Excerpt from Julius Paine's Memoirs: Journals of the Wanderer

Published 2035

If you never share your most precious secret, you will live a lonely, lonely life.

The story has been mine for too long. Here I declare the causes that impelled me to this separation: I have looked far across the world and seen little that I can trust. It feels like the forces near me are all those that I cannot. The story has to become yours again, world.

***

I will always remember where I was the day that news came through about Julius Paine's second Sabbatical. It was the fifth conference on Sustainable Modular Infrastructure; I was presenting to the conference about the nano-surface plasma containment battery that I and the rest of Dr. Peraster's triumvirate had conceived.

Five minutes before the bell would have called me up to stage I got a call from Questro, he had just told me what had happened and left it at that. The conversation was so short that I only listened to three more seconds than he talked. I don't really know what happened until I was called up on stage.

The lights were so bright; they never warn you that your winter clothes will leave you drenched in sweat if you try to wear them onto stage. "Hello fellow researchers. I had intended to tell you today all about the plasma battery developed with my colleagues that will deliver sufficient ampere-hours to power a single home during peak consumption."

"I think we should change this projector to the Valuestream news instead."

There was rustling, grumbling, and someone came up on stage to try to tell me to go ahead with my presentation. "I insist."

Eventually insistence prevailed.

"--you will receive fewer and fewer messages from me as our relative speeds differ. When it becomes necessary for me to turn my ship around. I will spend a day without acceleration. That is the day on which the time distortion will be greatest and thus I will be able to send you the fewest messages. When the Earth catches up to me..."

"Go back to the beginning of the speech!"

"What is this?"

"Go back."

As presenter I had control over the display. After issuing the commands to the presentation computer, I heard what millions of people would later call the world's most famous sigh. Julius Paine had always possessed a skill for self-expression, and the exhalation with which he started the first broadcast of his second sabbatical was dissected by pundits for the rest of his life.

All I heard in it was regret.

****

He sighed and then began to speak. We watched on the screen that was intended for my slides.

"Secrecy is one of the most intriguing social phenomena. Values associated with access to information are extremely varied based on the conditions of each case.

"Perhaps the right to privacy is a 20th century fallacy that the 21st will repeal, but it means something to me. Corporations, governments, and secret societies have the right to privacy codified into their constitutions, but people just seem to have lost it. My privacy was gone. So I left, again.

"My last Sabbatical was something like taking a few personal health months. This is more like taking a summer abroad. How am I supposed to reach a proper baseless paranoia about everything if my thoughts are filled with specific paranoia about my direct environment? So I left, again.

"My computer tells me that it will be at least four months until I re-enter the Earth's gravity well, so Earthlings, you have that long to sort shit out without my presence, with only my words to affect you. It may feel like I am present, but maybe that will help you understand the crucial value of words. That is one truth that has been better understood by the secret keepers than by everyone else.

"We arrive at the core of it. Each of us are secret keepers. I keep secrets about the nature of my guilt in the hopes that your judgement will be lessened because of it. Corporations keep secrets because of greed or the profit margin. Governments keep secrets because they are always preparing for war with other governments. Conspiracies keep secrets because the uninitiated haven't earned their respect.

"It's all incentivized paranoia, and that is perhaps the human emotion that I understand best.

"Over the next four months, I am going to tell a secret history of the world. I’m sure some of the secrets of history are truly lost, but I’m sure there are some sitting in vaults guarded and never breached. Our world has known secret keepers, societies initiated into the rule of silence for mutual benefit.

"Since I am among the uninitiated, by which I mean I have never been a member of any secret socoety, it will necessarily be a speculative venture based on curiosity rather than fact. But I wonder how many of my hypothetical situations are recorded in some precious tome in some secret sacred cave. If they were shared, how much light would they shed on our world's current trials?

"But I digress, I was telling you about the fact of world secrecy. It seems obvious to me history needs secret-detecting applied to it.

"When we read, it can be hard to remember that our ancestors were complete people. People with their own emotions and trials, hopes and paranoia. Who can blame them for their paranoia about the rest of us? Would I blame the Founding Fathers for using their Masonic lodges as centers for the agitation that began the American Revolution? I would not. People can be fickle and stupid, and identifying villains is not the only purpose historical perspective.

"The blessing of history is to gain perspective that can be applied to the present. For example, was James Garfield assassinated by a conspiracy? I look at the man himself, well-loved in every part of the country just a few years after the Civil War, capable of writing Greek and Latin simultaneously, and of surviving with a bullet inside him for weeks. It seems obvious to me that he himself was capstone of a conspiracy to prepare a candidate for the presidency.

"Would his time in office have been one of exceptional greatness or unparalleled corruption? Would he have been an ally of the people or of the Masonic interests that helped install him in the office of the presidency?

"What does this suggest about a war waged in secret? I hope to answer much of this question before the passing of my Sabbatical.

"I recognize that the lens that detects secrecy can be a hard one to take off, but at this juncture in history, I feel that I must wear it. The world is preparing for some event, and we all want it to be a good one. Technology makes it easier than ever to destroy the veils that protect secrets from the world. People are using the Internet to prove that they are ready for direct democracy; they are trying to justify the establishment of the first public government to grace the Earth in a long, long time.

"The route that I am taking will move me around the sun along the path of the Earth, but in the opposite direction. As I accelerate you will receive fewer and fewer messages from me as our relative speeds differ. When it becomes necessary for me to turn my ship around. I will spend a day without acceleration. That is the day on which the time distortion will be greatest and thus I will be able to send you the fewest messages. After this day, my ship will start accelerations which will restore my motion relative to the Earth. When the Earth catches up to me I will spend a few days in Earth orbit and then return to the world; hopefully this date will correspond to the last day of The Governance.

"It is your story now, world. Make it a glorious one. You'll have my commentary about events past, present, and future, but none of my direct actions. To those who feel betrayed by me leaving, I'm sorry. There are some research streams that are toxic, and I wouldn't want to subject any of you to the tributaries of the ‘streams that I take that are polluted. I also don't want to you to pollute the ones I take that are clean. I can't accept any transmissions while I am away.

"A final note, those secret forces in the world that would oppose what I am doing, please listen. I have so much sympathy for you. You have been the preservers of sacred knowledge; so much of the world's wisdom you clawed from the jaws of a barbaric world.

"Think on this: much of what you set out to accomplish has been achieved-- it is nearly a civilized world that we live in. If the stories that I tell are your stories, please, don't seek reprisal from me. Try to thank me in your hearts for lifting the burden of secrecy from your own lives. If your values do not let you, then speak against me in public on the day of my return. I promise I will be ready to listen."