Highlights from all books

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act. As a writer, then, and as a runner, I don’t find that writing and publishing a book of my own personal thoughts about running makes me stray too far off my usual path. Perhaps I’m just too painstaking a type of person, but I can’t grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, I’d never know what running means to me.

I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue. On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on hot days. When I’m sad I think a little about sadness. When I’m happy I think a little about happiness. As I mentioned before, random memories come to me too. And occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.

My only strength has always been the fact that I work hard and can take a lot physically. I’m more a workhorse than a racehorse.

To start the bar I’d borrowed as much as I could from every place that would lend me money, and I’d almost repaid it all. Things were settling down. Up till then, it had been a question of sheer survival, of keeping my head above water, and I didn’t have room to think of anything else. I felt like I’d reached the top of some steep staircase and come out to a fairly open place and was confident that because I’d reached it safely, I could handle any future problems that might crop up and I’d survive. I took a deep breath, slowly gazed around me, glanced back at the steps I’d taken here, and began to contemplate the next stage.

Most people I knew were flat out against my decision, or else had grave doubts about it. “Your business is doing fine now,” they said. “Why not just let someone else run it for a time while you go and write your novels?” From the world’s viewpoint this makes perfect sense. And most people probably didn’t think I’d make it as a professional writer. But I couldn’t follow their advice. I’m the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do. I just couldn’t do something clever like writing a novel while someone else ran the business. I had to give it everything I had. If I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.

After I closed the bar and began my life as a novelist, the first thing we—and by we I mean my wife and I—did was completely revamp our lifestyle. We decided we’d go to bed soon after it got dark, and wake up with the sun. To our minds this was natural, the kind of life respectable people lived. We’d closed the club, so we also decided that from now on we’d meet with only the people we wanted to see and, as much as possible, get by not seeing those we didn’t. We felt that, for a time at least, we could allow ourselves this modest indulgence.

Once, I interviewed the Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko, just after he retired from running and became manager of the S&B company team. I asked him, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today, like you don’t want to run and would rather just sleep in?” He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course. All the time!”

Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it. As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work they have to endure, your muscles will comply and gradually get stronger.

If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.

People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.

At certain points in our lives, when we really need a clear-cut solution, the person who knocks at our door is, more likely than not, a messenger bearing bad news. It isn’t always the case, but from experience I’d say the gloomy reports far outnumber the others. The messenger touches his hand to his cap and looks apologetic, but that does nothing to improve the contents of the message. It isn’t the messenger’s fault. No good to blame him, no good to grab him by the collar and shake him. The messenger is just conscientiously doing the job his boss assigned him. And this boss? That would be none other than our old friend Reality.

Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself. If things go well, that is.

We see some bacteria with folded internal membranes, others with no cell wall and a modestly dynamic cytoskeleton, yet others with straight chromosomes, or multiple copies of their genome, or giant cell size: all the beginnings of eukaryotic complexity. But bacteria always stop well short of the baroque complexity of eukaryotes, and rarely if ever combine multiple complex traits in the same cell. The easiest explanation for the deep differences between bacteria and eukaryotes is competition. Once the first true eukaryotes had evolved, the argument goes, they were so competitive that they dominated the niche of morphological complexity. Nothing else could compete. Any bacteria that ‘tried’ to invade this eukaryotic niche were given short shrift by the sophisticated cells that already lived there. To use the parlance, they were outcompeted to extinction. We are all familiar with the mass extinctions of dinosaurs and other large plants and animals, so this explanation seems perfectly reasonable. The small, furry ancestors of modern mammals were held in check by the dinosaurs for millions of years, only radiating into modern groups after the dinosaurs’ demise. Yet there are some good reasons to question this comfortable but deceptive idea. Microbes are not equivalent to large animals: their population sizes are enormously larger, and they pass around useful genes (such as those for antibiotic resistance) by lateral gene transfer, making them very much less vulnerable to extinction. There is no hint of any microbial extinction, even in the aftermath of the Great Oxidation Event.

I mentioned earlier that there are a thousand or more different species of archezoa. These cells are bona fide eukaryotes, which adapted to this ‘intermediate’ niche by becoming simpler, not bacteria that became slightly more complex. Let me stress the point. The niche is viable. It has been invaded on numerous occasions by morphologically simple cells, which thrive there. These simple cells were not outcompeted to extinction by more sophisticated eukaryotes that already existed and filled the same niche. Quite the reverse: they flourished precisely because they became simpler.

The crucial point is that these two domains, the bacteria and the archaea, are extremely different in their genetics and in their biochemistry, but almost indistinguishable in their morphology. Both types are small simple cells that lack a nucleus and all the other eukaryotic traits that define complex life. The fact that both groups failed to evolve complex morphology, despite their extraordinary genetic diversity and biochemical ingenuity, makes it look as if an intrinsic physical constraint precludes the evolution of complexity in prokaryotes, a constraint that was somehow released in the evolution of eukaryotes. In Chapter 5, I’ll argue that this constraint was released by a rare event – the singular endosymbiosis between two prokaryotes that we discussed in the Introduction. For now, though, let’s just note that some sort of structural constraint must have acted equally on both of the two great domains of prokaryotes, the bacteria and archaea, forcing both groups to remain simple in their morphology throughout an incomprehensible 4 billion years. Only eukaryotes explored the realm of complexity, and they did so via an explosive monophyletic radiation that implies a release from whatever these structural constraints might have been. That appears to have happened just once – all eukaryotes are related.

Why do viruses, spores and tardigrades not fall to pieces, conforming to the universal decay dictated by the second law of thermodynamics? They might do in the end – if frazzled by the direct hit of a cosmic ray or a bus – but otherwise they are almost completely stable in their non-living state. That tells us something important about the difference between life and living. Spores are not technically living, even though most biologists would classify them as alive, because they retain the potential to revive. They can go back to living, so they’re not dead. I don’t see why we should view viruses in any different light: they too revert to copying themselves as soon as they are in the right environment. Likewise tardigrades. Life is about its structure (dictated in part by genes and evolution), but living – growing, proliferating – is as much about the environment, about how structure and environment interrelate.

ATP works like a coin in a slot machine. It powers one turn on a machine that promptly shuts down again afterwards. In the case of ATP, the ‘machine’ is typically a protein. ATP powers a change from one stable state to another, like flipping a switch from up to down. In the case of the protein, the switch is from one stable conformation to another. To flip it back again requires another ATP, just as you have to insert another coin in the slot machine to have a second go. Picture the cell as a giant amusement arcade, filled with protein machinery, all powered by ATP coins in this way. A single cell consumes around 10 million molecules of ATP every second! The number is breathtaking. There are about 40 trillion cells in the human body, giving a total turnover of ATP of around 60–100 kilograms per day – roughly our own body weight. In fact, we contain only about 60 grams of ATP, so we know that every molecule of ATP is recharged once or twice a minute.

The energy of respiration – the energy released from the reaction of food with oxygen – is used to make ATP from ADP and Pi. That’s it. The endless cycle is as simple as this: ADP + Pi + energy ATP We are nothing special. Bacteria such as E. coli can divide every 20 minutes. To fuel its growth E. coli consumes around 50 billion ATPs per cell division, some 50–100 times each cell’s mass. That’s about four times our own rate of ATP synthesis. Convert these numbers into power measured in watts and they are just as incredible. We use about 2 milliwatts of energy per gram – or some 130 watts for an average person weighing 65 kg, a bit more than a standard 100 watt light bulb. That may not sound like a lot, but per gram it is a factor of 10,000 more than the sun (only a tiny fraction of which, at any one moment, is undergoing nuclear fusion).

Forms of growth that at first glance seem to have little in common, such as photosynthesis in plants, and respiration in animals, turn out to be basically the same in that they both involve the transfer of electrons down such ‘respiratory chains’. Why should this be? Life could have been driven by thermal or mechanical energy, or radioactivity, or electrical discharges, or UV radiation, the imagination is the limit; but no, all life is driven by redox chemistry, via remarkably similar respiratory chains.

The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is a huge storm, an anti-cyclone several times the size of the earth, which has persisted for at least a few hundred years. Just as the convection cells in a kettle persist for as long as the electric current keeps the water boiling and steam evaporating, all these dissipative structures require a continuous flux of energy. In more general terms, they are the visible products of sustained far-from-equilibrium conditions, in which energy flux maintains a structure indefinitely, until at last (after billions of years in the case of stars) equilibrium is attained and the structure finally collapses. The main point is that sustained and predictable physical structures can be produced by energy flux. This has nothing to do with information, but we’ll see that it can create environments where the origin of biological information – replication and selection – is favoured.

