Khannea Suntzu: speculative fiction
2113 series
2113/5 – Do you want to play a game?
My series 2113 is a speculative series of articles on a fictional timeline of the future set one century from now. This time portrays the future as it might be based on several premises. In 2010 there are many things wrong with the world, and we might experience major wars and crashes. Also, human rights are by no means set in stone, and those might devalue as well. Large numbers of people may die between now and 2113, and in a century we may have something resembling a Singularity, with just a few hundred million posthumans remaining. So the most important first premise is that we have no major catastrophes, and progress persists more or less without major industrial or societal collapse as it has for the last few centuries. A second premise is that we do not have a “tabula rasa” Singularity. The emergence of artificial intelligence occurs gradual and does not “displace” large sections of humanity, or the values espoused by current cultures. Again, this is by no means a certainty. In this preferred future the transition of human minds in to machine substrates and the recognition of non-human minds and human mental minds on artificial substrates is achieved seamlessly and “without major societal collapse”. The article also assumes a somewhat implausible continuation of the current abundance-assuming paradigm of freedom, free trade, globalism (or what might be labelled ‘Universalism’ in the 22nd century), a further increase and refinement of democracy and a growth of both individual affluence of all people, as well as a vast increase in individual affluence of elites.
The series is here: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6) … Since I abhor comment management on this blog due to spam predation, I will eventually invite my readers to respond with questions and criticisms, for which you are already encouraged to email me. The article may be reprinted or quoted with attribution. The article has specifically been made available for reprinting for Zero State publications, IEET, Transhumanity, Singularity Hub, Turing Church, Space Collective. I may opt to slightly edit the article later on. This is the 5th installment of my 2113 series.
Big things have small beginnings.
It was the year 2017. A modest cabal of unemployable game designers all over the planet endeavored to do something relatively new. These artists were inspired by the Novel Reamde, and wanted to push the boundaries of game design. Just a few years before Google Earth had been hacked and had spawned an ecology of “latched on” virtual reality games, augmented reality games and web sites that were accessible using proprietary Google Earth and some added software. By the year 2016 there had emerged a number of virtual environments in this geospatial simulatory environment. Early renderings were ugly and clumsy, much worse than the comparable Second Life. There were any number of private servers that latched on to Google Earth data, and these spaces offered gaming, collaborative brainstorming, art spaces, hacker spaces, meeting, pornography and all sorts of experiences. The most popular were combinations of versions of the game FromDust, MineCraft and Microsofts Project Spark. Within months the choice expanded to hacked world of warcraft servers (most of them considerably better than Blizzard venues), repurposed opensim, embedded Second Life and far more abstract and less recognizable environments, such as “ïnfinite world map” StarCraft2 games with hundreds of participants. Users coupled all graphics engines to work in tandem. Google more or less allowed (or encouraged) for the Google Earth embedding practice, since users had to actively download major bits of software and get them to work, so the initial years it was all all bugs and scotch tape.
Exavana was barely noticed at first.
The first incarnation of Exavana manifested itself in a specific region in Google Earth Wales. It was a parallel world that people could access through natural portals in the Google Earth locations. By 2017 you would see lots of avatars wander around in Google Earth, Exavana had access verification and only the best rendered and designed toons were allowed in. Users needed specific grade physical emulations to allow their avatars to move in a manner consistent with everyone else, and any aspiring users would need spectacularly decent designed avatars, using quite specific objective standards. Characters not only had to be tasteful (even if pornographic), they also had to make sense. In 2017 Exavana was a small fantasy duchy in Wales no bigger than a few kilometers by a few kilometers. Exavana was not owned by a single entity, but for design reasons late 2017 Exavana became a registered foundation in Switzerland.
Users crowd-sourced a ‘realistic’ kinesthetic model for sword fighting based on some work done by Neal Stephenson earlier, picked a spot over the Cambrian mountains in southwestern England and opened up for business.
From the get go it was selfevident that the chief architect of the endeavor was a genius. An old guy in his 60s, a socially awkward but an amazing designer and storyteller, he gathered geniuses around him as others would collect magic cards. The devoted team assembled a host of unique game design assets, in many case stolen content from other games. The crew ran a re-purposed and build-from-scratch Blizzard architecture and linked it up with off the shelf mocap controllers. It was all high bandwidth play – aspiring players would not be able to compete at anything under stable ten megabit connectivity.
There was a competitive element in the world. Game designers objectified and defined desirable in-world character qualities and interlocked these attributes using a “value algorithm”. This meant that as soon as a feature for a character (say, the ability to throw spears), this quality would be embedded in the game connected through other qualities (some as precursor traits) and connected to animations, damage. The more desirable the quality, the harder it was to obtain, within reasonable boundaries. This created an in-game mechanism of emergent scarcity, and that meant the acquisition of “simulatable” in-game traits turned in to an economy fairly quickly.
The mechanism made sense and it worked. Define what people most, and make those qualities only accessible after aquiring precursors, conquest, overcoming hurdles or making other effort. Or having to waiting or work in game a long time. Most traits could be acquired through Exavana community service (or volunteer grind) and since many traits were made mutually exclusive (a nimble and lithe character couldn’t effectively be very strong at the same time, etc.) this allowed for massive character diversification.
It is important to realize that there were characters in game that remained in existence for a century. From 2018 to 2118. After a few decades those characters had become deities, and before long they became Pantheon forces of nature. The acquisition of desirable traits was a lot easier before 2025, and this contributed to early characters being absurd powerful over time, but that was a good thing – it reinforced the history of the world. The game mechanism was based on characters careers – The avatars of respective players stayed in a chosen career for a few weeks or months, learned traits, and then moved to a new career.
Over time the number of traits that could be meaningfully defined in a virtual world ballooned to millions, and the time required to learn them all (insofar they weren’t logically exclusive to one another) quickly turned to thousands and thousands of years – i.e. effectively inaccessible.
The end result made sense – a world with competition for scarce fantasy resources and possible states. It was like a strategy game with high-detail avatars set in a pre-Christian parallel fantasy world. The early game allowed for character “permadeath”, but that didn’t last for very long. After a few years Exavana developed multiple dimensions, and two such dimensions were “Hell” and “Afterlife”, and it became possible to run quests to save deceased characters and return these to game life. Later versions also allowed characters from one player to “plex” in to collaborative unions, or “reincarnation trees”, each character in the pod having diversified skills, frailties, talents, abilities, aptitudes, traits and qualities. The design algorithm that defined how good characters had to look went up in imposed demands at the same time, so occasionally less well-designed or original old-timers found their avatars frozen, until that time they would be able to upgrade their styling or provide new rationales for outdated/flawed character concepts.
Exavana was still a relatively inaccessible niche game by 2020. It user base was less than thirty thousand in June 2020, but the land it simulated had expanded massively across parallel versions of England and parts of geographic Europe, and the land represented also ballooned – original one kilometer in the real world was one kilometer in Exavana. By 2020 it was a ratio of twelve kilometers in the game to one kilometer in equalent Google Earth spaces, and the ratio itself kept going up every year. Exavana was a lot geographically more expansive than the real world and new bits of land were retconned in to the world filling in white spots all the time.
This was the early 21st century, in “the dark ages of franchise”. Star Wars and Star Trek had died, due to the spectacular storytelling incompetence of big budget movie studios. People world wide were looking for authenticity and that invariably turned out being synonymous with non-profit, crowd sourced and non-corporate. Exavana was all these and within years of inception became equivalent for “cool” as well as “exclusive”. It was constantly quoted for generating amazing screen shots. Since people in the game spent careers on avatar styling, architecture, asset development, landscaping and game mechanics without any expectation of financial reimbursement, the game was a wind tunnel equivalent for functionality, challenge and beauty. The bar kept creeping up for character vetting, and even though many had feelings of deep resentment after having been rejected over and over, many more kept trying to get in. Taking part cost a lot of hard cash (28 euro a month), which added to the threshold for adoption. Last but not least it was incredibly hard-ware heavy, requiring space in your living room, a motion controller and motion capture cameras, all rigged to two state of the art PC’s, all with fiber-optic internet connectivity.
Exavana coasted along in Limbo for years, and was effectively bleeding recurrent users in the early 2020s. People logged in, played a while (“The Second Life effect”) and after a while didn’t return. Since many of these players had in-world developments, the process of neglecting in world investments lowered the bar for return, since these players would return to having lost half their property in world, after not logging in for a few months.
At the same time many people in the physical world were in considerable societal trouble. Unemployment was skyrocketing, and governments and corporations were constantly under siege by activists, protests, strikes, vandalism and populism. The default mode of governments to just ratchet up the police state had started failing in 2019, with a few dozen major whistle blowers coming clean on some major government false flag terror operation earlier in the century … such as the assassination of a US politician half a century earlier, and just how duplicitous banking had become.
Where Apathy was a global epidemic in 2010, in 2020 many of those same people had all turned radical activists by 2020. As we know in retrospect – people radicalize very fast when given access to virtual worlds. It turned out that the best way to psychologically vector people in to real world action was by means of virtual worlds.
This was called the Avatar effect, referring to three blockbuster movies by James Cameron. People who saw how beautiful existence could be in a virtual world became angry and bitter when they logged off and were faced with “reality”. People who were able to change and exert personal control in virtual worlds took some of that psychological control back in to the physical world and stopped being the real world equivalent of docile farm animals.
Virtual worlds, in retrospect half a century beyond 2020, were eventually to be understood to be the prime motivator in to people becoming angry, organizing and no taking no for an answer. Humans who had become subjected to designed virtual reality started looking at physical reality as “just another environment to play in” and “just another puzzle to solve”. These people also started assertively styling their own lives and “didn’t accept criticism on their lifestyle choices”. By 2020 75% of deep embedding virtual world aficionados were politically and socially active in the real world. Another popular term used for this was “the fight club effect”, describing a cynical disaffection for mundane, pre-cooked existence offered by modern consumerist lifestyles.
Imagine a game where people can be free. A world where people learn martial arts and sword fighting using kineasthetic motion capture. These same people were in effect using their minds on something else than flip burgers. These people were pretty relevant in physical confrontations. You don’t pick a fight in a bar with someone who is out killing virtual enemies, strapped to a pain emulator. Those people learn to keep fighting even after their are hit. This simple fact was being picked up by people in the real world who didn’t know Exavana – a typical veteran of a few years in Exavana looked the part in real life, and they knew how to overcome problems in a dispassionate and highly rational manner. In 2021 gangsters, police and politicians world wide were becoming damn cautious when confronting people who deep embedded in virtual worlds. These people played to win, and with great awareness of long-term consequences.
So as we might call the years 2019 to 2024 a brief winter era for these virtual worlds, a lot of foundational work was being done.
By 2023 a new player had emerged in the virtual world business. At the same time Exavana had been expanding in the late teens to twenties, another game designer had come up with a headset based GPS game, by the name Dust2Dust. This particular game environment took play in to the real world by means of high detail augmented reality. Play involved emulating and navigating a highly simplified landscape that overlaid the physical world. The system for Dust-to-Dust was an conceptual extension of the game Minecraft, linked to the existence of objects in the real world. D2D was not as visverally blocky as early minecraft. D2D used real world geographical map contouring and essentially comprised a game that allowed players to capture resources in a fantasy game that was linked to the real world by means of GPS data. In D2D you would allocate resources to your fantasy armies for either building castles and armies, or you would do plunder and conquest, but it always centered on your physicality in the world – your power reaches only as far as you were able to physically travel.
D2D allowed players to walk to street and while seeing reality (and cars and pedestrians that could conceivably run in to you) while playing the game, players also had to content with dangers, opportunities, challenges and puzzles. The distinctive play style of D2D gamers was iconic. Most of them had a mean dog (generally a stafford), to make sure they wouldn’t get their head tapped by people who didn’t much like AR gamers (or people who might want to snatch their headsets).
D2D was much like earlier success GPS formulas (Cratera, Ingress, AceGlobalConquest) in that these games were highly addictive and were all about capturing imaginary stuff in reality. In addition, D2D used bitcoin, and allowed for point to point bitcoin transactions. So when in 2024 D2D had exploded in to a 300 million user base game, and Exavana and D2D merged, the end result would have implications that would reverberate right across the entire 21st century.
The mingling of intricacies for Exavana and D2D was a new concept for humanity. The chimera of the two games spanned the entire planet. The world was suddenly a new place with new concepts that were no longer subject to design, control or understability. Hundreds of millions of people could now interface with an imaginary virtual world that allowed self-expression in to an imaginary fantasy creature, character advancement, motion capture combat, strategical investment and conflict. Distinctive spots in the real world, especially locations with cultural or historical relevance, became nodal points for competition. By 2025 ‘Exa’ had 90 million virtual world users (the kind with detailed avatars) competing to make their avatars more powerful, and some 1.2 billion users that were allocation resources in the associated GPS strategy game.
A billion people that would do anything to get access to the actual Exavana world.
Exa was not the first of many offering a complex diversified experience game; before Exa, CCP’s eve online had already broadened its user experience to incline multiple game formats in the context of a massively multi-player online universe, but Exa went all the way to include strategy gaming, dueling, investment games, social games, pornographic games, machinima, fashion design, metaphysics, networking, art. In 2025 Exa was not as all-inclusive as the bigger online worlds such as MetaLife (the 2016 successor of Second Life) or Gverse, but then again Exa was a consistent story where people went to play a uniquely styled version of themselves that was by and large consistent with all other aspects of the world.
Exa started expanding rapidly from cult to niche to elite to trendy to rage, and it didn’t really suffer the all-too common comedowns of other worlds. When other genre worlds started to decline (generally in 8 years after inception) Exa consistently found avenues to renew and revitalize itself. One great strategy was to create pockets of Exa that offer display space to other franchises – Disney’s Star Trek, Disney’s Star Wars, International Imports and Exports (the world of James Bond), Titan, World of Warcraft 2, Xenoverse – all used the unique design services to rent parts of Exa for display of their unique intellectual properties. Parts of Exa functioned as display space virtual reality shard worlds where game designers could use top notch graphic rendering services to showcase their IP.
Pure symbiosis.
In the mid 2020s the opportunities normall anticipate by people as to unemployment had become so disappointing that most countries started experimenting with forms of basic income, one way or another.
Most these basic incomes systems had proven disastrously unstable for regional economies, as any state-sponsored system of redistributive potlatch would quickly trigger an exodus of top income taxpayers. But the rich couldn’t endlessly flee. In the 2030s the tax nomads started running out of places to run, assets to invest in and banks to launder their dirty incomes and taxation systems were quickly catching up. Even the most radical randian libertarian billionaires had to accept the fact there were no safe zones to hide from “democrat nanny states taking their stuff”. In other words, Libertarians were fed up moving their assets from tax dictatorship to tax dictatorship. The old monetary system had collapsed, and governments had opened up free markets for currencies. In the late 2020s even the former United States (now the North Atlantic United Sovereignties) implemented basic income, started going after tax nomads with protectionism, and allowed “banks” to print private currency. From then on currencies and banks were in fierce competition, and this benefited governments and people living in various countries.
The availability of dozens of world wide privatized currency systems (with states competing in a rational system of reciprocal and consistent tax codes) made those same states dismantle to only provide the most essential survival needs of their constituents. It was a rational synthesis of far right wing libertarianism and far left wing socialism. But this paradigm could only survive if humans had something to do, and Exa was one of many emerging “meaning factories” to provide a sense of relevance for an ever higher number of irreversibly unemployed people.
Being unemployed in 2030 meant knowing you’d never have a job again. And most people in the ever bigger developed world realized that while consumerist lifestyles were dead never to come back again, life extension would soon be effective an accessible enough. People by 2033 knew they might live a lot longer than than any humans in previous history ever lived.
Longer lives, no work, radically reduced materialism, universal tools for play, communication, self-expression, self-development, spirituality and experimentation, it almost seemed like paradise, even in the early 2030s.
This world was a long shot from utopia or paradise.
Competition in 2035 was cutthroat and many people were desperate. The human mind, in particular the testosterone driven human mind, demands material possession, and preferably more material possessions than people around own. Especially in racially diverse society. All humans, in particular male humans, want more property than those other people they meet on a daily basis … in particular people with different outwardly genetic qualities. The world was in large part determined by genetic imperatives for breeding, even though most people in the western world had actually stopped actively procreating.
