Nearly every object of art and entertainment is different in this world. Early on, the variations aren’t that significant. But as the late 1960s gave way to the vast technological and social leaps of the 1970s, almost everything changed, generating decades of pop culture that never existed—fifty years of writers and artists and musicians creating an entirely other body of work. Sometimes there are fascinating parallels, a loose story point in one version that’s the climax in another, a line of dialogue in the wrong character’s mouth, a striking visual composition framed in a new context, a familiar chord progression with radically altered lyrics.
July 11, 1965, was the pivot of history even if nobody knew it yet.
Fortunately, Lionel Goettreider’s favorite novel was published in 1963—Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Vonnegut’s writing is different where I come from. Here, despite his wit and insight, you get the impression he felt a novelist could have no real effect on the world. He was compelled to write, but with little faith that writing might change anything.
Because Cat’s Cradle influenced Lionel Goettreider so deeply, in my world Vonnegut was considered among the most significant philosophers of the late twentieth century. This was probably great for Vonnegut personally but less so for his novels, which became increasingly homiletic.
I won’t summarize Cat’s Cradle for you. It’s short and much better written than this book, so just go read it. It’s weary, cheeky, and wise, which are my three favorite qualities in people and art.
Tangentially—Weary, Cheeky, and Wise are the three codified reactions I couldn’t remember from the Sixteen Witnesses to the Activation.
Cat’s Cradle is about a lot of things, but a major plot thread involves the invention of ice-nine, a substance that freezes everything it touches, which falls out of its creator’s control and destroys all life on the planet.
Lionel Goettreider read Cat’s Cradle and had a crucial realization, what he called the “Accident”—when you invent a new technology, you also invent the accident of that technology.
When you invent the car, you also invent the car accident. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. When you invent nuclear fission, you also invent the nuclear meltdown. When you invent ice-nine, you also invent unintentionally freezing the planet solid.
When Lionel Goettreider invented the Goettreider Engine, he knew he couldn’t turn it on until he figured out its accident—and how to prevent it.
My favorite exhibit at the Goettreider Museum is the simulation of what could’ve happened if the Engine had somehow malfunctioned when Goettreider first turned it on. In the worst-case scenario, the unprecedented amounts of energy pulled in by the Engine overwhelm its intake core, triggering an explosion that melts San Francisco into a smoldering crater, poisons the Pacific Ocean with tau radiation, corrodes 10,000 square miles of arable land into a stew of pain, and renders an impressive swath of North America uninhabitable for decades. Parents would occasionally complain to the museum’s curatorial staff that the simulation’s nightmarish imagery was too graphic for children and, since the experiment obviously didn’t fail, why draw attention away from Goettreider’s majestic contributions to human civilization with grotesque speculation about imaginary global disasters? The simulation was eventually moved to an out-of-the-way corner of the museum, where generations of teenagers on high school field trips would huddle in the darkness and watch the world fall apart on a continuous loop.
I’m not a genius like Lionel Goettreider or Kurt Vonnegut or my father. But I have a theory too: The Accident doesn’t just apply to technology, it also applies to people. Every person you meet introduces the accident of that person to you. What can go right and what can go wrong. There is no intimacy without consequence.
Which brings me back to Penelope Weschler and the accident of us. Of all of us.
7
Penelope Weschler was supposed to be an astronaut. In early-age evaluation matrices, she indicated the necessary mental aptitude, physical capability, and unwavering ambition. Even as a child, Penelope immediately knew this was the correct path for her and wanted nothing else. She trained nonstop, both in and out of school. Not to walk on the moon. Anybody could walk on the moon. Anybody could go for a monthlong orbital cruise. Penelope would cross the next frontier—deep-space exploration.
It wasn’t just the studying, the training, the constant testing. It was social. Or, really, antisocial. For long-term space operations, the recruiting agencies want you to grow up with parents and siblings so you have empathy models to apply to fellow astronauts on missions that last years, sometimes decades. They want you capable of caring about other people. But they don’t want you to actually miss anyone back home too much, so you don’t have a breakdown six months into a six-year mission. It’s a sliding psychological scale—self-assured loners whose parents never divorced are good, shark-eyed sociopaths less so.
From junior high on, Penelope maintained amicable but purposefully limited personal relationships, so she wouldn’t have anybody tethering her to Earth.
And she was utterly kick-ass. Top of her cohort across all categories. Universally recognized as a natural mission leader. She’d be a pioneer. She’d see the storms of Jupiter with her own eyes and surf the rings of Saturn on a space walk. And that was worth not having close friends or romantic relationships or a loyal dog.
Everything was going according to plan. Until the first time she went to space.
The launch was flawless. Penelope performed her functions with such precision they would’ve used it to teach incoming recruits how gloriously capable an astronaut can be. She was prepared. She was ready. She was perfect.
Until she passed through the top layer of Earth’s atmosphere and her mind went completely blank.
There’s a small subset of people whose cognitive functions get scrambled in outer space. Something about how the pressure change of the vacuum affects the bonds between molecules in the neurons of their brains. No one’s even sure why it happens. But Penelope was one of that subset. Somehow this fact eluded the years of rigorous screening. One moment she’s deftly guiding the launch vehicle through the final atmospheric layers, seeing the gaping expanse of space for the first time, her heart beating in measured but ecstatic bursts, the happiest she’s ever felt. And then . . . nothing.
She doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know what to do. Something in her basic constitution keeps her from having a panic attack, as most people would if they suddenly woke up piloting a goddamn spacecraft with the planet receding behind them. But she can’t remember anything. The instrument panel she’d spent years mastering means nothing to her, inscrutable acronyms printed over lights flashing in seemingly random patterns. She stares out the viewing dome at the radiant vapor of stars smeared across the black canvas of space, like the pollen clouds that would rise from the cedar trees in her grandparents’ backyard when the squirrels jumped from branch to branch, although she can’t understand why she’s thinking about something she hasn’t seen since she was eight years old when there are these voices in her earpiece getting loud and insistent.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m not really sure where I am right now.”