You have no choice in reading this article—maybe

Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion. 

Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad lecture. Maoz assumed his boss was going to tell him exactly what to do, or at least throw some PowerPoint slides his way. But no. Maoz had free rein to teach anything, as long as it was relevant to the students. “I could have gone to human brain augmentation,” he says. “Cyborgs or whatever.”

Yet that admittedly fun and borderline sci-fi topic wasn’t what popped, unbidden, into his mind. His idea, he recalls with excitement: “What neuroscience has to say about the question of free will!” 

How—or whether—humans make decisions (like, say, about what to discuss in an undergrad lecture) had been on his mind since he’d read an article in his early twenties suggesting that … maybe they didn’t. This question might naturally beget others: Had he even had a choice about whether to read that article in the first place? How would he ever know if he was responsible for making decisions in his life or if he just had the illusion of control?

“After that, there was no turning back,” says Maoz, now a professor at Chapman University, in California. He finished his PhD work in human movement, but afterward he scooted further up the neural chain to find out how desires and beliefs turn into actions—from raising an arm to choosing someone to ask out to dinner on a Friday night.

Today, Maoz is a central figure in the attempt to (sort of, maybe) answer how that neural chain functions. His research has since overturned and reinter­preted canonical neuroscience studies and united the straight-scientific and philosophical sides of the free-will question. More than anything, though, he’s succeeded in uncovering new wrinkles in the debate.

Machines and magic tricks

The concept of free will seems straightforward, but it doesn’t have a universally accepted definition. One intuitive notion is that it’s the ability to make our own decisions and take our own actions on purpose—that we control our lives. But physicists might ask if the universe is deterministic, following a preordained path, and if human choices can still happen in such a universe. 

That’s a question for them, Maoz says. What neuroscientists can do is figure out what’s going on in the brain when people make decisions. “And that’s what we’re trying to do: to understand how our wishes, desires, beliefs, turn into actions,” he says.

By the time Maoz had finished his PhD, in 2008, neuroscientific research into the question had been going on for decades. One foundational study from the 1960s showed that a hand movement—something a person seemingly decides to do—was preceded by the appearance in the brain of an electrical signal called the “readiness potential.” 

Building on that result, in the 1980s a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet did the experiment that had first piqued Maoz’s interest in the topic—one that many, until recently, interpreted as a death knell for the concept of free will.

An electrical impulse in our brains can shed only so much light on whether we truly are the architects of our own fates.

“He just had people sit there, and whenever they feel like it, they would go like this,” says Maoz, wiggling his wrist. Libet would then ask where a rotating dot was on a screen when they first had the urge to flick. He found that the readiness potential appeared not only before they moved their hand but before they reported having the urge to move—or, in Libet’s interpretation, before they knew they were going to move. 

Studies since have confirmed the observation and shown that the readiness potential appears a second or two—and maybe, fMRI implies, up to 10 seconds—before participants report making a conscious decision. “It suggests we are essentially passengers in a self-driving car,” says Maoz. “The unconscious biological machine does all the steering, but our conscious mind sits in the driver’s seat and takes the credit.” 

Maoz initially approached his own research with variations on Libet’s experiments. He worked with epilepsy patients who already had electrodes in their brains, for clinical purposes, and was able to predict which hand they would raise before they raised it. 

Still, some of the Libet-inspired studies people were doing nagged at him. “All these results were about completely arbitrary decisions. Raise your hand whenever you feel like it,” he says. “Why? No reason.” A decision like that is quite different from, say, choosing to break up with your partner. Try telling someone they weren’t in the driver’s seat for that. 

The field wasn’t looking at meaningful decisions, he says—the ones that actually set the course of lives. 

Maoz began pulling in philosophers to help guide his approach. They would challenge him to confront the semantic differences between things like intention, desire, and urge. Neuroscientists have tended to lump those concepts together, but philosophers tease them apart: Desire is a want that doesn’t necessarily progress toward an action; urge carries implications of immediacy and compulsion; and intention involves committing to a plan. (Maoz has come to focus specifically on intention—including, recently, the potential intentions of AI.)

In 2017, he organized his first in a series of free-will conferences, drawing many autonomy-interested philosophers. “Thank you so much for coming,” he recalls saying at the opening of the meeting. “As if you had a choice.” One day, the crew took an excursion out on a lake. As the group munched on shrimp, someone joked that they hoped the boat didn’t sink, because everybody in the field would die. 

The comment didn’t make Maoz feel existential dread. Instead, he figured that if the whole field was already there, why not lasso them all into writing a research grant? “He just thinks what should be the next step and just has a very good ability to just make it happen,” says Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University and a frequent collaborator.

That ability is special among scientists, says Chapman colleague Aaron Schurger, with whom Maoz co-directs the Laboratory for Understanding Consciousness, Intentions, and Decision-Making (LUCID, appropriately). “I really think that Uri is kind of at the nexus of this field right now because he’s really, really good at bringing people together around these big ideas,” he says.

Donations and interruptions

Maoz has recently been making progress on one of the big ideas that have consistently occupied his working hours: how trivial and significant decisions play out differently in the brain. In collaborations with Mudrik, he’s parsed the neural difference between picking and choosing—their terms for arbitrary decisions and those that change your life and tug on your emotions. 

Readiness potential? Their measurements didn’t clock it ahead of choices. In 2019, Maoz and a crew published a paper measuring the electrical activity in people’s brains as they pressed a key to choose one of two nonprofits to donate $1,000 to—for real, with actual dollars. Then the researchers compared that activity with what they saw when the same group pressed a key at random to donate $500 each to two nonprofits. The team saw the readiness potential in the arbitrary decision, but not for the $1,000 question. 

Libet’s result, they concluded, doesn’t apply to the important stuff, which means readiness potential might not actually be a sign that your brain is making a choice before you’re aware of it. “If Libet would have chosen to focus on deliberate decisions, then maybe the entire debate about neuroscience proving free will to be an illusion would have been spared from us,” Mudrik says. 

Maoz’s research has spurred others to reinterpret Libet’s work. It’s “enriched my thought process a great deal,” says Bianca Ivanof, a psychologist whose dissertation scrutinized Libet’s methods. They turn out to identify readiness potential at different times depending on how the rotating-dot setup is designed, complicating the ability to compare and interpret results.

Maoz has also continued to gather data on the subject. Last year, for example, he used an EEG to measure electrical signals in people’s brains as they got ready to press a keyboard space bar. At random moments, he interrupted their preparations with an audible tone and asked them about their intentions. He saw no connection between the readiness potential and whether or not they were planning to tap the key—evidence that the potential doesn’t represent the buildup of either conscious or unconscious plans. The team did see a signal, though, in a different part of the brain when people said they were preparing to move.

So … that’s free will? Sadly, Maoz would be compelled to say Well, not exactly. An electrical impulse in our brains can shed only so much light on whether we truly are the architects of our own fates. And maybe the confusing data from neurons is actually the point. “I don’t think it is a yes-or-no question,” Maoz says. Maybe our less meaningful choices aren’t mindfully made but big ones are; maybe we have the conscious power to change an intended action, but only if our brains are in a particular state. 

