CHAPTER 33
Deep in the bowels of the anchored vessel The Mendacium, facilitator Knowlton sat alone in his cubicle and tried in vain to focus on his work. Filled with trepidation, he had gone back to viewing the video and, for the past hour, had been analyzing the nine-minute soliloquy that hovered somewhere between genius and madness.
Knowlton fast-forwarded from the beginning, looking for any clue he might have missed. He skipped past the submerged plaque … past the suspended bag of murky yellow-brown liquid … and found the moment that the beak-nosed shadow appeared—a deformed silhouette cast upon a dripping cavern wall … illuminated by a soft red glow.
Knowlton listened to the muffled voice, attempting to decipher the elaborate language. About halfway through the speech, the shadow on the wall suddenly loomed larger and the sound of the voice intensified.
Dante’s hell is not fiction … it is prophecy!
Wretched misery. Torturous woe. This is the landscape of tomorrow.
Mankind, if unchecked, functions like a plague, a cancer … our numbers intensifying with each successive generation until the earthly comforts that once nourished our virtue and brotherhood have dwindled to nothing … unveiling the monsters within us … fighting to the death to feed our young.
This is Dante’s nine-ringed hell.
This is what awaits.
As the future hurls herself toward us, fueled by the unyielding mathematics of Malthus, we teeter above the first ring of hell … preparing to plummet faster than we ever fathomed.
Knowlton paused the video. The mathematics of Malthus? A quick Internet search led him to information about a prominent nineteenth-century English mathematician and demographist named Thomas Robert Malthus, who had famously predicted an eventual global collapse due to overpopulation.
Malthus’s biography, much to Knowlton’s alarm, included a harrowing excerpt from his book An Essay on the Principle of Population:
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
With his heart pounding, Knowlton glanced back at the paused image of the beak-nosed shadow.
Mankind, if unchecked, functions like a cancer.
Unchecked. Knowlton did not like the sound of that.
With a hesitant finger, he started the video again.
The muffled voice continued.
To do nothing is to welcome Dante’s hell … cramped and starving, weltering in Sin.
And so boldly I have taken action.
Some will recoil in horror, but all salvation comes at a price.
One day the world will grasp the beauty of my sacrifice.
For I am your Salvation.
I am the Shade.
I am the gateway to the Posthuman age.