Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.

HIS NAME WAS DUBOIS JEROME XAVIER HARRIS, PH.D. THE FRENCH first name came from his Louisiana ancestors on his mother’s side. The Harrises were Canadian blacks whose ancestors had come up to Toronto during slavery. Jerome and Xavier were the names of saints—two of them, just to be on the safe side. The family straddled the border in the Detroit-Windsor area. Inevitably, he had been dubbed Doob by his friends at school when they had still been too young to understand that “doobie” was slang for a marijuana cigarette. The overwhelming majority of people called him Doc Dubois now, because he was on TV a lot, and that was how the talk show hosts and the network anchormen introduced him. His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning rod for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.

“But, Moira,” Markus said, “we cannot do that anyway until so many other things are in place. A large population cannot live in arklets eating algae. We need to establish a viable and safe colony first. Then, we build your lab. Then, we create a more diverse ecosystem: better food, greater stability. Only then do we even begin to worry about the heterozygosity of the human population. Until that time, we have more than enough people to create healthy non-inbred children just by the usual process of fucking each other.”

It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

Ty shrugged. “Humans have always—” He was about to say deluded themselves but didn’t want to make a poor impression on Deep. “—preferred to believe that there was a purpose to the universe. Until the moon blew up, they had theories. After Zero, the theories all seemed kind of stupid. Fairy tales for coddled children. No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive. Like ants when their nest has been destroyed. On those rare occasions when we thought about the big picture, it wasn’t really that big—Red versus Blue or what have you. There was surprisingly little thinking about the Agent. Where it came from. Whether it was natural or artificial, or even divine.” Einstein, the Cyc, and Deep were all nodding as if to say Go on, go on! But he had nothing to go on with. “Some people—some Red, some Blue, and some ambiguous folks like the Owners of my bar—maybe even some of those kind of people”—he nodded at Deep—“seem to think they know something.”