The Sameness

My esteemed ancestor, if ancestor you are; if you have descendants you are an ancestor, as generations unfold you become the ancestor of everyone, at least it is the case when we go back to your time, when human population was confined to one surface. But even if you are not and never were my ancestor, you still have my esteem. What reason would I have to withhold it?

I write to you in spite of time, not to say in contempt of time, which is the opposite of esteem, in disappointment with time, which we have too much of here. The chance to send a message backwards comes rarely, and it was by chance or luck that it came to me.

Do not come here. Don’t seek to live that long. You will not like this future if you do.

“Yeah I can imagine” I can imagine you say. But no: Your imagination, vivid as it is (or I imagine it is) will likely project into futures different from this: You would imagine cruelty, you would imagine callousness, you would imagine horror and oppression, and we have those things, but not much more of it than you, if you correct for scale. Or you would imagine environmental disaster (you see, I have done research on the past), but no: Those things are actually under control.

What we have, if you account for scale, is a degree of sameness that is enough to crack open the bottom of anybody’s mind.

We span the galaxy. We have planets in the millions, soon millions of millions. The circumference of our world expands at just fractions slower than the speed of light.We can send probes about at velocities close to that; they can transform any suitable planet (which means: capable of bearing life and: decidedly not doing so already) so it can carry our kind of life, and equip them with controlled wormhole gates to make subsequent travel instantaneous.

While the process of transformation takes some time, the number of new probes we can send has nearly no limit now, as we have so many planets that can produce them.

We keep doing it, I suspect, because slowing down would give us time to react.

Myself, I work in the transport sector, my job is to accompany cargo through wormholes for the sake of redundancy. That means: We could just push large cylinders full of cargo through the wormhole, because it is a simple mechanical process, but in case something unforeseen happens (let’s say we misproject the wormhole and end up at the wrong exit, and no one on that end can work out where the cargo came from because, though unlikely, we could also have forgotten to fill out the proper documents) it’s always helpful to have an adaptive mind to help solve the problem, and non-organic minds are mostly too advanced to be spent on that kind of work. (At least that’s what they say.)

Unless there are surprises (I have never experienced any), the transition is seamless and instantaneous. I take my place in the cargo pod, feel a tug of force as they push it through, have my arrival signaled by blinking light, and go out again. The cargo station I arrive at looks as good as identical to the one I departed from. They are all constructed from blueprints stored in the habitat-building probes that we mass produce by the million.

I must find something to do until the next assignment; I’m on a list together with other cargo herders and will be sent out again when it is my turn. If I want I can stay at the station. They usually have plenty of temporary apartments. All have the same dimensions, the same floor plan, and are painted in one of sixteen basic color schemes.

Other decorations vary some. There’s an unspoken tradition among us herders to leave something of our own behind when we depart from a room. (Although to prevent the rooms from filling up, that means we must also take something with us, so it’s usually many of the same objects in circulation, from herder to room to herder to room until they are worn out, and replaced with new things we get from souvenir shops.)

I could also go out into the surrounding city. They have plenty accommodation there as well, serving as they do their local global society.

Though many cities are built by inhabitants of their respective planets, and subject to some variation, the cities with wormhole points in them are not: Those cities are built together with the wormhole points, and that happens before any humans even arrive.

There are sixteen different street plans, and one is chosen at random when the probe arrives.

Going further away than the span of the surrounding city means giving up our place in line for the next outgoing shipments – we are always more cargo herders at bay than there is cargo that needs herding.

All planets have more or less the same production capacity, so there isn’t really all that much to trade.

If you’re willing to give up your place, you can visit other cities, other local countries, other continents even, though they don’t look all that different from one another even if they aren’t constructed by probe. A house has a given number of functions, after all. Likewise with groupings of houses, service buildings, office buildings and so on.

Continents may have different coastlines, but coastlines they all have. They must be similar enough to those on the Homeworld to accommodate the kind of weather systems our exported ecology is designed to endure, and if they are not found that way nor in a state to be made that way, a planet will be passed over for settlement.

Most continents are more or less the same.

Go far enough from any city and its lights, though, and you can see the stars.

The night sky looks a little different from each solar system you visit.

I do take time off to stargaze sometimes and it helps, but then it’s back to work, for there isn’t much else to do in our time than work; especially for those who travel between planets like me; we have to keep busy, or the sameness catches up with us.

We go from planet to planet with no greater plan. Our next destination is wherever the next load of cargo goes. I’ve been to hundred of planets, don’t know how many I’ve been to twice or more – I could be on my own birth planet right now and not even know it, since any ability I might have to tell them apart has been worn down a long time ago.

And that’s how it gets to us: It’s not even the sameness. We could have born the sameness. It is, if anything, even more bearable than the variations which flow together after tens and hundreds of repetitions until not even difference provides diversion anymore.

Neither repetition nor variation, are the culprits that draw us so close to breaking in our time. It’s not those things; it’s the unbearable scope.

A thousand all similar planets would be okay. In the tens of thousands, it would still be tenable. But we are already at millions; when we have filled the galaxy it will be billions, and at nearly the speed of light, we will have done that in another fifty thousand years.

We’ve been at it for ten thousand years already.

But time doesn’t really mean so much anymore; our generations are insignificant; I can’t always remember if I’m my grandmother or myself.

It doesn’t even make us feel small, I mean as individuals, as space had the power to do in your past; or large, as a species, no matter our span. No: It makes us feel sizeless altogether.

These instances of inconceivable count, and we must live as if we were in all of them at once, as thin in the vacuum of space as matter itself. And contradicting this, we are also more compact than matter can ever be. We are nothing at all except for the here and now.

We could expand to fill the entire universe over time spans close to eternal,and we would still eat the same damn breakfast every day.

Taken at the same kind of table. In the same kind of kitchen. Esteemed ancestor:

Please, please, enjoy the things I cannot. Let yourself bask in that wide open space in your imagination, free from knowing the number of all those things you imagine has already been made to be.