The Journal of Ingeborg P. Hoffman

May 5th, 2106

After the highs of yesterday, today was an odd lull, one spent curiously waiting. I rewatched a recording of the interview with Greenwald and Akuna. It made me feel quite low. I suppose I’ll never be clean of what I’ve done. 

I used to day-dream of the day when I would tell Akuna the truth. I imagined he would be so happy. I was told so much, so quickly, about what Wiles and the rest were trying to do, that at the beginning, I was comfortable in the assumption that we were going to tell him eventually. But then the weeks turned into months, and then years, and now here we are.

Milosz came to see me to apologize for being a cad the other day. He brought with him a barrel of Alpine spring water, which must have cost a fortune. But he can afford it. Since his outing to Lagos, he has spent the last few days trying to keep investors calm, and hold the stock price steady. He told me that my appearance on Greenwald’s show helped our cause, but unfortunately only for a few hours. I haven’t heard from Undersecretary Ribera, which I think is unusual.

The protests demanding the truth of The Majestic are still underway, and still we do nothing. So I sit and sift through the transmissions from the crew, searching for god knows what. And I find myself back with Trena, or rather, the TRENA system. Akuna and I helped build it. Though she was adamant not to tell Akuna the truth, we did tell him a sliver of it; that the TRENA system was being built as a failsafe, and as a kind of experiment in Artificial Intelligence. Akuna helped her with the technical aspects of the system.

These were the last good months we spent together. Akuna and I would sit up late at night in bed talking about what questions we should ask Trena, to fill in the gaps in her story. Then, the next day, we would sit on Trena’s plush couches as she would have tea brought in. She wanted to talk about Akuna and I, about how we were doing. (Not infrequently did she ask when we were going to have children!) I disliked working in the lounging room. Her villa was constantly filled with people; she was too generous with her time. So one place was as good as another, I suppose. (Now that I’ve moved in, the villa feels empty. Even with Homer around, it’s too big for me. But Wiles insists that I deserve it.) And, when marshaled, Trena had the most exceptional depth of focus.

In our sessions together, I realized how little I really knew about the women I called my mentor. It was truly an honor to be able to work with her so closely, for so long.

Few cites on Earth were more profoundly affected by rising ocean levels than Manila. In 2034, Trena Arsillion was born in this drowning city, an only child, in a home ingeniously propped up on stilts by her fisherman father and seamstress mother.

When she was seven years old, Trena created a drainage system for her home using discarded materials. Afterwards, she developed a system for her entire neighborhood. Naturally, this attracted the notice of the authorities, who were skeptical that this almost mute girl could have managed to achieve this. She was shuttled off for tests, and was found to be a prodigy. The authorities were stunned, and impressed by the opportunity and potential they saw in this calm young girl. These officials applied pressure to her parents to force Trena to leave home. So, at the age of nine, Trena Arsillion was placed in an elite boarding school. 

Unlike her parents, Trena herself was curiously unemotional at the forced move. Indeed, she rarely, if ever, displayed any powerful emotion at all as a girl. However, this did not mean that she was especially odd, or regarded as such by her peers. While she rarely spoke much, she did communicate when she needed to. Furthermore, she appeared polite and unpretentious, if somewhat otherworldly (the latter quality was due in part to her prodigious intellectual gifts). This characteristic calm pleasantness continued until Trena received her P.h.D from the University of the Philippines School of Engineering at the age of 16. 

After graduation, Trena was inundated with offers to work at prestigious research institutes and international corporations. However, she turned them all down. Instead, she returned to the home that she had, apparently, missed dearly. There, Trena regressed and refused to do any scientific work of any kind. The very sight of a screen caused her to vomit. She spent roughly three years in a kind of fugue state, playing with dolls, speaking in a kind of baby talk, barely leaving the house on-the-now unnecessary stilts where she grew up. 

Many of her old mentors visited her and tried to shake her out of her stupor, but to no avail. Trena’s old professors shook their heads in their ivory towers. Among those in the know, her name became associated with a “crack-up,” or for someone who could not handle the pressure. Steadily, the number of recruiters showing up on her doorstep decreased, until there were none at all.