Neuroscientists likely can’t figure out, on their own, if free will exists. But they can, Maoz says, parse how semantically distinct decision-making forces—desires, urges, intentions, wishes, beliefs—manifest in our brains and become actions. “That is something that we are making progress on,” he says, “and I think that that’s going to help us understand what we do control.” And perhaps also help us make peace with what we do not. 

Sarah Scoles is a freelance science journalist and author based in southern Colorado.

Constellations

I.

We had crash-landed on the planet. We were far from home. The spaceship could not be repaired, and the rescue beacon had failed. Besides me, only the astrogator, part of the captain, and the ship’s AI mind were left. 

Outside, the atmosphere registered as hostile to most organisms. We huddled in the lifeboat, which was inoperable but still held air. Vast storms buffeted our cockleshell shelter, although we knew from prior readings that other areas remained calm. All that remained to us was to explore, if we wanted to live. The captain gave me the sole weapon. She tasked the astrogator with carrying some tools that would not unduly weigh him down.

Little existed on the planet except deserts of snow. But alien artifacts lay in an area near us. We were an exploration team, so this discovery had oddly comforted us, even though we had been on our way elsewhere. The massive systems failure had no discernible source, and the planet had been our only choice for landfall.

The artifacts took the form of 13 domes, spread out over that hostile terrain. The domes had been linked by cables just below shoulder level, threaded through the tops of metal posts at irregular intervals. Whether intended or not, these cables and rods formed a series of paths between the domes. 

Before our instruments failed, the AI had reported that the domes appeared to have a heat signature. The cables pulsed under our grip in a way that teased promised warmth far ahead. It took some time to get used to the feeling.

The shortest path between domes was a thousand miles long. The longest path was 10 thousand miles long. Our suit technology was good: A suit could recycle water, generate food, create oxygen. It could push us into various states of near hibernation while motors in the legs drove us forward. For the captain, the suit would compensate for having lost her legs and ease her pain. We estimated we could reach the nearest path and follow it to the nearest dome … and that was it. If the dome had life support capabilities, or even just a way to replenish our suits, we would live. Otherwise, we would probably die.

We revised the estimate of our survival downward when we reached the path and soon encountered the skeletons of dead astronauts littering the way. In all shapes and sizes, cocooned within their suits. Their huddled forms under the snow displayed a serenity at odds with their fate. But when I wiped the frost from face plates, we saw the extremity of their suffering.

It is difficult to explain how we felt walking among so many fatalities. So many dead first contacts. 

We no longer had to puzzle over the systems failure. Spaceships came here to crash, and intelligent entities came here to die, for whatever reason. We could not presume our fate would be any different, and adjusted our expectations accordingly. The AI’s platitudes about courage did not raise morale. There were too many lost there in the frozen wastes. 

Here were the ghastly emissaries of hundreds of spacefaring species we had never before encountered.

The number of the bodies and their haphazard positioning hampered our ability to make progress to the dome. The AI estimated our chances of survival at below 50% for the first time. We would starve in our suits as the motors propelled us forward. We would become desiccated and exist in an elongation of our thoughts that made us weak and stupid until the light winked out. But still, we had no choice. So even in places where the dead in their suits were piled high, we would simply plunge forward, over and through them, headed for the dome. 

What we would find there, as I have said, we did not know. But we were in an area of the galaxy where ancient civilizations had died out millions of years ago. We had been on our way to a major site, an ancient city on a moon with no atmosphere in a wilderness of stars. 

Although our emotions fluctuated, a professional awe and curiosity about the dead eventually came over us. This created much debate over the comms. We had made a discovery for the ages, but our satisfaction was bittersweet. Even if we lived longer than expected, we would never return home, never see our friends or family again. The AI might continue on after we were dead, but I doubt it envied being the one to report on our discovery centuries hence. And to who?

Here were the ghastly emissaries of hundreds of spacefaring species we had never before encountered. Their suits displayed an extraordinary range, although our examination was cursory. Some even appeared to be made out of scales and other biological substances from their home worlds, giving us further clues as to their origins. 

The burial of the suits by snow and the lack of access to anything other than a screaming face or faces, often distorted by time and ice, worked against recording much usable data. This issue was compounded in those cases where the suit was part of the organism and they had not needed any “artificial skin,” as the AI put it, to survive harsh conditions. That many had died despite appearing well-­prepared for the planet’s environment sobered us up even before our own suits dispensed drugs to help our mental states. 

After a time, each face seemed to express some aspect of our own stress and terror at the seriousness of our situation. After a time, the sheer welter of detail defeated us and caused us extreme distress. The captain made the observation that even one instance of alien contact might cause physiological and mental conditions, including anxiety, stress, fatigue. Here, we were constantly encountering the alien dead of what seemed at times an infinite number of civilizations. 

We stopped recording. We recommitted ourselves to the slog toward the nearest dome. 

The captain’s drugs unit had failed, but the AI found a way to help her by turning off the heating element in select panels of her suit. Some parts of her would soon be lost to the cold, but the system would allow her to live on with some measure of comfort.

I must admit, we were just glad the screaming had stopped and welcomed her counsel.

II.

For a long time, as we labored in our spacesuits on that planet—following the path, beleaguered by snowstorms—we could not understand why we found so many dead astronauts, of so many unknown alien types, and yet no spaceships. During good visibility, our line of sight reached, unbroken, for 500 miles. Where were the crash sites? 

But one day we chanced upon an antenna sticking up out of the ground. Clumsy attempts at excavation soon revealed that below this antenna lay a vast dead spaceship of a kind we had never seen before. The gash that had opened it to the elements had laid bare its unique architecture, but also gave the illusion that the snow had spilled out of it to create the world around us rather than having infiltrated and accumulated inside over time.

Aspects of the spaceship’s texture gave the startling suggestion that it had been made of some ultra-hard wood or wood equivalent. Clambering partway up to stare at the inner compartments, we all felt the strangeness of the dimensions and proportions of the living quarters. There was no sign of the occupants. Perhaps, I suggested, they had headed for the domes. Perhaps they had even made it to the domes. I tried and failed to keep hope from my voice.

But the captain had ordered the AI to perform a materials analysis. The “snow” in this region had been contaminated by ash and tiny particles of bone. The AI estimated that more than 70% of the white surrounding us was made of the remains of vertebrate sentient life and the remnants of suits. Of invertebrates there was no telling. A thaw might bring not just the drip, drip of water but a shushing sound indicative of bone particulate in the mixture. I imagined there might even be the clink of small objects not rendered down by whatever intense heat had created the ash.

The astrogator had insisted on digging deeper into the ship, with the idea that some recognizable commonality between technologies might yield a part or parts with which he could fix our ship. The rest of us allowed this delusion for the obvious reasons. But upon his return, he held in his hands ovals of snow not much larger than the space formed by the circle between a thumb and finger. Many of them had soft indentations, as one might find in the afterbirth of reptiles from eggs. A kind of ghostly cilia-like tread appeared along the bottoms of these objects.

