Ghost in the machine

Back to work, but don't look down!

The food was good; the fries delicious the burger divine. Real beef, from a real, lab-grown slab of Argentinean cow. She downed the last of the coke and crushed the can one-handed into a ball, then licked her fingers and belched loudly. Supplements and pink slime were great for increased longevity, but there was much to be said for being able to pig out on junk-food whenever one felt like it. She sat back, her hands caressing her belly. She was stuffed. Even half what she'd just eaten would have killed her a day ago.

Only it wasn't a day. It was a hundred and twenty six of them. She'd been dead for four months. Death itself hadn't been so bad. There wasn't much to it. Nothing to it at all really. Just a gentle drift into oblivion. It wasn't even a hole in time. One minute she was a floating gimp in the Xi Wang Geo Station going under for another prolongation procedure, and the next she was waking earthside in a genetically-enhanced human AI. A thousand years could have passed and she wouldn't have noticed the gap. She wondered what it would be like for the souls in storage when they downloaded into different bodies on a different planet. She made a note and sent it out to the psychs; make sure there was a program in place for the weaker minded that popped a fuse on reincarnation. Maybe they should make psych tests mandatory for customers. On second thoughts no. They all knew the risks when they signed up.

 A flash of light on the ceiling attracted her attention. Through the windows, on the horizon a shining silver bullet larger than an oiltanker sliced through white-capped, grey-brown waters, dragged by its six enormous sails. Its solar panels glinted in the sunlight. Ocean Tonka, read the name painted in white on its prow. One of seven such ships programmed to roam the oceans, taking out the trash and returning laden with treasures from the RoTW ports. Trinkets for gold. Just like in the old days. 

She didn't need to see the name to know this. Just from its silhouette and position her clearance allowed her to reference everything there was to know about the ship. Her ship. Half a million tons of Xi Wang Floating City waste on its way north east, through the Panama Canal, to be dumped on the ruined wetlands of Manhattan for recycling. She could have sent it anywhere, to any one of dozens of once-proud sea-logged coastal cities. Miami, New Orleans, Boston, Guangzhou, Shenzen, Mumbai, Nagoya, Osaka, London, Marseille, Napoli, Istambul, Tel Aviv, Jakarta. Even Guayaquil, which would have made far more sense. Any one of these places would be happy to receive her rubbish. She chose Manhattan because it seemed fitting. It sent a statement. Once upon a time, Wall Street had laughed at her. Now it recycled her trash and thanked her for the priviledge.

One century's rubbish, another's riches, without which the Exodus would grind to a halt. Copper, tin, iron, anitimony, indium, platinum, palladium, silver. They needed it all, these and thousand other materials, especially aluminium and high hydrogen content plastics like polyethylene. Aluminium and hydrocarbons, two things mined out of economical existence one time, now mined again in stinking landfills the world over, or trawled from the garbage soup clogging the ocean gyres. Tens of millions of tons of ancient supermarket bags, plastic bottles and cans, reformed and reused as shields for the fleet of Mindwisps cast into space.

So far, ninety thousand wisps were on their way. Ninety thousand intelligent, box-sized craft. Each a tiny piece of a giant puzzle designed to self-assemble on command. Each carrying a precious cargo, the proteins required to synthesize a life. Each a node in a redundant array ready to receive the instructions to build thirty thousand souls sent from earth on a beam of light.

For four years out of every twelve the wisps were flung into space from the end of the space cable, a hundred and forty four thousand kilometers up, into the path of Jupiter. Like little rubber balls fired at a speeding train they stole just enough angular momentum from the lumbering giant to push them beyond the sun's reach.

Once free of the sun's gravity, gossamer-fine carbon wings caught its energy transformed into microwaves by satellites and acelerated the craft to a tenth the speed of light, to the fourth of five planets orbiting a G-type star twelve light years from Earth, a planet listed as Tau Ceti 4, affectionately renamed Daddy Bear by the astronomers that found it. A giant, dense, oxygen-rich, terrestrial planet in a Goldilocks zone with an active hydrosphere and an abundance of photosynthesising plant life. With a little help from technology, it was a place almost-humans could live.

