An American citizen, Ms. Abigail Caldwell, emerged into civilization last week for the first time in her life, traveling by canoe via the Sepik River from the interior of Papua New Guinea. Ms. Caldwell has lived for 34 years with the Inisi, the last remaining isolated people group on the planet.

She was born in Papua New Guinea to American parents who were missionaries of the Christian religion. Ms. Caldwell’s family chose to remain with the Inisi when the government closed the tribe to outsiders. Her parents having died during the 2070s, she is the only outsider reportedly living with the tribe.

Found unconscious in her canoe last Sunday near the town of Dagua on the northern coast, Ms. Caldwell was transported to the hospital in Lae, treated for minor injuries, and released. The U.S. Embassy has arranged for a visit to the U.S. to meet her cousin and closest relative, U.S. Congresswoman Lauren Caldwell of Texas.

Christian religion.

Most readers of the story would naturally wonder about her reaction to encountering civilization for the first time. She probably had no Grid access. Certainly no neural implants. How could she even remotely function in the modern world?

I knew that those issues were secondary. Travel to a new country, and you can adjust to unfamiliar technologies and lifestyles—as long as you can find people with a similar belief system through which to interpret the experience.

But this woman would find no one of a similar mindset. Not in America.

9

Visitors typically expressed surprise upon their first visit to Bryson Nichols’s personally designed VR getaway. They expected one of the world’s leading innovators to prefer cutting-edge twenty-first-century décor. What they discovered instead was a nineteenth-century English bar that Nichols called the Library.

Fine oak bookshelves lined the walls, each filled with signed first editions of classic English works from the previous six centuries. An original of the Magna Carta hung on one wall, bearing the royal seal of King John. Dark brown leather easy chairs were separated by mahogany end tables. Oil lanterns provided low lighting. A haze of pipe smoke floated near the ceiling, its aroma permeating the room. Holographic patrons provided background chatter.

As Nichols explained to his guests—he rarely hosted more than one individual at a time—though his vision was toward the future, he was a man whose roots lay in the past. There the human creature had emerged from millennia of tribal warfare and despotic rule to shape the beginnings of an enlightened world.

The light had finally shone in thirteenth-century England with the signing of the Magna Carta. For the first time in recorded history, the authority of the king was curtailed. Subjects had rights. A revolution in political history, one corresponding to the Copernican revolution in scientific history, had begun. Within six hundred years Thomas Jefferson would pen the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”