It was at Edge Esmeralda that I first made the acquaintance of Helena Hythloday, though had you asked me at the time I would not have thought the meeting especially notable. Such encounters are common in places like that, where people step temporarily out of their usual schedules to run overlapping experiments in technology, coordination, and collective life under conditions that are intentionally provisional. For the better part of a month, ideas are tested without guarantees, tools are tried in unfamiliar combinations, and conversations are allowed to stretch beyond their normal endpoints, no longer required to resolve immediately into products, policies, or consensus.

I should say at the outset that Helena Hythloday is not the name she uses in her ordinary affairs. It is a pen name, a borrowed one, chosen with some care and used here with her permission. She prefers it when speaking candidly about the work she is doing, which she believes is easier to describe sideways than directly. I have honored that preference.

Edge, as it is usually explained, is an itinerant city, or rather a recurring attempt to see whether a city might briefly come into being without fully severing itself from the places that host it. Each iteration borrows an existing town, layering temporary social density, technical experimentation, and civic speculation onto infrastructure that already has its own rhythms and obligations. Esmeralda was the name given to this particular iteration, held in and around Healdsburg, a small town in Northern California better known for wine tastings and weekend tourism than for experiments in future governance. The grand ambition, stated plainly by some of its organizers, was not merely a gathering, but the sketch of a future small town also called Esmeralda, one that might someday exist more durably elsewhere.

Edge did not announce itself as a city. It borrowed one. People stayed in Airbnbs, spare rooms, apartments whose owners had temporarily decamped. Meetings took place in cafés that still served regular customers, in backyards where someone’s neighbor might wander through mid-conversation, in rooms that would shortly return to being dining rooms or guest bedrooms. Nothing was newly built for the occasion, and nothing pretended it would last.

Helena remarked on this almost immediately, though not with enthusiasm. She noted it the way one might note the weather, or the condition of a road.

We spoke briefly in person, but our conversation was interrupted several times, first by someone asking about dinner plans, then by a disagreement nearby about whether a certain proposal should be framed as speculative or actionable. We exchanged email addresses, which seemed to be the real currency of the place, and promised to continue the conversation later. That promise, unlike many others made at Edge, was kept.

In her first message, Helena wrote that she had not come to Edge to be inspired.

“I came because I wanted to see whether anyone here still remembers where they are,” she said.

By this she did not mean the geography in the narrow sense, though that mattered too. She had spent part of her first week meeting with local farmworkers, some of whom were organizing around heat exposure and water access. She attended a rally one morning, then returned in the afternoon to a discussion about planetary coordination frameworks. The contrast struck her less as hypocrisy than as habit.

“No one thinks they are ignoring reality,” she wrote. “They think reality is something that can wait its turn.”

What concerned her was not Edge itself, which made no claim to permanence, but the wider civilization that everyone carried with them into it. A civilization that speaks constantly of the future while organizing almost all of its effort around horizons short enough to remain emotionally manageable.

She asked whether I had noticed how often contemporary projects justify themselves by speed. Faster deployment. Faster learning. Faster returns. Even the language of responsibility is accelerated. We are praised for acting quickly, rarely for staying.

“There used to be cathedral projects,” Helena wrote in a later message, “and I don’t mean buildings. I mean undertakings that assumed they would outlast their authors.”

She was careful here. She did not praise the societies that built cathedrals. She acknowledged the inequality and coercion bound up with them. But she lingered on the timescale. Cathedrals assumed that the future would exist, and that it would not need to agree with you in order to inherit your work.

Modern civilization, she argued, still builds large systems, but it insists on completing them conceptually within a single lifetime. Even when something is meant to endure, it must be legible as an achievement now. Broken into phases. Assigned owners. Given metrics.

“We don’t lack ambition,” she wrote. “We lack patience with outcomes we cannot supervise.”

This impatience, she believed, shows up most starkly in climate work. Targets are set, dashboards constructed, narratives refined. All necessary, perhaps. But beneath them lies an unease with the idea that some responsibilities cannot be discharged, only carried.

Her concern sharpened when she began thinking about fire.

The year before Edge, a wildfire had come close. Not in the abstract sense of regional risk, but in the literal sense of distance. A shift in wind, a line held or broken. Helena walked with a local resident who pointed out where it had stopped. A few hundred yards. Close enough to change how you sleep.

“What struck me,” she wrote, “was how little of that memory was present in the conversations here.”

