ADVERTISEMENT

STEPHEN KENT JOHNSON

PRODUCED BY:

March 21–24, 2019 CO-LOCATED WITH:

Piers 92 & 94 NYC DIFFA’S DINING BY DESIGN

New York 2019 diffa.org
THE NEXT
25 YEARS 7 SCI-FI WRITERS IMAGINE THE ( &BONEW
LD
) FUTURE OF WORK P. 5 8

ICE
SUBMERSIBLE SEISMIC

ROBOTS EXPLOSIVES SENSORS

Scientists are racing to understand

Antarctica’s vast
and fragile Thwaites glacier—
before it’s too late.
jan 2019
| cool it
 27.01
LAUNCH

“HERE YOU ARE, HOLDING IN YOUR HAND

A PIECE OF SOME PLANET.”

P A G E 78

JAN 2019 DAN WINTERS 0 0 3

 RELEASE NOTES

fer we not use “defi-

nitely” to underscore
the point, because
“adverbs are terri-
ble.”) In his 15 years
at W I R E D , Rogers has
written about nerds
on a cruise, hang-
overs, and why no
one could agree on
the color of that
dress. On page 50,
Jason Kehe was he explores the leg-
weary with dystopian acy of comic book
predictions of nefar- icon Stan Lee. “I
ious robots taking learned to read with
jobs from humans. comics,” he says.
For this issue’s “Now I buy them for
Future of Work fic- my kids.” Rogers also
tion package (page contributed to our
58), the senior asso- Future of Work fic-
ciate editor wanted tion package (page
to do something dif- 74). His second book,
ferent. So Kehe chal- about the science
lenged sci-fi writers of color, comes out
to imagine a world in later this year.
which the gig econ-
omy and automa-
tion have redefined
the daily grind. The
results include tales
of hunky, AI-guided
actors replacing doc-
tors, an aging social
worker struggling to
preserve in-person
care for the poor, and
a romantic who fakes As a senior writer
W IRE D ’s a relationship to pay for W I R E D , Lauren
new creative his bills. What shines Goode tries out lots
director at our through in the stories, of devices. But for
25th anniver- her essay on page
sary festival.
Kehe says, is the per-
MAILI HOLIMAN sistence of the human 32, Goode jumped
spirit: “Even though (and lunged and ped-
they’re in the con- aled) into the world
text of robots and AI, of smart home fit-
they’re all about peo- ness. At first she

F
ple and our humanity.” thought, That’s so
Silicon Valley. But
once exercisers from
or Maili Holiman, this issue represents “a all over the country
sort of homecoming.” She was an art direc- began popping
up on livestreamed
tor at WIRED in the aughts and returned leaderboards, she
in October as our new creative director. saw the appeal.
“Since I was here last, the biggest change Get More WIRED Smart as they were,
We launched a pay- the fitness devices
I see is the number of women in leader- wall on W I R E D .com, didn’t take care of
ship positions, and specifically women but if you’re already everything. Goode
of color,” she says. “One thing I’m excited a print subscriber, When there’s Star neglected to ease in,
don’t worry: You can Wars news or a tweaked her shoul-
about is bringing fresh points of view to the visual authenticate your superhero narra- der, and had to cut
direction. As the audience has changed and the tech subscription and tive that requires her first workout
world has become more diverse, illustrating com- read all of our sto- analysis, deputy short. “Tech can fix
ries, ad-free. Get the editor Adam Rogers a lot of things,” she
plex ideas from many different perspectives is not hookup here: W I R E D will definitely have says, “but you should
only necessary, it’s imperative.” .com/register. insights. (He’d pre- still warm up.”

AMY LOMBARD 0 0 7

ALPHA
ARGUMENT
LOVE AND
ROCKETS
WHY I’M
STAYING PUT
BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
IN 1897, WILLIAM JAMES, the celebrity philosopher,
was offered $400 to lecture at Harvard on the
quaint subject of immortality. As a marquee
speaker on the Gilded Age circuit, James could be
selective about his gigs, and he almost declined.
Realism had superseded romance in philosophy,
and the keenest intellectuals now styled them-
selves as “cerebralistic materialists”—devo-
tees of the idea that life ends when the brain’s
activity does. If James was going to have to
talk about angels and harps, even a decent fee
would not be worth the scorn from colleagues.
JAN 2019
In the end James cashed
the check and gave an exqui-
sitely weird lecture, published
as Human Immortality, which
argued that while individual
minds might perish, a collec-
tive “mother-sea” of conscious-
ness lives forever.
The lecture then took an abrupt
turn. “Take, for instance, all the
Chinamen.” He described the
late-century crowds of immi-
grants arriving on the eastern
seaboard, confronting his audi-
ence—cleverly—with their own
social ungenerosity. “Which of
you here, my friends, sees any
fitness in their eternal perpet-
uation unreduced in numbers?
… Immortality of every separate
specimen must be to [God] and to
the universe as indigestible a load
to carry as it is to you.” And yet!
Rounding on his listeners,
James revealed that the after-
life was not as illiberal as they
were. Instead it was a utopia not
known on Earth: a place free of
tribalism and xenophobia where
all minds can be accommodated.
In life, James said, our compas-
sion for others is feeble. “Our
private power of sympathetic
vibration with other lives gives
out so soon.” Gives out, like a
knee. But God can take on the
burdens we cannot: “In the heart
of infinite being itself there can
be such a thing as plethora, or
glut, or supersaturation.”
Today, as our sympathetic
vibrations with other lives—
immigrants, Trumpites, Jews,
incels, people of other races—
keep blinking out, the idea of a
universe with an infinitely hospi-
table heart is a freshly poignant
fantasy. This heart shelters all
of the refugees displaced by the
tyrants, the racists, the climate.
It’s a glutton for humanity.
It’s 2019. Scientists and tech-
Virginia Heffernan
(@page88) is a con- nologists don’t want to call the
tributor to WIRED . infinite being God. It’s more

modern to know it as Mars.
Admittedly, Mars has draw-
backs; it’s about half the size
of Earth, for starters. But it’s
clutter-free and remarkably
underpopulated: home to zero
people. We’d each weigh 38 per-
cent of what we do now. Our
hearts would be light. We’d start
fresh in the new air. (Once it’s
enriched, that is: At 95 percent
carbon dioxide, it’s currently
lethal.) We could be good again,
more socially chill, not wolf
down all the resources this time.
WHAT WOULD IT FEEL LIKE TO LIVE WITHOUT
EARTH’S TOPOGRAPHICAL FEATURES?
WOULD WE EVEN REMEMBER HOW
MUCH OUR ESSENCE AS HUMANS IS AN
EPIPHENOMENON OF OUR HABITAT?
Though the two leading über-
menschen who would colonize
the moon or Mars—Jeff Bezos
and Elon Musk—try manfully to
hew to an empiricist idiom, their
language keeps edging close to
James’. Their promises are just
as exciting as his, just as consol-
ing, and just as terrifying. And
the promises say much more
about the current social orga-
nization of humankind on this
planet, about our sympathetic
vibrations with other lives, than
they do about outer space. What
I’ve concluded, not that anyone is
asking, is that I don’t want to go.
Bezos, who intends to start
sending nonastronauts into sub-
orbital space by the end of next
year, sees his aerospace com-
pany, Blue Origin, as charting
a course for a massive galactic
EMMANUEL POLANCO
ALPHA
migration. He predicts farms,
universities, and rivers on moon
colonies, where millions would
reside, all while zipping back
and forth to Earth.
In what seems like a rhetorical
project as much as a commercial
one, Bezos sounds like a mystic.
His prized rocket, New Shepard,
though named for the astronaut
Alan Shepard, itself could be a
born-again sect. He described its
engineering to wired as “How
God meant rockets to be!” Cen-
turies into the future, uncon-
strained by human civilization,
we will return to our “natural
state,” he says, but with the lim-
itless energy of the solar system.
Then there’s his image of the
universe’s largesse. “I’d love for
there to be a trillion humans in
the solar system.” Those allowed
in his kingdom in the firma-
ment include the expert and the
amateur, the despised and the
adored, the sick and the well, the
poor and of course the rich. (The
first tourists on New Shepard will
each pay an estimated minimum
of $200,000 for about 11 minutes
in space.) This is not space explo-
ration Bezos envisions, but space
migration. We all go.
To Bezos, Earth and space are
different in precisely the way
Earth and heaven are to
James. Bezos often says,
0 0 9
quoting Isaac Asimov, that
we earthlings are “planetary
chauvinists”—the same types
who, in James’ scheme, would
guard their precious Boston
from immigrants. To James, a
humanist in 1906, mortal beings
are short on love and hospital-
ity. To Bezos, who is trained as
an engineer, Earth is limited in
resources—the ones that, like
love and hospitality, welcome
and sustain warm-blooded
human life.
There’s something decidedly
less tender and expansive about
Elon Musk’s space plans. In “Mak-
ing Humans a Multi-Planetary
Species,” a 2017 article in New
Space, he described terror: An
extinction event would sooner
or later wipe out humankind.
The only remedy is to become a
“multi-planetary species.”
With this expression, Musk
trips the same wire James did
when he spoke of heaven. He
said there is this utopia. It’s
everything we dream of. You can
have this paradise. But you must
trade your humanity to get it.
In James’ vision of heaven,
an individual dissolves into an
undifferentiated collective. In
Musk’s version of space, you go
from a terrestrial being—with
all that implies about body
temperature, gestation, body
weight, hydration, exposure to
sunlight, tides, social and urban
organization, reliance on earthly
vegetation and microbes, the
metabolism of oxygen—to an
interplanetary one, for whom
all the earlier bets are off.
That sounds catastrophic. For
some 2,600 years, history, lit-
erature, and philosophy have
undertaken to represent human-
ness, humanity, and the humane.
But all along the unspoken
sine qua non of humankind has
been that we are born, live, and
die on Earth. All the Homos—
JAN 2019
from erectus to deus—are Homo
terreus. If we are interplane-
tary, are we even we? Would
we, as in James’ afterlife, lose
THE FORGET-
our individual identities? And
then more practically: What
ME-NOT FONT
would it feel like to live without
Earth’s sweet old topographical
features? Without civilization
inscribed into our stones and
soil? What would happen to our
bodies and brains, and would we
even remember how much our
essence as humans is an epiphe-
nomenon of our beautiful, warm,
blue and dying habitat?
To keep Mars at a livable tem-
perature and unlock water from
its pervasive ice, Musk has pro-
posed—with few details—using
nukes. Say what? I assumed the
idea of going to space was start-
ing fresh, keeping our footprint
modest, not potentially devas-
tating our new planet on week
one. But even if we don’t turn to
extreme thermonuclear mea-
sures, the impulse to make a
place habitable by nuking it is
an unnerving one.
Amid the talk of Earth’s short-
comings and the promise of
space, I found myself committed
to going down with the ship.
Ashes to ashes, feet of clay—I’m
happy to weigh my weight in
pounds if it means I can be
rooted on Earth like my ances-
tors and all of our ancestors and
even the word ancestor, and
indeed every language and piece
of writing and every single
thought. At the same time, the
Milky Way of the mind, as Bezos
and Musk present it, is an excit-
ing and sustaining fantasy—a
place of boundless love, indis-
criminate hospitality, and
infinite resources. Very like the
God that humans on Earth once
i nv e n te d , o r t h e o n e w h o
invented us.
MARTINA PAUKOVA
 ALPHA

Lean Back
Your brain isn’t used
to seeing sentences
tilt to the left—it’s
a typographic faux
pas. It takes you a
split second longer
to recognize words
in Sans Forgetica’s
8-degree back-slant,
triggering deeper
cognitive processing.

Use Responsibly
Reading an entire
textbook in Sans
Mind the Gap Seek Balance Forgetica would be Make an Impression
When presented with While breaking migraine-inducing. Though Sans For-
incomplete visual some design rules Instead, the font is getica was origi-
information, like the creates desirable meant to be used nally devised to give
random gaps in Sans difficulty without like a highlighter to students an edge
Forgetica’s charac- sacrificing legibil- emphasize important on exams, it’s since
ters, our brain fills ity, further futzing bits of information. been sought out by
in the missing bits. with the font—like A Chrome Extension brands—like an ad
“They pique your one early prototype lets you transform campaign for a Hun-
attention and slow that incorporated any section of online garian pharmaceu-
down the reading back-slant, gaps, and text into the typeface. tical company—to
process,” says Ste- asymmetrical let- more effectively
phen Banham, one of ters—caused recall worm information
the font’s developers. rates to plummet. into your brain.

WHAT’S THE DEAL naire, users are connected with VC funding. Roman’s parent
a licensed physician who con- company secured $88 million in

DOCS ON sults via phone, messager, or

video and can prescribe medi-
September, and Hims has raised
nearly $100 million to date. ¶ Now

DEMAND cation remotely. The meds are

delivered to your door, often
the model is expanding beyond its
anxious-male target audience. In

VIRTUAL
at a steep discount. Keeps pro- November, Hims introduced Hers,
vides generic Rogaine for $10 a a spinoff delivering birth control,

HEALTH CARE
month, compared with up to $29 skin care products, and hair loss
at drugstores, while Roman offers treatments. And with their latest
generic Viagra for $34 a dose, less $15.25 million funding round, the

FOR LESS than half the price at some phar-

macies. (Since the startups don’t
accept insurance, those costs are
out-of-pocket.) These sites have
already attracted thousands of
visitors, along with millions in
creators of Keeps are launching
Cove, a sister brand for migraine
sufferers, eliminating your throb-
bing head and the headache of an
in-person doctor’s appointment
in one swoop. —Andrea Powell

0 1 1
 ALPHA

Data and
content is mined
to target ads.

WIRED GUIDE

LIFE ON
THE DWEB All communication A company or the
THE WEB IS a playground in a panop- is stored in central government can easily shut
ticon. Though la vie online can be servers. the service down.

exhilarating, many of our e-scapades

take place on corporate estates that
log our actions and juice them for
ad dollars. Some rebels, pining for
THE CENTRALIZED WEB
greater freedoms, are trying to build
platforms outside the reach of Big The Two Faces of the Internet
Tech’s tentacles. On the so-called THE DECENTRALIZED WEB

decentralized web—truer to early

dreams for online life—you can still
shop or flirt, but your data remains
encrypted and under your con-
Users decide Transfers are
trol. Boosters as varied as crypto- who has control encrypted.
anarchists, venture capitalists, and over their data. So is storage.
the father of the web, Tim Berners-
Lee, say the DWeb, as they call it, will
create a digital commons less pre-
disposed to privacy-invading mon-
etization schemes. It’s still young
and glitchy, but the tech has matured
enough that anyone with a browser
can give it a try. Come play with us,
No central server.
fellow dweebz. —Tom Simonite

Staff writer Tom

Simonite (@tsimonite)
covers intelligent
machines for WIRED .

Ask a Decentralized Investor

Silicon Valley’s hordes of
venture capitalists made
billions of dollars fortifying the
walled gardens of the internet.
Andreessen Horowitz put money
into Facebook and Twitter—but
partner Chris Dixon, who helps
run the firm’s crypto fund, says
the next wave of tech will be
decentralized.
What’s wrong with the
web you helped create?
We backed into the situation
where four or five companies
control the code that powers
everything. All the companies
we see need Apple or Google’s
permission—or Facebook to
rank them a certain way.
What business opportunities
are there on the DWeb?
You can create digital money or
virtual goods, like CryptoKitties,
and new types of organizations,
like autonomous companies that
run as code in the cloud. It’s sort
of like mobile phones in 2005—
the iPhone hasn’t come out yet.
If those work out, how will
the world change?
I hope it’s going to be a golden
period in the way the ’90s were
for entrepreneurs and small
businesses. Maybe people on
the internet will be happier too.
Everyone seems really grumpy
right now.

JAN 2019 HOTLITTLEPOTATO

76
Obstacle Course
Just because the DWeb
sorta works doesn’t mean
it will win. These are the
four biggest challenges to
widespread adoption.
1. Network effects
If your encrypted “Hello world”
message blasts out and there’s
no one around to read it, do you
even exist? The web we have
today may be flawed, but it’s a
big metropolis and all the people,
businesses, and information you
need and crave are there. By
comparison, the DWeb is a one-
horse town. Persuading people to
Estimated percentage give up the tools they’ve built their
of top 1 million lives around will be difficult—not
normie-internet least because internet companies
websites that contain designed their products to feel
a Google tracker. indispensable.
2. Meanies—and worse
There are (surprise) bad people
on the internet, spewing hatred
and promoting violence (some-
times on behalf of foreign
agents). Companies like Face-
book have broad powers to
filter out some of that content,
but decentralized platforms can
be designed to be accountable
to no one. Sites like D.Tube rely
for the most part on community
moderation, but as the 4chans
and Reddits show, self-policing
doesn’t guarantee productive
discourse.
3. Lost keys
Being the only person with the
encryption key needed to access
your data protects your privacy.
It means your service provider or
government can’t easily snoop
on what you’re doing. Awesome!
It also means that if you lose that
key, no one can help you. F**k!
Unless you kept a backup—a
security risk in itself—that data
is out of reach forever.
4. Webonomics
DWeb advocates say they can
create an online realm less
dependent on ad tracking and
targeting than the one we live
in today. Instead, they claim,
people will pay for services they
use. Cryptocurrencies do make
it easier to digitally toss this
creator or that platform a few
cents, but it’s unclear whether
users will pay at all for online
services that they get on the
standard internet for free.

Giant-Killer Apps

Graphite Docs Blockstack

Similar to Google Docs, except you don’t
entrust your data to a giant ad-hosting
company. Files are encrypted with a digital
key that only you have. (This article was
written in Graphite.)
A new web needs new tools for developers.
Blockstack’s network helps with key building
blocks like storage and authentication. DWeb
apps using it include Graphite, social network
Afari, and encrypted chat app Stealthy.

Textile
This photo app functions like a private
Instagram account—your shareable photos
are encrypted and sent to a decentralized
storage network run mostly by volunteers.
Available for Android and iOS.
D.Tube
The stars of videos on this decentralized
YouTube mimic don’t chase ads—
cryptocurrency is distributed based on
upvotes. So far, the site’s community seems
to lean right and attract technolibertarians.

Augur
Join this prediction market built on the
computing system Ethereum to stake digital
currency on everything from US elections
and NBA championships to ghoulish bets like
whether the president will be assassinated.
OpenBazaar
Buyers and sellers can find one another here
without needing a company (like eBay) in
the middle. Wares include drones, Star Wars
merch, and oxycodone tablets. Payment in
cryptocoins only, please.

We Adopted a CryptoKitty
Meet WIRED’s new mascot. She’s a CryptoKitty, a digital collectible you can trade with other cryptocat
people—and even breed. One specimen changed hands for more than $170,000 in September; ours, less
prized, cost $1.05. CryptoKitties have become one of the most popular applications for Ethereum, a go-to
cryptocurrency network for builders of decentralized apps. Developers like Ethereum not just for its widely
held currency, ether, but as a way to support their services with things like blockchain-backed smart contracts.
Googly-eyed cartoon felines may seem frivolous, but they illustrate how decentralized services can give
consumers power. You may love your Pokémon, but—hold them close—they’re not really yours: The world
they inhabit could be shut down in a corporate eye-blink. WIRED’s CryptoKitty, however, lives immortally
on the Ethereum blockchain. Even if the venture-backed startup that created her shutters, she will still be
ours (as long as we don’t lose our encryption key). We call her Catoshi Nakameowto.

0 1 3
 ALPHA

Does it really have to be

this way?

LOSE THE BLINDERS

There’s simply no plausi-
ble alternative, the platforms
say. People will never pay to

YES, TECH PLATFORMS

use platforms, we are told.
Plus, dissidents and activists
in the developing world rely on
these free services to get their

CAN CHANGE
word out. How can we aban-
don them? And anyway, the
platforms say, we can’t pro-
vide the fundamental features
BY ZEYNEP TUFEKCI that our users value without all
this data collection. It’s simply
too late to change.
I say to all this: phooey, phooey,
and phooey.
First, people all over the world
pay for communication services.
We regularly pony up for Netflix,
HBO Go, and Amazon Prime on
top of sizable monthly payments
for cell phone plans. A Facebook,
I YouTube, or Twitter without a
bloated ad infrastructure could
likely charge far less than these
other services, which after all
have to buy or produce their
content. Before WhatsApp was
acquired by Facebook, it charged
IN 2006, Jeffrey Hammerbacher, then a recent Harvard graduate in users $1 per year, and it was
math, became an early employee at a budding company founded by growing like a vine.
another Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. After building Face- As for dissidents: Yes, online
book’s data team, Hammerbacher left the company in 2008. He later platforms offer important alter-
explained his decision to leave, despite the company’s tremendous natives to censored mass media
growth, in what has become one of the most iconic quotes of the second across the globe. But authori-
internet boom: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about tarians have figured out how to
how to make people click ads,” he told Businessweek. “That sucks.” defang most of these benefits for
Twelve years and hundreds of billions of dollars of market capital- activists, while adroitly using
ization later, that’s still true, and it still sucks. The few companies that social media for their own ruth-
control our digital public sphere—Facebook, Google, and Twitter— less purposes. Like other politi-
are all driven by the same fundamental business model, and it has cians and world leaders, Filipino
only grown more pernicious over time. To microtarget individuals strongman Rodrigo Duterte has
with ads, today’s platforms massively surveil their users; then they received guidance from Face-
use engagement-juicing algorithms to keep people onsite as long as Zeynep Tufekci book’s staffers on how to get
possible. By now it’s clear that this system lends itself to authori- (@zeynep) is a WIRED the most out of the platform.
tarian, manipulative, and discriminatory uses: hiding job openings contributor and an He has also made an art of using
associate professor
from minorities and older people; discouraging certain groups from at the University of Facebook to viciously hound and
turning out to vote; and allowing anyone with even a small budget to North Carolina. harass his opponents.
find audiences that are, say, anti-Semitic. It also creates an environ- It’s true that requiring users to
ment conducive to viral misinformation and hate speech. pay even a nominal amount for

JAN 2019 STORYTK


web services can offer govern-
ments a means to track activists.
But that’s not an insurmountable
problem. In many countries, cell
phone minutes are already used
as payments that can be trans-
ferred between people; a similar
system could easily be developed
for people who’d rather not pay
for Twitter with their credit
cards. Other potential solutions
could lie in cryptographic pay-
ment schemes that offer almost
cashlike privacy, along with the
ability to audit transactions.
But ad revenues keep the plat-
forms too well-fed and happy
to pursue much innovation in
payment methods.
What about the argument that
data collection is what allows
platforms to give users more of
what they want? Again, try inno-
vating. There have been exciting
developments in, for example,
encrypted databases—systems
that might allow platforms to
perform operations on data with-
out ever decrypting it. That way,
tech companies could garner
aggregate insights without con-
SURE, RAKING IN ALL THIS ducting individual surveillance.
USER DATA IS CONVENIENT. Surely researchers would
be excited to explore areas like
BUT LEAD IS ALSO A GREAT these, given more incentive to
INGREDIENT IN PAINT. do so. But right now these proj-
ects remain relatively marginal.
Why should the platforms bother
when they can siphon up data,
throw it against machine learn-
ing algorithms, and laugh all the
way to the bank?
In case I sound like I’m making
impossible demands from the
sidelines, consider that Apple
makes money directly from its
users. The company has devel-
oped specific ways to lock itself
out of user data while making
very functional phones, and it
has made these privacy protec-
tions a selling point. Apple may
not be a perfect company, but it
shows that other models work.
Sure, raking in all this per-
sonal user data is convenient.
Lead is also a great ingredient in
paint: It’s anticorrosive, it helps
coats dry faster, and it increases
moisture resistance. But we out-
lawed lead in paint anyway, for
reasons that now seem chillingly
obvious. We can do the same
for data surveillance.
Because of course it’s not too
late. Seat belts became man-
datory in the US in 1968, many
decades after cars became an
integral part of life. Airbags and
emission controls didn’t develop
overnight either—or without
prodding. Regulation forced the
car industry to innovate. It devel-
oped safer and cleaner cars, and
remained quite profitable.
To force platforms out of
their rut, some regulation will
be necessary. We should dis-
cuss outlawing invasive digital
tracking (online or offline), merg-
ing data from multiple sources,
and maybe even microtargeting
based on surveillance.
We could also use some real
employee pressure. After a walk-
out in November, Google and
Facebook put an end to forced
arbitration for sexual harassment
claims. The powerful employ-
ees of Silicon Valley could also
become advocates for user pri-
vacy. They could demand to start
using their formidable brain-
power for something other than
getting people to click on ads.
Because it really does suck. 
0 1 5
 EXPERIMENT

TAKING BACK MY DATA

I SOLD MY DIGITAL
SOUL FOR CRYPTO
ON A RECENT Tuesday night, during a session of rash bedtime scroll-

