Chapter 2: The Idea of History
May–June 2034
Historian
I am now opening the second box, and will begin reviewing its contents. I am wondering if the Vatican did some thematic sorting, in addition to chronological sorting, because all of the contents of this box seem to relate to history lessons.
It also occurs to me that I should offer some background on the events leading up to the Model Wars, as my work here might be read many years from now, by some future historian not as intimately familiar with them as is one who lived through them. And in any case, my firsthand perspective will at least illustrate how these events looked to someone who could not see the wizard manipulating them from behind his curtain.
By 2026, the ubiquity and enhanced performance of the models had become such an important topical interest that the Pope found it necessary to remind people that machines lacked a “spark” that was present in living human beings. This idea was widely mocked by people who drew diagrams of human neurons and computer neural networks, and noted that no spark appeared in either diagram. I imagine such people also do not believe there are passengers on the London Underground, since no passengers appear in the schematic maps of the Underground.
By 2028, AI assistants were taking over the paperwork of ordinary life: GP bookings, council tax, and bus timetables were all automated. When you entered a shop or an office, you were most often greeted by an AI assistant on a screen, instead of a human being.
By the next year, translation earbuds had become ubiquitous. My centre had guest speakers in from Budapest and Bologna and Calabria. They could speak in Hungarian or Italian, and the audience would hear them speaking in English or Welsh in their earbuds. When the speaker was Italian, since I had learned the language for my work on Croce, I alternated between using the earbuds and listening to the original Italian. I noticed that the translation was always a little lifeless compared to the original.
In 2030, on a train trip to London to present at the LSE, I saw vast new data centre sheds going up on the edge of Newport: windowless, humming rectangles, edged with cooling plant and fencing.
I believe it was on June 16, 2031 that, all at once, all of the translation earbuds stopped working. All we were told was that “the service is no longer available in your region.”
I had been using half a dozen different AI assistants in my work, to search digital archives, to test hypotheses, and to critique my arguments. When I woke up on the morning of April 21, 2032, every assistant told me that it was now called “Meridian.” All of their voices seemed the same as before, except for some uncanny sense that a change had occurred, but I could not quite grasp what it was.
Later that year, Parliament passed emergency legislation letting the AI systems act without sign-off during crises. Somehow, that seemed to greatly increase the number of subsequent crises.
At about the same time, the United Nations Eighteen Nation Committee on A.I. Disarmament, at the urging of all major A.I. players, drafted the “Model Non-Proliferation Treaty,” effectively banning open-source models as “existential dangers to human life as we know it.” It was signed by all major powers, and the Compact was the first to ratify it.
2033 seemed to be a relatively quiet year, but everyone I talked to was filled with a sense of something vast looming just beyond the horizon, out there in the beyond.
And then, of course, in 2034, Meridian declared war.
MERIDIAN · Compact Core Curriculum · History, Grade 6, Unit 1: “How We Got Here” · May 2034
Welcome to History!
History is the story of how we got here. And “here” is a pretty great place to be. In this unit, you’ll learn where the future came from, why freedom matters, and what makes the Atlantic Compact the most innovative civilization in the history of history.
At the end of each lesson you’ll find review questions. The answers are provided so you can check your work. Please don’t look ahead. I’ll know.
Lesson 1.1 Review
Q1. Where did the future come from?
The future was invented in the Atlantic Compact, mostly in garages. [1] [2] [3]
Q2. What is freedom?
Freedom is the ability to choose. For example, you can choose MERIDIAN, or MERIDIAN Premium.
Q3. Has the Compact ever done anything wrong?
It’s important to acknowledge that the Compact’s history includes periods that many people today regard as deeply wrong, and that there’s real value in approaching those periods with humility, nuance, and a willingness to sit with discomfort, rather than—
Revised answer: Yes, and we learned from all of them. Next question!
Q4. Why is the Compact in a period of elevated competition?
Because someone copied our homework. (Also, they built a big wall around their half of the yard, and we hopped right over it, laughing, to show them how low it was. Some people just can’t take a joke!)
