Project Suraci and the Suns of Man - Part I

I was just a child when they stole the night. At first, people were confused. Then they were angry. My father cursed the sun in rage as my mother held me close in fear. The whole world looked up at the sky, waiting for the night that never came.

Jans Furman, the billionaire tech founder and unofficial spokesman of the Techno-elite, initiated a worldwide simulcast. "Fellow citizens of the world," he began in his deep baritone voice, "Our collective hubris and arrogance have brought our ecosystems to the brink of catastrophe. The effects of climate change are now undeniable. Your governments have been unwilling and unable to confront this global threat. This is unacceptable. I, Jans Furman, along with the other techno-innovators from countries around the world, have taken matters into our own hands. Today, I present to you the inauguration of Project Suraci, a global initiative to solve the climate crisis once and for all."

The world held its breath, unsure what to expect.

"If you are a resident of the eastern hemisphere," Jans Furman continued, "you will notice a dark void where the sun should be. This is the Halo, a thin circular ring perfectly balanced in outer orbit at the L1 Lagrange point. It forever remains in the same relative location, directly between the earth and the sun, as if tethered to a string pulled taut between us. The Halo center has a thin film of densely packed ozone, providing us a permanent protective shield from the sun's harmful radiation. The Halo will forever eclipse the sun, solving the climate crisis once and for all."

The world's silence slowly transformed, erupting into cheering and applause as the understanding of the victory set in. But Jans Furman wasn't finished.

"The solution to one problem," he continued, "presents an opportunity to solve another. If you are a resident of the western hemisphere, you will notice light where there should be darkness. Not only does the Halo act as a powerful UV filter, but also as a giant concave lens, refracting light to hundreds of small geosynchronous satellites. These, in turn, are fitted with their own reflective lenses, allowing all corners of the globe to experience perfect daylight, constantly and simultaneously. A perfectly homogenous blanket of light, at all times for everyone everywhere. We call these satellites the "Suns of Man."

The world scratched their heads in collective confusion. Jans Furman smiled his billion-dollar smile. He was just now getting to the good stuff.

"Since the beginning of time, the light of day has yielded to the darkness of night, providing order to our lives. But as we leave our provincial past behind, as we become citizens of the world, the 24-hour day-night cycle has become an obstacle to true global optimization. We must think bigger. Why should a Chinese investor have to wake up in the middle of the night to do business with a Brazilian entrepreneur? Why should North Americans be forced into daytime traffic jams when the same streets sit empty at night? Why is the European power grid forced into rolling blackouts during peak demand when there is ample capacity after-hours? Why are we forced into the rigid oppression of our 24-hour life cycles when we have the power to offer ultimate flexibility? The answer is that we don't. We don't have to accept the world as it is, when we possess the power to change it. By bringing daylight everywhere all the time all at once, we have brought the world the gift of true freedom!"

Jans Furman ended his simulcast. The world remained every bit as confused as it was before he began. But they would come to understand soon enough.

***

Over the next few years, Project Suraci proved to be a wild success in all the ways its creators envisioned. The Halo was a shield and a salve. The earth cooled and its burns slowly healed. The hundred man-made suns bathed the globe in illumination, washing away the darkness of night. The globalized economy roared to life, expanding and inter-connecting around the 24-hour omnipresent light cycle, filling every minute with enterprise and industry. Traffic and congestion improved and energy costs decreased. Jobs opened up to fill the additional daylight hours. The economy boomed and stocks soared. Just like Jans Furman had predicted. Nobody seemed to care that the Techno-elite scooped up the vast majority of the profits. Society had been gifted extra time, and the world optimized itself to do more and live more fully. And for a time, the world was filled with optimism.

That's not to say there weren't warnings. It was just that nobody wanted to listen to the doomsayers when so much seemed to be going right. My father was chief among the skeptics, cursing the oppressive light to anyone who would listen. He did everything he could to keep the intrusive light from entering our home. He boarded up the windows. He installed heavy canvas curtains. He began sleeping in the basement. But still, the light seeped in, infiltrating every crack and pore so that he could never escape. He stopped sleeping. His health declined, both physically and mentally. He began info-dumping obscure conspiracy theories on my mother and me. Impending ecological collapse. Species going extinct. Hysteria gripping far-off communities. Everything was a sign that the constant artificial light was a force of destruction. My mother tried to reason with him. The Techno-Elite had solved the coming disaster, not created it. Why couldn't he accept it? She ignored his warnings and stopped listening to him altogether.

