One of my favourite modern streaming shows is the Canadian science fiction series Travelers. I've watched it three times now, and I'm still learning from it. It's available on Netflix: if you haven't seen it, and if you're looking for something with a little intellectual meat on its bones, I recommend it. After all, we may not see anything this good again for a long time, the way things are going.

Most science fiction starts with an idea that, while possible, isn't inevitable, and then asks 'what if?' What if somebody figured out faster-than-light travel and sent colonists to a goldilocks planet? What if aliens showed up, and they turned out to be space-faring cows? You know the sort of thing.

Travelers starts out with a situation that is, frankly, inevitable. At least, it is inevitable if Earth humans don't do anything to prevent it. I don't see anybody much doing anything to prevent it, so it's inevitable. Earth overheats. Genetic manipulation of crops causes widespread famine. An asteroid sneaks up on the skywatchers and pulverises the east coast of North America. What else? Oh, yeah: the military tries to weaponise a new discovery (antimatter) and makes things go boom. Etc, etc. 400 years into the future, the only humans left – a few hundred thousand of them – are clinging to a semblance of life in abject misery in geodesic domes under a thick layer of ice. Somewhere in the vicinity of Vancouver, of course. (This is a Canadian series.) They haven't seen the sun in ages.

This is where things get interesting. The humans aren't enjoying much of a lifestyle – they wear rags and eat slop and are dying out due to infertility – but they're plenty smart when it comes to Science Stuff. Particularly computers. So they've built themselves a fancy quantum AI, called The Director, and given it the job of helping them save history.

Oh, yeah: they've figured out time travel.

Well, not in the usual sense. They can't physically traverse time. But they can throw their consciousnesses around. The Director's very ethical: it only sends the Travelers into the bodies of people who are about to die. The Travelers take over the bodies (and lives) of the people they replace and go on to carry out missions aimed at preventing the extinction events that have left humanity in this predicament.

At least, that's the plan. A lot can go wrong, and a lot does – it's a tv drama, after all. It's pretty absorbing. The writers have thought of some good twists to the theme, and the acting is every bit as good as we've come to expect from Canadian scifi. It's a fairly realistic story, too, which means that the stuff the Travelers are doing doesn't always work. The more they interfere with the past, the more tangled things get – particularly as it becomes apparent that some people don't really want the plan to work, in the present or the future. Who wouldn't want to save Earth from turning into a wasteland and prevent its people from dying? You'll have to watch to see.

Predictably for a tv series these days, the sponsors pulled the plug on Travelers at the end of the third season. Much as I would like to have seen more of the show, I suspect the shortened timeframe was partly responsible for what I regarded as a satisfactory ending. I won't spoil it here, but it starts when the Travelers get a message from The Director: Protocol Omega. They explain to us that this protocol means that The Director has abandoned the timeline and will no longer try to fix what's wrong. They have a choice: give up and live out their borrowed lives, or try to fix things on their own with no cybernetic help.

Today the question occurs to me: what if we're facing Protocol Omega? What if we can't fix what's wrong because too many people don't want to fix what's wrong? In that case, whatever powers there are that have allowed us to build ourselves a civilisation may just have decided to let us go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. It would pretty much serve the 'movers and shakers' right, though I'm personally sorry about the collateral damage.

Maybe, if we're lucky, this particularly Tower of Babel can fall without taking the whole planet with it. Otherwise, we'll have to hope that there are other worlds out there – or else, let's face it, it was all for nothing.

Out – out are the lights – out all!

And, over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,

While the angels, all pallid and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy, 'Man,'

And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

– Edgar Allan Poe

Dmitri Gheorgheni

18.11.24 Front Page

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