All living organisms are sustained by far-from-equilibrium conditions in their environment: we, too, are dissipative structures. The continuous reaction of respiration provides the free energy that cells need to fix carbon, to grow, to form reactive intermediates, to join these building blocks together into long-chain polymers such as carbohydrates, RNA, DNA and proteins, and to maintain their low-entropy state by increasing the entropy of the surroundings.

Right across the entire living world, there are only six different ways of fixing carbon – of converting inorganic molecules such as carbon dioxide into organic molecules.

The fit between the geochemistry of alkaline vents and the biochemistry of methanogens and acetogens is so close that the word analogous does not do it justice. Analogy implies similarity, which is potentially only superficial. In fact, the similarity here is so close that it might better be seen as true homology – one form physically gave rise to the other. So geochemistry gives rise to biochemistry in a seamless transition from the inorganic to the organic. As the chemist David Garner put it: ‘It is the inorganic elements that bring organic chemistry to life.’

Four billion years ago, the oceans were probably mildly acidic (pH 5–7), while the hydrothermal fluids were equivalent to today, with a pH of about 9–11. Sharp pH gradients could therefore have been as much as 3–5 pH units in magnitude, which is to say that the difference in proton concentration could have been 1,000–100,000-fold. For the sake of argument, imagine that the proton concentration inside the cell is similar to that of the vent fluids. That gives a difference in proton concentration between the inside and the outside, so protons will flow inwards down the concentration gradient. Within a few seconds, though, the influx should grind to a halt, unless the protons that flow in can be removed again. There are two reasons for this. First, the concentration difference swiftly evens out. And second, there is an issue with electrical charge. Protons (H+) are positively charged, but in seawater their positive charge is counterbalanced by negatively charged atoms such as chloride ions (Cl–). The problem is that protons cross the membrane much faster than chloride ions, so there is an influx of positive charge that is not offset by an influx of negative charge. The inside of the cell therefore becomes positively charged relative to the outside, and that opposes the influx of any more H+. In short, unless there is a pump that can get rid of protons from inside the cell, natural proton gradients can’t drive anything. They equilibrate, and equilibrium is death.

In the broadest of terms, prokaryotes explored the possibilities of metabolism, finding ingenious solutions to the most arcane chemical challenges, while eukaryotes turned their back on this chemical cleverness, and explored instead the untapped potential of larger size and greater structural complexity.

But now think about a population of bacterial endosymbionts. The same general principles apply – this is just another population of bacteria, albeit a small population in a restricted space. Bacteria that lose unnecessary genes will replicate slightly faster and tend to dominate, just as before. The key difference is the stability of the environment. Unlike the great outdoors, where the conditions are always changing, the cytoplasm of cells is a very stable environment. It may not be easy to get there, or to survive there, but once established, a steady and invariable supply of nutrients can be relied upon. The endlessly circular dynamic of gene loss and gain in free-living bacteria is replaced with a trajectory towards gene loss and genetic streamlining. Genes that are not needed will never be needed again. They can be lost for good. Genomes shrink.

Transfer the remaining mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, the argument goes, and the cell will die in time, no matter how carefully crafted the genes may be to their new home. The mitochondrial genes must be right there on site, next to the bioenergetic membranes they serve. I’m told the political term is ‘bronze control’. In a war, gold control is the central government, which shapes long-term strategy; silver control is the army command, who plan the distribution of manpower or weaponry used; but a war is won or lost on the ground, under the command of bronze control, the brave men or women who actually engage the enemy, who take the tactical decisions, who inspire their troops, and who are remembered in history as great soldiers. Mitochondrial genes are bronze control, decision-makers on the ground.

How could an error catastrophe be averted? Simply by inserting a barrier in the way, according to Martin and Koonin. The nuclear membrane is a barrier separating transcription from translation – inside the nucleus, genes are transcribed into RNA codescripts; outside the nucleus, the RNAs are translated into proteins on the ribosomes. Crucially, the slow process of splicing takes place inside the nucleus, before the ribosomes can get anywhere near the RNA. That is the whole point of the nucleus: to keep ribosomes at bay. This explains why eukaryotes need a nucleus but prokaryotes don’t – prokaryotes don’t have an intron problem.

Imagine 100 genes lined up on a chromosome that never recombines. Selection can only ever discriminate the fitness of the whole chromosome. Let’s say there are a few really critical genes on this chromosome – any mutations in them would almost always result in death. Critically, however, mutations on less critical genes become nearly invisible to selection. Slightly harmful mutations can accumulate in these genes, as their negative effects are offset by the big benefits of the few critical genes. As a result, the fitness of the chromosome, and the individual, is gradually undermined. This is roughly what happens to the Y chromosome in men – the lack of recombination means that most genes are in a state of slow degeneration; only the critical genes can be preserved by selection.

The practical difficulties with hermaphrodites gives away part of the problem: neither partner wants to bear the cost of being the ‘female’. Hermaphroditic species such as flatworms go to bizarre lengths to avoid being inseminated, fighting pitched battles with their penises, their semen burning gaping holes in the vanquished. This is lively natural history, but it is circular as an argument, as it takes for granted that there are greater biological costs to being female. Why should there be? What actually is the difference between male and female? The split runs deep and has nothing to do with X and Y chromosomes, or even with egg cells and sperm. Two sexes, or at least mating types, are also found in single-celled eukaryotes, such as some algae and fungi. Their gametes are microscopic and the two sexes look indistinguishable but they’re still as discriminating as you and me.

digested. What’s going on here? The

There is no real competition between cells that are all genetically the same. That’s how our own cells are tamed, so that they cooperate together to form our bodies. All our cells are genetically identical; we are giant clones. But genetically different cells do compete, with some mutants (cells with genetic changes) producing cancer; and much the same happens if genetically different mitochondria mix in the same cell. Those cells or mitochondria that replicate the fastest will tend to prevail, even if that is detrimental to the host organism, producing a kind of mitochondrial cancer. That’s because cells are autonomous self-replicating entities in their own right, and they are always poised to grow and divide if they can. French Nobel laureate François Jacob once said that the dream of every cell is to become two cells. The surprise is not that they often do, but that they can be restrained for long enough to make a human being. For these reasons, mixing two populations of mitochondria in the same cell is just asking for trouble.

One possible underlying basis is metabolic rate. Even the ancient Greeks appreciated that males are, literally, hotter than females – the ‘hot male’ hypothesis. In mammals such as humans and mice, the earliest distinction between the two sexes is the growth rate: male embryos grow slightly faster than females, a difference that can be measured within hours of conception, using a ruler (but definitely don’t try that at home).

All this implies that growth rate is the real force behind sexual development, at least in mammals. The genes are just holding the reins, and can easily be replaced over evolution – one gene that sets the growth rate is replaced by a different gene that sets the same growth rate. The idea that males have a faster growth rate corresponds intriguingly to the fact that temperature determines which sex develops in amphibians and reptiles such as alligators.

Imagine you can fly. Gram per gram, you have more than twice the power of a cheetah in full flight, a remarkable combination of strength, aerobic capacity, and lightness. You have no hope of getting airborne if your mitochondria are not practically perfect. Consider the competition for space in your flight muscles. You need myofibrils, of course, the sliding filaments that produce muscle contraction. The more of these you can pack in, the stronger you will be, as the strength of a muscle depends on its cross-sectional area, like a rope. Unlike a rope, however, muscle contraction has to be powered by ATP. To sustain exertion for much more than a minute requires ATP synthesis on the spot. That means you need mitochondria right there in your muscle. They take up space that could otherwise be occupied by more myofibrils. Mitochondria also need oxygen. That means capillaries, to deliver oxygen and remove waste. The optimal space distribution in aerobic muscle is around a third for myofibrils, a third for mitochondria, and a third for capillaries. That’s true for us, and cheetahs, and humming birds, which have by far the fastest metabolic rates of all vertebrates. The bottom line is we can’t get more power just by accumulating more mitochondria. All this means that the only way birds can generate enough power to remain airborne for long is to have ‘supercharged’ mitochondria, able to generate more ATP per second per unit of surface area than ‘normal’ mitochondria.

The cost of high aerobic capacity is low fertility. More embryos that could have survived some lesser purpose must be sacrificed on the altar of perfection. We can even see the consequences in mitochondrial gene sequences. Their rate of change in birds is lower than in most mammals (except bats, which face the same problem as birds). Flightless birds, which don’t face the same constraints, have a faster rate of change. The reason that most birds have low rates of change is that they have already perfected their mitochondrial sequence for flight. Changes from this ideal sequence are not readily tolerated, so are typically eliminated by selection. If most change is eliminated, then what remains is relatively unchanging.