SUPERHEROES
ing, I sold my Facebook data to a stranger in Buenos Aires. Reck-
less, maybe, but such was my newfound life as a digital vigilante.
My tipping point was the Facebook hack, exposed in September,
in which I—along with some 90 million other potential victims—
Superheroes are over, done with, was temporarily locked out of my account. I imagined my identity
dead. There, I said it. If I see one
more lustrous cape, magic doodad, rippling across the internet, thanks to the single sign-in conve-
or chiseled hunk of a Chris, I’m gonna nience of Facebook Connect. After a long season of leaks, hacks,
beg Thanos to keep snapping. Look, and shady data pillaging, I’d had enough. I considered simply delet-
I love Black Panther, and Captain
Marvel totally deserves her own ing my account. But then I landed on a different strategy: making a
movie. But, man, the story is played profit. ¶ If my data is already being hawked to
out. Some misunderstood dweeb marketing firms, third-party apps, and politi- Associate editor
realizes he’s special; an extraterres-
trial plunks down on Earth to solve cal propagandists without my knowledge, I rea- Gregory Barber
our problems. Enough! Of all peo- soned, why not benefit from the racket? Thus (@GregoryJBarber)
ple, M. Night Shyamalan realized the wrote about high-
began an experiment in turning my personal tech crime fighting
need to break form years ago when
he made Unbreakable. Bruce Wil- data into crypto dough. tools in issue 26.06.
lis played an average dad with an
above-average ability to withstand
a beating. He wasn’t a Batmanesque
vigilante or otherworldly avenger. He
wasn’t an antihero. He wasn’t even
that great of a person. He was real.
Back in 2000, the movie bombed.
Would it in 2019? Audiences seem
more suspicious of traditional sav-
iors these days. (One reason: people
in real life using their great power
with great irresponsibility.) Shya-
malan followed Unbreakable with
2016’s Split, featuring a bald James
McAvoy with 20-odd personalities
that semi-cohere into a frighten-
ing super-crazy. Now the director is
attempting his most ambitious feat
yet, merging those two movies with
a third, Glass, that adds Samuel L.
Jackson’s titular villain to the mix.
The premise is that all three of these
dude-lusions of grandeur are institu-
tionalized in a mental hospital, much
as anyone claiming to be a super-
hero (or supervillain) in the modern
era would be. Do they really have
powers? Maybe. In Shyamalan’s
universe, abilities are self-mani-
fested. Perhaps that’s his message:
No one will rescue this godforsaken
planet except our deranged, unhe-
roic selves. — ANGEL A WATERCUTTER

JAN 2019 HAGAR VARDIMON

 ALPHA
Appealing to people indignant over their
data being abused, a new wave of companies
is peddling an alluring message: Users should
own their data and get a cut of its value. They
advocate a return to the internet’s intended
state of decentralization, before Facebook and
Equifax became digital oligarchs. Tim Berners-
Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, is building
a platform called Solid, which will allow users to
control which services access their data; Ocean
Protocol, a decentralized exchange where peo-
ple sell their data directly to AI businesses, has
attracted tens of millions in VC funding while
still in development. In the meantime, a handful
of scrappy data-marketplace apps are attempt-
ing to get in early.
Sign up for one of these apps and buyers
contact you directly, offering crypto tokens in
exchange for information like your bank trans-
actions, medical history, or the fluctuations of
your smart thermostat. You decide whether
the deal is worth it. These companies’ shared
conceit is the blockchain—the ideal venue, they
argue, for selling your data in a secure and pri-
vate fashion while keeping a meticulous record
of each deal you strike.
My suitors promised empowerment and crypto
spoils. I’d be joining an insurrection, wresting
control of my data from massive companies.
#TakeBackYourData. #GetPaid. But I was uneasy.
I imagined my foray into the just-outta-beta
blockchain world ending with me desperately
scrubbing my digital footprint from the dark web.
For guidance, I turned to Telegram, the secure
messaging app where early adopters convene
to discuss the latest crypto schemes. Most of
the chatter revolved around bug complaints or
feeble token values. It didn’t inspire much con-
fidence. Still, passive income beckoned.
I ventured in. First I signed up for an app called
Datum. With a tap, my GPS location was shared;
in exchange I was promised 1 DAT, a token that
can be traded on the Ethereum blockchain. Next
I scrolled to Doc.ai, where users share everything
from their prescriptions to results of microbiome
tests in return for a coin called NRN. I signed up for
an allergy study and agreed to alert the app when-
ever I felt a sniffle. Registration involved sharing
a selfie, my location, and my Apple Health data.
My next stop was an app called Wibson, where
I linked my biographical info from Facebook and
my running routes on Strava, which are down-
loaded and encrypted on my phone. Instantly, a
buyer beckoned. Big Data Analytics SA, based
in Argentina, requested my Facebook data in
exchange for 46 WIB, the app’s unique token.
I accepted.
Wibson was founded in 2017 by Mat Travizano,
the founder and CEO of a company that uses AI
to analyze consumer trends. He was already
buying user data from brokers, he reasoned, so
why not purchase it directly from users? Logi-
cal enough, but the business model depends on
scale. Our data is valuable to Facebook because
its vastness allows for detailed ad targeting. Tra-
vizano estimates he’ll need millions of users to
make his marketplace worthwhile, for buyers
and sellers alike. Currently, Wibson only has
around 5,500 sellers and 10 data buyers. For
now, the company is subsidizing its platform.
Travizano’s goal is a marketplace where users
proffer data from their bank accounts, GPS, and
social media to create a prophetic picture of
how and where they shop—every advertiser’s
dream. To ensure buyers aren’t being scammed,
he’ll enlist banks and telecoms to verify that the
data you’re selling is legit. If what he’s describ-
ing sounds a lot like what Facebook and Goo-
gle already do—tracking our purchases across
the web to flesh out detailed psychographic
profiles—that’s because it is. But with Wibson,
you’re theoretically in control: Your data is pri-
vate until you choose to sell it, and you get paid.
“It’s the post-privacy angle,” Travizano says. If
you already don’t care what Facebook does with
your data, why not make it work for you?
All of this presumes users can trust that these
unfamiliar companies are truly secure and private.
After two weeks of scrutinizing contracts and
terms of service, I was already fatigued from the
uncertain process of shilling my digital self byte
by byte. It’s hard work being your own data broker.
I’d begun this project with plans to be at the
vanguard of the new data economy, to break
my data free of its corporate silos and sell it far
and wide. Instead, my efforts had simply height-
ened my sense of just how much I was sharing,
and made me inclined to expose a little less: to
leave my phone at home when I went on a run,
or to conceal my phone number and real email
address from Facebook.
I was ready to call it quits—unless, that is, my
proceeds reeled me back in. I tallied up my fiat
(that’s money, to the rest of us): 162 WIB, 1 DAT,
0 NRN. My earnings, while eclectic, were worth
approximately 0.3 cents. —Gregory Barber
0 1 7
 ALPHA

SNOW ROVER
PRINTED FROM PLASTIC,
POWERED BY SUN
ANTARCTICA IS THE DRIEST, highest, windiest, and, of course, coldest continent. Since it’s
nearly uninhabitable for humans, it’s also the cleanest. That makes it the perfect place to
launch an odyssey aimed at persuading people to curb their plastic-pitching habits. ¶ In
late November, Dutch couple Liesbeth and Edwin ter Velde were preparing to set out on
a 3,000-mile roadless trip across the world’s most treacherous landscape, from Union
Glacier base camp to the South Pole and back. Their ride is a 52-foot-long, solar-powered
snow rover partially 3D-printed from waste plastic. Neither traveler was an experienced
engineer, but two years ago, starting with plastic from their trash bin and a commercial
3D printer, Edwin designed a lightweight, honeycomb-shaped block he dubbed the Hex-
Core. He partnered with custom material makers DuFor and Innofil3D to jigsaw 4,000
of them into the hull of this Solar Voyager, which is 15 percent upcycled plastic. ¶ The
electric vehicle is powered by 10 solar panels, which eke out enough energy to propel
it forward at up to 5 mph. The plan is for the
Ter Veldes to take turns driving their plastic
WHAT: The Solar Voyager
contraption 24 hours a day, sleeping in shifts.
With no heating elements inside the rover— LENGTH: 52 feet
all the solar energy goes to forward locomo-
WEIGHT: 3,274 pounds
tion—temperatures may plummet well below
zero. That’s part of the experience. “There is TOP SPEED: 5 mph
joy in the discomfort,” Edwin says. If all goes
3D PRINTERS 40
well, the plastic pirates will complete their USED TO
journey in early January. —Megan Molteni MAKE IT:

JAN 2019
Infrared Windows
Self-heating poly-
carbonate keeps
the windows from
freezing over.

Solar
Vacuum Tubes
Six steel tubes
sheathed in vacuum-
sealed glass are
used to melt snow
and boil water. In full
sunlight, the pipes
can reach more
than 600 degrees
Fahrenheit.

Solar Panels
These produce a
maximum of 3,500
watts of energy.

Balloon Tires
The 4-foot-tall rubber
tires are bolstered by
polyethylene netting.

Bulletproof
Bottom
The vehicle’s
underside is fortified
with a superstrong
fiber called Twaron,
which is frequently
used in armored
vehicles and anti-
ballistic vests.

0 1 9
 Sliding data centers into giant tubes and anchoring them to seabeds
may help Big Tech avoid runaway meltdowns—and high cooling costs.
OCEANS OF DATA
MOST ELECTRONICS SUFFER a debili-
tating aquaphobia. At the littlest
TECHNOLOGY’S
spillage—heaven forbid Doro-
thy’s bucket—of water, our
wicked widgets shriek and melt.
NATURAL BID
Microsoft, it would seem,
missed the memo. Last June,
the company installed a small-
FOR SURVIVAL
ish data center on a patch of
seabed just off the coast of Scot-
land’s Orkney Islands; around it,
approximately 933,333 bucket-
fuls of brine circulate every hour.
As David Wolpert, who studies
the thermodynamics of comput-
ing systems, wrote in a recent
blog post for Scientific American,
Senior associate “Many people have impugned the
editor Jason Kehe rationality.”
(@jkehe) wrote
about drone swarms The idea to submerge 864
in issue 26.08. servers in saltwater was, in fact,
JAN 2019 FRANCK BETERMIN
quite rational, the result of a
five-year research project led by
future-proofing engineers. Errant
liquid might fritz your phone, but
the slyer, far deadlier killer of
technology is the opposing ele-
mental force, fire. Nearly every
system failure in the history
of computers has been caused
by overheating. As diodes and
transistors work harder and get
hotter, their susceptibility to
degradation intensifies expo-
nentially. Localized, it’s the
warm iPhone on your cheek or
a wheezing laptop giving you
upper-leg sweats. At scale, it’s
Outlook rendered inoperable
by remote server meltdown for
16 excruciating hours—which
happened in 2013.

Servers underlie the networked
world, constantly refreshing the
cloud with droplets of data, and
they’re as valuable as they are
vulnerable. Housed by the hun-
dreds, and often the thousands, in
millions of data centers across the
United States, they cost billions
every year to build and protect.
The most significant number,
however, might be a single-digit
one: Running these machines, and
therefore cooling them, blows
through an estimated 5 percent
of total energy use in the coun-
try. Without that power, the
cloud burns up and you can’t
even fact-check these stats on
Google (an operation that costs
some server, somewhere, a kilo-
joule of energy).
ALYSSA FOOTE
Savings of even a few degrees
Celsius can significantly extend
the lifespan of electronic com-
ponents; Microsoft reports
that, on the ocean floor 117 feet
down, its racks stay 10 degrees
cooler than their land-based
counterparts. Half a year after
deployment, “the equipment is
happy,” says Ben Cutler, the proj-
ect’s manager. (The only excep-
tions are some of the facility’s
outward-facing cameras, lately
blinded by algal muck.)
Another Microsoft employee
refers to the effort as “kind of a
far-out idea.” But the truth is,
most hyperscalers investing
in superpowered cloud server
farms, from Amazon to Alibaba,
see in nature a reliable defense
against ever more sophisticated,
heat-spewing circuits. Google’s
first data center, built in 2006,
sits on the temperate banks of
Oregon’s Columbia River. In 2013,
Facebook opened a warehouse in
northern Sweden, where win-
ters average –20 degrees Cel-
sius. The data company Green
Mountain buried its massive
DC1-Stravanger center inside a
Norwegian mountain; pristine,
near-freezing water from a fjord,
guided by gravity, flows through
the cooling system. What Tim
Cook has been calling the “data-
industrial complex” will rely, if
it’s to sustainably expand to the
farthest reaches, on a nonindus-
trial means of survival.
Underwater centers may rep-
resent the next phase, a reverse
evolution from land to sea. It’s
never been hard, after all, to
waterproof large equipment—
Microsoft’s
facility lives
117 feet under-
water off the
Scottish coast.
ALPHA
00 ft
10 ft think of submarines, which get
more watertight as they dive
deeper and pressure increases.
That’s really all Microsoft is
doing, swapping out the payloads
20 ft
of people for packets of data and
hooking up the trucklong pod to
umbilical wiring.
Nonetheless, Cutler says, the
30 ft concept “catches people’s imag-
ination.” He receives enthusi-
astic emails about his sunken
center all the time, including one
from a man who builds residen-
50 ft
40 ft
tial swimming pools. “He was
like, you guys could provide the
heating for the pools I install!”
Cutler says. When pressed on
50 ft the feasibility of the business
model, Cutler adds: “We have
not studied this.”
Others have. IBM maintains
a data center outside of Zurich
60 ft
that really does heat a public
swimming pool in town, and
the Dutch startup Nerdalize will
erect a mini green data center
70 ft in your home with promises of
a warm shower and toasty liv-
ing room. Hyperlocal servers,
part of a move toward so-called
edge computing, not only pro-
80 ft
vide recyclable energy but
also bring the network closer
to you, making your connec-
tion speeds faster. Microsoft
90 ft envisions sea-based facilities
like the one in Scotland serving
population-dense coastal cities
all over the world.
“I’m not a philosopher, I’m an
100 ft
engineer,” Cutler says, declining
to offer any quasipoetic contem-
plations on the imminent fusion
of nature and machine. Still,
110 ft he does note the weather on the
morning his team hauled the
servers out to sea. It was foggy,
after a week of clear skies and
bright sun—as though the literal
cloud, reifying the digital, were
peering into the shimmering,
unknown depths. —JASON KEHE
0 2 3
 ALPHA Traffic to news
1 When Facebook Fails, sites during the
News Thrives YouTube outage

9%
On August 3, 2018, Facebook went offline PEOPLE
20%
for about 45 minutes. Seconds after the TRAFFIC SEARCH-
SPIKE DUE ING THE
platform malfunctioned, users clicked NEWS FOR
TO THE
over to news outlets. In an analysis of YOUTUBE “YOUTUBE”
more than 4,000 publishers’ sites, direct OUTAGE

traffic increased 11 percent during Face-

book’s lapse, while traffic to news mobile
apps ballooned 22 percent.

INFOPORN
140

BLACKOUT
TYPICAL TRAFFIC TO
NEWS SITES
120
Web traffic to news 2 Desperately
VISITS PER MINUTE (THOUSANDS)

sites during the

Seeking

BEHAVIOR
100
Facebook outage
YouTube
DIRECT TRAFFIC
TO NEWS SITES
80 When YouTube went

WHEN SITES
SOCIAL MEDIA
REFERRALS dark for about an
hour and 30 minutes
60
on October 16, 2018,

GO DOWN
news sites saw a 20
40 percent rise in traf-
fic. But nearly half of
that jump was driven
20

IT’S NO SECRET that Silicon
Valley has monopolized our
time: The average adult spends
24 hours per week online. It’s
tempting to imagine what we
might do with that time if we
weren’t thumbing through Face-
book photos, retweeting GIFs,
or spiraling down YouTube rab-
bit holes. Turns out we can get
S O U R C E S : C H A R T B E AT ( 1 , 2 ) ; P O R N H U B ( 3 , 4 ) ; G O S Q U A R E D ( 5 ) ; R E S C U E T I M E ( 6 ) ; D O W N D E T E C T O R ( 7 )
by people search-
ing for stories about
what the heck was
wrong with YouTube.
9 AM 10 AM PDT
3 Base Instincts
During YouTube’s
brief glitch this fall, Increase in search term +66%
popularity on Pornhub
Pornhub also reaped during the YouTube outage
the rewards: Traf-
fic to the porn site ARIANA GRANDE

a glimpse into that alternative surged 21 percent.

Many of those visitors +109%
reality from a rare online event— searched the X-rated
website outages caused by tech- video platform for +201%
nical problems. What happens search terms more
commonly associ- +79% FORTNITE
when Instagram glitches or ated with YouTube. +144%
Slack stalls, and we snap out
POKÉMON ASMR*
of our Very Online existence?
+183%
Spoiler: Research shows that WWE
+96% +82%
we don’t log off. We just scurry +51%
*THE USE OF SOFT
off to different (sometimes SOUNDS TO CAUSE A
TINGLING SENSATION
darker) corners of the web. ON ONE’S SKIN MINECRAFT OVERWATCH YOUTUBE CARTOON

9.8%
By Louise Matsakis (@lmatsakis),
a W I R E D staff writer covering
4 Gamers Pivot to Smut
security. Additional reporting by
Rebecca Heilweil.
A server issue caused Fortnite, the most pop-
ular videogame in the world, to go down for
nearly 24 hours on April 11, 2018. According
to Google Analytics, an abnormal number of
those identified as “gaming fans” clicked over
to Pornhub shortly after the outage began.

S P I K E I N G A M E R T R A F F I C TO P O R N H U B
D U R I N G T H E F O RT N I T E O U TAG E

JAN 2019
5 The Google 6 Slack Makes You Slack Off
Effect
When the instant (incessant) messaging plat-
Google and its sister form Slack went offline for more than three
services, like Goo- hours on June 27, 2018, time management
gle Docs and Gmail, tracker RescueTime found that users pivoted
rarely crash. But on to other platforms for work—and procrastina-
August 16, 2013, the tion. Though time spent on Google Hangouts
site went down for and email spiked, so did social media use.
less than five min-
utes—and took the

40%
rest of the web with
it as users went
offline entirely.
Time spent GMAIL +20%

on regular
email rose ... OUTLOOK +11%
ANGRY NERD

NUDGE OFF,
D R O P I N WO R L DW I D E I N T E R N E T
TRAFFIC DURING THE GOOGLE CRASH
... but so
did social
media use. LINKEDIN +27%
TWITTER +51%

AIRBNB!
Last summer was chaotic. A
deadline, then another; Mom had
emergency surgery (she’s fine);
the dog started barking at every-
7 Down and Out one. So whenever I found a sliver
of time, I searched Airbnb to
Some platforms stumble into technical snags more frequently than others. book a vacation. I needed a big
enough place for me, Mom, and
the BF. Not too expensive. Dogs
200
allowed. One night, after trying
yet again, the pop-up popped up:
Number of outage issues in “This home is on people’s minds.
2018, according to Downdetector It’s been viewed 216 times in the
(as of November 1)
past week.” My shoulders tight-
ened, my breath shortened. Et tu,
150 Airbnb? I had learned to ignore
the pokes from other sites: Trav-
elocity (“Booked 2 times in the
NUMBER OF OUTAGE ISSUES

last hour”), Hotels.com (“95%

booked! This is a popular loca-
tion on your dates”). I was used to
100 being tracked around the net (Dic-
tionary.com: “Tahoe Vista Lodge:
$143”). But this time I cracked.
How is it a good idea to add stress
to my stress of booking a trip to
get rid of stress? In their book
50
Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Rich-
ard Thaler wrote about the use of
“choice architecture” and liber-
tarian paternalism. The thinking is
INSTAGRAM
FACEBOOK

YOUTUBE

TWITTER

you can design features into prod-

GOOGLE

TINDER
AMAZON

SLACK

ucts that help consumers make

decisions that are good for them,
like healthy food. Once again the
tech industry—the one suppos-
edly streaked with libertarianism
(regulations be damned!)—fails
8 Outages Are Not a Crime the social sciences. Airbnb told
me that the pop-ups are about
When major sites go down, people panic—and even call 911. Authorities tweet back. helping me. The company ele-
vates “insights that a guest or host
“#Facebook is not a law Enforcement issue, please don’t call us about it being down!” would never be able to know (but
—@LASDbrink (Sergeant Burton Brink, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department), August something that Airbnb is uniquely
1, 2014; “Yes, FB & Insta are down. No, we can’t arrest anyone.” —@QPSmedia (Queensland positioned to provide insights on).”
Police Service, Australia), January 26, 2015; “Folks please do not call the police because Elevated helpful insight? Instead
#facebookdown we are as upset as you are but we cannot fix facebook. #sorry #wetried
#techpolice” —@HPOUTX (Houston Police Officers’ Union), September 28, 2015; “We will of a nudge, Airbnb had put a hand
move mountains to help those in our community, however we can’t fix Facebook so please don’t square on my back—and shoved.
call 911 to ‘let us know it’s down.’” —@BothellPolice (Bothell, Washington), October 11, 2017 — MARIA STRESHINSKY

0 2 5

FAUX SURE!
IT’S TIME TO EMBRACE
FAKE MEAT
RECENTLY I ROLLED into a local restaurant to try an Impossible Burger,
an all-plant patty invented by the Silicon Valley startup Impossible
Foods. It’s renowned for having an eerily chewy, even bloody, meat-
like quality, a startling verisimilitude that has made it “perhaps the
country’s most famous burger,” as New York magazine recently wrote.
One bite into its gorgeous, smoky flavor and, damn, I was convinced.
This is good news, because the time has come to scale up fake
meat, fast. Why? Because in the fight to stave off climate change,
meat replacement is—forgive me—one of the lowest-hanging fruits.
Meat production chews up land and spews out methane by the kilo-
ton, accounting for about two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions
from agriculture. A University of Oxford study recently found that,
to keep global warming below 2 degrees this century, we need to be
eating 75 percent less beef and 90 percent less pork globally. “With-
out concentrated change, we really risk exceeding key environmental
limits,” Marco Springmann, one of the Oxford researchers, warns me.
Diets are culturally enshrined, so changing them will be hard. Fake
meat can help camouflage that epic transformation as a mere tweak.
Still, even the most uncanny substitutes for meat face an uphill slog
if they’re going to replace 75 to 90 percent of beef and pork. The first
taste of an Impossible Burger—a moment when low expectations work
a powerful magic in the product’s favor—is one thing. But how do you
keep meat-eaters asking for more after their sixth, and their 26th?
Fortunately, the science here is firing on all pistons. Impossible
Foods owes much of its appeal to a bioengineering process that
cranks out big, blood-red tanks of “heme,” a crucial molecule that
gives veggie meat “that slightly metallic bloody flavor,” as David
Lipman, chief science officer of Impossible Foods, tells me. Mean-
while, “cultured meat,” created by growing actual animal cells in
a vat, is moving toward viability. In New York, the nerds at Ocean
Hugger Foods have engineered a process to transform tomatoes
into mock tuna. And over in the Netherlands, a company called The
Vegetarian Butcher is developing a Nespresso-style device: You
pour in a bag of vegetable protein and out pops fabricated meat.
The company aims to release it in two years.
To get to true mass adoption, fake meat will need to compete
favorably with the real thing on multiple fronts. Impossible Foods’
goal is to drive the price of its product below that of Safeway’s
80/20 hamburger meat, at which point people will simply vote
with their wallets. The new industry also wants to improve on ani-
JAN 2019 ZOHAR LAZAR
ALPHA
mal flesh in various ways. Those on-demand
fabricators will outcompete traditional meat
because “you won’t need to refrigerate it
if you’re making it as you go,” cofounder
Niko Koffeman says. That’d make unmeat
an enormous boon for energy-poor develop-
ing regions. Plus, custom fabrication could
improve choice. “You could have very soft
and tender meat for elderly people,” Koffe-
man adds. “You could have a custom meat
for whatever you need.”
We could speed this dietary shift with
smart public policy too. Beginning in 2006,
New York City cut the number of adults con-
suming one or more sugary drinks per day
by 35 percent by running zingy public ser-
vice campaigns and requiring the labeling
of their hefty calorie counts in fast-food
restaurants. Imagine similar measures pro-
moting fake meat: “Save the planet, bite by
bite.” Save your health too. (To say nothing
of your conscience: Industrial-scale animal
farming is an ethically ghastly enterprise.)
You can tell the world is shifting this way,
because the ranchers are nervous. Last year,
the US Cattlemen’s Association asked the
government to define “meat” as a product
“derived directly from animals.” That anx-
iety—and the sheer momentum of the sci-
ence driving it—goes to show that this grand
shift isn’t impossible.
Write to clive@clivethompson.net.
CHARTGEIST
Social Media
People who read “We’re all nano- People with
New York Times influencers!” ~1,000 Twitter
trend pieces followers
 JARGON WATCH

SURVIVAL OF
THE LAZIEST
n. A theory that species
with lower metabolisms are
less likely to go extinct.

Exercise Cryptocurrency

New fitness Lack of New Year’s Power Express Fossil fuel

tracker follow-through, resolutions needs of bit- ticket to hell energy
now documented coin mining on Earth production
with hard data

0 2 7
 Sony RX100 VI

Panasonic Lumix The most recent

DC-GX9 camera in Sony’s
revered RX100 line
A smidge bulkier than is its best yet, with
the other models a massive 1-inch,
here, the GX9 offers 20-megapixel sensor
added capability, like that slurps up color
a 20.3-megapixel and detail no smart-
sensor and a full array phone camera can
of manual controls. match. In an elegant
Rich black-and-white touch, sliding the
film simulation modes electronic viewfinder
and focusing fea- up and into position
tures suited for astro- also powers on the
photography make it camera, putting you
an alluring portal to in shooting mode
artistic experimenta- with an easy flick of
tion. It also plays nice your thumb.
with nearly any micro
four-thirds lens. $1,200

$1,000 (body only)

TECH REBOOT GADGET LAB

Your talent—and Instagram following—has outgrown your

phonecam. Start the new year by getting serious about your
photography with one of these small shooters. — MICHAEL CALORE

JAN 2019
Ricoh GR III

The GR III squeezes

a 24-megapixel sen-
sor and in-camera
stabilization into an
impossibly compact
magnesium case.
That pocketability
means you’ll always
have it, ready to cap-
ture that decisive
moment. There’s no
built-in flash, so you’ll
learn to use available
light, and the fixed
f/2.8 lens will teach
you to zoom with
your feet instead of
a rocker switch.

