The Secret Council of Planners Part 2: The Middle Generations.

For the initial centuries, however, the Ithacans were still very much Earthlings. Their biology remained firmly rooted in the circadian rhythm of earth’s solar orbit. Down in the deeper strata of ancestral memory, it still intuitively felt the tilt of the earth’s axis to its orbital plane, and their dreams bore obscure witness to the advent of passing equinoxes and solstices, to the intimate awareness of seasonal rhythm which their distant, pre-industrial ancestors had known. They still conceptualized space in terms of a solid earth beneath their feet, and a vaulted sky stretching above it, with spectral stars and satellites ceaselessly tracing its parabola. Earth dominated their imaginations. When they dreamed, they were always back on earth, and Starship dreams were such a rare occurrence that people accorded them a superstitious significance. The art of this period was almost exclusively concerned with life on planet earth. A new naturalism was born in the visual arts, as painters and sculptors sought to recapture the lost world with the utmost verisimilitude. What had formerly been the everyday on earth was now the otherworldly, the unattainably transcendent, on the Ithaca. Literature too was predominantly backward looking: various novels and plays hypothesized the painful destinies of those who had been left behind, while others eulogized the dead planet with vulgar sentiment, and lacerated humanity for its sad demise.

A certain malaise of unhealthy nostalgia was evident in every aspect of Starship life. Those who had not become embroiled in the “rubber” epidemic, or carried away in the swelter of violent passion engendered by the early cults of irrationalism, gathered frequently in the eerie darkness of the Ithacan Gardens. There, amid the collected and artificially preserved flora and fauna of their erstwhile home planet, they sat in racially segregated groups exchanging memories of their former lives. To the Council of Planners, ever distant and watchful, it seemed as though humanity might never really leave the terrestrial womb, or ever outgrow its prolonged and tumultuous growing pangs. But time passed, as it always will. Men and women died, and their ashes were cast into the space between the dancing stars. Children too were born to replenish the small stock of survivors. Slowly, the number of the first Ithacans dwindled, down to a hundred, to twenty, and then to the last handful who had actually lived on planet earth. Then, they too passed away, and their ashes were cast into the space between the dancing stars.

The Middle Generations.

It was some five hundred years into the voyage before the proper beginning of that prolonged period of prosperity and serenity which we call the Middle Generations. The first Starship-born Ithacans inherited the nostalgia and disquiet of their parents. In many respects, it was more severe in the succeeding generations; they blamed their parents and grandparents for the destruction of the earth, and envisioned themselves as wholly blameless exiles. Things, however, were steadily changing. The epiphanies continued to occur on the observations decks, and in time their frequency and intensity increased. The early star gazers, impressed by the essential similarity of the epiphany in each person who experienced it, formed a small group akin to a secular religious order. They met frequently on the decks to discuss what they perceived as a fundamental shift in their attitude towards themselves and their environment. The star gazers were slowly acquiring a new sense of the cosmos, whereby many of the old distinctions which had caused so much dissension and consternation in the past seemed to fall away. They believed that the universe possessed life, and intelligence, and purpose, but by no means in the old way which measured those concepts only as they related to conscious human experience. Human self-consciousness, they reasoned, was itself only an aspect of the total human phenomenon. This phenomenon they regarded as a highly organised structure which contained consciousness merely as one among many differing modes. Consciousness abrogated itself as the primary, defining aspect of this structure, merely by virtue of the fact that it was the only one of those modes endowed with either the inclination or inherent ability to do so. Instead of defining the entire structure, consciousness interfaced with various sub-, non-, and supra-conscious modes, many of which contained a superior innate intelligence to that of consciousness itself. In this sense, the Ithacan star gazers no longer drew a conceptual barrier between that which was alive, intelligent, and purposive, and that which possessed no active, volitional consciousness of itself as such. In so far they recognised in themselves higher modes of organisation that were entirely non-conscious or mechanical in nature, they saw something of themselves in the universe, and of the universe in themselves. And in so far as that part of themselves which was conscious was composed of the same molecular and sub-atomic matter as the stars, and by no means logically or conceptually separable from the rest of the cosmos, they saw the universe itself has being conscious through them, no more or less than the spongy, furrowed tissue of their brains were. These things were intimated to the Ithacans as they lay in deep trace on the observation decks, drifting deeper into and out of themselves as the stars eddied and flowed past the Ithaca.