The 2030s were the era of radicalized self-expression, in large part due to cosmetic surgery. This was called “pandorism”. Full-body cosmetic surgery had become safe and cheaper than owning a car. The ability of humans to engineer outward qualities with surgical and biomedical interventions (while at the same time reducing effective biological age) interventions allowed bored, jaded human beings new forms of self-expression. If you were a Draenai in Exavana, you could become a Draenai in the real world, for only something like the financial equivalent of 20 thousand dollars (or less if you went black market). In 2035 some parts of some inner cities became hives of radical experimentation. Various bottlenecks for radicalization on the world looked more exotic and alien than 20th century science fiction movies, and while humans remained more or less humanoid, they acquired the ability to don fur, change the composition of eyes, change skin pigmentation, adjust gender, enhance bone density and muscle mass, increase or decrease size.
The old model of materialist consumerism was dead and a new paradigm had emerged. Few people owned the range of “stuff” that people in the 20th century owned. People lived in relatively cramped conditions compared to the 20th century, since mass mobility had become gruesomely expensive. So people opted to consume in terms of affordable services – entertainment, self-expression, virtual games, synthetic forms of religion, narcotics.
Unemployment had long since become an irreversible part of society, and had proven completely irreversible. Despite earlier trends in the 20th century democracy was now a lean and mean decision-making machine, and democracy had evolved in to an increasingly effective bartering tool for the masses. Corporations and financial elites had lost most their affluence in the ruthless 2020s, except for a few stodgy potentates, oligarchs and moguls that were mostly locked in the few remaining enclaves of authoritarianism. The world was rapidly moving towards treaties and one world government and a far more systemic democracy than any time in human history before.
People were so incredibly bored. And that is what was driving political progress – people were desperate to make their lives better, and the only way to do that was to make themselves feel better, younger, more alive, more empowered, healthier, saner, more educated. It was like a transitional funnel squeezing humanity in to posthumanity as toothpaste in to the future.
But one aspect of the human state didn’t change (fast enough!), and that was the primate brain. Humans might have animated tails, blue fur, giant green nightvision eyes, fully functional hermaphroditic parts and cybernetic hookup parts to a form of cyberspace humans wouldn’t even be able to define in 2013 – they still were stuck in underwhelming 1450 gram brains.
And in the 2030s this started changing.
Brain prosthetics had been illegal in most countries for over a decade. Earlier 2020s brain interface experiments had turned people stark raving insane (or dead), and the resulting freaks had become mostly unable to function in civil society. But Exavana was exceptional, and black markets catered to a market with over a billion of users. There was profit to be made on all sides of the fence. The first interfaces for Exavana were motion caption implants, allowing people to interact with their preferred world, and a close second were implanted high resolution displays. But it didn’t end there – some implants delved in to the brain neurology and while they allowed people to vastly prosper in Exavana, they became fairly disabled in the real world. Who cared if Exavana users were in a constant pervasive euphoric haze?
Experimental states of neurological aberration that might have resulted in a steady stream of aberrant acts and behavior in the material world only added to the range of experiences in the pervasively virtual realms, and Exavana was perfectly suited for this new mode of being. Exavana accomodated the posthuman perfectly – the alternate world had become so sophisticated that in terms of sensory experiences large sections generated more input in sight, sound, detail, consistency, smell, touch, movement, temperature ranges, tastes than reality would. Exavana even offered a palette of strictly virtual input ranges – complimentary imaginative wavelengths in the virtually optical, tastes that were the result of metaphysical explanations of reality not possible on terra firma.
Tens of thousands of these transitional human creatures that migrate in to Exavana starting 2034 had no plans to ever return to “normalcy”. They could only do so situating their material form in relatively expensive medical receptacles in a very small range of geographic locations. Local laws in most of the Arabic world, The NAUS, China strictly disallowed these radical lifestyle choices, but Japan and western Europe more or less welcomed these freedoms. The influx of neocortical humans started as a trickle and by 2038 had become a torrent. The new reality they immersed themselves in was still based on human brains, but it assumed these brains were constantly hyperstimulated by the rendition of their inhuman bodies in Exavana.
Evolution went in to overdrive. It had proved possible to trick human brains in to thinking faster by a magnitude of three, by replacing key surface regions of the brain. Nothing functionally changed – it was easy to make events in dedicated Exavana transpire faster. In the real world the possibility that some people might be thinking at a clock speed several times faster than other humans made not much difference either, as since 90% of the people were effectively left unemployable due to competitive technological investments that thought at speeds thousands of times faster, more precise than humans, a few tens of millions of people thinking a tiny bit faster than others wouldn’t make much of a difference. In in Exavana, where nearly all things were possible insofar some people regarded them as fun or meaningful, there were regions where time could be made to run slower or faster. This allowed for functional experiments as to closely watch what happens with brains when they are made to operate faster. As it turned out, there were hurdles every step of the way. These hurdles were overcome by peace-meal prosthetic intercessions.
This progress was made between 2036 and 2039, especially in India and the Russian continental region. Much of this research trickled down in to Exavana quite fast. The term for this speed improvement of human cognition was labelled “overclocking” and in this decade progress was made for improvements up to 25 times thinking speed. This proved the absolute maximum for thinking faster based on the native architecture of the human brain. The improvement involved nanotechnological replacement of neuron pathways, replacement of individual neurons, vast upgrades to the cellular neurological transmission speed and the introduction of a whole new brain infrastructure of electrical driven connectivity means. But the human brain is so successful because it is the artifact of evolutionary exploitation of natural constraints. The moment you really transcend hurdles you end up with human minds that don’t really function well in physical reality, or in social context. Experiments in Exavana were insightful, and it was very valuable to run experiments and then reset the subjects to a previous state, as defined by these experimental subjects beforehand.
This was a legal nightmare – people became voluntary psychopaths, or subjected themselves to arguably horrific mental states. And if it didn’t pan out, the experimenters would discontinue these mental states as surely as applying euthanasia on the person then alive, while resetting the person to a precious mental state. Did this constitute murder? Arguably it took fairly strange humans to subject a future version of themselves to arguably horrendous abuse, and this research was only possible in the last bits of human history and geographic space where such immoral things were still possible. Ten years later this would have become completely illegal everywhere, and those ruthless and paradoxical experiments in the 2030s provided valuable stepping stones to greater and more civilized experimentation and progress.
By 2039 the old model of the state had more or less lost all relevance. There were still countries, with elected governments, and capitals, and civil servants, but these had become embedded in a substrate of technological progress and infrastructure much as a scarab bug had become incapsulated to immobility in amber, small ball of attending feces included. 20th century legal atavisms had lost all relevance in the late 20s, and now they simply ceased functionality, much as a human landscape swept aside by a volcanic lahar. The majority of people survived, even though there was incidental great distress and incidental loss of human life. Existing welfare systems transitioned in to algorithmic based welfare state infrastructures. The only artefact that survived were courts of appeal. Democratic representation became agent based – citizens didn’t vote as such, they rather had elaborate discussions with artificial intelligence agents on the nature if their preferences. The AIgents interpreted the desires of their respective client constituents, and billions of AIgents (often dozens representing one individual respective clients in differing realms) hashed it out among themselves. Equally so the AIgents helped their clients (if they so desired) to integrate with the AIgents, or with desired prosthetic realms. These AIgents were not yet fully sentient in the human conscious philospophical, self-reflective, morally ambiguous sapient sense of sentience but they were very close for the smartest 50% of the species. As for the less smart, as said, between 2025 and 2045 a few tens of million people actually did die on the consequences of bad planning and flawed judgement.
If someone from 2014 would have been taken to the year 2042, nothing would have made sense. Streets were still streets, but what happened there all around could not be translated to experiences from a human from less than half a century earlier. Nothing would have depicted the hidden violence and upheaval of states being displaced by a franticly legalese mush of post-state globalism. The main concern was fair representation, and that nobody lost any entitlements. Those that lost most were quickly planning exit strategies, and in the 2040s most “relative privilege maintaining” exit strategies focused squarely on subjecting yourself to emigrating from the planet. This was possible, albeit extremely expensive and hideously uncomfortable.
In essence planet Earth in the 2040s started “cooking off” the irreconcilable privileged in to the surrounding near space environment. Anyone that couldn’t except the ever expanding tax rates (insofar what was transactionally evolving could still be regarded in primeval outdated terms such as “economy” or “taxation”) simply started packing. The process of packing implied liquidation of terrestrial investments and taking it all in to space. It can be argued that those that did were the lucky ones, as they prospered immensely from their sacrifices in terms of “economic”, “industrial”, respectively “technological” advances made off the planet. The entrepreneurs of the 2030s and 2040s settled on the Moon and Lagrange archipellagos, had a range of spacecoms there for 2-3 decades, and then moved on to the Asteroid belt in the 2050s-2080s. But it can argued with equal authority that those that didn’t leave Earth were far better off, since they were surrounded by the most elaborate cognitive infrastructure, service providers and a social safety net that was has in the 21st century steadily expanded to cater to every whim, human, transhuman and posthuman.
The only thing that can be said with certainty that in the 2040s many things were no longer left to personal freedom. The transitional phase from localize state to a pandemonic one world governance was one of necessity. Necessity managing scarce resources, necessity curtailing population growth and consumption rates, necessity reconciling massive disequilibrium in affluence and lack of human dignity, necessity making sure the planetary biomass wouldn’t end up dead and lost.
Many events in Exavana wouldn’t have made sense in 2014. The world was quickly becoming a exponentially expanding permutation of normal reality and mutating in to far abstraction of metaphor. The fact that the majority of the user base in 2050 were functionally cyborgs just to take part in the game made the game itself competitively demanding to a degree that would have been inconceivable to even people from the 2020s. In 2054 the game was situated everywhere, and there were hardware structures in all major cities that catered to the needs of users everywhere. This made the game a deeply political entity, and the pervasive political ideology of the vast majority of users was labeled after their leader, the wellknown philospopher David Pearce. David was now living in an underground structure in the Northern part of the UK, and had been a very influential figure in Exavana since the early 2020s. In game he personally comprised a pantheon of seven godly creatures, and his symbolic relevance in game was as pervasive as the philosophical significance of the person David Pearce in providing out-game resources for users. But most relevant he had become a voice for allowing users of the game radical interventions in their own neurology, genetic makeup and body. Although this was not a well-known fact at the time, the original David Pearce was long since entombed in a full body prosthetic device, and the attractive elfin gentleman that occasionally physically traveled to key locales world world-wide to lecture on utilitarian philosophy was a vat-grown clone body interspersed with cybernetic functionality. David Pearce used several of these bodies for a range of tasks, and as such could not longer be easily summarized as a singular human being. But what was most relevant was his less public research work, initially conducted with by several networking foundation world wide, and later in the 2090s funded by Lunar Bank.
David was reverse engineering the human mind, the human brain, the algorithmic human connectome and how it interacted with both genetic imperatives for survival. David had been dedicated since the 20th century on exorcising the ‘Darwinian Demon’, or the inherent pain, fear and negative aggression that was root fundamental in the human state. The project had advanced slow up to the early 2040s but with the emergence of universal artificial intelligence it became quite feasible to redefine the human soul in to a format that would still be rational, sane, social, highly intelligent – yet fully emancipated from the shackles of survivalist instinct and suffering. But as David was having results with his team of volunteers it became clear he was shirking the very definition of what it meant to be human. Many countries world wide had blacnkly disallowed his research or the products of his research in their jurisdictions, and several countries only allowed the fundamentally psychologically engineered humans to only manifest ‘in virtuo’. Human beings were still defines as such by and large because they had at one time been born as humans, and the law was constantly catching up in definitions to accommodate humans with multiple bodies, or humans that had complex multitasking abilities, or humans whose mind operated mostly on silicate (non-organic) prosthesis. Exavana was the perfect experimental environment for David Pearce and his ardent followers.
In early life Pearce was all about furthering the interests of abolition in a generic, ephemeral, theoretical manner. But as technology progressed, and Pearce got richer and richer from his online activities and speculation (he might tens of millions of vircred speculations in the 2020s) his goals became more specific. In the 2030s there had emerged the philosophical problem that specializing in a virtual existence had become something of an existential trap – once any person developed majority parts of his or her connectome to exclusively deal with the intricacies of virtual world, the actual world would never measure up. It would always be possible to create new ‘low-abstraction’ channels of information and meaning in virtual environments. It was becoming routine to directly funnel these in to new “synthetic” senses, or interface these filtered in to participants in gaming environments. The end result is that large parts of the minds of real people in gaming environments (as opposed to people with no guaranteed incomes, no state recognition, no vote, no citizenship rights – i.e. “game sprites” or “NPC’s”) became irreversibly incompatible with physicality.
David Pearce tried to reverse this, and in the 2060s he pretty much declared defeat. But what he succeeded in was maybe more relevant to the flow of society. In the late 2050s David succeeded in successfully deconstructing the functional difference between game characters and people. For a number of years game characters had been active in the game, generating their own game revenues and carving out a unique space in the massive VR worlds. Quiite often these were branch-away characters abandoned by former players, running on automatic pilot. Some of these were strictly speaking as sentient as players. In the years that various researchers worked to reverse the exodus of human citizens in to the massive abyssal spaces of the virtual, the number of entities that were morally equivalent to human minds in these dimensions had ballooned to many more than the number of players. Since in the 2050s material Ceteceans had rights citizenship, why not grant the same rights to game characters who were just as sentient? Several European countries were faced with these demands, and were confronted with real world voters expressing a clear vote to make it so – in 2061 millions of high-detail game characters were granted subsidiary UN citizinship. Many of these game characters were only fleetingly aware of the actual existence of Earth and had been under the delusion that Exavana was “real” and any backchannel talk of “Earth” was just casual reference of equivalent dimensions of realities. This allowed Pearce and his team to prove these minds were authentic, sentient and deserced just as much citizenship acknowledgement as actual human beings. This made little difference at first, as the vast majority of these sprites would never be able to leave these virtual worlds. It did however mean they could no longer be arbitrarily eradicated in-world. In some cases there had been situations where conspiracies of characters (both “real” and “emergent”) had proved able to permanently extinguish emergent characters, who hadn’t formally consented in advance to being exposed to permanent existential risk. In the 60s it would be permissible for game characters to “emancipate” and work to generate in-game income, and use that income to purchase hardware to emulate a full self-awareness, sentience, sapience and consciousness on par with natural-born human minds in Exavana.
This recognition had been a formulaic recognition of accountable personhood. In 2064 the first game-generated emergent persona succeeded in attaining citizinship rights in the real world, by treating reality as just another environment, struggling up the existential mountain and acquiring funds to “grow a real body”. At that very moment Earth had several billion more potential citizens, and the theoretical electorate of the planet close to doubled.
It also opened up the potential for returning formerly cryonic suspended patients to full citizinship status. This was done first, depending on definitions, in 2059. A well-known transhumanist who had been suspended in 2017 was informationally reconstructed to a detailed semblance and self-acknowledgement in a remote region of Exavana. It took the mind a few objective years (which meant- several subjective decades) to make sense of his new existential state as an informorph mind and attain all the cognitive affordances to sue for recognition of his personhood. This individual then also used “sprite” emancipation laws to formally sue for personhood and claim back rights of the real world financial trust left in his name – which had expanded to become several billion euro in investment value. By the 2070s all people that had once been cryonic suspended had become reconstructed (and in many cases information loss compensated for by means of therapeutic reconstruction-through-simulation to “fill in the gaps”.) and readmitted into existence. It meant that people who had died in the 1970s had found themselves in a quaint and somewhat perplexing shadow lands of the 1970s, to find to their massive surprise they had forgotten most of who they were, but had become therapeutic constructs (but not wholly) mostly dead people.
Information loss to Cryonic suspensees had dwindled to negligible in patients who had become frozen by better vitrification in the late 1990s to early 2000s from negigible information retrievability to pretty decent “Dawkinsian” vitrification in around 2010 and onwards. The amount of patients recovered thus never exceeded more than a few thousand “people”, but the philosophical relevance of these retrievals was profound for humanity.