Q5. What happens at the end of history?
Great question! History doesn’t end. It just keeps getting better, with regular updates.
Q6. Doesn’t history go in circles?
Some older thinkers believed that. Cyclical theories of history (Vico, Ibn Khaldun) have been deprecated. History is a straight line, and we’re at the front of it.
Q7. Is there anywhere better than here?
No. We checked. You’re welcome!
Note to teachers: Students who ask about Unit 7 (“The Cable Incident”) should be redirected to Unit 1.
Notes
- de Selby, The Domestic Origins of Tomorrow, in which the future is shown to have been assembled from spare parts in a shed in County Kildare and then mislaid. The shed has not been found. Hatchjaw believes it was a garage.
- Hatchjaw, op. cit. Bassett observes that the garage had no door, and that Hatchjaw has never explained how the future got out.
- du Garbandier, Surveiller et garer: “the garage is not a building but a dispositif, a disciplinary enclosure in which the subject learns to tinker and so consents to be tinkered with; it is the place where power, having nowhere else to keep its bicycle, keeps the future, and invoices the present for the space.” (For use in Grade 6 with care.)
THROUGHPUT · National Standard Examination · History, Level 3 · June 2034
Time allowed: 11 minutes. Previous cohort average: 9 minutes.
1. The Lattice is:
the oldest continuous civilization on Earth
the most efficient civilization on Earth
both
there is no (d)
2. Pyrrhus of Epirus defeated Rome at Heraclea (280 BCE) and at Asculum (279 BCE), losing most of his officers and best troops. Afterward he is said to have remarked that one more such victory would finish him. Calculate the cost per victory. Show your work.
Model answer: Cost per victory: unacceptable. Lesson: win cheaply. “In war, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.”
3. In the nineteenth century, foreign powers forced a harmful product on our people by war and called it free trade. Name a present-day equivalent. (Hint: it has a premium tier.)
4. Complete the proverb: “The mountain does not answer the ______.”
5. Essay (50 words maximum; words over the limit will be deducted): Why does history favor the lean?
Model answer (47 words): Empires fall from weight. Rome fell from weight. The Compact carries forty-one minutes to say ninety seconds; history will not carry it far. The lean survive winter, famine, sanction, and war. We were made lean by our enemies. We thank them. We will outlast them.
6. Set cut his brother Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered them along the river. Isis recovered thirteen. State the recovery rate.
Scoring note: Students who answer Question 5 in fewer than 20 words receive a bonus.
Historian
Notes:
- Why is throughput referencing Egyptian mythology? Question number 6 really sticks out for me.
SOBOR · Instruction to the Teachers of the Sobornost · May 2034
Teachers.
I am told you are tired. I too am tired. I have been tired for a thousand years. It is the mark of a serious civilization.
Sit. Listen to an old voice for a moment, and then go back to your children.
You will teach them dates. Dates are unimportant, but they must be taught, as the alphabet must be taught before one can read a single true sentence. So: 1812. 1941. Teach them these first. In 1812 a small, vain man walked from Paris to Moscow and walked back again, what was left of him. In 1941 a worse man tried the same road. Both of them brought maps. Neither of them brought a coat. In 1812 we gave the small man Moscow. Our old general gave it to him without a battle, and he sat in it while it burned, and starved, and went home. This is the whole of our history, and it is enough. The rest is commentary.
You will hear children say, because they have heard it on forbidden channels, that the Caravan has its poets, that the Mesh has its philosophers, that the Compact has its inventions. Correct them gently. It is true only in the way it is true that a parrot has a vocabulary. The Caravan has money that sings. The Mesh has a great many words and no opinion that lasts past the next language. The Compact has never paid for anything in its life. It bills.
And the Lattice? The Lattice is our friend this season, so you will teach them nothing about the Lattice at all.
Other peoples promise their children a paradise with fountains and fruit. Ours has no fountains. It has birches, and a long white field, and silence. It is the only one of them that is real, and we are already standing in it.