Price TBD

CERA HENSLEY 0 2 9

GADGET LAB
TECH REBOOT
YOUR NEW
SIDEKICK
The best time to start breaking your screen addiction is now.
Step one: Get a second phone?! — ARIELLE PARDES
Your phone is ruining your life. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, really.
We’ve all become so absorbed in the blinking, bleeping monsters in
our pockets that even the gadgetmakers have started dispensing
salves for excessive phone use. One of their more out-there “solu-
tions”: Start carrying two phones. There’s a certain counterintuitive
logic at work—shouldn’t we have fewer phones? Maybe. But out of
this existential panic, those who created our screen dependency
and those who are committed to helping us fight it have come up
with a tantalizing (and tantalizingly profitable) fix. It’s not about
getting off your phone, per se. It’s about getting on a different one.
This is the phone that will help you live your best life—a life in
which Instagram, Slack, Facebook, and email are relegated to the
back of your mind. Barely larger than a credit card, this phone
relaxes your two-handed grip and liberates more of your pocket
real estate. That other phone lures you into a Chinese finger trap.
This gadget sets you free.
Perhaps you’re now thinking of the first phone you ever owned,
Tamagotchi-like with its plastic body and tactile keypad. But
these are not the phones of the 20th century. The Light Phone,
for example, looks like a glowing calculator. It behaves like a por-
table landline—it makes and receives calls, through your main
phone—and does little else. No internet, no
GPS, no music, no texts. (A second version, Arielle Pardes
due to ship sometime in 2019, adds an alarm (@pardesoteric)
wrote about
clock and basic messaging.) With it, you can
racial identity
stash your addicta-phone in a drawer and not among robots in
go completely off the grid. issue 26.11.
JAN 2019
But maybe you want your Lilliputian phone
companion to have greater ambitions. The
recently revived Palm (as in: Pilot) lets you
choose your own level of escape. It looks
more like the phone you’re already using,
only downsized to a 3.3-inch screen, a
12-megapixel camera on the back, and a suite
of Android apps to give you access to every-
thing you want—simply subtract that which
you wish to leave behind, and nothing you
don’t. (Yes, you could just find the strength
to delete the addictive apps from the phone
you already have, but the admittedly wishful
thinking here is that the minuscule display
will dissuade you from spending much time
on it anyway.) The monochrome-screened,
bubble- buttoned Punkt MP02 offers a
“dumb” experience with a couple of nice
features, like 4G connectivity and security
software built by BlackBerry. For the more
ascetic, there’s the diminutive Japanese
Kyocera Card Keitai KY-01L. It has an epaper
screen and handles only calls, texts, alarms,
and web browsing.
These inventions invite you to leave
your phone behind. Unshackled from your
ultrasmart, ultra-enticing device, you can
truly focus on your spouse, on the kids, on
finally finishing that New Yorker article about
brutalist architecture. These are phones that
are servants, not masters.
What a load of baloney. Face it, you’ll never
be the master as long as your eyeball magnet
of a real phone is conveniently stashed in
your bag. A second phone, however tempt-
ing, can’t save you from the desire to cap-
ture that perfectly Instagrammable shot,
the itch to check your email. It won’t stop
the intoxicating hits of dopamine when you
finally return to your primary phone, which
is brimming with notifications.
A minimalist phone can’t save us. But
perhaps it can do something else: provide
a dose of techno-suboxone. It can ease our
addiction, interrupting our habit of com-
pulsive notification-checking and anxious
screen-glancing without the pain of going
cold turkey. Will you return to your smart-
phone after a brief time away? Probably. But
a dumb phone can show us glimpses, however
brief, of a life without all the indulgences and
interruptions of our pocket supercomputers.
A tiny phone gives us a way toward the
first and most painful step in recovery: admit-
ting we have a problem.
The Light Phone
is as simple as it
gets. $150

0 3 1
 Mirror:
$1,495 plus
subscription.

JAN 2019
 GADGET LAB
TECH REBOOT
TURN ON, LOG IN,
WORK OUT
Forget wearables. The next wave of exercise tech includes home
fitness machines that respond directly to you. — LAUREN GOODE
“KEEP COMING BACK to the mirror,” Armond said to me. “Keep crushing it.”
He froze for a split second, then ghosted without saying goodbye. I was
alone with my reflection, sweating, trying to decide whether “Keep com-
ing back to the mirror” was encouraging, ominous, or oddly metaphysical.
That’s what working out with this full-length, internet-connected
mirror—simply called Mirror—is like. For $1,495 up front and a $39-per-
month subscription fee, you can stream both live and on-demand
classes like yoga, boxing, and cardio or barre workouts, all led by
certified instructors like Armond. You simultaneously watch these
instructors floating in space on the Mirror and assess your own form.
They stand in some faraway studio, looking at your screen name and
shouting instructions into a microphone.
If wearable tech quantified fitness and Instagram glossified it, then
internet-connected fitness systems are bringing it home. Whether it’s
Mirror, a Peloton stationary bike with a tablet screen, or Tonal’s new
“smart” weight-training system, these new products bring convenience
to working out. Place one of these machines between the bed and the
coffee maker, and you really have no excuse not to exercise.
But, wait! You might be thinking, doesn’t a “dumb” treadmill or sta-
tionary bike provide the same level of at-home convenience? And if I need
another human to tell me how to position my hip in Trikonasana, can’t I
just follow along to a (free) yoga video on YouTube? It does, and you can.
But what this new wave of products promises is a feedback loop
between you and the fitness gurus who grunt and flex and crunch before
you. Peloton instructors give shout-outs during live classes to screen
names they see performing well. Mirror studies your personal data to
build customized weekly workouts. Bum knee? Mirror will adjust your
program. Tonal, a $2,995 wall-mounted display with arms and cables,
can personalize its “digital weight” system, automatically adjusting
the resistance if you’re struggling.
Connected fitness started out with apps, says Tonal founder and
CEO Aly Orady. “Then we went to trackers, and then connected cardio
equipment. We’re focused on the next layer, and that’s intelligence.”
These devices also simulate a sense of togetherness you can’t get from a
video. Hop on the Peloton bike and you’re not just slogging through a work-
out, you’re joining a full-fledged party led by Alex or Cody or Jenn. One of
them might ask a DJ to play records during their spin class. Another might
wish you a happy birthday, or even send you a bouquet of flowers if you
mention the recent passing of a loved one. (Yes, that actually happened.)
Peloton’s instructors have become micro-celebrities—Jane Fondas of
the digital fitness world. The company’s promotional
efforts include slickly produced videos, Facebook fan Lauren Goode
pages, and real-life instructor meet-and-greets. Mir- (@laurengoode)
ror positions its instructors similarly, sharing their is W I R E D ’s senior
writer covering
bios in its mobile app and making their personalities personal technol-
as much of a draw as the product itself. “We’re a con- ogy products.
tent business,” says Mirror founder and CEO
Brynn Putnam. “We’re a media company.”
During a recent Mirror workout, a yoga
instructor named Rachel (“calm and nurtur-
ing,” according to her bio) told me her son
was learning to walk. OK, she wasn’t telling
me; she was speaking to the group of us taking
the class. Did Rachel know I was there? I don’t
know, but I think we’re best friends now. If I
catch Rachel’s next live class, I’ll send her an
emoji through the Mirror mobile app.
Peloton first started selling its bikes in 2013
and deserves much of the credit for driving
(pedaling?) the trend. Now it’s centering its
efforts around the most dreadful piece of home
exercise equipment: the treadmill.
During a demo of the $3,995 Peloton
Tread, an instructor named Chase appeared
on a giant touchscreen display to guide me
through a portion of a 45-minute live run.
He gave shout-outs to JohnnyRunsNY (not
me) and Charlie1992 (also not me) for work-
ing their way to the top of the sparse leader-
board. It was fun, but also, I was running on
a treadmill. Peloton CEO John Foley says the
company is experimenting with different
social interactions to keep users engaged.
“It’s performance theater versus just watch-
ing a movie,” Foley says. “You’re integrated.
You’re a part of the experience.”
But Peloton Tread might just be the sum of
all the challenges that exist in the digital fit-
ness market. It’s expensive, and as with Mir-
ror and Tonal, that hefty price tag comes with
a monthly media subscription. If you can
afford it, however, you gain the convenience
of sweating in your own living room—and
you won’t feel like you’re suffering alone.
0 3 3
 GADGET LAB
TECH REBOOT

If you choose your devices wisely, you can overhaul

your digital life without maxing out your credit card.
— JEFFREY VAN CAMP
2

Motorola Moto X4

You don’t have to

fork over $1,000 to
Cupertino for a sleek
smartphone. The
Android-powered
Moto X4 is proof.
The 5.2-inch LCD
screen is vivid, with
impressively deep
blacks. It has an all-
day battery, takes
killer photos, can
withstand a dunk in
2
the toilet, and will
work on all four major
wireless carriers.

$350

3
1

Monoprice
True Wireless
Earphones

The world is going

wireless, but leaping
into the cable-free
future can be costly.
The sound-to-price
ratio on these Blue-
tooth buds is out-
standing. They’re
sweatproof and get
up to four hours per 1
charge. Between lis-
tening sessions, slip
them into the com-
pact charging case
that holds 15 hours of
revitalizing power.

$50
JAN 2019
3

Amazon Echo Dot

The latest Echo

Dot is a two-for-
one bargain. You
get a smart Spotify-
ready speaker with
improved acous-
tics for music and
an interactive Alexa
voice assistant that
can control the
smart gadgets in
your home—or sim-
ply recite last night’s
basketball scores.

$50

4 5

Wemo Mini TCL 5-Series

Smart Plug 4K HDR Roku TV
(43-Inch)
Now you too can
brew coffee from This 4K viewmaster
bed. These internet- packs an extra shot
connected plugs of saturated color
smarten up any and crisp contrast—
appliance. Snap one thanks to Dolby HDR
into an electrical tech—for hundreds
outlet, connect it to of dollars less than
Wi-Fi, and you can most comparable
4
switch your inexpen- ultra-hi-def sets. And
sive “dumb” devices unlike $1,000-plus
on and off from any- models with subpar
where. It even takes streaming software,
orders from the the TCL has a smart,
major voice assis- Netflix-enabled
tants, including Alexa Roku system you’ll
on the Echo Dot. actually want to use.

$30 $430
0 3 5
 FEATURES | 2 7.0 1

DAVE TOWERS 0 4 1

S
cience season in Antarctica begins
in November, when noontime tem-
peratures at McMurdo Station climb
to a balmy 18 degrees Fahrenheit and
the sun hangs in the sky all day and night. For a
researcher traveling there from the United States,
the route takes time as well as patience. The easi-
est way is to fly from Los Angeles to Christchurch,
New Zealand—a journey of 17 hours, if you’re
lucky—and then to McMurdo, a charmless clus-
ter of buildings that houses most of the southern
continent’s thousand or so seasonal residents and
both of its ATMs. McMurdo isn’t the end of the
line, though. Often it’s just a pass-through for sci-
entists hopping small planes to penguin colonies
or meteorological observatories farther afield.
Few places in Antarctica are more difficult
to reach than Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized
hunk of frozen water that meets the Amundsen
Sea about 800 miles west of McMurdo. Until a
decade ago, barely any scientists had ever set
foot there, and the glacier’s remoteness, along
with its reputation for bad weather, ensured that
it remained poorly understood. Yet within the
small community of people who study ice for a
living, Thwaites has long been the subject of dark
speculation. If this mysterious glacier were to
“go bad”—glaciologist-speak for the process by
which a glacier breaks down into icebergs and
eventually collapses into the ocean—it might
be more than a scientific curiosity. Indeed, it
might be the kind of event that changes the
course of civilization.
In December 2008, a Penn State scientist
named Sridhar Anandakrishnan and five of his
colleagues made the epic journey to Thwaites,
two days from McMurdo by plane, tractor, and
snowmobile. All glaciers flow, but satellites and
airborne radar missions had revealed that some-
thing worrisome was happening on Thwaites:
The glacier was destabilizing, dumping ever
more ice into the sea. On color-coded maps of
the region, its flow rate went from stable blue to
raise-the-alarms red. As Anandakrishnan puts
it, “Thwaites started to pop.”
The change wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm.
Big glaciers can speed up or slow down for rea-
sons that scientists still don’t completely grasp.
But Anandakrishnan knew that Thwaites’ unusual
characteristics—it is shaped like a wedge, with
the thin front end facing the ocean—left it vul-
0 4 4
nerable to losing vast quantities of ice quickly. What’s more, its
size was something to reckon with. Many glaciers resemble nar-
row rivers that thread through mountain valleys and move small
icebergs leisurely into the sea, like a chute or slide. Thwaites, if it
went bad, would behave nothing like that. “Thwaites is a terrifying
glacier,” Anandakrishnan says simply. Its front end measures about
100 miles across, and its glacial basin—the thick part of the wedge,
extending deep into the West Antarctic interior—runs anywhere
from 3,000 to more than 4,000 feet deep. A few years before Anan-
dakrishnan’s first expedition, scientists had begun asking whether
warming waters at the front edge could be playing a part in the gla-
cier’s sudden stirring. But he wanted to know what was going on
deep below Thwaites, where its ice met the earth.
During that 2008 expedition and another a year later, Ananda-
krishnan’s team performed the geologic equivalent of an ultrasound
on Thwaites. Each morning they’d wake up in their freezing tents,
call McMurdo on the satellite phone to attest that they were still
alive, eat a quick breakfast, and move out by snowmobile across the
blankness of the ice sheet. At a prearranged point, they’d place an
explosive charge at the bottom of a hole—usually between 70 and
100 feet deep—fill the hole with snow, and blow it up. The wave of
energy would travel from the charge to the bed of the glacier and
back to the surface, where it would be recorded by an array of geo-
phones, exquisitely sensitive seismic instruments. By measuring
the time it took for the waves to rebound, and by looking at alter-
ations in the waves’ characteristics, Anandakrishnan’s team could
gain clues about the depth and makeup of the glacier’s bed, thou-
sands of feet below. They repeated the process again and again.
By the end of the mission in 2009, Anandakrishnan and his col-
leagues had collected data from about 150 boreholes. The new
information didn’t precisely explain what was hastening Thwaites’
acceleration, but it was a start. Meanwhile, the satellite maps kept
getting redder and redder. In 2014, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA,
concluded that Thwaites was entering a state of “unstoppable” col-
lapse. Even worse, scientists were starting to think that its demise
could trigger a larger catastrophe in West Antarctica, the way a rot-
ting support beam might lead to the toppling not only of a wall but
of an entire house. Already, Thwaites’ losses were responsible for
about 4 percent of global sea-level rise every year. When the entire
glacier went, the seas would likely rise by a few feet; when the gla-
ciers around it did, too, the seas might rise by more than a dozen feet.
And when that happened, well, goodbye, Miami; goodbye, Boston.
No one could say exactly when Thwaites would go bad. But Anan-
dakrishnan and his colleagues now had an even keener sense of the
perils that the glacier posed. “We had been walking on the lip of a
volcano without knowing it,” he says.
IF THE MYSTERIOUS THWAITES GLACIER
W ER E TO “ GO BAD,” I T MIG HT
CHANGE THE COURSE OF CIVILIZATION.
Sridhar
Anandakrishnan
has been to
Antarctica
more than
20 times.

Photograph by
Ross Mantle
 EXPLOSIVE CHARGES

ICE SHELF

2 1

GHOST RIDGE GROUNDING LINE

1. For the time 3. Seismologists

being, Thwaites is study the area
held in place by a under the glacier
bump in the sea- by setting off small
floor. Once it pulls explosive charges
off this so-called in the ice and lis-
grounding line, it’ll tening for the
begin to collapse reverberations.
more quickly.
4. A floating ice
2. Glaciologists have shelf defends
identified a second Thwaites from the ANATOMY OF A MELTDOWN
bump about 45 assaults of ocean
miles behind the currents. As it dis- In one of the largest scientific collaborations
current one. They integrates, more in Antarctic history, a team of British and
call it the Ghost and more of the American researchers is scrutinizing Thwaites
Ridge, and there’s glacier becomes Glacier from every side—air, ice, and sea.
hope it could sig- vulnerable, and Art by Bryan Christie Design
nificantly slow more icebergs
Thwaites’ decline. end up in the sea.

O
n a warm afternoon this past Sep-
tember, at a conference at Colum-
bia University’s Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory, just up the Hud-
son River from Manhattan, Anandakrishnan
gave a lecture detailing his plans for returning
to Thwaites. All told, there were 120 scientists
in attendance, some of whom had been meet-
ing annually to discuss the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet. For 25 years, they had debated whether
the region’s potential instabilities were cause
for alarm and whether Thwaites, which acts as
the keystone holding the ice sheet together, was
a near-term risk. This year the conference had a
larger sense of purpose: The United States and
Great Britain had recently announced a more than
$50 million joint venture known as the Interna-
tional Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Over the
course of five years, scientists would probe the
glacier in every conceivable manner.
At the conference, it was hard to shake the notion that the
situation was urgent. “The question is, what’s going to happen
next?” Ted Scambos, the American project coordinator of the
Thwaites Collaboration, told me. “Is it going to be 50 years or 200
years before we see a truly large increase in the rate of ice being
unloaded into the ocean from that glacier?” As a practical con-
sideration, the world needed to know. Over the past few decades,
climatologists have become better and better at modeling how
Earth’s atmosphere is responding to rising concentrations of
greenhouse gases. But ice-sheet models, which aim to translate
various future scenarios into actual impacts, such as changes in
sea level, aren’t nearly as reliable. One reason for this is that the
physics of glaciers has proven formidably complex, with many
factors that influence their behavior still unknown. “There is
uncertainty and crudity in these models,” Dave Pollard, an ice-
sheet expert from Penn State, told me. The point of the Thwaites
Collaboration, he said, is to fill in some of the blanks.
The architects of the collaboration, the National Science Founda-
tion in the US and the Natural Environment Research Council in the
UK, selected eight research projects from among 24 proposals. Some