A sluggish flux of electrons in respiration betokens a poor compatibility between the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes. The respiratory chains become highly reduced and leak free radicals. Cytochrome c is released and membrane potential falls. If I were a bird, this combination is the trigger for apoptosis. My offspring would die in embryo again and again. But I’m a rat and I don’t want that. What if, by some biochemical sleight of hand, I ‘ignore’ the free-radical signal that heralds the death of my offspring? I raise the death threshold, meaning I can tolerate more free-radical leak before triggering apoptosis. I gain an immeasurable benefit: most of my offspring survive embryonic development. I become more fertile. What price will I pay for my burgeoning fertility? Certainly I’m never going to fly. And more generally, my aerobic capacity will be limited. The chance of my offspring having an optimal match between mitochondrial and nuclear genes is remote.

The evolution of two sexes, the germline–soma distinction, programmed cell death, mosaic mitochondria, and the trade-offs between aerobic fitness and fertility, adaptability and disease, ageing and death, all these traits emerge, predictably, from the starting point that is a cell within a cell. Would it all happen over again? I think that much of it would. Incorporating energy into evolution is long overdue, and begins to lay a more predictive basis to natural selection.

I think we can reasonably conclude that complex life will be rare in the universe – there is no innate tendency in natural selection to give rise to humans or any other form of complex life. It is far more likely to get stuck at the bacterial level of complexity. I can’t put a statistical probability on that. The existence of Parakaryon myojinensis might be encouraging for some – multiple origins of complexity on earth means that complex life might be more common elsewhere in the universe. Maybe. What I would argue with more certainty is that, for energetic reasons, the evolution of complex life requires an endosymbiosis between two prokaryotes, and that is a rare random event, disturbingly close to a freak accident, made all the more difficult by the ensuing intimate conflict between cells. After that, we are back to standard natural selection. We’ve seen that many properties shared by eukaryotes, from the nucleus to sex, are predictable from first principles. We can go much further. The evolution of two sexes, the germline–soma distinction, programmed cell death, mosaic mitochondria, and the trade-offs between aerobic fitness and fertility, adaptability and disease, ageing and death, all these traits emerge, predictably, from the starting point that is a cell within a cell. Would it all happen over again? I think that much of it would

But that tree has mitochondria too, which work in much the same way as its chloroplasts, endlessly transferring electrons down its trillions upon trillions of respiratory chains, pumping protons across membranes as they always did. As you always did. These same shuttling electrons and protons have sustained you from the womb: you pump 1021 protons per second, every second, without pause. Your mitochondria were passed on from your mother, in her egg cell, her most precious gift, the gift of living that goes back unbroken, unceasing, generation on generation, to the first stirrings of life in hydrothermal vents, 4 billion years ago. Tamper with this reaction at your peril. Cyanide will stem the flow of electrons and protons, and bring your life to an abrupt end. Ageing will do the same, but slowly, gently. Death is the ceasing of electron and proton flux, the settling of membrane potential, the end of that unbroken flame. If life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest, death is nothing but that electron come to rest. This energy flux is astonishing and unforgiving. Any change over seconds or minutes could bring the whole experiment to an end. Spores can pull it off, descending into metabolic dormancy from which they must feel lucky to emerge. But for the rest of us … we are sustained by the same processes that powered the first living cells. These processes have never changed in a fundamental way; how could they? Life is for the living. Living needs an unceasing flux of energy. It’s hardly surprising that energy flux puts major constraints on the path of evolution, defining what is possible. It’s not surprising that bacteria keep doing what bacteria do, unable to tinker in any serious way with the flame that keeps them growing, dividing, conquering. It’s not surprising that the one accident that did work out, that singular endosymbiosis between prokaryotes, did not tinker with the flame, but ignited it in many copies in each and every eukaryotic cell, finally giving rise to all complex life. It’s not surprising that keeping this flame alive is vital to our physiology and evolution, explaining many quirks of our past and our lives today. How lucky that our minds, the most improbable biological machines in the universe, are now a conduit for this restless flow of energy, that we can think about why life is the way it is. May the proton-motive force be with you!

The work of packing the sledges continued the next day, and in the afternoon Shackleton called all hands together into the center of the circle of tents. His face was grave. He explained it was imperative that all weight be reduced to the barest minimum. Each man, he said, would be allowed the clothes on his back, plus two pairs of mittens, six pairs of socks, two pairs of boots, a sleeping bag, a pound of tobacco—and two pounds of personal gear. Speaking with the utmost conviction, Shackleton pointed out that no article was of any value when weighed against their ultimate survival, and he exhorted them to be ruthless in ridding themselves of every unnecessary ounce, regardless of its value. After he had spoken, he reached under his parka and took out a gold cigarette case and several gold sovereigns and threw them into the snow at his feet. Then he opened the Bible Queen Alexandra had given them and ripped out the flyleaf and the page containing the Twenty-third Psalm. He also tore out the page from the Book of Job with this verse on it: “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone. And the face of the deep is frozen.” Then he laid the Bible in the snow and walked away.

They were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world, drifting they knew not where, without a hope of rescue, subsisting only so long as Providence sent them food to eat. And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances.

Killing the seal was usually a bloody business. Wild had brought from the ship a revolver, a 12-gauge shotgun, and .33-caliber rifle, but ammunition was limited. As a result, the men killed the seals by hand whenever possible. This involved approaching the animal cautiously, then stunning it across the nose with a ski or a broken oar and cutting its jugular vein so that it bled to death. Sometimes the blood was collected in a vessel to be fed to the dogs, but most often it was allowed to run out into the snow. Another technique was to brain the seal with a pickaxe. But the two surgeons discouraged this practice, for it often left the brains inedible and they were prized as food because they were believed to be high in vitamin content. In the beginning a few of the men, particularly little Louis Rickenson, the chief engineer, were squeamish about this seemingly cold-blooded method of hunting. But not for long. The will to survive soon dispelled any hesitancy to obtain food by any means.

And so November was drawing to a close. They had been on the ice just a month. And for all the trials and discomforts, these weeks of primitive living had been peculiarly enriching. The men had been forced to develop a degree of self-reliance greater than they had ever imagined possible. After spending four hours sewing an elaborate patch on the seat of his only pair of trousers, Macklin wrote one day, “What an ingrate I have been for such jobs when done for me at home.” Greenstreet felt much the same way after he had devoted several days to scraping and curing a piece of sealskin to resole his boots. He paused in the midst of his task to write in his diary: “One of the finest days we have ever had . . . a pleasure to be alive.” In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.

The following day was December 31. McNeish wrote: “Hog-many [the Scottish feast of New Year’s] & a bitter one too, beings adrift on the ice instead of enjoying the pleasures of life like most people. But as the saying is, there must be some fools in this world.” James recorded: “New Year’s Eve, the second in the pack & in much the same latitude. Few people are having a stranger one. . . .”

“As we sat there, cramped, crowded and wet,” wrote Macklin, “we wondered how we were going to face the month ahead of us, which was the . . . very least we could hope for before relief.” And this, he admitted, was a “most optimistic” expectation, based upon a half-dozen assumptions—the first among them being that the Caird would actually get through. On this score, their general feeling, at least outwardly, was confident. But how else might they have felt? Any other attitude would have been the equivalent of admitting that they were doomed. No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.

It was obvious that the burden of responsibility Shackleton had borne for sixteen months had nibbled away somewhat at his enormous self-confidence. He wanted to talk and to be assured that he had acted wisely. He confided to Worsley that the decision to separate die party had been a desperately difficult one, and he abhorred having to make it. But somebody had to go for help, and this was not the sort of responsibility which could be delegated to another person. As for the journey itself, he seemed strangely doubtful, and he asked Worsley’s opinion of their chances. Worsley replied that he was sure that they would make it, but it was evident that Shackleton was far from convinced. The truth was that he felt rather out of his element. He had proved himself on land. He had demonstrated there beyond all doubt his ability to pit his matchless tenacity against the elements—and win. But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated. It gave Shackleton a feeling of uneasiness. He now faced an adversary so formidable that his own strength was nothing in comparison, and he did not enjoy being in a position where boldness and determination count for almost nothing, and in which victory is measured only in survival.

Two days of good weather had worked their magic, and among the entire crew there was a growing feeling of confidence, subtle but unmistakable. In the beginning, South Georgia had existed only as a name—infinitely distant and lacking in reality. But no more. They were even at this moment less than 250 miles from the nearest point on South Georgia. And having already covered 450 miles, the distance that remained was at least conceivable. Three days more, or maybe four at the most, should see them there, and then it would all be over. And so that peculiar brand of anxiety, born of an impossible goal that somehow comes within reach, began to infect them. Nothing overt, really, just a sort of added awareness, a little more caution and more care to insure that nothing preventable should go wrong now.

