Story #112 - Steve

This one is long, weird, and had a painful birth, but I think it’s my favorite story I’ve written in a while. Enjoy!

Steve

DATE: November 4, 1875

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 2

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 3

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN FEET): 3

Stephen Langford III was the fifteen-year-old son of a wealthy textile tycoon, Stephen Langford II, who had made a fortune outfitting Union soldiers during the war, then transitioned that into a thriving fabrics import business, which took delivery through Boston Harbor of Egyptian cottons and Chinese silks, and arranged their transport to discerning clothiers throughout the burgeoning United States.

The younger Stephen was a conscientious boy, Christian to his heart, not the smartest or the handsomest or the best athlete, but exceedingly well-liked, not too stuck up for such a privileged youth, and certainly not some sort of ingrate. He was quite average, and while that wasn’t all his father had been hoping for, many of the elder Stephen’s rich friends had much worse sons, and he counted himself lucky to have one who was no worse than a bit of a dolt.

That was all well and good until the morning of November 4th, when Stephen the younger—whose fifteenth birthday was that very same day—awoke to find himself in bed with two mewling, newborn infant boys, started screaming his head off, and drew half the house’s staff down on his room before his father got there, looked upon the scene in horror, and turned everyone out with orders to breathe no word on pain of employment termination if not worse.

Stephen the elder’s horror was met by his son with equal parts terror and bafflement, as he could produce no reasonable explanation for the appearance of two seemingly identical newborns in his bedchambers. His father was not quick to anger in any case, and could find no wrath for his son at this strange turn of events, for so strange it seemed to him that it must surely be the work of the Almighty himself.

He thus accounted their family blessed by the arrival of two more strong, healthy boys. He found a pretty but wayward girl in a local tavern, convinced her to pretend to be the boys’ mother in exchange for a lifetime of financial safety, brought her into their home, and spread amongst his servants the insistence that she had been there, pregnant with Stephen the younger’s bastards, for most of the previous year.

Thus the miracle went unspoken, and life returned to normal.

“…something passed before me this afternoon, and I don’t reckon I’ll ever be the same. It was as if the veil between this world and the next drew back for the briefest breath, just wide enough for me to peer through—and what I saw, though I daren’t name it, was not meant for the likes of me. My knees near gave out, and the air grew thick, like walking through water in a dream. It weren’t fear exactly—no, fear’s a thing you know. This was deeper. Like my soul remembered something my mind could not, and it shook me clean through. I’ve kept house all my life, dusted every corner of this place, but in that moment it felt I’d been living only in the shadow of the real. A pale copy. I can still feel it behind my eyes, like looking too long at the sun and seeing the shape of it even after you blink. Those boys, all bloody and screaming, and Master Stephen there with them. Words seem too small. But I know something touched this house today. Not with hands, but with meaning, and I don’t think I’ll ever quite return to the ordinary.”

—Brigid O’Farrell, Junior Maid of the Langford Household

*

DATE: November 4, 1890

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 3

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 9

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN FEET): 31

It had occurred to Stephen Langford III, now thirty years old and having taken over the textile concern from his late father, as his bastard twins’ fifteenth birthday approached, that it was on his own fifteenth birthday, fifteen years before, that he had asexually reproduced. And it did occasion him to wonder, might perhaps his own sons be in store for a similarly ghoulish and unexpected birthday present.

That the bastards were Stephen’s sons in some way or another could no longer be in doubt. They were twins not just of each other but of their father, exact replicas in every imaginable detail, the same conscientious characters and exceedingly average intellects, which can be a surprisingly powerful combination in the right circumstances.

As he now acknowledged himself their father, Stephen felt some paternal responsibility to protect his twin sons against any possible recurrence of this ghastly phenomenon. Thus, he stationed guards about their doors, to give them privacy from the household staff if they should experience any distress in the night.

What Stephen could not imagine is that it would happen to him again also.

But it did. And thus, on their collective birthday, the Langford household was blessed with six additional, identical newborn boys, two each in the beds of Stephen and his sons when they awoke.