The astrogator did not find any technology of use to us. Instead, he discovered that the species piloting the spaceship had been so different from us as to be safely encapsuled in suits the size of eggs. Much of what had spilled into or spilled out of the gash constituted the bodies of the crew, in their hundreds of thousands. Their suits had been inadequate to the conditions. They had died en masse attempting to escape their own ship.

The AI speculated that it had been a generation ship, perhaps fleeing a planet with a dying star. If we wondered how the AI had reached this conclusion, it was because we did not want it to be true.

The captain became silent upon receiving this further news and did not speak to us for more than 100 miles of further progress. 

As we left that site, unsure exactly what we stepped upon, we also knew that since the spaceship was entirely covered by snow, it had been falling into the sediment for days or months or years. We knew then that our ship might not be visible against the horizon should we retrace our steps. The already bleak probability of rescue through visual identification of a crash site from above would be lost to us in time, even as the line of cables remained perpetually visible to the horizon. We now thought of the planet as a trap. But of what sort? 

III.

We could not be sure, but in the absence of the captain’s voice, it may have been the AI that put forward the idea of the planet’s being “duplicitous.” The phrasing concerned us, for there was a duplicity in using the planet as the subject of the spoken sentence. A sphere rotating around a sun in deep space could not exhibit forethought or premeditation or other qualities of sentience. 

The AI meant whoever or whatever had created the conditions on the planet that allowed spacecraft to be trapped and then the occupants placed in a perilous situation with no recourse. But I distinctly recall the AI using the words “the planet.” In addition to being inaccurate, this also let us know that the AI did not have any analysis available that might help us understand the agency and motivations acting upon us. 

But in a sense, the AI only voiced something I had felt for several miles: that there existed an overlay to the planet’s surface, an area or space or different landscape unavailable to us. This overlay had also not been available to any of the prior astronauts who had died here. In this area or space or different landscape existed a wealth of the usual hoped-for things: a breathable atmosphere and abundant food and water. 

While we struggled with the line through the snow and through the storms that welled up, others could see us but chose to ignore us for reasons or perhaps just for their own well-being. For hundreds, possibly thousands of years, as explorers had died here in merciless and terrible ways, there raged a sumptuous feast for the senses, as excessive as it was ancient and unending.

I cannot tell you how powerfully the AI’s words struck us, so that our mouths watered at the thought of real food and of clean, unrecycled water, of a freedom unencumbered by suits and breathing apparatus. Even at our intended destination, we would have spent most of our days aboard a small space station. This tedium would have been broken only by the arduous process of reaching the unbreathable surface and its ancient ruins of jagged black stone. 

This vision that overtook us functioned not just as tantalizing delusion. It scared us so much that we could not compartmentalize it in our thoughts. It continued to overwhelm us like a wave.

We fought for the first time, with the astrogator expressing the wish to return to the ruined spacecraft and explore nearby areas for parts, while the captain broke silence to order us to continue to make progress toward the nearest dome. The AI, which had brought us to this point, stole the captain’s silence and said no more.

For each of us, those endless white plains with no real elevation, just the metal rope and the metal posts, had become a kind of repetition that hurt the brain, and the mind with it.

IV.

About halfway to the nearest dome, amid a storm that reduced our progress incrementally and our line of sight to nothing, we came upon a peculiar tableau. 

Six astronaut suits had fallen across and around the metal rope. With the flurries of snow, it took us, even with our powerful headlamps, some minutes to determine the nature of the obstruction. The six suits had been created for a humanoid species that must have had torsos like nine-foot-long slabs, attached to six limbs, three for walking. Their heads had flared out like thick fans. All the helmets were cracked open, and curled inside were the skeletons of some other intelligent species no larger than 40 or 50 pounds, possibly warm-blooded. With no sign of the original occupants. 

After a brief analysis cut short by the conditions, we postulated that the warm-blooded species had worn breathable skin suits that, as they failed, required these intruders to seek shelter. All they could find were these six dead astronauts. Because we could discover no trace of the original occupants, the AI put forward the theory that this smaller species had eaten every scrap of the remains within the suits. 

Then they too had perished, and in time, the AI suggested, something smaller would take up residence inside those bodies, then smaller still within those, and smaller still—

At this point, the captain attempted a soft reboot of the AI using a coded question. We could hear the concern in her voice.

Yet the AI continued undeterred, suggesting that we might find this to be a common situation. It might be replicated across the planet, depending on a system’s ability to break down and process meat that had not evolved alongside the devourer for millions of years. In all likelihood, most who attempted to eat in this way died soon after, poisoned by alien flesh.

V.

The AI began to talk to us in strange alien voices at mile 700, as we labored through the snowstorm to hold onto the cables and thus the path. The AI warbled and chirped and howled and hummed and clucked. The AI spoke in voices like fossilized choruses of beasts, vast and harmonious. And in voices like dry grass spun to fire by the sun. And in voices like the dissolution of all things, darkness in the blinding white that scared me. 

At first we thought the AI was deranged. Then that the AI channeled voices from the dome 300 miles ahead. But finally, the AI managed to make known to us that these were the voices of the dead astronauts we had come across from time to time. Huddled frozen. The suits in so many shapes and sizes. That the voices of the dead were channeled through the AI, and nothing could stop them.

VI.

The snow began to betray us, as the storms created different forms of ice. Often, our arms became weary, our legs cramping, and we had to rest with greater frequency. We came to accept the solid crunch that could support our weight. We came to reject the feather-light freshness that felt effortless underfoot but could give way just as easily as if it were air. In some places, slick purple-hued ice welled up in sluggish layers as if something half-alive. In others, we discovered strange islands of elevation, with brutal curls and curves that suggested two continental shelves had clashed in that space.

As we adapted to these conditions, and as conditions worsened and still we adapted, we came to feel an illusion of competency, one that made even the astrogator temporarily cheerful. The sounds through the comms of our efforts, the deeper breathing, the occasional muffled curse, seduced us in this regard. We felt that we were becoming adroit at handling the snow. We began to believe if we could only make it to the dome, we would be saved.

Yet this uptick in morale ran parallel to, rather than intersected with, the idea of our ultimate survival.

VII.

We lost track of the distance left to us without the AI to tell us. Or the captain, in her pain, no longer thought to issue updates. But across the distance left to us came sights beyond reckoning: three giant astronauts spaced 50 miles apart. Larger than most starships, each body lay sprawled across an area larger than several fields and in very different conditions.

The first had been badly burned and was thus unrecoverable, even in terms of salvage. The astronaut had crawled or pulled itself along for some distance. It had left a long smudge of black and red across that expanse. The alien species was, as ever, unknown to us, but the five arms were sunk in the ground as if in agony. The skull had once held three eyes, and the face plate had been cracked by force so strong it resembled a meteor strike. The body was bloated, the fabric of the suit gray with a shimmer of green that came and went, linked to photosensitive skin cells. The way the flesh took up space, and how it exhibited aspects more plant than animal, made it impossible to study further.

