The Abyss / Season 1, Episode 8
The Ambassador
THE ABYSS Season 1, Episode 8: "The Ambassador" --- [CHAPTER 1: THE OFFICE] They gave Mira an office in Geneva, in a building that had once housed the World Health Organization. Now it was the headquarters of the Human-Entity Relations Commission—HERC, in the bureaucratic shorthand that governments loved so much. Her title was "Principal Liaison to the Deep." Her job description ran to forty-three pages. Her actual work consisted mostly of explaining to politicians why they couldn't ask the entity to solve all of humanity's problems. "But it's ancient," the Secretary-General argued during their weekly meeting. "It has technology we can barely imagine. Surely it could help with climate change, or disease, or—" "It could," Mira agreed. "But it won't. The entity believes that solving our problems for us would be a form of communion by another name. We'd become dependent on it, guided by it, shaped by it. Eventually we'd stop being ourselves." "Is that so bad? If the alternative is extinction?" "According to the entity, yes. It's learned—we've taught it—that the struggle is the point. Beings who don't face challenges don't grow. And beings who don't grow eventually stagnate, no matter how long they exist." The Secretary-General rubbed his temples. He was a good man, Mira knew, trying to manage a situation that no human leader had ever...