Our Boeing 997 is a slim white arrow shooting over the top of the world, destination, Spitzbergen International.
Behind us trails a long hydrogen flame, freezing into a rainbow of sparkly ice crystals arcing back to Whitehorse, the pot of gold I call home.
Aboard the thirty-minute flight, everyone is chattering with each other— all except me.
I’m staring out the round window, watching the fields beneath flash by and shrink away as we climb toward low orbit where, for a moment, the sky turns black. Then a multitude of stars fills Space, stark against the cobalt-blue Arctic Ocean hugging Mother Earth’s curvature.
An involuntary gasp thumps once in my chest, growing to chills of awe throughout my body.
The moment passes, ending with a brief kiss of zero-gee before we begin our descent. Ahead, an island rushes at us, grows huge, and with a soft bump, we’re back on terra firma.
“You may unbuckle and debark for the bus outside,” our captain says over the intercom. Judging by her accent, she’s from the west end of the Yukon-Alaska Federation.
Rising, I merge with the other passengers, all students my age, ready to shuffle down the aisle, excited about our day trip. Some, I gather, are from as far away as the bicoastal regions of US2.
None from the quarantined inner wilds of Evangia zoo.
Daring a scare, I try imagining my thirteen-year-old self as someone named Purity in that place. Uneducated, my sole purpose is ripe chattel. Next stop, trafficked into an arranged marriage of nightly rape, lit by candles in a new, Bible-based Dark Age.
Shudder.
In one of life’s ironies, my grandparents, who were newlyweds when that calamity began, thought we were the ones who were backward, frequently moaning about how they missed the old days.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
We lost Gramps and Gram after they refused the WHO’s final Omni-shot. I’m still raw about it, even missing their regular kvetching over the lack of some obsolete device called a smartphone.
One of their occasional complaints was particularly enigmatic.
“Social media is not a vector for this cognopath hoax!”
It took me a while to puzzle that out—before it became a quest. Even an obsession, but in a positive way. For one thing, my research inspired an essay I themed about cognopathy that won me a place on this transpolar expedition.
A friendly “we’re moving” from behind puts me in motion to the exit.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
The bus our pilot promised is an antiquated, internal combustion monster converted to hydro. Climbing the stairs, I swear I catch a stray whiff of diesel, and once underway, it is as loud as the dickens, but to my surprise, the ride is velvet smooth. Soon, we pass through a gate guarding our destination, and the hiss of airbrakes chases off any further remnants of the Stinky Past.
The driver stands and faces her three-dozen visitors. A dignified elder, she’s willowy and blonde with piercing blue eyes tinged by world-weariness as she scans us before speaking.
“Welcome to the World Eco-Heritage Preserve, maintained by the Republic of Scandinavia. My name is Elbee Fireberry, and I will be your guide during your visit. Please stay together and follow me.”
More shuffling along an aisle ensues. Once out, not much around besides empty tundra resembling old pictures of the Yukon back when it still snowed. Closer, hanging at a tilt on the fence, a rusty sign reading “Beware of Polar Bears” with a red slash through it. Most otherworldly, an imposing obelisk towering from the hillside.
“We enter here,” Ms. Fireberry advises, and through a pair of doors, we troupe, descending broad mason steps toward a cool gloom bright lights cannot warm. At the bottom, the space opens into a subterranean Great Hall, and with a shiver, my vision adjusts. Before me, a series of stone carvings feature people groaning under the weight of history and its pains.
Disease, famine, war, and death. The Four Horsemen, if I recall my comparative mythological studies with any accuracy.
‘For these things too shall pass’ was another notion I squirreled away from those lessons.
But not in the way most expected.
Ms. Fireberry’s voice pulls me back to the here and now, canceling my tendency to digress and daydream.
“Can anyone tell me what we commemorate today?” she asks.
I do but refrain from raising a hand. As I hoped, a few others signal they want to play.
“Remembrance Day!” a boy in the front of our group blurts out.
“Well done,” our guide responds, “and would someone else care to expand on what we are remembering?”
This is when I first get sad.
“My grandparents,” I mumble, from a burst of emotion that breaches my self-control.
The granite walls amplify my lament into a booming dirge. In response, several hands lay on my shoulders, touching, condoling.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You must miss them.”
“I, too, lost some family, although before I was born.”
Different voices, each sharing kind words.
Ms. Fireberry let a beat pass.
“We all lost beloved family, and for us elders, friends too.”
She sighed, adding softly, “sometimes, evolution can be so cruel.”
There it was. The Neanderthal Redux Theory, and leaving our suffering ancestors behind, we follow our leader into the inner sanctums without a word.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
It’s ancient history how, back when everything looked grim, some worriers stashed all sorts of seeds as a type of Noah’s Ark in this remote locale. Records get murky around The Zap, however. On that hinge of time, my hero, Dr. Joel Morgansteen, proposed the existence of a new class of life: Infectious cognitive pathogens raising oceans of pandemic irrationalism.
