17776 - a web story about AI, immortality, and football (spoilers after OP)

Cafe Society
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I was just turned onto this story from a Reddit post, because today, April 7, 2026, is the day that a pivotal event in its narrative takes place. It was published in installments in 2017 from the sports website SBNation and is a sort of mixed media experience that incorporates text, Google Earth animations, and short Youtube videos with an easy listening soundtrack that sounds like it was taken from '90s Weather Channel broadcasts. AFAICT it’s never been posted about on this site before, so it’s my pleasure to share it with you. It’s a short-ish narrative that you can experience in about two hours. I went into it completely blind and that’s probably for the best, but I’ll provide a brief summary in spoiler tags for those who want to know more.

On 4/7/2026, human beings stopped being conceived, growing old, or dying. Every living and yet-to-be-born human being in existence grew to maturity and then stayed there. It’s been 15,000 years since then. Global warming has melted all the ice caps and changed the shape of the world’s coastlines - most of the American southeast and the eastern seaboard is underwater, and California’s central valley is now an inland sea, for example. Fortunately, because humans are now immortal, nobody died as the result of the climate catastrophe, and mankind has achieved a post-scarcity age and become mostly culturally and technologically stagnant since then. With little need to work for a living, the American people have become focused on recreation as a way to keep themselves occupied - in particular, the game of football, which has evolved from its roots as a gridiron sport into a game which potentially takes place on playfields spanning hundreds of miles with thousands of players, where every game has bespoke rules and can potentially last thousands of years, where players throw themselves into tornadoes in order to avoid a tackle, or one game where a guy standing on the top of Denali fires a football out of a cannon at the continental US and the first person to catch it scores a point.

The story is seen from the POV of the Pioneer 9 satellite, which after 15,000 years drifting alone in deep space has become sapient and capable of FTL communication, and talks to Pioneer 10 and the ESA JUICE probe which are also sapient and have been so for longer.

It’s a very interesting and thought-provoking story. It’s definitely on the soft side of sci-fi and takes a lot of scientifically implausible liberties in order to tell its story. It borders on magical realism at points. It’s nonetheless a very interesting look at what it means to be human and how that would change if one of the most fundamental facts of our existence were to change.

If you’ve read it before I’d love to know what you think of it. If you haven’t, I’d like you to do so and share your thoughts.

Here’s the link;

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I remember this! It’s really good, pretty interesting in the way it tells a pretty unusual story through HTML.

If anyone decides to check it out, be aware that the first section of it is a definite slow burn–lots of scrolling with few clues as to what is going on at first. After that it moves a lot faster.

The Wikipedia article is worth a read:

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There is additionally a sequel, which picks up several thousand years later, where JUICE has somehow become the commissioner of the NCAA, and the story revolves around a single college game.

The game has been going for about 2200 years. There are 111 colleges participating. The field of play starts with each team’s home field and extends in an indefinite line from there until it reaches the ocean or the border. Each team started with one football and the game will end once all 111 balls are on a single team’s field. Each team gets 125 players - 100 offensive players and 25 defensive. Defense players are restricted to their own field. Offensive players can cross from their own team’s field to another team’s freely, but if they leave the general field for longer than 10 seconds they are permanently ejected from the game.

When the game started, SDSU insisted on being included, even though the geography meant that its field of play starts at the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla and ends at the Mexican border a few miles away without intersecting any other team’s field, meaning it should be impossible for them to actually compete, and so the Aztecs are just a paper team that nobody takes seriously and that people just join for a year or two so they can say they were pro players. There is, however, a loophole - for every year that a player is in the game, they bank an extra second worth of out-of-bounds time that they can use at their discretion.

Over the last 2,000 years, two players, a married couple (football is co-ed in the distant future because immortality means there’s no longer any practical physical differences between the sexes in top-tier athletes, but this is a male couple) have banked just enough time to run a 3:30 mile across five miles of the southwestern desert to make it to another team’s field that’s connected to the national network, with just barely enough time to make it back the other way, and have since spent centuries doing recon, and are about to pull off the greatest heist in the history of the sport.

It unfortunately ends on a cliffhanger that has yet to be resolved, but it’s a damn good story.