The Future

“The night drive out, the music beating in his head, the future was just moments away. This was the midnight beginning. This was the smooth running-out of the old world and the birth of the new.”

From the beginning, “the future” functions as a metaphor, shifting and reassembling depending on the moment and the character’s point of view. Here, Lenk is being driven to the plane that will take him away from the apocalypse and into what he believes will be a better future. The new future will place him, and his company, firmly at the powerful center.

“According to various providers of tepid takes, Seasons Time was either the most crass and culturally appropriative place on Earth, an ecological disaster, a charming example of Singaporean whimsy, or honestly, just lighten up, it’s a fun place to spend an afternoon shopping.”

Seasons Time is an apt and mischievous symbol of the consumer culture that permeates the book. It appropriates holidays, cultural traditions, religions, and even time itself to sell huge quantities of mostly pointless, wasteful products. As she flees from her assailant, Zhen hides in a bin of plush Valentine’s Day toys—in the middle of June.

“Martha had refused because—on balance—she liked truth better than lies and she thought Lenk’s volatility and childish petulance more truthful than Ellen’s polish.”

Ellen invites Martha to give a talk with her on women in technology, but Martha does not trust the woman. Her sentiments above reveal the complicated nature of her character: On the one hand, she is loyal to Lenk, in spite of everything; on the other hand, she will eventually betray him. Ironically, she professes to respect the truth, though she will engineer an enormous lie.

“They’d lived on an enormous rural compound in Oregon, and Enoch had been unusual in the right wing at that time for accepting the reality of climate change, for interpreting it as a sign of God’s will.”

This passage also reveals something about Martha’s character. While she has allegedly left Enoch behind, she maintains many of his values, including his concern for the environment. She, however, does not believe that climate change is “God’s will”; rather, it is the result of rapacious companies and consumer culture run amok.

“She’d thought of her mother, of what could still be found and preserved, or the way that anything her mother owned was precious to her now. How it is only time that makes things precious.”

Zhen reflects on her mother, who passed away when Zhen was a child. This passage gestures toward why Zhen was drawn to archeology and the Temple of Orpheus. The passage of time and the preservation of memory are significant to her; they create meaning—in direct contrast to the unknown future and the impending apocalypse.

“That’s what these social media and big technology companies have done. They’ve found a way to siphon off something that no one used to be able to own. They invented a new kind of fence to make a new kind of enclosure.”

These statements are found in Badger’s video entitled “Enclosures.” They begin by discussing the enclosing of public lands for private use in 18th- and 19th-century England, before arguing that people now are “enclosed” by technology and the mining of data. However, Badger goes on to insist that “[w]e also own the influence, the networks, the infrastructure, the information” (91). They, along with Martha, Selah, and Albert, will fight to reassert their authority.

“We are the riders before the storm. The future is on the way, my friend, and we are its augurs. The city you live in has been judged and condemned. Something bad is coming and you do not want to be here when it arrives.”

OneCorn/Martha prophesies about the looming and inevitable future. Her posts—unlike her professional presence—contain a tinge of religious feeling, with its gestures toward judgment. She and her collaborators could be designated the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for their implementation of the end of days—even if the apocalypse is merely a hoax.

“She watched the simply furry potatoes snuffling for treats, eating from their carefully tended grass boxes, hiding under blankets, and she thought: You see, it doesn’t take much to make a being happy.”

Martha watches her guinea pigs in their castle, which foreshadows her eventual plans. She has experimented on her guinea pigs; now, she will experiment on people. She will provide Lenk with all that he needs—the algae that will sustain him; the beds and blankets that will keep him warm—to live a simple, happy life.

“And Martha knew she was truly alone. Now and forever. Her friends in the valley would always understand why she left but not why she stayed. The Enochites would understand why she’d stayed by never why she left. She’d broken herself into fragments and now she had to live that way. There was no one who could see all her pieces.”

The motif of fragments and wholes appears several times in the book. Martha’s father preaches that humans should strive for wholeness, which comes about by being connected to nature and faithful to God; humanity is fragmented by cities and technology. Martha, though, becomes fascinated by the fragments—the little moments of life that can bring meaning outside of faith—and leaves Enoch’s compound. It takes years for her to understand that she has fragmented herself.

“What Enoch thought is true: we are connected, one to the next to the next.”

Martha reveals her mercurial nature: She feels alone when reuniting with a former member of Enoch’s cult, but when she begins working with Albert, she thinks about the connections between people. She knows that she belongs in a group that works toward a greater purpose. Tellingly, her boss’s name—Lenk—is a homophone for “link,” a piece that connects one to the longer chain.

“We are always in the process of catching up to the future. Only when we get there, it’s never what we imagined.”

This reveals one of the underlying paradoxes of the future: As soon as one witnesses it, it is no longer the future. The elusive “future” functions as an ever-shifting metaphor throughout the book. Here, it foreshadows the novel’s twist: The novel leads up the apocalypse from the opening line; yet, when that future arrives, 350 pages later, it is not at all what it first seemed.

“The thing that she had never said was the greatest lesson Zhen had taken from all that—you could die while wanting desperately to live, with many important things left unfinished. The future would come while you were looking the other way and there were so many things that could kill you.”

Zhen’s mother leaves some of her feelings unspoken in the wake of her illness. Zhen’s desire for survival comes out of that unspoken fear of being unprepared for what the future might bring. The uncertainty that lurks in the future terrifies her.