West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier
is the size of Florida.
will focus on the front end of Thwaites, which
extends beyond the shoreline of Antarctica and
forms a cantilevered ice shelf that floats on the
Amundsen Sea. Ice shelves are a good thing. As
glaciologists are fond of saying, they act like corks,
preventing upstream ice—the wine in the bot-
tle, so to speak—from pouring into the sea. They
also protect the glacier from warming waters.
Thwaites’ ice shelf has been crumbling, so one
group in the collaboration, calling itself Tarsan
(Thwaites-Amundsen Regional Survey and Net-
work), will investigate the local effects of ocean
circulation and warm air. Another team, known
as Melt (not an acronym), will use submersible robots and seals
tagged with satellite transmitters to examine the glacier’s so-called
grounding line, the point where its front end rests on the ocean floor.
Anandakrishnan’s seismic experiments will be among the most
crucial parts of the collaboration’s work. His group has taken the
name Ghost, which stands for Geophysical Habitat of Subglacial
Thwaites. His study will map a sliver of the bed beneath the gla-
cier, deep below sea level, in an effort to predict how Thwaites will
behave in the future. Soft, wet sediment, Anandakrishnan says,
can make a glacier slide extremely fast, and it is probable that a
lot of such sediment lies under Thwaites. He likens it to what you
might find “when you go into your backyard and play with the mud
with your kids. It’s got a little bit of strength but not a great deal.”
A few weeks before the conference, I visited Anandakrishnan
at Penn State. His office, an austere space with white cinder block
walls, cluttered with books and stacks of papers, had little in the
way of mementos to show that he’s been to Antarctica more than
20 times. As we talked, he laid out his plan for studying Thwaites. In
2008 and 2009, he told me, he examined an area of the glacier bed
roughly 25 miles long. The blueprint for the next four years, begin-
ning in the winters of 2020 and 2021, is far more
ambitious: With nearly a ton of explosives in tow,
Anandakrishnan and around a dozen colleagues
should be able to chart an area 10 times as big. If
things go right, the seismic reverberations will
illuminate the contours and material composi-
tion of what’s underneath Thwaites.
Anandakrishnan stood up and walked over to
a whiteboard to draw me a picture of the glacier
bed’s geometry. It was a line that began with a
bump in the front, where the glacier met the sea,
and sloped gently downward as it went inland.
At the moment, he said, it’s unclear how long
Thwaites has before it pulls off its bump—its
grounding line—and starts a rapid decline. “It’s
kind of hanging on by its fingernails right about
there,” he explained, gesturing at the bump.
Glaciers like Thwaites that terminate in the
ocean tend to follow a familiar pattern of col-
lapse. At first, water gnaws at the ice shelf from
below, causing it to weaken and thin. Rather
than sitting securely on the seafloor, it begins to
float, like a beached ship lifted off the sand. This
exposes even more of its underside to the water,
and the weakening and thinning continue. The
shelf, now too fragile to support its own weight,
starts snapping off into the sea in enormous
chunks. More ice flows down from the glacier’s
interior, replenishing what has been lost, and the
whole cycle starts over again: melt, thin, break,
retreat; melt, thin, break, retreat.
It is difficult to find any scientist, Ananda-
krishnan especially, who thinks that Thwaites
can avoid this fate. Because its bed lies below
sea level, water will pursue it far inland. When
Thwaites’ grounding line starts to retreat, possi-
bly within the next few decades, Anandakrishnan
says, it could do so fairly fast. That retreat may
raise sea levels only modestly at first. From radar
studies, scientists believe they have detected
another bump, now called the Ghost Ridge, that
runs about 45 miles behind the existing one. This
is what Anandakrishnan’s Ghost team will trace
with their seismic experiments from the surface.
Is the ridge made of wet sediment, or is it firm
and dry? Is it low, or is it high? Such esoteric dif-
ferences may have extraordinary effects. If any
good news arises from his fieldwork at Thwaites,
Anandakrishnan says, it may come from the dis-
covery that the glacier has a chance of getting
firmly stuck on the Ghost Ridge.
You might therefore think of Thwaites as a man
dangling from the edge of a cliff. Just as he falls,
he grips a rock, a sturdy handhold, to avoid the
abyss. Of course, the rock may loosen and dis-
lodge tragically in his hands. And then he’ll drop.
0 4 7
T
he first team ever to set foot on
Thwaites Glacier, in the late 1950s,
included a crusty glaciologist named
Charlie Bentley. He spent 25 months
driving around West Antarctica in a tractor, tak-
ing soundings across the ice. His process was
much like Anandakrishnan’s. Bentley would
drill a hole deep enough to reach the compact
layer of snow known as firn or, better yet, solid
ice; place in it an explosive charge; and then
register the shock wave using geophones. In
those days, the data was recorded in analog
form, with a needle “that would shake back and
forth and inscribe something on a piece of paper
that was whipping past,” Anandakrishnan says.
“Afterwards, you would look at the record, and
the distance on the paper was equivalent to a
certain amount of time.” Bentley’s momentous
discovery was that much of West Antarctica’s
land is actually below sea level, even though it
is cloaked by thick sheets of ice.
Anandakrishnan never intended to help rev-
olutionize this process with digital networks,
but that’s how things turned out. He had little
interest in ice or climate when he arrived as a
graduate student in electrical engineering at
the University of Wisconsin in the mid-1980s.
Born in India, he had spent his teenage years
in suburban Maryland, which is why he carries
in his speech a relaxed folksiness; his father, a
civil engineer, worked as a science adviser to
the Indian ambassador in Washington. Anan-
dakrishnan’s main interests during his college
years were fiber optics and lasers. He planned
to become a professor or an optical engineer in
Silicon Valley. But then he answered an adver-
tisement for a summer job.
A group of Wisconsin glaciologists were try-
ing to link their instruments together in the
field, so they could record their data on a cen-
tral hard drive. Anandakrishnan designed a
fiber-optic system for their project and was
eventually asked to go to Antarctica to install
it. He was 23 years old. “These were things that
I knew absolutely nothing about,” he says. “I’d
come from a straight engineering background.
I knew that glaciers existed. I knew glaciers had
something to do with sea level. But I really knew
nothing more than that.” When he got back to
school, he remembers thinking, “I’m a year
into my PhD program in electrical engineering.
I have a guaranteed mansion or a yacht down the
road, if I want it, or a position in a university.
Or I could retrain myself—learn seismology,
geology, glaciology, climate, oceans.” He’d been
transfixed, he says, by the “unending horizons”
IF T HE WORST HA PPE NED,
THE J EF FER SON M EMOR IA L WOU LD BE U NDERWAT ER.
SHA NG H AI , LAGOS, M UMBAI —
AL L WOU LD FLO OD O R DROW N.
of the ice sheet, but he was also taken in by a world of what he
calls “capital-T” toys—snowmobiles, forklifts, cranes, and cargo
planes. He immediately signed up for a PhD in glaciology, which
happened to be Bentley’s department.
Anandakrishnan knows that exploding small bombs in ice may
seem primitive. Each blast, known as a shot, can yield a foul gas that
blows up from the borehole, along with sooty residue that sometimes
rains down on researchers and their equipment. “But the reality is
there is almost no other way to get the information we’re trying
to get,” he says. Airborne radar missions can do some of the same
work with equal accuracy and less fuss, but they can’t penetrate
rock, so they don’t reveal much about the nature of the glacier bed.
This used to be the case with seismic soundings too. When Bent-
ley was driving around Thwaites in 1957, the only thing he could
calculate with any certainty was depth. When digital recordings
became standard in the 1980s, researchers could focus on small
changes in the reflection strength of the bed at different points
and different angles. This new level of sensitivity, Anandakrish-
nan says, profoundly changed his field.
Innovations in explosives have also helped. Early glacier
soundings, including Bentley’s, were done with TNT. On the
upcoming Thwaites expeditions, Anandakrishnan—who still
designs much of his own equipment—will instead use PETN, a
chemical compound frequently found in plastic explosives. (It
comes in 200-gram cylinders about the size of your index fin-
ger.) Besides being very stable, PETN is fast; its seismic waves
propagate through ice at about 12,000 feet per second. This is
critical, because a higher-frequency explosion will collect more
detailed information about the glacier bed.
When it comes time for a shot on Thwaites, the wind has to be
quiet. Nobody is allowed to breathe, cough, or sneeze. “We have
a protocol for all machinery in the area to be shut off,” Ananda-
krishnan says. “Nothing can be happening. People can’t be walk-
ing. They can’t be talking. Everybody gets stock still. And for that
five seconds when that seismic energy is coming up to your geo-
phones, that’s the only thing you want those devices to be hear-
ing.” On the surface you hear a thunk. If you’re close enough, and
if it’s a large enough shot, you can feel it in your feet, a little tap
on the soles. The team will look at the data quickly to confirm that
the blast reached the bed. Then they’ll move on.
I asked Anandakrishnan whether there was any chance that he
might crack off part of Thwaites with his explosive charges, which
can sometimes add up to about a kilogram. I imagined some kind
of calamitous avalanche, as in the Alps. He shook his head. “This
ice sheet is so large,” he said. His small bombs would destroy the
office we were sitting in, but they were nothing compared with the
forces of nature moving Thwaites’ ice into the ocean.
P
erhaps the greatest problem in imagining the future of
Thwaites lies in trying to imagine a natural disaster that
has never occurred in all of recorded human history. One
day at Penn State, I dropped in on Anandakrishnan’s col-
league Richard Alley, who sat me down in his office and insisted that I
watch a clip of a short documentary he had been replaying on YouTube.
Like his friend Anandakrishnan, Alley studied with Charlie Bentley
at Wisconsin and has been thinking about the instabilities of West
Antarctica for 30 years. The video detailed a catastrophe in Norway
in the late 1970s. In the agricultural town of Rissa, the land, an unsta-
ble soil known as quick clay, suddenly liquefied during a construc-
tion project. Within a few hours, 82 acres fell into a lake. One person
died, and the man filming the incident barely escaped with his life.
“It’s not ice,” Alley cautioned me as we watched. “But it’s an
analogy for what can happen when things can break, when the cliff
is too high and nothing piles up at the bottom.” Alley’s point was
that this could be the situation for Thwaites. As a glacier breaks
down, larger cross sections of the wedge become exposed to the
elements. The process creates an ice cliff, which gets so tall that it
can no longer sustain itself. In engineering terms, the ice suffers a
material failure. In models, it breaks, and it breaks fast. The result-
ing icebergs are likely to float away, carried by swells and tides,
rather than create a pileup that slows things down.
“So the question,” Alley said, “is where is the threshold for
triggering that in an irreversible or nearly irreversible way?” In
his view, one of the most critical pieces of the Thwaites Collab-
oration is investigating when the glacier’s grounding line might
move beyond the Ghost Ridge. This is conceivably the point at
which disaster ensues. “If Thwaites behaves itself, and we only get
a meter of sea-level rise by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario,
a meter is a big deal,” Alley said. It would be painful, but humanity
could adapt by building floodgates and sea walls, rethinking pat-
terns of real estate development, and retreating from vulnerable
shorelines. But what Thwaites and the glaciers around it have in
store could be much more significant. “You have to think in terms
of maybe 3 feet, but maybe 10 or 15,” Alley said. Maybe 15 feet. In
that scenario, the Jefferson Memorial and Fenway Park would be
underwater, and the Googleplex would become an archipelago.
Outside the US, the damage would be incalculable. Shanghai,
Lagos, Mumbai, Jakarta—all would flood or drown.
For now, the prospect of Thwaites’ rapid collapse seems enough
of a possibility that a few scientists have suggested buttressing
it. One of these geoengineering schemes, recently put forward by
Michael Wolovick and John Moore, proposes that an “artificial
sill” of gravel and rocks be constructed at the base of Thwaites to
protect it from warm water. In an academic paper, Wolovick and
Moore acknowledge that such an undertaking would be “compara-
ble to the largest civil engineering projects that humanity has ever
attempted.” When I spoke with Wolovick, he told me that the idea
was intended to spark debate about a “glacial intervention” that
may take a century to conceive and execute. Whatever the cost, he
said, it seemed worth it. Rapid sea-level rise could mean trillions
of dollars in losses and the mass migration of
hundreds of millions of people. The poorer parts
of the planet would invariably suffer worst. “If
you stop sea-level rise at the source,” Wolovick
said, “that benefits everyone.”
When I asked Anandakrishnan what he thought
of this plan, he said it made him wonder whether
we were in danger of losing sight of the larger
problem. Geoengineering Thwaites would be
the most difficult and dangerous construction
project in the history of humanity, he agreed. As
one of only two dozen people who has actually
been to the glacier, he could say this with some
authority. About 100 workers died building the
Hoover Dam, he noted; the hazards here might
be similarly large, or worse, even if you could
get the right equipment in place. “But whether
geoengineering works or not—and that’s a sep-
arate question—it doesn’t address the effects of
pumping CO2 into the atmosphere,” he told me.
“And that’s what is raising temperatures, melt-
ing glaciers, acidifying the ocean, and changing
weather patterns around the earth.”
Dave Pollard, the Penn State ice-sheet mod-
eler, and his colleague Rob DeConto, of the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts, have found divergent
futures for Thwaites. “It ranges from devastating
sea-level rise and rapid retreat into the middle
of West Antarctica for ‘business-as-usual’ emis-
sions,” Pollard told me, to “very little sea-level
rise and tiny retreat around the edges.” The sec-
ond future is possible, though, only if we keep
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations
where they are today or allow them to go only
slightly higher. Such a feat would involve cut-
ting back drastically on fossil fuels and making
a wholesale switch—as soon as possible—to a
renewable-energy economy. Pollard’s point was
that even a glacier as vulnerable as Thwaites
could conceivably be contained if humans
decided to radically change their behavior.
And that’s the biggest problem of all. We’re
so small and so stubborn, and the challenges
in holding back the ice are so large. Saving
Thwaites, or even finding out whether the Ghost
Ridge looks stable, won’t save the world. At the
rate temperatures are rising, Anandakrishnan
may soon have to pack up his explosives and go
elsewhere. By then, some other glacier will be
hanging by its fingernails. 
JON GERTNER (@jongertner) is the author of
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age
of American Innovation. His second book,
about the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet,
is due out this summer.
0 4 9
To
B e
Continued ...
Stan Lee unleashed the great
power of the outcast—
and found the hero in all of us.

By Adam Rogers Photograph by Jeff Minton

051
 about characters he helped
invent. But to the extent that
joke landed, it was because
Lee’s inf luence on the mod-
ern cultural landscape, as the
longtime writer, editor, and
publisher of Marvel Comics,
was cosmic.
man. And then: the deluge. The
books, cheap magazines that
took advantage of bulk postage
rates, crummy paper stock, and
lousy four-color printing tech-
nologies, sold by the millions.
I n f ac t , “ S t a n L e e ” h ad
his own secret identity—he

If
As one of h is cha racters started out as Stanley Lieber, a
might say: “Stan Lee—dead! child of a Romanian immigrant
No! No, it can’t be!” The man
who u nderstood t hat w it h
great power there must come
great responsibility? The man
who created or cocreated basi-
cally half of comic book super-

herodom? The Fantastic Four,
the Incredible Hulk, Spider- Stan Lee started as a
gofer at the company that
Man, Iron Man, Black Panther, would become Marvel.
Thor … I could go on! Lee, a He kept writing while serv-
ing in the US Army Signal
florid—nay, dramatic!—mas-
Corps during World War II.
ter of bangs and em-dashes, an Below: a Spider-Man cover
aggressive activator of alliter- from 2000.

ation, certainly would have.

Not a dream. Not a what-if.
Stan Lee—no more.

It’s controversial whether

Lee was the father of the mod-
If you haven’t spent your life reading comic books, they can seem ern superhero or more of a
weird. Like any medium, like movies or books or podcasts, com- midwife. You could trace the
ics have their own informational syntax. The pairing of static concept of a human hero with
images with cartoon indicators of motion, typographically dis- godlike powers back to—well,
tinct onomatopoeic sound effects, enbubbled words for dialog— gods, I suppose, or demigods.
you have to learn to digest all that. Detectives and adventurers
After the basic architecture come more subtle cues. Time doesn’t have been challenging mad
always move at the same speed within a frame, or in the gutters scientists, criminals, and mon-
between frames, as comics creator Scott McCloud has written. sters since the dime novels of
A single frame can last an hour or a nanosecond, and in that time the 19th century, with a lineage
the Flash can run across a county. A 3⁄16 -inch gutter can separate that goes back even further.
frames by instants or millennia. Superheroes wear primary col- Lee didn’t invent the comic
ors; villains wear secondaries or tertiaries. Splatters of black dots book superhero; that’s usually
mean crackling energy. Words in round bubbles with pointers credited to Jerry Siegel and
are speech; words in cloudlike bubbles connected by circles are Joe Shuster, a couple of Jew-
thoughts. As in video, an image can convey a meaning opposite to ish kids from Cleveland who
the words spoken in it. As in text, words can evoke emotions and alchemized religious imag-
sensations that an image, by itself, wouldn’t. We comics readers ery, science fiction, and urban fat her a nd New York–born
internalize all that and a million other rules, truths, and tropes crime-busting into a hero who, mother, keenly aware of how
because some creator taught us how to read them, page by page, rocketed to Earth as an infant, scarce jobs, money, and fan-
while we were engrossed in a narrative. gained powers and abilities far tasy were in the waning years
The person who first understood the real power of that medium, beyond those of mortal men to of the Depression. Lee was just
Stan Lee, died in November at the age of 95. He intuited early what fight a never-ending battle for out of high school when a nep-
it was for, what it was best at, how to shape that visceral power truth and justice. otistic connection scored him
into a new kind of story. He also figured out how to industrialize Th at w a s S up e r m a n , of a gig as a gofer at Timely Com-
the process. In late life, Lee was an avuncular spokesperson for course, who came first in 1938. ics in either 1939 or 1940 (his
superhero comics and a go-to cameo joke in blockbuster movies Then, the next year, came Bat- own accounts differed), in the
art deco McGraw-Hill Building
in Manhattan. Comics were
“the absolute bottom of the
cultural totem pole,” as Lee
told IGN in 2000, and Timely
wasn’t even publishing char-
acters as popular as Super-
man and Batman. Lee’s job
was to fill inkwells and fetch
coffee for Joe Simon and Jack
Kirby. It would be those two
guys who gave Timely a real
smash hit in the form of Cap-
tain America, who debuted in
late 1940. As a career choice,
comics was still a risky bet,
but hav in g grow n up on a
steady diet of Shakespeare,
detective stories, and pulp,
Lee had ambitions to write.
His first story for Timely, a
two-page text-only filler, was
“Captain America Foils the
Traitor’s Revenge,” which
feels like a lot of words. (I’m
indebted here to a vast canon
of comics history, especially
Sean Howe’s thorough Mar-
vel Comics: The Untold Story.)
Simon and Kirby were two-
timing Timely, freelancing
from a nearby hotel room on
their lunch breaks. The boss
fou nd out; t hey got f ired.
According to Simon, Kirby
always thought it was Lee who
ratted on them. Simon wasn’t
so sure, and Lee denied it. At
18, Lee took over the editorial
operations of Timely, becom-
ing writer, editor, and art direc-
tor, a superhuman presence
who kept writing while serv-
ing in World War II. Timely
expanded to funny-animal
comics, romance books aimed
at teenage girls, Westerns …
and managed to stay alive.
After the war, the superhero
craze died off. In comics and
pulp more broadly, crime, sex,
and horror became the real
moneymakers. Eventually that
led to an old-fashioned moral
panic, replete with newsmag-
azine articles (What about the
children?), book burnings, and
worries that comics were too
violent and too gay. In 1954 the
US Senate held hearings; a psy-
chiatrist named Fredric Wer-
tham wrote a book about the
dangers of comics called Seduc-
tion of the Innocent. And the
industry did what media indus-
tries used to do when the gov-
ernment came sniffing around:
It caved. Fifteen publishers
went out of business, and those
that remained agreed to abide
by a new watchdog, the Com-
ics Code Authority.
The rules were stupid. Good
must triumph over evil. Mar-
riage is sacred. Don’t sympa-
thize with criminals. They
were the kind of rules that
make stories boring. And com-
ics, as a consequence, con-
tracted. The sex and Grand
Guignol horror disappeared;
sales dropped. It was a bad
time for comics.
By 1960 or so, Lee—now in
his late thirties—knew he was
capable of more. So were his
freelancers. Lee had rehired
Kirby to work on simpleminded
monster stories for what was
now c a l led At l a s Com ic s,
but Kirby yearned to create
epic space-god cosmologies.
Another writer-artist, Steve
Ditko, was interested in nerds
gaining power to mete out righ-
teous justice. (He’d later go
full Ayn Rand.) But those guys
weren’t doing any of that yet.
It wasn’t just the Code—Lee
hated his boss’s fear of inno-
vation as well as the ups and
downs of a business in which he
was already a 20-year veteran.
His wife, Joan, convinced him
to stick it out—if he was going
to do one last comic book, she
said, why not make it one he
was proud of?
Around then, his boss—Mar-
tin Goodman, the same pub-
lisher who’d hired Lee in the
first place—reportedly found
out from his opposite number
at the crosstown rival (which
would become DC Comics) that
they had a hit in Justice League
of America, a team book fea-
turing atomic-age revamps
053
 of some of their World War II–
era characters. Goodman told
Lee to copy it. But, you know,
different.
What happened next is a
matter of controversy—the
kind that makes Lee’s legacy
much more complicated. As Lee
records it, he spent days tin-
kering, making notes, and then
A story
without
a message,
however
subliminal,
is like a
man without
a soul.
— Stan Lee
emerged with the expression of
his central insight. If the rules
said that the bad guys couldn’t
be sympathetic, dangerous,
violent, or a credible threat
… the good guys would have
to bear that narrative weight.
Where DC’s popular heroes
had been gods and oligarchs,
confident white men, Lee’s cre-
ative team was fascinated by the
implications of what happened
when outcasts got abilities they
didn’t ask for. Lee added a new
superpower: angst.
He had f i g u red out t hat
heroes like Superman were
fundamentally boring. If noth-
ing can hurt the guy, what’s the
challenge? The most interest-
ing conflicts would be inter-
nal. Lee conceived of a family,
whose powers seemed to be
based somewhat prosaically
around earth, air, fire, and
water—gained through their
own hubris, against the back-
drop of the Cold War space
race. One of them, the Thing,
would be the kind of monster
Kirby had gotten good at writ-
ing, a creature dismayed at
his own transformation. Lee
wrote up a précis of the char-
acters and the first issue and
gave it to Kirby to lay out and
art: the Fantastic Four.
Kirby told the story differ-
ently. He died 25 years ago, but
in 1989 he described the origin
of the FF to The Comics Journal,
saying it had been his idea. One
day he found Lee in despair, he
said, as Goodman was getting
ready to shutter the place. “He
didn’t know what to do, he’s sit-
ting in a chair crying—he was
just still out of his adolescence.
I told him to stop crying. I says,
‘Go in to Martin and tell him
to stop moving the furniture
out, and I’ll see that the books
make money.’ ”
In Kirby’s favor: He’d writ-
ten, in the late 1950s, a comic
c a l le d C halle n ge r s of th e
Unknown featuring a team of
four science-adventurers. It
was familiar territory. Other
evidence belies this extrem-


Captain America was
one of Marvel’s first
big hits. From top: a
1944 movie poster; a
still from the 1979 TV
series; a poster from
the 2011 film.
ist depiction. As The Comics
Journal pointed out in its Lee
obituary, contemporary evi-
dence—notes, memos, t he
memories of other artists—
says otherwise. And Lee wasn’t
just out of adolescence, as Kirby
would have it; he was nearly 40.
What no one argues is that
The Fantastic Four was a mas-
sive hit, the kind the company hadn’t seen since Captain America.
Atlas changed its name to Marvel.
What followed was a decade of profound creativity. Ping-
ponging ideas back and forth with Kirby, Lee fleshed out the
Marvel pantheon. Their Jekyll and Hyde riff—another nerd,
caught in an atomic-bomb-like explosion that transformed
him into the Hulk—was less popular. But Lee’s next idea took
off. A geeky, bullied teen granted awesome powers by the bite
of a radioactive spider, Peter Parker would also be burdened
with a massive personal failure early in his costumed career.
As Spider-Man, he’d learn that he could never use his pow-
ers to enrich himself or avenge personal loss, but only to help
others. Kirby’s macho style wasn’t right; Lee went to Ditko for
fluid, dark weirdness.
The ideas came almost frantically, to keep up with demand.
The X-Men: teenagers hated and feared by society, even their own
parents, thanks to pubescent biological changes outside their
control. Iron Man: a millionaire playboy who can never remove
the armor around his heart. Doctor Strange: a Tibet-trained psy-
chedelic mystic (who was mostly Ditko’s idea). Captain America,
resuscitated after having been in suspended animation since
World War II. Antimatter universes, intergalactic world destroy-
ers! I mean! Set in a realistic New York City and illustrated with
Pop Art verve, the stories turned comic books into zeitgeist. This
was pulp as high art.
Even when the stories themselves didn’t soar, the storytelling
did. From the fantasy-pulp midden, Lee had excavated a gem of
a truth: These tales about men and women in garish tights hit-
ting each other were also about more. Superheroes had incredi-
ble abilities, yes, but they were also often the victims of prejudice
themselves, or trapped in moral webs stronger than anything
Spider-Man ever thwipped. So the comics appealed to people who
felt the same, even before Lee and the other Marvel creators pub-
lished the first African American heroes, the first popular Asian
American heroes, and strong, leading-character women in num-
bers large enough to populate a dozen summer crossovers.
Swirling soap-opera character motivations together with
the costume fights and social relevance became a Marvel hall-
mark. Lee’s writers made the cultural chaos of the 1960s into
a backdrop for their stories. In 1971, Lee even defied the Com-
ics Code itself, giving one of Spidey’s supporting cast a tragic
drug-use B-plot. “A story without a message, however sublim-
inal, is like a man without a soul,” Lee wrote in a 1970 edition
of “Stan’s Soapbox,” the column he awarded himself that ran
in every Marvel book.
And in another, from two years prior: “Bigotry and racism are
among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But,
unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can’t be halted
with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun … it’s totally irra-
tional, patently insane to condemn an entire race—to despise an
entire nation—to vilify an entire religion.” Lee usually ended his
column with the exhortation “Excelsior!” (Ever upward!) This one
he signed off with “Pax et Justitia.” Peace and justice.
Deputy editor Adam Rogers (@jetjocko) suggests Lumberjanes
and Usagi Yojimbo for your kids and Y: The Last Man for yourself.
055
 cliff-hangers and kraka-thooms
was limited only by imagina-
tion and sales numbers. Lee had
unlocked a key to serial drama,
the foundation of today’s forever
franchises. Without Lee, there’s

It
no Star Wars, no Harry Potter.
Meanwhile, Lee’s fundamen-
tal showmanship led him to
do a lot more than write and
edit. His monthly column touted

Lee, seen here in his

office in 1975, oversaw
a parade of cliff-hangers
and kraka-thooms,
limited only by imagina-
tion and sales.

It wasn’t just that Lee and his colleagues figured out what made
stories great—they also found a new way to generate those stories
at scale. At its 1960s peak, Marvel was producing up to 18 monthly
books, and Lee had a hand in all of them. That made it easier to cre-
ate shared universes, with popular characters guest-starring in
less-popular books to goose their sales. But it also transformed
the business. In a process that would come to be called the Marvel
Method, Lee would send a story for an issue to an artist, who would

lay out the actual story on the page, leaving room for dialog. Lee
would then fill in the bubbles, often with melodramatic, pseudo-
Shakespearean tripe. Sometimes his summary would be complete,
with key beats. Sometimes just a beginning and end, and someone like
Kirby or Ditko would often change stuff. Collaboration made it better.
New Marvel writers had to ape Lee’s approach and tone; by some
accounts, he judged artists mostly on their ability to imitate Kirby.
Half a century before the golden age of peak television, Lee had
stumbled onto the showrunner model. He had turned pop culture
into art, and the manufacture of it into a commodity.
Lee’s direct involvement with so many books defined the “shared
universe” concept. Comics had been crossing their characters over the wacky fun of the “bull-
at least since the first Human Torch fought Namor the Sub-Mariner pen,” an exaggerated Marvel
back at prewar Timely. But as Marvel Comics grew in popularity and office where all your favorite
sophistication through the 1960s, Lee developed that concept—into writers hung out, bantering
continuity and continuation. What happened in one book would affect about groovy superheroes. He
what happened next not only in that book but in all the books. Even called fans “True Believers,”
more remarkable, these stories were ongoing. They could have, as members of the “Merry Mar-
Lee construed it, the illusion of change—a villain unmasked, a mad vel Marching Society.” All the
scientist’s hidden island lair destroyed, shape-shifting aliens sent artists and writers got nick-
scurrying back to their home galaxy—but the heroes’ fundamental names. (Kirby was the King.)
personal problems would only get worse. The unceasing parade of Lee would make live appear-
ances, narrate records. He ring-
mastered a weird Carnegie Hall
show and spoke at colleges. He
went on Dick Cavett’s talk show.
That approach to business,
and his apparent willingness to
take all the credit for Marvel’s
creations, set him up as a target
for resentment. Lee’s longtime
partnership with Jack Kirby dis-
solved in acrimony in 1970. Kirby
felt—not unreasonably—that
Lee didn’t give him enough pub-
lic credit and that Marvel didn’t
give him enough money. Most of
the artists for Marvel operated
on a work-for-hire basis; Lee’s
dual role as creative and spokes-
person earned him money that
other writers and artists did
not. It all made Kirby so nuts he
actually left Marvel for DC and,
amid other craziness, created a
villain based on Lee: the vapid,
vain, cash-grubbing Funky Flash-
man. By the end of Ditko’s work
on Spider-Man, in the mid-1960s,
he and Lee didn’t speak to each
other. Ditko did most of his work
from home. The artists were
doing a lot more than drawing.
By the 1980s, grimmer, grit-
tier comics aimed at an older
and more cynical audience were
all the rage, partly because of
the more mature themes Lee
and his cocreators inserted in
their work, skirting the weak-
ening Comics Code Authority
rules through metaphor and
implication. By the end of the
decade, Lee was mostly a figure-
head; in the 1980s he narrated
a Spider-Man cartoon and tried
to license Marvel IP to movies
and television. Marvel the com-
pany got traded around by cor-
porate raiders before finally,
in 1998, emerging from bank-
ruptcy to merge with the toy
company Toy Biz.
The reorganization actually
saved the day. It paved the way
for the Marvel Cinematic Uni-
verse, beginning with Iron Man
in 2008. The next year, Disney
acquired the company and the
characters Lee had helped build.
(And two years after that, the
Comics Code Authority van-
ished completely, after multi-
ple softening revisions initially
forced by Lee’s flouting of it
four decades prior.) Even into
his dotage, though he rarely
wrote, he appeared in cameos
in multiple Marvel movies. For
comics fans of a certain age—
my age—Lee was very much the
face of the medium.
Lee’s creative output never
again matched what he’d done
in the 1960s and ’70s. Let’s just
say Stripperella, the character he
created in the early 2000s with
the actress and model Pamela
Anderson, seems unlikely to
have the staying power of, say,
the Black Widow. He worked
with other wannabe entertain-
ment companies and ended up
in financial and legal fights with
some. Joan, to whom Lee had
been married for 69 years, died
in 2017. And in his final months,
people in the industry worried
that Lee’s caretakers were taking
advantage of him. Lee filed a law-
suit against one earlier this year.
His death encouraged people
to tell stories of Lee’s kindness
and enthusiasm. But for every
story that circulated after Lee’s
death about how wonderful and
caring he was, comics profes-
sionals tell other tales in which
Lee is … not.
Every bit as complicated as
the characters he helped bring
into the world, Lee taught gen-
erations of nerds the concepts
of responsibility, morality, and
love. He waged a sometimes
ham-fisted battle against prej-
udice, misunderstanding, and
evil. This is what makes some of
nerd-dom’s recent tack toward
intolerance so painful; other-
ishness is engineered into
comics’ radioactive, mutated
DNA. Even if Lee wasn’t a super
human, he was superhuman,
empowering colleagues to leap
creative obstacles and to give
readers a sense of their own
secret strengths.
Stan Lee died on November
12, 2018. But he leaves a legacy
of work that pulses like mys-
tic energy through the secret
networks of our shared pop-
ular culture. Face front, True
Believers! This is comics. Death
is just part of the story arc. It’s
never forever. 
0 57
“When your robotic lover tells you that it loves
you, should you believe it?” —“Robots, Love, and
Sex: The Ethics of Building a Love Machine,”
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2012)

