Jeremiah’s Offer
A battle of wits between two individuals will decide the future of humanity. Within the gleaming perfection of the new city set like a jewel on the lunar plain, the best and brightest from Earth, intimately connected in cyber space, are attempting to wipe the slate clean and engineer a new civilization based on pure reason, while clamping down on the distracting elements in human nature, the unnecessary emotion and self-serving artistic license--the non-computable--which breeds the irrationality blamed for the unfolding chaos on Earth. As a political compromise, a sub-colony reservation of these atavistic elements is maintained, but safely outside the body politic. When a setback in food production occurs, Jeremiah, of imposing stature and iron will, who rose up from inner city Detroit and a dissolute musician father, conceives a plan for eliminating the inhabitants of the colony and converting its dome to food production. Considering survival the only priority, this is mathematically the best choice in a critical moment of their endeavor. It is a chance to make his mark; a final purpose in a purpose driven life.
Cosimo, a former seminarian from the Liguorian coast of Italy, diminutive and Picasso-esque, who was instrumental in gaining the old world compromise, steeped in history, language and semantics, begins by questioning technology’s effect on conceptions of morality. Wasn’t it faith--faith by definition itself irrational--that they can, and do, record and capture individual minds which will surely be fully reconstituted as the inexorable tide of their technology advances? Doesn’t this skew the moral vision of death? Even execution? He is concerned not only for the colony, but fears that the pendulum has swung too far the other way, and that in the effort to suppress undesirable aspects of the mind, they are compromising its full functionality, even its perception of reality, and so threatening their survival in a more fundamental way. And in any case they may be on the verge of jettisoning their humanity in order to save it.
Though the implementation of fully participatory democracy is evolving, there is still opportunity for individual initiative and Jeremiah, heavily involved in operational and executive functions, holds the upper hand. In the old world Jeremiah had been the underdog, the new kid on the block facing off against Cosimo’s continental, cosmopolitan sophistry. But everything has changed. Cosimo already feels his isolated corner of the kingdom fading into esoterica, as well as the declining usefulness of his own biological life. He has one last chance to sway the course of events, and maybe save himself. He must use his wits, his rhetoric, and something of feeling and poetry, to break the spell.
A battle of wits between two individuals will decide the future of humanity. Within the gleaming perfection of the new city set like a jewel on the lunar plain, the best and brightest from Earth, intimately connected in cyber space, are attempting to wipe the slate clean and engineer a new civilization based on pure reason, while clamping down on the distracting elements in human nature, the unnecessary emotion and self-serving artistic license--the non-computable--which breeds the irrationality blamed for the unfolding chaos on Earth. As a political compromise, a sub-colony reservation of these atavistic elements is maintained, but safely outside the body politic. When a setback in food production occurs, Jeremiah, of imposing stature and iron will, who rose up from inner city Detroit and a dissolute musician father, conceives a plan for eliminating the inhabitants of the colony and converting its dome to food production. Considering survival the only priority, this is mathematically the best choice in a critical moment of their endeavor. It is a chance to make his mark; a final purpose in a purpose driven life.
Cosimo, a former seminarian from the Liguorian coast of Italy, diminutive and Picasso-esque, who was instrumental in gaining the old world compromise, steeped in history, language and semantics, begins by questioning technology’s effect on conceptions of morality. Wasn’t it faith--faith by definition itself irrational--that they can, and do, record and capture individual minds which will surely be fully reconstituted as the inexorable tide of their technology advances? Doesn’t this skew the moral vision of death? Even execution? He is concerned not only for the colony, but fears that the pendulum has swung too far the other way, and that in the effort to suppress undesirable aspects of the mind, they are compromising its full functionality, even its perception of reality, and so threatening their survival in a more fundamental way. And in any case they may be on the verge of jettisoning their humanity in order to save it.
Though the implementation of fully participatory democracy is evolving, there is still opportunity for individual initiative and Jeremiah, heavily involved in operational and executive functions, holds the upper hand. In the old world Jeremiah had been the underdog, the new kid on the block facing off against Cosimo’s continental, cosmopolitan sophistry. But everything has changed. Cosimo already feels his isolated corner of the kingdom fading into esoterica, as well as the declining usefulness of his own biological life. He has one last chance to sway the course of events, and maybe save himself. He must use his wits, his rhetoric, and something of feeling and poetry, to break the spell.