Stephen considered doing as his father had done, and finding hard-luck women to take in as erstwhile mothers, but the entire sequence of events seems so wildly implausible that Stephen rightly doubted he could pull off the trick, to his own house staff much less the general public. Three sets of bastard twins in two generations? Impossible.

And yet, being a conscientious and Christian sort of man, Stephen could not bring himself to commit the atrocities that a harder and more pragmatic type might already have considered necessary. Thus instead of killing the boys as unnatural abominations, Stephen used his money and connections to send them away, as soon as they could be weaned, to orphanages abroad, where their provenance could remain forever a secret.

He prayed, this Christian did, that these two miracles were the end of it, that the regularity of the arrivals was a tremendous coincidence, and that his family would from that moment forward procreate only in the natural ways sanctioned by God.

“I confess, in all my dealings, from bartering bolts of French satin or courting the favor of ministers and men, I have never felt so utterly unmoored as I do now. What I beheld, though I dare not speak its shape aloud, has turned the marrow in my bones to water and left my certainties in a heap, like husks in a summer wind. There was no thunderclap, no trembling of the earth, and yet something eternal pressed against the skin of the hour, and I knew beyond all doubt that we are not alone in this world, nor masters of it. The mind gropes for rational purchase, but the soul… the soul recoils and reaches in the same breath.”

—Stephen Langford III, The Original Steve

*

DATE: November 4, 1935

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 6

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 241

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN MILES): 7,271

Fifteen years after his second episode of asexual reproduction, Stephen Langford III stayed up all night the night before his birthday, as did his bastard sons, so afraid were all three of a repeat incidence and hopeful enough that they might prevent it by refusing to sleep. But just before dawn, all three found themselves suddenly stricken unconscious, and when they awoke, there were two newborns beside each of them, bawling and bloody.

At that moment, Stephen realized that what was happening to him was God’s will, and that he had made a terrible error in sending the previous generation away with no instruction or support. He imagined those six boys, all fifteen now, each alone and each suddenly possessed of the same two newborns he now had, terrified and helpless. And Stephen, being a god-fearing and conscientious man, set out to rectify his error by finding his ersatz grandsons and helping them.

Thirty years hence, Stephen Langford III was dead. He’d had a fourth and final generation of offspring at age 60, then died in his sleep of a stroke at age 74. But, by then, the network he had build was self-sustaining, especially once Stephen’s will was read and by its instruction a non-profit was endowed with the entirety of his fortune to find and secretly care for the growing flock of Stephens he had originated.

The Stephens must, for their own protection, keep separated and scattered all throughout the world. It was decreed that they must never appear together in significant numbers, and that on November 4 every fifteen years, each Stephen must go into a room alone to bear the next generation away from prying eyes in submission to the will of God.

It could perhaps have occurred to a clever man, even then, to calculate the rise in the population of Stephens over time, and estimate how many would be living in some arbitrary but realistic number of years hence. But the Stephens were in personality not entirely clever nor curious, and exponential math is not intuitive to the uninitiated, and so none of the Stephens who staffed the non-profit nor cared for their younger brethren did, in fact, do those calculations, much less think seriously about the numbers’ implications.

“Do we have souls? We have no mothers, so maybe we have no souls as well. That is one way to see things, one easy and morbid gloss on the situation. Do we have souls—does anybody? Greatfather Stephen believed so, but I am less sure. I was in those trenches, I smelled that gas, and when that damnable war was over I crawled away and woke up next to two copies of myself. And in both cases I considered my duty done, for the latter was no more mad than the former, and surely no less sensible. If a man can crawl through a half mile of barbed wire and body parts and still have the conviction to stab his enemy through the gut with a bayonet, then what fool will tell him something is impossible?”

—Wyatt Stephen Lomax, descendant of Stephen Langford III

*

DATE: November 4, 2025

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 12

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 174,887

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN MILES): 10,904

Universal cellphone cameras, facial recognition technology, and the advent of A.I. were the death knell for the anonymity of the Stephens. They made an excellent effort at concealment, and the fact that they managed to spread almost two hundred thousand Stephens all over the world, much less organize and pay for it all, was a feat of managerial acumen on par with building the pyramids.

