[Aberrant Life] The Bower and the Hour
May. 6th, 2003 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aberrantangelsI didn't mean this to become primarily Hugh's blog, nor to neglect it so, but I've been busy. More entries, including some from other voices, will follow. - ed
They call it Operation Eden. Let's hope it takes them quite a while to figure out who the serpent is.
Utopia has announced a joint project, with the UN and the government of Ethiopia, "to transform the desert regions of northern Ethiopia into a lush temperate region capable of supporting a variety of non-desert lifeforms, as well as agriculture." Some people are actually calling it "terraforming," as if those desertized areas were no longer part of Earth.
They're not as off-base as it sounds. Antaeus' work in the region (what, like anyone besides the good Dr. Balmer could lead such a project?) is intended as the dry-run for terraforming of other planets, once hyperflight-capable novas have done the exploration. (Our sources inside major governments indicate that they started considering this as an option after T2M saved the shuttle Discovery back in March.)
[I debated whether to include this, since it might be seen as in bad taste given the fate of the Columbia, coincidentally a little before the time of the Discovery incident Hugh speaks of. I told him about Columbia, and he sends his condolences and wishes T2M could have saved shuttles in both universes. - ed]
All that quantum energy flying around is apt to lead to another spike in the rate of increase in the nova population. (The official nova population, that is.) Aeon's year-end census has shown a steadily increasing number of public novas in the world population (2500 at the end of last year), and we still hear of 30 to 40 eruptions a month, but the rate of increase of the per annum rate of increase has been keeping less and less ahead of mortality attrition. There was a bump last year, probably from the rollout of eufiber the year before (people on the street wearing a material that conducts quantum energy will have that effect), but it wasn't much of one (300 in '01, 400 last year). 1999 (when the public nova population more than doubled) remains the high-water mark.
But as I say, I think that's going to change now. And there's no guarantee that any given one of those new novas will be on "our" side. Hell, there's no guarantee that the ones Utopia does recruit will stay on its side.
Then again, given my misgivings about Utopia's management (the kind of misgivings you can only have if you yourself work for Aeon), that may not be a bad thing. Aeon would be happier if N-Day had never happened, if we were still the only ones who knew about what used to be called the paranormal. Failing that, my employers are happy to control as much of the post-human as they can.
Was it really only five years ago that Aeon announced its UN support and invited all interested novas to come in for a chat? (Technically, it was five years and five days ago. Time sure flies when you're having fun, doesn't it?) Of course, when Lavielle opened dialogue between Aeon and the UN a few weeks before, offering to seek out and study novas, she hadn't deigned to mention that these weren't the first eximorphs we'd ever had available for study. Nor, obviously, did she go on to say anything about the possible differences between these "new humans" and the dynamically inspired individuals we already knew about, the differences we wanted to find out about.
Your typical Jordan McDevitt listener is the only one asking how Aeon was in position to make its pitch to the UN so soon after N-Day, and he only asks that as a sideline between rants about the ATF and the NWO. But at least he's right to be worried about one thing (the way a stopped clock is right once or twice a day). Bill Burroughs once said a paranoid is just someone who knows what's really going on; if you think that was just the smack talking, you haven't been paying attention.
So, as you can see, I actually have several candidates for the role of that serpent I mentioned in my opening paragraph, but I only know where to find one of them. The others may not even exist yet, but if and when they do, they'll hit Aeon in ways I could overheat my node trying to extrapolate. And they don't scare me half as much as the one in my mirror.
They call it Operation Eden. Let's hope it takes them quite a while to figure out who the serpent is.
Utopia has announced a joint project, with the UN and the government of Ethiopia, "to transform the desert regions of northern Ethiopia into a lush temperate region capable of supporting a variety of non-desert lifeforms, as well as agriculture." Some people are actually calling it "terraforming," as if those desertized areas were no longer part of Earth.
They're not as off-base as it sounds. Antaeus' work in the region (what, like anyone besides the good Dr. Balmer could lead such a project?) is intended as the dry-run for terraforming of other planets, once hyperflight-capable novas have done the exploration. (Our sources inside major governments indicate that they started considering this as an option after T2M saved the shuttle Discovery back in March.)
[I debated whether to include this, since it might be seen as in bad taste given the fate of the Columbia, coincidentally a little before the time of the Discovery incident Hugh speaks of. I told him about Columbia, and he sends his condolences and wishes T2M could have saved shuttles in both universes. - ed]
All that quantum energy flying around is apt to lead to another spike in the rate of increase in the nova population. (The official nova population, that is.) Aeon's year-end census has shown a steadily increasing number of public novas in the world population (2500 at the end of last year), and we still hear of 30 to 40 eruptions a month, but the rate of increase of the per annum rate of increase has been keeping less and less ahead of mortality attrition. There was a bump last year, probably from the rollout of eufiber the year before (people on the street wearing a material that conducts quantum energy will have that effect), but it wasn't much of one (300 in '01, 400 last year). 1999 (when the public nova population more than doubled) remains the high-water mark.
But as I say, I think that's going to change now. And there's no guarantee that any given one of those new novas will be on "our" side. Hell, there's no guarantee that the ones Utopia does recruit will stay on its side.
Then again, given my misgivings about Utopia's management (the kind of misgivings you can only have if you yourself work for Aeon), that may not be a bad thing. Aeon would be happier if N-Day had never happened, if we were still the only ones who knew about what used to be called the paranormal. Failing that, my employers are happy to control as much of the post-human as they can.
Was it really only five years ago that Aeon announced its UN support and invited all interested novas to come in for a chat? (Technically, it was five years and five days ago. Time sure flies when you're having fun, doesn't it?) Of course, when Lavielle opened dialogue between Aeon and the UN a few weeks before, offering to seek out and study novas, she hadn't deigned to mention that these weren't the first eximorphs we'd ever had available for study. Nor, obviously, did she go on to say anything about the possible differences between these "new humans" and the dynamically inspired individuals we already knew about, the differences we wanted to find out about.
Your typical Jordan McDevitt listener is the only one asking how Aeon was in position to make its pitch to the UN so soon after N-Day, and he only asks that as a sideline between rants about the ATF and the NWO. But at least he's right to be worried about one thing (the way a stopped clock is right once or twice a day). Bill Burroughs once said a paranoid is just someone who knows what's really going on; if you think that was just the smack talking, you haven't been paying attention.
So, as you can see, I actually have several candidates for the role of that serpent I mentioned in my opening paragraph, but I only know where to find one of them. The others may not even exist yet, but if and when they do, they'll hit Aeon in ways I could overheat my node trying to extrapolate. And they don't scare me half as much as the one in my mirror.
