A Parable
Even if you wanted to look up as far as you could, you’d still never see the top. Even on the clearest days, the column faded into the thin blue haze of the morning skies.
Far from an illusion though, the graphene of the sky-elevator superstructure was the fulcrum of an entire generation of dedicated focus and ingenuity of hundreds of thousands in the face of massive obstacles of physics and material science. The citadel of shimmering obsidian; a beam radiating into the backyard of the stars.
Nearing completion, it represented a port of departure for a new age of discovery. At its zenith, a drydock that would soon bring forth ships whose mastheads would arc the horizon, first to nearby planets and asteroids, and learning from those first steps outward, no doubt other worlds. No longer would humanity rest its head and dream of a single planetary dream; soon many would wake to the promise of a boundlessly open horizon of new worlds.
It had never been easy, from the beginning there were many hardships and complications. There had even been a crew who’d perished accidentally when some mainstay cables gave way and they were crushed, a tragedy which had put a solemn note on the endeavor and halted work for several weeks. But the many workers involved in the visionary project represented had been patient -- even when arguments and disagreements occurred, there was room for understanding. It had been a labor of love to coax it to this point and now the finish line was in sight.
Not everyone was celebrating though, some stood in revisionist defiance, and saw these plans as extravagant, heedlessly optimistic - criticisms couched in their own dark desire to reign and subjugate in due course. Such cynics, myriad and loosely confederated only through their antagonism of these accomplishments, were keenly aware they would never be able to convince the whole of humankind to their own petty causes. Yet, they realized that they might be able to control some, and that was enough to lay plans that would sufficiently seal the tower’s demise.
They brought forth a virus, one that would inflame the limbic system, targeting the host’s ability to step back from the broad brush of feeling to the deeper certainty of shared truths. They planted it in the darkest corners of the world, and it emanated outward, spreading from one person to another. Suddenly, slights that were inconsequential became insurmountable. Vicious words thrown carelessly became meaningless bickering; meaningless bickering became outbursts of violence, frequent and widespread. And they made war with weapons as fantastic and far-reaching as the engineering feat that had once shown such promise.
No one remembers with certainty the charges that brought the tower to the ground. Because the cruelest irony, the deepest wound, was the incessant hostility caused them to forget – forget the collaboration, forget what they had overcome, forget the meaningful work they were doing, the dream they’d built together of a place called Babel.