Trena Arsillion graduated in the year 2050, or in other words, as the world was heading into the darkest years of World War III. As is well known, this was brought about by the global dissemination of fusion power in 2040 by Ronny Cheung’s philanthropy, To An (funded entirely by Milosz Lukas). The major aspect of Cheung's philanthropic vision was that so-called “third world” countries would receive this life-altering technology before more “developed” nations. This vision, of course, included the Philippines, which became a hugely contested prize in the war, a flashpoint between the economic spheres of China and the United States. 

In 2053, with the war raging around them, Ronny Cheung visited the Philippines, with Dr. Kwame Earnest Appiah himself, for a routine inspection of the fusion power reactor. At a dinner with the Director of Intelligence for the Philippine Resistance, who had previously taught at the University, Cheung was told the sad story of Trena Arsillion. Intrigued, Cheung, under the protection of the PR, decided to visit the failed prodigy herself. (The PR, like countless other resistance groups around the world, greatly benefited from the cutting edge fusion materiel designed by Calliope Group, including anti-nuclear missile devices.) 

The house on stilts had been bombed and destroyed, like the rest of her neighborhood. Cheung found Trena in a refugee camp, and like the others had found her, playing with her toys, barely coherent. Feeling out of her depth (perhaps because she had no children of her own) she offered Trena’s parents money. They accepted it and Cheung returned back to central Manila. Cheung felt badly for the unfortunate young woman, but believed that there was nothing she could do for her. A short while later, as Cheung was discussing the status of the reactor with Appiah, the great physicist noted that the Manila reactor was the single most efficient in their system. This was achieved by a few lines of code written by a student at the University. Cheung insisted on hearing the name of the student. Sure enough, it was Trena Arsillion.

Overcome with guilt, Ronny Cheung returned to the refugee camp. She would return every day for six months. (This is why the Philippines is the site of one of the largest of the Calliope headquarters, since Cheung based her global operations there during this period.) Slowly but surely, Cheung gained the trust of Trena Arsillion, and indeed, brought the young woman back to life. Ronny Cheung brought the 20-year-old Trena back with her to the island Calliope (impenetrable due to the sophistication of its defense systems, now dismantled). Thus began 30 years of research, the height of which were encapsulated by Trena herself, in her famed Arsillian Experiments in Immortality. (Meanwhile, the war ended and the world was divided into Autonomous Zones under the authority of the United Nations.) This was when I first met her. Trena was in her 40s, at the apex of her international acclaim and success.

At 50 years old, Trena Arsillion once again retreated from the world. She was found six years later by chance in a convent in the mountains of Peru, when a member of a group of lost Brazilian hikers, tourists, recognized her after stopping off for directions. Arsillion decided it was time to come back, and she left the next day with the hikers. She returned to the island Calliope where, over the next decade, she connected Milosz, her boss and patron, with a new friend, Wiles Gregory. Arsillion spent the next phase of her life putting her research into reality with The Majestic. It would prove to be her last.

In one session, when Akuna was not present, Trena told me the story of how she met Wiles Gregory. When she arrived back at her lab on Calliope Island, among the tens of thousands of messages left for her, one was of particular interest. It was from Wiles, who sent with it a book; The Secrets of First Light, the famous Sambat manual for higher civilization, which included a guide to space travel. Thus, Trena Arsillion became the first human being to know the truth of the Universe.

When Akuna and I were newlyweds, over glasses of wine at our old apartment he would tell me stories of Trena in his childhood. He liked to do impressions of her. They were quite rude, but very funny; in one he would sort of shift around with his knees in his shoes, squawking here and there, forgetting where he put things. 

Other times were more fractious. On more than one occasion I remarked how similar in temperament Trena was to Wiles. Akuna disagreed in the strongest terms. But Akuna dealt very infrequently with Wiles. I think that, at times, he was jealous of how close we were becoming. I see now that the seeds of our unhappiness may have been planted earlier that I imagined. Trena was a kind of second mother to him, and he was quite protective of her. His real mother died when he was young. And his father, Kwame, while kind to everyone he met, almost universally beloved, was brutally tough on his own children.

Trena died soon after she finished giving her testimony. Her death was peaceful, expected, and utterly devastating. Among the last words Trena Arsillion spoke were those instructing Milosz to tell Akuna the truth. I’m so glad she didn’t see what happened to him after she died. I don’t want to write Akuna’s story. But I have to. I don’t know if I can do so without crying.