Risk was discussed constantly, but as scenario rather than recollection. Fire appeared as a case study, not as something that had nearly entered these streets. Helena began asking whether there were ways to hold that proximity together, not as warning or compliance, but as shared memory.

“Civilizations used to embed memory in place,” she wrote. “Now we externalize it, and then wonder why we repeat ourselves.”

The community Helena belongs to, which she described only gradually and without naming, takes memory seriously. It is a loose network of people who believe that humanity’s destiny is to take root amongst the stars, not as escape or conquest, but as continuation. Some of them think about this explicitly in terms of life beyond Earth. Others arrive at the same conclusion by paying close attention to fragility here.

What unites them is a refusal to treat the future as a deliverable. They are interested less in arrival than in rooting. In what it would mean for human life, culture, and responsibility to establish itself across radically different environments without severing itself from what came before.

They practice what she called memory protocols. Not archives exactly, but habits. Repetition. Physical markers. Stories passed deliberately, even when inconvenient. The aim is not preservation for its own sake, but orientation.

“A mission you can’t remember across generations,” she wrote, “isn’t a future. It’s an abstraction.”

Edge, in her view, had the potential to interrupt the habits of mainstream civilization precisely because it did not pretend to last. But that potential was fragile. The danger was not detachment from reality, but fluency. Becoming too skilled at discussing futures without absorbing their weight.

In her final email, she did not suggest reforms, or protocols, or improvements. She merely observed that a society capable of imagining humanity among the stars, yet uneasy with carrying forward the memory of last year’s fire, might be revealing something important about what it believes the future is for.

That observation has stayed with me, not as a conclusion, but as a way of noticing the world we have already built, and the much longer one we seem unsure how to begin. I had the sense she already had much in motion.

Coda

This piece was assembled the way many things at Edge were: from borrowed parts, provisional conversations, and a refusal to settle too quickly on what anything was “for.” The form owes something to a book club convened under the Contraptions banner, where texts were treated less as authorities than as tools to think with, misuse, and occasionally set aside. That sensibility leaked into the writing. If this reads like a report, a letter, or a thought experiment that forgot to conclude, that is not an accident. It is the residue of a method that prefers scaffolding to monuments, and leaves open the possibility that what matters most will be added later by someone else.

It was at Edge Esmeralda that I first made the acquaintance of Helena Hythloday, though had you asked me at the time I would not have thought the meeting especially notable. Such encounters are common in places like that, where people step temporarily out of their usual schedules to run overlapping experiments in technology, coordination, and collective life under conditions that are intentionally provisional. For the better part of a month, ideas are tested without guarantees, tools are tried in unfamiliar combinations, and conversations are allowed to stretch beyond their normal endpoints, no longer required to resolve immediately into products, policies, or consensus.

I should say at the outset that Helena Hythloday is not the name she uses in her ordinary affairs. It is a pen name, a borrowed one, chosen with some care and used here with her permission. She prefers it when speaking candidly about the work she is doing, which she believes is easier to describe sideways than directly. I have honored that preference.

Edge, as it is usually explained, is an itinerant city, or rather a recurring attempt to see whether a city might briefly come into being without fully severing itself from the places that host it. Each iteration borrows an existing town, layering temporary social density, technical experimentation, and civic speculation onto infrastructure that already has its own rhythms and obligations. Esmeralda was the name given to this particular iteration, held in and around Healdsburg, a small town in Northern California better known for wine tastings and weekend tourism than for experiments in future governance. The grand ambition, stated plainly by some of its organizers, was not merely a gathering, but the sketch of a future small town also called Esmeralda, one that might someday exist more durably elsewhere.

Edge did not announce itself as a city. It borrowed one. People stayed in Airbnbs, spare rooms, apartments whose owners had temporarily decamped. Meetings took place in cafés that still served regular customers, in backyards where someone’s neighbor might wander through mid-conversation, in rooms that would shortly return to being dining rooms or guest bedrooms. Nothing was newly built for the occasion, and nothing pretended it would last.

Helena remarked on this almost immediately, though not with enthusiasm. She noted it the way one might note the weather, or the condition of a road.

We spoke briefly in person, but our conversation was interrupted several times, first by someone asking about dinner plans, then by a disagreement nearby about whether a certain proposal should be framed as speculative or actionable. We exchanged email addresses, which seemed to be the real currency of the place, and promised to continue the conversation later. That promise, unlike many others made at Edge, was kept.

In her first message, Helena wrote that she had not come to Edge to be inspired.

