Time Off

Chapter Twenty

Sadly, less than a percent of humanity could be accommodated by the technologies available at the time. But the biggest constraint back in those days was energy supply. The brightest and most advanced humans raced against time, working to escape the grips of their dying planet, whose fate would soon be similar to its closest neighbor, Mars. Mars was a lifeless world, nearly stripped of its atmosphere. The human colonies on Mars did manage to persevere somehow. For a while anyway. But the biological frailties of the human body, or of any earthly creatures taken to Mars, did not do well in procreation or basic living, and suffered defects and permanent mutations. After all, living things from earth were tuned very specifically to live on earth, nowhere else. Certainly not in a hell hole like Mars.

The idea of trying colonize local planets or moons was flawed from the beginning. But who could be blamed. The transformation of consciousness took time, several generations. Meanwhile, people carried on with their plans, no matter how futile. Mars was the most costly folly, but there were others. If only that precious energy and resource had been applied toward the goal of elevated consciousness and immortality.

Many times more could have been saved. But Earth finally died, gasping its last breaths and in doing so, causing all of the remaining biological life forms to expire. The atmosphere and water had been so depleted, and once the bottom of the food chain, the plant kingdom, started to decline swiftly, most everything else was doomed. Everything except those new robust machines and computers, that didn't care about breathable air or drinkable water, only electric power.

Ironically, all of man's follies were to be forgiven in the end, for they were not the final blow to humanity's existence on earth. It was instead, Armageddon. A gamma ray burst (GRB) scorched half the planet, from Japan to the eastern sea board of South America. A massive nearby supernova, only forty light years away, shot out its dipolar beam of light, as if igniting a giant light saber. To make a rare event even rarer, one of the beams crossed Earth's path forty years later, bathing the earth's surface for tens of minutes and pumping both the air and the oceans with deadly ozone.

In a seemingly divine twist, a healthy, clean planet would never have driven humanity to plan for an escape from Earth. As it happened, the decline of Earth moved science and man's will to survive and when the GRB arrived, many souls had already been saved.

*****

Lola sipped her coffee and felt the warm, sweet brew as it flowed down, causing a soothing and satisfying feeling inside. She enjoyed the aroma as she watched the crimson sunrise. An instant later, she switched off the human body simulation. It was simply a ritual she enjoyed when time permitted. It gave her comfort and a degree of entertainment value, which she rarely needed, but once in a while it was nice.

Lola wasn't promised immortality but in the end she achieved it, and was the oldest human to do so, barely surviving long enough to make the jump from man to machine. But although the hardware was purely non biological, the essence of her consciousness was preserved. There was little guaranty at the time, but even fewer options. It was the moment of truth for humanity, and Lola had been instrumental in the development of a path forward. Fittingly, she became the only surviving member of the original developers that was able to transition.

As a youngster, she was in a league apart, but through her life she could see the acceleration of others developing the same capabilities, many even more impressive. But Lola was the force behind it and she lived into her nineties, staying active and engaged, trying to save humanity, and herself. And she did.

Once the fundamental transition occurred for some tens of millions, these lucky few were able to carry on and develop further technology advancements of their own collective choosing. Far from imprisoned in man-made machines for eternity, the survivors were in fact liberated, able to dream and realize those dreams. The burdens of limited time, sleep and mortality no longer gnawed at each and every mind in the new collective.