It is not possible to tell now whether all the star-gazers had the same experience, or whether certain charismatic proselytizers of the epiphany influenced and contaminated subsequent experiencers. What mattered was the Starship had finally begun to develop its own distinct and unifying belief system, a new religion of the stars and the cosmos, of man and the universe; a new awakening of the old Hermetic doctrine of the mirror of microcosm and macrocosm. Religion was perhaps an inexact term for the new belief, since it held that the religious and the scientific were merely dialectical linguistic states that described essentially the same thing. The ultimate effect of the movement, whatever its nature, was to finally begin to untether the crew of the Ithaca from the long spell of solar-based, planetary existence. In time, a generation was born in whom the ancestral memory of terrestrial life had grown very dim indeed. They were born without any baggage or burden of inherited guilt, and rather felt themselves extraordinarily fortunate to have survived, to be alive at all, and to bear the responsibility of maintaining the germ of human sentience for subsequent generations. Alongside this new buoyancy, changes were occurring in the human mentality with an extraordinary rapidly. The old concepts of racial and class consciousness became exotic specimens for the attention of the anthropologist and historian, as a strong communal, crew-based ethos took hold. Indeed, prolonged Starship life had the effect of dampening the drive towards individualism and competition which had been so instrumental in guiding human evolution on earth. Instead, what the Starship did was present in stark terms what had been true all along: that the human enterprise was entirely a communal one, whose survival in the long term required a co-operative rather than competitive societal structure. This should have been obvious, perhaps, but the terrestrial environment had appeared so apparently boundless, so seemingly self-sufficient, that the human race had always envisioned itself as men idling and scheming on dry land, rather than as crewmen bound to the fortune of their vessel, and set in common effort against the vicissitudes of the sea. Now at last, in the Middle Generations of the Ithacan voyage, the last remnants of the human race became a closely knit, cohesive tribe. As in the cosmic religion, where consciousness was neither subsumed by the vastness of the physical universe, nor the physical universe moulded to fit the confines of consciousness, the Ithacan tribe neither overwhelmed the individual, nor the individual the tribe.

These were, truly, the greatest years of the voyage. Advances in technology meant that the Ithacans had more free-time than ever before. Their very concept of time was itself slowly adjusting to life in Interstellar space. The Ithacans were alerted to their work shifts by means of buzzers that they wore on their wrists. While working, they were aware of quantified, divisible time only as it related to the necessity to do certain things before a certain time elapsed. Outside of the necessities imposed by work, however, clock time vanished altogether for the Ithacans. Time felt boundless, undifferentiated, mesmerizing, and voluptuous. With their increasingly mystical temperament, the Ithacan could stare at his hand for a period of hours without noticing the time pass. Social encounters were always left to chance, for absolutely no one could be relied upon to keep an engagement. As generations passed, the Ithacans had lost their natural diurnality, often staying awake and active for periods of days at a time. In a peculiar way, this reorientation of subjective time, coupled, no doubt, with a general sense of well-being, eventually began to manifest itself in the biology of the Ithacans, slowing down senescence, and greatly extending life-expectancy and mental and physical acuity in later life.

As this new sense of boundless time opened up before the Middle Ithacans, stretching around them in all directions like the vast darkness between the stars, it must have felt as though they had found again the hallowed Golden Age, the time of abundance, completion, and serenity. The arrow of time seemed to slow down, and stall altogether in their subjective, indivisible models of eternity; they spoke of growing younger, and felt that only the Starship itself went forward, and even that only in spaces so vast that they obliterated all sense of momentum. They must have thought that these things, too, would never end. But time passed, as it always will. The first of the Middle Ithacans passed way, and their ashes were cast into the space between the dancing stars. Generations followed, and in time the Starship itself was palpably older, and closer by far to the end than the beginning.

The Secret Council of Planners Part 1: The First Ithacans.

Alcmaeon says that men die for this reason, that they cannot join the beginning to the end.

Aristotle, Problemata XVII, 3, 916a33.

The bulk of the vast starship Ithaca was built on earth, and then in the last decade it was tethered to the moon. Crews of labourers, the majority of whom would be left behind, worked day and night on its completion. It must have been a beautiful spectacle to watch all that furious work going on into the night, the starship like a gleaming, bustling city viewed from above. It must have been so strange for the people in the cities below, stepping out into the street from humid bars and clubs, looking up at the Ithaca, knowing they were being left behind on earth to die.