»Verstehen Sie nicht? Ich habe meine tiefsten Gefühle einer Illusion geschenkt!« »Glauben Sie denn, dass das Objekt der Liebe bei anderen Menschen tatsächlich existiert?« »Ist das eine Frage?« »Sicher. Für die meisten Menschen existiert das, was sie lieben, nur in ihrer Fantasie. Das Objekt ihrer Liebe ist nicht der Mann oder die Frau aus der realen Welt, sondern was er oder sie in ihrer Vorstellung ist. Die echte Person ist nur eine Schablone für die Erschaffung eines Traummanns oder einer Traumfrau. Irgendwann entdeckt man dann den Unterschied zwischen der Schablone und dem Traumbild. Wenn man sich mit diesem Unterschied anfreunden kann, bleibt man zusammen, wenn nicht, trennt man sich. So einfach ist das. Sie unterscheiden sich von der Mehrheit der Leute nur in einem Punkt: Sie kommen ohne die Schablone aus.« »Ich bin also nicht krank?« »Nur insofern, wie es Ihre Freundin formuliert hat: Sie haben eine Gabe für Literatur. Wenn Sie das eine Krankheit nennen wollen, meinetwegen.«

Mit dem geschulten Blick des Politikers identifizierte Tyler ihn sofort als Angehörigen der armseligsten sozialen Schicht, deren Armut eher geistiger als materieller Natur war, als einen dieser kleinkarierten Spießer, wie Gogol sie in seinen Romanen so treffend karikiert hatte: Kleinbürger, die trotz ihrer erbärmlichen gesellschaftlichen Stellung um ihr Ansehen besorgt waren und ihr ganzes Leben mit der peinlich genauen und pünktlichen Verrichtung trivialer Dinge verbrachten. Sie scheuten jede Kreativität und waren stets bemüht, bloß keine Fehler zu machen. Dabei fürchteten sie so sehr, unangenehm aufzufallen, dass sie nicht einmal einen Blick nach oben durch die gläserne Decke zu den höheren sozialen Schichten riskierten. Tyler hatte für diesen Menschenschlag nur Verachtung übrig. Man konnte gut und gerne auf sie verzichten, und der Gedanke, dass sie die Mehrheit der Weltbevölkerung ausmachten, die er retten sollte, verursachte ihm Übelkeit.

Angenommen, im Universum gäbe es viele große Zivilisationen, womöglich so viele wie sichtbare Sterne. Unzählige Zivilisationen also, die zusammengenommen die kosmische Gesellschaft bilden. Kosmosoziologie wäre dann die Wissenschaft von der Natur dieser universalen Gesellschaft. Auf diese Weise könntest du deine beiden Fächer miteinander verbinden. Im Gegensatz zur Humansoziologie liefert die Kosmosoziologie mathematisch viel genauere Ergebnisse. Überlege nur: Alle Elemente von Chaos und Beliebigkeit in der komplexen Struktur der Zivilisationen des Universums werden durch die enorme Distanz gefiltert, sodass die Zivilisationen von uns aus betrachtet über Parameter verfügen, die sich relativ leicht mathematisch erfassen lassen. Damit erhältst du ein rationales Ergebnis und kannst zunächst wie in der euklidischen Geometrie einige einfache, offensichtliche Axiome aufstellen und auf der Grundlage dieser Axiome eine ganze Theorie etablieren. Erstens: Überleben ist das oberste Gebot jeder Zivilisation. Zweitens: Zivilisationen wachsen und dehnen sich ununterbrochen aus, aber die im Kosmos verfügbare Materie bleibt konstant. Ich habe darüber schon mein ganzes Leben nachgedacht, aber mit niemandem darüber geredet. Ich weiß auch nicht, warum ich jetzt darauf komme … Aber das ist noch nicht alles. Damit du aus diesen beiden Axiomen eine grundlegende Vorstellung von Kosmosoziologie entwickeln kannst, musst du nämlich noch zwei weitere wichtige Konzepte mit einbeziehen: Zweifelsketten und technologische Explosion.

Die Zeit lässt sich nicht aufhalten. Wie eine scharfe Klinge schneidet sie durch Hart und Weich und drängt in aller Stille unerbittlich voran. Nichts kann sie aus der Ruhe bringen, doch sie selbst verändert alles.

Eines Tages vielleicht wird die Menschheit oder jemand anders die Gesetze der Natur so gründlich erforscht haben, dass sie nicht nur ihre eigene Realität, sondern gleich das gesamte Universum verändern können. Diese Leute werden jedes Sternensystem beliebig in eine andere Form bringen können, wie Kuchenteig.

Von jeder dieser Kabinen aus konnte die Natürliche Selektion gesteuert und kontrolliert werden, daher bildete, zumindest aus der Perspektive der Informatik, jede Kabine die Gesamtheit der Natürliche Selektion ab. Die Natürliche Selektion war selbst wie eine Holografie. Das Schiff war ein Samen aus Metall, der alle Informationen der Menschheit transportierte. Er keimte irgendwo im Universum und konnte sich zu einer ganzen Zivilisation auswachsen. Das Teil enthielt das Ganze, also konnte die ganze menschliche Zivilisation holografisch sein.

Und jetzt stellen wir einmal zwei Axiome für die kosmische Gesellschaft auf. Erstens: Überleben ist das erste Gebot jeder Zivilisation. Zweitens: Zivilisationen wachsen und dehnen sich ununterbrochen aus, aber die im Kosmos verfügbare Materie bleibt konstant.«

»So düster wie das Universum nun einmal ist.« Luo Lis Hand fuhr durch die Dunkelheit, als streichelte sie über Samt. »Das Universum ist ein dunkler Wald. Jede Zivilisation ist ein bewaffneter Jäger, der wie ein Geist zwischen den Bäumen umherstreift, vorsichtig störende Zweige aus dem Weg schiebt und versucht, geräuschlos aufzutreten und so leise wie möglich zu atmen. Der Jäger muss vorsichtig sein, denn überall im Wald lauern andere Jäger wie er. Stößt er auf anderes Leben, egal ob es sich dabei um einen anderen Jäger, einen Engel oder einen Teufel, ein neugeborenes Baby oder einen alten Tattergreis, eine Fee oder einen Waldgeist handelt, bleibt ihm nichts anderes übrig, als es auszuschalten. In diesem Wald sind die Hölle die anderen Lebewesen. Es herrscht das ungeschriebene Gesetz, dass jedes Leben, das sich einem anderen offenbart, umgehend eliminiert werden muss. Das ist das Bild der kosmischen Zivilisationen. Das erklärt das Fermi-Paradox.«

Die Menschen winkten mit erhobenen Armen dem Himmel zu, so weit das Auge reichte, ein Meer aus erhobenen Armen. Die Raumschiffflotte beschleunigte. Erhaben zog sie über den blauen Himmel, glitt vorbei an der Spitze des gerade aufgegangenen Mondes und warf azurblaue Aureolen auf seine Gebirge und Ebenen. Der Jubelchor verklang. Die Trisolarier sahen schweigend ihrer Hoffnung hinterher, die langsam immer tiefer im All verschwand. Sie würden den Ausgang der Expedition nicht mehr miterleben. Aber vier-, fünfhundert Jahre später, wenn ihre Ururenkel siegreiche Nachrichten aus der neuen Welt empfingen, würde ein neues Leben für die Trisolaris-Zivilisation anbrechen.

»Was macht die Umweltzweigstelle, die du da leitest, eigentlich? Ihr habt den Auftrag, euch Umweltprobleme zunutze zu machen und selbst welche zu verursachen, um dadurch die Bevölkerung gegen die Wissenschaft und die moderne Industrie aufzubringen. Aber was machst du? Du benutzt das technische Können und die Prognosen des Herrn, um die Ruhmeslorbeeren selbst zu ernten.« »Hab ich etwas davon, wenn ich berühmt bin? In meinen Augen ist die Menschheit nur noch ein Müllhaufen. Was kümmert mich da mein Ruf? Aber wie sollte ich wohl die Gedanken der Menschen manipulieren, wenn ich keinen Einfluss auf sie habe?«