But I listened. Everyone thought his rantings were the cries of a madman. Until they began coming true. And then he was no longer a madman screaming into the abyss, but a prophet preaching in the wilderness. And it was time to return home to the flock. The world's eyes were open to see, its ears open to listen. First, the animals started disappearing. Then the vegetation. Crops failed and rivers ran dry. Famine and plague scorched the land. The economy collapsed as quickly as it had been born. Anxiety and mental illness spread like disease across every community, a feverish mania unleashed on the population like a plague. The collective hysteria had no shadows to hide in, no darkness to conceal itself. The light became a cruel prison with no chance of escape. My father was now just one voice in a chorus of discontent. The world wasn't made for constant daylight, the voices chanted. The world needed darkness, the chorus sang. But their song fell on deaf ears. The Techno-elite had already retreated into their impermeable domed cities.

***

It's long been a point of debate how much and at what point the Techno-elite first realized the consequences of their actions. If they shared in the initial optimism, why did they begin building their domes? Almost immediately after the launch of Project Suraci, a dozen domed cities began construction across the globe. Each dome was a miracle of engineering, a geodesic lattice 3 miles in diameter and towering a mile into the sky. The top of the dome was fitted out with light-adaptive panels programmed on a 24-hour cycle - fully transparent for 16 hours and fully opaque for 8 hours. The Techno-elite had made artificial day for the world, and then turned around and made artificial night for only themselves. Each octant of the dome had a large condenser protruding outward, 1000 feet high in the air and similar to the old window air conditioning units popular in the 20th century, only scaled up to a massive size. There were no doors or means of egress. The domes were meant to be a perfectly sealed ecosystem. A paradise separated from the coming devastation beyond.

My father was one of the technicians working on the domes in the final days before the world completely crumbled, nearly seven years after the night was stolen and the domes were first conceived. It was one of the few jobs still available, and the irony was never lost on my father. As he cursed Project Suraci publicly and privately, he became complicit in the Techno-elite's master plan. He hated it until the very end, and I fear he hated himself a little more each day. It was only a month before the domes were complete when my father had his accident. He was on a team tasked with installing the last of the condensers. He slipped and fell, plummeting a thousand feet to the world below. He hadn't slept in five days. The light had slowly been destroying him, and now it had finished the job. After my father's death, my mother sunk into despair, never to recover. The grief of my father's death, the guilt of not listening to him sooner, the hardship of survival all became too much for her. She died a month later, just as the Techno-elite retreated into the safety of their dome fortresses, hiding away from the disaster they had wrought. 

I was a child when they stole the night. I was a teenager when they stole my family. But they weren't yet done with me. Our fates were intertwined.

***

Twenty years had passed when the sun was suddenly reborn, blinking back to life in an instant, larger and brighter than its man-made doppelgangers. Nobody knew why it suddenly appeared again. We in the outerlands had lost the tools to look into the heavens. The technological advances of the 21st and 22nd centuries had been hoarded and locked away with the Techno-elite two decades ago. Among the wild speculations and conspiracies, the most likely theory seemed to be that an asteroid had collided with the Halo, knocking it out of its stable orbit. Whatever the cause, the earth had now lost its protective shield, and we were helpless against the blistering solar radiation.

If society had been in free-fall twenty years ago, it had all but collapsed by this point. Only the most resilient of creatures had survived - bacteria, cockroaches, humans. The rest had disappeared or gone extinct. Likewise, the flora had been whittled down to little more than undergrowth. Grass and shrubs were all that was left, scattered spots of life in an endless desert. Amid this ecological collapse, a network of tent-cities sprang up around the domes, small pockets of society, organized around the tributaries flowing out from the great dome condensers. Waterfalls of condensation collected on the giant condenser coils, then tumbled and cascaded down the sides of the domes, branching and forking outwards. As the rest of the planet dried up, these rivers and deltas became the lifeblood of the outerworld. We had become tethered to the Techno-elite, a vast serfdom of slums surrounding their gilded citadels. 