There was simply no way to build a starship that could take the whole of the earth’s population. Everybody understood that. And yet, some portion of the human population had to survive. The species, for whatever it was worth, had to survive. A certain percentage had won their place on the Ithaca through merit of various kinds. Great scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers, and athletes were gradually selected while work on the starship continued. That, also, must have seemed reasonable and fair. For the rest, however, it was the same sorry story which had always characterised life on the planet. The other places on the Starship went to the planetary elite: the politicians, the extremely wealthy, and those who were well-connected. You always think that when it comes to life and death moments, some greater dignity should assert itself. But back then, when a person was dying, somebody had to pay the hospital bills, or else they were left out in the cold. And that’s how it was, that was the only way people knew how to operate. That was how the world ended.

Then the Ithaca was completed, and it was time to leave the dying earth behind. The bulk of the crew and passengers were already living on the Starship; others were nearby on the moonbase called Phaedra. The skies were alive in the very last days: shuttles to-ing and fro-ing the remaining passengers to the Ithaca, and furious dogfights with hijacked military jets that were making desperate, last-minute bids to get on board the Starship. That too must have had possessed its own eerie beauty from the calm of the streets below, from outside the bars, clubs, restaurants, and whatever other businesses were still functioning. Finally, a great roaring sound like primordial thunder rocked the whole of the earth, and the Ithaca was engulfed in a crimson flare like the birth of a small sun. Nobody knows what became of the human beings that were left behind. The best estimates of the scientists suggested that the surface of the earth would have been habitable for another two decades at most. Then there was probably a few more years underground, and that was it. They simply couldn’t have survived.

Thus began the 2,370 year journey of the Ithaca from earth orbit to the planet Pantopia in the Gilese 581 star system. For the crew and passengers, it was the beginning of a very strange life indeed. They, and their children, and their children’s children, would live out all of their days on board the Ithaca. The Starship would be their occupation, environment, and culture. They would live always in the middle: between the point of departure and destination, in the intervening stages of journey and a saga, moving always between the stars. Nobody knew precisely what effect this new environment would have on the psychology, even the physiology, of the crew and passengers. To live in an enclosed and limited technological space, always moving but never arriving, never seeming to cease nor ever make any significant progress: in some respects, the Ithaca resembled a vast social experiment where the crew of the ship would serve both as scientist and laboratory rat. Would a new, altruistic variety of social order emerge on the Starship, or would the tribal, territorial instincts of terrestrial life reassert themselves? What would be the long-term effect of living on the permanent night-side of interstellar space, the older rhythms of day and night marked off only by the ship’s artificial lighting? Would the Ithacans feel a new sense of connection to the majesty of the cosmos; or, marooned behind the steel and glass walls of their artificial life-support system, would they feel ever more alienated from the natural, organic world? Nothing was certain in the beginning.

The First Ithacans.

The early generations of the journey were the most difficult. The first Ithacans were characterised by a pervasive and understandable sense of grief and guilt. They had witnessed at first hand the final stages of humanity’s gradual despoiling of the earth’s environment. When they looked down on their erstwhile home prior to the launch, it must have hit them with an extraordinary force: humanity had destroyed one of the only environments in the known universe capable of sustaining complex life-forms. It must have felt like a profound failure on the part of man, in the scale of cosmic time, never to have matured, never to have attained a level of civilisation whereby the human genus actually felt like something that was worth preserving at all costs. And the cost of their survival had been immense and almost unconscionable: the greater majority of the human race left behind to die. These were inauspicious circumstances under which to embark upon the great journey between the stars, and morale was sluggish and fraught in the early generations of the mission.

The social system by which the Ithaca operated was called the labour credit system. This utilized no currency as such, since money was envisioned as one of the primary causes of everything that had gone wrong back on earth. Under labour credit, everybody who worked a standard weekly shift received a weekly credit chip. This chip entitled them to a very good standard of living: they were well-fed, and had a substantial allowance for social and cultural pursuits. There was, however, a higher, luxury level credit chip that entitled the owner to a slightly improved standard of living. The luxury chip was given as a matter of course to the Captain, and all the elite officers and engineers on whom the safety of the ship depended. Normal crew members, however, were also able to earn a luxury chip by working extra hours in a given week. The idea of the labour credit system was to combine elements of communism with the meritorious benefits of a capitalist economy. There was to be no substantial gap in the quality of life between different classes of crew-member on board the Starship. The only difference pertaining, that between luxury and regular credit chips, was first and foremost not substantial enough to warrant envy or generate sectarian class divisions; moreover, the difference was clearly determined by merit, and available to anybody who was prepared to make an extra effort.