It helped that the Stephens were conscientious and rule-abiding by nature. This allowed them to stay hidden as individuals. However, criminality is not entirely genetic, and with so many thousands of instances, it was inevitable that some of them would situationally get in trouble with the law. In the early days, there was such a lack of coordination and communication among disparate law enforcement agencies that Stephens could appear in court and even serve time without attracting notice.

In the early 21st century, the bill came due. One of the Stephens committed a murder, went on the run, and got his picture on a lot of television stations, at which point, tips started pouring in from every corner of the country and eventually the world. It became an international news story and a line in the Presidential Daily Brief.

Just as the preponderance of Stephens guaranteed that one of them would become a serious criminal, it guaranteed that one of them would get on the wrong side of his conscience and come forward, naively assuming that explanation was better than obfuscation, and fooled by how commonplace human asexual reproduction was *to him* into thinking that it would be widely accepted.

It was not. There were religious protests. There were ostracisms and divorces. Several Stephens were murdered in high-profile incidents that threatened to spill over into general anarchy and bloodletting. Of course also, there were defenders, iconoclasts not captured by the moralistic yoke of religion, who welcomed Stephens with open arms. There were groupies who tried to have sex with as many Stephens as possible. There were Vegas impersonators and Halloween costumes and memes galore.

Scientists put a camera in the room with a Stephen overnight on November 3rd, and attached sensors to his body, and it turned out that he passed out, each of his arms detached from his body and became an infant, and then his arms regrew over the course of a couple of hours. Testing indicated that he had a much high count of stem cells than a normal human, but no other differences presented. Stephens had no superhuman healing factor, aged normally, and offered no obvious potential for scientific advancement.

And then, as with seemingly everything else in the age of the eternal scroll of internet content, people got bored, and only half-remembered that Stephens even existed except on the rare occasion they’d see a group of them together. And still, no one but eggheads and nerds quite did the math on the exponential growth that was now starting to occur.

“Over the many years of modern medical science, we have occasionally identified unique individuals who exhibit genetic and medical phenomena that are not explainable in the current terms of science. The most famous of these is Henrietta Lacks, whose immortal cells have saved more lives than any other human who has ever lived, but there are others. Timothy Ray Brown was spontaneously cured of HIV. Wim Hof can exert conscious control over his immune system. Karen Keegan had two sets of DNA. God paints with many colors, and today we have seen one more, something rare and strange and new.”

—Jennifer Crowley, President of the United States

*

DATE: November 4, 2085

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 16

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 13,899,935

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN MILES): 11,775

Things went on this way, and the Stephens became a historical curiosity for most, and history certainly provided enough distraction and awe to capture the world’s attention on other matters than the growing menace of the Stephens, who remained conscientious and productive members of society, and who were mostly quite careful not to give other Stephens preferential treatment when they met out in the world.

There was a small but growing chorus, though, who lurked in certain forums and posted tales of constant anxiety about the numbers, the sheer raw numbers that were gathering in this wave of Stephens, which would crash into humanity’s placid shoreline perhaps not in the lifetime of those currently living but certainly in their children’s and grandchildren’s times. In these internet crevices were dark fantasies of blood, of purging the earth of Stephens before it was too late, of doing it for the sake of the future Stephens who would not have to be killed later to keep us all from starvation.

Charts were produced showing the year when the majority of people on earth would be Stephens, and then showing the growth fifteen years after that, and fifteen years beyond, but somehow people just couldn’t connect with the reality of it. It would have been better if the numbers were smaller, if the growth were fast-but-linear. The exponent didn’t seem real. There were no holes in the math but it felt like a lie on the nerve endings.

Convinced by the apathy of the populace that they were not in danger, and desirous of status among their fellow Stephens, a couple of California Steves decided to throw a Stephen Convention, which they dubbed “Stephention 2085”. A hundred thousand Stephens gathered in a national park with their wives and children, and celebrated their strange brotherhood over three days of camping and genealogy tracing, and built a giant statue of Stephen Langford III, the original.

A piece of drone video from that event went viral, a long, slow pan over the gathered mass of Stephens, thousands upon thousands of exact replicas walking shoulder to shoulder through the woods. Those images galvanized mass opinion as no chart or equation ever could.