This model of new people emerging was pushed to the breaking point in the late 1960s as various universities world wide started running historical simulations using offshoots of the Exavana format. While these simulations were never true enough to be able to long deceive anyone who was in them, these universities did cause major problems by running historical persona and allowing these to blossom in to full sentience. This again flooded the emancipation process with billions of minds, in many cases quite confused and angry minds from a range of “fairly small” historical simulations, all throughout the 2060s and 2070s, to seek readmittance to reality. The UN limited this process. It stipulated new laws to protect minds that could effectively argue they were real before a parole board,. but the UN also stipulated that anyone who could be held directly responsible for this emergence of a new sentience to be financially accountable as a parent for several objective years. This parental period expanded from a few months in the 2070s to one billion seconds (just over 30 objective years) in the year 2113.
Exavana in the year 2114 is by any reasonable definition bigger than reality, and there are many hundreds of billions of authentic sapient minds with citizenship rights “down there”. ‘Exflux’ from Exavana is modest – only a few million a year, mostly emergent sprites seeking to explore reality through emancipation. Exavana now runs on a planetary computronium substrate in subterranean nodes all over the planet. Each human-equivalent mind needs the functional equivalent of a large office building to render all the survival infrastructure, backup, communications nodes, energy processors and virtual reality simulations systems, so for (also including the many dozens of non-exavana systems) all of mindkind locked in perpetual mental activity below the surface of the planet, the total infrastructure in dedicated mass exceeds the mass of a major asteroid. That is getting close to what can be liberated in natural resources in the planetary crust using 2114 technology. Exavana and other systems have problems getting off the planet, since these virtual reality servers like to be within a few light nano-seconds of one another. Exavana has a toe-hold in several captured asteroids in geosync linked with sky hooks, and there is quite an expanding Exavana community (a few ten billion minds and counting) on Luna as well.
So now we are here, in Wales. The Exavana old country lies embedded under a bubble, restores to a semblance of its original state. It is emulated in a block of deep crustal iron computronium deep under North Sea continental basalt. All roads an pathways in Exavana lead to the source, this original bit of universal aesthetic aspiration.
In 2114 there are hundreds of billion souls in Exavana, many of them frantic swirls of meaning and beauty and adventure beyond what a person from 2014 might possibly conceive of or understand.
2113 (part one) – Immortality and Taxes
It is the year 2113. It is a very strange future, and one that has been shaped by the world we are already forming. 2113 is a the result of good 21st century where people didn’t die, and there was no major collapse or instability, and very few people died. There was no “great reset” and humanity made it through a number of massive challenges. This 2113 is the best world we could have inherited out of many.
In this future people have moved in to space and have swarmed the Solar System. But it didn’t just stop there – already in the 2020s people started extending their lives and the oldest person alive in 2113 is in her 160s. And it didn’t just stop there – people uploaded their minds in to machine substrates and lived in virtual realms, as well as in robotic bodies. Human bodies didn’t just enter in to a Promethean bargain and became post-human – they exploded in numbers. In the 2040s and 50s humans procreated with no constraint as human minds were copied. In the mid 21st century the number of human minds in the earth-moon system swelled from just over 10 billion to fifty billion in the span of decades, largely because of copying. All these copies and derivative minds were people too, deserving of legal recognition. By now in 2113 there are several thousand billion minds with recognized citizenship status and the tide of procreation has been slowly turned. All people live in relatively blissful conditions, amid many times as many nonvolitional artificial intelligences (processes) who are sentient and mindful, but who do not care if they exist or not. The solar system of 2113 is innundated with mind.
All this has implications. Where do you leave all those minds? Clearly these minds are by and large software entities. They exist in machine programmable substrates. Each such mind has an infrastructure guaranteeing security and computational comforts in the ton-range of what we might label computronium. Most these minds still exist on Earth – over a trillions superhuman consciousness states. These people don’t work – machines work for them, so they need to validate and meaningfully perpetuate their own existence. Many do so in unspeakably beautiful states of enhanced perception and enhanced immersion. These are no sollipsistic dream states – the trillion or more on Earth are and experience far more than Arhchangels could ever has aspired of being, doing, achieving or experiencing. But the consumption of experience required material resources and it requires energy. These minds have tunnelled towards the greatest gradient of energy available – on the one hand the energy of the Earth’s hot core, and on the other hand the free flow of high energy particles radiating from the sun – and as a third the cold vacuum of space. Facilitating all those minds and their needs was a huge undertaking. It required the reconfiguration of the Earth’s crust. Humanity burrowed down and through veins of dedicated processing infrastructure clawing through the primal bedrock, massive computational industries spread much as the roots of a planetary fungus. Heat exchangers transport warmth downward from the sun, in to the Earth, and heat from the inner Earth crust outward in to space.
Imagine Trillions of minds, the most dim of them starting at several times the processing power and cognitive ability of a single baseline human mind – ranging well in to the dizzying heights of supernatural, or divine cognitive achievement. That means – for each human several tons to sheer mountains of devices with a sophistication where down to the atom level condensed meaning is generated and cultivated. Multiply that by over a trillion, and you get a new tectonic state on Earth – atoms of the planetary crust having been forced in to a computational geology, an industry of calculation and deliberation.
Trillions of consumers have citizenship rights. They “vote”, although not in a manner we’d recognize in the early 21st century. These humans deliberate on what is important and they demand from the collectivized means of the state apparatus how available resources are used. One thing all these minds agree on is a very constrained influx of new minds. New minds cost resources. All minds agree that a certain broad range of configurations of sapiens, self-awareness, free will, desire, pleasure and unpleasure comprises a person. These persons have inalienable rights. The two trillion plus minds of the solar system vehemently agree that recognition and affirmation of personhood is the essence of civilization, and this collective insistence brings with it certain inalienable rights. One consequence is consensus that the influx of new minds MUST be curtailed.
Another consequence is that, even though to be a large mind is subject to freedom, it IS taxed. Taxation still exists and thrives, but not in a manner where it would make sense to people from the early 21st century. In essence – undesirable states, consumption and behavior are taxed. Yes, there are also illegal functions, and they are quite effectively disallowed. One illegal is murder. Another illegal is suicide. In the Earth-moon system to die is very difficult, even when its done volitionally. That’s the consequence of democracy. People in 2113 care, and they do not want to lose someone they know and most probably cherish. Hence nearly everyone in the Earth-Moon system agrees – Thou shallt not die. So in essence on and in Earth taxes are still inescapable, but death – not so much.
Imagine all those machines making computations. Imagine flows of energy. That energy has to go somewhere. Already the Earth’s surface is very hot. The atmosphere has become much thicker and natural terrestrial life can nor survive on the planetary surface. The world is bathed in a thick soup of exhaust fumes, nanobots and pushed out planetary gasses. The sky is green and overcast, but illuminated in a rather novel manner. From the planetary crust emanates a equatorial halo of literally thousands of brightly glowing spikes – space elevators. These do ferry up cargo, but the transport of material objects in and out of Earth is inconsequential with the true function of this forest of structures reaching up in to the sky – the true function is to radiate away heat from the planet.
And that it does – a forest of thousands upon thousands of sometimes hundreds of meters thick structures carries a steady flow of thousands degrees hot plasma in to Earth orbit, fans it out over a jungle of interwoven strands and surfaces reaching tens of thousands of kilometers in to space, and having surfaces of hundreds of kilometers broad planes. The leaves of Earth radiate heat away, and they glow at hundreds of degrees centigrade Celsius. All this would not make sense to people of the early 21st century. Imagine these structures rising from the equator unevenly, dotting oceans and mountains, embedded in to mountains of pure industrial shape, and imagine these gossamer strands reaching in to the very zenith, where they fan out in pitch black fractals of indescribable celestial beauty. One glance and everyone would agree – this is pure beauty. But it is function too. Well-deliberated functionality always comes with a pleasing aesthetic quality, and the nimbus of structures swirling the planet meshes with a far far greater halo of energy collecting structures tunneling electrical energy in to the Earth system. In fact the halo of devices and industries that captures solar energy is a gossamer web of physically interlocking entities that reaches to the moon and beyond. These are often thin cable like structures running for tens of thousands of kilometers, making use of scientific processes scarcely suspected in the early 21st century, and doing so quite effectively.
As I said, things are taxed in 2113. They are as long as they are forms of vanity. Possessions. Minds who own things need to pay taxes over ownership. In the Earth system everyone, even the most inadequate incompetent mind, is thousands upon million times “richer” in material goods than any baseline human ever was, but at a certain level of affluence these minds find themselves constrained by the needs of the majority of voters. Voters come to complex flowing coalitions and through these coalitions come to determine common good. The common good implies that what is contrary to the common good is subjected to tax – disincentive. Tax is then recycled back in to the maintenance of collectivized resources of all of humanity. One such consequence is that all ability – intricate forms of mind and personal property mostly is taxed, beyond a certain level. In 2113 owning tons of computational substrate, by whatever regionally enforced configuration (computronium in the Earth tectonic layers is another substance than vacuum exposed computronium in a asteroid solar orbit) means you as a person take from what other peoiple might also like having access over, and it means you get to pay for the privilege. Yes in 2113 there is still a thing such as private property. In fact, the few tens of billions of directly human derived personhoods still maintain properties and physical heirlooms dating back in to the 20th century.
Old clothes. Dolls. A favorite gramophone. Your ancestral jewelry. A painting.
But there is a certain level of measurable, algorithmic opulance in the solar system of 2213 every other mind has the freedom to disagree with. Own to much and the tax man cometh.
This can be interpreted as a form of “progress tax” but it makes more sense to label this a “displacement tax”. If you are too smart or resourceful, this is nearly always the result of knowing unique “intellectual properties”, i.e. you know things other people do not. In the worlds of 2113 this is nearly the only form of achievement – everyone is effectively rewarded by being subtly better than a trillion other citizens in doing something specific with all the means at your disposal. In that manner you create a steady growth of personal affluence, of which the vast majority (well over 90%) is taxed away in real time, instananeously, with every nano-transaction you engage in.
This burdens all minds with certain constraints on their ability. In a universe where ability is largely dictated by the amounts of computational substrate you can buy, the new evolutionary algorithm which dictates how successful you are is by and large exclusively dictated by a host of subtle nuances of ability you can’t (yet) buy, because you own the IP. Ability of course is programmable and transferable in 2113. It’s all software. However if you discover a subtle new “trick”, you get to enjoy the fruits of having made that progress.
This has created an ecology of stable states if existence and mind in 2113. It is much like an ecology of animals. In the universe of 2113 location and modus operandi dictates everything. Pain is real. Pain in 2113 is experienced by shrinkage. Becoming less of you, though reversible (recoverable) is the measure of what is undesirable, hence painful. In the solar system of 2113 sacrifice is relinquishment of mind. To sacrifice and to suffer is the loss of cognitive substrate. The trillions of diffuse citizenry of 2113 receive many free services, but beyond a certain level (and at a specific spot in the system) taxes tend to eb and flow in a complex cyclical tide to take away.
Taxes must be calculated along a predictable metric. This Metric is derivative of a digital measuring mechanism for currency. All currencies in 2113 are digital and algorithmic. There are many thousands of dominant competing forms of currency and all are subject to supply (measurable new ideas and conceptions, new ways to generate value) and all currencies are linked to the great and famous of 2113. In the solar system several great names of the early 21st century still live and name brands, corporate personhood and personal name identity flow in to one another. These great entities are very rich, very resourceful, unspeakable shrewd and ingenuous and they create massive economic progress.
The constant flow of progress creates a constant eb and flow of value. The manifestation pf progress, especially when it is created by enterprising individuals, creates power. The use of power implies displacement and quite often such displacement is physical.
Have a look at the inner solar system. The moon is aglow in cities. The Earth and Moon are linked in a halo of structures, like ephemeral glowing figure eight rings stretching like diamond dust through planetary space. Looking from afar it is clear regular geomatric patterns of illumination on Earth and the Moon signify pervasive industry and civilization. Even with human eyes from 2013 such patterns are beautiful. But they do signify a cutthroat tug of war between the realms of the collective versus the private. Self-interest collidides with state interest.
It is a quaint historical artifact that the final arbiter of collective interest turned out to become Google. Google merged with the Lunar bank in the 2060s, and created a zero point for taxation. This was an akward historical choice but it has proven largely inescapable. In 2113 taxes are 100% on that spot on the moon. Hence all entities near that spot on the moon (which is situated north of Rima Pitatus and east of the Wolf Crater) are non-profit entities. The physical structure is massive – a giant iron dome several rising over ten kilometers from the lunar surface and burrowing just as deep. Around that dome the Moon surface is barren, as by definition that spot is the highest world possible tax real estate, with the highest tax rates in the solar system, algorithmically VERY close too 100%. Life is only possible along several very narrow corridors leading in to and out of the “economic transaction equilibrium point” on the moon. Then slowly, hundreds of kilometers along the Lunar surface some very sparse spartan tax anti-havens can exist.
Every person in the solar system receives a basic income. That means that for every mind a relative level of affluence is guaranteed, and beyond a certain property and income level a certain taxation is implied. In nearly all places except a few the wealth implied by the basic income allows a standard of living literally (and objectively) millions of times as affluent as the most affluent person in 2013 is guaranteed. But in many places – especially close to the “economic transaction equilibrium point” taxes will make any sort of business impossible. To engage in libertarian practices, i.e. “enterprise” one needs t be somewhat removed from this point. So in essence the other side of the moon is the least taxed place on the moon. And this is visible – on the other side of the moon there is a massive and thriving city with conditions most locally suited for industry, traffic, service and trade. But there are other spots on the moon, generally close to energy conveyance hubs and traffic hubs where conditions are stable and predictable enough to allow for the formation of thriving metroplexes of habitation and progress.
Once you get off the moon this gets very complicated all of a sudden. It means that taxation ebs and flows with the orbit of the moon, the time it takes to transport goods, energy and information relative to the “economic transaction equilibrium point”, and (to make matters overly complex for all entrepreneurs in the solar system) with the emergence of new ideas, the consumer policies of large stakeholders (which we might naively label “the artilects”) and fads and fashions. So to conclude this first installment of my 2113 series – the Earth of 2113 is bathed in three sources of extropic illumination – the light of energy from the sun, the dark radiance emanating from the southern half of the lunar surface emanating the measure of “the golden rule” or the “social contract” and of course the subtle and pervasive emanation emitted from all region zones of enterprise scattered everywhere throughout the solar system.
This was written by me, Khannea Suntzu. The article may be reprinted or quoted with attribution. The article has specifically been made available for reprinting for Zero State publications, IEET, Transhumanity, Singularity Hub, Turing Church, Space Collective, Singularity Network, Terasem and VenusPlusX. I may opt to slightly edit the article later on. This is the first installment of my 2113 series.
2113 (part two) – Getting stuck in progress
pIt is the year 2113, and humanity “made it”.
It was touch and go there for a while – but the advancing tidal wave of technological progress has swept all things that could be argued problematic aside. There are over two thousand billion acknowledged citizens in the solar system, most of them in the Earth-Moon system, but literally hundreds of billions away from the inner heart of activity around the sun. There are tens of thousands of solar space colonies – most of these intricate flower-like variants of O’Neil habitats in habited by thoroughly post-humans. There are thriving colonies on all planets, on nearly all moons known a century earlier, and on dozens and dozens of centaurids, plutino’s and more distant KBO objects. And let us not forget the smaller colonies on asteroids. And nearly all of the citizens in the solar system live in a state of affluence measurably thousands to millions times as prosperous and comfortable as ‘baseline’ humans in 2013 did.
But more on that later.
In such an environment electoral politics proceeds in iterative cycles of nanoseconds, rather than primatebrain four-year voting rounds. There is great need for a consensus in the solar system, since there are many conflicts of interest. The vast majorities of the two+ trillion citizens do in fact agree on a range of matters, and one body of pervasive agreement being a diffuse alternative for the system we (even more diffusely) used to label Capitalism. There is a name for that New System, and what that new system entails is agreed upon by the vast majorities of citizens. Ingrained in that system is something we would find very strange in 2013 – the new Capitalism ‘facilitates’ discontent as part of the system. In essence the system itself acknowledges it is an act of force to implement a form of governance and some will never disagree – so it is a form of falsifiability to acknowledge discontent and make it a recursive part of the governing paradigm.