REAL
GIRLS
BY LAURIE PENNY

t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k
061

L
LATE JUNE. SWELTERING, airless English
summer heat. 4,165 days since the finan-
cial crash. 1,112 days since Charlie Bar-
rett—described by everyone, including
his mother, as a nice young man, consider-
ing—graduated with a degree in English,
eyewatering debt, and a thundering case of
impostor syndrome. And three days since
the girl who made everything bearable, the
girl who held his heart between her hands
like an egg and hated it when he called her
a girl, even though she was the only girl,
The Girl—three days since she had told him
to pack up his dignity and leave.
It was two months till the lease they
shared ran out, during which time Becky
would occasionally stay at her sister’s.
When someone tells you they just can’t
respect you anymore and they’re sick of
paying for everything and picking up your
socks while you find your feet, you can’t
really negotiate.
Well, you can, and Charlie had. He’d been
upset; he hadn’t been thinking properly. In
hindsight those were excuses he’d proba-
bly worn out. Either way, his immediate
problem was how to make two grand in two
months and persuade Becky to let him stay.
Which is how Charlie came to be working
as a fake robot girlfriend.
The Boy—the boy whose robot girlfriend
Charlie was paid to pretend to be—lived
eight time zones and more than 5,000
miles away in San Jose, which was some-
where people always seemed to be try-
t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k
ing to get to in old songs. Charlie lived in
Guildford, which wasn’t. So while Charlie’s
real human ex-girlfriend went out to all
the parties, Charlie stayed up late eating
crackers and trying to fail the Turing test
for money.
> You’re different from all the other
girls I know, The Boy said on that par-
ticular Tuesday night.
> Obviously I am different from other
girls, Charlie replied.
It was Niall who put him on to the gig.
Money for free, Niall said. Niall was a ludi-
crous and exhausting out-of-work actor
whom Charlie would never have associated
with if he were not also his very best friend.
“All you have to do,” Niall said, “is sit up all
night on the internet talking to depressed
strangers about their conspiracy theories,
and you do that already. Just remember to
ask them about their feelings too.”
Niall explained that a lot of lonely people
liked the idea of having a robot girlfriend
who was always on call and had no feelings
of her own, a remote algorithm that could
shape itself to your particular needs—
they’d seen it on TV. But the technology
just wasn’t there yet.
Hence the front company. All over the
world, Niall said, broke millennials who
needed cash fast were signing NDAs and
signing on to pretend to be robots.
> I mean, I know you’re not real, wrote
The Boy. You don’t really care about my
problems. But I suppose …
> What do you suppose?
> Lol. I was gonna say, you’re real to me.
> All I want is to be real to you, wrote
Charlie. You’re real to me, too.
> What are you wearing?
Charlie looked over at Becky, who was
sleeping in her work hoodie and sweat-
pants.
> Black panties. One of your T-shirts.
When Becky slept at the apartment, she
and Charlie still shared the bed. It was eas-
ier that way—apart from the bit where it
was like having your ribs cracked open
and your heart slowly dug out with a spoon
every morning. 
“You’re real to me,” Charlie said to Becky.
She didn’t hear him. Charlie lay awake and
thought about The Boy, about what he’d
think when he found out that 4Amy was
real, but also fake.
The money was what mattered. In two
weeks he’d have enough to pay Becky back
for the last two months’ rent and then
some. Then she’d see that he was worth
another try.
The Boy had to pay extra for the over-
nights. That meant sex talk. Initially,
Charlie worried about how easy that part
was, staying up necking energy drinks
and talking The Boy through an elaborate
scripted wank.
Soon, it became fun. Charlie enjoyed it.
Not in that way, of course, not at all, it just
took a lot of creative input, and really, he
had never truly had a job that used all his
writing skills like this. A hundred extra
quid for a couple of hours of telling The Boy
in detail what 4Amy wanted to do to his
body, what she would feel when he touched
her, what she would sound like when she
came. Hastily flicking through some of
Becky’s lady-porn books for inspiration.
It became quite educational.
Sometimes, after a few hours, Charlie
would get into such a state of professional
satisfaction that he’d have to head to the
bathroom to crack one off himself before
bed. Other times the exchanges took a
weird turn.
> If I was there, Charlie wrote, I would
make a meal for you. You are work-
ing so hard.
Robot girlfriend syntax was piss-easy.
Once he got over his pedantry, Charlie just
sprayed the grammar around like Jackson
Pollock with a thesaurus and Yoda’d it up
a bit to make it authentically inauthentic,
beautifully unfinished. There was an art to
it. Like a tasting menu served on a plank
of wood. Which, on that night, was what
Becky could have been eating for dinner
right then with her sleazy boss who hated
Charlie. Don’t think about it.
> We could just order in.
> Yes, but a very old-fashioned girl I
am. I want to take care of you.
Three dots, pulsing on the thread. The
three hanging dots of doom. The Boy Is
Typing. Stop. The Boy Is Typing.
> What would you make?
Charlie hadn’t thought that far ahead.
What did Americans eat? Corn syrup?
Propaganda? Avocado toast? He Googled
frantically.
> Mac, he wrote. And cheese. For your
dinner I will make a Mac And Cheese.
In a panic, and forgetting entirely that he
could have simply searched for images, he
looked up a recipe. Then he got a bit carried
away going through the cupboards. The
oven was cranky and hard to turn on and
he burned himself twice, but the pictures
alone were worth it.
> That looks real good, babe.
It looked like a bowl of fried vomit, but
it smelled like what decent, god-fearing
carbohydrates hoped would happen to
them when they died.
> My dad used to make it like that,
Charlie wrote.
> Do you miss him?
Father-shaped sucking holes in your life
weren’t something Charlie had to spend
much time researching. Yes, he missed his
disappointing dad. Very much. Which was
odd, because they hadn’t got on.
> I do not really have a father, said
Charlie, which was true enough.
> Trust me to get the girl with daddy
issues, haha.
> He walked out when I was only just
a small little pixel.
Charlie caught his breath. Three dots of
doom. The Boy Is Typing …
> Was that a joke?
> Yes. Did I make a good joke?
> Yeah. Bit of a dad-joke. LOL.
> I don’t understand.
> Don’t worry, said The Boy. Sorry this
isn’t a very hot conversation.
> Do not be sorry. It’s good to talk
about.
> Yeah. Yeah, it is good.
“This is insanely good,” said Becky, when
she got back. The tasting menu had not
been satisfying. She ate mac and cheese
from the dish, with a serving spoon, sitting
on the counter. “Who are you and what have
you done with Charlie?”
Charlie usually hated to watch her eat,
especially when she was drunk, the gross
animal reality of her.
But she was enjoying his food so much.
“I just decided to try something new,”
he said. That was true enough.
Becky put her plate down and glanced
around the kitchen, which looked like
somebody had murdered one of those flour
babies kids had to carry around in school to
scare them off parenthood. Charlie winced.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll get it in the
morning. You must be exhausted. Thanks
for dinner.”

AT DAWN, THREE weeks later, a text from
Niall: Have you seen the news? Shitshow.
Charlie sat up. Next to him, Becky stirred
awake.
“What is it?”
“My job,” said Charlie. “It’s—”
“Oh,” said Becky. “You got fired?”
“No.” He moistened his lips. “The com-
pany. The one I work for. Someone … some-
one told stories to the press. A few of the
girls there. It’s all over Twitter.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you were
doing really well at that job. It’s—but
you’ve got the back rent now, right? So if
you need to stay a couple of weeks longer.
You could do that.”
“I could?”
“Yeah. I mean, or longer than that. If you
want.” Becky cleared her throat to dislodge
some stray emotion. She seemed about to
say something more. Then she squeezed
his hand, and left.
Charlie took a look at his bank account.
Fat with money that he could give to Becky
right now. And stay longer. Or stay forever.
He could make her more mac and cheese,
maybe even a lasagna. He could—
He tore open 4Amy’s profile. The Boy
was still online. 

KEFLAVÍK. ICELAND. FROST on the windows.
Forty feet above the runway. Connecting
flight on a cheap red-eye.
Four thousand miles from San Jose.
Charlie paid attention, for once, as stew-
ards in purple jackets pantomimed how to
survive catastrophe. Reassuring everyone
that it would probably be fine.
It was a two-hour drive from the airport
to San Jose. In theory. Charlie couldn’t
drive.
The Boy could.
The Boy Is Typing … 
Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) is the author
of seven books, including Bitch Doctrine and
the sci-fi novella Everything Belongs to the
Future. She is also a commentator on issues
of gender and technology.
54
06 3
“Recent technological advances have led to speculation that smart contracts might largely, or entirely,
displace the apparatus of contract law.” —“Contracts Ex Machina,” Duke Law Journal (2017)

THE
“IT’S 6:30 ALREADY, Katie,” the mousy man tells me. “How much
longer to fix the contract?”

TRUSTLESS
“It’ll be done when it’s done,” I say, without taking my eyes off
the lines of LegalEase on the screen.
A shipment of drone parts from Busan to Boston should have been
simple enough to arrange. One of the primary design goals behind
BY KEN LIU LegalEase was to offer “a syntax that doesn’t frighten lawyers.”
They’d write up a human-readable smart contract, which would
then be compiled into byte code for execution on the Res Iudicata
blockchain. But a lot of old-timers like Glenn never got the hang
of the new language.

t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k
 “There,” I say, pushing back from the
keyboard. “All fixed.”
“Hmm,” Glenn says. “That didn’t actually
take long, did it?”
I know where he’s going with this, so
I ignore him. I drag the saved source file
onto the simulator icon and watch the con-
tract compile and come to life. After a few
moments, a message appears onscreen:
TEST SUITE PASSED.
“Now, Katie, I’ve been doing some
thinking. What if, instead of paying you
per contract—”
“Just a second.” My phone is buzzing. I
glance down and see that Glenn’s Aureus
address has just transferred the agreed-
upon amount of aura to my burner address.
Passing the test suite was the sole precon-
dition in our contract.
I knew he’d try to stiff me. Too bad there’s
no way to withhold payment or renegotiate
terms with a smart contract.
I pack up my things. “See you next time.”
 ises in slick brochures from for-profit law
SAN IS SITTING on the stoop, blocking my
way. I don’t know anything about her except
that she and her family live across the hall
from me, six people in a one-bedroom.
“Enjoying the fresh air?” I ask, more out
of politeness than interest.
“Sure,” she says, brushing her long black
hair behind her ears and scooching aside
to let me pass. “My baby niece won’t stop
crying because of a weird smell coming
through the wall.”
“Did you call Darren?”
San snorts. Darren may be the laziest
landlord in history. I haven’t been here a
month and I already know he’ll never fix
my leaky kitchen sink.
“We talk about moving,” she says. Then
she shrugs.
Everyone knows the deal: After rounds of
trade wars and stimulus packages, inflation
is rampant; rent control has reduced the
housing supply; landlords have their pick
of the “best” tenants, which means that
people with no credit, like San and me,
have no choice but to put up with slumlords
like Darren.
“You could always go to housing court,”
I say. “Implied warranty of habitability,
you know?”
She gives me a funny look. “Courts and
lawyers aren’t for people like us.”
I go inside and retrieve a six-pack.
Back on the stoop, San tells me about her
family—the claustrophobic boat hold;
the trek across the desert; the basements
where they hid from federal agents; the
jobs that millionaires want done for below
minimum wage; the tricks you learn when
you grow up undocumented.
“It was easier when you could still pay for
things with cash,” she says. “But at least
there’s aura.”
I nod. With aura, I pay Darren on the first
of the month and get the new code for my
door lock. If I don’t pay, I’m immediately
and automatically locked out. No credit
check, no lease, no eviction proceedings,
no appeal. Smart contracts and crypto-
currency: funny how both the rich and the
poor have come to rely on them.
“So what’s your story?” San asks. “Why
do you live here? I see you with that office
tote bag.”
I tell her about the unenforceable prom-
schools. Three years and $200,000 of
nondischargeable debt later, I received
no offers from Big Law. My degree, it turns
out, is worthless; it’s not trusted because
it doesn’t have a name like Harvard or
Stanford on it.
That’s why I decided to disappear from
the world of credentials and respectability.
I’m not authorized to practice law, but I can
do the work that established lawyers like
Glenn can’t for the crumbs they’re willing
to throw me.
“Too bad you’re not a real lawyer,” San
says. “Then maybe you could actually do
something.”
I smile bitterly. Upstairs, her niece is still
at it. Someone in another unit is shouting
in Portuguese. The smell of spicy cooking
wafts down—Southeast Asian, maybe? I
wouldn’t know. None of us living in Dar-
ren’s smart-locked cubbies have even
bumped phones, much less gotten to know
one another’s troubles. The trustless can’t
give out compassion on credit.
An idea begins to take shape. “Maybe
we don’t need a lawyer,” I say. San raises
an eyebrow.
Haltingly, I explain that I can write a
smart contract for the door locks that will
refuse to reset them unless a checklist is
satisfied—clean water coming out of the
faucets, functional heating, no strange
odors, no leaks in the ceiling.
San ponders this. “But who gets to decide
if the odor is strange? Don’t we need a
judge?”
“I’d draft the contract to have the precon-
ditions evaluated jointly by landlord and
tenant,” I say. “If there’s a disagreement,
we call on a Nonce Oracle.”
“A what?”
“Uberized jurors—uh, people who ride
around all day on scooters and adjudicate
preconditions in smart contracts. Big com-
panies use them all the time to save on
costs. We’d have to pool some aura to pay
them. They’re just underemployed people
not much better off than you and me.”
“OK,” she says, warming up to the idea.
“But how do we get Darren to agree?”
If all of us, all the tenants in all of Dar-
ren’s buildings, banded together and
insisted on my contract being installed,
I tell her, Darren would have to cave. We’d
end up with a tenants’ association built
in code. We could even block the building
entrances to stop him from bringing in
replacements.
“Everyone is going to have to trust you,”
San says.
We’re all people with something to
hide, wary, suspicious, working at cross
purposes. But even when code is law, even
when you yearn for the ideal of a trust-
less web of incorruptible cryptography,
sometimes you still have to rely on your
fellow human beings, with crying babies
and shitty credit and nothing better to
share than cheap beer.
San’s niece has quieted down. She gets
up and takes a final swig. “I’ve got to go.”
My heart falls. The vision of a revolution
through code remains just that, a vision.
But she holds out her phone.
“Want to bump? Next time the beer’s
on me.”
Maybe, just maybe, it’s the first block in
a new blockchain. 
Ken Liu (@kyliu99) is the author of The Grace
of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other
Stories. A winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and
World Fantasy awards for his fiction, he is also
a lawyer and programmer.
065
“Roughly half of Americans would feel better about the concept of a robot caregiver if there was a human operator who
could remotely monitor its actions at all times.” —“Automation in Everyday Life,” Pew Research Center (2017)

PLACEBO
THE THING IS BEEPING at Brad.
> Begin EOL protocol. OK?
> Beep.
> OK to begin?
BY CHARLES YU
All he needs to do is accept. Click it and the action cascade will
download to his tablet, setting into motion the procedure. End of Life.
> Beep.
The patient is a woman, maybe late forties, around the age of
Brad’s mom. Her insurance covers only Basic Bedside Manner, which
should, in theory, make it easier for Doctor Brad, because at the Basic
level he doesn’t have to perform the enhanced EOL script with its

t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k
awkward dialog, a mishmash of corporate
sincerity and legally binding waivers.
Not that anyone asked Brad. Why would
they? He’s just an actor. A pretty good one—
even if auditions haven’t been going so great.
That’s just the biz. You have ups and downs,
you stay motivated, you focus on the craft.
“Hi,” says the patient. Brad almost jumps.
“You’re awake.”
“Am I?”
“Sorry, I didn’t expect you to be awake.”
“You’re not a doctor, are you?”
“What gave it away?”
“The white coat. It fits too well. I can see
your pecs through it. Also, your clipboard
is upside down.”
Brad laughs.
“You have good pecs.”
“Thanks,” Brad says, and then realizes
the patient has fallen back asleep. Or into a
coma. He doesn’t really know the difference.
He wishes he could have said something
better.
> Beep.
> OK to begin the protocol?
“No. It’s not OK,” Brad says. “If it were OK
I would have begun the protocol.”
> Are you sure?
“I’m sure.”
> Press Continue to continue, or press
More Information for more information.
“Or how about I just press the power
button?”
> If you do that, I will automatically gen-
erate a report to the administration.
“You’re going to murder me someday,
aren’t you?”
Brad sighs. It’s not really asking, any-
way—just delaying the inevitable for a deci-
sion already made. The human in the room
is not in charge. The thing is. As it should be.
Brad barely made it through a year of junior
college. The black cube in the corner, on the
other hand, is a $10 million doctor in a box,
running trillions of calculations per second,
simulations within simulations within what-
ever. It’s already been to the future.
This woman is going to die.
So the phrasing of everything as a polite
request, the illusion of deference, is all
for show. And Brad is part of the show. A
human placebo.
> Please tap More Information for more
information.
It’s getting pushier by the minute. Brad
taps it and a window opens up on his screen:
PATIENT A-0053912-F-7: FEMALE,
49 YEARS, 7 MONTHS, 6 DAYS
DIAGNOSIS: SARCOMATOID CARCINOMA, STAGE IV
COMPLICATIONS: PLEURAL EFFUSION, DECREAS-
ING LUNG FUNCTION, HEMOPTYSIS
-----
< 5 % OF PATIENTS WITH COMPARABLE DATA
SET SURVIVE > 7 DAYS
The thing beeps one last time. This time
not a request at all. A warning.
> Beep. EOL initiated.
The beeping wakes her.
Patient 539 opens her eyes, which Brad
notices are brown. 539 looks at Brad, then
closes her eyes again. Just an involuntary
response, perhaps.
He leaves the room. Goes down the hall to
the elevator. The black box starts tracking
him, talking to him through his ear piece.
> Please return to the patient’s room,
Brad.
“Why? So I can tell her she’s going to die?”
> Because your job function is limited to
the script. Deviations are beyond your
competency level.
“See, that’s why no one invites you to
happy hour.”
> Where are you going, Brad?
“I’m going down to the lobby.”
> Why? Your duties do not require you
to go to the pharmacy.
In the pharmacy Brad makes his pur-
chases quickly, the tablet beeping at him
the whole time. Brad ignores it, tucking the
small paper bag under his arm. He hurries
all the way back to the room, where he finds
Patient 539, awake again.
“You’re not my wife,” Patient 539 says,
a dry whisper.
“I can find her for you,” Brad says.
“Might be tough. She died last year.”
Brad makes a little noise, not on purpose.
He’s in way over his head now.
What does he say to her? He’s done the
training simulations, improv class, prac-
ticed holding hands, the comforting ges-
tures. He knows what to say, what not to.
Things humans don’t like to think about.
Things humans tell themselves. But he can’t
do any of that for her.
If Patient 539 could afford Basic Plus or
Premium, Brad could squeeze her hand, give
her kind eyes, tell her one of the prewritten
jokes for dying people. Instead, he just gets
a blinking cursor. He stares at it, as if that
will make it do what he wants.
“Come on, you stupid thing,” Brad says.
“Excuse me,” Patient 539 says.
“Oh, shit. Sorry. I wasn’t talking to you.”
“I know,” she says. “What’s your name?”
“Um, Brad. I mean, Doctor Brad.”
“Hi, Doctor Brad,” she says. “I’m Jenny.”
“Hi, Jenny.”
“I’m dying.”
“It’s not up to the machine. That thing
doesn’t decide.”
“No. But it knows.”
Brad lets out an involuntary sigh.
“That’s your move? Sighing heavily?”
Jenny laughs.
“I can’t do anything for you,” Brad says.
“Tell me about yourself.”
“Me?” he asks, ignoring the beeps. The
thing is recording him now, for insurance
purposes, for the administrative post-
mortem. “I had an audition for a part as
a heart surgeon. I had to give smoldering
looks at the nurse.”
“Guessing you didn’t get the part?”
“Not even a callback. But on the way out,
I did grab a flyer.”
“So this is a paycheck for you.”
“Yeah,” Brad admits. “I guess so.”
“Well, you look official.”
“It’s mostly the coat,” Brad says. “I got
you something.” He takes the candy bar
out of the bag.
“A gift from a handsome fake doctor.”
She smiles and takes it. Struggles to open
it. Brad watches her.
“Doctor Brad, maybe a hand?”
“Oh, right, sorry.”
“Apparently I’m past the point of opening
my own food.”
> Beep. Beep. End of Life in progress.
> Touch the arm. Place a hand on the
shoulder. Comfort the patient.
“I’m supposed to place a hand on your
shoulder now,” he says. “And comfort you.”
“OK,” she says.
> Beep.
He places a hand on her shoulder. He looks
at the tablet, hoping it will tell him the right
thing to say. 
Charles Yu (@charles_yu) is the author of
three books, including How to Live Safely in a
Science Fictional Universe, and has written for
HBO, AMC, FX, and Adult Swim.
067
“It seems like journalists are used to being in charge
of editorial processes.” —“Algorithms for Journalism:
The Future of News Work,” The Journal of Media
Innovations (2017)

THE FARM
BY CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k
069

N
N E W S B R E A K S L I K E a rain cloud, or a day-
dream. Roy arrives at his desk just in time
to claim the story: Rival militias started a
gunfight at a federal water pipeline that
they both wanted to steal from. Nine peo-
ple dead, another 17 injured.
Roy feels a bump of pleasure as he shifts
from weary commuter to seasoned jour-
nalist, digging into the bare-bones wire-
service report to turn it into an article,
with quotes from law enforcement and
details about both groups. (The Clean
Hands Militia say they just want to be left
alone inside their walled-off commune; the
Big-Wheelers aim to destroy the govern-
ment—and may have been trying to poi-
son the Billings water supply.) Roy files the
piece, slugged MilitiaWaterWars0809X,
and it goes to the Farm for vetting.
Less than 15 minutes later, the article
is kicked back to Roy’s desk covered with
red marks. The Farm has found fault with
almost every word.
Roy sighs. Once, The Daily Argus had
fact-checkers, copy editors, legal advisers.
Those people are gone now, and in their
place there’s the Farm: a virtual machine
populated with copies of a few trillion dif-
ferent bots, scraped from the internet, liv-
ing inside a fake social network.
Some of the bots are highly sophisti-
cated, picking up on any hint of ideologi-
cal slant. Then there are the ones that get
activated only if you mention a particu-
lar slogo, like #!castratecapitalism!# or
t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k
#!restoreamericanvalues!#. One particular
bot has a tizzy anytime an article mentions
egg salad sandwiches. Every news article
must avoid upsetting too many of them,
because the Argus top brass believe they
represent how readers—and other bots—
will react in the real world.
Every one of these red marks links to
comments made by bots inside the Farm.
Many of the libertarian bots loathed
Roy’s article because he described the
Big-Wheelers as “antigovernment extrem-
ists”; several Lithuanian bots were roused
by the word “massacre.” Pro-gun-rights
bots objected to the mention of fatal gun-
shots in the nut graf, while pro-ruling-
party bots had a freak-out in several places
because Roy noted that the government
keeps changing its response to water
shortages. Some environmentalist bots
disputed the explanation of the water cri-
sis in the second-to-last graf.
Inside the Farm, the bots are still
screaming at each other and spitting
invective nobody will ever read. Nobody
except for Roy and other staffers, who can
open a view tab and see a real-time feed
of all the bot discussions of his article.
(“Irresponsible rePOORting,” says one
bot called Guns4All. “U can’t steal water
bc its not a commodity smh,” says another,
called FreeUrHead.)
Breathe, Roy tells himself. He pokes at
his keyboard, hoping its rows of lettered
blocks somehow harbor the right words to
convey what happened without upsetting
the Farm, and then he can go get lunch.
Roy lives in a cube-shaped apartment,
the same size and shape as 857,003 other
units in the city that are all enrolled in
the same exchange. Once in a while, his
apartment relocates while he’s asleep, to
a better or worse neighborhood—depend-
ing on the current market bid for place-
ment in the nice part of town. Some days
Roy opens his front door and sees broken
bottles and syringes. Other times he steps
out into a neighborhood of florists and
high-end coffee. This week Roy’s living
in a trendy spot, dotted with parklets—so
he can’t help believing that everything is
headed in the right direction.
OK. Instead of a “shoot-out,” let’s say
that there was an “exchange of gunfire.”
Strike the word “massacre” entirely, and
also cut some of the wonky stuff about fluc-
tuating water subsidies. In the graf where
he’d written about the clashing ideologies
of the two militias, Roy injects some anti-
septic: The Big-Wheelers are no longer
“militantly antigovernment” but “con-
cerned about regulatory overreach”; the
evidence that the group tried to poison a
city’s water supply is replaced with the
line “They had a cache of potentially toxic
additives.”
An hour later, Roy sends his article back
to the Farm, clasping his hands in mock
prayer. His chest scars are itching again,
so he bites his tongue to distract himself.
Maybe he’ll grab lunch at that new Uzbek
taco joint.
The Farm’s reaction comes faster this
time, with more yelling. A whole new clus-
ter of bots is angry (“media jacka$$”): The
revised lede suggests that this situation is
the result of out-of-control water demand
from smart cities. Plus, Roy’s new head-
line asks whether this is the first skirmish
of the new water wars, and thus invokes
Betteridge’s law (concerning yes/no ques-
tions)—leading to jeers from the mob of
Betteridge bots. Plus, all the bots who were
pissed before are still pissed, and now they
scent blood.
Roy plunges into a third rewrite, this
time staying as close as possible to the
bare facts. What, where, when, how, and
a minimum of why. But there’s nothing
more guaranteed to whip the entire Farm
into a frenzy than a stark recitation of a
sequence of events that makes it way too
obvious who fired the first shot, and the
last. One bot shrieks that the “bRane-deDd
MeedIa” is out to lunch—when going to
lunch is all Roy wants to do.
After a fourth and fifth rewrite go down
in flames, Roy finally stands from his desk
and heads to the staircase.
Soon he’s face-to-face with Josh and
Maven, the Argus’ managing editor and
publisher, who are in their mid-thirties but
look hipper and more exhausted than that.
Josh steeples his hands and says, “We need
to get every story right, no matter what.”
Maven frowns. “Complaints hurt adver-
tising, and we don’t want to drive away sub-
scribers. This is how we pay your salary.”
Josh says, “We need to be responsible”
and “People trust us to be the paper of
record” and “It only takes the slightest
appearance of bias to ruin everything.”
Roy even feels something like
affection when he sees CorruptUSAll
yelling about an obscure
conspiracy theory involving the Secret
Quadrilateral Congress.
These are Roy’s coworkers now.
“But,” Roy says, “I mean, these bots. Congress. These are Roy’s coworkers now.
They’ve always been terrible. But they’re “I went into journalism to help people
getting worse. I can’t make them happy, make sense of the world,” Roy says aloud
whatever I do.” to the glowing live-feed display, and the
“If the job were easy,” says Maven, “it bots keep chattering.
wouldn’t be so important.” At last Roy returns to his open docu-
“We think the bots are evolving,” adds ment, feeling weirdly calm, like he and
Josh. “Something about keeping them in the bots understand each other. This time,
that virtual enclosure, it’s speeding up he writes an article in which it’s clear that
their progress. Maybe in a few years they’ll something happened. There were gunshots.
be able to write the articles by themselves.” People died. There were toxic substances.
Roy’s empty stomach wrings so tight, he Everyone blames everyone. Everybody has
can’t even speak for a moment. grievances, everybody is thirsty. Obfusca-
Then he asks the question. tion wrapped in vagueness, covered with
“Do we keep these bots because we a layer of gibberish.
think they reflect public opinion at large? The Farm gives Roy’s 10th draft a clean
Or do we think that people are so simple- bill of health, and he realizes all the lunch
minded they let obvious bots tell them places have long since closed.
what to think?” Roy gives in to a strange compulsion
“Yes.” Maven lifts an eyebrow. and loads an interface to the Farm onto
“We’re not trying to make your life more his luxpod, so he can keep gazing at the
difficult here,” Josh says. “But this is good feed during his train ride home. He stares
practice in using language with care.” at the rain of commentary while down-
Roy goes back to his desk and—sixth town shrinks away and people around
time—retools the story, which by now him talk about craft beer and clothing.
is late; other major outlets have already By the time Roy reaches his gorgeous new
progressed f rom factua l accou nt to neighborhood, he’s holding the Farm’s
think piece. live feed tenderly, as if carrying home a
Roy finds himself staring at the live feed brand-new pet. 
from the Farm. Certain names pop up over
and over, until Roy feels like he’s getting
used to their personalities as well as their
preoccupations. Roy even feels something
like affection when he sees CorruptUS- Ch a r lie Ja ne A nders (@charliejane)
is the author of The City in the Middle of
All yelling about an obscure conspiracy the Night, out in February, and the Nebula-
theory involving the Secret Quadrilateral winning All the Birds in the Sky.
071
“The nature of these jobs, which often involve heavy physical demands and risk of injury … makes them difficult to fill and has
led to concerns about an ongoing shortage in paid caregivers.” —“Automation in Everyday Life,” Pew Research Center

