The Destiny
Our past is cosmic matter, our future beyond our knowing. Ashes to aspirations, stardust to stardust.
They'd made promises before, had the Miller Institute. Vast, unedifying essays of mind-bending complexity on the subjects of humanity and its future. Promises of a world where you could plant an acorn and come back to it as a mighty oak. The futurists promised immortality, they promised post-scarcity, they promised the Singularity, they promised telepathy. They'd promise anything they could think of to keep the general public interested in their works, and the syndicates with the funding happy to keep the money flowing.
Once in a while, of course, they hit a nail. A stopped clock is right twice a day, after all. So long as it's analogue, anyway. Or digital and broken in some quite specific ways. Oh, and bound to the same length of time as your current orbit, I suppose. But assuming you have an analog clock tuned to the same time rate of the planet or ship you're currently on, that passes through a biphasic time measurement, it will be right twice a day.
The Miller Institute was right considerably less often than that.
Their revolutionary new diet system required its users to use one of their tins every hour on the hour, except noon and midnight. It was very good for you, but the lack of sleep involved sent most of their test subject into hallucinations. Their military strategy simulator looked very pretty but didn't have any weapons. Their companion AI developed an unhealthy addiction to maize, and the Millar Institute developed a well-earned reputation for high vaulted, far looking, half baked ideas. The core brain trust had a tendency to get three quarters through developing ideas before spotting something more interesting on the horizon and handing the final details to a low level tech.
Eventually the central leadership of the Miller Institute quit to join Betterment, where such behavior is not only expected, but lauded.
So the final plans for the future of humanity, as dreamed of by the Miller Institute, ended up in the hands of Arnold Adrian Gordon.
Gordon had joined the Institute at the bottom of his own personal character arc. From a high achieving biologist at university he had failed to really be able to apply his skills in a world where the emerging Lintilian was convincing the world that technology - not biology - was the future of the world, he had managed to get a low level position at the Miller Institute, cleaning up and publishing ideas that the ideas guys had abandoned for their shinier new lily-pad.
No one would have believed in the last years of the dominance of humanity that their future was being devised in a laboratory underground by intelligences greater, and yet as mortal, as his own. That as they busied themselves about technology and philosophy their very thoughts and brains were being studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency folks went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.
And when the Miller Institute announced they had not only theorized, but actually created the next evolution of humankind, nobody believed them. On his own, Gordon was less than he had ever been. Fragile, even sickly, the biologist was forgetful, fretful, tired. It wasn't until he bonded with a second subject that they became more than themselves, stronger, faster, both able to perform tasks that only one of them had the intricate training - both mental and physical - to do. As their bonded tribe grew, so did the array of tasks they could perform. So did the level of expertise. So did the power. They discovered that together they could rewrite the rules of the universe - be it ever so briefly - to lift things in the air, to bind and strengthen others, to seek definitive answers from the universe itself.
Some of the initial members split out, unbonded themselves from Gordon's tribe, and founded their own collective consciouses, devoted to different ideologies. As the collective waxed and waned, they found that smaller collectives bonded tighter, that larger collectives brought more brittle ties.
When a training accident first killed a bonded member, the shock reverberated through the consciousness of her collective, until they realized they could still feel her thoughts. With one thought, one voice, they brought their combined might of power together. Knitted a new body of carbon and nitrogen, oxygen and calcium, hydrogen and phosphorus, and bound her thoughts to it.
Telepathic and immortal, collective and dependent, aspirations and stardust. They consider themselves humanity's Destiny.
Nicholas Avenell