Sauvage Sitdown - An Anti Foundation

Being a review of The Matrioshka Divide by Isaac Young

Right, I know we’re all still half frozen stiff from that last cold sleeper blind jump, our pods are badly out of spec and all, but what do we got Glass?

Cap’n! We’re running the numbers on the far stars now for a final fix, but the preliminary FAST check shows a good jump.

Very good Glass, Sparks, give us a space shanty while we peep out the system down the well, find us a nice fat gas giant in the outer shallow gravy for fuel distillation ops and we can signal the fleet to follow us in. And let’s all of us pray now, that this is the last one too, we’re running out of jump, simple as.

Aye-aye, one shanty, on the pipes. How about an old slow boat song?

Aye, Sparks, that’s the stuff. This damn mega-road has been slowboatin’ ‘nuff, for sure.

A signal has been detected on the outer edge of the galaxy, possibly from a colony ship thought lost nearly three thousand years ago. The Free Exchange, the dominant power of the known universe, puts together an unexpected crew to go find it. Only time will tell if this impossible beacon will change the course of human history forever.

And that’s all we get for add copy from Master Isaac. Well, they do say that brevity is the soul of wit, but it’s a bold move Cotton, let’s read on and see if it pays off for him.

Spoiler - it does.

Let me just say frens, this is a very well written first effort. Brothers, lend me your ears, read this opening hook aloud with me.

“I’VE NEVER KNOWN a soldier to take up gardening.” Glen Tannis surveyed the small plot of land. “You should take a job at one of the Eden worlds. They would take you as a designer in a heartbeat. The latest generation of terraformers could clean up that horizon with some mountain ranges and add a few lakes. Change the soil to be less acidic. Have everything tailored to how you want it.” “And ruin all the fun?” Samir Singh shook the dirt off his gloved hands. “I suppose you’ll have me watch from orbit, letting the robots do all the work?”

The Matrioshka Divide (p. 1). Kindle Edition.

We’re not even past the first paragraph and Glen is already an arsehole city slicker and Samir Singh is already a mensch. Now that’s efficiency. I cannot impress upon you sufficiently dear readers, how slick and powerful the writing is here, you need to read this for yourselves. The story pulled me in and I read, no consumed, the whole work in two days.

So what do we get in these forty eight chapters an four hundred and twenty four pages? OK, so in the far future(tm) all known space is… overseen by the so called Free Exchange, which present themselves as basically a combination of Space AT&T (hello there ComStar!) and a Space Highway Administration, operating and maintaining the jump gates that facilitate routine FTL between the far flung stars of the known worlds. You know, bureaucrats and civil servants, neutral functionaries. Nobody important.

Except that they are in fact the ruling body of the entire expanse of human settlement, firstly, by controlling the commons, the jump gates and the FTL comms, they can turn on and off the various petty power’s access to the wider Galaxy, and secondly, and more insidiously, by application of an applied science of history, man, and technics. Through correct modelling of their secret esoteric equations, they can predict what the stellar powers will do, how they will grow, and how they will die. And not just on the macro scale, but the micro as well. As above, so below. Through their perfected mathematical modelling of human interactions, desires, and drives, they know what you, the individual you, is likely to do before you yourself do.

So yeah, basically, the Galaxy is run by Hari Seldon’s Foundation of ‘psychohistory’ dweebs. Of course, their models are much simplified by the reduction of most people in the Galaxy to mere blobfish consoomers ruled by simple appetites. Any folk that tries to rise themselves above the mire, to reclaim glory, to rebirth power, to overthrow the idols of the marketplace and replace them with the Gods of Copybook headings and to stalk the night in savage nobility with naked blades, is reduced by a secular and atheistic black-crusade called and organised by the Free Exchange, and the rising power, excommunicated from access to fast communications and fast travel, becomes fodder. An intergalactic Stalingrad, no matter the quality or quantity commanded by any one or collection of several rising powers.

Samir Singh is a veteran of one of these black-crusades, an admiral who burned the worlds of one of these rising upstart powers that attempted to overthrow the Free Exchange, to escape the trap set for all of humanity. He is haunted, ridden by what he has done, the weight of worlds aflame and seeks some way to atone for his ruthless and depraved indifference to civilian noncombatants. It’s not that he’s unaware of the Exchange, how he and his men were mere pawns in their science experiment. He knows how things really work, that he was, in effect, programmed and unleashed, precisely to do what he did, that he was a weapon wielded by faceless men in cubicles, to murder worlds and make pyres of stars, but this doesn’t help, he’s still gonna carry that weight.

Erika Terese is a mad scientist who thinks she has discovered a way out of the trap laid out by the ‘Free Exchange’. If the Exchange have mathematically solved human nature, we stop being human. Needless to say, this transhumanism is problematic. To ‘save’ an an abstract ‘mankind’ she would eliminate human-ness itself, along with untold numbers of particular persons who resist get in her way, or are otherwise inconvenient. She is, in short, a utopian. An immanentizer of the eschaton.

To be fair, her first attempt at putting her radical trans-evolutionary theories into practice was in the least harmful way; a small sect following her charisma out into the deep black to work out their own path in fear and trembling and drugs. But the Exchange could not allow this, anything outside the context of their equations is anathema, and Erika’s world is burned by another weaponized military man, just like Samir. But Erika is pulled half-dead from the burning wreckage and put on ice. Literally. Break glass in case of outside-context problem.

Glen Tannis is a system bag man with an outside-context problem. Tannis is some sort of troubleshooter for the Exchange, often quite literally, if seldom if ever personally. He has people for that. Catspaws. Pawns. He is an able practitioner of the Exchange’s arcane arts of manipulation, he prides himself on his ability to talk anyone into anything. In another life, he would be a con man, but under the reign of the wicked mathmagicians of the Exchange, he is a man of high status, a ruler from the shadows. A puppet master. His problem? An ancient beacon has been lit - figuratively - signifying the return of an expedition to the neighbour galaxy Andromeda.

An expedition that was never supposed to return. That was intended to die out there in the black void between galaxies. A convenient way to dispose of malcontents and wilful big brainiacs that would otherwise be disruptive of the Exchange’s neat and tidy system. This is an unknown factor, a factor that has had thousands of years to diverge in physiology and mentality from Milky Way mankind, which is to say, Exchange-ianity. This new thing must be contained if possible, or destroyed if not.

And that’s the setup. Three personalities, three philosophies, three politics. Larger than life conflict ensues. You see, the central problem at hand is the problem of ‘progress’ itself. Technological changes; namely automation, AI, mechanisation, threaten to make man himself irrelevant. Man is on the verge of building a machine-cosmos that doesn’t need man at all.

Let Agent Smith explain. Faced with the inevitability of being forced to choose between a Reaper or Synthesis ending, the Exchange, in the person of Glen, instead opts for Control. They will Control the allowed technological solution set by controlling Man himself. Erika, the mad scientist, would rather go full Mechanicus. And Samir, Samir is prepared to make the great refusal. To deny both Control and Synthesis. The Machine must be subject to Man, and Man to something Higher.

Or if you’re anything like me, you would know these points of view as ‘Commander’, ‘Vahlen’, and ‘Spokesman’.

But making his great refusal, and making it stick against Space AT&T, and Dr. Girlfriend…

That ain’t gonna be easy. But nothing worth doing is.

Except reading The Matrioshka Divide. It’s only 4.99 for a Kindle version. Go, read it.

<post publish update> Master Isaac has informed me that the Amazon link is temporarily down, as an alternative, please consider supporting the author at laterpress. </post publish update>

Now!

That’s it Sparks, we’re done here, play us out.

Helm, make for the jump-point!