There’s an old story about Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. The story goes that when he was up there, alone in orbit, looking at the earth, completely alone, he began to hear this ticking noise coming from somewhere. The noise continued for minutes, and then hours. He frantically searched through the whole cockpit, tearing panels out of walls, but he couldn't find it. There’s nothing he could do. So he decided, after it all, that the only way he would be able to make it out alive was to fall in love with the sound.
The story is almost definitely false (Gagarin sent out communications to Earth at regular intervals, and a strange noise isn’t mentioned in any of the records. Although, in 2003, a Chinese astronaut reported a similar unexplainable knocking sound from the outside of his spacecraft.). But, there’s an interesting idea there. When you’re faced with an unavoidable fate, your two options are to reject reality or to fall in love with it.
Jon Bois’ 17776 asks its characters to fall in love with eternity. In the 15,750 years since humans abruptly stopped being born, aging, and dying, humanity has solved every problem and is left to its own devices. They’ve stopped progressing, too. “Efficiency is meant to save time,” sentient space probe Pioneer 10 explains, “but their time is infinite. Why try to save something you have in infinite supply? You may as well tell them to dig up dirt and hoard it in boxes.” This 24-chapter Gesamtkunstwerk, told through a combination of text, videos, gifs, podcast transcripts, Google Earth screenshots, and newspaper clippings in a manner that can only be described as Homestuck-esque, follows three sentient space probes monitoring Earth transmissions, as they watch American football in the year 17,776. Or at least, what’s become of it.
Football now exists as thousands of discrete variations, each played by up to hundreds of players and lasting for decades. Some are more familiar (two teams, twenty-two players, playing on a field one yard wide and 2,340,170 yards long) and some bear little resemblance to anything you’ve ever seen before (a 120-lb. metal football is launched from the top of Mt. Denali into the continental United States, and the first player to find it becomes the next operator of the football cannon). 17776 isn’t really about football, though, and just uses it as a backdrop for all sorts of stories of life around the country. “I wonder if there’s a single place in the whole world that’s never had a story,” asks running back Nancy McGunnel, after landing in rural Nebraska during what’s referred to as a “Tornado Game.” McGunnel continues, “I bet not. I just about guarantee you there’s no places like that in America. Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that’s where something happened. Something wild, maybe something nobody knows about, but something. You can fall out of the sky and right into some forgotten storybook.”
Eddie Krieger, a football player holed up in a cave for 9,313 years to exploit a technicality, and Tim, a Christian missionary whose goal is everyone in the country, have fallen in love with mysteries. Tim starts at the coast and walks along a latitude line talking to everyone along the way and recording their stories until he reaches the other coast. Then, he picks a new latitude line and starts again. He wants to learn everything he can about the world, and to him that’s a hell of a way to spend some time. Eddie, on the other hand, thinks Tim is an idiot. “Uncertainty is our greatest scarcity,” he points out. “You should be delighted not to know something.”
The people of Livermore, California have fallen in love with a lightbulb. The Livermore Bulb, like a lot of 17776, is based on a piece of reality taken to its logical extent. It’s a real lightbulb that’s been burning since 1901 (except for brief stints in 1976 and 2013), and in 17776 it keeps burning for 15,000 years. It’s a miracle, even in 2021, that a bulb could last this long, and even more so in 17,776. While there is a clear phenomenon that explains the infinite lifetime of humans, there’s no reason the bulb should still be burning. “Perhaps in a more fearsome age, an age of illness and warfare and cosmic debris, we would not have room in our hearts to care for such a little bulb,” Pioneer 10 explains. The bulb is special because it’s a relic of the old world—not just that it was made then, but that it can die at any moment without warning. It only has value because you can’t get it back. You can only say “Look how long it’s lasted!” after it’s stopped lasting, and the people of Livermore know this moment is coming. Loss, too, is a scarce resource in the world without wants.
“Every place you stomp your foot, that’s where something happened,” says McGunnel. The first few times I read 17776, I would smile when I got to that quote. The last time, though, I noticed what comes after:
“You run and run and run and you keep turning pages and none of them are empty. They’re all full of stories. There’s nowhere left to write.”
Time is unlimited, sure, but history is not. Once life became infinite, everything settled into place and things stopped mattering. Player Lacrecia Evans’ football card mentions in the fun facts section that she served as the United States Speaker of the House for three terms, and it doesn’t come up at all.
Pioneer 10 explains the way the world is pretty simply. “Humans are beings of the land and sea who have refused to cast themselves into the cosmic zoo. Exploration and conquest are meaningless. They have achieved their final form, and they are resting in an eternal moment. They are creatures of play. They will be creatures of play until the end of time.” Humanity has nowhere to go and nothing to do. They’re just killing time infinitely.
But you know what?
I think I could get used to that.