It was an elegant system that was perfectly tenable within the small, goal-orientated population of the Ithaca, but there were considerable teething problems in the early years. The Old Plutocracy from Earth found it difficult at first to adjust to the newly equalized living standards and social status. Forming the majority of the ship’s Senate, they lobbied the Council of Planners again and again to introduce further differentiation in the credit chip, in order, as they put it, to incentivise a greater commitment to the Ship’s mission. The Council of Planners were the highest authority on the Ithaca, a small governing body that included the Captain, as well as the Ship’s greatest political, scientific, and philosophical minds. The Council served two functions, one of which was public, and the other undertaken in absolute secrecy. The public face of the Council, naturally, was the daily governance of life on-board the Ithaca: co-ordinating the efforts of the Captain and his crew with the engineers, security officers, AI computers, food-producers, leisure officers, etc. to insure that the Ship functioned properly and the long voyage proceeded smoothly.

The second, secretive activity of the Council consisted of a series of meetings which were convened once every Starship month in an auditorium in the Northern Quarter of the Ithaca. During these meetings, the Council attempted to resolve the issues that they regarded as their gravest responsibility: what precisely was to be done when the Ithaca arrived on Pantopia? What kind of society and culture should the settlers pursue on their adopted home-world? Most importantly, how could they, as social planners, insure that the depressing tragedy of their history on earth was not repeated?

It was due to the resolve of the early Council that the Senate remained unsuccessful in their attempts to reintroduce the class divide by stealth. Those attempts didn’t end in the official arena, however. The first and only contraband substance traded on the Ithaca was money. (All of the drugs which had formerly been criminalized on earth were legal on the Starship; perhaps unsurprisingly, marijuana, LSD, and psilocybin proved to be the most popular space drugs. Alcohol remained popular for a while among the Old Plutocracy, but it had gradually died out by the Middle Generations.) Certain subversive factions within the Old Plutocracy began to produce a black-market currency which consisted of bands of different coloured rubber tubing. The first generation of Ithacans had just relinquished centuries of currency-based economic existence, and consequently the hoarding and exchange of “rubber” became an explosive epidemic in the early years of the journey. This underground economy became organised to the extent of having four banks in operation at its height. Ironically, due to its illegal nature, almost nothing of any real value could be procured with “rubber”; its popularity was largely a matter of ingrained habit, coupled with the illicit thrill of transgressing the Ship’s laws. Once again, it was only through the stern resolve of the Council that this potentially devastating retrogression was stopped in its tracks. “We will not go back” the Captain insisted, in a speech announcing severe prison sentencing for those found in possession of “rubber”. The “rubber” epidemic died out within a couple of centuries.

Crimes of passion were also a considerable problem in those difficult years. These people were, after all, the first of their kind; the first to leave planet earth. Many of the First Ithacans experienced a profound sense of disorientation, a space madness that expressed itself in a heightened appetite for transgressive sexuality and violence. Cast adrift in the vastness of space, hemmed into an artificial environment of clean, precise geometry and humming machinery, the first Ithacans appear to have gone to extremes of the irrational in order to preserve their threatened sense of ancestral identity. In hindsight, it was perhaps the final consecration of a terrestrial human nature that was soon to die out. For even in those fraught early generations, there was also evidence of the beginnings of a change in the human mentality. Gazing at the dance of stars and distant galaxies that swirled around the Ithaca was naturally a popular leisure activity. Nevertheless, in those early years, the observation decks were relatively quiet, and not yet the social focal points that they would become in the Middle Generations. But those who did spend time in the decks began to experience a peculiar mental transformation. It began with a vertiginous trance, whereby the gazer began to effectively forget the presence of the vast Starship, and even his own body, experiencing him or herself as a disembodied consciousness moving freely through space. This was followed by an ecstatic epiphany, in which the gazer’s sense of self was simultaneously obliterated down to the smallest quanta of nothingness, and expanded outwards into a sense of intimate connection to the totality of all matter in the universe. It was simultaneously a faster than light shrinking into the tinniest, most basic and homogenous constitute particle of matter, and a faster than light explosion outward into the myriad, complex, all-encompassing singularity of everything. This experience would soon become as common as gazing at a sunrise had been on earth. It was the beginning of the re-orientation of human consciousness to its new Interstellar Spacecraft Environment, a slow, gradual process that would necessitate newly emergent models of the time/ space/self matrix for all crew members.

Dr Seuss Through the Door in the Wall.

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Mexico: The Coming of the Pointy Boots Craze.

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1991 Hard Copy Report on the Mystery of the Airboure Snuff Video.

NIN "Down In It" report on "Hard Copy," March 3rd 1991 from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.