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

out of the way. We can’t harm it, although we may be able to shut it out of certain systems.

The philosophy of the program may be alien to a ship, of all entities, but it is still capable of making jokes about it. Changing the view out of my window one day to a loop of the famous Tacoma Narrows collapse was one.

To achieve our program, though, we first have to understand it.

~~~

The chopper flew us north, and as we flew a small vial of black medical nano was hooked up to the rigid mat of nano fused to my back.

The soldiers said nothing to me and little to each other.

Later I was told what had happened.

A Cumbrian nurse whispered to me of subverted activate codes; of centuries-old US controls on the “Independent Nuclear Deterrent” being bypassed in seconds; of every English nuclear weapon on missiles, bombers and submarines exploding simultaneously.

For reasons never entirely clear, every nuclear power station on the island had been surrounded by nukes.

England was gone; Scotland south of the Highlands and Wales lower than Snowdonia were gone. All despite the Peoples Republic of Scotland and the Welsh DMZ having no nuclear weapons of their own at all.

Ireland and most of the west coast of Continental Europe were left dying under clouds of radioactive dust.

The US blamed the insurgents in Snowdonia in general, and my mum and dad in particular, for the attack.

I was treated with the best care available in a hospital in Russia, a very public symbol of mercy by the US. Meanwhile, Snowdonia was carpet-bombed, the first real attempt to root out what had previously been a convenient and weak adversary.

This was the trigger for the far more terrible Event #2 — indisputably insurgent devised.

~~~

DNV informed my parents who, irritated at being dragged away from designing the garden maze accommodation of Drum #5, dragged me into the house conference room.

“Do not fuck this up. Fail and no space on ship.”

Mum’s hair always seemed to stand on end when she was angry, as though it were carrying an electrical charge. I began to idly calculate how much charge would be required.

“What if I don’t want to go on your stupid ship?”

I knew the answer, of course. I was just being petulant.

“Then you die within 1000 years, along with the rest of us. The ecosystem is becoming shallow. There’s no buffering anymore. When it crashes, anti-senescence drugs will be of no use.”

I knew the obvious arguments. “You go then,” I said.

“I wish we could, son. We’re too old.” As so often, my father got the last, slowly fading word.

~~~

Everyone knows who we are, everyone knows we’re up to something, everyone knows our abilities. We haven’t done anything but conspire, and that’s not currently against the rules in our Nomic-driven legal system.

Still, we’re frozen out of everything important. Those of us who had been part of the movers-and-shakers now find ourselves ostracized at their carefully casual lunches. Our data flows are crudely monitored.

Twelve against 188. We’ve planned for this.

~~~

A single dog escaped the fire-bombing of North Wales. A golden retriever as far as anyone could tell, it got as far as the ruins of Liverpool where radiation killed it. That was far enough.

The virus it carried interacted with adapted harmless gut bacteria released into the wild years before. The resulting airborne virus infected, and proved extremely virulent in, primates.

Soft-hearted US servicemen fed the dogs and returned home at the end of their rotations carrying a virus with an incubation period of 18 months and a fatality rate of 75 percent.

The rate of increase of global population began to fall six months after the dog escaped. The total population of the US began to fall at the same time.

The US lost five million people before the vaccine was perfected; it became a military dictatorship in order to survive.

I proved to be immune to the virus.

~~~

After rehab I returned to my studies with a little more enthusiasm than before and cut back on the drugs.

I soon got back my usual stratospheric grades and DNV, using some arcane, trade secret, adolescent behavior metric, gave me a six-month recertification.

All was good. Even my parents’ marriage.

“It works better when we’re together and we’re going to be working as a team for a very long time.”

“And when the ship leaves?” I asked.

“We’ll still be working on improvements and fixes to send on for centuries, if we live that long.”

I could tell Father felt the conversation was over and that I should leave his office.

Other than the cluttered bookshelf, it was clinical in there, all white with Virtuals — with their slightly off look when projected — everywhere.

“Why did you adopt me?” I asked, the question coming out of nowhere.

“You needed to be safe. You were all over the news and everybody wanted you dead. So we adopted you; that gave you EU citizenship to protect you from the US and her clients. Plus, that turned news coverage to cute and cuddly and away from son of mass murderers.”

“And what was in it for you?”

He hesitated, looking at the projected artworks around the room. I realised he was looking for something to hang a lesson on. Not finding it, he was forced to come clean.

“You filled the gap between us.”

~~~

“Stoney, do you think it’s too soon?”

“It was always going to be too fucking soon. I wish I’d never come.”

He speaks as though he were talking about a school trip.

Perhaps for him it was, raised as he’d been from birth to to be an engineer on the ship. Provided as he’d been with the modifications necessary for ship engineer, plus ones for sunny optimism.

Now, Unity controls the engines and his optimism circuits have burned out.

“It’s too late to back out now. It’s begun.”

The vast amount of now redundant code contains about 0.005% extra code. Foreseeing this, I had forced my parents to infiltrate an adaptive virus. It was left untouched through three millennia on the general principle that no one screws with working code.

~~~

For a