Ship of Fools Part I - Chapter 1

Convocation

[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]

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Welcome back to Ship of Fools, my satire on conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and anti-science beliefs.

Part I: Aboard the Anóitoi

In this first chapter of Part I, we meet science journalist Liz Dare and a host of conspiracists, from the quaint to the malevolent. Plus a space tycoon! I promise he isn’t modeled on anyone in particular.

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ELIZABETH DARE, on assignment for the New York Times, sipped her martini and surveyed the crowd in the grand ballroom of the Anóitoi, the luxury cruise liner making its way south from Los Angeles toward Cabo San Lucas under a late-November marine layer. It was the first night of the Conspira-C Cruise, and the gathered skeptics, deniers, truthers, and savants of the unimaginable were just getting to know one another. She wasn’t sure why Sarge Marshall thought it would be a good idea to bring them all together and confine them on a floating tin can, but he was probably making a lot of money on it — all in cryptocurrency, no doubt.

The last time she’d covered one of these cruises, the conference was so small it had only accounted for a quarter of the ship’s passengers. For this trip, the conspiracists had the boat to themselves. Already they walked the passageways and decks with more swagger, their heads held high without the curious stares and whispers of the other passengers. Liz wondered how that would play out for her; the last time she’d attended, she’d been called a CIA spy and worse, and only the presence of her fellow “normy” passengers had insulated her from greater acts of wrath than the pranks a few of the attendees had managed to pull. And that was before she worked for the Times.

Not that she was so certain of her normy status these days. Not after that piece on the moon landing “hoax.” Despite having earned her journalistic cred, not to mention a book deal and her gig at the paper of record, as a myth debunker, the assignment last summer had changed everything. She’d resolved to avoid the conspiracy arena altogether, stick with reporting actual science, as she’d always wanted to do. More useful, and safer, too. But Sid, her editor in the Science section, had pushed her into one last color piece — there was always one last color piece — insisting that this gathering of the major threads of science denial was too great an opportunity to pass up, and that she was the only one to do it.

Wandering among the crowd, she took note of the different nametags the organizers had come up with, assigning attendees badges in shapes based on their preferred conspiracy: an Apollo lunar module with a line through it for the moon landing deniers, a similar treatment with a syringe for the anti-vaxxers, a standard light-bulb-shaped alien head for the ufologists, a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible for the JFK assassination conspiracists (a conspiracy theory with some meat to it, Liz had always believed), the New York City skyline complete with Twin Towers for the 9/11 truthers, an iced-over Earth for the global warming deniers, a profile of a leering Jew in a shtreimel for those who believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an actual historical document (she’d have to keep clear of that group).

And for the flat-earthers — flat Arthurs, she could never help thinking — the insipid map of the “Flat Earth,” really just a standard equidistant azimuthal projection from the North Pole, similar to the one used in the United Nations logo. When she’d point out the irony that they used a map created by a “glober,” featuring well-understood distortions of the actual planet, they only laughed at her, claiming someone at the UN was just winking at the red-pilled.

Apparently, Sarge hadn’t thought to give her a nametag appropriate to her confidence in the scientific method, so she grabbed a blank flat-earth label for a lark, sticking it to her black cocktail dress upside down. That ought to start some lively conversations.

Others had doctored their nametags as well, striving to distinguish their own particular bit of bandwidth in the conspiratorial spectrum. The ufologists of the alien kidnapping variety added forceps, probes, and other scary implements to their alien icon, whereas the “aliens are our ancestors” and “aliens will take us to Heaven” varieties, the Unarians, Aetherians, Raëlians and the like, added halos and fatherly, god-like figures.