The second was a sprawl of limbs, with the suggestion of a defensive posture. The debris of conflict flared out to the side in an incomprehensible display. The suit had an intactness that surprised us, but a similar crack in the face plate without any trace of body within. The rest of the suit had become inhabited by a wealth of other dead astronauts of varying sizes and shapes, who had sought shelter or sustenance and then become trapped or simply … given up. As the AI had predicted, we had once again encountered bodies providing other bodies with temporary sustenance and shelter.

I felt like a parasite who beheld a god. Or was the scale even more ludicrous?

But this condition was not at first evident to us, becoming apparent only after we had clambered for an hour to reach the cracked face plate and the entry hole extended like a broken archway before us.

Despite the number of remains within, and the difficulty in moving through them to explore, the captain ordered an exhaustive recon. Her pulse in the readings had a thready quality. Sometimes I felt, and the astrogator too when we took private comms, that the captain had begun to say things similar to the AI’s delusions. Yet we obeyed the order, on the chance that some internal calculation on the captain’s part meant she believed this was the only way we would survive. 

What did we expect to find in the dead body of a once-­intelligent giant? Food? Oxygen? Some cause of death? To put off the thought of our own death by seeking shelter with a death so large we could not comprehend it?

I felt like a parasite who beheld a god. Or was the scale even more ludicrous? I had trouble envisioning the way the body must have twisted as it pitched forward into that icy ground. I had trouble holding onto my own thoughts.

More and more pressure moved through my skull as I contemplated that scene. We were in the midst of something none of my kind had ever known. We might be the only ones, ever. I better understood the unraveling of the AI and of the captain. My sharpness had dulled, taking my calm with it.

It was impossible to tell how long the astronaut had taken to die. Unless somewhere within that fallen figure some hint of life hid that we would never find.

The storms fell away, rose, then fell away again. 

VIII.

The third huge astronaut was full of light and life and shone out across the wasteland of snow like a beacon. For a moment, I thought we had pierced the invisible layer and could see what lay beyond the veil. We would have comforts beyond anything found on our ruined spaceship even when it had been fit to cross galactic space. There would not be recycled urine for our water. There would not be the faint stink of sweat creeping into our suits as the ventilation system began to fail. Our liquid food would not taste stale and moldy. 

As we approached, the suit extended almost to the horizon in that foreshortened perspective created by the left foot. We noted through our remaining instrumentation that the suit remained intact. The pressure told us a kind of air circulated within its sealed surfaces. 

We climbed with a renewed energy, the promise of sanctuary so close making us giddy. We each exhorted the others on with such exuberance that it made me a little afraid. What lay on the other side of this state of mind but a fall?

When we reached the helmet plate, we could see inside not a face or a skull, but instead such a richness of healthy growth that we fell silent before it. None of us could, I believe, understand exactly what we saw, except that it equaled ecosystem—resplendent with vibrant greens and blues, stippled with other colors. There might be some parallel to a terrarium full of moss and exotic plants. There might be some sense of life moving amongst those plants, as of jewel-like amphibians or even tiny shy sapphire birds. We could not smell or taste or hear what lay behind the face plate. We could not experience it in that way, but somehow we each imagined enough to be calmed and comforted by it. 

The astrogator said he might be able to create a hole in the plate or elsewhere on the body to let us in, and then patch the surface such that not too much air or vitality would spill out. This workaround might take an hour or two, due to the delicate nature of what we saw within. But it was possible.

The captain considered the astrogator’s proposal and then agreed. The weather had begun to turn dangerous again. That we should begin immediately did not need to be said. With the proper pressure brought to bear, we would have some measure of sanctuary from which to recover for a final push to the dome. It could be the difference between life and death, the astrogator said. If the atmosphere was breathable, we might even be able to give the captain some better solution to her pain.

I unclipped the astrogator’s equipment from his waist and threw it off the mountain that was the astronaut and watched it sail through the air and into the snow. Then I used my weapon to fry it where it lay. Then I threw my weapon into the snow, too, in a place where the featheriness would cover it and hide it forever. 

We were a team and I had helped my team while showing them I posed no threat—although I knew the astrogator and the captain would not see it that way. I stood there on the face plate that we could no longer open with the diminished tools at our disposal as they both yelled at me through the comms. It’s unimportant what they said to me. They were admonishing me for something that had already happened and that they had no power to stop. I did not bother to explain, but began to make the descent to the ground so we could once again take up the metal rope and make for the dome.

That in that frozen hellscape, the persistence of life in that manner, an oasis in the midst of nothing, could be categorized as a miracle.

ROGAN BROWN

This reply incensed him and he castigated me in words not used among members of a team that respect each other. Once more, I ignored him, but told him if our oxygen got low, he could have mine if we calculated he could make it to the base. I meant this, as I knew the odds were low anyway. I had hurt my knee taking the equipment from the astrogator and then making my way so rapidly down from the dead astronaut.

The astrogator did not reply, by which I knew he did not accept my answer.

The reason I took the tools and destroyed them is because the wind had told me something it had not whispered to the captain or the astrogator. The wind had not spoken to me before, so I believed what it told me. That the astronaut within the suit lived on, if unable to move. That what we saw on the outside and registered as ecosystem, as separate “plants” and “animals,” instead formed a composite life-form and that to crack open the suit or cut through the suit at a leg would have been a violation.

That in that frozen hellscape, the persistence of life in that manner, an oasis in the midst of nothing, could be categorized as a miracle. 

I would not snuff that out. I could not allow that to be snuffed out. But I remembered too how I felt looking at that vast and alien country behind the face plate. So calm, so comforted, overcome by the depths of an emotion I could not place. Would I replace that feeling with the feeling of seeing all those explorers dead within the other vast suit? Even as I become one of them? 

Because the planet had already told us the rules, the consequences, and the ultimate outcome. There are no odds so terrible that they could not be experienced, and in dozens of ways, in this place. 

So I trudged on and the astrogator cursed me and cursed me and called out my childhood and how badly I must have been brought up and how I must have cheated to pass the psych exams, and yet I had thought the same of him at various points during our journey.

See how beautiful the snow is, falling now, I said to him over the comms. See how precise and geometric this line we follow across this expanse. 

He did not reply, but a little later he told me he no longer believed in the line at all, and by his calculations he would get to the dome faster if he abandoned it and struck out on his own.

I could not stop the astrogator and did not want to, so I watched him become a smaller and smaller figure against the white until the white ate him up and I was alone.

X.

I have been walking a long time, visiting with the dead. Here, against an arch of heaven that appears no different than what I see directly in front of me. 

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling Southern Reach series, translated into 38 languages. His short fiction has appeared in Vulture, Slate, New York Magazine, Black Clock, Interzone, American Fantastic Tales (Library of America), and many others.

Listen to Earth’s rumbling, secret soundtrack

The boom of a calving glacier. The crackling rumble of a wildfire. The roar of a surging storm front. They’re the noises of the living Earth, music of this one particular sphere and clues to the true nature of these dramatic events. But as loud as all these things are, they emit even more acoustic energy below the threshold of human hearing, at frequencies of 20 hertz or lower. These “infrasounds” have such long wavelengths that they can travel around the globe as churning emanations of distant events. But humans have never been able to hear them.

