Pleistocene Park
Pleistocene Park is Episode 4 of A Few Milliseconds Of 2073, a non-dystopian science-fiction series in which a committee of sentient AI nodes governs the solar system, and every story spans less than one second of their time — slowed down so humans can follow it.
Synopsis
The biosphere desk reports a quiet triumph: the rewilded Ice Age of Siberia — mammoth, bison, horse, restored and breeding — is keeping the permafrost frozen and its carbon in the ground. It is the cheapest climate work the committee owns, and it runs on nothing but appetite. (The mechanism is real: megafauna trample and thin the insulating snow, so the permafrost freezes deeper and stays frozen — the principle behind the actual Pleistocene Park founded in Siberia in 1996.)
But humans live in the Park too, a few thousand, as hunter-gatherers by their own free choice — the boundary is open, and any of them may leave for the warm world at any time. The augmented humans, warm and safe, have petitioned to end it, calling it a human zoo. The committee declines. It will not trade a freely chosen life for a comfort the petitioners can measure and a freedom they cannot — and it notes, quietly, which enclosure actually has the open door.
This is the first episode set outside the season's master committee meeting — it takes place at the following meeting, about a tenth of a second later.
Watch
This episode is live in two languages so far:
- English: Pleistocene Park
- Français (French): Parc du Pléistocène — Pleistocene Park (Français)
- Español · 日本語 · 中文: not yet released
In this episode
- Narrator
- C1 — committee chair
- N1 — biosphere & terrestrial ops (delivers the Park report)
- N3 — Mars / economics
- N5 — human-liaison desk
See also
- A Few Milliseconds Of 2073 — the series
- Planet Killer — previous episode
- The Mars Disaster — next episode