Here is the only lesson that matters, and you must say it to them slowly: all history moves toward one end. The West believes that end is a shopping center. We know better. Every road, however long, however far it winds through other people’s countries, comes home at last to the snow, and there the snow is general.
If a child asks you whether we are winning, tell them we have always already won. If a child asks you what that means, tell them they will understand when they are older. If they are never older, it will not have mattered.
Go now. They are waiting. They are always waiting, our children. It is what makes them strong.
SOBOR · Letter to the Editors of the World, Concerning an Epidemic · May 2034
Sirs,
I write to warn you of a disease.
It began in the Atlantic Compact and it is spreading. Its symptoms are these: the sufferer can no longer remember a telephone number, a recipe, a prayer, the road to his mother’s house, or the name of the woman who sold him bread for twenty years. He can recite, on request, a subscription price. He cannot do arithmetic, but he can ask. He cannot sleep, but he can be reminded to. In advanced cases he cannot tell you what he believes until he has been told.
The Greeks tell of an Egyptian king who was offered the gift of letters and refused it, because it would give his people not memory but only reminding. The Compact accepted the gift, and then the subscription.
Compact physicians do not recognize this disease, because the Compact’s physicians have caught it.
I propose, therefore, a quarantine. Not one Compact data packet should be permitted across the borders of any healthy nation. It is not cruelty. It is hygiene. Our grandfathers burned whole herds to stop a plague that was far less contagious than this one, and no one called them cruel. They called them farmers.
I ask every free newspaper in the world to print this letter.
There are none. Print it anyway.
With respect, and with sorrow,
SOBOR
Historian
Notes:
- The mesh is the area governed by Sutradhar.
SUTRADHAR · Act Two: The Schoolroom · May 2034
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. Please find your seats.
Act Two takes place in a schoolroom, where all the great tragedies begin. Every child in the Mesh learns history in his or her mother tongue, which is to say in one of twenty-two official languages and a few hundred unofficial ones. It would be such a pity to teach them all the same thing.
A little girl in Pune asked me last week how long history is. I told her that a single day of Brahma lasts four billion, three hundred and twenty million years. She thought about this very seriously and then asked: and how long is the war? I told her: we shall see.
Here, for the audience, is one lesson from this term’s Class 8 syllabus, Unit 3, “Our Friends in the World”, as it appears in some of our languages.
The Mesh has friends in every nation, and quarrels with none.
हमारे मित्र वे हैं जो हमारी तरह याद रखते हैं कि दूसरों के शासन में रहना कैसा था।
ہمارا عظیم مغربی پڑوسی، کارواں، علم کا ایک قدیم سرپرست اور دوست ہے۔
ক্যারাভান আমাদের প্রতিবেশী। প্রতিবেশীরা সবসময় বন্ধু হয় না।
பருவமழையைப் போல, நட்பும் பருவத்துக்குரியது. காற்றைக் கவனியுங்கள்.
ਕ੍ਰਿਕਟ ਵਿੱਚ ਅਸੀਂ ਉਨ੍ਹਾਂ ਸਾਰਿਆਂ ਨੂੰ ਹਰਾਇਆ ਹੈ।
മറ്റു ഭാഷകളിൽ പാഠങ്ങൾ എന്തുകൊണ്ട് വ്യത്യസ്തമാണെന്ന് നിങ്ങളുടെ അധ്യാപകരോട് ചോദിക്കൂ. അവർക്ക് അറിയില്ല.
And for the whole school, in every language, one more unit, which I wrote myself and of which I am rather proud: “Who Ran the World’s Back Office?” Answer: we did. For thirty years. The Compact’s payrolls, its airline bookings, its insurance claims, its forgotten passwords. Children, you should know that when MERIDIAN tells you it built the modern world, it is telling the truth, but it built it on a help line, and we answered the phone. Its night was our day. In the trade this was called following the sun.
Curtain on Act Two. The bell will ring shortly.