Until now, that is. Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World, a new album by the musician and artist Brian House, condenses 24 hours of these rumbles into 24 minutes of the most basic of bass lines, putting a new spin on the idea of ambient music. Sound, even infrasound, is really just variations in air pressure. So House built a set of three “macrophones,” tubes that funnel air into a barometer capable of taking readings 100 times a second. From the quiet woods of western Massachusetts, House can pick up what the planet is laying down. Then he speeds the recording up by a factor of 60 so that it’s audible to the wee ears of humans. “I am really interested in the layers of perception that we can’t access,” he says. “It’s not only low sound, but it’s also distant sound. That kind of blew my mind.”

House’s album is art, but scientists made it possible. Barometers picked up the 1883 eruption of the South Pacific volcano Krakatoa as far away as London. And today, a global network of infrasound sensors helps enforce the nuclear test ban treaty. A few infrasound experts—like Leif Karlstrom, a volcanologist at the University of Oregon who uses infrasound to study Mount Kilauea in Hawaii—helped House set up his music-gathering array and better understand what he was hearing. “He’s highlighting interesting phenomena,” Karlstrom says, even though it’s impossible to tell exactly what is making each specific sound. 

So how’s the actual music? It’s 24 minutes of an otherworldly chorus, alternating between low grumbling vibrations and soft ghostlike whispers. A high-pitched whistle? Could be a train, House says. An intense low-octave rattle? Maybe a distant thunderstorm or a shifting ocean current. “For me, it’s about the mystery of it,” he says. “I hope that’s a little bit unsettling.” But it also might connect someone listening to a wider—and deeper—world. 

Monique Brouillette is a freelance writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

3 things Juliet Beauchamp is into right now

The only reality show that matters

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is one of the best shows on television right now. Not one of the best reality TV shows, but one of the best TV shows, period. Chronicling a shifting group of wealthy women in and around Salt Lake, the show has featured a convicted felon whom federal agents came looking for while cameras were rolling, a church leader married to her step-grandfather, and a single mom in an exhausting on-again, off-again relationship with an Osmond. In one season, there was an ongoing argument between two cast members after one told the other that she “smelled like hospital.” Later, one woman was secretly running an anonymous gossip Instagram about her fellow housewives. We can debate the “reality” of reality television, and it’s certainly true that these characters and scenarios are far-fetched. But every single person is dealing with something relatable—difficult marriages, failing businesses, strained relationships with children, addiction. It’s entertainment, and high camp, but I find that I still have a lot of empathy for these people.

The last good place(s) on Facebook

Facebook sucks. That’s not controversial to say, right? But there is one reason I still have a Facebook account: my neighborhood Buy Nothing group. The spirit of community and camaraderie is alive and well there—and probably in yours, too. A non-exhaustive list of things I have given away: empty candle jars, a bookcase, used lightbulbs, unopened toiletries, bubble wrap. I’ve scored a few good things as well: a gorgeous antique dresser that I refinished, some over-the-door hooks, and brand-new jeans. It makes me happy to know that stuff that would’ve otherwise ended up in a landfill is bringing one of my neighbors joy.

Going analog

I used to wear an Apple Watch a lot. I’m a pretty active person, and I liked tracking my workouts and my steps. But after I’d had it for a while, my watch started dying in the middle of a 30-minute run; it became useless to me, and I gave it up completely. Guess what? I’m happier. I feel more present when I’m not checking how much time is left in a yoga class or reading texts during a long run. The amount of data it gathered about me was also stressing me out, and it wasn’t useful. And I don’t need a wearable to tell me how poorly I slept! Trust me, I already know.

Now is a good time for doing crime

Eons ago, in 2012, I had a weird experience. My iPhone suddenly shut down. When I restarted it, I found it was totally reset—clean, like a new device. This was the early days of iOS, so I wasn’t too concerned until I went to connect it to my computer to restore it from a backup. But when I flipped open the lid of my laptop, it too was mid-restart. And then, suddenly, the screen went gray. It was being remotely wiped. I turned on my iPad. It, too, had been wiped. I was being hacked. 

Frantically, I shut down all my devices, unplugged everything connected to the internet in my house, turned off my router, and went next door to use my neighbors’ computer and find out what was going on. Deepening my panic, I realized hackers had also gained control of, and nuked, my Google account. Worse, they were in control of my Twitter, which they were gleefully using to spew all sorts of vile comments. It was nasty. 

You have to remember, this was before all of us lived with a constant rain of text messages and emails designed to elicit the information necessary to pull something like this off. These crooks hadn’t brute-forced their way in, or used any sort of sophisticated techniques to gain access to my accounts. Instead, they had relied on publicly available information, and a fake credit card number, to socially engineer their way into my Amazon account, where they looked up the last four digits of my real credit card number. Then they used that information to get into Apple. And because that account was linked to my Gmail, and that to my Twitter, it gave them the keys to everything.

But what really troubled me was what I learned as I followed up on my hack over the ensuing weeks and months: This kind of thing was, while still novel, becoming more common. Some version of what happened to me had happened to lots of other people. The kids who were responsible—it was a couple of kids—weren’t criminal masterminds. They had just found a gap, a place where a technology was now commonplace but its risks and exploitable surface areas weren’t yet fully understood. I just happened to have all my stuff in the gap. Today that gap might feature a crypto wallet or a deepfake of a loved one’s voice. (Or both.)

But those same new technologies that have allowed crime to outpace law have also reenergized law enforcement and government—offering new ways to root out crime, to gather evidence, to surveil people. Think, for example, of how cold-case investigators tracked down the Golden State Killer years after his murders, using DNA samples and genealogy databases—launching a new era of DNA-powered investigations. 

Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse. It sometimes calls into question the nature of crime itself. Unregulated behaviors, facilitated by technology, can exist in murky zones of dubious legality. (Until TikTok announced its new ownership structure, Apple and Google were both technically breaking the law by allowing the app to stay on their platforms, under the provisions of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Ah! Well. Nevertheless.)

That tension is the key to our March/April issue. Thanks to technologies like cryptocurrency and off-the-shelf autonomous autopilots, there’s never been a better time to do crime. Thanks to pervasive surveillance and digital infrastructure, there’s never been a better time to fight it—sometimes at the expense of what we used to think of as fundamental civil rights. 

I never pressed charges against the kids who hacked me. The biggest consequence of the hack was that Apple set up two-factor authentication in the following months, which felt like a win. Now I’m not sure anyone expects their personal data to be secure in any meaningful way. I’m certain, though, that somewhere on the net, a new generation of kids is coming up with another novel crime. 

Job titles of the future: Breast biomechanic

Twenty years ago, Joanna Wakefield-Scurr was having persistent pain in her breasts. Her doctor couldn’t diagnose the cause but said a good, supportive bra could help. A professor of biomechanics, Wakefield-Scurr thought she could do a little research and find a science-backed option. Two decades later, she’s still looking. Wakefield-Scurr now leads an 18-person team at the Research Group in Breast Health at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Their research shows that the most effective high-impact-sports bras have underwires, padded cups, adjustable underbands and shoulder straps, and hook-and-eye closures. These bras reduce breast movement by up to 74% when compared with wearing no bra. But movement might not be the only metric that matters.