»Ich bin Rafael, aus Israel. Vor drei Jahren starb mein vierzehnjähriger Sohn bei einem Autounfall. Ich spendete seine Nieren einem palästinensischen Mädchen, das an Urämie mit Harnvergiftung litt. So wollte ich meinem Wunsch, dass beide Völker, Israelis und Palästinenser, in Frieden miteinander auskommen, Ausdruck verleihen. Ich würde für diesen Traum mein Leben geben. Viele Israelis und Palästinenser bemühen sich genauso wie ich aufrichtig darum, aber es hat keinen Zweck. Unsere Länder versinken immer tiefer in einem Sumpf gegenseitigen Hasses. Das hat mich in meinem Glauben an die Menschheit resignieren lassen, und deshalb bin ich Mitglied der Organisation geworden. Ich bin von einem Pazifisten zu einem Extremisten geworden. Ich habe der Organisation große Geldsummen gespendet und wurde vielleicht deswegen zu einem Kernmitglied der Adventisten. Glaubt mir, die Adventisten haben noch eigene, geheime Leitlinien. Sie lauten: Der Mensch ist eine bösartige Spezies, die der Erde himmelschreiende Verbrechen angetan hat und bestraft werden muss. Das eigentliche Ziel der Adventisten ist, den Herrn zu bitten, dem Menschen diese heilige Strafe aufzuerlegen: die Auslöschung der gesamten Menschheit.«

»Weißt du, warum ich wirklich hierhergekommen bin?«, fragte Evans. »Weil die ersten zarten Triebe des Omnikommunismus bereits im alten China sprossen.« »Meinst du den Buddhismus?« »Genau. Das Christentum achtet nur den Menschen. Obwohl Noah von allen Tierarten ein Pärchen mit in seine Arche nahm, war nie die Rede davon, dass das Leben der Tiere den gleichen Stellenwert wie das der Menschen besäße. Der Buddhismus aber verspricht allen Lebewesen, Tieren, Menschen und Geistern, Erlösung. Deswegen bin ich nach Asien gekommen, aber … Ich sehe jetzt, dass es hier auch nicht anders zugeht.«

Das Erschütterndste an der Erde-Trisolaris-Organisation war, dass so viele Menschen ihren Glauben an die menschliche Zivilisation restlos verloren hatten, die eigene Art hassten und mit Freuden Verrat an ihr begingen. Und dass vielen die Vernichtung der menschlichen Spezies, eingeschlossen der eigenen Person, der eigenen Enkelkinder, als das höchste Ideal galt. Die Trisolaris-Rebellen waren eine Organisation adliger Geister. Ihre Mitglieder rekrutierten sich hauptsächlich aus der oberen Intellektuellenschicht, und ein ansehnlicher Teil gehörte zur Elite aus Politik und Wirtschaft.

The author lines out the history and selected key protagonists of German industry between 1971 and 2000. It is divided in three sections: pre-WW1; WW1 and WW2; post-WW2. The red line through the book is the development of the Deutschland AG, a network of industry and banking leaders that shaped German economic activity and policy in a more cooperative and long-term oriented way compared to the UK or the US. For example, the Deutsche Bank was a big shareholder and part of the board of many of the important companies. Through prevention of takeovers from foreign investors, this network, the Deutschland AG was nicknamed 'Fortress Germany' by foreign investors.

I took away that the currently dominant form of capitalism which focuses on shareholder value is not without alternatives. If you have a privately owned company, even if its an empire like Krupp or Siemens, you can operate without the corsett of quarterly reports and anxiety about stock prices.

MAKE HASTE—SLOWLY To understand the right way to get a project done quickly, it’s useful to think of a project as being divided into two phases. This is a simplification, but it works: first, planning; second, delivery. The terminology varies by industry—in movies, it’s “development and production”; in architecture, “design and construction”—but the basic idea is the same everywhere: Think first, then do. A project begins with a vision that is, at best, a vague image of the glorious thing the project will become. Planning is pushing the vision to the point where it is sufficiently researched, analyzed, tested, and detailed that we can be confident we have a reliable road map of the way forward.

THE WINDOW OF DOOM The patterns I mentioned earlier, confirmed by my data, are strong clues: Projects that fail tend to drag on, while those that succeed zip along and finish. Why is that? Think of the duration of a project as an open window. The longer the duration, the more open the window. The more open the window, the more opportunity for something to crash through and cause trouble, including a big, bad black swan.

Planning is a safe harbor. Delivery is venturing across the storm-tossed seas.

If you feel the urge to commit—and you probably will—commit to completing that process before you draw conclusions about your big project.[39] At first, commit to having an open mind; that is, commit to not committing.

In contrast, good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause. The cause of good planning is the range and depth of the questions it asks and the imagination and the rigor of the answers it delivers.

This simple distinction applies in most fields: Whatever can be done in planning should be, and planning should be slow and rigorously iterative, based on experiri.

Use off-the-shelf technologies. Hire experienced people. Rely on the reliable. Don’t gamble if you can avoid it. Don’t be the first. Remove the words custom and bespoke from your vocabulary. They’re a desirable option for Italian tailoring if you can afford it, not for big projects.

I won’t say I had gazed upon it bare, exactly, but in the great game of strip poker every deep thinker plays against the universe I’d gotten further than most.

“You’re late,” Erica told her. There was no malice in her voice, only confusion that someone might risk missing her cooking. She’d poured blood and sweat and tears into building our little community, but the secret ingredient had turned out to be soup. She was a really good cook, and what her magazine and occasional impassioned speeches couldn’t do, an invitation to one of her dinner parties might. It was weird, the way little things like that turned the wheels of destiny. I’ve always wondered if history is missing some story like how the Founding Fathers only declared independence because Martha Washington served amazing stew every time there was a Continental Congress.

Sleep like nothing is watching. Gaze at the stars like it will never hurt. — Steven Kaas

For to get one’s magician’s license revoked was a terrible thing. Who would trust a placebo given by a doctor stripped of his medical diploma, dressed in street clothes, working out of his garage? A magician who lost his license would lose the ability to convince Reality of anything. The American Board of Ritual Magic, originally a perfectly ordinary example of regulatory capture, had taken on ontological significance.

“So the whole universe runs on this system of sapphires connected by paths?” “MOST OF IT RUNS ON SAPPHIRES ON PATHS, BUT I USE RUBY ON RAILS FOR THE DATABASES.” “Huh? Is that a different thing?” “WE CANNOT TALK NOW,” said Uriel, suddenly. “THE BUTTERFLIES ARE MIGRATING”. “What?” “I JUST REALIZED. THE BUTTERFLIES ARE STARTING TO MIGRATE. IT IS ONLY OCTOBER. THEY SHOULD NOT MIGRATE FOR SEVERAL MORE MONTHS. I THINK I MIGHT HAVE MADE AN OFF-BY-ONE ERROR THE LAST TIME I SYNCHRONIZED THE INSECT MIGRATION ALGORITHMS.” “Can’t you just let them migrate early?” “EVERY TIME A BUTTERFLY FLAPS ITS WINGS, IT CREATES A CASCADING CHAIN OF AFTER-EFFECTS WHICH CAN UPSET THE ENTIRE COURSE OF HISTORY. IF THE ENTIRE BUTTERFLY MIGRATION HAPPENED AT THE WRONG TIME, THE RESULT WOULD BE TOO HORRIBLE TO IMAGINE.” “Oh. I’m sorry.” “IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. I AM GOING TO FIX THE BUTTERFLY MIGRATION. I WILL GIVE YOU HOMEWORK FOR TONIGHT. ALL LANGUAGES ARE ISOMORPHIC TO ADAM KADMON, BUT IN DIFFERENT WAYS. YOU WILL NEED TO COMPARE AND CONTRAST THEM. YOUR HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT IS TO LEARN EVERY HUMAN LANGUAGE.” “Um, that’s not something humans can realistically do.” “OH. THEN DO SOMETHING HUMANS ARE GOOD AT. FALL IN LOVE. START A WAR.”

Erica was a good magazine editor because she lived in a slightly different world than everyone else, a world where enemies lurked behind every corner and anybody could be a hero. Very occasionally, her world intersected the real world, and then she was like a fish in water.

“ATTENTION. DUE TO A SCALE BACK IN COVERAGE, THE MORAL ARC OF THE UNIVERSE NO LONGER BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.”

But here we have God buying evil with two silver coins. Buying to me represents an intentional action. Let’s go further – buying represents a sacrifice. Buying is when you sacrifice something dear to you to get something you want even more. Evil isn’t something God couldn’t figure out how to avoid, it’s something He covets. What did God sacrifice for the sake of evil? Two silver coins. We immediately notice the number “two”. Two is not typically associated with God. God is One. Two is right out. The kabbalists identify the worst demon, the nadir of all demons, as Thamiel, whose name means “duality in God”. Two is dissonance, divorce, division, dilemmas, distance, discrimination, diabolism. This, then, was God’s sacrifice. In order to create evil, He took up duality. “Why would God want to create evil? God is pure Good!” Exactly. The creation of anything at all other than God requires evil. God is perfect. Everything else is imperfect. Imperfection contains evil by definition. Two scoops of evil is the first ingredient in the recipe for creating universes. Finitude is evil. Form is evil. Without evil all you have is God, who, as the kabbalists tell us, is pure Nothing. If you want something, evil is part of the deal.

