“My document and demands have been transmitted to those who can bring this case forward. I have already heard of massive international support, and I know that there are those who are, inevitably, against it. I thank those of you who are helping.
“To illustrate Dr. Woodward’s vision, we plan to offer you a flocking ballet. It is a work of art that has mathematical underpinnings. It will be a spontaneous event performed by prepared minds on the Winter Solstice, beginning on Kauai, Jean’s home. All of you on Earth can participate.
“This is her life’s work.
“And mine. Soon, perhaps, it will be yours, the work of all of you, for in a flock, there is no set leader.
“We take turns.”
There was enough time for all of us to get to Kauai for the Winter Solstice; the dance.
I’ve taken the update; my husband has not.
Kara, our daughter, was here only a few months ago, but that is a long time for a toddler. Everything is new, and she is delighted with the surf, from which I grab her, the mountain, where she wisely shies from heights, with the ancient banyan tree by the hale, where she plays hide-and-seek among its many trunks, as I did with my mother. The deep sadness I carried within me for so long has lifted. The world seems as new for me as it is for Kala, charged with hope.
In the end, it was the power of social media that helped sway Psittacus, though the legal system can take some credit in setting the terms and conditions of Meitner’s freedom to speak. The world wanted to hear Meitner. Psittacus stock seesawed wildly during those hours, a fluctuation directly based on online supposition and conjecture. Now, it’s going great guns.
The whole ohana is here, some ready for the dance, with their updates, their bracelets. Lots of Dad’s friends flew to Lihue and were helicoptered in. They are a strange collection of academics, carpenters, plumbers, programmers, businesspeople, and old neighbors from his days in California and on the Big Island. Most everyone he knows.
Meitner’s mathematician is here, too. She is a tiny, vivacious Thai woman—quick and thin, with long, silver hair. I am intimidated by her brilliant reputation, but her smile and her hug wipe all that away in an instant. She says, “Meitner has told me a lot about you,” and we fall into a long, healing conversation about my sister and the years during which she was lost to me.
Despite such outbreaks of serious, quiet discussion, there is a festive air. People are gathering all over the world in parks, stadiums, and living rooms, and it seems that many animals are behaving differently as well, though that angle is pooh-poohed by the media. Still, there is news of the same communication bracelets we wear having been dropped, in pellet form, over great swathes of wild areas, which has caused environmentalist uproar. My father has an odd glint in his eyes and something like joy on his face.
Many of us rise in the dark for Zen meditation at the hale, and then we wait for dawn. The lovely cacophony of parrots, macaws—a sliding, whooping, trilling music—fills my mind, taking me back to my childhood.
They stop vocalizing, as if cut off by a switch.
In that deep silence, a ray of sunlight shoots over the ridge. My father, listening to his earpiece, says, “The parrots have dropped.”
But I know without his saying so. We all do, and we rise.
Parrot music bursts forth once more, but I gradually realize that I am hearing a new kind of speech, which I also hear as music.
My movements are beyond thought. Perhaps they are like flight. My feeling is one of pure delight in an odd sort of work.
My father says, “Oh.” He is the only person who speaks the entire time, as we human-parrots dance the mathematics of nonlocal emergence.
That was the last time he spoke. And that was the instant the ship vanished, to everyone’s astonishment, except, perhaps, his.
And that was when something new emerged.
I’ve seen the parrot ballet, of course, many times now. I know that Meitner said, “Emergent Nonlocality: Going Home,” and then movement began.
Because I experienced it, and still do, I am endlessly fascinated by watching Meitner’s flock perform, in space, their three-dimensional dance of Meitner’s proof, ten short pages of symbols that they make real. That reality moves, via our communication bracelets, into us and into other living creatures.
Like others, I study the first movements of humans and other creatures around the Earth that sunrise as we dance the pattern, which, once begun, continues to emerge in science, behaviors, art, politics, policies, and law.
But I am an amateur in this study, where others are serious, and brilliant. To me it is simply beautiful.
All living creatures have one goal, communicated, understood, and shared on a broad bandwith: the survival of all of us. With joy.
We flock.
My father still spends all his time at the hale or on the beach. He is completely functional and appears to be thinking. He just does not speak, not in words, not in writing. But he speaks in other ways.
He writes code: a form of speech, but not one I can cipher. I have not found anyone who really can, though I have been told both that it is gibberish and that it is profound. No one can say what its purpose might be, so it is probably art. In my opinion, art is communication on a spectacular range of wavelengths.
I believe his art describes the strange new place he inhabits now, which I think is wherever that ship is. His mind is nonlocal, in two places at once, two places that communicate, part of the human-machine world he sought to create his entire life. Like art, it is its own purpose.
I visit him every few months, between stretches at The Hague where my family now lives and where I work on litigation and legislation with international teams of lawyers, ethicists, and scientists. When I need respite from the Pandora’s box we have opened, I am drawn home to the place I hid from for so many years, and to my father.
I seek him at the hale, climbing that haunting, lightswept trail limned with bracts of wild ginger. Or I look for him at the beach, where waves pound their infinite dance and the blue Pacific stretches half the world before me, charged with lives I can now protect, lives that interact with mine in a new dimension that is like an ineluctable flavor, a previously impossible shape, or a tone that infuses all of my senses. I am immeasurably enriched; deeply changed.
My father smiles at me quite often. His eyes glow with intense peace.
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