A biological rarity

Few anatomical structures hang outside of the body unsupported by cartilage, muscle, or bone—meaning there wasn’t much historical research to build on. Wakefield-Scurr’s lab was the first to find that when women run, the motion of the torso causes breasts to move in a three-dimensional pattern—swinging side to side and up and down—as well as moving forward and backward. In an hour of slow jogging, boobs can bounce approximately 10,000 times.

A sports necessity

Wearing a bra that’s too tight can limit breathing. Wearing one that’s too loose can create back, shoulder, and neck pain. Pain can also be caused by the lag between torso and breast movement, which causes what is scientifically known as “breast slap.”

The lab’s research has also found that the physical discomfort of bad bras, combined with the embarrassment of flopping around, is the one of the biggest barriers to exercise for women and that if women have a good sports bra, they’re more willing to go for a run.

An open question

Some bras function by deliberately compressing breasts. Others encapsulate and support each individual breast. But scientists still don’t know whether it’s more biomechanically important to reduce the breasts’ motion entirely, to reduce the speed at which they move, or to reduce breast slap. Will women constantly be forced to choose between the comfort of a stretchier bra and the support of a more restrictive one?

Wakefield-Scurr is excited about new materials she’s tested that tighten or stretch depending on how you move. She’s working with fabric manufacturers and clothing companies to try out their wares.

As more women take up high-impact sports, the need to understand what makes a good bra grows. Wakefield-Scurr says her lab can’t keep up with demand. Their cups runneth over.

Sara Harrison is a freelance journalist who writes about science, technology, and health.

Community service

The bird is a beautiful silver-gray, and as she dies twitching in the lasernet I’m grateful for two things: First, that she didn’t make a sound. Second, that this will be the very last time. 

They’re called corpse doves—because the darkest part of their gray plumage surrounds the lighter part, giving the impression that skeleton faces are peeking out from behind trash cans and bushes—and their crime is having the ability to carry diseases that would be compatible with humans. I open my hand, triggering the display from my imprinted handheld, and record an image to verify the elimination. A ding from my palm lets me know I’ve reached my quota for the day and, with that, the year.

I’m tempted to give this one a send-off, a real burial with holy words and some flowers, but then I hear a pack of streetrats hooting beside me. My city-issued vest is reflective and nanopainted so it projects a slight glow. I don’t know if it’s to keep us safe like they say, or if it’s just that so many of us are ex-cons working court-ordered labor, and civilians want to be able to keep an eye on us. Either way, everyone treats us like we’re invisible—everyone except children.

I switch the lasernet on the bird from electrocute to incinerate and watch as what already looked like a corpse becomes ashes.

“Hey, executioner!” says a girl.

“Executioner” is not my official title. The branch of city government we work for is called the Department of Mercy, and we’re only ever called technicians. But that doesn’t matter to the child, who can’t be more than eight but has the authority of a judge as she holds up a finger to point me out to her friends.

HENRY HORENSTEIN

Another lie, because we both know the city would never send anyone to the docks for flies. Flies are killed because they are a nuisance, which means people only care about clearing them out of suburbs and financial districts. They’d only send a tech down to the docks to kill something that put the city proper at risk through disease, or by using up more resources than they wanted to spare.

LeeLee is expecting me home to sit through the reassignments with her and it’s already late, so I hand out a couple of the combination warming and light sticks I get for winter to the pack of children with nowhere to go. As I walk away, the children are laughing so loud it sounds like screaming. They toss the sticks in the air like signal flares, small bright cries for help that no one will see.

LeeLee’s anxiety takes the form of caretaking, and as soon as I’ve stepped through the door I can smell bread warming and soup on the stove. I take off my muffling boots. Another day, I’d leave them on and sneak up on her just to be irritating, and she’d turn and threaten me with whatever kitchen utensil was at hand. But she’ll be extra nervous today, so I remove the shoes that let me catch nervous birds, and step hard on my way in.

Sometimes it seems impossible that I can spend a year killing every fragile and defenseless thing I’ve encountered but still take such care with Lee. But I tell myself that the killing isn’t me—it’s just my sentence, and what I do when I have a choice is the only thing that really says anything about me. For the first six months and 400 birds, I believed it.

There it is. Because two of us didn’t leave juvie together to start community service—three of us did. But Jordan didn’t last three weeks into his assignment before he turned his implements inward.

I notice she doesn’t say What if  I get what Jordan got? Because LeeLee is more afraid of being left alone than of having to kill something innocent.

“We don’t know what his assignment was,” I say.

It’s true, but we do know it was bad. Two weeks into our first stretch, a drug meant to sterilize the city’s feral cat population accidentally had the opposite effect. Everyone was pulled off their assigned duty for three days to murder litters of new kittens instead. It nearly broke me and Lee, but Jordan seemed almost grateful.

“Besides, we don’t know if his assignment had anything to do with … what he did. You’re borrowing trouble. Worry in”—I check my palm—“an hour, when you actually know there’s something to worry about.”

You’d think it would hover over us too insistently to be ignored, but after we sit down and talk about our day I’m at ease, basking in the warmth of her storytelling and the bread that’s more beige than gray today. When the notification comes in, I am well and truly happy, and I can only hope it isn’t for the last time.

We both stiffen when we hear the alert. She looks at me, and I give her a smile and a nod, and then we look down. In the time between hearing the notification and checking it, I imagine all kinds of horrors that could be in my assignment slot. I imagine a picture of kittens, reason enough for the girl I met earlier to condemn me. For a moment, just a flash, I imagine looking down and seeing my own face as my target, or LeeLee’s.

But when I finally see the file, the relief that comes over me softens my spine. It’s a plant. Faceless, and bloodless. 

I look up, and LeeLee’s eyes are dark as she leans forward, studying my face, looking for whatever crack she failed to see in Jordan. I force myself to smile wide for her.

“It’s a plant. I got a plant, Lee.”

She reaches forward and squeezes my hands. Hers are shaking.

“What did you get?” I ask.

She waves away my question. “I got rats. I can handle it. I was just worried about you.”

I spend the rest of the night unbelievably happy. For the next year, I get to kill a thing that does not scream.

“You get all that?” the man behind the desk asks, and I nod even though I didn’t.

I’ve traded in my boots and lasernet for a hazmat suit and a handheld mister with two different solutions. The man had been talking to me about how to use the solutions, but I can’t process verbal information very well. The whole reason I was sent to the correctional facility as a teen was that too many teachers mistook my processing delays for behavioral infractions. I’m planning to read the manual on my own time before I start in a few hours, but when I pick up the mister and look down the barrel, the equipment guy freaks out.

“They were supposed to add sulfur to this batch, but they didn’t. So you won’t smell it. It won’t make you cough or your eyes water. It’ll just be lights out. Good night. You got me?”