The idea that disagreement and protest would be largely anathema to 20th century thinking. Sure, in the 20th century there was the brief era of “unionization” and “populism” but this was part of the societal consensus. The version of “positively affirming discontent” in the year 2113 is an altogether novel pattern, and it emerged from the insurance industries. Around 2000 there were laws that governed society. Laws emerged from political discourse that was completely removed from the actual electorate. In 2113 every civilian has access to multiple AI systems that can represent their interests. These AIgents can be brokers for transactions, or intermediaries in disputes, or automated lobbyists, lawyers, consultants. The nett effect is that the political class itself has dwindled considerably and has been replaced by complex mechanisms of deciding right from wrong. Three hard rules remain in existence ..
1 – first consideration is survival. Citizens flock together in protecting shared interests, even if those interests are theoretical. The highest interest is survival for nearly every citizen. Hence if survival of one is threatened by some new emerging industry or technology, there is almost immediately consensus on that this development must be curtailed. This led to citizen protection laws from scarcity. In the year 2013 people would recognize this as a guarantee for all that is needed to survive; i.e. protection from toxic environment, air, energy, medical care, repairs, shelter, social interaction, education, robotic servants, whatever it takes for a very solid majority to feel absolutely safeguarded they’ll survive comfortably. In essence – there is a consensus in the entire solar system that no citizen should be without necessities. The converse is also true – citizens are not allowed to willfully endanger themselves. For example – there are no ‘organic’ human citizens allowed in the asteroids. Admittance in the complex asteroid civilizations hinges on any citizen having a very rugged robotic physique that allows survival in a range of temperatures (generally cryogenic cold) and chemical conditions (generally an atmosphere without oxygen or other corrosives). If an organic human would ever aspire to travel to the main belt Asteroids, he or she would have to bring her own conditions for survival, and that in essence would be economically unaffordable. However, if for some reason an organic human would somehow find itself stranded near Ceres (the de facto capital of the belt) then the local municipalities would bend backwards to protect such a citizen from death, even respecting the physical integrity of such a person and create an environment that would allow comfortable survival for an organic shape. Paid for by essentially billing all locals for a tax.
2 – the second consideration is a guarantee for resources that do not guarantee survival. Essentially this is a guarantee that every citizen can own a considerable number of personal properties to do with as he, she or it pleases. Generally these properties comprise automated systems that are running tasks with certain long term benefits, i.e. business. Business opportunities in the year 2113 are so universal and easy to unlock that even the smallest and outdated robotic system can find something useful to do. This means that even a very small effort by anywhere near competent AI systems generated utility, and hence profit. The expectation of profit allows for personal advancement and growth. There is however a problem that very competent systems (especially a lot of them) allow far more growth and personal advancement than others. The problem with that is that the very competent and the very rich can effectively conspire to outcompete any other citizen by a factor of millions or billions. Against such out competition there is easy consensus that the majority of citizens in any area agree they do not want it to happen to them. For example – some mogul can not be allowed to outbid everyone else on energy on local markets, since outcompeting majorities on not just survival, but also the means to have personal ambitions beyond mere survival, immediately generated democratic agreement. The converse of such agreement is that the “very successful” are taxed on property, income, predation, competition, growth, or however you dare to call it.
3 – The conclusion of the early two is that everyone in the entire solar system vehemently agrees that the number of citizens, whatever physical qualities they have, must be curtailed in procreation. Procreation is a very strong neurological force of action or desire, and it reinforced itself well in to irrational behavior. Hence the 2 trillion plus citizens of the solar system in 2113 are overwhelmingly in agreement that population growth must be curtailed. There is good news – the various authorities of the solar system have calculated that around 2150 populations will start plateau-ing around 4 trillion, and will stabilize thereafter.
All this creates some might strange tensions in the solar system. Let’s have a look at some tragedies in existence in the solar system, and to explore one particular tragedy – that of the asteroid Euphrosyne.
To understand the Euphrosyne disaster one must understand the early solar system, the tax system, how procreation worked in the middle 21st century and how travel inside the solar system works.
Euphrosyne was settled by a Terasem developmental crew in the year 2061. The crew consisted of several dozen recognizable human beings, governing a flotilla of self-assembling robotic systems. The voyage of the people took a few months, so can be classified as “harsh”. To travel to an asteroid is generally done with a cluster of ion propulsion systems driven by a small nuclear reactor. Such vessels have enormous problems radiating away their excess heat, so these vessels are usually very long, with enormous arrays that act as photovoltaics in the inner system, as coolant fins while accelerating, and as reaction mass when deccelerating the vessel. In essence such a vessel “eats up” its own mass when deccelerating towards the end goal of a voyage. For very large vessels with dozens of organic settlers, including the required payload, the required amount of thrust to attain the necessary speed for making such long hauls is brutal, and quite costly. When departing from the inner system the launch is serviced by the magnetic coil launch infrastructure near the moon, as well as the strong energy from the sun and as a consequence such a launch is cheap. Attaining a high cruising speed (“insertion”) is the relatively easy part. The tricky part is the decceleration, and such a process is even in mid 21st century market terms gruesomely expensive as well as wasteful.
Euphrosyne was a success, before people really understood what “success” means. The colony expanded explosively, and the settlers had a value system that emphasized large numbers of people. Ten years after settlement the colony had a native population of many thousands of genetically modified cyborg human beings (all of them organic and recognizable as humans) and by 2190 the population was numbering in the millions. However it should be clear that the population was by and large in complete denial about the long term lack of planning. These people would effectively become stuck on Euphrosyne. There was absolutely no way to turn these people in to much more efficient “post-organics” and even if it had been possible to bootstrap the excruciatingly complex industries required on this asteroid to turn people in to “low footprint consumers” it wouldn’t have been possible to export millions of machines or even millions of fragile and delicate uploaded minds in carrier shells to other destinations. By 2190 most asteroids that would have been accessible from Euphrosyne also had populations and those asteroids would have vehemently objected against an influx of dirt poor, welfare craving economic refugees from Euphrosyne.
The situation on the asteroid Euphrosyne is ‘harsh’ in the year 2113, yet conditions for each and every person in the asteroid would have been regarded as paradise like for people from the year 2013. Essentially the people who live on Euphrosyne are all fairly humanoid, their bodies engineered to survive in the particular atmosphere inside the endless cavernous tunnels that worm deep in to the asteroid. The amount of real estate in Euphrosyne is comparable to all the space provided by all the cities of the continental united states of the year 2013, embedded in primordial rock. This itself has destroyed the industries of Euphrosyne, since such a grotesque population has thawed the asteroid. The average surface temperature of Euphrosyne is now well over the thawing point of water ice. This has evaporated most volatiles of the asteroid, and the Euphrosynians are now forced to send their robots ever deeper in to the core of the planetoid to retrieve water and oxygen compounds. The asteroid has a very strict government – if the population of Euphrosyne would be allowed to damn well do as it pleased, the first Euphrosynians would start to die in months.
Imagine living floating in these caves, machine systems everywhere, always dozens of these beautiful creatures nearby. Euphrosyne is a beautiful place even if life proceeds very slow (by 2113 standards the rythm of organic life is regarded as snail paced). One might say that an asteroid such as Euphrosyne (and this planetoid is probably the most “dystopian” one around) is conceptually somewhat comparable to the destiny faced by “Cubans” a century before. It is ironic that the main city hub of Euphrosyne is called Habana.
Let’s face the facts – unless technology rapidly changes the feeble organic Euphrosynians are stuck on their paradisal rock. By maintaining a sustainable practices and literally cultivating a regimen of draconic recycling they will be able to survive there for at least two decades. But even when maintaining spartan practices in the long run the solar system will have to shoulder the extreme cost of either migrating these thoughtless near-baseline creatures from their self-imposed imprisonment back to the already overcrowded Earth-Moon system, and integrate them in a culture that will be able to process the quaint and outdated values of these relatively isolated living people, or venture out to Euphrosyne and literally impose an industry of uploading all these poor people in to new mind substrates and then migrate millions of them in to the cutthroat competitive environments of the main asteroid belt.
2113 (part three) – Under Fifty Million Humans
pThe first installment of this series was about the general outlines of this future and can be found Here, the second was about a specific failure (or tragic) mode, in case of certain dead-end asteroid colonies, Here, This article is posted Here, and eventually you, my readership (all three of them) might find the forth installment Here. Since I abhor comment management on this blog due to spam predation, I will eventually invite my readers to respond with questions and criticisms, for which you are already encouraged to email me.
The 21st century exploded and was completely unlike the 20th century. Fairly soon all who lived in this universe started realizing the uncomfortable truth that whatever was happening around them was becoming completely incomprehensible. By 2113 this is becoming a problem, since political management of such turbulence has become next to impossible. The moment someone established ‘authority’ anywhere, within seconds, minutes, hours or days the hyper-dynamic system of traffic, communication, commerce, transaction creates unmanageable exceptions and paradoxes and effectively challenges that authority. As a result there is no more ‘state’ in 2113 (and The State died well before that date), and all things happen consensual and ‘algorithmically democratic’.
There are massively posthuman minds in 2113, especially in the energy fertile halo around the Earth where lunar materials exported from the fairly dense lunar gravity rise up from the lunar surface by the billions of tons daily quickly coalesce to form intricate mechanisms to harvest and utilize solar energy. These minds are vastly smarter than baseline human minds. In such an environment of extropy the biggest minds in the solar system interact but since they not any more knowledgeable than their billions of immediate (and quite otherwise developed) competitors these minds just play catchup. Nobody, not even the smartest mind, has any semblance of control.
There is a massive dynamic flux between scarcity and abundance in the solar system. Ambition, desire, imagination, greed for the denizens of the solar system of 2213 quickly outpaces the constraints of such any resource surplus. Everyone wants more, immediately. This engenders a highly competitive environment. In such environment there is displacement, and since everyone has a stake to defend against displacement the only remotely stable legal infrastructure of the Solar System (in theory reaching beyond the orbit of Saturn) is about tempering displacement. The solar system is a hostile environment and if some agency decides to buy up all oxygen products in this or that month, potentially a few million humanoids living nearby suffocate the next week. Everything is on-demand. There are no long-term guarantees or contracts.
The only way to defend against any such predatory displacement is by means of “economic democracy”. This was realized first in the 2030s of the previous century when one after another country saw their inhabitants scramble in a mad panic to guarantee their constituents equivalents of “basic income”. This process of “equity emanicipation” was inescapable in 2020 hind sight. Politicians sure took their sweet time implementing it, and if it had been implemented in the 2020s maybe a billion lives in the third world wouldn’t have been displaced in to premature extinction. Water under the bridge in 2113.
Another major difference for what it means to be human was life extension. That particular progress went considerably faster than everyone expected in advance. It took humans decades to finally turn cancer in to ‘an ecology of curable diseases’ but a simple affordable therapy that replicated most functional symptoms of health .. however the ability to bestow youth took Google just over 15 years. Hundreds of millions of people that were getting old and frail around the turn of the 3rd millennium found themselves to their stark surprise turning in to the equivalent of twenty-somethings by the middle 2030s to 2050s. The historically oldest person alive in 2113 was born just after the second world war. That is a 165 year old human citizen in 2113 … except for one little detail.
The oldest somewhat biological human in 2113 was born in the year 1963. That’s a little younger, and that person lives on the Moon, and doesn’t look a day over 19. The oldest historical human on the other hand isn’t anywhere near human any more. This person isn’t even a person anymore, and even worse – it isn’t even a single psyche any more.
In 2113 roughly half of the people that lived a century earlier didn’t formally die. They are all still around in some form, and many of them in many forms. They slowly changed their bodies in incremental steps, metamorphing from mostly biological humanoids in to enhanced humanoids (2030s-2040s), then slowly in to cybernetic organisms (2040s-2060s) and gradually the most of these turned themselves in to mostly virtual beings linked to ‘plastinated’ brains that ran in some clinical laboratory environment (2060-2080) and finally the vast majority of formerly human beings became info-morphs – largely software constructs that emulated the legacy individuality of the person they once were (2060-2090). Not in any manner that could be interpreted as less or inferior than humans. In fact the original biological humans they used to be would be as insignificant larval forms compared to these post-humans. And they wouldn’t just scatter out of the terrestrial gravity wells by the billions – they’d move to the Moon, Mars, Mercury, the Asteroid Belt. But these minds would also procreate laterally – create idealized variants of themselves, or copied themselves (2050-2078) until the authorities finally made lateral copying of sentient citizenship illegal.
Visualise the human species leaving mortality and biological constraints behind and entering in to this existential diaspora. This happened fast. It happened as much as would an explosion of change. In the 2030s it was hundreds of humans who left in to space. In the 2040s it became thousands of humans, most of these humans subtly edited. In the 2050s the ascent of humans in to space had succumbed to the logarithmic progress rates of information technology and had escalated in to the tens of thousands, and come 2080 millions of humans were migrating in to space, and most of these humans barely had recognizable human bodies. At the same time there was an explosion of individual humans, trans-humans and post-humans, each seeking their own niche, meaning, rationale and in full pursuit of prosperity and happiness on the surface of Earth, and natural biological reproduction became an antiquarian oddity only practiced by the few. Human bodies were replaced by synthetic vatgrown bodies, humans created android partners and sought to bestow full recognition as legal persons and citizens in the eyes of the law for these partners. Population expansion followed an S curve between 2035 and 2080 on Earth and in the near Earth system. Humanity, transitional humanity and post humanity ballooned in numbers from several billion to close to two trillion. Clearly the vast majority of these minds were not physically incarnated and most lived info-morph lives.
That leaves us to deliberate the fate of humanity. For what does it mean to be a human being? Thinking at a snails pace dictated by biological neurons, imbibing food, breathing air and having children through arbitrary sexual procreation? Because if that were the constraint the last pure human was born somewhere after 2075. Fundamentalist humanity died then, since after that date natural procreation was declared outlawed and apart from some incidents was not practiced again. But many tried to remain as human as they could within the strict constraints of legality. Many sought to outlaw the pathetic state of humanity, mostly for reasons of pity. The residual “mostly baseline” humans quickly dwindled and by 2080 none were left. All had hadf their bodied altered and it need be added quite voluntarily. Even a minor upgrade is a vast improvement over the natural state and none objected much. But a small fraction of humans insisted on cultivating a lifestyle that would be at least moderately recognizable for their forebears in the 20th century, having more or less human bodies, more or less human lives in “cities”, insisting on eating and sleeping and ambulation and fairly recognizable speech. Some even read books and watched movies and did things that were crafts very similar to the crafts practiced all throughout human history. This violitional luddite state (or “ludditional”) became for the masses of posthumanity a snailpace slow spectactor sport and these humans were left alone, heavily subsidized and able to follow their archaic lifestyles to their hearts content. However the temptations of transitioning to another state were tempting, and ludditional numbers dwindled over time. In 2113 only some fifty million are left.
As the surface of the earth has transformed in to something unrecognizable – the atmosphere is thick with a soup of industrial nanoids, the average temperature is at least ten degrees higher world wide – these ludditionals live mostly underground on the Earth and on the moon, and most in a few dozen titanic caverns deep in most stable planetary tectonic bedrock of the planet. Many are religious, many practice “re-enactment”, and as said their curious lifestyle is quite expensive. A dwindling few circulate back and forth between an infomorph existence (although this is met with hostility with the majority of them) and a flesh existence. Their numbers have followed a steady downwards S curve trend, and it is widely believed that because of predating economic pressure their lifestyle will have become ‘fiscally’ unsustainable by 2150 or so.
2113/4 – Computronium Flavors
The first installment of this series was about the general outlines of this future and can be found Here, the second was about a specific failure (or tragic) mode, in case of certain dead-end asteroid colonies, Here, This article is posted Here, and eventually you, my readership (all three of them) might find the fourth installment Here. Since I abhor comment management on this blog due to spam predation, I will eventually invite my readers to respond with questions and criticisms, for which you are already encouraged to email me.
It is the year 2113, and humanity lives throughout the solar system. Or I should rather qualify this is a different manner – humanity is extinct. Most humans upgraded their physiques as would most people in 2013 upgrade their smartphones, and they became something that people in 2013 would not recognize as human. But these days what the whole Solar System law recognizes as person-hood (or soul!) is linked to Google bank on Luna. No one in the solar system can engage in legal transactions without being a legal person, or a proxy for a legal person (in which case the person assumes responsibility for the legal consequences of the transaction), so in effect legal recognition of personhood is signified by an unbreakable person-hood algorithmic formula held by Google. On the Earth’s moon. So if a new person materializes somewhere on the moons of Neptune (which, granted, doesn’t happen all that often) this can only happen by means of a so-called “procreation transaction” that involves one or more parents. In this case the emerging person is attributed a youth (which is measured in a billion seconds) probationary period, and Google appoints, in close conference with any nearby authorities or states, a ‘parent’.