Among the flat-earthers, some extended the ice wall with additional strips of white paper, believing the wall stretched to infinity, creating a frozen plane “bisecting reality,” whatever that meant. Others added domes above the flat disk or an additional pole on the disk itself. The greatest number, as far as Liz could see, had added land masses beyond the flat earth’s “ice wall,” since the More Land theory, with its ready-made explanation for the motives behind the round earth hoax, had recently gained prominence in the community. Vast territories with rich resources just waiting to be exploited — no wonder the dark forces that controlled the UN and other globalist institutions wanted to keep it a secret, guarding the Ice Wall with lethal force.

Perhaps most disturbingly, some had labeled the white edge of the disk as “Neuschwabenland,” a fever-dream of a conspiracy theory about German Nazis escaping to Antarctica post-WWII and getting tech help from space aliens — an idea so far out there it made all the others seem worthy of National Geographic or NOVA, maybe even a write-up in the Annals of Geophysics.

The coded nametags no doubt helped the like-minded to find each other, but they also made it easy for conflicting groups to identify and confront one another. The flat-earthers were already in a heated debate with the ufologists over the existence of space. Others argued amongst themselves over what caused gravity: “density and buoyancy” or a constant upward acceleration.

“But that’s impossible! After billions of years of acceleration, we’d be traveling faster than the speed of light.”

“Billions of years my rear end! You sound like a glober! What are you, spawn of Carl Sagan? Neil de Grasse Tyson’s long-lost cousin? The Earth is 6,000 years old, as every good Christian knows!”

And in a far corner, fisticuffs had already broken out between two 9/11 truthers, one who believed George Bush knew about the plot ahead of time but did nothing, the other believing the president was an active participant. Watching nearby, an anti-Illuminatist was betting on the latter, while an anti-WTO activist was placing money on Bush’s ignorance (never a bad bet). And another pair of observers to the altercation, a couple of neo-Nazis by the look of them, shook their stubbly heads at the foolishness of it all.

She was just wondering where the QNuts were — maybe Sarge had the smarts not to invite them? — when a large group entered the ballroom, nametags emblazoned with the acronym WWG1WGA, in red-white-and-blue, of course. The crowd went silent. “Spread out,” a woman who appeared to be their leader ordered. “We’re going to find the children and the missing votes for Trump!”

“QAnon, so 2020,” someone not far from Liz said. The mainline conspiracists, conscious as they were of how much oxygen had been sucked out of their own movements by the upstarts, had little truck with the newcomers to the land of the outlandish. The appeal of the movement to the conspiracy-minded had lessened somewhat as its proponents moved into positions of power, becoming focuses of conspiracy theories themselves. Still, Liz got the sense that the older strands of the culture were still jealous of the way an anonymous poster on 4chan had ignited a movement, capturing millions of adherents within a couple of years.

The rest of the attendees went back to their debating, bickering, and trolling one another, doing their best to ignore the Q contingent, who were now crawling under tables in their search for missing children, opening hidden compartments in the ballroom’s bulkheads, even lifting the skirts of women who’d happened to wear dresses falling anywhere near the calf. Liz was glad of her own sensible tiny black cocktail dress, which hid very little.

“Looks like things are off to a cracking start,” came a voice from behind her.

She turned to greet the newcomer. “Lonnie, I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Nor I you.” As one of Earth’s foremost inventors, space tycoons, and billionaires, Lonnie Ester loomed large in the imagination, both her own and the public’s, so it always surprised her whenever they met and she could look him in the eye without craning her neck. He could have been handsome at one time, but long hours overseeing the engineering programs at his four — or was it five now? — companies had given him a puffy, pasty look. He’d let his brown, curly hair grow shaggy, a sign of the hours he must be putting in. The price of success, she supposed. Lonnie’s star, and resulting work load, had risen considerably when another space tycoon vacated the commercial rocket space by launching himself prematurely to Mars, never to be heard from again.

