THE PROJECT MANAGER

He hunches at the bar, slugging down repped beers and oysters by the dozen. As the lead project manager on PROJECT STAR TREK, he was accountable for the development of the replicator hardware line between the years 2025 and 2027.

He's had a few drinks before I arrived.

None of us knew what we were in for. Nobody.

I mean, we knew we were going to change the world. And I suppose we did. But we couldn't have imagined the path this thing would take.

The weird thing about it is... people had been predicting the replicator—or something more or less like it—for centuries. And near about all of them had made dark predictions about what it would all mean.

The first that comes to mind is obviously Marx. He toyed with the idea of a future where human jobs had all been replaced by robot labor. And he went back and forth on the question of whether that would require some sort of overthrow of the dominant economic system.

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel was about the idea of a post-scarcity society as well. He held the dystopian view, of course. The "humanists" always do have the darkest outlook on humanity, don't they?

Very, very few people throughout history have had the fuckin' balls to imagine a utopia. Or even just real, lasting, positive progress.

Don't we all feel, deep down, that we deserve the apocalypse?

It's that Christian underpinning of the culture, man. Judgment day is coming eventually. Just try to prove you're one of the good ones in the meantime.

The apocalypse has always been so easy to imagine. Just picture everything around you burnt down, mushroom clouds in the sky, people scrounging around. Easy.

Imagining a utopia is much harder. And yet when you do manage to scrounge together some forward progress, it also seems like it was predetermined that things would go that way. Like, right now, they've got the elementary school kids reading "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," as if it was always a part of the canon.

I remember my middle school reading list. Nineteen-Eighty-Four, and Brave New World, and a bunch of books about racism and the collapse of empires. Dystopia, dystopia.

You had to go to Star Trek to see images of a future utopia. And even then, every time they rebooted that series, it got darker, less far out, more close to home.

We wanted to make Star Trek real.

Or, at least, a piece of it. That's the story behind the project's name.

Tell me about how the project started.

From the beginning, it was a secretive thing.

The guy who originally started Alphacorp, THE OLIGARCH, had been uninvolved with day-to-day operations at the company for nearly a decade. His net worth was well into the billions, so he basically spent his time trying to figure out the best—or maybe worst—ways to blow his money. And one of those ways he spent his cash was by funding "R&D" projects at Alphacorp.

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The deal he had with the C-suite staff at that time was that he'd basically fund these projects with his own money, so long as they let him hang out on campus and maybe pull in some top talent from other projects at the company to work on his "moonshot" projects.

Over the years, some of these R&D campaigns had produced some pretty interesting things, like an AI algorithm that could beat anyone in the world at competitive Animal Crossing. But, I mean, that's not something with much, real economic value.

If you think in terms of opportunity cost—like, how much value could those engineers have generated if they had been working on something more useful—then you realize how much of a money sink these R&D campaigns were.

So, it was actually after the Animal Crossing esports AI thing that the board came to THE OLIGARCH and told him that he was going to have to produce something with real market potential if he was going to keep using Alphacorp resources on his projects. They told him he'd need to put together a proper pitch for his next campaign. Show the upsides and downsides, all that.

Well, THE OLIGARCH tells the board that he gets it. Says he'll come back with a solid pitch. And then he disappears. This was in the first half of 2024.

Six months later, he shows up at Alphacorp headquarters with this entire retinue of scientists from Germany and China. The scientists have apparently made a big theoretical breakthrough, but they need funding to prove out their theory—something about "replication and relocation of physical matter via digital archival of atomic structures." THE OLIGARCH says, basically, he's willing to put everything he's got into this project. Billions of dollars. And he's making the case that this technology could result in a trillion-dollar industry.

He's ranting about how they're gonna revolutionize health care, travel, industrial production. Everything. All he wants is access to Alphacorp's facilities. Maybe some manpower in the form of product managers, security guys, etcetera.

Alphacorp's board members basically look at each other, roll their eyes, and agree to humor THE OLIGARCH. They didn't really think this shit would work. But they figured if they gave him a building and let him play on his own, he'd stay out of their hair.

I was brought on to the project about six months later.

What was the appeal of the project for you?

I don't know. I wasn't sure, at the beginning. But THE OLIGARCH was extremely charismatic with his pitch. Something about it appealed to that part of me that loves Star Trek. He kept using the phrase "post-scarcity economy," and that clicked with me, hard.

With no more need to work for food, everybody would be freed up to devote time to their family, or if they were technically skilled, maybe pitch in on larger projects like the development of General AI. The jump from there to the Singularity would be small. We figured within our lifetimes we'd all have robot slaves doing shit for us like in The Jetsons.

Tell me about THE CUSTODIAN.

THE PROJECT MANAGER groans.

Why didn't we just pay him better? Jesus Christ... fucking finance department insisting on paying everyone at market rate. It's no surprise he couldn't resist the urge to grab a rep when given the chance. The man was living below subsistence level, and every day he's watching a bunch of dipshit engineers playing around in a miniature version of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

THE CUSTODIAN saw an opportunity to grab his own golden ticket and he took it. I don't blame him for that.

As for what his friends did later... I mean, who would've imagined?

He says that after he took the first rep, Alphacorp sent a security team after him.

I'm sure they did. But that's not my department. To be honest, at that point in time I didn't really care that one machine had gone missing.

We were so close to finalizing work on the reps anyway. I was just staying focused on working out the final kinks in the hardware. The machines were working almost perfectly. But there were a couple of final issues that the marketing guys wanted us to fix before taking things to the next stage. Like, for one thing, reps didn't seem to handle gelatinous substances very well.

Gelatinous substances?

Yeah. You'd try to make some ketchup or toothpaste and it'd just come out all runny and sort of weird tasting. Or, like, maple syrup. This thing couldn't make syrup for shit.