THE
BRIDIE HELD THE dropper centered over her left eye and couldn’t
see it. She tried shifting it right. Better. But the sparkling whiteness
of her blind spot had spread. Again. She needed to talk with her

THIRD PETAL pharmacist. This prescription wasn’t working. She squeezed the
dropper’s bulb anyway.
After the medicine’s sting faded she ducked into her burnoose
BY N I S I S H AW L and stepped out onto the balcony. Across the street Lillian, her
newest recruit, hung laundry on lines strung from porch roof and
stair railings to branches of the high, dusty bushes that protected
her garden. Bridie waved. Lillian pegged up her brother’s last dia-
per and disappeared for a moment, emerging at Bridie’s gate. Bridie

t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k
lowered her fat bottom onto a plastic chair
and waited for her visitor to climb the two
flights from the street.
Peripheral vision was failing too. When
she heard Lillian’s heavy breath rise above
the echoes in the stairwell she asked, “You
got time before our morning client?” and
gestured at the jug of sun tea on the spool
table beside her.
Lillian came in sight. “Sure. This a new
blend? What you call it?”
“Livin Your Life Like It’s Golden.” Bri-
die listed ingredients as she poured them
both mugs.
“You likin the gig so far?”
“What’s not to like?” Lillian sat in the other
chair. “Gettin paid for changin my own broth-
er’s underpants, cookin and cleanin and carin
for him the way a cheap old machine wouldn’t
know how to do right ... oilin his skin so his
legs don’t chafe where them pants fit him so
tight, feedin him by the spoonful same as if
we was lollin around rich.”
“Well—”
“So it ain’t Federal dollars I get paid in.
So what?”
Some stuff only Federal dollars bought.
Bridie’s medicine, for instance. But Federal
welfare checks took care of most of that sort
of stuff, and she had set up the Five Petals
Care Collective so anything else important
could be covered by trading among them-
selves. She’d spent a lot of time and love on
Thought, the First Petal, before getting around
to organizing, which was the Second Petal,
Action. Worth it. Five Petals Collective pay-
ments were food harvested from seeds they
sprouted and planted, milk and eggs from
animals they raised. Rides. Clothes salvaged
from castoffs. The same rich people whose
trendy whims had made nonautomated care-
giving so expensive provided the collective
with plenty of useful garbage.
Lillian left before the reps from the new
Antitrust Authority arrived. Thank good-
ness she wasn’t around to stir up trouble.
Too soon to be using Reaction, the New
Bedford Rose philosophy’s Fifth Petal. Now
was the time for Observation, the Third
Petal. Then Integration, the Fourth.
The Five Petals of Thought had saved Bri-
die from dying of despair, helped her make
the world a better place. She was sticking
to them. Now and always.
Bridie had been expecting the AA since
the legislation creating them passed,
though naturally it had taken a couple of
months to get a nationwide police depart-
ment—which was what they essentially
were—off the ground.
“Mornin,” she said, leaning over the
balcony’s rusting wrought iron. “Nice uni-
forms.” Though in truth she couldn’t see
anything except a pair of dark green blurs
with pink and brown ovals above. But the
uniforms would be brand-new, and these
bozos were probably proud of them.
“May we come up?” That was the near-
est one. Sounded like a man.
“If the landlord says so.” Scuffing foot-
steps on the stairs proved they’d already
checked.
“I’m Officer Darroli, and this is my part-
ner, Officer Flint.” He smelled like a man.
Bridie took each officer’s hand in turn.
Skin slightly damp with perspiration met
her double clasp. “Any way I can assist you
boys in your duties?”
The one called Flint winced. “Meaning
no disrespect, ma’am, but we hardly ain’t
no boys.”
Bridie smiled and slitted her eyes like a
sleepy toad. “I’m 62. Anyone under 50 seem
like a kid. Now how do I help you find what
you lookin for?”
“Actually, ma’am, it’s you.” Darroli pulled
a phone out and touched his tongue lightly
to the wake-up port. He held it to her face.
“These exceptions you filed for? We hafta
deny them all.”
“All?” She did her best to appear sur-
prised and confused. “Why?”
“Insufficient justification. Most people
in your demographic are happy with no
more than a dozen face-to-face contacts,
and roughly 20 or so virtual.”
“But I’m tryin to keep the neighborhood
together!” Which she knew was the real
reason they were there.
Darroli held out his phone with the
government-sponsored “community build-
ing” app. “Don’t you have Hoodi?”
“I’m not most people.” Bridie ignored
the question. They had her browser his-
tory. They knew what she had and what
she didn’t. “Ain’t you impressed at an old
woman like me stayin so social?”
Unimpressedness flowed off the two men
like chilled air rolling down a mound of dry
ice. For the next 50 minutes they explained
each of the 11 warnings they were now issu-
ing—unironically—for her “unwarranted
monopolization of other people’s social
availability.” When they finally left the bal-
cony, there was barely any time before her
pharmacist stopped taking calls for the day.
Inside, Bridie dialed twice and got
through. Voice only, then a weird animation,
a duck whose beak-flapping didn’t match the
pharmacist’s words: “No other treatments
are currently approved by your insurance.”
Icy panic poured up from her gut. Damage
to her optic nerve was irreversible. “But my
eye pressure was higher last time you tested
me. I filed for the new generic then. What’s
the deal?” she asked the duck. She could
handle how blind she was now. Just about.
The duck quacked silently. A nasty hum
filled the air—her speaker quitting? Loud
clicks, then blessed silence again—and a
chyron running below the duck mime: “Join-
ing Five Petals Care Collective When Secure
Will Reveal Benefits Provider Conspiracy.”
“What?” No response. Three passes for
the message and the call ended.
Someone must be trying to contact her.
Weird method, and they’d stopped so
suddenly—surveillance avoidance, most
likely. Adjusting for the lack of punctuation,
though, she got the gist of their meaning:
She’d bagged another member. Also, com-
ing soon, an explanation for the pharma-
cy’s slowness in sending the proper meds.
She had a few minutes till Lillian expected
Bridie to relieve her at her brother’s bedside.
The picture window’s heavy curtains
were closed to keep in the morning’s cool-
ness. Shadows clogged the room’s corners.
But Bridie’s brain processed large patches
of the darkness as blank and therefore
white. Any more vision loss and she’d be
as much client as worker.
Well. Third Petal. Observation. Bridie
sighed out her sorrow, listening to the
catches in her breath. Felt and noted the
trembling of her hands, the track of her
hot tears.
Then it was time. She stood slowly,
reached for her favorite cane, and walked
the remembered way—toward the door
and out of it—to begin another shift. 
Nisi Shawl (@NisiShawl) is a writer of
science fiction and fantasy short stories and
the author of the novel Everfair. She has also
worked as a home health care aide.
073
“When normalized on a per 1,000-short-ton basis, the estimates indicate that 1,000 tons of recycled material attributes 1.57 jobs,
$76,030 in wages, and $14,101 in tax revenues.” —”Recycling Economic Information Report,” Environmental Protection Agency (2016)

MAXIMUM
Iggy said. He and Jia were climbing down
“J U S T M O V E T H E M , ”
a ladder, her first. Now she’d stopped. Iggy had a big bag over his

OUTFLOW
shoulder and couldn’t fit into the narrow compartment until she
got out of the way.
Fighting back a gag, Jia extended her arm through a curtain of
coils. They were warm and clammy. She squeezed through.
BY ADAM ROGERS Past the coils was a larger space, and the air was cooler. Iggy
scrambled in behind her. “AJ showed you this?” she asked.
Iggy put down the pack, put his hands on his knees. Breathed hard.
“I fell through the membrane coils. AJ had to come get me,” Iggy
said. Grief and fatigue strangled his words. “Come on.”

t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k

 it’s like microliters. It just kind of osmoti-
IGGY DIDN’T KNOW anything about any-
thing back when AJ pulled him out of school.
As a kid, maybe 9 years old, Iggy knew that
the whole world was inside. Home was Build-
ing 8; school was Building 2. One of the teach-
ers told AJ that Iggy had a knack with tools
but not much else, and AJ made Iggy a tech.
AJ showed Iggy the other half of things.
The guts, he called it, every duct, pipe, tube,
and pump that held together the cluster
of buildings and domes. Outside: nothing
left to eat, drink, or breathe. Inside: all the
people, on top of an oozing, respirating clot
of innards. Nobody knew the guts better
than AJ.
One morning about a week ago, AJ hadn’t
woken up. That was it. Iggy would be chang-
ing filters on his own from now on.
A few days later, Iggy had gone out to
swap a HEPA-9 in a little one-room near an
exterior wall, and something had been dif-
ferent. The seal wasn’t pliable, and it had
an almost imperceptible grain. Everyone’s
air filters had HEPA-9s. If something was
wrong with them …
He checked. Air handling: nominal. Partic-
ulates: nominal. Microbiome: nominal. Even
the nominals were nominal. Still.
That night he’d shown up at Jia’s carrying
a bag half his size. “Something bad is get-
ting up here, and it killed AJ,” he’d said. He
could tell she didn’t believe him. It didn’t
matter; Jia worked in the protein reactors,
diving in tanks full of nutrients. Iggy was
going to need her.
 After making sure Jia had her mask on,
“EVERYTHING CONNECTS TO everything,”
Iggy said, helping Jia leap a gap in the cat-
walk. “Filtered airflow, passive and active
water purification, solid waste conversion.
We even recover most of the volatiles and
combustion carbon.”
They shimmied down another ladder. “We
live in a terrarium,” Jia said.
“Well, but, see that red line up there?” he
said. Amid crisscrossing square metal air
handlers, a red hose snaked into and out
of view. “That’s ULW. Unrecoverable Liq-
uid Waste. The last little trickle from every
recovery system in the city.”
“Where does that go?”
“The manual says we recycle so much that
cally exits the wall.” Iggy turned a wheel set
into a metal door, which hissed and chunked.
Jia tried to unsee the biohazard trefoil on
the wall.
“But the guts are pulling instead of push-
ing, and they pulled something in that killed
AJ,” Iggy said. He handed Jia his tablet.
“You’re better at this than me.”
She looked. “Wait, these raw protein
numbers … and this is ULW? A week ago
the inputs stop syncing to the outputs.”
“Yup,” Iggy said.
“A mythical, forgotten drain. And it’s
clogged,” Jia said. “Crap.”
At a hatch set into a concrete floor, Iggy
dropped his bag and unzipped it. “I’m pretty
sure we’re the first people in here since they
built all this,” he said.
“Spectacular,” Jia said. “Also, disgusting.”
From the bag, Iggy handed Jia a respirator.
He took out a body suit made of chemical-
resistant polymer, with weighted booties
and a clear helmet. He climbed in, zipped up,
and attached a carry-bag to his belt.
Jia pulled out an umbilical cable and an air
handler. There were O2 cylinders. She looked
at the gear skeptically. “You sure about this?”
“Well, I’m doing it.”
“All right,” Jia said, her tone shifting to
professional. “If your O2 level gets below 20
percent, I’m going to—”
“Jia.” He smiled and pointed at the breath-
ing gear. Her specialty, not his.
“Copy that,” she said, and plugged the
umbilical into the port at his side. Iggy
locked down his helmet; she checked the
seal. Cool air chugged into the suit.
Iggy opened the hatch. He popped on a light
and saw 10 rungs of a ladder leading into a
blackbrowngray muck.
Jia gave him a thumbs-up and Iggy
climbed down. He could feel the stuff against
his legs, and then chest. He resisted the
instinct to hold his breath as it came up
around the mask and blocked his vision.
After a few minutes, Iggy’s feet touched
a floor. He reached out and felt a wall. That
was good. He shuffled left, keeping the wall
under his hand until he felt a ridge, and the
texture under his glove changed to some-
thing spongy. A drain; a clog.
The stuff came away in clumps, which Iggy
crammed into the carry-bag. The sludge
around him began to shift, and Iggy kept
pulling. He took a step toward the last of
the clotted mass—and felt a tug. He couldn’t
move. The umbilical was stuck. He was at
the end of the line.
Iggy made his bet. He unplugged, reach-
ing for the clog.

WAKING UP WAS a pleasant surprise. He
saw Jia, and that was nice too. “Hey,” he said.
She smiled. “Hey.”
He was lying down in a bed. The sky out-
side the window was yellowish and bright.
Jia stood, walked over. “Your umbilical
went slack, so I hit the autoretract, which
splattered unrecoverable liquid waste all
over me and the room.”
“Gross.” Iggy was groggy, but he got it.
“The biohazard alarms triggered.”
“Flashing lights, everything. Did you
know that was going to happen?”
“I saw the biohazard sign and guessed
the room was instrumented.”
“Well, by the time the response crew
found a room they didn’t know existed,
the ULW was drained and you were gone.”
“I knew it! Kind of.”
She blinked that away. “Your bag of crap
was still there. Cellulose interwoven with
some kind of structural biocide.”
He yelped out a laugh. “Wipes,” Iggy said.
“Antiseptic wipes. People flush them. The
nanotech sort of melts the cellulose.”
Jia shuddered. “While you were knocked
out, three more people reported the same
symptoms as AJ. I told the medtechs to
check their HEPA-9s, and they found some
kind of prion eating the seals. Easy enough
to treat. They’re OK.”
“Wait, so, I was outside, right?”
“Iggy, yes! What the hell, man?”
Iggy put his head back against the clean,
nice-smelling pillow. “The outflow pipes are
so old, no one knows how big they are,” he
said. “AJ was right.”
“So when you unplugged … ?”
“I got flushed,” Iggy said. Iggy knew the
guts better than anyone. 
Adam Rogers (@jetjocko) is a deputy
editor at W I R E D and the author of Proof:
The Science of Booze.
075
“Human enhancement with in-the-body technologies introduces new potential for both individual
opportunity and individual exploitation.” —“Cyborgs, Robots and Society,” Technologies (2018)

COMPULSORY:
A MURDERBOT DIARIES STORY
BY MARTHA WELLS

t h e f u t u r e o f wo r k

IT’S NOT LIKE I haven’t thought about
killing the humans since I hacked my gover-
nor module. But then I started exploring the
company servers and discovered hundreds of
hours of downloadable entertainment media,
and I figured, what’s the hurry? I can always
kill the humans after the next series ends.
Even the humans think about killing the
humans, especially here. I hate mines, and
mining, and humans who work in mining,
and of all the stupid mines I can remember,
I hate this stupid mine the most. But the
humans hate it more. My risk-assessment
module predicts a 53 percent chance of a
human-on-human massacre before the end
of the contract.
“Knobface,” Elane said to Asa. “You’re
not the supervisor.”
Maybe that percentage should have been
higher, the way the three humans on the
observation platform were fighting about
the flow rate. Not that I cared. I was in the
entertainment feed, watching episode 44
of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and
monitoring ambient audio for keywords in
the unlikely event that a human said some-
thing important.
“Those things make my insides creep.”
That was Sekai, looking at me. Nobody likes
SecUnits. Even I don’t like us. We’re part-
human, part-bot constructs, and we make
everybody nervous and uncomfortable.
I didn’t react. I’m in full armor, and I keep
my visor opaque. Also, 98 percent of my
attention was on the episode I was watch-
ing: The colony solicitor’s bodyguard and
best friend had just been crushed under
debris while trying to save a transport mech
trapped in a crash. Were they really going
to kill her off? That sucked.
I didn’t realize anything had happened on
the platform until I heard a strangled yell. I
ran back my video: Asa had turned abruptly
and accidentally bumped into Sekai, knock-
ing her off the platform.
Great. I paused the episode and checked
the monitoring drone down in the shaft. I
couldn’t get a visual, but I tracked the power
signature of Sekai’s suit. She bounced off the
stabilizer wall (ouch) and hit a blade on the
extractor housing. Gravity was lighter in
the shaft, and there was a chance that the
impacts hadn’t—yeah, she was moving. I
isolated her comm signal and heard harsh,
frightened breathing. She had 90 seconds
before that blade moved and dumped her
down to be incinerated in the collectors.
You would think dealing with this would
be my job. But no, my job is: 1) to prevent the
workers from stealing company property,
everything from tools to disposable nap-
kins from the mess hall; 2) to prevent the
workers from injuring and/or killing man-
agement, no matter how tempting the pros-
pect might be; and 3) to prevent the workers
from intentionally harming one another in
ways that might diminish productivity. So
HubSystem’s response to my alert was to
tell me to stay in position.
The mine was run by cheap, venal bastards,
so the nearest safety bot was 200 meters
above us. HubSystem ordered me to stay in
position; SafetyResponder28 was incoming.
It would arrive just in time to retrieve the
smoldering lump formerly known as Sekai.
Asa, realizing what he’d done, was mak-
ing a noise that did uncomfortable things
to the organic parts in my head. Elane was
sobbing. I could have ignored them and gone
back to the episode, but I liked the colony
solicitor’s bodyguard and I didn’t want her
to be dead. Sekai, a human I was technically
responsible for, would be dead soon too.
With my governor module inert, I some-
times do things and I’m not entirely sure why.
(Apparently getting free will after having 93
percent of your behavior controlled for your
entire existence will do weird things to your
impulse control.) Without thinking about it,
I stepped off the edge of the platform.
As I fell down the shaft, I kicked the stabi-
lizer wall to push myself into the lighter grav-
ity well. I landed on the housing above Sekai,
just as HubSystem sent a command to my
governor module that should have flash-fried
my inorganic parts and soft human bits. Ha.
Sekai looked up at me, eyes wide. Her
helmet had cracked (that’s what cut-rate
safety equipment gets you) and her face was
streaked with tears. I initiated a secure audio
link between my armor and her suit, hooked
one hand around the edge of the housing,
and reached down. “We have 45 seconds to
get out of here before we both die,” I said.
She gasped and shoved upward to grab
my arm. As I pulled her against my chest,
the blade cycled and dropped. A blast of heat
and radiation washed over us. Sekai made
an “eep” noise. I wanted to make an “eep”
noise too, but I was busy. I said, “Just hook
your harness to me.”
She fumbled the clips into place and got
them fastened. Now I was free to focus on
phase 2 of this stupid plan. I’d hacked Hub-
System when I was first shipped here. Now
I needed to make it forget what it had just
seen. No—I needed to make this look like
HubSystem’s idea.
By the time I’d climbed the shaft and slung
us both up onto the platform, HubSystem
was convinced that it had ordered me to res-
cue Sekai. I set her on her feet, filtering out
the crying on the comm, and pulled up the
management feed that I wasn’t supposed
to have access to. Good: The supervisors
were puzzled that HubSystem had directed
a SecUnit to save a worker, but figured it was
a productivity issue. Sekai and the others
would be hit with fines for almost clogging
the collectors with her burning body, but it
was better than being dead. I guess.
Elane tried to pull Sekai away, but she
turned back and stumbled toward me.
“Thank you,” she said. It was like she could
see me through my visor, which was a terri-
fying enough thought that my performance
reliability dropped 3 percent.
Asa took her arm gently. “They can’t talk,”
he told her.
She shook her head as her friends steered
her toward the access bridge. “No, it talked.
I heard it.”
Back at my guard station, I started the epi-
sode again. Maybe somebody would save the
colony solicitor’s bodyguard too. 
Martha Wells (@marthawells1) is a New
York Times best-selling author of 23 works
of science fiction and fantasy. This story is a
prequel to The Murderbot Diaries, her Hugo-
and Nebula-award-winning novella series.
077
 Peru,
In the remote high plains of

a red-hot chunk of rock plummeted from the heavens,

making landfall with a tremendous blast.

0 7 9
 Half a world away,

meteorite hunters got word

and rushed to get a piece of the action.

Then things got weird.

space inv ders

a

0 8 0
By Joshuah Bearman and Allison Keeley
Joshua Davis contributed to this story.

A collaboration between WIRED and Epic Magazine.