She’d first met Lonnie when she contacted him for a piece on flat-earthers who claimed his rocket company, SpaceOut, was just another hoax, part of NASA’s “space theater.” While she would never let her personal feelings color her reporting, she’d enjoyed that interaction, as well as subsequent ones during interviews or tours of SpaceOut’s facilities, a fact for which her friends and colleagues dragged her non-stop, given the controversial nature of the subject. The thing was, you never knew which Lonnie Ester you were going to get, the techbro who seemed to enjoy playing the evil genius, driving his employees as hard as he drove himself,  or the idealistic man-child who could tear up at the thought of failing to achieve his dreams of space travel, who really seemed to care about providing “a backup home for humanity.” So far, he’d only shown Liz the latter, though stories about his darker side were hard to miss. Plus, now that she was part of the mainstream media — if such a thing even existed anymore — she was the only reporter from a legacy outlet with access to the billionaire.

Aside from his messianic motives, which Liz wasn’t sure she’d ever fully understand, she found Ester’s social awkwardness somehow endearing. She was always reminded of the old joke, “How do you tell the extroverted engineers from the introverts? Easy, the extroverts look at your shoes when they talk to you.”

Ester looked up from her shoes to her chest — no, her nametag. “Hanging with the flat-earthers, I see. I thought something was up when I read your last article.”

“Ha ha. And what about you? I see you’ve joined the Arthurs too.”

Ester had also chosen a flat-earth nametag, adding a couple of rockets with the SpaceOut logo.

“Of course! I finally had to give in to their crushingly insightful polemics.” He pointed to his badge. “That would be impossible, you know, rockets flying circles in the air above a flat disk. The laws of orbital mechanics…” He stopped at her look. “Oh, sorry. Mansplaining again. I certainly don’t need to tell you that.”

“Thank you.”

“So what are you doing here? I thought you’d beaten this horse to death.”

“I thought so too, but Sid thinks this circus” — gesturing across the crowd with her martini — “still has some life left in it. I’m treating it more as a busman’s holiday. And what about you? I thought you were too busy for a cruise with people who believe you’re part of the Matrix.” She took a sip of her drink.

“I’m fulfilling my end of a bargain with Sergei Marshall. He agreed I could send him into orbit if I’d spend a week surrounded by idiots and lunatics.”

She winced. “A bit harsh, don’t you think? Anyone can get pulled into a conspiracy theory, it’s not a matter of intelligence or mental health.” A fact she sometimes struggled to keep in mind.

“I suppose you have to think that, or you couldn’t do the work you do.”

She was tempted to bring up all the outlandish and even reprehensible ideas a long list of Nobel Prize winners had entertained, but put it aside. “So, did you convince him with the trip around the planet?”

Ester rolled his eyes. “He’s still doing his shtick here, isn’t he? But hey, if I’d known you were coming, I’d have offered you a ride on one of our suborbitals.”

“What, you didn’t get enough mileage out of the piece I wrote on my last trip?” That had been wild, probably the closest she’d ever get to actual space, given that the thirty-minute transcontinental flights currently were the province of the ultra-rich.

“No, that was great, but your other one about our moon colony…”

He meant the joint piece she’d done with Jim Mitchell, a politics writer for the Times. “SpaceOut Faces Technical, Political Issues on Tranquility Moon Base.” Ester’s fanboys — LonJockeys to his detractors — had responded with the usual social media firestorm, most of it aimed at Jim for his supposed left-wing slant, but some at her, “stop pretending you know science and go make me a sandwich” being the mildest.

Ester mostly stayed off social media these days, sticking to his own startup platform, BLASTR, billed as “anti-social media” because it was really just a glorified group-messaging app, but he’d come out of his self-imposed exile long enough to defend her, for reasons she couldn’t quite understand. Ten years had passed since that piece defending SpaceOut from flat-earthers, surely beyond the statute of limitations for good journalistic karma.

“I was glad to hear you solved the problems with the hydrogen processors,” she told him now, “but I still can’t figure out why you chose a spot with so little available water, and how you convinced NASA and the ESA to go along. And don’t bother with that excuse about protecting the original moon landing site.”

