The Edge

By R. Khosrowshahi

It’s all up to you.

You’re completely responsible for your life on the land.

You are the rotation.

Awesome burden. Perfect freedom.

When you take responsibility for one life you take it for all life.

If you won’t take it, you don’t exist.

Tough, isn’t it?

Eighty acres on the Quimper Peninsula, seven kilometres southwest of Port Townsend, accessed via a logging road at the site of a decommissioned skid landing. The parcel was purchased in 1981 by a Marin County periodontist named Gerald Fane, who had taken 5-MeO-DMT in a motel room in Sedona and emerged four hours later convinced that the electrical grid was a parasitic intelligence feeding on human attention. He installed a rain catchment system and three structures framed with salvaged old-growth fir from a demolished cannery in Anacortes. He died of a perforated ulcer in 1986, alone, on a Thermarest pad, a copy of Illich's Tools for Conviviality open on his chest.

When in The Gospel according to the Egyptians, Shelom asked the Lord:

“How long shall death prevail?” He answered: “So long as you women bear children….” And when she asked again: “I have done well then in not bearing children? He answered: “Eat every plant but that which is bitter….”

It is not enough to be moral. It is not enough to be just. It is not enough to be right. 

Linden held a theory session. Capital and war were the same machine at different clock speeds. The correct response was to accelerate. No one objected.

The first set of scenarios: Iranian nuclear milestones. We worked them in the main cabin over three days. Linden administered the injections on schedule. We ate our portions. We read, we talked, we built the predictions. Narrow confidence intervals. Very high accuracy. Morley’s friend came back for the results. He took the laptop and left a new one.

The second set: what would happen if certain actions were taken against Iran. Strike scenarios. Escalation ladders. The questions were formatted to look like our own work. The variable categories had been adjusted since the first set — adjusted to match the refinements we had made to our own system in the three weeks between deliveries. You are in the signal. You are performing the signal. Somewhere past the fog line the signal becomes a city on fire or a currency that isn't worth anything anymore or a mother running with her child, but in the edge that's just data resolving. It doesn't have a sound. It has a confidence interval and a timestamp.

***

That night Morley mentioned at the watch change T. was in Rome. Private lectures near the Vatican. The subject was the Antichrist.

0200. Bay black and still. I climbed into the cockpit and sat on the teak grating. From the Alba, the hum of the servers. They also ran the feed to Arlington — a satellite uplink Morley had rigged to look like a weather station.  

I thought about it the old way, like before. The protocols that keep me in the edge are the same protocols that keep me from calling Kai. 

Garrett was up. Three boats over. His navigation lights had been off for months. I got in the dinghy and rowed over. 

His bilge pump was running again. A wet, laboured sound. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. 

He said, “Ours were in a basement. You could feel them through the floor.” He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “We were running futures on municipal water systems. Who was going to privatise what and when. We were very good at it. Then someone used our numbers to short a utility in Flint and sixty thousand people lost clean water for three years and we knew and we kept going because the model said that was what we were supposed to do.”

He looked at the Alba. 

“You know the thing I didn’t figure out until after?”  He was turning a shackle pin between his fingers. “We thought we found the sources and built the feeds and made the connections ourselves. But afterward, when I was in the hospital, I kept thinking about how easy it all was. How the feeds were just there. How the contacts fell into place. How the first client showed up before we had a product to sell.” He looked at the shackle pin. He said, “Nobody recruits you. They just make sure you find what you’re looking for. They put the pieces where you’ll trip over them. And you build the thing and you think it’s yours and you run it and it works and it works and it works, and then one day you realise the thing you built was specced before you built it.”

He said, “Your friend?” He held up his scarred arms. “We had one of those, too. Same type. Same approach. Came straight to us in the dark.” 

I didn’t say anything. 

He said it the way you’d say the tide was coming in.  

“Not because someone’s going to stop you, who would that even be. The engine doesn’t break. You break. And then the engine finds new people.” 

I asked what happened in Portland. He held up his arms again, thick with burn scars.

He said, “One of us tried to destroy the servers. I was standing too close. She was right to do it. It didn’t matter. They rebuilt the whole thing in Austin in six weeks. Better than before.”

About the Author

R. Khosrowshahi is a writer and Orchid Grower on the Big Island.