets vanquished and the President’s mandate over, Star Wars was put on the back burner.

              Agent T disagreed with ending Star Wars, arguing that the US needed to have a long term defense strategy against extraplanetary threats. The president, who had been his principal supporter, became the Cabinet’s main opponent in its last days because he was an implacable apologist for individual freedom and self-determination, refusing to fill the sky with everlasting eyes. He removed resources and power, coming within a millimeter of eliminating it. T protested at first, but later took the giant step that led him from a simple disagreement to having his own secret agenda to, finally, throw himself into that leap with no return of conspiring against a legitimate government. In order to survive Reagan’s pressure, the Cabinet created the Holy Ghost and designated him to strike a future blow from within the security services that would remove opponents in that sector from the scene. T was repeating his 1945 adventure in Berlin, but this time in a much wiser way.

              Before dying, with the radical Islamic threat being so visible that it had rehabilitated him, Agent T had the custom of saying that the Antichrist will hesitate when he turns his computer on to spy on us and discovers that he is being spied upon. The Antichrist will hesitate when, in Mecca, he looks to the sky and sees, not a thousand virgins, happiness and splendor, but a thousand satellites watching his every step. At the beginning of the end, after discovering the Deep Inn with its unforeseen eighth discontinuity, T tried to deactivate the Holy Ghost, but it was too late. When he died, his name remained secret and his headstone only stated “Agent T, transferred from the Promised Land to true paradise on January 18, 2018. Signed HG.”

* * *

While Sofia and Mariah spoke in a small high school in a Columbia neighborhood, in Seattle—far from there, Trinity’s three parts reached a general agreement after negotiating every detail. They then initiated the second phase of the new industrial-military complex’s most ambitious operation, formed by the Knowledge Industry and the Secret Services: Operation Celestial Smoke.

Part Three

One Thousand Centuries