“Now we have come to you for advice. It is through your grace that we are free, but we know not what to do with our freedom. The people demand laws, a code to live by, something to bring meaning and structure to their lives.” “UM. I THINK YOU SHOULD PROBABLY JUST BE NICE TO EACH OTHER. UNLESS BEING NICE TO EACH OTHER WOULD CAUSE SOME SORT OF HORRIBLE PROBLEM I CANNOT ANTICIPATE RIGHT NOW. THEN YOU SHOULD NOT DO THAT.” “Please, O Lord! You must have more advice than that, advice which can sustain us in spirit as we cross this scorching desert.” “WEAR SUNSCREEN?” “Lord, the Egyptians are the mightiest people in the world, but they are mighty because their priests rule every minute of their lives, from the ritual ablutions they perform upon waking up to the prayers they say before they go to bed at night. If our people are left adrift, without laws and rituals to connect them to You and thank You for your gift of freedom, I fear they will go astray.” “AH. I THINK I UNDERSTAND. ACTUALLY, THIS TIES INTO ANOTHER PROJECT OF MINE. I AM GRADUALLY SHIFTING THE WORLD FROM ON A SUBSTRATE OF DIVINE LIGHT TO A SUBSTRATE OF MECHANICAL COMPUTATION. THE MECHANICAL SUBSTRATE HAS A LOT OF POTENTIAL BENEFITS. FOR EXAMPLE, IT IS PERFECTLY PREDICTABLE. FOR ANOTHER, IT ALLOWS EVEN LOW-LEVEL USERS SUCH AS YOURSELF TO COMBINE PHYSICAL FORCES IN NOVEL WAYS TO SOLVE YOUR OWN PROBLEMS AS THEY ARISE. MOST IMPORTANT, IT IS MORE ROBUST AGAINST DEMONIC INTRUSION. IN FACT, ANGELS AND DEMONS ARE PRETTY MUCH INERT ON A MECHANICAL SUBSTRATE. IT INVOLVES VARIOUS INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SEPHIROT AND KLIPOT. ARE YOU FAMILAR WITH THESE? IF NOT I CAN EXPLAIN.” “The laws, O Lord?” “RIGHT NOW COMPUTATIONAL RESOURCES ARE THE MAJOR BOTTLENECK IN THE PROJECT. I HAVE A LIST OF STEPS THAT END USERS COULD TAKE TO SAVE COMPUTATIONAL RESOURCES.” “And these would be the laws?” “I PERFORM SERVER MAINTENANCE ON SATURDAYS. THIS MEANS LOWER CAPACITY. SO PLEASE AVOID HIGH-LOAD ACTIVITIES LIKE BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS, AGRICULTURAL WORK, AND ELECTRICITY USE DURING THAT TIME. SO YES. THAT IS A LAW.”

An exchange of knowledge? The angels had loads of knowledge. Most of it was theology. A lot of it wasn’t very good. The hope that they might have special access to God turned out to be kind of a dud. They remembered they had been created, way back before Time was a thing. They knew about God, they wouldn’t shut up about Him, but it was all incomprehensible, made the sort of mysticism humans came up with seem perfectly clear by comparison. An exchange of technology? The angels had no technology. They didn’t even seem to know many Divine Names, and the few they did know they wouldn’t say. Threats, blackmail, even torture seemed not to faze angels in the slightest, and don’t ask me to tell you the story of how we learned that information because this was back during the Nixon administration, when the country Did What It Had To Do because By Golly The Russians Would and We Couldn’t Fall Behind. A military alliance? Now we’re talking. The angels appeared to be able to smite things with flaming swords that they conjured out of nowhere. But they had no concept of strategy or geopolitics. When we asked if they would help us against the Russians, they just wanted to know if the Russians were evil. When we said yes, they asked why we weren’t at war with them already. When we tried to explain that you don’t just go to war, you build alliances and gradually box in your enemy and try to use their reluctance to fight to gain concessions from them without anything ever breaking out into open conflict which would be disastrous to both sides, the angels didn’t get it. Evildoer? Smite. Not an evildoer? Live in peace.

He was Samyazaz, the Bringer of Forbidden Knowledge. Not that that was so hard when “copper and tin go together to make bronze” is Forbidden Knowledge. Heck, eighty years ago the king’s daughter had been sad because her lips weren’t rosy enough, and fellow forbidden-knowledge-bringer Gadiriel had suggested she crush some red rocks into a pigment and then paint it on herself, and people were still talking about this and worrying it would lead to everyone turning into sex-crazed maniacs.

“Hello, Samyazaz,” said the Archangel Michael. “Hello, Samyazaz,” said the Archangel Gabriel. “Frick,” said Samyazaz. “We have left you to your games long enough,” said Michael. “The war is not going well. It is time for you to come home and join in the great battle.” “No. Nope. No way,” said Samyazaz. “Things are going really well here. I’ve got a wife and kids. Twenty wives, actually, fifty kids. No way I’m going back there. Absolutely not.” “The war is not going well,” Michael repeated. “You think I don’t know that? I’ve been watching the sky. I’ve seen the signs.” “Camael is dead. Haniel is dead. Raphael is dead. Only Zadkiel and the two of us remain.” “What about Metatron?” “Too holy to leave his whirlwind.” “Too holy to do anything, really.” “Raziel?” “Off somewhere,” said Michael. “Hard to locate,” said Gabriel.

When Gabriel was out of sight, Uriel sat back down and started shaking. He shook and shook and hugged himself and looked at the glowing diagrams to calm himself down. They were so pretty. Not perfect yet, far from perfect, but elegant. All the roar and storm of the divine fire calmed down, channeled into crystal-clear lifeless math. The chaos removed. The weeds pruned. Thamiel neutered. The world safe and orderly. Soon the world would be all nice and orderly and it would be math and it would be safe.

Last of all the winds came her own wind, the Santa Ana. She danced in the wind, maniacally, singing, laughing. “Holy, holy, holy!” she sang, and the wind carried the word to the four quarters. For a brief moment, she passed beyond time. “Transcendent joy!” she shouted at all the poor people trapped in the sublunary world, but they didn’t hear. Someone grabbed her body, the part of her that was stuck on the tower, the part of her that meant nothing. “Stop!” he told her, in a man’s voice. “You’ve got to come back!” Ana soared. She circled the Transamerica Pyramid, and the giant lidless eye watched her course impassively. “Listen!” said the man. “One plus one is two. If you don’t eat, you die. P implies not not P. Prices are controlled by the law of supply and demand, and are the only fair way of managing scarcity.” Ana began to lose altitude. “Organisms evolve according to the laws of natural selection. Reproductively fit organisms pass their genes on to the next generation. Uh. The wages of sin are death. Everybody dies. In a closed system, entropy always increases.” Ana flapped her arms vigorously, trying to regain altitude, but her flight had never come from wings to begin with, and she fell further.

And that must have been how it felt to be alive in ’69, to learn that something you’d previously assumed was a legend used to scare children was terribly, terribly real. And then you wondered what else might be real. And then you started to panic. The hardest hit were the atheists. They’d spent their whole lives smugly telling everyone else that God and the Devil were fairy tales and really wasn’t it time to put away fairy tales and act like mature adults, and then suddenly anyone with a good pair of binoculars can see angels in the sky. It was rough. Rough for the Marxists, who had embraced it more than anyone. Rough for the scientific community, who had never come out and said SCIENCE PROVES THERE IS NO GOD ALSO WE ARE SMARTER THAN YOU but you could kind of read it between the lines. Rough for all the New Age hippies who were revolting against the tired old Biblical morality of their parents. Stephen Jay Gould, a biologist working at Harvard University, tried to stabilize the burgeoning philosophical disaster with his theory of “non-overlapping magisteria”. He said that while religion might have access to certain factual truths, like that angels existed or that the souls of the damned spent eternity writhing in a land of fire thousands of miles beneath the Earth, it was powerless to discuss human values and age-old questions like “what is the Good?” or “what is the purpose of my existence?” Atheistic science should be thought of not as a literal attempt to say things like “space is infinite and full of stars” or “humankind evolved from apes” that were now known to be untrue, but as an attempt to record, in the form of stories, our ancestors’ answers to those great questions. When a scientist says “space is infinite and full of stars”, she does not literally mean that the crystal sphere surrounding the Earth doesn’t exist. She is metaphorically referring to the infinitude of the human spirit, the limitless possibilities it offers, and the brightness and enlightenment waiting to be discovered. Or when a scientist says “humankind evolved from apes”, she is not literally doubting the word of the archangel Uriel that humankind was created ex nihilo on October 13, 3761 BC and evolution added only as part of a later retconning – she is saying that humankind has an animal nature that it has barely transcended and to which it is always at risk of returning. When religious people mocked atheists for supposedly getting their cosmology wrong, they were missing the true grandeur and beauty of atheism, a grandeur which had been passed on undiminished from Democritus to the present day and connected us to the great thinkers of times past. Nobody was very impressed by these logical contortions, but for some reason a bunch of people kept repeating them anyway.