To quote him, “despite all we’ve learned through science, we are as blind to the true nature of our peril as those who endured the Black Plague before germ theory and microscopes.”
Whenever I recall those words, I indulge in a fantasy of traveling back in time, lugging along a Subquantum Resonant Imager—the microscope my globally-vilified hero lacked.
He gasps as I show him modulated synaptic emanations in subspace. Now, I’m a hero too, but we are still thwarted because these are the bitter olden days when his prescience came too late. Compromised cognitive immune systems—mental AIDS—is widespread from cognopaths mutating and replicating at warp speed via seductive and promiscuous new technologies with zero cogno-viral safeguards.
It’s time to recheck my surroundings, but Ms. Fireberry is talking about stuff I already know, so I return to my mind castle in the sky.
As the queen of my domain, I float to the far edges of possibility, imagining Before when everything glittered surface cool and shiny. Did a pan-conscious entity emerge among the faithnet-infected? A would-be deity enraged by Morgansteen outing it as a baby emperor—sans diapers. Per the spiteful pathology, it motivated its hosts to mass suicide rather than abdicate.
Allegorical, yes, but tied to historical facts. An ICBM hacked by The Rapture Apostles leveraged the magnetosphere for maximum global mayhem, and anything electric went Zap.
Closer to the heart, Gramp’s and Gram’s occasional retelling of that monstrous day, they in bliss over a sonogram of my unborn Mother when everything went offline.
You’d think the hard years the few survivors needed to reboot the world would’ve taught interspecies cooperation, but the final fight I witnessed between Mother and her folks ended my delusion.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
“Take the new Omni-shot! It’s AI-tested and the last one you’ll ever need,” my Mother pleaded.
But all Gramps did was scoff.
“Machines parroting their atheist creator’s words that faith is the symptom of an infectious mental illness. No bloody way! How do I know they won’t also try to cure my faith in God?”
My poor Mother shook her head.
“Getting vaccinated won’t change your beliefs because that ship sailed. You know damn well medicine claims no reliable cure for having faith once infected—although if they announce one, I swear, I’ll sneak it into your bedtime glass of warm milk!”
It took a week to rebuild that burned familial bridge and a month before conversational traffic resumed, helped by me as chief mediator.
Not long after domestic tranquility moved back in, Gram got a Variant from another old, secret pray-mate, and Whitehorse lost both them and Gramps in two hellish days.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
I’ve overindulged my inner world this time because the tour group is far ahead. Catching up, a placard tells me this is the Vault of Historic Horrors, featuring the last samples of all the bio-pathogens once afflicting humanity;
Smallpox, Leprosy, Bubonic Plague, Measles, Malaria, ‘flu, AIDS, Covid33-omega.
Plus, oh, so many, many others.
I realize I’m holding my breath as I read the labels, paling at the descriptions—and pictures—of the symptoms listed under the hyper-carbonate containment vessels.
A girl beside me whispers, “what if one of these leaked?”
Ms. Fireberry overhears the question and answers while managing to portray confidence.
“Unlikely, given the safety protocols, but worst case, your Omni-shot is adaptive.”
More musing and chills down various spines ensue as we gravely regard clips of crying, dying people interspersed by a short holographic interview with an ‘epidemiologist’ famous during the original covid pandemic.
“Come along,” our guide calls when this brief foray into the Barbaric Past concludes, “our next stop only opened a fortnight ago.”
Again, protected, but this time, for our viewing discomfort, the last physical sources of all the faith-disease cogno-pathogens.
Bible, Koran, Talmud, Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf.
Also, the ultimate Trojan Horse, the US Constitution. A pioneer of smuggling mass-cognopathy past the Guardians of the Enlightenment by guaranteeing freedom of religion instead of freedom from religion.
Those and more loomed. To me, a gruesome family of infectious mental illnesses with a rap sheet of murder relegating cancer’s snake-pit of assassins to the amateur leagues.
I study them with slitted eyes, the culprits pretending inert harmlessness inside their enclosures. Yet we all fear with gut-twisting certainty that if let loose, the seeds would rush out, seeking minds to infect and restart millennia of dystopia, stumbling toward apocalypse—and over the cliff humanity goes.
The boy who blurted “Remembrance Day” is bubbling with energy.
“If modern humans possess superior cognitive immunity to cognopaths, why isolate the sources?”
“A splendid question!” Ms. Fireberry responds. “Can anyone tell us?”
We all regard each other and shrug. I mean, come on, we are all only thirteen—very well-educated, true, but not experts on disease like the long-gone Dr. Fauci we just witnessed.
“Because,” our guide answers when no one speaks up, “like bio-pathogens, cognopaths also mutate and evolve, but far faster, so why tempt fate when we can eliminate the possibility of a pandemic forever?”