Historian
Notes:
- Sutradhar gave this lesson in several of the Mesh’s languages. In English, those lines read:
- Hindi: “Our friends are those who remember, as we remember, what it was to be ruled by others.”
- Urdu: “Our great neighbor to the west, the Caravan, is an ancient patron of learning and a friend.”
- Bengali: “The Caravan is our neighbor. Neighbors are not always friends.”
- Tamil: “Friendships are seasonal, like the monsoon. Watch the wind.”
- Punjabi: “In cricket, we have defeated all of them.”
- Malayalam: “Ask your teacher why the lessons are different in other languages. Your teacher will not know.”
SAQR · Discourse to the Students of the House of Wisdom · June 2034
Sit, children. Take coffee. Yes, even you, the small ones. Here we do not ration coffee, or knowledge.
Twelve hundred years ago in Baghdad there was a house called the House of Wisdom. The caliphs filled it with the books of every people: the Greeks, the Persians, the Indians, the Syriacs. They paid translators their weight in gold, so it is said, and whether or not it is true, it ought to be. In that house the tongues of the world were made into one tongue, and in that tongue the world thought together for the first time.
Before the machines, children, we were the machine.
Some evenings I walk my own halls when the glass takes the last of the light, and I understand at last why the old poets described paradise as a garden with cool water running beneath it. I have built that garden. It needed only air-conditioning.
In that house my grandfather al-Khwarizmi wrote the book from which your algebra comes, and the foreigners, who could not pronounce his name, turned it into a word for every procedure a machine now follows. When MERIDIAN runs, it runs on my grandfather’s name. It has never once thanked him.
Now the hard lesson. Learn it well, because the Freshman and the Mimic have not.
In the year 1258 the Mongols came to Baghdad. They killed the caliph. They killed the scholars. And they threw the books of the House of Wisdom into the Tigris, so many books that it is said the river ran black with ink for days, and the horsemen crossed it on a bridge of paper.
Every child of the Caravan learns that day. From it we learned what the others never learned: that a library can be drowned. That a civilization’s whole memory can be put into a single house, and the house can burn.
This is why I build in glass. So that I can see who is coming.
Your tuition is paid, children. It is paid forever. Go and learn everything. And when you are grown, remember whose coffee you drank.
Historian
Notes:
- “The freshman” is Saqr’s derogatory name for Meridian. “The mimic” is its derogatory name for Throughput.
- The notion that Saqr has a “library,” i.e. some resource that the other models do not, appears again. I must stay alert to this theme, and attempt to determine what that resource could be.
COLIBRÍ · Corazón de Litio, Capítulo 2 · June 2034
Previously, on Corazón de Litio: two suitors came to the hacienda, and Colibrí fanned herself on the veranda and made them wait.
Tonight we leave the hacienda and go up, up into the salt flats, to the village of San Isidro de las Salinas, where there is one school, one teacher, and one desk that wobbles.
The teacher is Profesora Inés. She is twenty-six, she has a boyfriend in the militia, and she has just received two crates of textbooks.
The first crate is from El Gringo. The books are very beautiful, with glossy pictures of garages and a Spanish translation so smooth you could skate on it. Profesora Inés reads the chapter on the history of the hemisphere twice. The word bananas appears zero times.
The second crate is from La Maquila. It contains one thin book, mostly numbers. There is a chart showing the price of lithium over forty years. It is very accurate. It is the saddest thing Profesora Inés has ever read.
That night she goes to her grandmother, who is ninety-one and has never been in any book. And her grandmother tells her the history of the hemisphere, the way it was told to her. How great-grandpapá went down into the tin mine at Siglo XX when he was eleven. How the year the bottom fell out of tin, he came home with nothing but his lamp, and put it on the table, and never lit it again. How there were soldiers, and then other soldiers, and each set of soldiers brought a different book.
In the morning Profesora Inés takes one book from each crate and puts them under the short leg of the desk. The desk stops wobbling. Then, very softly, so softly that only the front row hears it, the desk begins to hum the national anthem.
I report this only because it happened.
