The Journal of Ingeborg P. Hoffman

 Calliope Island, Gulf of Guinea

April 30th, 2106

By now, the Outernauts should have woken up from stasis. They’ll have realized that they are wildly off-course. They are likely in a profound state of panic. I only hope that they find our instructions before they start clawing at each other. Back on Earth, we certainly couldn’t imagine the possibility of the positively bombastic Corbin O’Mally. I’ve spent the day tracking his media appearances. There’s not much there, besides his own gaffes. I’m pleased to report that, with the passing of 4/28 with no further incident, the story is already on the wane.

This afternoon Undersecretary Lorena Ribera called on an encrypted line to assure me that our deal was still in place. Actually, that’s putting it mildly, even inaccurately. Lorena was fishing for information. She’s exceedingly anxious to proceed quickly. As much as we do, she needs the announcement of our agreement to go off perfectly. It must be said that the U.N. has been damaged by their association with Outersky and Calliope. Though I like Lorena personally, I don’t feel guilty for what we have done. We have not told her the real reason we sent The Majestic so far away. If everything goes to plan, and the crew are still alive, it won’t be long now until everyone knows.

In order to sell the ships, I have shown Ribera confidential information, that the plan was never to travel to Proxima Centauri b. On the phone I told Ribera what I have been telling her for years, that we’ll announce the agreement of the sale of our fleets to the United Nations when we hear back from the crew. To put it rather starkly, their lives are our “proof of concept.”

Undersecretary Ribera knows better than anyone that the authority of the United Nations needs to be bolstered. Briefly, certain elements within each of the old superpowers resent the new world government, which rests in the United Nations. Nationalist movements within the eleven administrative “Autonomous Zones” that Russia, China, and the United States were carved up into after the Third World War have gained traction. The era in which the world-wide proliferation of fusion energy had undercut their power is over. Now that they have gained parity, the partisans - no better than thugs, to my mind - see no need for U.N. control.

But they are wrong. The promise of The Majestic is the promise of real peace on Earth, for the first time in our history. It means jobs; it means military power; it means the possibility of prosperity and a semblance of hope in this damaged world. It means that mankind will be able to do its part in the struggle to come. Even more than that, it means that we will be able to save ourselves. The nationalist thugs are our adversaries, no doubt. But the real enemy, humanity’s true existential threat, is the rot within ourselves. 

If Wiles had his way, the entire project would have be done in secrecy. But that was not possible. We couldn’t physically build the ship ourselves. So, an elaborate fiction had to be created, one that satisfied the expectations of the people who would actually be working on the project, including of course, those of my unfortunately morally righteous Akuna.

The public plan was for The Majestic to travel to Proxima Centauri b (an exoplanet in the habitable zone surrounding the closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri), do a ring around that planet, and place the cornerstone of the future colony there. (The plans made it look more like a resort.) Since Trena Arsillion herself intended on flying with The Majestic, and because of the sophistication of the failsafe TRENA system, the crew did not have to be seasoned pilots. They could be anyone. I remember Milosz saying, with a crude kind of accuracy, “why not have them be celebrities?”

As I mentioned, that was where I came in. In Milosz’s words, we were going to initiate a “marketing blitz" to help sell this story. The theory was that people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and that people will eventually believe anything if you repeat it frequently enough. 

However, if maximizing media exposure was to be my entire role, then there would have been no point for Wiles and the others to bring me into this circle of trust. Along with recruiting “the celebrities” to join the trip, I was to ensure that each of them reported back on the status of the trip in a series of video-diaries. This was the actual reason I was brought in: to receive, categorize, and generally make sense of these communications, with a view towards global dissemination at a later date. Milosz, Wiles, Ronny, and Trena were looking forward to the time when the Big Lie would be revealed. Which is to say, they were looking forward to what is happening now, or more accurately, what will happen soon, if and when we hear back from the crew.

As such, I was getting a promotion: I was to be made the “Chief Archivist” of Calliope Island. I agreed on the spot.

“That’s settled then,” Trena said. “Now, I have another piece of business.” 

I could tell from the faces of the others that this was not part of the plan. Then Trena insisted that the fusion reactor engineer had to be a professional. The Majestic needed someone who could actually understand what was going on with the reactor in case something went wrong. (Wiles, who rarely showed strong emotion, shot back, “That is impossible.”) Trena said she had someone in mind, a person that everyone in that room, excluding myself, had known since he was a boy: Dr. Akuna Appiah, Dr. Kwame’s son, my husband.

There was a confused silence in the room, which was broken by Ronny. “Trena, I don’t understand. I thought you were traveling with the crew." Then Trena Arsillion of Manila, perfecter of fusion power, the first human to learn the truth of the Universe, informed us that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. 

Trena phrased the rest of her speech in conditionals (“If I cannot go, then…”) She went on to explain that this was why she had begun the exhaustive process of uploading her entire consciousness to create the super-sentient A.I. which would serve as the ship’s complete computer system. 

“You are not, on any account, to tell Akuna about any of this,” Trena said. “That is, not until the ship is ready to fly. Like his father, he's a stickler for proper codes of conduct. If we ask him to keep a secret of this magnitude, then we may offend him. Worse, he may well insist on going public with the entire enterprise. We all know Akuna’s integrity.”

“Why should we tell him at all?” The boss asked. “We’re not telling any of the others.”

“Don’t be absurd, Gregory,” retorted Milosz, his voice at an unusually loud volume. “Dr. Akuna is one of us. We will treat him with the utmost respect. Not only will he know, but he must agree, as his lovely wife has done.”

“Well said, Milosz,” Trena added, patting my hand. 

“And who knows? Trena may pull through.” Milosz continued. I remember he had tears in his eyes then.

“I won’t,” Trena said, with devastating simplicity. “I have stopped taking the treatments some time ago.” There was another silence, which Ronny broke again, now terribly emotional.

“You’re killing yourself, you know that? This is a suicide. You, of all people, do not have to die!”

Ronny stormed out of the room; Milosz followed after her. However, by the next day, Trena and Milosz had made up. Together, they informed my husband that he would be Trena’s replacement, in the event that she was unable to perform her duties aboard The Majestic. As planned, they did not tell him why. 

When Akuna told me the news at our apartment that evening, I was excited for him. I wasn’t at all worried that my husband was in any legitimate danger. In retrospect, I’ve wondered why I felt this way. Like Milosz, I suppose I must have found it quite impossible to believe that Trena Arsillion, author of The Experiments in Immortality, might one day no longer be with us.

Built from her design, The Majestic was the culmination of her life’s work. So, for Trena, the decision to build the TRENA system was deeply personal. By sending her mind, or her consciousness, to see the new frontiers of the outersky instead of her body, she may have believed that she had achieved a better kind immortality than that offered from her treatments. I regret I never asked her this outright.

Her decision to include Akuna among the crew was no less profound. If she could not end her career at Calliope with her greatest mentor, Dr. Kwame Earnest Appiah, then she would have the next best thing. All of us, even Wiles, agreed that Dr. Akuna was perfect. At the time, we truly believed it.