Bandwidth (Analog #1)

by Eliot Peper

The universe was malleable, as long as you defined the rules.

eventually I realized that building something meaningful requires you to let go of the obsession with perfection. It requires empowering others and trusting them to do their part, even if they do it differently than you might have. But trust is a two-way street. Autonomy means you’re held accountable.”

It was almost as if he might be able to escape the dark environs of his personal history if he could immerse himself in that of others. Like memory, history was synthetic. Humans thought of both as factual records, but study after study confirmed that they were more like dreams, narratives constructed and reconstructed by the mind to fit the demands of the present, not the reality of the past.

He was nothing. A short-lived speck on a meaningless rock orbiting an insignificant star in a forgotten galaxy in a universe bound by the unflinching laws of thermodynamics to descend into ultimate heat death. For a moment, the veneer of paranoia that laced this excursion fell away to reveal the unadulterated curiosity beneath. Whatever was at the center of this uncanny labyrinth, he wanted to press his face to the railing and stare.

“Shankar Vedantam wrote that those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers, while those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine,”

We take the world we’re born into for granted. We imagine that we control our thoughts and dreams. We think we’re free to be who we want to be. But there’s this vast hidden architecture that shapes us, and we don’t even know it. It’s like we’re actors in a play who don’t realize we’re working off a script.”

“Even actors have a choice,” she said, serious again. “Once you know there’s a script, you can choose your own inflections. You can learn to improvise. You can make the play better. Understanding how things came to be frees us to imagine new possibilities.

“Ultimately, the only power we have is to choose how we see the world,” she continued. “We don’t control what happens. But we do get to decide how to interpret what happens, how to synthesize it, what to do next.”

Maybe this was the natural way of things. Career nonprofit staff spiraled into cynicism as they faced the futility of so many failed social-impact projects while savvy lobbyists discovered idealism like divorcées falling back in love.

Despite the trappings of wish fulfillment and the pleasures of experimentation, the previous night’s carnal spree had left him disgusted with himself. It clarified just how negotiable his own virtue really was.

In between hotly contested debates, they’d imagined futures of whispered conversations fraught with geopolitical consequence. Though they differed in their outlook, they shared the urge to become players in the great game. The reality of it was shabby compared to the grandeur of their dreams.

Verdant wilderness and untold fortunes awaited them, along with infection, violence, and disaster. They had pressed ahead into the unknown, hoping to escape the lives they left behind and forge something new and wild and beautiful with whatever they could pack in their wagons or tuck away in their souls.

Science had cut away technical problems like a hot scalpel through butter, but social problems persisted because there was no perfect solution, only the messy ongoing processes of commerce and politics.

If you couldn’t come to terms with those across the aisle, you lost your claim on the common good.

Analysts liked to generalize geopolitics into abstract trend lines, explaining wars with complex economic reasoning. But in the real world, the human beings in charge often made momentous decisions for far more obscure, far more personal reasons. Helen wasn’t a metaphor—she was flesh and blood. A face really could launch a thousand ships.

The risks we take define who we become.”

It is the curse of the wise to suffer the petty degradations of the ignorant.”

The certain knowledge of how bad it might get tainted the burgeoning hope that this time might be different.

There was nothing but the next step. Nothing but exhaled puffs of condensation. Nothing but that strange kernel of being that became apparent only in the absence of its trappings.

The crowds through which Dag roamed were filled with people in that special category of borderless professional, the post-nation-state elite who flitted between Manhattan boardrooms, San Francisco hacker dens, and Delhi art galleries with equal ease.

Books are sharks, he remembered reading somewhere once. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

Politics is the gap between what is and what should be.”

Narrative was so much easier to follow when you weren’t living it.

the ‘right time’ is something you create, not something you wait on.”

she was the kind of person who would reframe every conversation, defining the terms of engagement. Only once you were out of her presence might you discover that her reality wasn’t necessarily the reality. The one thing that someone like that couldn’t handle was when you decided to construct a parallel universe.

“Humanity is more important than any one person,” she said. “No,” he said. “How we treat people defines humanity.”

It was one thing to whistle while the world burns from the comfort of a luxury berth, quite another to summon the same insouciance amid the ashes.

Ends and means didn’t justify one another—they were two sides of the same coin.

Critical thinking without hope was cynicism, while hope without critical thinking was naïveté.

Who are you? If his mind was not his own, how could he possibly know? Anyway, it was the wrong question. The only thing that mattered now was who he would become.

Everyone imagined their political opponents to be infallible leviathans who ruled with ruthless efficiency and relentless execution. But few plots survived contact with reality. The tangled network of human relationships that was the political arena was so complex that something inevitably went awry. It was through those cracks that new players clawed hand over bloody hand into the game. And once you were in, the only way to stay in was to throw yourself into the abyss of uncertainty with wild abandon over and over and over again. You had to risk everything every single day. Otherwise, someone willing to do so would topple you in no time at all.

History wasn’t linear. Radical change happened only in fits and starts, separated by fallow periods of relative stability.

Choosing not to care might mitigate the risk of pain, but in doing so it destroyed the capacity for joy, for finding meaning.

Discovery consisted not in exploring new lands but in looking at the world through fresh eyes.

We are the stories we tell ourselves.

He spent so much time being the person the situation required, honing every aside and microexpression, that he couldn’t help but wonder whether that came at a cost. Did his own life lack depth and texture because he invested so much in external effort?

Outside the false constraints of sport, there was no such thing as decisive victory. There was only the blind fumbling of the fallible, of which history was its record.

The world is what we make it. If we throw up our hands when the going gets tough, we get what we deserve.