My most ardent detractors have accused me of hating America, an odd contention, as it was America that took in my entire family after we fled our home country of Iran, and America that I have called home most of my life. We all have ways of showing our patriotism, and mine is holding my country to account. I want to dissuade her from her worst, cruellest impulses, for I truly believe that if she does not evolve past them, she will not survive.

In that way, America is synecdoche for humanity as a whole—capable of such feats of wonder, such innovation, such compassion, but also such greed, such exploitation, such consumption, such empire, and such cruelty. Are these truly traits of our shared human nature? Is this an inexorable, inescapable state of our being? Or is this all the result of a shared construct that we have erroneously agreed is a necessary evil of civilization, a fiction agreed upon, one that might be changed? If it is the latter, then perhaps we might be saved, but if it is the former, if our self-destructive tendencies arise not from construct but from our innate natures, then I truly believe that we will not survive. After a point, it is not even a question of surviving First Contact; outside intelligences need not be our own undoing if we can take care of our own destruction ourselves.

• • • • •

I’m relaxing under a great sequoia tree, contemplating the way Nikola has described his civilization to me—a people that have grown to embrace fear, and to fear change. This was not always the case, he tells me. This is not some inescapable by-product of their nature, but a development as a reaction to outside forces that frighten them. This appears to be something our great ships have in common.

Sometimes he talks to me about his ideas on the Divine, which as best I can tell is his concept of God. The Divine is not religious to Nikola. The Divine is not a thing to be believed in; like gravity itself, it either exists, or it doesn’t. But the Divine also encompasses everything outside of that which we can perceive, and, more frightening, lies outside of our understanding or control. The Superorganism seeks to control all that it encounters, mundane and Divine alike, which Nikola assures me is impossible, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. We have a word for this in English, I tell him. It is from the Greek hybris, meaning “wanton violence, insolence, outrage,” or more specifically, “presumption toward the gods.”

“Hubris will be our end,” he tells me.