Until the femtoengineers could produce designer shields on an industrial scale, aluminium and plastic had to do. One point eight kilos per square metre per light year of travel, if the wisp was to have any chance of surviving the hundred and twenty year trip, plus anything up to another fifty circling the planet in the dust and debri-filled Tau Ceti system while they waited for the terraformas to prepare the ground and the nurseries the hosts.

And there was her problem. The terraformers and nurseries. Summarised as a simple equation: half kay em vee squared. The energy required to propel a city-sized object with mass 'em' to a velocity 'vee' that was fast enough to cover twelve lighty years before the lights in the universe fizzled out. In theory, with their simple 0.1c nuclear pulse engines, they could have left ten years ago, but she'd calculated that the resources and energy needed to fuel the ship would be better spent solving the gamma emission and heat transfer problems inherrent in their anti-matter rockets. If they could double the speed to 0.2c they would halve the time for the trip. Even if that took another ten years it was possible that the planet would be ready for the hosts when the mindwisps and their precious real and digital cargos arrived.

She sensed Achilles approaching from below accompanied by one of his minions. Right on time. They both knew there was no need for this tête-à-tête, as he'd called it. They both knew that now that she was a physical presence on the ground, the Queen Bee in a hive where a thought set an army of workers scurrying to do her bidding, she had no need of someone that told her less than she already knew and reminded her to begin things that were already underway. They both knew that she hadn't really needed anyone since the early days of transhumanism, not even when the ravages of time and the unravelling of DNA confined her to space, and especially not now that she'd been reborn more powerful than a thousand past-selves.

Still, being human again, being whole and mobile rather than a floating combine of organic bits and pieces, was a thrill, and it seemed a shame not to share it with someone. Achilles was proud and vain, but his manners and punctuality pleased her and his obedience was beyond question. Four months was a long time to be gone and many unpleasant things could happen. She had ambitious rivals and powerful enemies and it wouldn't have taken much to delete her from the Cloud's neurams and the Earth's history. Yet here she was. In no small part, she believed, thanks to Achilles.

In that, he was his father's son. Peleo, a Catalonian tech wizard and publicist with an IQ higher than her own had been her right-hand, hired when she was only the fifth richest person on a decadent planet, a philanthropic heiress and mistress of online commerce.

For half a century Peleo helped her buy and sell and swap and acquire. He defended her when she was mocked and ridiculed and denounced as a hypocrite for pointing out the consequences of promoting consumerism and chasing GDP growth while stuff.com made and sold as much 'stuff' as the plebs were willing to buy.

Then it happened. A day that changed her forever. A a day she remembered it as though it were yesterday and not almost a century ago, the day a fire ignited in her mind and her ideas began to coalesce. The day, a hundred and thirty years after it set out, that Starwisp TC362 phoned home.

Peleo opined quietly, humbly, while she invested, divested, lost money and made more. He listened in silence, without judgement, as she ploughed everything she had into her vision of the future, remaining by her side when their political leaders publicly branded her misguided, even subversive, when she spoke of the need for a new way of thinking, a new beginning, an escape from the slavery imposed on the many by the few that controlled the world's financial resources. An Exodus, some smart-ass had called it. The journey of the chosen ones to the promised land. The term was derogatory, but Peleo convinced her to keep it. It was a sad day when he died, murdered in her place, just as her dream began to look real.

She could not call Achilles a friend - no one in her position had such things - but nor could she call him a servant. For all practicalities, now that she was reincarnated on the ground she might well call him a human pet, something whose proximity would provide comfort, reduce the heart rate and blood pressure. And yet he was more than that. He was blood, in a way that real family was not, and he had been her presence on the ground when age and infirmity confined her to space and her guardian angel when she passed away. His presence would break the endless monotony of messages and mind-to-minds. It would be nice to use her voice, to speak with another human, even if, for all intents and purposes, the time used would be time wasted.