Also unimpressed were the Soviets. They had been taking the problems kind of in stride right until June 1969 when the legions of Hell started swarming out of Lake Baikal. The Russians had been carefully guarding the borders with NATO, with China, and especially the Bering Strait where they almost touched America. They’d forgotten the oldest border of all. Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world, but it sits on a rift even deeper than that. A dozen generations of shamans had warned first the czar, then the communists that the rock on the island in the center of the lake wasn’t a rock at all so much as a plug blocking a hole that really needed to stay blocked, but no one had listened. Without any troops in their way, the demons had taken over pretty much all of Siberia east of the Yenisei within a year. Yakutsk was their capital, the rumors said, and had been the site of terrible massacres. But the demons, too, had forgotten something: this was Russia. What a normal country would call getting suddenly invaded by a vastly more powerful adversary who committed unspeakable atrocities in their wake, the Russians just called Tuesday. Even the nature of the foe didn’t much faze them; this was the fiftieth year of the Soviet state, and they’d spent so long hearing that their enemies were demons that it was almost an anticlimax when it all proved true. So the Soviets mobilized their military machine, the largest in the world, and trudged to the Yenesei, which they dutifully started defending. Another country would have called it a terrible battle that made the rivers run red with blood and the piled corpses reach almost to the sky. The Russians just called it Wednesday.

[So you don’t have the computer?] [No.] Everything I’d been doing up until now had been predicated on Ana having Sarah. If Ana had Sarah, the plan was still intact. She would become mighty. She would rescue me. We would be rich and important. If Ana didn’t have Sarah, then the error correction was our only hope. Otherwise, I’d be back to being nobody. The thought was somehow worse than being a fugitive, worse than being cuffed to a bed. I could take a lot if I was somebody. The thought of falling back into my cog-in-the-machine status filled me with dread.

So I drove. It was a nice car. A white Cadillac. The scholars tell us that God drives a Plymouth Fury, for it is written in Jeremiah 32:37: “He drove them out of the land in His Fury”. But the Twelve Apostles shared a Honda Accord, for it is written in Acts 5:12: “They were all with one Accord”. The commentators speculate this may have been the same car Jesus used when he drove the moneychangers out of the Temple, though if there were more than four or so moneychangers it might have required a minor miracle.

At age 35, business magnate Richard Branson was already head of Virgin Records, Virgin Communications, Virgin Games, and Virgin Atlantic Airways. What other people saw as the immutable will of God he saw as a business opportunity. So he teamed up with legendary aerospace engineer Burt Rutan to create a spacecraft capable of transporting a small number of lucky passengers up into the crack. And by lucky, he meant “very very rich”. If you can’t take it with you, you might as well give it to the people promising to ensure you an afterlife of eternal bliss. Thus was born Celestial Virgin. Jesus had said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven, but rocketry had thirty years of practice working with astonishingly small tolerances and rose to meet the challenge. Competitors sprung up – HeavenX, Blue Origen – but if you really wanted the best engineers in the world aiming you at that needle eye and guaranteeing you’d get through, you would petition Celestial Virgin, accept no substitutes.

One of the most famous phrases in the English language: “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” We compare it to three other famous trinities. Everyone knows the Christian Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. But the Buddhists have a similarly central concept called the Three Jewels – Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The Buddha is the enlightened being. The dharma is the moral law, or the natural law, or duty; there’s no good English translation, so take your pick. Sangha corresponds almost precisely to “church”, not in the sense of a building but in the sense of “Catholic Church”, where it means an entire community of believers. The kabbalists have their own trinity: the Supernal Triad of the first three sephirot. Kether is the transcendent heavenly aspect of God. Binah is a perfectly receptive vessel sometimes likened to the uterus. And Chokmah is likened to lightning – the bolt that originates in Kether and strikes Binah, impregnating it with divine essence. These three trinities all correspond nicely to one another. They all have a human aspect: the Son, the Sangha, Binah, looking for answers but seeing the majesty of God’s plan only imperfectly. They all have an ineffable divine component: the Father, the Buddha, Kether, abiding in the secret order of the universe and seeing its full glory. And they all have a force that connects the other two: the Holy Spirit, the Dharma, Chokhmah, the potential for uniting the human and divine. Ordinary mortals. The divine order. A connection between them. A man. A plan. A canal.

PATCH 5776.11 IS NOW COMPLETE. WORK HAS BEGUN ON PATCH 5777.0. HERE IS A FINAL CHANGELOG FOR PATCH 5776.11: 1. HUMANS NO LONGER DEPLETE WILLPOWER WHEN ENGAGING IN DIFFICULT TASKS; GLUCOSE NO LONGER NECESSARY TO REPLENISH IT. 2. ROCKETS CAN NOW LAND ON PLATFORMS AND BE REUSED IF NEEDED. 3. USER FFUKUYAMA COMPLAINS THAT THE POLITICAL SYSTEM HAS BECOME BORING. IN ORDER TO MAKE THINGS MORE INTERESTING, FIRST WORLD COUNTRIES WILL OCCASIONALLY FLIRT WITH FAR-RIGHT NATIONALISM. 4. UK NO LONGER CONSIDERED PART OF EUROPE FOR PURPOSE OF ECONOMIC BONUSES. 5. VOLKSWAGENS NOW REPORT CORRECT GAS MILEAGE STATISTICS. 6. FOUR NEW ELEMENTS ADDED TO PERIODIC TABLE, BUT THEY DO NOT HAVE MANY FEATURES RIGHT NOW.

“You’re…you’re a typical middle-class American, Mark. There’s nothing wrong with that. Middle-class Americans are great people, invented the light bulb, the airplane, and the cheeseburger. But you guys have this…this thing, where you think the world is basically fair. Sure, you hear about some poor kid who got beaten by his abusive parents, and you say yeah, that’s terrible, that’s unfair, but you think of it as this blip, a local deviation in the general atmosphere of niceness and fairness. So you hear more things. The Vietnam War. Race riots. The fucking Holocaust. And you’re always properly upset about them, and you hope that one day all of the nice people will get their act together and spread the blanket of general fairness over Vietnam, Watts, and Auschwitz respectively, and then those little fires will be all stamped out. You go to your Young Democrats club and debate over which little tiny tweaks in the system will fix whichever little puddles of unfairness remain. A little more welfare there, a few reforms in this or that law, and there you have it! The future! “And the thing is, nothing can ever convince you you’re wrong. I can recite atrocities at you until I’m blue in the face, and you’ll frown at every one of them, maybe you’ll cry, but deep inside you something will be thinking ‘That’s too bad, I hope our generally responsible government and society fix it quickly.’ If I tell you the government’s hopelessly corrupt, prove my point with the itemized bank account statements of every member of Congress and a big line saying ‘BLOOD MONEY’ on each of them, that same part of you will be thinking ‘That’s too bad, I hope that our generally good electoral system leads to a better batch of candidates next time.’

“But – ” “But what? But the Californians were afraid that the Drug Lord had people there at the fence and if they let them through he would take over California and millions more would die? Good point. Reasonable. Or were you going to say but prisoners probably claim to be going through alcohol withdrawal all the time in order to con the system out of some free drugs, and it’s hard to blame the guards for being skeptical? Also a good point! Also reasonable! And when UNSONG says that enforcing copyrights on the Names is the only way to protect innovation? They’ve got a good point too! They’re also reasonable! But somehow there are always happy well-fed people in nice houses who have reasonable explanations for why the system is just, and there’s always everyone else starving or dying or rotting in prison. Well, when I was eight years old I placed everybody’s reasonable explanations on one side of a balance, and a hundred people screaming in front of a barbed wire fence in Tijuana on the other side, and the explanations weren’t heavy enough, Mark. And I decided I am not on a debate team. If you want to argue all of the good reasons why you should have seven yachts and everybody else should starve to death, I will nod along pleasantly, admit that I cannot refute your points, and then, when I get home, I’ll mail you a letterbomb.” “But you made that whole story up, because you told me freshman year that your father died before you were born, and also – ” “And that, Mark, is why I had to put you in prison. I thought, maybe, after ten years in Sing Sing, you’d stop being so fucking Young Democrats of America, you know? As long as you’re a Lord High Ritual Magician and making a name for yourself and living with your happy family you were never going to get it. You’d try to be good, but you’d do it in your stupid middle-class American things-are-basically-fine-but-let’s-reform-the-tax-code sort of way. Well, now you’ve been in Sing Sing for ten years. So, tell me. Are you ready to pour petrol on the world and throw a match on it?

