It is up to the mind that inhabits the brain to assemble these coded impulses into information, or pleasure, or beauty. And a mind that happens to be inhabiting machine storage can do that just as well.
So the pleasure, all the pleasures, were as “real” as pleasure ever is. And if the mere pursuit of pleasure began to pall, after a (subjective) millennium or two, he could work. Some of the greatest music of the period was composed by “ghosts,” and from them came some of the greatest advances in scientific theory. It was really surprising that, nevertheless, so many people still preferred to cling to their organic lives.
All of this led to a rather surprising situation, though it took awhile for anyone to realize it.
When the Gateway explorers started bringing back useful Heechee technology, the world population on Earth wasn’t much more than ten billion. That was only a tiny fraction of all the human beings who had ever lived, of course. The best guess anybody would make about the total census was—oh, well, maybe—let’s say, somewhere around a hundred billion people.
That included everybody. It included you and your neighbor and your cousin’s barber. It included the president of the United States and the pope and the woman who drove your school bus when you were nine; it included all the casualties in the Civil War, the American Revolution, and the Peloponnesian Wars, and their survivors, too; all the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns and Ptolemys, and all the Jukes and Kallikaks, as well; Jesus Christ, Caesar Augustus, and the innkeepers in Bethlehem; the first tribes to cross the land bridge from Siberia to the New World, and also the tribes who stayed behind; “Q” (an arbitrary name assigned to the unknown first man to make use of fire), “X” (the arbitrary name of his father), and the original African Eve. What it included was everybody, living or dead, who was taxonomically human and born before that first year of Gateway.
That came, as we said, to a grand total of 100,000,000,000 people (give or take quite a lot), of whom the great majority were deceased.
Then along came Heechee, or Heechee-inspired, medicine, and things got started. The numbers of the living meat people doubled, and doubled again, and kept on doubling. And they lived longer, too. With modern medicine, they didn’t die before they wanted to. And when they did . . . well, when they did “die” they also still “lived” in mechanical storage, and among that growing electronic population there were no fatalities at all.
So the number of the living continued to increase, while the number of the truly dead remained essentially static, and the result was inevitable. But when the point was reached it still took everyone by surprise; for at last in human history the living outnumbered the dead.
All of that had some interesting consequences. The eighty-year-old woman writing her X-rated memoirs of youthful indiscretions couldn’t drop the names of video stars, gangsters, and bishops anymore—not unless the indiscretions had really happened, anyway—because the video stars, gangsters, and bishops were still around to correct the record.
It was a great plus for the oldest persons in machine storage, though. The names that they dropped from their meat days were well and truly dead, and in no condition to dispute the stories.
It wasn’t bad to be a meat person anymore. Hardly any of them were poor.
Well, they weren’t money poor. Not even on Earth. Nor were they poor in possessions. All their factories with all their clever robots were turning out smart kitchen appliances and fun game machines and talk-anywhere video-telephones, and they were doing it all the time. The cities got really big. Detroit led the way in the old United States, with its three-hundred-story New Renaissance megastructures that covered everything from Wayne State University dormitories to the river; a hundred and seventy million people lived in that crystal ziggurat, and every one of them had personal TVs with three hundred channels and holographic VCRs to fill any gaps left by the networks. Out in the Navajo reservation the tribe (now eighty million strong) erected a more-than-Paolo-Soleri arcology; the lowest forty stories produced frozen diet meals, clothing, and woven rugs for the tourist trade, and all above was filled with extended Navajo families. On the sands of the Kalahari Desert, the Kungs entered a life of plenty and ease. China reached twenty billion that year, each family with its fridge and electric wok. Even in Moscow the shelves of the GUM department store were loaded with clock radios, playing cards, and leisure suits.
There wasn’t any problem producing anything anyone wanted anymore. The energy was there; the raw materials cascaded down from space. Agriculture had become as rationalized as industry at last: robots planted the fields, and robots harvested the crops—genetically tailored crops, enriched with artificial nonpolluting fertilizers and trickle-irrigated, drop by drop, by smart, automatic valves. And the whole, of course, supplemented by the CHON-foodfactories.
And if anyone still felt that Earth was not giving him all he chose to desire—there was always the rest of the galaxy.
That was what the meat people had. What the machine-stored had, of course, was much more. It was everything. Everything they had ever wanted, and everything they could imagine.
Really, there was only one real problem with machine storage after death, and that was relative time.
That couldn’t be helped. Machines move faster than meat. In the interactions between the machine-stored and the meat persons they had left behind, it was a considerable handicap to conversation. The machine-stored found the meat people desperately boring.
It was easy enough for the still-living to talk with their dear departed (because the dear departed hadn’t really departed any farther than the nearest computer terminal), but it was not a lot of fun. It was as bad as trying to make small talk with the Sluggards all over again. While the flesh-and-blood person was struggling to complete a single question, his machine-stored “departed” had time to eat a (machine-stored) meal, play a few rounds of (simulated) golf, and “read” War and Peace.
The fact that the machine-stored moved so much faster brought about some emotional problems for their meat relicts, too. It was particularly disconcerting right after a death. By the time the funeral was over, and the bereft put in a call for the one who had gone before, the one who had gone on had likely gone to take a relaxing, if simulated, cruise through the (also simulated) Norwegian fjords, learned to play the (unreal) violin, and made a hundred new machine-stored friends. The survivors might still have tear stains on their cheeks, but the deceased had almost forgotten his dying.
In fact, when he thought about his life in the flesh his feelings were probably nostalgic, but also quite glad all that was over—like any elderly adult remembering his own blundering, confused, worried childhood.
As one small consequence, machine-storage put the undertakers out of business. The machine-stored did not need a mausoleum to be remembered. Deaths were still marked by ceremonies, but they were more like a wedding reception than a wake; the business went to caterers rather than funeral directors.
Psychologists worried about this for a while. With the dead still (sort of) alive, and even reachable, how would the bereaved manage their grief? When push came to shove, the answer was obvious. Grief wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t much to grieve.
Unfortunately, full stomachs and comfortable lives do not necessarily make human beings good.
Such things probably do help, a little. Nevertheless, the worms of ambition and envy that live in the human mind are not easily sated. As far back as the twentieth century it was observed that the manual laborer who managed to promote himself from cold-water flat to a ranch house with a VCR and a sports car could still feel pangs of envy toward his neighbor with the jacuzzi and the thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser.