Next – an issue skated over so fast I knew something was being hidden – came a split between the Inner System and the Outer. Most of the existing space settlements, in Earth orbit, on the moon and Mars and in the Belt, had apparently succumbed to some sinister ideology of consolidation and reconstruction, striving to aid the stricken population of Earth. The Earth-Tenders, as they were called, were depicted as small-minded, spiteful, envious and backward-looking.
The Outwarders had gone their separate way – outward. Out to the solar system’s real prize, the greatest planet of them all. Here were the resources for the wildest dreams, the boldest projects.
The project they’d embarked on, those men and women and uploaded minds and artificial intelligences, was bold indeed. They’d shattered Ganymede, scooped megatonnes of gas from Jupiter’s atmosphere, turned a tiny fraction of it into smart matter and departed into its virtual realities. Not to dream, or not only to dream. They were applying minds of unprecedented power to the fine grain of the universe. They had found loopholes in the laws of physics; they stretched points. (Space-time manipulation with non-exotic matter, Malley, I K, Phys. Rev. D 128(10), 3182, (2080).)
They’d left behind, outside the macros, tens of thousands of human minds running at more-or-less human speed: slow folk, they were called. Most of them were from the labour-company camps. Whether they were in their original bodies or in robots, their job was to harness and harvest the dumb-mass requirements of the smart-matter civilisations. Within the macros, the others – the fast folk – had copied, split and merged, reproducing with post-biological speed into billions. The account spoke of the process as if it had happened in the far past, although the dates showed that it had come to fruition only three years earlier.
But those minds were thinking, and living, thousands of times faster than human brains. To them our world was already as ancient as Sumeria, and theirs the millennial work of men like gods.
The next screen that came up offered an option labelled: Sign-off. It repeated what Reid had explained, the offer of a temporary, and indefinite, return to oblivion. All I had to do was key in my name.
I considered it. Then I noticed that the icon had a file attachment labelled History. Just what I wanted to know, I thought, and pointed at it.
It wasn’t the history of the project, or of the world. It was the history of the Sign-off file: my own name, dates and times. The times between ‘Status open’ and ‘Status closed’ increased from hours in the first to weeks in the last-but-one entry.
There were seven of them. The eighth had flipped to ‘Status open’ a few hours earlier.
Well, fuck you, I told my weaker, earlier selves. I was going to stick it out, if for no other reason than that suicide was no escape. If escape were possible at all, it would come not from my own death but from the deaths of others: whoever, or whatever, it was that had put me in this place.
I had always wanted to live forever…but not on those terms. I had always wanted the end of history to be: and they all lived happily ever after, and not: and they all died, and went to heaven. I had always thought the time to think about transcending humanity would be when we’d achieved it.
Something in me had changed. If the file was true, I had chosen death seven times over, rather than this existence. But Reid had hinted that the inevitable spontaneous re-awakening might find its subject better fitted to cope. The increased lengths of the times I’d ‘survived’ suggested a selection process, an adaptation: each time I came back, I had a little more iron in my silicon soul.
I had always thought of myself as tough-minded. Now, when I looked back at my real life, I was astonished at how much tougher, more cynical, more ruthless, I could have been. My values hadn’t changed – unless my memory had been warped – but the strength of my passion for them had hardened.
I looked out at the alien things that had abandoned the rest of humanity, that had used me as a machine and now wanted to exploit me as a hired hand, bought off with beautiful visions. I knew that I wanted to live long enough to see their bizarre beauty perish. As I knew it would: I could foresee their fate even then.
I was interested, and I would be there.
I went back to the lounge, lit another cigarette and pressed the first button again. The television didn’t react.
‘Well, hi,’ said a voice beside me. I turned and saw a woman sitting at the other end of the sofa. She had an elfin, mixed-race face. The black flood of her hair and the black smoke of her shift both came to her hips. She slid a hand between her thighs and looked at me. Her eyes were as black as her hair and as big as the night sky.
‘Do you want me to be with you tonight? I know you do. But first, we have something for you.’ She smiled. ‘Come on.’
She stood up and walked through to the other room. Her feet were bare, her shift was a vapour, but she walked as if she were in high heels and a narrow skirt. I don’t know how she did it, although I was giving it close attention. I followed her as far as the frame, which she passed through like a ghost, and which caught me like a Venus fly-trap catches a fly. Outside, in the black vacuum, her image faded just beyond the brush-tips of my fingers.
‘Work,’ smiled her starry lips. ‘See you soon.’
I clamped on to an I-beam. The familiar sooty taste of polycarbon seeped through my grippers. I reached out for the assembly node and zoomed in on it. The mechanism had warped under excessive heating. Carefully, I unkinked the wave-knot and re-calibrated the junction, then let the pieces snap back together. Sealing the node, I released one gripper, extended it, gripped, released the other and brought it over, then repeated the step several times, like a bird moving along a perch.
At the next node I had to do some instant refining, playing a laser over a chunk of meteoric scrap until the metals in it melted, then reaching out and spinning the glowing mass into the cage-shape I needed, and fitting it into place around the assembly node.
On to the next…
What the fuck am I doing?
I froze, clinging to the beam as the vertiginous question spun my mind around. My vision shifted uncontrollably, the deep star-fields suddenly becoming visible in all their intense immensity, their component points of light appearing and disappearing as the spectrum of my sight ranged up and down the wavelengths.
With an effort of will I steadied myself. The bad moment passed. I looked down again at the node on which I was working, surveying its complex, microscopic mechanisms and recognising them without any memory of having seen them before. I had been working with a journeyman’s offhand assurance, until it had all seemed strange. Evidently I’d been sleepwalking through these processes countless times already, and like an awakened sleepwalker on a ledge, I’d panicked and was in danger of falling.
Nothing for it but to get on with it. There was a mental trick to it, a detached attention that let my hands and instruments work while my mind looked on and intervened where I could see something which my programmed, or conditioned, reflexes overlooked.
After a subjective hour or so of this, an instruction set manifested itself in a corner of my sight. It told me what to do, and where to go. I let go of the beam, jetted a brief burn (…toes thrust…) then, after a soaring leap across a kilometre of emptiness, another flare in the opposite direction (…heel strikes…) and caught the destination girder.
I had just fastened myself to it when a macro rose in the space before me like a whale in front of a dinghy. I clung, panicked and giddy again, to the girder as the glowing surface streamed by, metres away from my facial lenses. When it had passed I still clung, staring at the after-images. I didn’t dare look up.