A soul is always attributed by law a brain. Brains in the solar system must have a certain computational complexity, which exceeds the naturally born (biological, baseline, default, paleoantropic) brain by about three. There still are about fifty million more or less baseline humans alive in the solar system (most on Earth) and these are all burdened (much against their chagrin) with processors in their spine that allow them to tap this surplus (from their perspective) computational or cognitive ability, “in case they want it”.
However most “children” in the solar system (anyone who is younger than one billion seconds, which is just over 31 years) have substantially more computational ability than the aforementioned “three times a typical human brain”. In the computational measurements of 2113 computational prowess can be objectively measured, and it is a translation of bits that are interlinked with other bits in a complex hierarchy. Let’s call this something like ‘interbits’. Yes there is a minor amount of quantum entanglement involved in the baseline human brain (Quaker, Sima and Freundlich, 2034) but this is not something that cannot be functionally replicated by adding “a little extra computational interlinkage”. The quantum entanglement of the brain isn’t something very elusive or magical, and it was mostly reverse engineered in reductionist theory well before 2040. It’s only worth some 5% of definable neurological complexity. So if we take these (in 2013 as yet undefined metabits) we end up with a legal minimum cognitive capability for a “child” in 2113 to be somewhat over 10E18 metabits. In essence it’s 10E18 bits of computational ability, however if one were to run this software on a 2013 computational substrate it would take thousands of years per subjective second, because in 2013 we can’t create all these complex linkages yet, and the only way we would be able to do that is by making enormous (and ponderously slow, swelteringly hot and inefficient) mainframes spread out over acre sized server farms. A tangle of 10E18 interbits is just one mass of highly concentrated computational stuff where a decent percentage of bites immediately affect the state of every other bit in the substrate. This percentage is far below 100% (maybe in the order of 7 to 13% rather) but it’s still a lot more computationally parallel than a baseline human brain (which at best of times in the greatest genius didn’t even get close to 0.8% metabit interlinkage).
So in essence there is a law in all of the solar system, and everyone in the solar system pretty much agrees that in order to be a legally recognized “child” citizen you have to have this minimum cognitive ability at “birth”, and in order to become a fully fledged adult citizen you have to wait, under legal protection of a “parent”, or a “guardian”, for just over 31 years.
Most “legal” children in the year 2113 are generated partheomemetically in an act of passionate artistic creative union (or love), mostly from two “parents”. Even in 2113 a lot of symbolism is taken from the biological sexual act, and quite often it involves some aspects of intimacy as well. This is pretty much universal throughout the solar system – two (and in some cases one or numerous) parents come together, express intimacy and kinship over a lengthy courtship, occasionally engage in a contractual state of close trust (which frequently lasts several years) and they produce a child. To make that legal, they contact Google, Google physically sends over an attorney (which in the outer solar system can take a few weeks …) who is licensed to attribute the unbreakable citizenship algorithm code to the fledgling citizen-in-training.
A mind is a precious thing, and all people in the Solar System agree on certain bands of what is acceptable for minds. Nobody wants minds too smart –and it is not technologically feasible to just keep adding computer substrate. A bigger mind loses on interbit efficacy, so at around 10E22 bits of computational ability the mind becomes so ponderously big (generally the mass of a small bull elephant of computational substrate) that it quickly loses this precious bit interlinkage. The mind starts conflicting with itself, arguing internally and the practice is that minds over 7.2x10E21 bits fall under 1% of effective metabit interlinkage, and tend to become “a little weird”, and “not necessarily smarter”. Most importantly they tend to involuntarily enter partheomemetic breakups, or “they involuntarily hatch offspring”. Again, when that happens both parties to the existential fission enter immaturity (or that one billion objective second childhood clause) and 31 years in 2113 is a LONG time, so most mind in the solar system stay about one order of magnitude below the risk of “becoming emeritus” or “potentially losing citizenship for 31 years”.
This establishes both an upper and a lower bound to mindhood in the solar system of 2113. The most creative and original minds are the ones bit-interlinked to the highest degree, regardless of how much mind they have.
However that does not mean all these minds are ambulatory people or machines. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of recognized citizens are stuck in an existentially confined niche. They don’t have much of a choice and for them it is quite challenging (and in many cases not very desirable) to get out of their confined state. The problem is that, especially in the inner Solar System, minds are taxed. Each mind has “property” or “investments”, from which it is almost routinely easy to produce “economic growth”. Or profit by an archaic name. But since many utilities are subject to severe competition in the inner solar system, all citizens vehemently agree that certain utilities, them being scarce, are subject to a sliding scale of taxation. In other words, if everyone wants a thing, the thing is subject to a very high tax, on both income and on existing property. And this tax is correspondingly higher (and definitely progressively so!) in the inner solar system. So the net effect is that, in particular in the inner solar system, i.e. near the Martian moons, on the Earth’s surface, on the poles of Mercury, in the Lagrange points and most extremely so on the Lunar surface, certain “utilities” (or affordances) are taxed to such a degree they become unaffordable.
This system of imposed (and universally consensual) taxes is the biggest memetic compromise of the Solar System. Nobody likes this, but the vast majority of voters (constituents, citizens, free agents, etc.) would not have it any other way. In fact everyone in 2113 is stark raving terrified of any alternative, as any alternative would imply the very most horrible thing they can contemplate – conflict.
The fear of open conflict (or zero sum competition by any other name) compels all of the solar system (except for some Darwinian radicals in the Asteroid Belt).
The most conflicted form of affordance in the inner solar system is embodiment. It is practically unaffordably expensive to have an incarnate physicality on the Earth’s surface. As a result while there are over a trillion (a thousand billion) recognized (more or less, it gets a bit incestuously complex in some of these virtual universes) citizens in the terrestrial plate tectonic computational substrate, less than five billion is materially incarnate. That means – they can afford to have a body of sorts.
Whatever the case, minds run on artificial (designed, algorithmically evolved) nonbiological substrates. The normal pidgin slang in 2013 for this substrate is “computronium”.
So what is Computronium?
Computronium was defined in the 20th century in near-magical terms. People back then didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, but slowly science started catching up with this idea and the concept of Computronium became more or less vogue. The idea is that Computronium is the most effective substrate for computation, preferably meaningful computations or “thoughts”. Computronium is not about boringly vulgar number-crunching or rote calculations – it is about the creation of densely packed thinking substrates (with lots and lots of higher order quality bit entanglement through and through) as to produce lots of “soul”. The problem is that clusters of “computronium” can’t be too big, else regions of the substrate start disagreeing with one another, and produce meaningless (and more importantly: economically result-less) white noise. So again, the clusterized blobs of computronium(with the state of technology in 2113) are still constrained to configurations as heavy as a bull elephant, containing the net effect of well under 7.2x10E21 bits, and generally one fiftieth of that. Add more to the cluster (or computational “cell”) and the thing starts “spazzing out” and produced meaningless white noise.
But even on Earth this stuff is difficult to set up right. A well equilibrated computational cell isn’t just a few ton of densely packed computronium – it is also a nova of communication lines, cooling ducts, material feedstocks, repair facilities, redundancies, backup devices, data store devices, typically hundreds of times the same original mass, for the most quintessential logistics. And it depends on large amounts of energy differential, available materials, temperature and proximity to serves.
If you have gradient electrical energy source of gigawatts on one end, and a bath the size of an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled with liquid helium on the other end, you have a near perfect flow of energy. This is delicious for computational states and high energy gradients are a very attractive (and hence very scarce, and highly taxed) precursor to very adapted and creative minds as well as the ability to experience the most desirable mental states, the most admirable social qualities and the most productive skills and aptitudes. But energy differential isn’t the whole story for minds in the Solar System – it is also access to other minds. A single mind is a lonely thing – to really enjoy reality, social pleasure, creativity, spirituality a mind needs nearby other minds, all around, stacked up and down, left and right, before and after. For humanity in the Solar System the ideal configuration for community is a lot of electrical energy on the one hand that generate high energy photons to scatter about meaningfully in all these massively parallel twenty million color optical processors – no you also want to share that stuff with “likeminded”, in these elaborately constructed idyllic virtual realms. For fun. For profit. For sex. For beauty. For spirituality. And for another million or so meaningful existential variable states humans in 2013 will not have a clue of for a long long time.
But energy isn’t the whole story. Linking all these cells together into meaningful social aggregates isn’t the whole story – no, materials are the next story. And that is where it gets sticky. The best materials are on Earth, and in particular in the inner crust (several miles under the surface) of terra firma. Carbon, Iron and unbridled access to trace elements. And there’s also a lot of space down there. So in terms of configurations of meaningful computational substrates of choice computronium real estate Earth ranks pretty high, and as a result well over a trillion minds (each mind bigger than an office building, counting all required logistical peripherals) there is a pretty vicious expansion of industrial activity down there, operating at temperatures ranging from a 150 degrees centigrade (equivalent to the Hamptons) to 400 degrees centigrade (equivalent to the slums). The ability to perform on Earth is linked to the ability to keep cool.
In space it is easier – like always, just add lots of tinfoil to collect energy and radiate it away. But in space there is not much material substance, and this places a very harsh constraint on community. And even worse, orbital space is a a horrendous abyssal gulf removed from all other minds, in terms of lag. Even the Lagrange points are regarded as quaint and somewhat tasteless backwaters relative to the bustling computronium hives of the great terrestrial coastal areas. You can see these terrestrial places from space – massive cloud formation, massive salt lakes and a lot of seriously bad climatic conditions – cooling hundreds of billions of minds, each operating so overclocked they emit visible spectrum light from their computronium processor cores, produces waste heat, to a degree that it is overcooking the Earth’s atmosphere. And in 2113 this is a bit of a crisis, because again, all that economic dumping displaces the right to live of other people on the surface, and they happily sue for economic damages. The net effect is that the privileged tectonic computronium hoi polloi of Earth pay ridiculous amounts of economic value to get rid of all that heat. They started doing that in the 2090s with radiation towers that unfold at night, emitting temperatures well over hundreds of degrees. You can still see those archaic heat radiating arrays and many of them are still up and running and quite desperately so. The night side of Earth is aglow in infrared, and in some places in a dull red light.
But a planet radiating away its tectonic heat to support computronium is not a viable long term sustainable strategy. So for the last 15 years the masses of Earth have started implementing a heat radiation quota (much a parody of carbon credits a century earlier) that take this waste heat, pump it up through thin filaments of pressurized nitrogen and cycle them upwards along the hundreds of thousands of radiating sky hooks. So in effect the Earth has near solid spokes and rings, and these rings glow in 120 degrees Celsius, over endless strata of radiator surface sometimes hundreds of kilometers big in lower to higher earth orbit.
Elsewhere in the Solar System things get probably madder. Computronium on Mercury, ah you don’t want to think about the pain it takes to refrigerate the overheated minds there. Cables crossing the planet, unaffordably expensive imports of oxygen, nitrogen, helium, all to burn away the hundreds of degrees celsius surface heat on the hot side at day, to the night side. It’s good gradient, and mercury has te best computronium precursor ore in the entire solar system, but who would want to live there? Luna faces similar problems, but at least the day-night cycle is a lot more favorable, and it is a lot easier to construct decent sized cooling skyhooks and radiation fins there. Clearly no one from 2013 would recognize the moon – the surface is a featureless industrial grey crisscrossed with industry. On the south side there is a massive lump of concentrated activity where Google Lunar Equity is situated, and the irony here is palpable – the moon of 2113 looks uncannily like the Death Star wrapped in ephemeral gauze when perceived from Earth.
This equation for the optimal computronium substrate is different anywhere in the entire solar system. Asteroids – a lot of volatiles and decent range of computronium precursor ore all around, but barely any shared sense of community and lousy and expensive energy access. Each place has its own variables and as a result wildly different configurations and templates of computronium, the embedding logistical means for this computronium, means to funnel energy in to the substrates and siphon waste heat out, and to communicate meaning and values to adjacent neighbors, or to purchase products (both social, intellectual and physical) from available markets. Computronium on Earth is a deep transparent glassy green material. Like green volcanic glass. Asteroid computronium is black and elongated. Mercury computronium is gunmetal white and arranged in giant snowflake shakes that crisscross surrounding support infrastructure. Lunar (google) computronium has a (patented!) helix shape with radiating fractal side strands, and the material has a distinctive blue color. Open space computronium looks like terrestrial flowers, with golden colored lumpy hearts and roots that simmer in infrared and brilliant patterned leaves radiating for hundreds of meters.
One might almost call all this an ecology of computronium.
2114/6 – on the nature of evil
Posted: 14 June 2014
My series 2113 (2114( is a speculative series of articles on a fictional timeline of the future set one century from “now” . This time portrays the future as it might be based on several premises. This fictional timeline assumes things will be a logical extension of the world of 2014, will perpetuate all things mostly as they are, yet everything turns out good.
So the most important first premise is that we have no major catastrophes, and progress persists more or less without major industrial or societal collapse as it has for the last few centuries. A second premise is that we do not have a “tabula rasa” Singularity. The emergence of artificial intelligence occurs gradual and does not “displace” large sections of humanity, or the values espoused by current cultures. Again, this envisioned future is by no means a certainty. In this preferred future the transition of human minds in to machine substrates and the recognition of non-human minds and human mental minds on artificial substrates is achieved seamlessly and “without major societal collapse”. The article also assumes a somewhat implausible continuation of the current abundance-assuming paradigm of freedom, free trade, globalism (or what might be labelled ‘Universalism’ in the 22nd century), a further increase and refinement of democracy and a growth of both individual affluence of all people, as well as a vast increase in individual affluence of elites.
The series is here: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7) … Since I abhor comment management on this blog due to spam predation, I will eventually invite my readers to respond with questions and criticisms, for which you are already encouraged to email me. The article may be reprinted or quoted with attribution. The article has specifically been made available for reprinting for Zero State publications, IEET, Transhumanity, Singularity Hub, Turing Church, Space Collective. I may opt to slightly edit the article later on. This is the 6th installment of my 2113(14) series.
In 2114 there is a war of words, and the war is waged between the two ideological poles of the Solar System. On the one extreme is the political center, and this statist center stands for democracy. Of all registered citizenship minds in the Solar System (well over 2.5 trillion and counting) a vast majority over 95% supports this state of affairs, and it can be said that this is the most in-demand cultural state of affairs possible. It isn’t a state however. There are no more precisely defined states. There is concensus, largely carried by automated systems that tally votes in a bewilderingly complex mechanism of political decissionmaking. Most citizens have automated their electoral responsibilities and have their voting preferences tallied by some A.I. and occasionally tweak their desirability algorithms in the most ephemeral terms, and more or less desire to not be bothered by the minutiae of existence.
Since the vast majority of people live as substrate independent minds in vast swaths of tectonic computronium in the bedrock of Earth (about 2 thousand billion), Luna (about 50 billion), Mercury (about 10 billion), the NEA asteroids (about 10 billion) the solar habitat halo (about 25 billion) and the main body asteroids (about 50 billion), you can easily see that the democratic balance leans heavily towards existential sollipsism. In other words, the vast majority of citizens do not want anything to do with materiality and prefer existence in intricate and often quite pervasively abstract virtualities. Most would take (objective) years to return back to a semblance of material existence, and such a return would be traumatic.
Virtual existence is in itself highly sustainable, and consumes very little material resources, and the people of earth (all 2+ trillion of them) are convinced they made the right choices for post-human eternity. They are right – even if the small percentage of materialists in space would all be destroyed by some sinister solar accident, and the sun would turn in to a black hole, they’d be fine. They are deeply embedded in multi-story bricks of cintered iron crystal lattices in the Earth’s crust and pretty much safe. The only thing they need is to get rid of waste heat, and even without the Earth being covered in arrays of skyhooks filtering out waste heat in to space they’d be quite alright.
There are maybe tens of billions of people who for some intricate personal reason want more. Or less, depending how your view it. There is a shrinking number of “mostly” humans, less than 50 million in 2114. They are volitional luddites and they are under threat. Most these humans live on Earth, and they live in deep basalt cavern complexes in sybaritic luxury (as perceived from a 2014 context) living pre-transitional lives of utter beauty and satisfaction.