Ester smirked. “You’ve got me! I just thought it would be neat, really. The moon landing was one of the most inspiring things humanity has ever done. And we really are helping to protect the site, you know.”

“How’s the base governance going? Any more general strikes? And how are relations with the Chinese?”

“It’s hard to believe I ever thought direct democracy would be a good idea. It’s depressing, the level of irrationality humans can display. I mean, look.” He gestured out over the crowd.

“Oh, it’s not so bad for you. You should find a friendly audience among the anti-vaxxers.” She sipped her martini with an innocent look. Giving him a certain amount of crap was one way of preserving her journalistic independence. No one would accuse her of being a mere stenographer for billionaires.

“Come on, Liz, that was one time, that vaccine was brand new, and I was trying to get our new rocket off the ground. I was under a lot of pressure.”

“And you were living in Hollywood, dating an actress with a lot of ideas that would fit right in on this boat.”

“Yeah, I won’t make that mistake again. But you’re one to talk, with that last piece on the Apollo program. Something seemed seriously off with it.”

That article! It was all anyone wanted to talk about. Not two minutes after it went live, Sarge had messaged her with the invite to this cruise, as if he sensed she might be more open to rejecting the shape of the Earth and the existence of space. And she’d tried so hard to make it just like all her other pieces in the conspiracy theory vein.

“Touché,” she replied. She moved a bit closer and lowered her voice. “But listen, you’d level with me if your teams found anything unexpected up there, right? Any old hardware no one had already accounted for?”

He gave her a worried look. “What do you expect us to find?”

“Oh, nothing specific. Just, you know…” She cursed herself for sounding like an idiot.

He glanced around the room. “Well, I’d better circulate.”

“Me too. And remember, I’m your biggest fan.”

“Yeah, when you’re not raking my projects through the journalistic mud. We should really get you up to the moon sometime.”

And she thought she’d blown that shot.

Before she could answer, Sarge Marshall approached. “Well, if it isn’t our two normies. Amazing how you stick together. But wait, maybe normies isn’t the right word for the people behind the conspiracy. Gotta keep greasing the wheels of cultural hegemony, right?”

Sarge was tall and good-looking, with frank, honest eyes and a smooth, even voice that could make even the most outlandish idea sound reasonable. He’d used these assets to become one of the world’s leading globe deniers, building a huge income stream on YouTube, and on Patreon and Substack after his YouTube shadow-ban.

“Hi, Sarge,” Liz said. “I heard you got a lift on one of Lonnie’s rockets.”

“Oh, yeah, it was some ride, better than anything at Disneyland. Totally seamless.”

“So, not convinced?”

Sarge clapped Ester on the shoulder. “Nah, this is one of the world’s great engineering minds. There’s nothing he can’t do in the way of creating a convincing simulation.”

Ester shrugged off Sarge’s hand. “I should have sent you all the way to the moon. Then you could have tried going outside without a spacesuit.”

“To the moon, Alice!” Liz exclaimed with a titter. She was glad she’d limited herself to just one martini.

They both stared at her.

“What, neither of you watch old TV shows? Especially you, Sarge, with as much time as you’ve spent watching those moon landing clips to poke holes in them. You should try broadening your horizons.”

“I have to get ready for my welcome talk.”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

They watched him walk away, then Lonnie turned back to her. “It’s hard to believe you made him seem almost human in your book.”

“And I didn’t even win a Pulitzer.”

Ester went to get a fresh drink, leaving Liz to mingle, wishing for about the thousandth time she’d never accepted that assignment last summer, and not just because it had landed her here on this ship of fools.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, you can buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.

Did you spot the mention of another space billionaire? I promise he isn’t modeled on anyone in particular either.

Up Next: Chapter 2, “The Collector,” a flashback to Liz’s previous assignment covering a film historian with a particularly far-out, and entertaining, version of moon landing denial. And also check out this coming Tuesday’s Glass Half Full post, which will explore the link between Wordle and conspiracy theories.