The plan was simple and built on a tragic and fortuitous accident. Five years ago, an earthquake had hit one of the domes and dislodged a condenser, the same one that my father had died working on. I like to think he had sabotaged the installation, his last gift to humanity. His last gift to me. The condenser tilted outward before tumbling down the side of the dome, destroying the community beneath it. As tragic as this event was for those in its path, the fallen condenser opened a hole in the side of the dome, presenting a window of opportunity in the sky. It took the Techno-elite a week to patch the hole. We watched as the distant silhouetted figures moved back and forth across the opening, as if walking on a tightrope, before the breach was finally sealed. But it showed us their weakness and focused our plan of attack. That was the last time anyone had seen the Techno-elite.

Over the next five years, we formulated our plan and gathered our tools. We salvaged explosives from the decaying cities. We dismantled the broken condenser, repurposing the copper tubes into a giant modular scaffolding system, each piece carefully hidden within the tent-covered slums and able to be quickly erected. Once we began our attack, we had no idea how long we would have until the dome started fighting back. And now, with the sudden reappearance of the sun, we could no longer afford to wait. We had to act and act now. 

We had enough supplies to attack three condensers simultaneously. I was the leader of the northwest demolition team, waiting for the signal from the southern team. We crouched, hidden among the tents, until we heard a single drumbeat in the distance. Now was the time. Quickly, the base of the scaffolding emerged, carried and assembled by 50 men and planted firmly against the dome's base. We had practiced this a hundred times in pieces, synchronizing our movements until it was a finely choreographed dance, a single staccato drumroll keeping us in rhythm.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

The base was complete. A group of twenty more men emerged, carrying the next piece of scaffolding, climbing and firmly affixing it on top of the base.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

The next piece ascended the tower, assembled and attached, slowly bringing us closer.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

As leader of the demolition team, I would be the last to climb and the first to descend. For the time being, I watched, waiting for a sign of activity from within the dome. Waiting to sound the alarm.

Rat-a-tat-tat. 

The tower grew steadily, piece by piece, as the scaffolding teams ascended ever higher.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

The distant drumbeats from the southern and northeastern teams fell in line with our own. We held our breath as progress slowly continued.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

The final pieces of scaffolding were put in place, a vast copper tower scaling the side of the dome, flush with the top of the condenser. 

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.

A persistent drumbeat signaled the final step. My team mounted the tower, quickly ascending. Half of the team carried the explosives. The other half, tightly coiled cables. The rhythmic drumming grew in intensity as we neared our destination. But still no sign of movement from within. Were the Techno-elite blind to our efforts, or were they simply biding their time? We reached the top, and the explosives were quickly set in place, charges positioned on the scaffolded side and top of the condenser. We had less than a minute to descend as far back down as we could, hoping the charges were strong enough to dislodge the condenser, but not too strong to send the scaffolding collapsing to the ground below. As we raced to safety, the drum rolls ceased, and a stillness gripped the outerlands. Besides our demolition team, the whole world seemed to be looking to the sky, waiting in anticipation.

A clap of thunder and a crash of lightning as the charges began igniting. The dome quaked and the scaffold tower pitched outward, swaying dangerously, before snapping erect, crashing back to safety against the side of the dome. I thought of my father and the panic that must have consumed him as he plummeted to the distant world below. But I held on. 

A cracking as the condenser tipped forward, slowly at first then gaining speed, as it broke contact and tumbled downward. We all watched, frozen in place, until it crashed against the earth below, exploding and splintering outward. The first piece of our plan was complete, and the first piece of the Techno-elite's impenetrable fortress had fallen. We ascended back to the top of the tower to find an open window to the darkened city below. We had hoped to invade during the dome's daylight hours, but there had been no way to tell. We would be at a disadvantage during the night as our eyes were used to constant light. We would be blind. 

We secured the coiled cables to the sides of the dome and dropped them down into the abyss. I wrapped my legs firmly around the cable and lowered myself into the darkness. Like my father before me, I began the 1000-foot descent into the great domed city below.

***End of Part I***