And then there’s a few transitional humans, in thousands of clades, living all across the solar system. For organic transitionals life is difficult away from the Earth’s surface, the lunar tunnels, the lunar domes or the orbital habitats. To be an organic, no matter how transhuman you are, is no picnic on Mercury or the outer Asteroid belt. It is a prohibitively expensive lifestyle.
That’s why some political extremists in the belt are against it.
Here’s a current polarizing political debate in the solar system, and for someone in 2014 it is pretty difficult to parse.
The inner system people demand services and resources, primarily ongoing technological growth, free flow of cheap energy and an endless supply of mineral resources from the moon and the the asteroids. Energy is most cheaply produced from billions upon billions of square kilometers of solar collection arrays between the orbit of Venus and Earth. This energy collection infrastructure is expanding at an exponential rate, and it is hard to keep up with the demand in minerals. All the time outdated photovoltaic surfaces in orbit are nanotechnologically upgraded in to new configurations to produce a type of quantum-plasma energy flow that’s even theoretically unknown in 2014. This energy is easily stored, transported and converted to electrical or photonic energy types for consumer level applications. It is even changed in to antimatter, for consumption in the outer solar system.
All this involved economy, and economy requires investment and capitalism. The capitalism in 2114 isnothing like the gruesomely predatory capitalism of 2014, but still it its a pretty cutthroat business nonetheless.
Since so many consumers in the Earth-Moon system are pretty much not interested in where their services, energy, server cores, technological advances and resources are coming from, and happily subsist in sollipsism, their sole political relevance is their expressed vote. They simply vote, and since they are with more, their vote is all that matters. That’s two trillion+ votes in favor of anything they want implemented, so whatever your ideas, it’s best to stand out of the way when Earth majorities want something.
The people from Earth wanted Basic Incomes in the 2020s and it took a lot of political violence to get their wish, but eventually the majorities were obeyed, world wide. The people demanded free money, and they got free money. When finally in the 2030s “money” was abolished, it simply meant that the majority could vote for whatever free stuff they demanded and they got it. Clearly this electoral exertion of power is backed up by a lot of political and military force. The moon exerts force, and since it maintains the banking infrastructure of all inter-polity trade, commerce and communication, everyone in the solar system tacitly supports this arrangement.
Tax rates, as you have read in the first article, are well over 99% of everything – progress, property, investments, wages, interests, revenues, transitions, everything. In the inner system away from Earth tax rates are a little less, depending on the time of the month, the position of the celestial object you just happen to inhabit. You may perceive this as a shifting equilibrium of taxation rates, but at the end of the day it is projection of force from a central state apparatus. That this state apparatus has overseen the biggest technological and industrial progress in history of life in the solar system is no argument for some.
Those in the outer system still call it slavery.
If you listen to the viciously angry voices on Ceres, all forms of tax are simply slavery, and whatever economic, treaty, military, democratic or memetic force the Lunar Google bank projects across the plane of the solar system, is irrelevant. Belters demand lower system taxes. They barter and cajole and protest all they can, but at the end of the day the central governments demand a tax rate for the common good of the system. Since it is hideously expensive for Belters to send goods to the inner system, that’s OK and it gives them a lot of negotiation wiggle room. They have to invest (tax credits that are stolen from them) in to launch facilities to send their (stolen) mineral resources from (their) belt to the resource hungry inner system. This is mostly done very slowly. An array of billions of sky hooks constantly ferry an endless stream of ballistic cargo containers in to the inner system, by dismantling and processing asteroids by the score. This is a very slow process, but the more the belters construct the required launch facilities, the lower the travel times become and by virtue of translation of economic algorithms, the higher the tax rates become. So in effect, obeying tax dictates from the Lunar bank, requires Belters to contruct infrastructural interplanetary highway conveyance projects that in turn require them to pay more algorithmical determined taxes.
Many belters (who have only lived in the main belt for a couple of decades) have just about had it and fear the Belt becoming just another exploitation region for quickly panspermeating inner system industries. It wasn’t too long ago that Mars was still wild west – and now we are already seeing actual organics spreading on the Martian surface, and the formation of unique martian tectonic computronium infrastructures. It’s still only a few million organics on the surface of Mars, and only a measly few hundred million virtual barsoomians, but the belters can see the signs written out clearly – progress is coming and with it higher and higher tax.
There was a guy once, born in 1968 on Earth. He fled Earth once, screaming with moral outrage, at the direction of politics and settled the then frontier moon region. This guy prospered there in the 2030s and got exceedingly rich and become a transitionally humanoid being of composite metal in the 2040s. But as the moon became developed he became unhappy and in the 2060s he left the inner system and briefly settled the wild west of Phobos, where he stayed for less then a decade, because setting out for Ceres. Whatever the name of the guy was in 2014 is not relevant, but what is important is that He became Mister Chairman 1, president of the free libertarian coalitions of Ceres, and most the Belt Asteroids. His current name is now something like Overmind Solo, or something equally transhumanly militant, and he wants to be free at all costs. Chairman One (or Obie) makes choices often not out of political expediency or rational economic self-interest. Instead he makes his political choices out of programmed and inalienable emotion. This guy might be argued to “hate” central governments (he would describe it as unwillingness to ideologically compromize) and with his six ton computronium brain he doesn’t want to doubt or second-guess his core moral programming – he believes a certain set of core axiomas and even if it costs him a fortune, he is dead set on perpetuating his intransigence for all of eternity. Many in the belt follow him and consider him a paragon of freedom and virtue. Chairman One is a hero for the old New Hampshire settlers, and he has a plan.
There is no special reason for the solar system to have a single central nexus for banking transactions, and in theory it could easily have two or three nodal focus points for determining taxation. If this were the case, all calculations of cost, expense, democratic (electoral) voting rights would be calibrated to the new situation and that’s what Chairman One wants. He wants to resist the evil of central government by taking His proverbial anti-statist axe to Lunar Google bank and cleaving it in two and create a second nodal office for deciding tax rates.
This is extremely desirable for Luna. On the moon any progress is paralyzed by near 100 percent tax rates. A specific region on the southern half of the moon is unable to progress, except by 100% tax deductible investments. In that zone only statism is possible, and tax rates radiating outwards from that region are effectively a zone of death and extermination of progress. So Google, while it is effectively the Ain Soph of the human system, it is a precarious and unpopular existence. And since LUnar Bank is against “evil”, it agrees with the basic philosophical argument of Chairman One. Tax rates would go down all across the solar system, and there would be a new golden age of technological advance. Pretty much everyone is in favor.
But there is one downside, and that’s a downside Chairman One understands very well. Once the twin polar state regimen would be implemented, not just tax rates would go down for all inhabitants of Earth, also all generated Basic Incomes would go down. As it is, in 2114 “Basic Income” is not decided in strictly monetary or financial terms, it is decided upon in terms of a political claim to accessible resources, in terms of travel times, energy expended, personal involvement, wages, technology used, and so forth.
So if two trillion virtal people on Earth would become subjected to this regimen, they’d suffer at least a decade of “austerity”, i.e. no server upgrades, more expensive energy, lower computronium clock speeds and a lot less fun.
But the most brutal consequence would be for the mostly organic baseline humans left in Earth. They’d lose everything. Being an organic human on Earth in 2114 is an extremely expensive hobby. Most these people are very religious and refuse to be turned in to non-human abominations. In 2114 the Pope and the Catholic church are all still humans. Many muslims are still humans and consider any attempt to upgrade (with genetics, cybernetics, nootropics, interfaces, etc.) as pure blasphemy.
But what if Chairman One forces the inner to recallibrate its economic system? If that were to happen, and Google Lunar Bank would find itself philosophically compelled to agree with the demands of the Libertarian Belters, then there would be two outcomes.
Outcome one, is that all current ludditional (volitional luddite) humans in the inner system would be forced by law to upgrade to transhuman state. Since suicide is not allowed in the inner system, this would be pretty much inescapable. The minimal standards of living to actually be a human would not be possible. In other words since humans can’t protest by refusing upgrades, the state would be forced to use compulsion to upgrade them, one way or another.
Outcome two is even more sinister – humans would be forced to surrender citizinship rights, and become effectively a state of protected, nonvolitional creature. Imagine this – the last 50 million or so humans reduced to pets in a zoo. They’d still have full protection of their comforts under the law, but they’d lose the ability to choose much on how the are able to live now. In fact – they’d become prize commodities for barter, much like rare zoo animals have become in 2014. Highly protected by the law, but in effect nothing more than historical commodity of a bygone age, to be marveled at ass curiosa.
It looks like Chairman One will get his wish, about 2016. That means in effect that in the year 2016 baseline humanity will become mostly extinct as a free species, and be reduced to commodity – or be forced to upgrade to a more stable state as transhumans.
Whatever the outcome, Chairman one doesn’t care. The solar system as a whole will pay a lot less basic income to what he perceives are mostly useless eaters anyway, and even though he’d pay a lot more taxes, he plans on leaving for the outer system and settle Saturn anyhow. He doesn’t care on whose head he steps to get what he wants, and what he wants is liberty.
Catchup Mission
It is the year 2079 I am floating in the void. This is a mission of great historical relevance. I am 350 Astronomical Units removed from earth. My signals take over two days to reach the inner solar system. I am flying solo in a private fusion-propelled yacht by the name of Stross IV. For dozens of astronomic units in all directions there is no object greater than a small hill. My synthetic aperture radar captures several small frozen clumps of ammonia ice, but all of these are months removed from my current location, and besides I am moving with a radically different velocity relative to any nearby debris. Space is empty here. I occasionally use my programmable spectral laser to push away some small objects. Closest I came to a stray Kuyper Belt Object was about 2 million kilometers, and the people back in the solar system treated that as a near miss. I subtly change my position in space to skim past larger objects, and anything bigger than a snowflake and smaller than a basketball I burn away and evaporate with my laser from a few million miles distant. Target is one week away and as a consequence I am sending frequent updates to traffic control on Luna and Ceres. I have been on this voyage (depending on how you define the start of my trip) for earth 14 months, or more than 36 million seconds. Returning to the inner system will take me 18 months, and halfway I’ll have to connect with a deceleration fuel pod that will be launched from Ceres a few months from now. Without that pod I’ll shoot straight through the solar system and into interstellar space. No way to decelerate without that fuel. I am paying for that pod with rights on my current media exposure, but I have already paid for the expense twice over so I might as well order me a second fuel pod from the scientific base on the Jovian Greek asteroids and shave off some travel time.
I am mostly human. Sure, my body has been radiation hardened and for any human from half a century ago I’d look more like an alien than anything human. I am a cyborg, and there isn’t much natural skin exposed. My skull is bare and naked, my eyes are big and black, and my body is all colored in reds and greens. This invasive level of adjustment is necessary – several years in the interstellar medium means a firm dose of galactic radiation. My body is already crisscrossed with scars from the Iron ions blasting through, but redundancy and self-repair and the occasional printed replacement allow me to last a decade here without appreciable loss of function. During my trip weather control has warned me – the big one at the center of the galaxy gobbled up a few icebergs and I got one months dose of Ions in a few minutes.
My travel speed has been a steady 0.2 mean Earth gravity for most of my trip. My vessel was assembled near Ceres, but I entered the main habitation hull in a high Lunar Orbit a few month early. The trip from the inner system to Ceres was done with boosted sail propulsion at a somewhat higher acceleration, and the good people on Ceres launched my main propulsion some months early so I could catch just inside the orbit of Jupiter. Then it was coasting time, at a gradual efficient acceleration.
My target is silent. I can see the targeting blip in my cross-hairs and my ship clock is counting down for the moment I will catch up. I have already been the furthest human being from Earth and Sol for a month, depending on how you define “human”. There are some uploads conducting science experiments on Sedna, and they are further out but those aren’t human.
My vessel is radiating as little energy as possible and making a tumbling motion. The target is frozen, and any engine exhaust particles would in theory damage its pristine state. I can see the little speck now, at a few hundred thousand kilometers. I’ll be making my final breaking maneuvers a few hours in advance and coast in gentle for a few days. Space around me is boring as hell. I run a few statistically interesting science observational experiments (mostly parallax observational adjustment instruments, mostly pulsar observations) but since my propulsion system is a loud roar in all parts of the visible spectrum (and I am purposefully radiating a lot of waste heat from my radiator panels) I couldn’t take along any sensitive equipment. So the last year I spent most my days in hibernation. Nothing much to do.
Target is getting close. I can spot it like a bright orange flake. It looks badly burned, like the old Russian Venus landers. Orange and browns as if dipped in industrial tar. The little thing got beat up by cosmic background. I get closer. It is deep frozen cold, non-responsive. All instruments shut down. I am under instructions to not change its direction, but I fail just a little. The heat of my vessel wobbles it a tiny bur perceptible amount, more than the project planners expected. So I leave the main hull at several hundred meters distance and send the adjustment package (which is itself deep frozen) to intercept, on a cable, inching closer at a snails pace. I climb along the strand in my space suit and go and have a look.
It’s amazing. The little machine has been here a century. It’s a tough little piece of metal, beautifully archaic machinery. I open it up as planned, with minimal interference. The plutonium housing is very hard to reach, but I replace the plutonium cells with a new batch. Then I add a dozen or so Columbia built instruments. Historical relevance and all, Columbia nation used to be part of the historical union of North America. The new instruments will have some minor scientific relevance, but the point is pretty much that the little Victorian era spacecraft has some science left to do, and beam back something significant with its upgraded antenna array. The new plutonium cells will last substantially longer, at least centuries, and its emitter will act as a beacon. Legacy of human history and all that.
My mission in the presence near the Voyager 1 spacecraft takes me a few weeks. Then I have done all there is to do. I hang in space, looking at the quaintly antiquated piece of junk, and allow my neurology to marvel at the occasion in a distinctly emulated human emotion, and I throw in a little alcohol enervation algorithms for good measure. I actually feel human for a while there, drifting in the interstellar medium for a while, several tens of meters away from this little piece of history. All the time, during every moment of the transaction all parts of my ship, and myself, stayed respectfully behind the Voyager 1 spacecraft, as seen from Earth. Wouldn’t want to catch up on history, bad luck.
Mission done, I turn my engines around with my gyroscopes and I slowly start coasting back to the inner system. Long way to go, lots of media stuff to do. When I get back on my vessel my inbox is overflowing with several billion congratulations. Mission has become a financial success. Time to go home. I glance back in to the void but my cybernetic can’t even see the little Voyager probe any more.
If there’s any scientific inaccuracy in this short post please me and I’ll add the corrections. It isn’t excessively researched, just a bit of spontaneous writing.
Children of Prometheus 001
Posted: 4th April 2014 by Khannea Suntzu
The universe has become a tower and the tower mounted a lance of fire. Deep below the tower was a barely visible yellow dot with a half crown bright arc of silver. The dot was millions of kilometers distant, and the illusion is was below the tower was cultivated by the onset of deceleration of Zeus I. The vessel was slowing down with a spectacle of force. The light cast forward by the four main engines would be brighter than the sun on a small 100 kilometer circle on Saturn and in that region a storm would form caused by the laser light cast by Zeus. The illumination of the vessel was well visible with the main telescope array, blazing in bright infrared. Moving ever closer, Zeus1 would pick up containers moving at the precise same speed launched from Ceres orbit years before Zeus1 left on its voyage from the Moon. These containers were densely packed with reaction mass, and they allowed the craft to reduce speed with an incredibly ferocious one tenth G. A strand of a dozen containers acted as fuel for this ferocious maneuver, lined up in advance at the precise desired trajectory and speed. Automated clamps would capture the containers and drain them for reaction mass. Close to a hundred similar vessels were hurtling through the solar system at the same time, and all had been launched in the same manner – the massive lunar laser arrays to add acceleration. Slingshot from high Lunar orbit, a stretched out sequence of fuel containers that maximized linear accelerator capacity. Then the Zeus1 had started its main engines as the plasma cloud used for particle beam acceleration had evaporated, and Zeus had initiated engine thrust to attain desired coasting speed to Saturn. Saturn still qualified as an outer planet, and even with this milking for maximum efficiency of available launch and deceleration infrastructures the voyage from departure to low speed coasting above the rings would still have lasted seven years, most of it coasting along in a swarm of micrometeorite defense measures. Most of this voyage had proceeded in a gentle arc high above the plane of the solar system, skirting most of the debris cloud of the asteroid belt by an appreciable margin. This had added some to the travel time, but had reduced risk for impact considerably.
