Travel Documents 138: Pantheon
by Craig Silverstein, based on stories by by Ken Liu.
Genre: sci-fi, near-future, social change, cultural change, transhumanism, cyberpunk
The Dust Cover Copy
In 2001, Stephen Holstrom, a genius visionary and founder of the technology company Logorhythms, began his mission to reach digital immortality with the advancement of "Uploaded Intelligence" or "UI," - scanning the human brain and uploading it on the Cloud. After Holstrom's death, Logorythms continued his project.
In the present day, Maddie Kim is a bullied teenager still grieving over the death of her father two years prior. She soon receives mysterious help from someone online.
Across town Caspian Keyes, a troubled yet highly intelligent teenager, has been raised unaware that he lives in a constructed environment and is constantly monitored by Logorythms to one day fulfill a purpose.
With Maddie and Caspian stuck in the middle, a global conspiracy unfolds that threatens to trigger a new kind of world war.
The Scene
Worldbuilding
In a world just around the corner…
This animated series seems pretty normal on the surface. Nice Silicon Valley house, nice family, not nice but not unusual high school experience…but there’s the kind of stark poise to it that I associate with the clever sort of horror movies. A sense of tensions right under the surface, of things poised in the balance and waiting to spring.
The first move in the game is a text message full of emojis. And down the rabbit hole we go.
What this series does particularly well is skew just a little of the world, just enough to make the next step plausible. Instead of AI, companies are playing with UI. Uploaded Intelligence. Every neural connection of a person’s brain laser scanned and uploaded to banks of servers. Transcending the body…at a cost. The physical brain is destroyed during the upload process. Once you go Upload, you don’t come back down.
It’s a fascinating and sinister setting that Pantheon builds: one where infinite power can end up in the hands of one digital ghost, where whole lives can be molded by the needs of corporate heads, and where what’s in your head might just make you the next upload. But it’s not all heavy stuff: there are plenty of homages to the goofy fun of the gamer world and 80’s style hacker chic (including scenes in an arcade because of course we need scenes in an arcade) Throughout the work the themes of personal choice, personal integrity, the meaning of true autonomy and the meaning of love wind like cables out of a mainframe.
The Crowd
Characterization
I ended up writing this section last, which is a first for me. I’m usually all about characterization in stories. But Pantheon is like that: it’s not about people, it’s about people in circumstances.
Which isn’t to say that the characters aren’t good. In fact, they’re great.
At first, the story focuses around Maddie. She’s your original geek girl: clever, dogged, and absolutely determined. She’s very intelligent, but she’s also fourteen and shows all the strong emotions and simple point-a-to-point-b thinking of that age. ‘But it’s the right thing!’ is kind of her go-to mindset. She shares this with her dad, David, whose death has been…well…not exaggerated exactly, but somewhat misrepresented. And then there’s the hard reset of the relationship between Maddie’s parents. One of whom is corporeal now and the other digital. And you thought your relationship drama was a lot.
Other characters and character dynamics grow up around this core: reserved and deeply disconnected Caspian, who’s got reasons to keep himself safe inside. His parents, who have VERY unexpected dynamics. A heart-wrenching romance across states of being, and a poor guy who got in too deep, lost his head and doesn’t handle it well (yes I am going to make that pun). We’ve got idealists who forget that the pawns they move around are PEOPLE, and people scared of a world they don’t understand. And a few actual altruists and helpers are in the story too. Not a lot. But enough. The dynamics between all these actors, all trying to improve things in the only ways they can imagine and getting in each others’ business, makes for an intricate and really interesting exploration of human nature.
The Lingo
Writing Style
The tight, pensive writing style of the opening episodes made me assume I was getting into a horror piece. I wasn’t exactly right, but not that far off either. Once it sets up the premise, the show spends the rest of its episodes making the watchers face the price of technology in visceral and in-your-face terms. One of its key elements is exploring what the cost of giving up our physical bodies for a virtual life really is. Is it the loss of physical touch? Is it the connections we once had? Who are we when we aren’t our bodies? And who are we when our brains don’t work the way we expect them to? Most importantly, the show posits the question: does having an ability to do something give us the right?
Permeating the writing is the shivery sense of being at a hinge in history: a point where things could go either way, or go in a way nobody can predict. That sense of mixed trepidation and anticipation definitely keeps watchers coming back for more!
The Moves
Plot
Slow, stark, tense storytelling in the spirit of Vivarium and The Stepford Wives puts a creepy cast on everything you think you know: sunny suburbs, the high school experience, the relationship between parents and children, and even the innocuous text message. The step-by-step revelations are an effective house of cards, and by the time things get really wild it all feels both organic and inevitable. All the way along, the plot forces the watchers to ask ethical questions we really need to explore in the age of AI: who owns thought? Does greater good outweigh personal rights? At what risk do we trade our innate abilities for replacement technologies? And are we who we think we are, or are we what circumstances make us?
Pantheon never tells us that tech will save us all. It never tells us that tech will doom us all either. It tells us that tech can do both or either. And that what it does is all a function of what we do. What we choose. Who we really are.
Maybe that’s one of the scariest elements of all.
Overall Rating
With enough fun to be enjoyable and enough plot to be powerful, this is a story to follow.