“I came because I wanted to see whether anyone here still remembers where they are,” she said.

By this she did not mean the geography in the narrow sense, though that mattered too. She had spent part of her first week meeting with local farmworkers, some of whom were organizing around heat exposure and water access. She attended a rally one morning, then returned in the afternoon to a discussion about planetary coordination frameworks. The contrast struck her less as hypocrisy than as habit.

“No one thinks they are ignoring reality,” she wrote. “They think reality is something that can wait its turn.”

What concerned her was not Edge itself, which made no claim to permanence, but the wider civilization that everyone carried with them into it. A civilization that speaks constantly of the future while organizing almost all of its effort around horizons short enough to remain emotionally manageable.

She asked whether I had noticed how often contemporary projects justify themselves by speed. Faster deployment. Faster learning. Faster returns. Even the language of responsibility is accelerated. We are praised for acting quickly, rarely for staying.

“There used to be cathedral projects,” Helena wrote in a later message, “and I don’t mean buildings. I mean undertakings that assumed they would outlast their authors.”

She was careful here. She did not praise the societies that built cathedrals. She acknowledged the inequality and coercion bound up with them. But she lingered on the timescale. Cathedrals assumed that the future would exist, and that it would not need to agree with you in order to inherit your work.

Modern civilization, she argued, still builds large systems, but it insists on completing them conceptually within a single lifetime. Even when something is meant to endure, it must be legible as an achievement now. Broken into phases. Assigned owners. Given metrics.

“We don’t lack ambition,” she wrote. “We lack patience with outcomes we cannot supervise.”

This impatience, she believed, shows up most starkly in climate work. Targets are set, dashboards constructed, narratives refined. All necessary, perhaps. But beneath them lies an unease with the idea that some responsibilities cannot be discharged, only carried.

Her concern sharpened when she began thinking about fire.

The year before Edge, a wildfire had come close. Not in the abstract sense of regional risk, but in the literal sense of distance. A shift in wind, a line held or broken. Helena walked with a local resident who pointed out where it had stopped. A few hundred yards. Close enough to change how you sleep.

“What struck me,” she wrote, “was how little of that memory was present in the conversations here.”

Risk was discussed constantly, but as scenario rather than recollection. Fire appeared as a case study, not as something that had nearly entered these streets. Helena began asking whether there were ways to hold that proximity together, not as warning or compliance, but as shared memory.

“Civilizations used to embed memory in place,” she wrote. “Now we externalize it, and then wonder why we repeat ourselves.”

The community Helena belongs to, which she described only gradually and without naming, takes memory seriously. It is a loose network of people who believe that humanity’s destiny is to take root amongst the stars, not as escape or conquest, but as continuation. Some of them think about this explicitly in terms of life beyond Earth. Others arrive at the same conclusion by paying close attention to fragility here.

What unites them is a refusal to treat the future as a deliverable. They are interested less in arrival than in rooting. In what it would mean for human life, culture, and responsibility to establish itself across radically different environments without severing itself from what came before.

They practice what she called memory protocols. Not archives exactly, but habits. Repetition. Physical markers. Stories passed deliberately, even when inconvenient. The aim is not preservation for its own sake, but orientation.

“A mission you can’t remember across generations,” she wrote, “isn’t a future. It’s an abstraction.”

Edge, in her view, had the potential to interrupt the habits of mainstream civilization precisely because it did not pretend to last. But that potential was fragile. The danger was not detachment from reality, but fluency. Becoming too skilled at discussing futures without absorbing their weight.

In her final email, she did not suggest reforms, or protocols, or improvements. She merely observed that a society capable of imagining humanity among the stars, yet uneasy with carrying forward the memory of last year’s fire, might be revealing something important about what it believes the future is for.

That observation has stayed with me, not as a conclusion, but as a way of noticing the world we have already built, and the much longer one we seem unsure how to begin. I had the sense she already had much in motion.

Coda

This piece was assembled the way many things at Edge were: from borrowed parts, provisional conversations, and a refusal to settle too quickly on what anything was “for.” The form owes something to a book club convened under the Contraptions banner, where texts were treated less as authorities than as tools to think with, misuse, and occasionally set aside. That sensibility leaked into the writing. If this reads like a report, a letter, or a thought experiment that forgot to conclude, that is not an accident. It is the residue of a method that prefers scaffolding to monuments, and leaves open the possibility that what matters most will be added later by someone else.