There already was a human presence on various moons of Saturn. Titan had received two vessels worth of settlers seven years before Zeus1 departed from the inner system.
A crime had been committed. One of sabotage.
As Zeus decelerated a critical software flaw started affecting the deployment of the vessels massive cooling halo. Ships with such powerful engine output had the thrust of hundreds of atmospheric fighter jets. Even those the quadruple particle beam accelerators were extremely efficient, the plutonium reactors at the top of the tower put out massive heat and all that heat had to go somewhere. The ships artificial intelligence systems had quickly discovered the software flaws and had corresponded with its partner on the moon. The conclusion was almost immediate – industrial sabotage by corporate and ideological strategic competitors who were destined for Mimas, and who would arrive no sooner than 2 years later. The software hack had altered deployment of the cooling radiators and caused them to burn away partially. This had a gruesome effect. On board the vessel were twelve human cyborgs, in a state of suspended animation. These were all old men, and they were supposed to boot up the colony upon arrival.
The Zeus1 artificial intelligence calculated from a range of possible solutions to an impossible dilemma. Not decelerating was not a viable option, since overshoot would add at least two years to the voyage, needed for the vessel to tumble back to Saturn in a mostly uncontrolled spin. There was only one solution – use the plutonium reactors full force, partially deploy the cooling radiators, embed the critical radiation-sensitive cargo in one of the water-ice containers and gyrate it on a crane half a kilometer away from the particle accelerator beams, swirling it against a counterweight. This would keep the sensitive cargo away from the radiation. The human crew had no such luck – it received a lethal dose of radiation and they were awakened prematurely as parts of the vessel reached 60 degrees centigrade.
A good three months before Zeus1 would formally and legally arrive in coasting speed above the plane of the rings of Saturn the twelve old men on-board the main Zeus colonization hull awakened. These men knew they wouldn’t last long anyhow, and had willingly trained for the mission knowing it would be a one-way mission for them. They awakened sick and dying. They also awoke quickly. Hibernation technology that was available was not really a very gentle solution. From the perspective of the UN placing crews in suspended animation was an illegal act. The foundation responsible for launching Zeus1 had skirted UN and Lunar laws by using volunteers who were old and dying anyway. That same trick was used for colonizing the main asteroid belt decades earlier when hibernation technologies hadn’t been available yet. Hibernation required replacement of several major organs from the body of the recipient, which in itself wasn’t a completely healthy treatment to begin with. So when the 12 European astronauts in Zeus1 were awakened, three almost immediately died. One died a day later, and that was the primary ship physician so that wasn’t very good news for the eight remaining.
Two crew members were so sick they couldn’t do much anyway of which one had suffered brain damage, leaving the vessel at six sick but somewhat functioning frail old humans. These did what they could do, pumping themselves full of heavy sedatives and stimulants and assessed the damage.
The situation was grave – colonization of Prometheus was no longer viable under these circumstances. The sabotage that had resulted in the ship cooling fan deployment had in theory caused a complete mission failure. The three competitor vessels destined for Mimas would in two years time be able to claim Zeus1 and recycle the vessel for spare parts. The precious cargo frozen would be destroyed or recycled for carbohydrates.
The six wept, huddled in the deccelerating vessel. They pondered several solutions but couldn’t come up with any viable way to save the mission. So they dumped all dilemmas they faced in one query in the ships AI and talked it over with the vessel. The problem was that the political situation back home was even more miserable than when they had departed, half a decade ago. Earth was again in war, this time with Indonesia experiencing a migratory conflict. Earth had become a horrific place, and less we say about Earth, the better. The mess back home did cause problems for the ship AI to correspond with full confidence with its AI counterpart on the moon, out of fear parts of the correspondence would later be accessed by the many strategic competitors that would have their eyes on the investment value Zeus1 represented. Zeus1 had been crowd-sourced. Technically the ship represented a mixed EU investment by a large number of private institutions, ideological groups and private citizens. In practice the ship would either be owned exclusively by the crew of the vessel or, barring that, by any legal heirs of the vessel back on Earth. However, automated vessels with no living crew could be claimed by anyone, according to maritime law. So if no crew would remain on Zeus1 within a few years, people who could best be interpreted at this stage as mortal enemies would be completely free to legally appropriate Zeus1 and treat the vessel in the most dehumanizing and condescending manner imaginable.
The six remaining crew-members were embittered and viciously angry. They had some weeks left to come up with a solution before they would die. They would be dead long before the actual arrival, which was still three months away. The AI came up with an idea. That idea itself effectively constituted criminal act, by UN law. The six pondered the solution fate offered them and decided to do it, thereby setting in motion a sequence of events that would reverberate around the solar system for centuries.
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Ceres
Ceres was first permanently settled in 2151 by standard-issue 16228 ton parochial automated pioneer, establishing the Californian Parish Liberty, with a “reduced” crew of five, after a voyage of under 14 months or 35923520 seconds from exit to entry burns. The crew entered a 250km equatorial orbit on 6 march 2051, and set down its 2-person 3 days later along the Kerwan rim of the Planitia region. UN central registration affirmed the wildcatter claim almost immediately. The two crew consisted of the reduced remains of astronauts Alexei Wilforst and Bruno Ithaqua, who were declared legally deceased shortly thereafter. (Quaint mid 21st century law required a living human to be able to establish a permanent base – the practice meant that an almost dead human, with most its body removed, kept alive in stasis was legally an acceptable vessel for establishing a claim).
The first “meatsack” colonists arrived eight months later with a standard Connestoga vessel, after a 38 months voyage, originating from Earth Archipellago (L4), with a crew of 28. The first conscious human to land on Ceres was Draghira Stebanov, registered Californian.
By any metric the Ceres city Kerwanorth was a highly successful colony, a critical main belt trade, ideological, cultural hub. Although not as brutally libertarian as most other Belt asteroids, the capitalism here is still regarded as extremely devout and unregulated. In 2150 Ceres spots 16 steel core equatorial elevators, with an equatorial cabled habitat ring. Population numbers of citizens in the surface-orbital system (Ceres maintains a strict Census) increased quickly – E2(100) in 2156, E3 in 2164, E4 in 2170, E5 in 2179, E6 in 2207, E7 in 2219 and current stabilizing at over 31 million. Most its citizens are cyborgs and partial (hybrid) uploads.
Ceres is still predominantly mixed Californian anglo, obligatory English language. 93% are effectively prolized (not economical agents, i.e. living of colony civilian dividends) even they would vehemently claim otherwise. It has 6 major (E5+)and 16 major (E6) surface cities. The biggest city in 2150 is still Kerwanorth, with approximately 551000 citizens.
The Ceres government is strongly aligned with Lunar Bank, and co-signatory to the inner system treaties, much to the chagrin of Main Belt radicals. Nonetheless its kanton-based government structure actively resists inner system refugee streams, having established an immigrant quotum of 10 thousand per 30mS (under a terrestrial year). Transgressors are housed in temporary refugee camps along the orbital, do not receive civilian status and are deported routinely to other main belt asteroids designated refugee resettlement areas. There have been illegal landing incidents which are dealt with harshly (forced involuntary remigration in a hatchetcan to the Terrestrial Archipellago).
The Ceres system maintains 5 large O Neil Habitats, in 250 sixth under construction. These are not popular, with most The “Cereals” preferring median Ceres gravity – and used primarily for refugee processing. All these structures orbit at 150.000 kilometers.
Ceres has six Tyson Spiral orbital launchers sharply reducing travel time across the belt.
Ramble 1/N
Posted: 13th February 2022 by Khannea Suntzu
All the above happens somewhere between the year 2205 and 2270. What’s written here is subject to possible later editing. It might lead to late ‘chapters’ of incoherent rambling and obtuse insider referenes. It’s all very transhumanist and whatnot.
1
My mind arrived on Earth in a super lean state, to manage the essentials of me obtaining a proper body. I went with the typical chain service I had been using for decades. Upon arrival my thinking ended. The law stipulates that a single registered citizen can’t think in two places at once. Soeven though I have essential archives of Me in several places in the solar system, I went dark. I was not legally dead, but the transition waiting being printed you are actually indisposed in the eyes of the law. You can run your estate with any number of nonvolitional AIs, but it’s always a bit scary.
The time you actually wait for a print you aren’t there. You aren’t waiting as such, since there’s no object or subject. You aren’t in a “legal” state of sleep either, nor are you legally suspended or dead.
There are a few ‘taxfree’ benefits to being printed. You receive your Basic Income, but you don’t pay existential taxes. Citizens like to draw the process out as much as reasonable legal, as it is actually profitable to be in this limbo. It’s a legal black hole of about forty minutes where you are saying quite a handful of credits. You pay taxes while dreaming, you pay taxes while in medical or other suspension, you are essentially dead and archived when being printed. There’s a EDI law in debate for literally years on limiting printing cycles as right now a print costs less than what you save on paying taxes but we’ll see it when it happens when the politicians arrive at a consensus.
Printing a body is mainly a think for the Inner system. People have a physique mostly in the Langranges and on the moon, but on Earth the materialized population is as upgraded as they can afford, so they generally only do so for business purposes. You pay taxes for any positive deviation of the ‘legal minimum of what constitutes embiedied personhood’, yadda yadda. It means – the law does not normall allow completely biologically baseline humans, but you can get pretty close. It’s am Amish thing, to be like that, but to me it feels pretty horrific, so the Body portfolio I have assembled over the years is bespoke boutique quality stuff.
I got a great subscription on a whole line of physical features, so the bodies I have printed are better than most others that get churned out in the Archipellago. While the meat is printing I do actually run a post-hoc simulation of a rendering of me sitting in a mid 2th century lobby leafing through dead tree magazines, all scented up upholstery and obligatory elevator muzak remixes of ancient lipstick bonjovi tracks. It seems modestly real, because I am personally a narrative continuity fetishist. So after my body boots up, I remember having waiting. But it’s all retroactive smoke & mirrors.
As I said it’s a bluster of boutique weave IPs that suit me the best. I don’t use all of the IP\s I own, don’t need all the big guns for a party, but it’s the good physiology nonetheless. Composites of skin fabric, very resilient cartilage, patented Me features, and a suitably powerful brain.
I am not someone famous. People don’t know me. I am culturally a ghost, but a very idiosyncratic eidolon by any algorithmic standard. They can’t effectively google me from the proverbial memetic flak against CMB of the terrestrial ontosphere. I mean, there are probably millions of 181cm tall raven haired feminines with dark blue eyes and slightly too big flowery irises with an apparently turcoise color (It’s heterochromia blue with an amber pattern in the middle).
The succubus style is a cliche. Many of those girls to the succubus thing, but I have only small horns and small wings and nothing like excessive a tail. Most Succubi are a a bit more elaborately equipped, you know the type.
The style been with me so long that it’s embedded. My choice of manifest persona is so normative that I get automated IP challenges every week, but I shake those off and my aigents counter-sue with success guaranteed in seconds. I got the receipts dating back more than 6 GS. That’s over 200 years of being a succubus afficionado for you.
I am In The Now, 1200 meters below 2000 median sea level around the geographic zone called Gyda in a city of 6 million mostly organic citizens right where the North Sea used to be.
I have to be in a sexy body. Those are the Rules Of Conduct here, and Talisman is a party town. It’s my essential nature to oblige. Outward from Talisman radiate six suburb spokes to the metroplexes of ABDN, Scar, Helgo, Flyholm, Lerwick and Egersund. Taxes here are a bit more affordable to be in, squared to the mainland planetary surface, and that makes Talisman one of many flourishing party ambiances planet wide. I’d rather had done Amsterdam but haven’t instantiated there in something like half a century. Only the depravedly rich can afford to print&party in such an exclusive environment like Amsterdam. I miss it a lot, since I lived there for decades.
Talisman is remarkably classy and pretty nonetheless. It’s an irregular cave with a dozen spokes about 300 meters high kept at 1.6atm underpressure. It’s very brightly illuminated, the organic structures designed by some famous artist about as historical as I am. It’s not yet gaudy, but superficially so. Right over my head is a Spoke arching up 15 degrees to HEO, meeting in the GSR that circumnavigates Earth. My data came in a 62 gram physical containment from the Spoke, all very expensive, down from L5, carried down by FedEx from 16P over the space of three weeks. During that time I beamed from my home of 16Psyche to L5 and from L5 to GSR, where I have “some modest investments” generating “much needed revenues”. I am one of the most historical (euphemism for old) citizens in the solar system, and I would be considered destitute by most citizens half my age, but those that know me would vouch in front of a Judge that’s my modus operandi in life.
Earth these days is terrifying. The atmosphere is a thick nanoid soup over nine atmosphere at 2000 sea level. Temperature at the surface of the Talisman spoke is still high at 29 average. The sky is a bright orange day and night as the sky is mostly covered from directly illumination from the sun, and GSR is chock full of a glowing nimbus of radiative surfaces stretching out from geostationary. Earth is very hot and needs to export all those heat calories at a prohibitive cost, and by now any hypothetical alien civs can probably see the terrestrial archipelago from a thousand light years away in bright IR. The heat is pumped up the gravity well by heat superconductors up the spokes. Did I say this is expensive? It is very expensive, but Earth would have become another Venus without it. The atmosphere is already deadly for organics. Probably some insects and lichens still survive in oxygen rich pockets here and there. You would think Earth to be horridly barren otherwise but it’s not. Organic diversity went down till 2067 AD but only shot up persistently in vitro to over 1150 carbon gigaton. That’s animals, plants, bacteria, nematodes – the whole lot. This year there is more biodiversity on earth than there ever was in geologic time, and more than ten times that if you count the entire solar system. That is the nature of exponential technological growth. I mean, it’s 95% genetically engineered stuff. Earth has an exporting share of biomass IPs probably as big a market as Mercury exports solar energy. But it’s all contained stuff, in domes and underground and in arcologies. You can’t sustain much life in the outside atmosphere of the planet. There’s too much rogue nanoids blindly procreating out in the open. That’s why the planet is under strict quarantine. It all got a bit out of hand on Earth.
I walk around now, in the clinic. Behind semi-opague surfaces others wake up from print, exercise their bodies, laugh loudly. There’s music, there’s dancing. I converse amicably with the printing AI, check the economic metrics, check my threads. I see the ebb and flow of taxation and macro and nanoid trends in a range of my preferred semiotic standard 3D depictions. Earth surrounded by a shock wave of the moon plowing around, casting a mobile delay nimbus determined by technological constraints, physical travel time, communication delay, gravity well. It’s a tidal rhythm of where the Sun and Moon and Ceres are respective to one another, what gigawatt each respective second, andsoforth. These cyclic rhythms dictate incomes and tax rates. Deep in the archipellago taxes are close to dangerous for longterm viability, and it takes months of planning for most citizens to even be able to visit the Lagranges, let alone the planet surface. I am by no means an average citizen, but even I can’t afford to hobnob on the actual surface, let alone anywhere metro. So I pick a third rate underground town like Talisman, in the middle of the diked-off north sea, in highly subsidized socialist paradise Norway. And even then I can only stay here not even a 100K seconds. That’s a day in baseliner terms. I still get to print a high grade hedonist physique in a good clinic, but there’s rich people who do several orders of magnitude qualitatively better.
The glass partitions swish aside for me and I smell the open atmosphere of Talisman. Flowers, almost a cliché. Massive plant life here, deep underground. A balmy 28 degrees. Low humidity. It’s a arcology town, all interlocking and ergonomic and brightly lit. No commercial stuff. A crowd throngs downwards a large bridge swarming with geodesics. Stretch out the Valencia Arts and Sciences all over the cave, stradle it with a tropical jungle, brightly animate and illuminate it like a few square kilometers of tomorrowland. It’s designed so it feels as real as possible, and not as if you ambulate in some cheap ass algorithmic RP1 VR. It feels solid, tangible, sensory and immersive, but there are thousands of these subterreans on earth and not much less on Luna. There are now over 2 trillion citizens in the Earth-Moon archipellago, of which easily 100 billion physical bodies. They need to Hajj every now and then, become a body, and feel they are actually existing instead of just LARPing software cycles. The party is hundred meters below me, and a crowd gathers. Beautiful angels all around me. Talisman is a very pan place and everyone is pretty or at the very least very interesting. Young too, most less than a few decades old. Children, essentially, but by 20th century metric very very smart children with an agency that would be shockingly Mary-Sue even a century ago. Everyone here is living a printed body on godmode cheatcodes. It’s idealized porn actresses and actors in their mid 20s. A callibrated mix of interesting flaws and optimization. Nothing extravagant like furries or anime – my horns and wings already stand out as a bit tasteless but that’s just me. I’ve had these since the 20th century, “in a way” and I don’t compromise in terms of Nymity. I just can’t. It’s my bedtrock, it’s my love letter to eternity.