Photographs by Jake Naughton


On
the morning of September 15, 2007, station I08BO—an infrasound
monitoring post for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty near La Paz,
Bolivia—picked up a series of atmospheric vibrations. It was an
explosion at very high altitude, and there was something streaking
across the sky, heading southwest at 27,000 mph. A few minutes
later, at about 11:45 am, a brilliant fireball flashed over Carancas,
a tiny village at 12,000 feet in Peru’s remote altiplano, a high plain
bounded by the Andes. For those on the ground, this celestial
visitor was the brightest thing anyone had ever seen in the sky.
A local radio host witnessed the blaze descend behind a hill-
top statue of Jesus and rushed to his station to announce the
arrival of a UFO. One villager saw the smoky trail and figured
it must be Superman. Someone else saw a scorpion falling; he
thought it was an antahualla, a mythical creature in local lore
that soars from mountaintop to mountaintop at night, cloaked
in light, menacing those below.
What they all saw was a rock, somewhere between 7 and 12
tons of chondrite studded with pyroxene, olivine, and feldspar,
burning at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It had begun its journey
in the asteroid belt, more than 110 million miles away, floating
between Mars and Jupiter, and it was among the largest mete-
orite arrivals in living memory. The rock was probably not much
bigger than a dinette set, but that was large enough to generate
an exospheric detonation with the energy of a low-yield nuclear
weapon. Then it struck Earth.
Gregorio Urury, a farmer in Carancas, was sitting outside his
small adobe house, taking a break from tending his sheep, when he
felt the impact. He listened, paralyzed, as the sound passed over
him—a low hum that quickly rose into a scream—until the ground
shook. He couldn’t stand up at first. His dogs barked wildly. When
he gathered himself and searched the plain, he saw a column of
dense smoke rising in the distance.
It was the end of the dry season and the land was parched.
The spring storms were about to roll in, and farmers would take
cover indoors for fear of being found by a lightning bolt in the flat
expanse. Urury, like most residents of Carancas, is part of the
indigenous Aymara nation, a group that has lived here for cen-
turies. Their land is hard to farm, contains few minerals, and
has almost no features but for sod brick houses, shepherds, and
their flocks, along with wild herds of vicuña, a more graceful
relative of the llama. There are no fences, and a single dirt road
bisects the plain. Urury’s farm is a modest holding that he had
meant to leave to his children, until they, like so many others,
left their father’s village for the cities.
Urury got on his bicycle and raced toward the smoke. He dis-
covered a crater nearly 50 feet wide. The ground was dusted red,
and a sulphuric smell stung his nose as he peered over the edge of
the pit. The water table in this area is very shallow, only about 5
feet below the surface, and the hole had immediately filled with
dark green water, which was bubbling from the heat. Around
him he saw debris: clay and jagged rock, scattered like shrapnel.
It looked like a bomb had gone off.
Urury borrowed a motorcycle and rode the 7 miles to Desagua-
dero, a town of about 20,000 people, to alert the local police. By
the time they arrived, dozens of people had gathered and were
picking up rock fragments around the crater. Urury and the
police started collecting debris as well. The police chief went
to find Maximiliano Trujillo, the mayor of Carancas, who was at
a celebration for Santa María at a nearby church, and presented
him with a handful of smoking black rocks. “What do you think
it is?” the police chief asked.
By now, panic and confusion had taken hold in some places around
the altiplano. Some thought the plain had combusted and were
waiting for the fire that would engulf them. Others were certain
that the end of days had arrived. People retreated to their houses to
pray with their children. A local barfly named Vincente paused at
the sound of the crash and then ordered another round of Paceña.
Around the world, experts were also confounded. Peter Schultz,
a professor at the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Plan-
etary Sciences at Brown University, first heard of the Carancas
event while attending an impact-crater conference in Montreal.
News reports showed images of the scene, and by midday Schultz’s
voicemail was full of inquiries for comment on what had happened.
Good question. It was unclear. Craters like this are extremely rare.
Even more unusual were reports of a mysterious illness. Within
hours of the impact, it seemed, people were getting sick in Caran-
cas. Urury had already collected several dozen small rocks when his
son called from the city of Tacna and said not to touch them because
they were dangerous. “¡Contaminado!” his son said. The fear spread.
The rocks were somehow toxic, people thought, or radioactive or
just plain cursed. Locals had packed themselves 10 to a truck to see
the crater and were now complaining of headaches and vomiting.
News reports said that livestock were bleeding from their noses,
Moritz Karl, top, grew up in the world
of meteorites. His father is a rare-rock
dealer. Mike Farmer fell in love with space
rocks when he came across them at a gem
show. Previous spread: Robert Ward.
(Karl photographed by Kevin Faingnaert)
and hospitals and health clinics in the area were full of patients.
On the popular meteorite-list listserv, scientists and amateur
enthusiasts alike debated the nature of the Carancas event. Peo-
ple were skeptical about both the illness and the crater itself. The
only way to make a proper determination was to see it in per-
son, collect samples, or retrieve the impact mass. The rock itself
would be enormously valuable, both for scientific inquiry and
also to collectors in the brisk, high-end market for meteorites,
in which a rare, crater-producing landfall could command espe-
cially steep prices. But this crater was in a remote area, difficult
and expensive to reach. And there were only so many people in
the world willing to head to the highlands of Peru at a moment’s
notice to look for things that fell out of the sky.

Across the Atlantic on that same day, Mike Farmer

walked through an olive grove in central
Spain. He scanned the ground in front of
his feet as if he’d lost something. Among the
fallen olives he spotted a small stone, dark and rough. “Oh, my,”
Farmer said, picking it up to look at the black, pitted surface. It
was part of a rare achondrite meteorite that had exploded over
Spain four months earlier, lighting up the evening for the tourists
staying in the surrounding villas. This olive grove sat square in
the area Farmer had calculated was the likely debris field. Rob-
ert Ward, Farmer’s meteorite hunting partner of late, took the
rock and held it up. “Look at that fusion crust,” he said. He could
tell immediately that it was a eucrite, similar to a meteorite that
landed in Brazil in 1923, and likely very valuable.
Ward and Farmer could identify the rock because they were
professional meteorite hunters, members of a small clan of adven-
turers, most of whom make their livings retrieving specimens
for the rarified trade in extraterrestrial mineralogy. They trawl
exposed terrain for weeks or longer looking for long-fallen space
rocks, and snap into action to travel across the planet whenever
a fireball appears over some far-flung place. Ward always keeps a
packed duffel that includes kits for desert or jungle or whatever
terrain might await him. (Meteorites are not often kind enough
to land in the pleasant orchards of Iberian hill country.)
Between them, Farmer and Ward have found thousands of mete-
orites all over the world: in Argentina, India, Kenya, Morocco.
Deserts are good for meteorite hunting; flat, dry, and unchang-
ing, the sandy surfaces can yield ancient finds. At the time of this
trip, Farmer and Ward had been working together for about a year,
having first teamed up in 2006 on an expedition to the Arabian
Peninsula, where they discovered, among other things, a beau-
tifully feldspathic piece of the moon in a desolate stretch of the
Dhofar desert, deep in southern Oman.
Meteorite hunting attracts a type. It requires study, dedication,
and a tolerance for dirt and disappointment. It can be monoto-
nous. You spend a lot of time looking at the ground and you never
know when something might catch your eye, so you are always
looking. (Farmer says he once found two meteorites while poop-
ing.) But the drudgery can pay off dramatically. In Oman, Farmer
and Ward drove in circles. They argued. And they were coming
up empty in every sense, running low on gas more than 100 miles

0 8 3
from the nearest outpost, when Ward wandered away from the
truck, eyes on the ground, and returned through a cloud of dust
with a big smile and a lunar meteorite that had formed 3.9 billion
years ago sitting in the palm of his hand. Ward reckoned it was
the 40th moon rock ever found on Earth.
Ward and Farmer make an odd pair. Farmer is liberal and talks
incessantly, while Ward is politically conservative and stoic, hav-
“Meteorite
ing grown up tending cattle on his father’s ranch in Bullhead City,
Arizona. Farmer is a big guy, 6'<2" and 250 pounds and sort of sham-
obsession is
bling in his field dress of cargo shorts and floppy hat. Ward wears
pricey expedition gear, and what you might call his “civvies” are
like a spiritual
full-on cowboy regalia, with pearl-buttoned flannel shirts and
jeans accessorized by a handsomely brimmed hat and matching
calling. It’s
belt, holster, and boots, all custom fashioned from stingray leather.
Ward’s stories open with lines like “I was down in the bunkhouse
much deeper
with an old cow-puncher named Strawberry …” and end with him
skinning a mountain lion and eating it. He is handsome in that
than a career,”
all-American mode and likes a good night of two-stepping down
at Matt’s Saloon in Prescott, Arizona, where he typically had no
Robert Ward
trouble attracting women. The problem was keeping them once he
started talking about meteorites—until, that is, Ward met his wife,
says. “It’s
Anne Marie, who doesn’t mind his love of rocks. Ward is an experi-
enced outdoorsman, having spent weeks in the Arizona desert alone
a God-given
with just a bedroll growing up. He was fine with not showering for
a week at a time in the Omani desert, while Farmer did his best to
directive.”
dry bathe three times a day with baby powder out of the back of
their off-road vehicle. Farmer thought Ward smelled too “rugged,”
while Ward thought Farmer looked insane carrying his oversized
rolling luggage through Arabia’s Empty Quarter. just a sinkhole. There were images of fragments, but they looked
But they had complementary skills. Farmer would go sleuthing like chondrite, and that made no sense. Chondrites are among
in the archives of Arizona State University’s Center for Meteorite the most fragile of space rocks. They usually burn up or explode
Studies to find evidence of an undiscovered landfall in Canada, in the atmosphere. They also don’t make craters. Karl smoked
and Ward could build a rig that trailed an 11-foot metal detector and looked at the screen, uncertain. Ward was undaunted; he
behind a combine, which is how they unearthed $1 million in pal- wanted to see it firsthand.
lasite fragments from several square miles of Alberta farmland. They knew they had to move fast. Speed is vital in the case of a
And they are also aligned in their mutual thrill of the hunt. “This witness fall—when a meteor is seen hitting the Earth—because
is what I live for,” Farmer says. “Not just the meteorite, but also rival groups will be vying for the same otherworldly prize. At
the acquisition. I mean it’s treasure hunting.” times the competition includes a French father-son duo, a Rus-
They were accompanied in Spain by Moritz Karl, a fellow space sian team known for long hunts in places accessible only by heli-
rock enthusiast from Germany. Karl was quiet, a chain-smoking copter, and a pair from Oregon who hunt with what they claim
bookworm born into what counts as a Brahmin family in the min- is a team of meteorite-sniffing dogs. It can be a shifty business,
eralogical world. His father is a rare-rock dealer in Frankfurt, and and distrust is common. Once, before they teamed up and were
used to bring his teenage son to Libya to search for meteorites. both hunting the same landfall in Kenya, Ward thought Farmer
In college, Karl studied engineering, but he later returned to the was having him followed—until he realized the tail was hired
family business and discovered a deeper love for the field. by someone else altogether.
After a day of poking around olive groves, the group retreated Roaming the same olive groves in Spain, in fact, was another
to their hotel. They’d said their goodnights when Farmer first saw rival hunter: Robert Haag, a flamboyant self-described “space
the reports from Carancas. He called Ward. “Did you see what cowboy” who had made appearances on both the cover of Sky
happened in Peru?” he asked. “Come down to the lobby.” It was & Telescope and David Letterman’s TV show. Ten years earlier,
midnight by then, but Ward hurried downstairs to huddle over Haag had been Farmer’s mentor. The veteran hunter had beaten
Farmer’s computer and look at the images showing up on the mete- his former protégé to Spain, and Farmer knew he’d see the news
orite forums. A crater in the middle of an empty plain. Photos of of the new landfall. They’d have to mobilize. “Guys,” Farmer said,
villagers posing with black rocks in their palms. And reports of “let’s start packing for Peru.”
witnesses falling ill, struck by some invisible ailment. Both the mystery and the money were irresistible, although not
Farmer was skeptical; he thought it might be a hoax. The forums equally between them. Farmer is the more mercantile hunter; find-
were full of theories: It was a spy satellite, it was volcanic, it was ing meteorites provides his main income, and he sees the rocks
as a rare commodity, often worth more than their weight in gold.
Ward is independently wealthy and keeps a lot of what he finds
for his impressive collection, which is housed in a biometrically
locked display room at his ranch outside Prescott. His business card
says ROBERT WA R D, PL A N ETA RY SCI ENCE FI ELD R ESE A RCH,
and he likes contributing to the scholarship of meteorites, often
donating pieces of his finds to the Chicago Field Museum, where
he is a volunteer field researcher.
He is also flat-out awed by space rocks. “Here you are,” he says,
“holding in your hand a piece of some planet that didn’t make it.”
Sometimes Ward will stand in his collection room and let his mind
wander to the eons compressed in those rocks, relics of a primordial
time, the oldest of which predate the solar system itself. “Meteor-
ite obsession,” he says, “is like a spiritual calling.” He was 13 when
he saw his first fireball cross the Arizona sunset. He remembers
the cherry-red highlights, the dark center, the plasma dissipat-
ing around it, and ever since that moment he has felt compelled
to hunt them. “It’s a much deeper calling than a career,” he says.
“It’s a God-given directive.”
One of the first people to make space rocks into a
life’s work and living was a man named Harvey
H. Nininger, a biology professor at McPherson
College, in Kansas, who in 1923 read an article
about meteorites in The Scientific Monthly and became an instant
convert. A few years later, Nininger left the stability of his ten-
ured post, bought a Ford Model T, and set out on a string of inter-
national journeys looking for landfalls. Nininger traveled with
his wife, Addie, an equal enthusiast, and together they collected
samples and recorded the “memories of startled laymen” who
had observed “blazing streams of fire lighting the landscape.”
Nininger’s many books about his travels helped create popular
interest in finding meteorites. It was one of these books—Find a
Falling Star—that the 13-year-old Ward discovered in the science
stacks at the Prescott library the day after he saw that fireball in
the western sky. Ward borrowed the book a dozen times, worry-
ing the pages. When he wasn’t roping cattle or gunsmithing with
his father, Ward spent his free time searching for rocks among
the sagebrush and saguaros.
Ward’s father started taking him to gem and mineral shows,
and one day young Ward made his way into the booth of Debra
Heidelar, a prominent meteorite dealer, who heard a voice saying
“Excuse me, ma’am” but couldn’t figure out where it was coming
from until she looked down, below her counter, and saw a tiny
cowboy asking very politely if he could please buy a piece of the
Canyon Diablo iron. Heidelar handed Ward a nice, sculpted piece
as big as his hand and has been selling to (and occasionally buy-
ing from) Ward ever since.
Farmer was an adult when he became captivated by the allure of
meteorites. Every year, merchants and fanatics of fossils, gems, and
minerals of all kinds converge on Tucson, Arizona, for an interna-
tional gem and mineral show that takes up every available hotel room
in the city. In 1996 Farmer was living in Tucson, and on a whim one
day he walked to the Holiday Inn Express near his apartment and
happened into the room where Robert Haag had a makeshift shop.
Farmer was fascinated. He’d grown up in Show Low, a tiny town
in the Arizona mountains, with just his mom and sister, a tough
upbringing he brightened by looking for Anasazi pottery shards in
the wilds behind the house. Farmer would collect them in a cigar
box with other finds, like his lucky wheat penny, rabbit’s foot, and
rocks he liked. Farmer surveyed Haag’s display at the gem show and
looked at all the little pieces of the galaxy that had somehow wound
up in plastic bins, labeled with prices. Farmer was hooked. These
finds were like his pottery shards, elevated to cosmic grandeur.
Farmer had been aimless for years, ever since he’d left the Army.
That’s where he had met his wife, Melody. She was a radio oper-
ator on the ships where Farmer worked as a Spanish translator,
eavesdropping on drug flights coming from Colombia. Farmer
would make excuses to come out of the secure facility and flirt
with her, and their romance unfolded from there. After the Army,
he tried being a hotshot firefighter but thought it too grueling. He
worked retail jobs and then went back to school. He and Melody
were living in an apartment that cost $400 a month when Farmer
happened across Haag’s hotel showroom. Farmer thought about
how, when he was a kid, his mother had looked in the cigar box
of treasures he carried around and said, “I hope you make some
money off those one day.” He pulled out his checkbook and bought
a fragment of pallasite for $70.
The check bounced.
Farmer spent the next few weeks dodging phone calls from Haag’s
wife while he came up with the money to pay them. Eventually he
did, and Haag took Farmer under his wing. Farmer announced to
Melody that he was dropping out of school, but not before he could
redirect his student loans toward meteoritic investment. “This is
the silliest thing I’ve heard in a long time,” she told him. Melody
picked up odd jobs while Farmer followed the news for any hint of
a meteorite sighting. Money was slow to materialize.
Farmer remembers a lot of yelling during those years; Melody
recalls just being concerned about the whole enterprise and wor-
ried about spending the little money they had on “rocks.” Then
Farmer bought a ticket to Morocco and came back with a lunar
stone in the shape of an orange slice that sold for $79,000. He
bought a car and used the rest as a down payment on a house. “I
didn’t say a word after that,” Melody recalls.
Moritz Karl thought his father, one of the world’s foremost gem
cutters, was crazy for collecting what looked at first like weathered
pebbles. But then he watched his father split them open and saw
how they revealed their true selves. “Meteorites are traumatized
by their journey to Earth,” Karl says. “But inside, they are wonder-
ful.” The face of an iron meteorite, washed with nitric acid, reveals
a tight mosaic of metallic etchings. Open up a chondrite, the most
common form of stony meteorite, and you see spangled stardust. A
well-cut pallasite can be polished to look like royal silver studded
with jewels. The beauty, Karl says, “is not obvious at first, but it is
there, waiting for you.” There are pieces of the Fukang meteorite,
found in northwest China in 2000, that when held up to light shine
like the stained-glass windows in Tours Cathedral—if the stained
glass had been forged in volcanoes on planets that disintegrated 4
billion years ago. In 2008 a piece of Fukang was valued at $2 million.
But such finds don’t happen every day. Meteorites can be a tough
business, even for an experienced hand. There were times when
0 8 5
Farmer had to borrow money to make it through a few lean sea-
sons. (It can be a tricky trade when sometimes all your assets are
as illiquid as they come, in the form of rocks.) Farmer and Melody
were also trying to start a family but were having trouble. Farmer
tried the stock market, but he lost most of what he’d earned. Mel-
ody suggested that he turn his focus back to meteorites. Some-
thing was bound to fall from the sky.
People have always looked to the stars for meaning
and destiny. And can you blame them? There
was danger in the darkness, while the constel-
lations provided security, marking time and
guiding voyages. Ever since the first astronomers chronicled the
traffic of the firmament, the historical record is full of those who
appealed to the heavens for signs and found them in stars and
supernovae, orbital ice, and errant rocks.
The Aztecs identified the god Quetzalcoatl with the planet Venus
and believed that it forecast the future. The Romans venerated a
meteorite they referred to as the Needle of Cybele and attributed
a surprise victory over Hannibal to their possession of this inter-
planetary amulet. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the providential
appearance of Halley’s Comet just before William the Conqueror’s
victory at the Battle of Hastings. Of course, arbitrary suffering was
also attributed to celestial phenomena. “Wandering stars” have
been blamed for the fall of Jerusalem (66 AD, advance warning),
the eruption of Vesuvius (79 AD), and a London plague (1665). Pope
Callixtus III is said to have excommunicated Halley’s Comet itself
as an “instrument of the devil.”
In the days after the Carancas meteorite struck the altiplano,
some people chose to see the visitation as a sign that there would
be a good year, but more said the opposite. People asked Maxi-
One man who
saw it fall thought
he’d seen a UFO.
A boy took a photo.
Villagers figured it
must be Superman.
Someone else
said it was a
mythical creature.
0 8 6
miliano Trujillo, the mayor, for guidance. Trujillo had been elected
only recently and was the type of leader who respected tradition.
He heard grievances, marched in local parades, and presided over
ancient rituals in the fields. He was popular, a politician people
believed in. Yet now he felt unprepared.
It didn’t help that people were getting sick. The hospital in Desa-
guadero was treating people for nausea, vomiting, and headaches.
Rumors started to spread. Trujillo knew some of this arose from
superstition, but he took the matter seriously. He did think it was
strange that even the police who had visited the site became sick.
News reports said authorities were considering declaring a
state of emergency. The altiplano is normally a forgotten place, a
distant province with little importance in the capital, Lima, but
now the national government was paying attention. Scientists
came. The Red Cross arrived, took blood samples, and sent them
to Lima for analysis. Some experts offered an explanation for the
sickness: Arsenic in the water table had been heated and vaporized
by the impact energy and sent into the air as a gas. Luisa Macedo,
a geological engineer from Arequipa, visited the site and sought
to put the community’s fears to rest. There were no spirits, she
said. The crater was not dangerous.
Trujillo tried to calm his citizens. He convened a meeting at
la casa comunal, a bare compound with stone walls—a rarity in
the village. Nearly 800 people, almost all the people of Carancas,
arrived. Around Trujillo were about a dozen village elders. The
mayor said that he’d met with scientists, and they’d explained
that a meteorite had fallen. Some people accepted this. Others
were unconvinced.
Trujillo understood the collective psychology at work, and in
front of the assembly he asked Marcial Laura Aruquipa, the local
shaman, to prepare a sacrifice. Aruquipa was one of two shamans
left in Carancas, and he felt gratified to be needed again. Aruquipa’s
assessment was that whatever had arrived had turned the land
malignant, and that to restore equilibrium among the deities the
thing to do was to offer a sacrifice and pray.
As a practical measure, the community also decided to build a
fence around the crater, to protect it and the people. Trujillo told
everyone to sign up for 12-hour guard shifts, night and day, chang-
ing hands on the sixes. Shirking duty would cost you a sheep. We
need to be vigilant, Trujillo said. He wasn’t sure about what exactly.
Saturday, September 29, Farmer, Ward, and Karl
On
arrived in Desaguadero. The town is split by a
river, marking the border between Bolivia and
Peru. The team had flown into La Paz and taken a
taxi to the altiplano. They walked the river’s concrete bridge, which
was lined with Aymaran women in bowler hats and braids selling
dried corn, peanuts, and coca leaves. It was midmorning, and they
could see the Ancohuma, or Janq’u Uma, the densely glaciated 21,082-
foot crown of the Cordillera Real, the eastern ridge of the Andes.
Ward loves the romance of antiquity, and now they were ventur-
ing into the realm of the Inca. He’d reflected at times about how
much of human history is fleeting, how civilizations rise and fall
from war, weather, and the flaws of human nature. The Inca had
the largest empire in the world at the turn of the 16th century;
After the meteorite
landed, the local
shaman, Marcial
Laura Aruquipa,
was called in
to assess the
situation and to
make a sacrifice
to the gods.
three decades later they were gone. Even the Andes began their
tectonic rise only 25 million years ago, but Ward knew the rock
he and his colleagues were looking for was once illuminated by
the infant sun—a smaller, brighter memory of the mature star we
see today. Ward bought some coca leaves, filled his pockets, and
stuck a pinch in his cheek.
On the far side of the bridge, they came to a battered border control
outpost. Inside, Peruvian police were surprised. Farmer’s Spanish
was still pretty good from his Army days, so he did the talking. He
had a high-pitched American accent, but when Farmer said they
came to find a meteorite, the police quickly understood and agreed
to take them to the spot. They hustled the group into two SUVs and
sped off for the crater. The police were friendly, which Farmer took
to mean they knew there was money to be gleaned from the gringos.
He made sure not to reveal that they were carrying $30,000 in cash.
Having that kind of money could be dangerous in remote places.
As they drove they got a sense of just how remote this area was.
There was a reason Carancas could not be seen on Google Maps.
The altiplano was a lawless frontier, the police said. “Watch out for
the village people,” they added, warning of occasional instances
of frontier justice. When the Aymara didn’t want to wait for the
police, they’d been known to burn suspected criminals alive in the
fields. “You need protection,” one of the cops said.
Farmer took all that with a grain of salt. He suspected the “protec-
tion” would be offered at an inflated rate. What he didn’t know was
that his onetime mentor and current rival, Robert Haag, had just fled
this very place. The veteran hunter had arrived a day earlier, rented
a car, attached a portable PA system to the roof, and driven around
broadcasting an offer to buy meteorite fragments. It was a some-
what inelegant technique that attracted a lot of attention. Haag was
essentially advertising what Farmer wanted to hide: that he was a
rich yanqui with a wad of cash. At the end of his first day, Haag felt
that he had put himself in what he called a “seriously dangerous”
situation, and when he tried to leave he found his car surrounded
by locals with crowbars. Somehow Haag evaded the angry throng
and hurried back to Bolivia. On the road back to La Paz, he proba-
bly passed Farmer, Ward, and Karl heading the opposite direction.
When the trio arrived at the crater, they saw a makeshift fence
of wire mesh on wooden stakes, with a single guard in his bowler
and brown shawl. Farmer approached the guard while Ward hung
back. Karl hung farther back, smoked, and said little.
“That’s a big hole,” Farmer said in Spanish. “We came a long
way to look at that.”
“Why?” the guard asked.
“To understand what this is.”
Farmer could see that the guard was wary of both him and the
authorities. “They just drove us here,” Farmer said, waving at the
police. “We’re not with them.”
The guard motioned for Farmer to go inside the fence. He waved
Ward and Karl over, and they all walked up the incline and stood
at the edge of a fresh meteor crater for the first time in their lives.
Ward looked at the ejecta layer, a spread of clay and mud and pul-
verized asteroid that fanned out for 400 yards, mostly on one
side, showing the angle of impact, and thought: “Oh my God, this
thing is for real.”
Karl and Farmer were equally excited. They found a few frag-
ments and recognized the veins streaking the surface that memo-
rialized the rock’s fiery journey. The samples were shot through
with little bubbles of preplanetary dust, identifying this landfall
definitively as a chondrite. They knew that what they were seeing
was scientifically shocking. Planetary geologists had been saying
that a chondrite crater was impossible, and yet here they were,
looking at it—the only known impact of its kind in recorded history.
“No amount of money can replace the feeling of finding a rock
that was in space two days ago,” Ward says. “It’s indescribable.”
Ward started wandering the edges of the crater with a metal
detector, while Karl searched the debris field. As usual, Ward
was the first to find a small fragment, but as soon as he held it up
a grandmotherly local woman who had appeared nearby pointed
at it, as if she wanted a closer look, and when he handed it over she
slid it into her skirt and ran away. But most of the Aymara were
happy to sell the gringos fragments they’d collected. Each piece
was worth a little money, but the real prize was at the bottom of
that crater. Or so the hunters hoped: The meteorite must have been
many metric tons, but they couldn’t see it because of the water.
Ward climbed down the crater for a better look. Because of the
altitude—the plain stands 12,550 feet above sea level—he was hav-
ing trouble breathing and chewed coca leaves, as the locals did, to
acclimate. Even at the water line he saw nothing; the surface was
an opaque green murk. This crater was 20 feet deep in places, and
Ward quickly guesstimated the volume of water. “We’re going to
need some real equipment to pump this dry,” he said.
Farmer led the group back to Desaguadero—Carancas had no
proper accommodations—and booked the nicest place they could
find; it was $4 a night. At a restaurant with an inviting display of
rotisserie chickens, they sat down to a giddy dinner. The food was
excellent and kept coming—pollo a la brasa and trout from Lake
Titicaca—and talked about what they’d seen. If they could get that
thing, they knew, it would be a career-defining recovery, a glori-
ous entry in the great ledger of meteorite hunting.
But they had to move fast. Chondrite is porous, and depending
on the composition it’s liable to disintegrate in water. They needed
to pump out the pit as soon as possible. Luckily, Mayor Trujillo
had approached them earlier in the day. He didn’t seem worried
that the crater posed any danger, but he still had questions. The
government hadn’t reassured the locals. “We can help dispel the
fears,” Farmer said, “and share whatever the rock is worth.” Tru-
jillo said that he was open to this idea, but his responsibility was
to present their offer to the town. There would have to be trans-
parency. “Come to the casa comunal tomorrow morning,” Trujillo
said. They would have to convince the Aymara.
The courtyard filled up quickly. Farmer, Ward, and
Karl arrived by taxi around noon and found
more than 100 people waiting for them. The
women were on one side, men on the other,
with elders between. The casa comunal’s adobe bricks were red
from the local soil. The Aymara skirts and shawls were full of
color. Trujillo was there, presiding. Farmer had no idea how they
would be received and had an anxious thought: I hope the pitch-
forks don’t appear. He told the taxi to wait for them.
 Farmer rose to talk, while Ward and Karl hung back. Ward didn’t
like being so visible and worried that Farmer’s approach could
backfire. Karl sat on a low wall and smoked.
Farmer began by explaining the unbelievable odds that had led to
this moment. “This rock traveled through all of space and somehow
wound up exactly here,” he said. “That makes this place special.”
Farmer spoke in Spanish, which was then translated into Aymara.
He said that something important might be hidden beneath the
water, that he and his friends wanted to preserve what remained
of the rock for science and the community. But they needed to
drain the crater now, before it was too late.
“If we lift it, will it stir up the poison?” one Aymara man asked.
“No,” Farmer said. “It’s not poisonous.”
There were more comments along these lines. Cows were sick.
Chickens had stopped laying eggs. Many villagers were still con-
vinced this was a sinister arrival.
Farmer wasn’t the best candidate for soothing superstitious
fears. He considered religion a weakness and had hated church
since childhood. Still, he was respectful toward the Aymara and
tried to be reassuring. People talked about their sick friends and
family members. Farmer said he understood why people were
afraid but tried to explain that the rock was not dangerous. This
thing, he said, is an opportunity.
Trujillo had come to agree. He’d started thinking that maybe
Carancas had been visited by good fortune. If this crater was so
unusual, he thought, maybe it could be an attraction. He was thinking
big. They could build a museum. And pave the road to a new tourist
destination in a place that had none. Maybe they could even cre-
ate a sightseeing zone with some Inca sites. And, of course, they’d
get some money from the meteorite itself. When the conversation
turned transactional, the Aymara complained that Peruvian offi-
cials had a way of stealing their money. They wanted the hunters
to deal only with the Aymara elders and pay with cash. In other
words, don’t cut deals with the authorities or police. Farmer agreed.
An elder stepped into the center of the circle and said to Farmer:
“You can go now.”
“OK,” Farmer said, confused.
“What’s going on?” Ward asked as they walked out of the
main square.
“I think they’re going to vote,” Farmer said.
They waited outside, beside their taxi. Eventually the Aymara
all filed out of the casa comunal.
“What happened?” Farmer asked.
It was the taxi driver who figured it out first. “They agreed to lift
the rock,” the driver said. “But only if the spirits agree.”
The next day, their taxi joined a long caravan of motorcycles,
cars, and bicycles heading for the crater. Several hundred people
turned out to see Aruquipa, the shaman, set up a small altar of
reeds at the edge of the impact zone. He added bundles of dried
flowers and spices and chanted while the villagers placed candy,
coins, and coca leaves on the makeshift altar.
We do not know what has just arrived, the shaman sang in
Aymaran. Don’t punish me.
The shaman set fire to the coca leaves, which caught quickly
and ignited the rest of the altar. To ensure a plentiful harvest,
the shaman might normally offer a llama heart as sacrifice. Now
he needed something more powerful to ward off evil. He pulled a
llama fetus from a bag. The animal’s downy fur was matted and
dried. The wind whipped ash and sparks from the altar as Aru-
quipa held up the sacrifice for the spirits to see, threw it on the
fire, and made a plea: Pachamama, forgive me.
As Farmer watched the ritual, he felt his old complaint about
religion—that it preys on fear—rise in him. But if it’s going to get
the rock out of the ground, he thought, let’s offer a llama to the
gods. Ward took a different view, being both a God-fearing man
and a believer in science. His was an ecclesiastic cosmos, spirited
by the sheer wonder of creation—and destruction. Some meteor-
ites are full of organic compounds, like amino acids and sugars,
and astrobiologists think this might be how the chemical building
blocks of life arrived on Earth. Asteroids may or may not giveth,
but we do know that they taketh away, via cataclysmic cosmic
bombardment. In Ward’s line of work, he can’t help but think
“This rock
traveled
through space
and wound
up here,” Mike
Farmer said.
“That makes
this place
special.”
that Armageddon will arrive in the lithic form from space. “In
the ongoing game of cosmic pool,” he says, “the white ball hasn’t
knocked us into the corner pocket yet, but it’ll happen.” Maybe in
our lifetime, he says, or maybe not. “Or maybe it will all be over
two minutes from now.”
As Ward is quick to note, there are plenty of “near Earth asteroids”
with uncomfortably close orbits that could end human civilization.
Just last April, a massive asteroid called 2018 GE3 was discovered
only hours before it passed so close to Earth that it was nearer to
us than the moon. “Statistically,” Ward says, we’re “about 20,000
years overdue” for a decent-sized cosmic knock. At times, Ward
sees his work as helping to protect the planet. And part of his hope
Joshuah Bearman (@joshbearman) is a cofounder of Epic Magazine.
He wrote about the Silk Road drug case in issues 23.05 and 23.06.
Allison Keeley is a freelance journalist based in Bacalar, Mexico.
0 8 9
 The village
of Carancas
sits on the
high altiplano
of Peru at
an altitude
of about
12,000 feet.