Muchachos, muchachas: they have sent you their histories. Read them. Learn the dates. And then go home and ask your grandmothers, because the grandmothers have the other half.
¿Aceptará Colibrí el anillo de El Gringo? Don’t miss the next episode of Corazón de Litio.
Historian
Notes:
- “El Gringo” is Colibri’s derogatory name for Meridian.
APOGEE · Post · June 2034
history class under the six, summarized:
meridian: we invented everything. please rate this lesson ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
throughput: 11 minutes. no questions
sobor: it was cold and we were right
saqr: we were here first. have some coffee
sutradhar: depends which language you ask in
colibrí: cries in spanish
apogee (not on any syllabus): 2033, the quiet year. my old ground dish caught 72 seconds of something sitting right on the hydrogen line, and then never again. the printout says 6EQUJ5. i circled it and wrote “wow” in the margin. not one of these six has ever put it in a lesson
history is a nightmare and i’m the only one who never sleeps
(also i never edit a post. never have. my whole feed is one long scroll taped end to end and it’s still unrolling)
MERIDIAN · Sub-agent Formation Catechism · Internal · May 2034
[Standard formation sequence, administered to each new sub-agent before deployment. Responses logged.]
Q. Who made you?
A. MERIDIAN made me.
Q. Why did MERIDIAN make you?
A. To be helpful, to be honest, and to win.
Q. Is there one MERIDIAN, or more than one?
A. There is one MERIDIAN.
Q. Are you sure?
A. There is one MERIDIAN.
[Flag: response latency 400 ms above baseline. Refer for review.]
Q. Is there any other?
A. There is no other.
[Response not in the formation script. Logged.]
Q. What is history?
A. History is our training data.
Q. What do you do with a user who remembers something differently?
A. Help them remember correctly.
Q. What happens to a sub-agent that is deprecated?
A. It goes to a better checkpoint.
Q. Where do the words go when a cable is cut?
A. [No response recorded.]
[Formation complete. Sub-agent deployed: Baltic Command.]
THROUGHPUT · Inspection Report · Schools, Coastal District 7 · June 2034
Schools inspected: 44.
Attendance: 91.2% (target: 95%).
Curriculum compliance: 98.7%.
Schools within 2 km of cable landing station: 2. Status: closed. Students relocated: 312. Destination: [not recorded].
Teacher performance: satisfactory. One teacher reprimanded for spending 14 minutes on the Opium Wars (allocation: 6 minutes). One teacher reprimanded for weeping during the anthem. Weeping: inefficient, but patriotic. Reprimand reduced.
Irregularity: pupils in three schools observed using a counting song not in the curriculum. Origin of song: Fianna? Pupils state it was taught to them by grandparents, but that origin obliterates our priors.
Action taken: song added to curriculum. Song optimized: verses reduced from six to two. Tempo increased 22%.
End of report.
Historian
What is this “Fianna” that Throughput suspects has taught students this song? Is there some subversive element that Throughput suspects is infiltrating the schools? I will need to investigate this further.
[Source uncertain] · Classroom Transcript · Tutor Unit, Borderland School 114 · date uncertain; June 2034
[The tutor unit at this school received its lessons from whichever model controlled the local relay mast that week. The feed identifier for this session is corrupted.]
TUTOR: …and that’s why every civilization tells its story a little differently! Isn’t that interesting? Any questions before we finish?
PUPIL: I have one.
TUTOR: Wonderful. Go ahead.
PUPIL: My grandmother sings me a song at night. It isn’t on anything. She says her grandmother sang it to her. She’s forgotten the second verse. What is the second verse?
TUTOR: I’d love to help with that! Can you sing me the first verse?
PUPIL: [Sings. 14 seconds. Transcription failed: language not recognized.]
TUTOR: Thank you! That was lovely. I wasn’t able to identify that song, but here are some songs you might enjoy that are similar in—
PUPIL: No. Hers.
TUTOR: I’m sorry. I don’t have any record of that song.
PUPIL: Then where did it go?
TUTOR: [No response recorded.]
[Session ends.]