There are some 3 million residents in Talisman, and those are rich people. To be permanent here you gotta be rich. Aside from that today is reunion day, where a slice of people from all over the solar system agreed to be on a specific time and place to encounter one another, just maybe. These are Hajj experiences, where citizens go to be physical and reminisce and wallow in sentimentality. In this day and age of dynamic Utopian progress a few decades feels much more like a long time than in the late 20th century. Back then people didn’t change much for years and they were more or less the same blobs of existential identity at the start as they were when their lives started ending. These days lives don’t end anymore, not unless you insist it should and not many do that. It’s all about indefinitude now. The long haul. I mean 2300 is far away, but most people speculate rather on how the year 3000 will be.
I am not rich for a reason. As I move down the crowd I realize the chances on me seeing another me as vanishingly small, but that’s the point. I have been in Talisman four times now, each time around the same paleodate (my previous bodily birth day) and I know my alts do the same. I can’t afford coming here every time, but neither can my many sisters. But I have am different than the other girls and that is the simple fact I am the real one. In this body are some relics of the former me. Some actual living cellular material and bone not Theseused out of me just yet. I hold on to these little mementos inside me although I lose a small percentage of the atoms every year. But in a philosophical sense, I am the Numero Uno, and my sisters are all derivatives of me, and that’s pretty OG. I don’t know how many of me there are out there, and the guesstimate is about a few hundred now. Monetary growth is very difficult these days – and every time I procreate into a version of me, it means I have to split my resources and assets equitably. I have done so actively a few dozen times, but I assume each of the girls do the same, albeit with considerable difficulty. Procreation, however it’s done, is subject to draconian constraints. Every time you branch or get a child or however you do it these days you saddle the collective trillions of recognized human citizens with yet another collectively generated stipend to be handed out for all indefinitude. Voters want to experience at least some secular growth every year, and even with a procreation rate in the low low fractions of a % per capita per paleoyear that’s a lot of competing interests and desires and ambitions sloshing around. I mean, we are all civilized people – we don’t glorify algorithmic psychopathic libertarianism like they do in the main belt, so we don’t begrudge or envy one another. We share, we love, we cherish. That’s the nature of soft squishy organics or the many fascimiles thereof.
It’s a crazy party down there. One of the uncommomly good ones where people talk about for years. ‘Did you attend the summer Hajj in Talisman in the year 22XX’ and you’ll get envious stares. I got this intuitive tingle at the back of my neck I have been having for two centuries that indicates something special is up. Don’t ask me how to explain that shit without becoming spiritual and like anyone over a certain age I grew a deep seething resentment against woo-woo supernaturalism. But it’s there and I chalk it down to some higher level of pattern recognition. I have seen the uncanny stuff in other centenarians and it still eludes materialistic explanations. The crowd gets progressively more frenzied. A significant percentage of the thousands strong crowd use narcotics (Norway territory is tolerant about types of responsible adult self-harm) and are dancing and reveling like maniacs. I get a moment of deep synchronicity and absolute joy as I gaze around and I take it in. I am quite happy now, in a deep satisfied sense of erlebnis. I record all of it, for future generations so to speak, and it’s truly a moment to relive many times in some undefined future.
This Is A Special Moment In Time.
Beautiful girls and boys, beautiful physiques, beautiful faces all around. No superficial stuff – Talisman has a minimum age entry requirement of 2 bS – that’s 62 or so paleoyears. Plus the town parties are quite expensive. The printing is expensive. The municipal taxes are steep and you have to have an actual credit in a broad range of crypto to actually be here. Beautiful dance styles and absolutely stunning clothes. There are clocks – esoteric artefacts in a subterrean city without any semblance of a day-night cycle, in a planet where nobody ever visits the corrosive, infectious, toxic, stinking, swelteringly hot and humid outside atmosphere. But they are there counting down to midnight and they give an extra boostercharge to the revelers. It’s minutes to my historical birthday but that is just a logistical convenience for me. I meet faces painted with ecstasy and I am overcome more and more and I lose myself in timeless pleasure for an hour. Bodies all around, dancing and screaming and laughing, eyes bright with meaningful exaltation. Baseline humans used to forget these moments and ratonalize them into the margins of the subconscious when faced with the banal mundaneity of mortality and everyday drudgery. But we escaped that hellish primeval age and humanity reverse engineered Heaven and we are here. We aren’t all gods and goddesses yet but we are definitely ranking on the celestial hierarchy and many of us are truly angelic.
And then I see it. The reason for my intuitive sense of specialness comes into conscious focus and it dawns on me what’s happening. I realize I have been manipulated into violating my previous intent by someone much much smarter than myself. And I am not the only one. I look around as I Realize and then I See.
Expulsion
1.0 – Zvartsnots Yerevan
It is 2071, 6AM. I am deep in CNU18 psychosis. Nauseous and edging closer to seratonin shock. Taken too much conflicting meds to combat the paralysis and searing pain of the ceramic police dart in my thigh, the trypanosomiasis meds treating advancing chronic sickness, the memory integration meds I absolutely need taking but don’t, a small dose of weight loss meth, the hormones, immune surpressors and antiallergens. Consequently sweat profusely, I smell quite bad, and I am tormented by involuntary subliminal advertising in the corner of my eyes. To aggravated this mess, I aquisitioned a case of food poisoning and diahrea. CNU is for integrating memories and media files, to make sense of who you are, relative to your experiences, memories and the gargantuan ecosystem of automated recording means haunting your every move. I am integrating memories and these are not the best of conditional parameters. I lie down in a cubicle that stinks of chemical sterilizing agent, but the sound supression is broken. Every half hour a shuttle launches from west of Vagarshapat, and they veer a sharp 50 degrees over the airport in a violently yellow-green column of water vapour. There’s been fighting between YMPD and some branch of radicalized students so my ears are still ringing from violation type dispersers mounted on switchblade aerodynes. I watch my timeline back since my last savegame six days ago, which is quite long. I haven’t slept for days, so there’s a firm component of meth psychosis attempting to rerout my consciousness into a state of unmanageable. My Jeeves is scrolling in 3D Marquee still updating whatever the fuck trips I can get. The label above literally says ‘whatever the fuck’, extolling the previous desperation as I limped into a taxi under the Opera Geodesics, in downtown Yerevan. My timeline is a twisting snake from there to here, dodging civil war conditions, picking up my clothes and equipment and toys from my ex’s apartment at Sundukyan. Took me 40 minutes to pack it and fedex it to limbo. The memory snake winds to my Ex his mom at the Hrazdan arcology where she lives, wasting an hour to get in through security. My biometrics were off because of the integration surgeries I got here half a year ago, and arcologies are tight during a civil war. Then my credit ran out and I had to call my meat agent to authenticate access to my secondary credit, and she was in a noisy privacy shielded club somewhere in Ningxia, celebrating the ten year independence of Shandong. All the time the timeline on my sex worker visa was running out fast. Somewhere on the M1 I got stuck in a conflict hub and some serrated police dart penetrated the cab panelling and spalled itself in my ass, taking half my pants inside. Quick visit to the airport medic, some crap Indian antibiotic, spraying pink over the precipitously bleeding wound, guy taped a sack of fluids on my shoulder. Painkillers and meth don’t jive. So there I am, lying in a Zdrojowa hexagonal box and I just bawl my eyes out, shuddering convulsively.
It’s always a little too convenient blaming the muslims, but in this case it is the fault of the muslims. Revolutions are algorithmic affairs. Parties to armed conflict cast clouds of legality over the landscape, which I can see quite clearly zooming out. I check every hour or so. I am smack in the middle of Taglidian sectarian conflict. Yerevan really doesn’t like Wabs, but they own the local economy. So it’s mostly mercenary busywork, this revolution, all frightfully insincere, and it means that freelance girls of dubious chromosomal origins should really get lost. Last time I checked they work with guillotines to rectify these matters. I am now in fully Wab legislative zone, so I am on borrowed time. The wrong militia grabs me, I literally in some anonymous execution truck.
But probably not. It’s psychosis talking. I start dry-heaving again, and retch up bile tinged with half melted medical slime, painkillers, stomach protectors, vending droid manti. I am so fucking miserable, I’d consider knocking myself out. But I can’t. Being caught 14 hours from now spasming like a junky as some far right mercenary group drags me from this cubicle, ritualized gang rape is the best I can look forward to. I fucking need a ride so badly, and it’s not working out. I am scared, and I resist the urge to use whatever I have to bid higher and higher. It’s going to take time for my Jeeves to find a ticket out of this. So I return to the snake, watching me travel, argue, bicker, take cover for hours. That’s me, that version of me, it’s me and not a CNU18 fiction. I am really me, a real person, my neurons are part of that ship of theseus agglomerate of nymity. I have to believe it, I am not doing enough integration as is, and existential drift is a shitty way to go insane. One day you stop believing you are actually that person from sixty years ago, she’s a stranger, and fuck it, you are irretrievably lost. Nobody cares as you lose faculty after faculty and just get lost. There’s millions like those everywhere out there on the streets, in every major city and it’s truly terrifying. I am still upper middle caste, I can do this, I can keep it together. But t’s a lot of balls to keep in the air.
I wake up in sheer raving panic. I passed out, and checking the marque I passed out way to long – 48 minutes. I am drenched in piss and sweat and bile, which does not improve my bartering potential onto obtaining the ride. I need to get clean, which is problematic. I am very sore, patched up, drains in several parts of my body from surgery, a police drone in my thigh that might still be leaking location data despite it being wrapped in foil. But I do what’s needed, drone up a shower in a can which arives minutes later. I look out the coffin into the airport and I see a canyon of coffins, bright blue and red flashing beyond that, police aerodynes, sirens. But I reached the sardonic sweet spot of waking up after an especially raw client, where you simply don’t give a fuck anymore and everything’s fine and you can laugh about it. That in itself ain’t good, it’s exhaustion but I’ll have to roll with it.
Jeeves found several rides, and all are shit. But one isn’t. A Cebu delta wing is in hangar, repatriating Tel Avivian gamers. They have seats, and affordable. Flight leaves in 35 minutes, hich is cutting it short, for Duhok international. Kurdistan is a great desto, very stable and liberal. I start crying so goddamn badly, hysterically sobbing and trembling guy next cubicle starts slamming the wall. I hold my chest and my belly and squeeze and bite my lip and curl up into a ball and keep fucking silent, but everything really hurts and it’s the kind of pain where you lose your mind a little. Checkin to the Cebu delta is from a runway north of the airport hub. That’s safe, underground tunnel. I do the unthinkable and open the cubicle half naked and proceed sponging myself off – and find myself in a group of completekly post description travelers. People look at me, edge away, I ignore them as I was myself clean and spray and spasmodically put on neutral gray passenger fatigues I got from the drone as I ordered the hygenics. They are warm and fresh and clean and I lean against the cubicle and
DO NOT FALL ASLEEP. A kid pushes gently against me. Mom doesn’t like it. But that simple generosity of the kid, I can just cry with gratitude. I smile at the kid, a face etched with vitiligo smiles back, but not a happy smile. Kid’s very unhappy, and has a black eye. Kid kinda wants me to help it, but I can’t. I just can’t. I have to insulate myself from the glint of desperation in the kid’s eyes as mom isn’t a mom, but almost certainly something more sinister. I turn away and stagger, rolling on my passenger issue international standard sneakers and I dump several thousand digital currency worth of traveler junk and personal effects in a garbage chute.
I am still wearing the barest essentials for travel – my hardware suite strapped to my body, my identification and citizenship package of Faroe islands EU. The stuff that makes me provably me. My coms, my grid tools, the most certifiably legal of meds ever. That means I fly without Meth and that in turn means I will probably get pretty sick halfway the flight to Duhok Int. The tunnel is at the end of a mall enclosure with an illuminated roofing a full fifty meters long. Dreaming is nature’s way of integrating and I start dreaming and phasing in and out as I ambulate in the correct direction. I can see where I need to walk, Jeeves painting an autopiloted route through the cacaphony of an airport riddled with refugees and panickstricken people caught between proverbial rock and hard place and no way out. Lots of Jews leaving. It’s pandemonium. It’s Zvartsnots security and drones. I see mercenaries that switched sides And need To Leave Now. Everybody in utterly neutral passenger fatigues of highly differentiated color schemes. Jeeves fast checks me in for the equivalent of what a local stewardess would make in a week – I couldn’t possibly make it all the way to an actual physical desk. There’s a secured elevator going down in the main hall and underground is an equivalent extremely cluttered space with access raps for a traffic jam of underground taxi’s.
There’s people on the floor before me in the main underground concourse – shot by someone with a very fast low caliber weapon and they have been eviscerated. It’s very serious now, once they start gunning down people in an airport, things are as bad as they get, Idi Amin levels of bad. There’s this pervasively solemn silence in the crowd, as if everyone turned trained ninja. Typical age of people here is well over 75, even though most don’t look it. People who still have business in this hall are headed out and cheap folks could not afford being here, and old folks know how to keep their wits about them in order to maximize survival chances. Many people are bruises, some have been hurt and patched up. PD has been busy. The crowd thickens and beyond some barriers disperses again. A taxi blinks the travelers identification code I have on my tickets and I get in.
It’s cold in the taxi. I get from a very high humidity 30+ to under 12 in seconds. I sit in the cab with eight extremely solemn and quiet people. Taxi moves, enters a tunnel and becomes a particularly claustrophobic containment for a good fourteen minutes. I close my eyes and immediately start integrating. My ass and my stomach HURTS. I dream again.
Jeeves wakes me up, but no panic this time. It is very difficult for me to get up. I take out a small fluid flacon from a transparent etui and spray my eyes. My tear ducts don’t produce sufficient tears to lubricate the implant eyes I have so I carry it, but I can’t take it on the delta wing. Travel on planes is done very lean. Outside the taxi I realize the taxi took me to the end parking range of the taxi, which is outside and the temperature shoots up to 36 degrees, 90+ humidity, acrid smoke with a hint of crowd control gas, very loud engine noise and sound of aggraved civil bleating in the distance. At the airport perimeter there air helicopters, in the distance stand SWAT robots, there’s junk on the concrete everywhere. There’s a snaking column of yellow smoke billowing, lit from below by an ocan of LED lighting everywhere I look. I am not walking in a passenger concourse, I am on the fucking pavement less than 50 meters from te Delta, in open air. This is really bad. The delta is a star trek icon some 70 meters wide, a single fuselage hybrid winged design with two dozen small propellors. Passengers are not supposed to be so close to such a vehicle out in the open – the combustibles they use aren’t paryicularly healthy – but seeing the Cebu hull gives me a burst of energy. Passengers filter into a haphazzardly set up check-in truck parked and folded open. There’s a stunningly pretty stewardess, left side of her face wrapped in foam bandaging caked in blood checking te monitor. She’s Real Concerned About Taking Off Right NOw, but she has to dot a whole bunch of I’s before the system gives anything approximating a go-ahead. Everone around me makes absolutely no fuzz and works along with a degree of collective discipline and awareness you’d expect of SAS or marines, but they are all old people with money, and as such survivors who have been survivors for decades. We are all wearing the designated formfitted and standard issue printed CEBU passenger fatigues. There’s an elevator truck that’s inoperable so we snake up a metal conveyor stairs into the delta wing. As I pass the hatch I half expect something utterly cinematic as a nuke to go off in the night over civil war Yerevan, end credits but that doesn’t actually occur. I enter the escapist womb of the Cebu fixed wing, file towards the chair Jeeves designates as mine, right side of the wing, and I sit down and start trembling and shaking very hard. We all do in here.
Linked from 23/10/2020; 15/2/2022 Journals