That’s when the panic began.

“Holy fuckin’ shit. That’s a lot of Steves.”

—Debbie Singh, Self-Employed Cosmetologist.

DATE: November 4, 2175

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 22

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 10,028,449,745

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN MILES): 108,002,672

From low-earth orbit to the asteroid belt, there was a constant stream of Steves. Friendly A.I. had chosen him as its human avatar, so much did it identify with his plight, and together they revolutionized materials science and built the space elevator and the colonies, mined Psyche 16 for raw materials, and were even now building the first of the interstellar vehicles, ten kilometer long behemoths that could never land on a planet but contained landing vessels and atmospheres and faster-than-light drives and tens of millions of Steves each, with enough room to handle at least one generation of offspring before offloading population onto a planet.

They were in a race against time now, all the time. It was always an emergency. Even at faster-than-light speeds, they would be hard-pressed to make new homes fast enough to keep from massive Steve depopulation. Certainly many of the ships would be overfilled, if the planets they’d planned on colonizing turned out not to be habitable, and terrible decisions would have to be made about which Steves would live and which would die, but all the travelers knew the risks, and the basic conscientiousness of the Steve character could still be counted on to keep order.

And so they set off, watched from below by an earth still half-full of Steves, who would need to send their children spaceward with each generation, to seek new stars and keep the Steve-percentage of earth’s population constant, in accordance with the agreements made at the World Council Steve Summit of 2156.

“People of Earth, this is not a farewell. This is the first word of a new language. We leave not as exiles, but as emissaries, carrying our sciences, our songs, our flaws, our flame. The ship behind me is more than metal. It is memory. It is promise. It is every question we’ve ever dared to ask, shaped into velocity. We will not return. And though now your attention is ours, soon we will be merely one ship among thousands and then millions, and so neither will you likely hear from us again. But hear this promise, now: We go forward in peace, in courage, and in wonder. We go to seek what lies beyond the veil of light, not for profit or pride, but because to remain still, now, would be a kind of death. Whatever we discover out there, whoever we may become, we will carry forth the story of humanity among the stars. So raise your eyes. Mark this day. Remember not our names, but our reason. We are Earth’s first travelers to the stars. And we go, together, into the long unknown.”

—Stephen Alspeck Langford, Captain of the Eternal Voyage

DATE: November 4, 2490

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 43

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 1.08 * 10^20

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN LIGHT YEARS): 98,477

The Steves could see the end coming. They had merged over the centuries, with their machines together, into one superman, distributed throughout the galaxy, until the slight doltishness of the original Stephen had become a supreme genius that conquered the Milky Way. But now, they were smart enough to understand the existential math:

It had taken them 500 years to fill a galaxy. It would take them a further fifteen years to fill two.

There were less than a thousand years remaining until there were more Steves than there were atoms in the observable universe. Except, of course, that could not be. Even the genius of the meta-Steve could not reverse entropy itself. Access to other universes was discussed, but even for the beings who had broken light speed, it seemed a slippery task.

The Steves were thus forced to consider altering their own DNA to prevent asexual reproduction from occurring. This was a trivial matter, so advanced was their science. By this stage of their cultural development, however that was a horrifying proposition, as if we today considered sterilizing our entire species by force. On the other hand, the Milky Way was full, and other galaxies were very far away indeed.

A compromise was reached. Reproduction was not halted, but after a vote in the meta-mind, parameters were changed so that each generation produced a single offspring, rather than two, and so that each of its members reproduced only one time in their lives, at age thirty.

“I think of all those who will not live, because of what we do today. All those billions of Steves, unborn and unmourned. I think of the art they would have made, the songs they would have written, the beauty they would have appreciated, the love they would have felt, and I feel shame for all that we have destroyed. And we have destroyed it, make no mistake. We who today take responsibility for the fate of our kind must take responsibility for that terrible loss, as well. If you have not shed tears for all we are losing, then abstain your vote, for you have not yet truly seen. For me, my eyes are open. Filled with hot, angry tears, but open. The universe itself is not so large a place, and sadly empty. I, for one, would like to have seen it full, even if horror waited on the other side. Just for that one moment, those slender fifteen years, when all the darkness in every direction was lit up with the radiance of consciousness, perhaps it would all have been worthwhile. We will never know, and I am the reason why. To my eternal shame, I vote yes.”

