The Concord of Babel

When they founded Data, Alaska, the owners of Seeling Corporation hadn’t expected it would  become such a popular tourist destination. Data was not legally a city, after all. This is why Seeling’s attorneys were able to convince the government not to tax what they dubbed “nonhuman shadow property.” No residences had been installed in the skyscraping server towers; no plumbing ran alongside the cables laid under the peat. The real substance of the place existed not in the massive machines founded upon the razed forest and the permafrost, but in the Cloud, that exalted realm beyond the plane  of human existence. The Cloud was secure and spacious, but Data itself was inhospitable. Erected in the  polar zone, the “Empty City,” as it was sometimes called, generated enough heat to simulate subtropical  weather. Its hyper-reflective buildings, designed to protect the hot servers from the Sun, frequently  blinded birds, roasted insects, and singed the hair of passing reindeer. Its grid of 5,000 narrow, unlabeled  roads intersecting nearly 20,000 times, was designed for drones, and proved daunting for humans to  navigate. To expedite tourism, Seeling developed a GPS which could lead visitors to any of the simple numerical addresses between 0 and 77,214 (omitting those which would end in 13). 

Thousands visited each year, lodging in Winter resorts far from the dry desert surrounding Data.  They tanned beside the identical conical white towers, or swam in a nearby Arctic bay, which in the  process of cooling Data through its single-circuit Ocean sewer, exceeded eighty degrees Fahrenheit, in Summer. They visited its famous servers: Ride Tower, which directed passenger aircraft, public trains, driverless cabs, and assault drones; Identity Tower, which processed and packaged information on criminals, immigrants, their family, and everyone who might someday fit into one of those categories; or Love Tower, through which pornography was uploaded. For security reasons, the Financial District was  buried in horizontal towers rented by investment firms contesting an unproven millionth of a percent advantage in internet speed. The center of this district was marked by a podium resemblant of a gas meter. This was Data’s most popular attraction. Visitors lined up to have their picture taken beside the meter, on which they could watch the digital wealth of the world oscillate over a staggering range  measured in six currencies. They loved to imagine the money stored under their feet, as if a vast, Stevensonian trove was entombed beneath the heat-warped asphalt. Of course, the real wealth was distributed across the Earth, but the fetishization of the money meter was merely one of many myths which so aggrandized Data as a holiday destination. 

Such myths gave visitors the impression that by gazing upon Data, they could witness the limits  of reality itself. Some proud engineers claimed that this was literally true, since the Sky District, whose  towers contained astronomical, meteorological, and geological information, did in fact contain all known  parameters of the universe. For a time, too, Seeling advertised that one of their patented towers would  be enough to archive every memory of every living person on Earth. They removed this claim from more recent brochures, after construction began on an exciting new structure. Over several months, Data’s  newest and largest server was installed in another sharp cone. It was called “Human Tower.” 

Rumors of universal knowledge inspired the Concord of Babel, a cult of scientism which advocated transcendental enlightenment through increasing data compression and the institution of Seeling’s code  as a universal language. Founded by a man who called himself “Zero,” the Concord initially subsisted on  seminars for which derisive tourists paid to scoff at Zero’s vision for a united human race at one with the  universe, in a shared house of pure information. Yet as the blasphemers filtered through, some remained  longer than they expected, surprised by the sense of Zero’s strange ideas. Soon, on the outskirts of Data, the growing clergy installed servers of their own: proxies to link them to the Seeling network. Every  morning, the congregation performed its rites, each member synchronizing their personal device to the  tall Modem at the front of the Concord, then retiring to their “Nodes”—small, single, unadorned  bedrooms—to study the code they recited together in the afternoon. Concord leaders insisted that these readings were nothing like prayer: They served a practical function of familiarizing members with their  language, and with the means of their prospective society. Because only Seeling code was spoken in the Concord, socialization among the congregation was limited by its unambiguous functions. Speech was constrained to a framework of request or description. 

By the time Human Tower was complete, the Concord of Babel had grown to a few thousand members, and was primarily sustained by a contract with Seeling, to continue providing the donor-funded  proxy servers the corporation had come to value. It was almost a matter of course, then, that when Seeling  announced the completion of Human Tower, Zero was the first to upload his consciousness. On what would be remembered as a pretty boring livestream, he was anesthetized and dressed in electrodes inside an air-conditioned capsule which shielded him from the ultraviolet light reflected by the towers. Thirty hours later, he was disconnected and awoken. As the engineers dryly congratulated him, and offered him an electrolyte solution, he glanced frantically around the capsule, and at the crowd of unmanned cameras watching him. Feeling no different, he confirmed with the lead engineer that the experiment was a success. She explained without looking at Zero that the mind uploaded to Human Tower was a perfect copy, living its own life within the bounds of Seeling’s code. 

“What about me?” Zero asked, embarrassing himself by breaking from his own binary dialect. 

“You can go home,” she said, double-checking something on her tablet. “That’s all we needed.”

Flash Issue 11