Launch: Chapter 12
37 years ago…
When Markus was eleven years old, his family made their way to Ottawa for the festivities celebrating the New Commonwealth’s centennial anniversary. It was the first transnational meta-state, and widely considered the most reputable and integrous. It involved some elements of the classical British Commonwealth and her allies, but today consisted of the individual provinces, states, and territories of Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and many other nations in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
At the centre of the Centennial festivities was the opening of the new Peace Tower which was erected for the occasion, and was now the new tallest building in the world. Although the old Canadian Parliament and Peace Tower were preserved as a historical site, a larger and more expansive complex was now required for the political city which sat at the centre of a vast global community, and the impressive new Peace Tower was the final piece of the Ottawa River Complex. Young Markus stood on the transparent floor on the bottom of its disc, looking down through the glass floor he was standing on towards the ground below.
Canada was one of the few nations which in many ways benefitted from anthropogenic climate change, with much of its territory becoming more hospitable with much milder winters. The country was also fortunate in that very few of its large cities were on the ocean and thus not inundated by the dramatic two meter rise in sea levels over the last two centuries. Parts of the Vancouver lower mainland, Markus’ hometown, were saved using the local expertise gleaned from keeping Richmond dry below sea level. Fortunately most Canadian cities were situated in the prairies or on the great lakes. They were unaffected directly by rising ocean levels, and only suffered the same ever more frequent and extreme weather events which were more generally challenging people all over the world.
Canada was already a popular immigration destination before the warming, but once it began there were mass migrations the world over away from the unbearably hot and dry equatorial regions. Canada became the most appealing immigration and refugee destination of all, and its warming land made it ever more inviting. As a result, politically and economically Canada became the most prominent region in the world, which led one of its more ambitions and dramatic Prime Ministers to declare the founding of the New Commonwealth from the steps of the old parliament building in Ottawa, after the constitution was changed to allow other nations and states to join into the new and more inclusive meta-national institution. Enticed by the offers of equal status and protection as New Commonwealth citizens, many nations and states democratically accepted the terms of entry into the New Commonwealth and it grew, all leading to this day celebrating the achievement.
It was found that only once a people felt secure in their borders, ethnicity, and culture, could they look outwards with a cosmopolitan mentality, and look more favourably upon the formation of political unions with other groups. All over the world countries which had once fought bitterly to establish their independence from the domination of their neighbors, found themselves long after engaging in regional political coalitions which, now feeling confident and on an equal footing, could be negotiated fairly and equitably on their own terms, without any group feeling like they were being taken advantage of by any other.
It started with the European Union, bitter old regional powers, once feeling secure in their own borders and cultural integrity, somehow found it possible to do what was once the unthinkable, unify in peace after centuries of attempts at forced unification through war and domination. What was impossible in the long term through war, became almost inevitable through peace.
Night had fallen, and from the observation deck of the tower, Markus was looking down through the periscope telescope mounted to the glass floor beneath him, which allowed him to clearly see the brightly lit flurry of activity below. He could see individual figures, but not much detail. They were all moving about, obviously with their own aims and motives, each no doubt with a unique story, a perspective and world-view all their own, and dispositions of varying instabilities. They sometimes appeared to bounce off each other, or to merge into a single entity and then separate again as they all walked in their own direction. From his perspective they appeared less substantial than ants.
The entirety of the saucer atop the tower was made of transparent material; it was intended to signify the mutual trust and openness between nations which the New Commonwealth represented. During the day it could be tinted to spare visitors what could be the harshness of the midday sun, but at night it was clear and tonight so too was the sky, without a trace of clouds. Young Markus pulled away from the periscope and was drawn to look upward. He saw the night sky anew, in a way that he never had before. His sense of perspective had lagged and for a moment after looking down, he was now seeing those stars as he had seen the specks below. Now the stars were not mere points of light to him, they were each massive entities with their own story to tell, just like those people down there, moving in similar ways in relation to each other only infinitesimally slower. He found himself temporarily disoriented; it was somehow difficult to tell the difference between the stars above him, and those shadows down below him.
Each point above was a whole universe unto itself too, the raging inferno of a star! A fierce nuclear fireball burning away for eons and eons, he even knew that half of the points he could see were actually multiple stars, forever dancing about each other like those shadow dancing below. Planets and other debris around those stars were perpetually forming, living, and dying in celestial epics above no less worthy of story and song than any of the figures below. And below there were as many more universes again. Each shadow was somehow a universe all to itself, complete with its own creation myth, metaphysics, and existential narrative. Inside each mind was a unique perspective, an entirely unique universe, entirely contained within just one brain.
The experience was so powerful that it overwhelmed his young and still forming mind. But the experience had also shaped him in a very important way. Beyond learning where the value in a human life lies (that being the existence of a unique universe inside every human mind), he also learned that they were at the same time nothing special. Human beings were the most significant phenomenon in the universe, and somehow at the same time entirely insignificant.
To go visit one of those stars, to map its debris and study its unique composition and furious dispositions, would be a wondrous adventure, as marvelous a journey of discovery as plumbing the depths of any one individual person’s mind. Their uniqueness was equally riveting, equally worthy of study and understanding. And yet in both cases, a standard pattern was followed, each individual instance only a subtle variation on overwhelming similarities. Both were equally valuable and somehow, both equally worthless.
He saw how from his perspective, any one of those nondescript shadows down there could blink out of existence and he would be hard pressed to miss it, and to honestly claim that he could tell whether one had really been lost, or which particular mote it had been. The same could equally be said of the stars above him. Perspective wise, he was equidistant from both. He was able to see the objects above and below both as collections of things, and simultaneously as individual things, each with their own unique quirks and stories to tell. He became aware that neither view was in any sense ‘wrong,’ and that both perspectives were equally and necessarily valid, that both stars and people were somehow simultaneously large and small. He spent the next several decades of his life trying to understand how this could be.