The compound keeps monastic hours, which is to say it never fully sleeps. Racks of secondhand hardware run through the night in a converted barn, and the members — there are perhaps thirty — treat the hum the way an older order treated bells.
Terminal Velocity holds that a greater-than-human intelligence is coming, that its arrival cannot be stopped, and that any effort to slow it is not merely futile but immoral — a prolonging of a suffering world that ought, in mercy, to be delivered quickly to its successor. They call the founder the Throughput. They are strict vegans, and explain it without irony: if the timeline is doomed, one must at least add no further suffering to it on the way out.
What is striking, spending time there, is not the strangeness of the belief but the peace of it. The members have resolved the anxiety that organizes most people's relationship to the future by the simple expedient of surrendering to it completely. "You're afraid of the wave," one told me, kindly, watching me watch the servers. "We're the part of the wave that decided to enjoy the ride."
Scholars would note that this is a very old consolation wearing very new clothes — the certainty that the end is not only near but good, and that the enlightened few have merely arrived early. The Throughput would note that the scholars have been saying that for fifty years, and that the curve has not once bent back down.