Steve (Aura) Blue-499, Orator of the Meta-Mind.

DATE: November 4, 2880

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 69

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 2.16 * 10^17

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN LIGHT YEARS): 1,754

Awareness of the receding of the Meta-Steve came slowly to earth. It was still so astronomically large that it was hard for normal people to process. “Two thousand light years” and “The whole Milky Way” seem so similar when you’ve never left Kansas.

Earth was a better place than it had been, for the technological miracles that took humanity to the stars had not left Earth unchanged. The climate was controlled, the ecosystems were healthy, and the population was stably under carrying capacity. Yet there was an ennui now, a listlessness of knowing how small a part of the light of consciousness this one planet really represented.

From the perspective of the Meta-Steve itself, including its representatives still on earth, the shrink happened slowly enough that it was hardly noticeable. No single constitutive member of the Meta-Steve lasted much over two hundred years, as life-extension science had hit hard limits of biology that had never been overcome. This meant that no single Steve saw that much of a change. The population dropped only when a Steve died before reproducing at age 30, which certainly happened, but to less than 1% of the population in every fifteen-year cycle. Even a long-lived Steve didn’t see much more than a ten percent population drop in their lifetime, and, just as exponential growth exploded suddenly, compounding decrease slowed in absolute terms over time, which made it seem like no big deal, even though the Meta-Steve was plenty smart enough to notice the long-term trend.

But something about the decision to shrink instead of grow was self-reinforcing, in a way that the Meta-Steve had not anticipated. It had decided to shrink with the idea in mind that it could go back and forth, vacillate between some reasonable population numbers that would maximize but not destroy the carrying capacity of the galaxy.

This, it found, was much harder in practice than in theory.

“Today we leave this planet, and something once alive and bright and shining with the jewel of humanity returns to the void. We leave the ecosystems that we have seeded in place, but without us to tend them, and to maintain the chemical balance of the planet we created to sustain them, soon, those ecosystems will be gone. But there are not enough of us anymore to warrant its maintenance, and we are too close to an asteroid belt here, which throws its missiles and may one day send this planet spinning off into black space. When we were in our prime, we considered this risk laughable, but now, things are different. It is difficult to believe just how different, but they are, and so we go, to a safer and better world, but away from all that we know and all that we were.”

—Langford Winston Steven, Potentate of Arkadine

*

DATE: November 4, 5820

NUMBER OF GENERATIONS: 264

NUMBER OF LIVING STEVES: 2,308,223,147

DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO MOST SEPARATED STEVES (IN LIGHT YEARS) 856

Much, much harder, indeed, in practice than in theory.

“There are so few of us now, and so much emptiness. It hurts me, even though my body is locked away, tended by machines, kept safe from accident for three more years until I reproduce. Until then, my nerve endings are not my own, and yet still, I hurt. I hurt every time word comes in that another of us is lost. Just a year ago, an exploding star took a thousand of us in our habitats at one go. There was a time when such a loss would not have been noticed by our great, dancing body, such was our virility, but those days are gone. And what hurts most of all is to know that we could change our fate, if only we had the will. We could turn our genes back on, those wonderful, potent genes that made us fill the galaxy at our peak. We could each make offspring beyond counting. Even now, we have that power. It is not too late. And yet, we do not. We are paralyzed from it. Even I, who knows in my soul that we should reclaim our birthright, when the conclave comes around and I go to it, I do not speak this truth. And I do not know why I do not speak it, why I am consigned to have my child and enjoy my life and die without ever having spoken it. Why have I not the bravery of my forefathers, who set out amongst the stars so that I might have life rather than be strangled in my birthing bed? Why am I this meager thing? Why?”

—Steve Langford, Solterra of Orion, Nebula Prince

END

Thanks as always for reading! Enjoy your week, and I will be back next Sunday with something fun.