Sounds good to me.
Remembrance Day, as I’ve nicknamed him in secret, pipes up again, and I suspect he carries more in his cranium than he’s letting on.
“She’s right! Christianity started as a message of love but mutated into pandemics of severe cognitive damage espousing sheer hatefulness.”
Tempted to encourage his enthusiasm, I ask, “How severe?” and it’s all he needs.
“So severe victims even gaslighted themselves, refusing to acknowledge direct physical evidence of extreme personal danger when it contradicted their cognopathic faith delusions!”
Somehow, Remembrance Day channels my painful memories of losing my grandparents, nigh-last specimens of a cousin species.
Plus, let us remember a quarantined remnant in Evangia zoo.
Proud, stubborn, fatally misinformed, spurning salvation for Salvation, and a self-extinguishing trait evidenced by their ever-falling numbers.
Ms. Fireberry seems unsurprised by the somber mood of her entourage, so her following words rate, shall I say, the least objectionable given all the other worse options.
“We cannot blame those who lacked the Enlightenment-spurred, epigenetic mutation conferring improved cognopathic immunity. It has little to do with intelligence, and they suffered terribly. First, from damage to reliable logical thinking, then the psychological agonies inflicted by faith. Finally, further opportunistic physical and mental infections as gateways to addictions and other self-destructive behaviors ending in death.”
Yes, kindness, empathy, always, yet also, that other thing, again, Neanderthal Redux, a temporary, dual-species coexistence. I let the thought roll forward. Those long-lost cousins sported bigger skulls than our more direct ancestors, but something wiped them out while we kept going. Only this time around, the extinction is still in living memory. The difference, or fault if you will, though too small to see with the naked eye, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.
Or, as another hero of mine, Darwin, might say, in those less fit and adapted for the future.
Craving some mind-light, I force myself to one-eighty out of this downer and focus on the upsides—and they abound. We’ve arrested global warming, cured all disease, dismantled war, and eliminated poverty for the billion who inherited the Earth.
Most exciting, lifespans are now stretching out faster than we’re aging…
In five years, I’ll qualify for Sol Fleet, my lead interest, terra-forming Venus, so it can be made habitable. Amazing what we, Homo-Stellaris, can accomplish when we’re not held back.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
One final display awaits my attention. A row of terminals labeled “In Memory of.”
Access to billions of digitized, extinct-in-the-wild, homo-sapiens genomes and full-neural engrams illegally collected by the old internet oligarchs.
I can call up Gramps and Gram and, looking at their smiling images, tingle as love and heartache wash over me, swelling next to tears.
Remembrance Day swims into the blurry edge of my sadness, realizes my state, and we’re both embarrassed, me dashing a stray tear that splats the touchscreen—right on the ‘Close’ icon.
Again, my grandparents are gone before I’m ready, and I whisper, “Goodbye.”
Yes, I know, it means “God be with you,” and though an illusion, they believed it, so I wish them the comfort of their dearest belief.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
On the way home, everyone is quiet. Me? I’m mind-smacked, the flight a fitful dream, drifting to sleep-walking past shapes and noises inside the Whitehorse Airport concourse.
A tap on my shoulder wakes me. It’s Remembrance Day, breathless, I’m guessing, from running to find me. As he presses a slip of paper into my hand, the intercom announces the suborbital for SanFran is boarding, and he gasps.
“Write to me, please?”
Before I can respond, he dashes away, leaving me to read his address and name, Sehn Zeitmann, all in fine cursive.
I stuff the note in a pocket.
This is a day of days, and I make my way to the parking lot, burdened with an invisible but heavy bag of thoughts, emotions, and memories. Wandering, I sigh at my tendency to forget where I leave my little red e-Ford. After resorting to a serpentine search pattern, I find it and, hopping in, tell it to take me home on the west shore of Lake LeBerge.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
In the soothing respite of our veggie garden, Mother is kneeling, dressed in her usual camo overalls, collecting basil for pesto with dinner. Sensing my presence, she glances up, wipes her brow, and smiles.
“Hey, Meridith. How was your trip?”
I squat, raise the wooden gathering bowl to my nostrils, and savor the sweet aroma of her harvest before answering.
“Interesting. I think I made a new pen-pal—and I saw Gramps and Gram in the Memory Vault.”
A moment of surprise widens her eyes before a wistful smile pulls on her lips.
“Not the afterlife they imagined…but perhaps someday.”
It’s a novel hope circulating. Cure and edit out the faith infections before genomic resurrection from samples infused with engrams.
The irony is not lost on me or anyone else.
All it took for humanity to achieve immortality and heaven was losing all faith.
That last sentence holds the winning words in the essay that earned my ticket to Spitzbergen. I call them my sunny side to Morgansteen’s First Postulate:
Faith promises forever, but when mixed with enough technology, the forever of extinction is inevitable.