“Martha felt she could see the pixels in the world. A world made up of tiny pieces, like a pointillist painting; the trust is that everything is both pieces and a whole.”

Martha looks at all of the little pieces of her larger plan; she can see in the software that she and her friends have created a bigger and bolder composite. This passage alludes to other grand systems like chaos theory, quantum physics—and Enoch’s teachings. It suggests that one has to stand back to see the big picture.

“Consequences are outside the parameter of the machine. After all, it is only a set of small pieces of cardboard, or silicon. It has no urge to reach out to other minds, to connect, to understand or be understood.”

The novel often poses humanity against technology. Marius’s lecture to his students impresses upon them that the computer is nothing without the human programmer behind it. He dismisses the notion that AI could learn or understand like humans; thus, he implicitly disavows the claims of the AUGR program. In addition, this emphasizes one of the overall themes of the book: Technology cannot replace human interaction.

“The algorithms can’t do everything. But if they can make us more polarized, more angry, and more hateful, surely they can do the opposite of that.”

Martha and her co-conspirators use the “happymeal” algorithm to expand on positive posts and to minimize negative or neutral ones. Again, this emphasizes the fact that the technology itself, those algorithms, do not create meaning; rather, the humans behind the software direct its intentions. When these intentions are not focused on the maximization of profit, a different kind of technology becomes possible.

“While Martha and Selah, Albert and Badger figured out what to try next, time passed. Companies grew bigger. Things became, slowly but inexorably, worse.”

After their disastrous attempt to disrupt the big three technology companies, the four have to devise a more humane plan. In the meantime, the influence of large corporations grows ever larger, while the planet and the humans who live on it suffer more and more. For Martha, this justifies the elimination—if not the murder—of the CEOs who do nothing to stop the spread of environmental destruction and human misery.

“They tried to explain for a while. In the end, because she could not in fact take in what they were saying, they just had the suits show her the footage they had. Documentation of the last days of human civilization.”

Zhen is shown the “proof” of the apocalypse in video footage and posted articles and archives. This passage implicitly reveals the limits of technology: Such documentation can be easily faked—as in current examples of deep fake images and posts—and the apocalypse in which the CEOs fervently believe is a hoax.

“She was on this island with three people who each had access to weapons and resources she had never even heard of. After the end of the world, what possible reason was there for any of them to want her alive?”

Zhen’s survival instinct is triggered when she realizes that Lenk, Ellen, and Zimri do not trust one another. If they are willing to turn on one another, then Zhen’s lack of resources makes her even more vulnerable. Thus, she must devise a plan to keep herself safe. Her idea, expressed early in the book, that survival depends on banding together is overruled by the self-interest of the rich and powerful.

“Zhen saw that this was real to Lenk, more real than the current sickness sweeping the world. The future was more real to him than the present.”

Lenk shows Zhen his cave bunker, carefully curated by Martha. His vision of what the future can be—the simplicity of living off the land coupled with the knowledge of modern science—enthralls him. He does not care about the Pigeon Flu or the people who have died; he cares more about seeing his ideas come to fruition. There is irony here, too, in the placement of Lenk’s bunker in a cave: It is the opposite of Plato’s vision of enlightenment, with humans emerging from the cave to see the light of reason.

“In the shadow of a great cliff, within the life of the jungle, Ellen Bywater cowered. Clamped to the rock like a barnacle, molded and curved and flat places. Hiding like any other creature.”

The simile here compares Ellen not just to an animal but to an animal with no discernible features or mind, a barnacle. She has been reduced, by fear and rage, to a creature whose one object is to survive. It is a brief realization: She, like all humans, rich or poor, is just a living, struggling animal.

“Something flitted through Zhen’s mind that she’d read while browsing NTD years ago. People after the destruction of civilization taking refuge in a cave. Telling themselves there was no one else left alive in the cities. So unable to trust that this isolation seemed the safest thing for them.”

Fear prevents the CEOs from contemplating whether the apocalypse is real. This passage foreshadows the revelation that Zhen herself actually knows the truth. She knows the world carries on without her, that her sacrifice is in accepting her isolation.

“This is always the secret; this was how these technology fortunes had been made: make it all so easy and enjoyable and frictionless that you never start to ask yourself the big questions about whether this is really how you want to be spending your life.”

The novel’s critique of technology centers on The Conflict Between Authenticity and Artifice. The artificiality of the interface keeps people looking, scrolling, and enjoying something less than real life. It also speaks to the dissatisfaction that all the CEOs expressed in their previous lives. Despite having vast amounts of wealth and influence, Lenk wishes to live simply; Zimri yearns for acceptance; and Ellen mourns her dead husband.

“And when Lenk Sketlish, Ellen Bywater, and Zimri Nommik had reviewed the photographs and video files and seen what AUGR had done, they believed in AUGR. Not just with their money, which was relatively easy to extract from them, but with that rarest of all commodities: their trust.”

The key to keeping the CEOs trapped on Admiral Huntsy Island rests with their belief in AUGR. Without that belief, they would not have boarded the plane and accepted AUGR’s version of events. They are convinced of AUGR’s power by witnessing a video replay of Zhen’s attack and escape in Seasons Time Mall. They trust technology more than they trust each other.