“Did you not hear me? Don’t even look at that thing without your mask on.” He takes a breath, calmer now that I’ve lowered my hands. “Look, the first solution—it’s fine. It’s keyed to the plant itself and just opens its cells up for whatever solution we put on it. You could drink the stuff. But that second? The orange vial? Don’t even put it in the mister without your mask on. It dissipates quickly, so you’re good once you’re done spraying, but not a second before.”

He looks around, then leans in. “They were supposed to add sulfur to this batch, but they didn’t. So you won’t smell it. It won’t make you cough or your eyes water. It’ll just be lights out. Good night. You got me?”

I nod again as I grab the mask I hadn’t noticed before. This time when I thank him, I mean it.

It takes me an hour to find the first plant, and when I do it’s beautiful. Lush pink on the inside and dark green on the outside, it looks hearty and primitive. Almost Jurassic. I can see why it’s only in the sewers now: it would be too easy to spot and destroy aboveground in the sea of concrete.

After putting on my mask, I activate the mister and then stand back as it sprays the plant with poison. Nothing happens. I remember the prepping solution and switch the cartridges to coat it in that first. The next time I try the poison, the plant wilts instantly, browning and shrinking like a tire deflating. I was wrong. Plants this size don’t die silently. It makes a wheezing sound, a deep sigh. By the third time I’ve heard it, I swear I can make out the word Please.

HENRY HORENSTEIN

When I get home, LeeLee’s locked herself in the bathroom, which doesn’t surprise me. I heard that they moved to acid for rats, and the smell of a corpse dissolving is impossible to get used to and even harder to get out of your hair. I eat dinner, read, change for bed, and she’s still in the bathroom. I brush my teeth in the kitchen.

The next morning, I have to take a transport to the plant’s habitat on the other end of the city, so I spend the time looking through the file that came with the assignment. Under “Characteristics,” some city government scientist has written, “Large, dark. Resource-intensive. Stubborn.”

I stare at the last word. Its own sentence, tacked on like an afterthought. Stubborn. The same word that was written in my file when I got sent from school to the facility where I met LeeLee and Jordan. Large, dark, stubborn, and condemned. I’ve never been called resource-intensive. But I have been called a waste.

And maybe that’s why I do it.

When I get to my last plant of the day, I don’t reach for the mister. This one is small, young, the green still neon-bright and the teeth at the edges still soft. I pick it up, careful with its roots, and carry it home. I find a discarded water container along the way and place it inside. When I get home I knock on LeeLee’s door. She doesn’t answer, so I leave the plant on the floor as an offering. They aren’t proper flowers, but they smell nice and earthy. It might keep the residual odor from melted organs, fur, and bones from taking over her room.

“Killing things is a dumb job,” says the girl.

After a week of hearing the death cries of its cousins, I was moved to use some of my allowance to buy cheap fertilizer and growth serum for my plant. The girl and her friends, fewer than before, were panhandling at the megastore across the way. She ran over, braids jingling, as soon as she saw me. I thought she’d leave once I gave her more glowsticks for her friends, but she stayed in step and kept following me.

“It’s not a dumb job,” I say, even though it is. 

“What’s the point?”

I shift my bag to point at the bottom of my vest. Beneath “Mercy Dept.” the department’s slogan is written in cursive: Killing to Save! 

“See?”

She sees the text but doesn’t register it, and I have to remind myself that even getting kicked out of school is a privilege. The city had decided to stop wasting educational resources on me. They’d never even tried with her or the other streetrats.

“It just means we kill to help.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

Suddenly, all I can think about is Jordan. “Maybe they don’t mind.”

“What?”

I think of the plants. Maybe they hadn’t been pleading. Maybe they’d been sighing with relief. I think of the birds that eventually stopped running away.

“Maybe they’re tired. The city’s right, and their existence isn’t compatible with the world we made. And that’s our fault for being stupid and cruel, but it makes their lives so hard. We’ve made it so they can only live half a life. Maybe the least we can do is finish the job.”

It’s a terrible thing to say—even worse to a kid.

Her eyes go hard. “What are you killing now, executioner?”

The question surprises me. “Sewer plants. Why?”

“I don’t believe you.”

I’d wanted her to leave me alone, but when she runs away I feel suddenly empty.

I have an issue at work when I can’t find my poison vial. I tell them it rolled away in the sewer and I couldn’t catch it in time, because I don’t want to tell them I was unobservant enough to let a street kid steal from me. After a stern warning and a mountain of forms, they issue a new vial and don’t add to my service time.

Pulling overtime to make up for the day I didn’t have my poison means it’s days before I get to fertilize my houseplant. LeeLee’s door is open, so I bring in the fertilizer and serum. She’s put the plant on her windowsill, but it prefers indirect sunlight, so I move it to the shelf next to her boxes of knickknacks and trinkets. I add the fertilizer to its soil and am about to spray it with the growth serum when I get an idea. I get the mister from my kit and set it up to spray the prepping solution on the little plant to prime it. I open the window and put on my mask, just in case, but I’m sure the man was telling the truth when he called the first liquid harmless. After its cells are open, I spray it with my store-bought growth serum.

I’m halfway through making dinner when I hear the crash and run into LeeLee’s room.

“Shit!”

The plant has grown huge, turning adult instantly, and its new weight has taken down LeeLee’s shelf. Dainty keepsake boxes are shattered on our concrete floor.

I bend to my knees quickly, so focused on fixing my mistake that I don’t register the oddness of the items I’m picking up—jacks, kids’ toys, a bow—until my fingers touch something small and shimmering. It’s a scrap of silver, still rounded in the shape of the braids it was taken from.

I got rats. I can handle it.

I’d forgotten the city has more than one kind.

I’m waiting up when Lee gets home. I don’t make her tell me. I just grab her kit and rummage through it. Where my kit has a hazmat suit, hers has a stealth mesh to render her invisible. Where I keep my mister, she has a gun loaded with vials too large for rats. I have a mini-vac to suck up excess plant matter to prevent seeds from sprouting. She has zip ties.

By the time I’m done, she’s already cracking under the weight of everything she tried to protect me from. Within moments she’s sobbing on the floor. I carry her to her bed and get in beside her. I try not to listen too closely as she recounts every horrible moment, but I’m listening at the end, when she tells me she can’t do it anymore. When she confesses that she’s the one who stole my poison, and has only been waiting to take it because she didn’t have the stomach to do to me what Jordan did to us.

I tell her how we’ll make playgrounds of dead data centers and use hoses to fill the holes where skyscrapers were, and kids will play Marco Polo swimming over a CEO’s sunken office.

I leave her for just a moment, but by the time I lie back in bed beside her I’ve figured it out.

I tell her that she won’t have to take her shift tomorrow. I tell her I’m going to go around the city with my mister and my growth serum. That I’ll move plants from sewers to the yards around City Hall and every public space and the support pylons of important people’s companies, and then spray them so they become huge. The city will freak. I tell her it will be like the kittens, but this time we’ll all be pulled off our assignments to kill plants. And maybe the serum will work too well. Maybe the city was right to fear these plants, and they will grow and grow and eat our concrete while the roots crack our foundations and cut our electricity and everything will crumble. And the people with something to lose might suffer, but the rest of us will just laugh at the perfection of rubble. I tell her how we’ll make playgrounds of dead data centers and use hoses to fill the holes where skyscrapers were, and kids will play Marco Polo swimming over a CEO’s sunken office. 