Between them, father and son had been a hand and a crutch. They'd believed in her when she doubted herself, reminding her that, in private, when the microphones were off, her political critics blanched when they thought about what she said. The politicians weren't stupid, they knew she was right, that something had to give, that nothing grew forever, least of all econimies with footprints larger than the land on which they trod. But ego was stronger than conscience, and none of them wanted to be seen as the fool that left the party before the cake had been cut, and so they spoke of sustainable development rather than sustainable de-growth, and since 'stuff' equalled votes they maintained business as usual. Power and prestige today (with social and ecological collapse shunted to tomorrow) was preferrable to immediate (and permanent) ignominy, unemployment and lower standards of living.

The mobs watched the news, laughing, crying and lynching on cue. They shook their heads in pity when she announced her intentions to build a floating city in the sea and another in space linked by a thirty-five thousand kilometer thread. They said she was crazy, but it was her money, and a free country, and if she wanted to throw it away on nutty ideas it was fine by them. They hardly noticed when she began to send out her wisps, but howled with laughter when she pointed to the sky and told them their future was up there. Future to them was next week. Future to her was as a concept they couldn't grasp. They were too busy killing themselves trying to survive in the present. Too busy trying to make a better life for the kids to think that far ahead.

But a few listened and others agreed. Those that looked into the future and shuddered at what they saw. They joined forces. Seventeen of the richest of the rich, men and women able and willing to indulge their fantasies. And she hired the smartest of the smart, men and women able and willing to help her indulge hers. They looked out together, and when they saw the red, white and black banners of the Apocalypse fluttering in the wind across half the world, they knew it was time to go. So they did. They bought up a country and built a wall and watched the sand encroach as the water and the oil and the trees ran out. They were ready for the hunger and the thirst. They hid from the war and cured the sickness it brought. Behind their walls they were safe from the first three Horsemen, but behind them came the fourth, the Pale Rider. And behind him came Hades.

And now, as the Earth lay dying beneath their feet, with its fragile ecosystems irreversably damaged by the selfish, irresponsible, inefficient use of its finite resources, with its atmosphere corrupted by progress and the nocive, man-made hell that was its surface ravaged by the sun and overrun by the few pestilent species that still survived and thrived, with its arrogant, bellicose Old World superpowers decimated, divided and driven back to the Information Age by war, debt, disease and desperation, the laughing had stopped.

They listened now. They had no choice. Their home was dead, killed by cancers named greed and stupidity and an Exodus to another was their only hope. But it had become more than that now, because, while they squabbled and fought and died she had studied, invested and built. First on the ground, then up in space, where she chose to reside as her body aged and time and gravity took their toll. Her people, her science and her technology were the best in the world and as her dream came true the hope she offered was not just a better life, it was an eternal one. 

Those that could pay for a shot at immortality (and she was now the living proof, and immortality was what the Exodus had become; mind, memory, a person's unique being scanned and recorded and transmitted across the galaxy to a waiting wisp and, in time, downloaded to a new body for a new life on a new planet) did. The price, one vCoin per terabyte, one zettabyte required, one billion vcoins in total, in cash, with no exceptions, no refunds, no guarantee of success and no fixed date for awakening, could now be doubled.

The idea of the Exodus had grown like a snowball. It began with one, then a another, and then more as the influencers of opinion, the shining nodes on the social networks, bought into the promise that, on the day of their death, or perhaps even before, she would cut out their brain and dissect it, neurone by neurone, synapse by synapse, and write its map onto a beam of light shone out to the stars.

Her group of visionaries had always been as rich as a country, but their power and wealth grew until they were as rich two, then three, then all of them put together. They outbid struggling governments for resources. They drained them of their brains. They outbuilt them, outthunk them and did everything that she had promised. She put up her floating cities and the space elevator to join them and, silently, secretly, filled the skies with her fury. And when the world complained she rained it down on their heads and drove them to their knees.

It wasn't all easy. There had been deaths and disagreements along the way. First Peleo. Then seventeen became twelve became nine became eight. Five died natural deaths. They were scanned and stored and ready to go when the wisps were in place. Four were lost. Three to the war and the fourth to her God.