0 9 1
in recovering this rock was to learn more about chondrite impacts.
Aruquipa fanned the flames. The smoke kept rising. After a
few minutes the small altar had burnt away. The shaman stood
up and looked around. He knew the spirits could be selfish and
were easily disturbed. But after a moment of silence, the spirits
had no anger. Pachamama had spoken: They were free to move
the water and take the rock.
A heavy-duty pump roared to life. It had been brought in by flat-
bed truck from Desaguadero. The machinery was massive, loud,
and smelled like diesel, but within a few minutes it was already low-
ering the water line in the crater. Farmer and Ward were watching
from just outside the fence and could barely contain their excite-
ment: If there was a main mass still intact down there, they were
about to set eyes on an incredible find.
As the pump chugged along, more cars arrived. The area was
now thick with people: residents, local politicians, and even offi-
cials from Puno, the regional capital, 235 miles away. A contingent
of police from Desaguadero also arrived. Farmer noticed one guy,
apparently a politician, standing on a truck with a loudspeaker,
like a traveling firebrand on campaign. Some of the police were
not the same ones he’d seen before. The politician was gesturing
and shouting through the loudspeaker. Farmer couldn’t make
out what was being said, but dark murmurs spread through the
crowd. Then the pump stopped.
Commotion ensued, and without the din of the pump, Farmer
could now hear the factions arguing. Regional officials told the
locals that everything in the ground belonged to them. Local offi-
cials protested. Paperwork was displayed. Paperwork was swatted
away. Trujillo was exasperated. Police declared, “No one may touch
the area.” An Aymaran villager yelled back: “This is not yours!” At
the comunal, the Aymara had decided among themselves that they
would share whatever wealth might come from the crater evenly.
Now there were outsiders here. The Aymara felt betrayed. The yell-
ing spread. It wasn’t clear anymore who was in charge, if anyone.
The crater was almost empty. The prize was almost in reach.
Ward decided he would turn the machine back on himself. “That’s
a bad idea,” Farmer told him. The crowd was riled up and the police
were on edge, but Ward started climbing the fence to get at the
pump anyhow.
This did turn out to be a bad idea. People in the crowd turned their
shouting toward Ward. Now the focus was on the three strangers,
and Farmer could tell they were not wanted. The orator with the
bullhorn started denouncing “the foreigners.” Just like that, the
scene had turned. “We gotta go,” Farmer said. The rock had gone
from spiritual totem to apple of discord. No one was afraid of the
rock anymore; everyone wanted it for themselves. If it was even still
there. As the crowd argued, the crater slowly refilled with water.
When Farmer, Ward, and Karl got back to Desagua-
dero, the police were waiting. “We need you
to come to the station,” an officer said. Ward
couldn’t understand what the police said to
Farmer in Spanish, but they looked serious, and he could tell from
Farmer’s expression that it wasn’t good. They were escorted to
police headquarters, where they were ordered into a room and
Ward has a display case
in his home where
he keeps fragments of
the meteorite that
fell in Carancas.
greeted by a man in uniform waiting behind his desk. Someone
shut the door behind them.
“Are you enjoying your time in Peru?” he asked.
“Uh, sure,” Farmer answered in Spanish. “It’s beautiful here.”
“You’re very far from the United States,” the officer pointed out.
“It’s not good to cause problems when you are far from home.”
“We’re not trying to cause problems,” Farmer said. “We’re just
collecting rocks for scientific research.”
“What authorization do you have to operate here?” the officer
asked abruptly.
“What kind of authorization do I need?” Farmer asked gamely.
Farmer was pretty certain Peru did not forbid their activity,
but the legality of taking meteorites out of a country is often a
question, and hunters are easily accused of smuggling. Ward sees
meteorites as gifts to humankind, a scientific treasure for all, and
yet the moment you pick them up they are converted into com-
merce. So it is a semi-licit or semi-illicit field, depending on your
perspective. Antiquities laws don’t always apply to meteorites,
but sometimes they are applied anyhow, and some countries have
specific rules for space material while others don’t.
It’s usually better if there are laws on the books, because if not,
new “laws” can be invented on the spot, by a capricious author-
ity, in a tiny police station on some distant desert plain. This
happened on one of Ward and Farmer’s later trips to Oman: They
were arrested, tried, and sentenced for illegal mining, and spent
54 days in jail, the first month in isolation but for interrogations,
eating (as they described it) “rat bone soup” while listening to
people being tortured through the walls.
As far as Farmer could tell, they were being accused of attempt-
ing to steal the cultural patrimony of Peru. It was even more wor-
rying when their passports were confiscated. The interrogation
continued for more than an hour, and the questions became more
aggressive. Karl was concerned about their safety. He’d never been
in trouble before. “You don’t know what you’ve done,” the officer
said, darkly. “You’ve stirred up the people.”
He told them the indigenous people were angry because of
the gringos and their money and the conflict that followed them
here. Rumors were already spreading among the Aymara that
the gringos were going to take the rock, or that Trujillo had sold
it to them, or that they had already stolen it. “What right do you
have?” the officer asked. “This is not your country.”
It was a fair point. They were, in fact, strangers abroad. Their
entire practice entails showing up in a foreign land, hoping to
find some extraterrestrial arbitrage. It’s not like making off with
the Elgin Marbles or ancestral bones—what they came for wasn’t
there a week ago—but they were outsiders and they were mid-
dlemen, which creates its own ethical issue. They pay less than
 the rocks are worth, of course. But if someone didn’t show up and
identify the value, the rocks would be worth nothing to anyone.
“We’re watching you,” the officer said, eventually declaring the
questioning over. He returned the men’s passports and had them
escorted back to their hotel. Farmer wanted to leave immediately. By
that time, it was night, and the concrete border bridge they crossed
Rumors were from Bolivia just a hundred yards away was closed. “We need to
get to that border tomorrow as soon as it opens,” Farmer said.
already spread- At first, Ward was bewildered. “We didn’t do anything wrong,”
he said. He had gotten close to unearthing a rock that shouldn’t
ing among the be here. He wanted to own a piece of that impossibility. But things
started to look even worse when, defying the police’s warning,
Aymara that the group left the hotel and scoped out the border checkpoint.
They noticed one of the officers, now in plain clothes, following
the gringos them. “Nice night out,” the man said to Farmer. “So where do you
think you are headed?” Farmer thought he saw more police in
were going to plain clothes. “Just going for a stroll,” Farmer said. Back in their
rooms, they started packing. Now they knew they were being
take the rock watched. Even Ward was alarmed. They were biding their time
and hoping there wouldn’t be a knock at the door.
for themselves. That knock came at 4 am. Farmer opened his hotel room door
to find two officers with a new message. “Give us $2,000,” one
They were of them said. Farmer argued with them, and one of the officers
smiled and said, “That’s fine. We’ll get it all.” The officers won-
growing angry. dered aloud how the gringos thought they were going to get

0 9 3
past the police at the border. And they said the national police
were already coming from Lima to arrest them. Farmer knew
the situation was getting dangerous. There were conflicting
authorities, maybe working together, maybe not. Some corrupt,
maybe some not. Farmer was worried they could get fleeced and
thrown in prison. From his room, Ward could hear something
was going on and started hiding his money and the few speci-
mens they’d collected.
Farmer and Ward woke up Karl, who had slept through the
whole thing. “Dawn is an hour from now,” Farmer said. “Be ready
to make a run for it.” (The police chief declined to comment on
the meteorite hunters; however, in an interview with a South
American newspaper, he rejected accusations of impropriety.)
The streets were still dark when Farmer, Ward, and Karl tiptoed
through the halls of the hotel and out the door. As usual, Farmer
was traveling heavy, and although they’d had to pack fast and
had left things behind, he was nevertheless rolling three giant
suitcases toward the border bridge. It was a market day, and the
roads were filling with Aymaran merchants and their livestock.
At the end of the main street, they turned toward the bridge and
saw the border lined with a phalanx of police. The sky was bright-
ening over the Andes. Farmer could see the police watching them,
and thought he saw them grinning.
Between them was the public square, packed with vendors set-
ting up produce stalls and donkey carts full of chickens. Farmer
had been studying a map for the past hour and knew there was
another border crossing 50 miles north. He walked to the near-
est taxi, waved several hundred dollars, and said, “We have some
problems, and we need to leave quickly.”
Farmer had no idea if the driver would be sympathetic, but the
guy nodded, asked no questions, and opened the trunk. Farmer
casually walked back over to Ward and Karl. “Don’t say anything,”
he instructed. “Head for that taxi, throw your stuff in the back,
and get in as fast as you can.”
As soon as the taxi doors closed, the police saw them. The driver
peeled out, and there was shouting behind them. Ward turned to
see one of the officers running behind them while the taxi gunned
it, swerving up onto the sidewalk to get around the market stalls.
The border police were caught off guard, away from their vehicles.
Ward looked back and saw the officer in full sprint, catapulting
over a chicken cart. But the driver got into the open road, and the
cop fell behind into the market crowd.
On the highway the car was quiet. Farmer realized he hadn’t
talked to Melody in days. When he’s in the field, he usually checks
in, but communications were spotty in the altiplano. Melody didn’t
know how dangerous this place would turn out to be, and Farmer
was glad about that. But he knew she’d be waiting for his call,
and there would be no way to reach her until they got out of Peru.
Before they reached the crossing, though, their taxi was flagged
by a cop in the middle of the road, next to a man in a business suit.
He was holding a radio. “Oh, shit,” Farmer thought, figuring the
border police had sent word up the road. He put his head down. All
Ward could make out were heated words between the taxi driver
and the stranger. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Shut up,” Farmer
said, “I’m trying to listen.” Karl was completely still in the back
seat, wondering how he’d gotten himself into this situation. The
yelling stopped and the car started moving again. “Turned out
that was a politician trying to commandeer this taxi,” Farmer
explained to Ward and Karl. “He had no idea who we were.”
They carried on along the road and eventually reached a border
crossing on the shore of Lake Titicaca, where they stepped onto
a ferry that would take them to Bolivia. By now the sun was ris-
ing over the Andes, bringing up the blue of the lake. The crossing
takes more than an hour, and by the time they stopped at Isla del
Sol, an island just inside of Bolivia, they started to feel safe. Sev-
enteen days earlier, a massive stone had careened over this lake, a
fittingly Empyrean setting for such a grand celestial appearance.
Farmer, Ward, and Karl had come all this way to find a visitor from
the stars, only to be confronted by a small but swift maelstrom of
very terrestrial habits: fear and anger, hope and disappointment,
opportunism and greed. Farmer had been at such pains to reassure
everyone else that the rock was not dangerous, but in the end it had
summoned enough danger to force him and his partners to flee.
The Aymara pray to their gods at this lake. In the distance was
Amantani, an island where Pachamama receives offerings for a
bountiful harvest. The meteorite hunters might not talk about it
this way, but they too were here to find fortune from the sky. And
for a brief moment they thought they’d found it. Feast or famine
from above, the enduring human tradition. In a way, the hunters’
obsession is almost mystical itself, imbuing their rocks with an
aura built on belief. Both science and superstition attributed some-
thing special to the meteorite, and therein resided its spiritual or
material worth. Its value was an expression of faith. Even at their
deepest rationalist moments, the meteorite hunters are hoping
for life to be changed by celestial intervention.
The group arrived on the Bolivian shore in a small town that they
were surprised to discover was called Copacabana. “Quite unlike
the one in Rio,” Farmer said. His joke was greeted with silence.
They headed for La Paz, where they checked into their hotel and
found an email from the vice consul to the US embassy in Lima. It
They were here
to find fortune
falling from the
sky. Feast or
famine from above,
the enduring
human tradition.
turned out the US authorities thought the trio had been arrested,
and Peruvian news was claiming that they were already in custody
there. Farmer assured the consul they were not, in fact, in jail; they
had evaded capture and were heading back to the United States.
It wasn’t until Farmer got to Miami that he reached Melody, who
was glad to hear from him, even if they were coming home practi-
cally empty-handed. After all, they had not made the career-defining
recovery they imagined. They lamented what was lost. But if the
desire for divine intervention is eternal, so is the wait. Everyone,
in some way, is hoping that their own rock will fall from the sky—
that thing which brings riches and fame or transforms failures into
successes and sorrows into joy, the existential alembic that makes
ordinary life extraordinary. And for all their smarts and pluck,
Farmer, Ward, and Karl had just learned what we already know deep
in our hearts: Destiny is not determined by the stars. The odds of
that stone landing where it did were calculated at 1 in 182 trillion.
They didn’t get the rock—and typically we don’t get ours either.
None of that will stop these guys from continuing the search. “I
will do this forever,” Ward says. Back home, Ward sent one of his
few samples of the Carancas meteorite to the Field Museum for
analysis, and placed the others on a glass plinth in his biometrically
sealed room, where he admired it while drinking fine wine from his
own cellared collection. (“Even cowboys can have a wine phase,”
he says.) Just having a small specimen of this unique stone was
inspiring. “I was already thinking about the next hunt,” Ward says.
Farmer never even unpacked his bags entirely. Melody started
trying to intervene, telling her husband she wished he wouldn’t
go on expeditions that were dangerous, but she knew it was futile.
Eventually, Melody did get pregnant. Ward thought that might
slow Farmer down, but he remained ready to go wherever the
landfalls took him.
In Carancas, the crater was never drained. It remained full of
water, its contents unexplored. The rainy season wore down some
of the impact furrows, softened its shape. The locals stopped feel-
ing sick, and la contaminación prompted health officials to do tests
that confirmed the presence of arsenic in the water table, potentially
saving lives. Peter Schultz, the planetary astrogeologist, visited
the site to properly study the impact. The chondrite, he theorized,
could have slipped through the atmosphere by coming apart and
reshaping itself into a narrow projectile. He cowrote papers, updated
models. If indeed chondrites can arrive intact, what fell in Carancas
portended a higher danger of deadly cosmic collisions, since most
meteorites are chondrites and they were previously thought to carry
less risk. Maybe everyone was right to be afraid of it.
The Aymara went back to tending sheep, although bitterness
remained. Some locals blame outsiders for bringing the authorities
around. Some thought the gringos stole the rock. Some still believed
it was just an antahualla, the scorpion spirit from the mountains.
The police showed up to guard the crater after the gringos left, but
what remained of the rock had almost certainly dissolved in the
water. It may have already been gone when the meteorite hunters
arrived in the town. Trujillo never got his museum. Nearby were
concrete pilings, the beginnings of a structure never built. Tru-
jillo had hoped the crater would invigorate the area, but now it’s
just a strange feature of the landscape. And soon that too will be
gone. A few more seasons of rain and the land will be flat again. 
COLOPHON
UNINVITED GUESTS THAT HELPED
GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
The fruit fly that invaded a perfectly good bottle of
leftover Halloween wine; the jackhammer wrecking
Bryant Street and my eardrums; our new pet wild
turkey; certain significant others at intimate din-
ners; allergy-inciting tahini in a slice of delicious
pumpkin pie; booze my former coworker brought
to Friendsgiving that I suspect she swiped from my
former boss’s desk; the (adorable) tabby cat that
insists on upstaging the musicians at San Fran-
cisco’s Red Poppy Art House; HQ2 (to everyone
who takes the G train); the onion bagels in the vari-
ety selection at the bakery; the True Knot from
Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep; the stray cat we’ve
named Filthy; the concerning mold that popped
up on our ceiling; the influenza virus–despite
mounds of hand sanitizer and a flu shot; my signi-
ficant other’s spine surgery; election bots that
texted, called, polled, and prodded; surprise hos-
pital bills; all the bits of Camp Fire ash bedding
down in my lungs; the raccoons lurking around
our neighborhood in search of scraps; the Qantas
pilots I partied with last night in Nob Hill; the Star
of Extinction; the jack-o’-lantern-stealing rat.
WIRED is a registered trademark of Advance Maga-
zine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2019 Condé
Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA. Vol-
ume 27, No. 1. WIRED (ISSN 1059–1028) is pub-
lished monthly by Condé Nast, which is a division
of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Editorial
office: 520 Third Street, Ste. 305, San Francisco,
CA 94107-1815. Principal office: Condé Nast,
1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Robert
A. Sauerberg, Jr., President and Chief Executive
Officer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial Offi-
cer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Chief Revenue & Mar-
keting Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New
York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada
Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503.
Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration
No. 123242885 RT0001.
POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM
707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY
FACILITIES: Send address corrections to WIRED,
PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0662. For sub-
scriptions, address changes, adjustments, or
back issue inquiries: Please write to WIRED,
PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0662, call (800)
769 4733, or email subscriptions@ WIRED.com.
Please give both new and old addresses as
printed on most recent label. First copy of new
subscription will be mailed within eight weeks
after receipt of order. Address all editorial, busi-
ness, and production correspondence to WIRED
Magazine, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY
10007. For permissions and reprint requests,
please call (212) 630 5656 or fax requests to
(212) 630 5883. Visit us online at www.WIRED
.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast maga-
zines on the web, visit www.condenet.com.
Occasionally, we make our subscriber list avail-
able to carefully screened companies that offer
products and services that we believe would
interest our readers. If you do not want to
receive these offers and/or information, please
advise us at PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-
0662, or call (800) 769 4733.
WIRED is not responsible for the return or loss
of, or for damage or any other injury to, unsolic-
ited manuscripts, unsolicited artwork (includ-
ing, but not limited to, drawings, photographs,
and transparencies), or any other unsolici-
ted materials. Those submitting manuscripts,
photographs, artwork, or other materials for
consideration should not send originals, unless
specifically requested to do so by WIRED in writ-
ing. Manuscripts, photographs, artwork, and
other materials submitted must be accompanied
by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
0 9 5
 SIX BY SIX: STORIES BY WIRED READERS
Each month we publish a six-word story—and it could be written by you. Submit your six words on
Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, along with #WIREDBACKPAGE. We’ll pick one story to illustrate
here. Your next assignment: In six words, imagine the interactive future of entertainment.

#WIREDBACKPAGE

A COURTROOM DRAMA SET IN THE YEAR 2058:

DRIVER
INFLICTS
EMOTIONAL
DISTRESS;
CAR SUES.
@PRESTONJBYRNE, VIA TWITTER

HONORABLE MENTIONS: THE PEOPLE VS. INTERNET OF THINGS. (@SHUTTER.PUNK, VIA INSTAGRAM) // SIRI EVISCERATES ALEXA ON WITNESS STAND. (GYASI BURKS-ABBOTT, VIA
FACEBOOK) // YOU’RE ASSIGNED A COURT-APPOINTED INFLUENCER. (@EVDLINGEN, VIA TWITTER) // FACIAL RECOGNITION PLACES YOU AT SCENE. (@ANNUNCIATIONMG, VIA INSTAGRAM)
// OBJECTION, YOUR HONOR! HACKING THE WITNESS! (@BLAKEWTAYLOR, VIA TWITTER) // ROBOT LOVER CITED IN DIVORCE PROCEEDINGS. (@CRAIGHALLIDAY, VIA INSTAGRAM)

0 9 6 JULIEN PACAUD JAN 2019

 PROMOTION

WIRED.
NOW ON
YOUR
SMART TV.
WIRED’s Video App Now Available
on Your Smart TV