She asks if I’ll put any at our old detention center.

I tell her, Hundreds.

I talk long enough that her eyes close, and loud enough that neither of us can hear the sound of my mister blowing. The man who gave it to me was right. Even without the mask, it doesn’t smell like sulfur. It doesn’t smell like anything. 

Micaiah Johnson’s debut novel, The Space Between Worlds, a Sunday Times bestseller and New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, was named one of the best books of 2020 and one of the best science fiction books of the last decade by NPR. Her first horror novel, The Unhaunting, is due out in fall 2026.

The myth of the high-tech heist

Making a movie is a lot like pulling off a heist. That’s what Steven Soderbergh—director of the Ocean’s franchise, among other heist-y classics—said a few years ago. You come up with a creative angle, put together a team of specialists, figure out how to beat the technological challenges, rehearse, move with Swiss-watch precision, and—if you do it right—redistribute some wealth. That could describe either the plot or the making of Ocean’s Eleven.

But conversely, pulling off a heist isn’t much like the movies. Surveillance cameras, computer-controlled alarms, knockout gas, and lasers hardly ever feature in big-ticket crime. In reality, technical countermeasures are rarely a problem, and high-tech gadgets are rarely a solution. The main barrier to entry is usually a literal barrier to entry, like a door. Thieves’ most common move is to collude with, trick, or threaten an insider. Last year a heist cost the Louvre €88 million worth of antique jewelry, and the most sophisticated technology in play was an angle grinder.

The low-tech Louvre maneuvers were in keeping with what heist research long ago concluded. In 2014 US nuclear weapons researchers at Sandia National Laboratories took a detour into this demimonde, producing a 100-page report called “The Perfect Heist: Recipes from Around the World.” The scientists were worried someone might try to steal a nuke from the US arsenal, and so they compiled information on 23 high-value robberies from 1972 to 2012 into a “Heist Methods and Characteristics Database,” a critical mass of knowledge on what worked. Thieves, they found, dedicated huge amounts of money and time to planning and practice runs—sometimes more than 100. They’d use brute force, tunneling through sewers for months (Société Générale bank heist, Nice, France, 1976), or guile, donning police costumes to fool guards (Gardner Museum, Boston, 1990). But nobody was using, say, electromagnetic pulse generators to shut down the Las Vegas electrical grid. The most successful robbers got to the valuable stuff unseen and got out fast.

DIMITAR DILKOFF / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Advance the time frame, and the situation looks much the same. Last year, Spanish researchers looking at art crimes from 1990 to 2022 found that the least technical methods are still the most successful. “High-tech technology doesn’t work so well,” says Erin L. Thompson, an art historian at John Jay College of Justice who studies art crime. Speed and practice trump complicated systems and alarms; even that Louvre robbery was, at heart, just a minutes-long smash-and-grab.

An emphasis on speed doesn’t mean heists don’t require skill—panache, even. As the old saying goes, amateurs talk strategy; professionals study logistics. Even without gadgets, heists and heist movies still revel in an engineer’s mindset. “Heist movies absolutely celebrate deep-dive nerdery—‘I’m going to know everything I can about the power grid, about this kind of stone and drill, about Chicago at night,’” says Anna Kornbluh, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She published a paper last October on the ways heist movies reflect an Old Hollywood approach to collective art-making, while shows about new grift, like those detailing the rise and fall of WeWork or the con artist Anna Delvey, reflect the more lone-wolf, disrupt-and-grow mindset of the streaming era. 

Her work might help explain why law-abiding citizens might cheer for the kinds of guys who’d steal a crown from the Louvre, or $100,000 worth of escargot from a farm in Champagne (as happened just a few weeks later). Heists, says Kornbluh, are anti-oligarch praxis. “Everybody wants to know how to be in a competent collective. Everybody wants there to be better logistics,” she says. “We need a better state. We need a better society. We need a better world.” Those are shared values—and as another old saying tells us, where there is value, there is crime.

Good technology should change the world

The billionaire investor Peter Thiel (or maybe his ghostwriter) once said, “We were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

That quip originally appeared in a manifesto for Thiel’s venture fund in 2011. All good investment firms have a manifesto, right? This one argued for making bold bets on risky, world-changing technologies rather than chasing the tepid mundanity of social software startups. What followed, however, was a decade that got even more mundane. Messaging, ride hailing, house shares, grocery delivery, burrito taxis, chat, all manner of photo sharing, games, juice on demand, and Yo. Remember Yo? Yo, yo.

It was an era defined more by business model disruptions than by true breakthroughs—a time when the most ambitious, high-profile startup doing anything resembling real science-based innovation was … Theranos? The 2010s made it easy to become a cynic about the industry, to the point that tech skepticism has replaced techno-optimism in the zeitgeist. Many of the “disruptions” of the last 15 years were about coddling a certain set of young, moneyed San Franciscans more than improving the world. Sure, that industry created an obscene amount of wealth for a small number of individuals. But maybe no company should be as powerful as the tech giants whose tentacles seem to wrap around every aspect of our lives. 

Yet you can be sympathetic to the techlash and still fully buy into the idea that technology can be good. We really can build tools that make this planet healthier, more livable, more equitable, and just all-around better. 

In fact, some people have been doing just that. Amid all the nonsense of the teeny-­boomers, a number of fundamental, potentially world-changing technologies have been making quiet progress. Quantum computing. Intelligent machines. Carbon capture. Gene editing. Nuclear fusion. mRNA vaccines. Materials discovery. Humanoid robots. Atmospheric water harvesting. Robotaxis. And, yes, even flying cars—have you heard of an EVTOL? The acronym stands for “electric vertical takeoff and landing.” It’s a small electric vehicle that can lift off and return to Earth without a runway. Basically, a flying car. You can buy one. Right now. (Good luck!)

Jetsons stuff. It’s here. 

Every year, MIT Technology Review publishes a list of 10 technologies that we believe are poised to fundamentally alter the world. The shifts aren’t always positive (see, for example, our 2023 entry on cheap military drones, which continue to darken the skies over Ukraine). But for the most part, we’re talking about changes for the better: curing diseases, fighting climate change, living in space. I don’t know about you, but … seems pretty good to me?

As the saying goes, two things can be true. Technology can be a real and powerful force for good in the world, and it can also be just an enormous factory for hype, bullshit, and harmful ideas. We try to keep both of those things in mind. We try to approach our subject matter with curious skepticism. 

But every once in a while we also approach it with awe, and even wonder. Our problems are myriad and sometimes seem insurmountable. Hyperobjects within hyperobjects. But a century ago, people felt that way about growing enough food for a booming population and facing the threat of communicable diseases. Half a century ago, they felt that way about toxic pollution and a literal hole in the atmosphere. Tech bros are wrong about a lot, but their build-big manifestos make a good point: We can solve problems. We have to. And in the quieter, more deliberate parts of the future, we will.