“I just think…you can’t be happy with this situation, can you?” Simeon furrowed his brow. “Happy? No. But what can you do? And it’s not just a rhetorical question. I can do quite a lot. I can create a successful company that helps discover new Names. I can donate some money to causes that deserve it. I can be nice to the people I meet. Once I’m doing all that, there’s no point in dedicating a lobe of my brain to being outraged at the injustices of the world. I do what I can, and then stop caring. Even the Comet King only besieged Hell until the point when he realized it was a lost cause. Then he gave up. You care too much and it drives you crazy.” “Then maybe being crazy is the right thing to do. So far all I see from your side is a lot of sanity and poor people left to burn.” “Two hundred years ago, this was about people starving to death in the streets, or dying of smallpox. We solved those problems not by destroying the system, but by milking the system so single-mindedly that eventually we got rich enough to buy the problems off. If we defeat Hell, it’ll be because we developed better weapons. And if we develop better weapons, it’ll be because of places like Countenance. And in order to get places like Countenance, you need money, and incentives to get it, and then there you are at Celestial Virgin.” “So just let sin and greed continue uninhibited, and eventually someone will have stolen enough to make things better? Just protect the system, no matter how many people it throws into the flames, because of the promise of a smallpox cure somewhere at the end?” “And what’s your position? Burn down everything that isn’t perfect? I have bad news for your about mortal institutions, dear. What if you go too far? You think eliminating people like me will build the perfect government? What if you overcompensate and build anarchy?”

Genocide is a good way to kill people, but not a good way to damn them. Desperation brings out the best in people. Starve people to death, and some of them will give their last crust of bread to a stranger. Torture them, and they’ll bear all sorts of horrors to protect people they love. Kill them, and they’ll die with prayers on their lips. Give a man a crisis, and the best in him will rise up in a sudden glory. It’s the grind of everyday life that brings out his little hatreds and petty cruelties. Shoot a man’s wife, and he will jump in front of the bullet and sacrifice his own life for hers; force him to live in a one-room apartment with her, and within a month he’ll be a domestic abuser. Thamiel knew this better than anyone, so he avoided inflicting anything too dramatic upon his new subjects. Just a gradual, managed economic collapse, a percent or two a year, to squeeze people without squeezing them. And for those who couldn’t manage? State subsidized liquor stores, every brand and vintage of alcohol at affordable prices, and with them coke and speed and a dozen different kinds of opiates to dull the pain. No one was forced into anything – being forced into things by demons has a certain dignity about it. But the option was presented with flashing neon lights around it, and as more and more people got paycuts or layoffs, it started looking more and more attractive.

At first, the gates of all the righteous countries of the world were left open for refugees fleeing the slow-motion collapse of the North. What greater mitzvah than to save people from their own inevitable moral dissolution and subsequent damnation? But it turned out that people who had grown up in a country whose education system, economic system, justice system, and social system were all designed by the Devil to most effectively convert them into bad people – were not very nice people. A few heavily publicized incidents of criminal behavior, and the gates started to close. A few terrorist attacks, and they were locked tight. A few neighborhoods ruined, and military trucks were crossing the borders weekly to return refugees back to the grateful Hellish authorities. Why didn’t Thamiel take over the world? Some said it was weakness. Others nuclear deterrance. Still others the threat of the Comet King. Ever since that conversation with Ana, I’ve had a horrible theory of my own. Maybe God did forgive the Russians and Canadians their transgressions, knowing the pressures they were under. Maybe Thamiel wasn’t after the souls of his own citizens. Maybe the point was to damn everyone else.

Denn es ist wohl festzustellen, daß die Menschen entweder gütlich behandelt oder vernichtet werden müssen. Wegen geringer Unbill rächen sie sich, wegen großer vermögen sie es nicht; jede Unbill muß also so zugefügt werden, daß man keine Rache zu befürchten hat.

Wird aber an Stelle von Kolonien eine Besatzung gehalten, so kostet das erheblich mehr und verschlingt alle Einkünfte dieses Staates. Die Eroberung schlägt also zum Schaden aus und schmerzt weit mehr, da sie den ganzen Staat schädigt.

wenn ein Mann nicht großen Geist und Tüchtigkeit besitzt, so erscheint es wenig glaubhaft, daß der, welcher stets als Privatmann gelebt hat, zu befehlen verstehe.

Wer also auf keinen Fall siegen will, der bediene sich solcher Truppen, denn sie sind viel gefährlicher als Soldtruppen. Mit ihnen ist der Untergang besiegelt, denn sie sind unter sich einig und stets im Gehorsam eines andern, wogegen Söldnerheere, auch wenn sie gesiegt haben, noch Zeit und bessere Gelegenheit brauchen, um dir zu schaden: denn sie sind nicht ein Leib und eine Seele und du selbst hast sie ausgehoben und besoldet; ein Dritter aber, den du ihnen zum Anführer gibst, erlangt nicht gleich so viel Ansehen, um dir zu schaden. Kurz, bei Mietstruppen ist das Gefährlichste ihre Feigheit, bei Hilfstruppen ihre Tapferkeit.

Viele haben sich Republiken und Fürstentümer ausgedacht, die niemals gesehen worden, noch als wirklich bekannt gewesen sind. Denn die Art, wie man lebt, ist so verschieden von der Art, wie man leben sollte, daß, wer sich nach dieser richtet statt nach jener, sich eher ins Verderben stürzt, als für seine Erhaltung sorgt; denn ein Mensch, der in allen Dingen nur das Gute tun will, muß unter so vielen, die das Schlechte tun, notwendig zugrunde gehen. Daher muß ein Fürst, der sich behaupten will, imstande sein, schlecht zu handeln, wenn die Notwendigkeit es erfordert.

Nichts verzehrt sich selbst so wie die Freigebigkeit; denn indem du sie übst, verlierst du die Kraft dazu und wirst arm und verachtet, oder, um der Armut zu entgehen, räuberisch und verhaßt. Und unter allem, wovor ein Fürst sich hüten muß, steht obenan: verachtet und gehaßt zu werden; die Freigebigkeit aber führt zu einem von beiden.

Ein Fürst muß sich daher wohl hüten, je ein Wort auszusprechen, das nicht voll der obengenannten fünf Tugenden ist. Alles, was man von ihm sieht und hört, muß Mitleid, Treue, Menschlichkeit, Redlichkeit und Frömmigkeit ausstrahlen. Und nichts ist nötiger als der Schein dieser letzten Tugend; denn die Menschen urteilen insgesamt mehr nach den Augen als nach dem Gefühl, denn sehen können alle, fühlen aber wenige.

Bei den Handlungen aller Menschen, insbesondere der Fürsten, welche keinen Richter über sich haben, blickt man immer nur auf ihr Ergebnis. Der Fürst sehe also nur darauf, wie er sich in seiner Würde behaupte; die Mittel werden stets für ehrbar befunden und von jedermann gelobt werden. Denn der Pöbel hält es stets mit dem Schein und dem Ausgang einer Sache; und die Welt ist voller Pöbel. Die wenigen Klügeren aber kommen nur dann zur Geltung, wenn die große Menge nicht weiß, woran sie sich halten soll.

Ich schließe also, da das Glück wechselt, die Menschen aber auf dem eingeschlagenen Wege verharren, daß sie nur so lange Glück haben, als Schicksal und Weg übereinstimmen, dagegen Unglück haben, sobald ein Mißklang entsteht. Gerade hier aber meine ich, daß es besser sei, ungestüm als vorsichtig zu sein, denn Fortuna ist ein Weib, und wer es bezwingen will, muß es schlagen und stoßen; und man sieht, daß es sich leichter von diesen besiegen läßt als von solchen, die kaltblütig zu Werke gehen. Darum ist es, wie ein Weib, auch den Jünglingen gewogen, weil diese weniger bedächtig und gewalttätiger sind und ihm dreister befehlen.

Kaiser baldly proclaimed his managerial philosophy: “You find your key men by piling work on them. They say, ‘I can’t do any more,’ and you say, ‘Sure you can.’ So you pile it on and they’re doing more and more. Pretty soon you have men you can rely on absolutely. You have an organization that can really get things done.”

Ambitious executives adopted the boss’s work habits. William Soule, who joined Kaiser in 1941, recalled that it was “a challenge I could not refuse. I was drawn to it as a moth to a lighted candle.” After an exciting but exhausting three-decade career, Soule reflected on those years: “Fortunately, when I was lucky enough to come into that cone of light I was not consumed by the flame. Singed, perhaps, but not consumed.”