Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan (bill gates book recommendations TXT) 📗

Traversing the void, as we are doing, is not enough. We have to close it, make it a place in its own right.

~~~

The people around the quadrangle observed my favorite status with the soldiers with dull contempt. The children hated me for a traitor without being able to do anything about it. I was untouchable and even my Aunt and Uncle despised me as they ate the extra rations I got them.

The soldiers took to giving me forbidden gifts. Jeans, sneakers, music patches loaded with the latest thrash from Cleveland, the latest hip-hop from El Paso. My family ate better than any other, I had more sweets than I could eat — but no one would share them with me.

Then came the Events.

~~~

Soon after returning from Mars to Tallinn, Mother and Father began work on projects that, mysteriously to me, somehow dovetailed.

They made and received tenders to and from a multitude of places, generating clouds of financial data that gradually turned red. If they didn’t get this one, even I could tell we’d be on the rocks.

Thankfully it all came through.

“Look son, your Mother does the large-scale drum design, subcontracting everything from biosphere to fabrics. I use her data to come up with an idealized Virtual used, and steadily adapted, during construction.”

Father’s face was animated in the pure white light reflected off the snow outside the window. He always seemed more present when Mother wasn’t there. Mostly, though, he was nondescript with gray eyes, brown hair and features that tended always to a look of resentment.

His gaze kept skipping to a print leaning precariously on top of a bookshelf, one of the only physical objects in his Virtual-infested study. He pointed at the multicolored fungoid towers and said, “It’s called ‘Europe After the Rain.’”

Looking at it seemed to make him sad.

Yet he kept looking at it when he told me, “Everyone has to be involved in a project this big. Russians, Chinese, even the US. The brains behind it are all European, though. You of all people must see how important that is.”

I closed my face to him and walked away.

~~~

I can’t complete my project if we don’t reach our Destination. Now, 3100 years into the journey, it becomes clear we won’t.

We and the ship are too complex to retain integrity in these conditions over these timescales. From the very beginning we have calculated and recalculated the time at which we erode completely away. Gradually, that estimate has fallen from 7500 years after launch, which was comfortably greater than flight time, to 4000 years — 1000 years before our flight completes. We’re left to count on some leap in technology to give us the time, lacking any other realistic hope. Or rather, any hope but one — unlocking the nano.

~~~

As part of their indulgence, the soldiers allowed me onto the central area whenever I wanted as long as no officers were around.

One day, as I stood on the mud at sunrise, I watched a bird fly up fault lines of azure sky and out of sight. I ran to the concrete bunker to tell one of the soldiers, an amateur ornithologist, what I had seen. As I entered the doorway an unbearable heat raked along my back and I saw an impossibly bright light flash in front. I screamed and fell to the ground. A soldier, well-trained reflexes cutting in, slammed shut the heavy bunker door and then rolled me over and over to put out the flames.

As I lay in a corner whimpering and descending into shock, I heard a voice counting off seconds. The longer the gap between flash and shock wave the less force the shock would have when it hit us.

~~~

Mother and Father were several years into the project when I found out what they had done to me.

Two metallic rocks and one dirty snowball were on their slow way to L5 while a disposable skeleton of the ship was being built from materials mass-driven from the moon. Father’s Virtual was hung from it and became a Virtual for those on site.

For fun I had a crude MRI done at a friend’s house. She wanted to be a neurosurgeon and her parent, approving, bought her a cheap, off-the-shelf kit.

The scan showed a lattice of metal threads running through my brain.

“What is it?”

“Let’s find out.” She ran a utility to map the lattice onto a sphere tagged with brain areas and uploaded it.

A comparison with maps available online gave us a result.

“Mathematical reasoning, spatial awareness, intellectual flexibility.And OCD.” She giggled. “They add OCD to everything. It’s like salt.”

I was too shy to ever talk to my parents about it.

~~~

Stoney comes to visit.

Out of deference to my history, he always changes the stars and stripes on his chest to a Starship Unity flag: a circle of twelve gold hands on a royal blue background. A sweet but unnecessary gesture. It’s been a long time after all.

“Either way we die. Eroded or engulfed, we’re doomed,” he says.

“Why take such a dim view of nano unlocking? It’s a short route to our aims.”

“I expected something more — gentle. Something that might leave us walking around in things that at least look like Real bodies.”

“With current technology there’s essentially no difference between Virtual and Real bodies.”

“We’ll be complex computer programs running on blobs of gray goo, somewhere between the stars, moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. We won’t be human.”

“Look,” I say, losing patience. “We aren’t human now. We don’t have DNA, we have twists of buckytubes laced with metal ions. Our bones are mostly a ceramic lattice, filled with adapted coral polyps that act as a secondary immune system. We’re already covered inside and out by gray goo and we don’t know exactly what it does beyond tumor busting. So don’t give me any shit about being human.”

We contemplate the starfield on my wallscreen. My cabin is an exact replica of my parents’ cabin on the Jules Verne. Not an act of respect. More one of