Years became decades and the survivors and the heirs and the families yeilded to her leadership. Then one lost the faith and they fought and split. Three behind her and three the other, who disagreed with her methods and met a disagreeable end. Like all the greatest leaders, cost what it cost, she would do what it took to keep her dream alive.

And still the rich and famous and powerful fell over themselves to give her all their money.

Then, when she had it all, or nearly all, she destroyed it. Refused to accept it. Called it the root of all evil, and the reason they were in the mess that they were. The new currency was brains and resources. She exchanged what she didn't need for that which she did. She offered a better life those with a skill, and took everything that life could give or produce.

The lift doors hissed and Achilles entered with a bow. His companion, a small, unobtrusive, hispanic-looking girl scurried to clear the table. Achilles surprised her by waiting by the lift as the doors closed and took the girl back down. He seemed intimidated or unsure how to react before his new, improved master. He was as he always was. Tall, skeletally slim, his blond hair and grey suit impeccable. It was she who was different. She waved him in, trying to put him at ease, and spoke for him to sit, gesturing at the long glass table in the centre of the room.

As soon as he stepped forwards into the room she sensed something had changed. A silent alarm sounded at the back of her mind. She was on her feet, her greetings choking in her throat and her chest suddenly tight. She was not yet accustomed to this body and its reactions, but she knew something was not right. She coughed to clear her throat, and as she raised her hand to her mouth she saw how it trembled. She studied it with interest feeling as she did the pounding of her heart and an unknown fear coursing through her veins.

- President?

Achilles hurried towards her and it was then that she saw it, really saw it, and understood. The dog. Speedy Gonzalez. The spidery clone of a clone of a clone of a torpid, minature greyhound that never left his arms. So used to it was she that she ignored it, filtering it out, but her body had not, and it was screaming.

Observing herself, scanning her inventory of sensory information and following each thread to its physical manifestation, she found it was the smell. A canine stench her heightened sense of smell recognised, and yet didn't, identifiable even through the shampoo and the perfume and the genetic engineering. Though there was no reason or memory that she could think of to explain it, the smell terrified her.

- That, she hissed, pointing at the dog. The animal gazed at her with its stupid brown eyes and idiotic grin. It knew her from her hologram. - Get it out!

Achilles frowned, not understanding. They'd worked together for seventy years and for forty of those he'd carried the dog. His eyes darted around the room, and seeing nowhere suitable he did the only thing he could and recalled the lift. He deposited the dog in the frightened girls arms and closed the door. He returned, and as he asked her if she required a glass of water she sensed him informing the girl that, should Speedy not receive the care he deserved, she'd be stocking dishwashers for the rest of her life.

- I'm fine, she said, declining the water. The panic was under control.
- Should I call-
- I said I'm fine!
- Allergy?

She wasn't sure. Perhaps, though her symptoms were more pschological than physical. As though her body was reacting to the presence of the dog itself, rather than its dander. She could still smell the rank odour of the creature on his hands, on the front of his suit, but the revulsion was gone now that her brain was in control. The nausea had passed and she was no longer afraid. Just curious. Maybe she would mention it to Dr. Hongdong.

Or maybe not. There seemed little point now. She wasn't going to lose another month while they wiped the host and waited for the synapses to grow back.

- So it would seem, she replied. - I'd forgotten how much they stink.

- My apologies, President. It won't happen again.

She waved her hand to say it was nothing.

- Give me a few minutes.

Achilles tipped his head and stepped back to stand behind the table. She moved to the balcony, ordering open the glass doors that separated it from the room. The air inside the tower was much cleaner than out, but she needed to clear her mind of that smell. She ordered the balcony door to close and an external window to open. The window refused, warning her that at the height above sea-level was fifteen hundred metres and the external windspeed was a hundred and twenty km/h.

It would only take a minute or two for the filters in the room to do their job, so she leaned on the sill to admire her city, and made the mistake of looking down.