by Ian Douglas
Later that afternoon, he, Vasilyeva, and a dozen of her xenosoph people had boarded another, considerably larger, grav flier for the very nearly 10,000-kilometer flight to Quito, in the Unión de América del Sur.
From there, a brief tube ride had taken them to the base of the first of Earth’s three space elevators, anchored to a mountaintop perched directly astride Earth’s equator. The group had then boarded a special express skycar for the trip up to SupraQuito.
Express meant an acceleration of one G—which, added to the one G of Earth’s surface gravity, meant that the passengers were under two gravities for the first part of their trip. The magnetic skycar was impeccably appointed, however, with luxurious reclining seats designed to keep the passengers as comfortable as possible despite the sensation of another person sitting on their chests. Decks, bulkheads, and overhead projected views of their surroundings—in particular the gloriously beautiful vista of the cloud-wrapped Earth falling away below them.
Not that any of them had any particular interest in watching the Earth. Gray was focused on his breathing as they shot faster and faster into the sky above Quito, magnetically accelerated along the taut Earth-to-heaven cable.
The sensation of crushing weight lessened bit by bit as the skycar rose higher. Thirty-two minutes after leaving the elevator port, they were traveling at 19.5 kilometers per second and they were at the halfway point, almost 19,000 kilometers above the mountaintop. Acceleration ceased, and the passenger compartment rotated through 180 degrees, until the vast blue-and-white expanse of the Earth below swung around and took up a new position above them. They were now decelerating at one gravity, though it felt like considerably less because the Earth now was working against that acceleration rather than adding to it.
“I thought we would be in zero-G once we were in space!” one of the scientists grumbled. His name was Dr. Liu and Gray had been told he was on loan from the Shanghai Institute of Advanced Technology.
“Only if you’re in orbit,” Gray told him. “If you’re in free fall, you’re basically falling around the Earth . . . but you’re never outside of the reach of its gravity. This part of the space elevator isn’t in orbit, and if you were to open a hatch and step outside right now you’d fall all the way back down to Ecuador.”
“It’s different up at geosynch,” Vasilyeva added gently. “We’ll be in free fall there.”
Liu grunted, and Gray fell silent, feeling a small disquiet. He would have thought that any scientifically literate person would know that, and not make such a rookie goof.
Expertise in one scientific area, evidently, didn’t qualify the person as an expert in others. Space, however, was a place where ignorance could get you killed.
He wondered how savvy the rest of this crowd was when it came to basic orbital mechanics.
One hour and five minutes after leaving Earth, the skycar decelerated into SupraQuito Synchorbital Station, and a five-minute tube run brought them to the yards.
Gray sat in the tube capsule looking up through the overhead transparency at a labyrinth of struts and railguides, and orbital structures, gantries, and dockyard facilities slowly moving past against the backdrop of space. Ahead, docked within her gantry, the USNA CVL Republic looked just as Gray remembered her.
He was coming back on board her, he knew, with decidedly mixed feelings. He was eager to get back on board a ship—any ship—once again, and the sooner the better. There was little enough on Earth to hold him there now, he knew. Each time he returned to explore his roots within Manhatt, he found more and more change, less and less a sense of home or belonging.
But his interview with the Pan-Euros had shaken him. They seemed to have a nearly apocalyptic prescience about this mission, a feeling that failure might well spell disaster for all of Humankind.
And knowing that so much was riding on his decisions, his experience, filled Gray with a deep and angry foreboding.
Chapter Three
1 February 2426
Lieutenant Gregory
SupraQuito Synchorbital
1218 hours, TFT
The offices of Paradise, Inc. were located in a rotating wheel attached to the synchorbital complex just outside of the naval yards. Gregory had checked himself off of the Republic and taken a mag-tube to the office structure’s microgravity hub, from which he caught an elevator “down” to the wheel’s one-G rim. The reception office was luxuriously appointed, with viewalls set to peaceful mood-abstract animations, and with hauntingly ethereal music piped through from hidden speakers.
An android robot took Gregory’s personal stats, and he was ushered through to an inner space where he met Kazuko Marukawa, seemingly adrift in swirls of colored light. “So, Lieutenant Gregory,” she said with a dazzling smile as he took a chair opposite her desk. “What brings you to Paradise?”
“I’ve . . . lost someone,” he told her. “Someone very important to me. I’ve been wondering about the eschatoverse.”
“An eschatoverse,” she said, gently correcting him. “We build one exactly to your specifications. We have, quite literally, billions of available models to choose from.”
The thought of his own private heaven felt uncomfortably claustrophobic. “Isn’t that . . . I don’t know . . . kind of lonely? A virtual universe just for me and whoever I bring along?”
“Not at all. Think of your ’verse as a bubble . . . but one that is constantly merging and interacting with others, with many others. You would have access to the entire virtual multiverse of billions of distinct realities. We offer ready-made realities representing the afterlives of hundreds of distinct religions and belief sets. We offer realities tailor-made to your specifications, where you can fly with a thought, enjoy superhuman powers, anything that is possible for you to imagine . . . and much, much more! Your new reality, I assure you, will be far, far more intricate, more interesting, and more fulfilling than the so-called real world is for you now!”
Gregory knew about virtual uploads. It was the same trick, more or less, used by the Baondyeddi and other technically advanced alien species to vanish down a virtual rabbit hole out at Heimdall. Human technology had been moving toward this goal for centuries, but virtual uploads had become practical only within the past few decades and on a much smaller scale.
But that scale was growing fast.
“So . . . I know it’s possible to make a copy of the human brain,” he told her. “And that copy can be uploaded into a computer that’s running a virtual simulation of a world . . . of an entire universe, even. But if I uploaded myself into one of your bubbles . . . would that really be me? I mean . . . even a perfect copy of my mental state is still a copy. What happens to the . . . uh . . . real me?”
She laughed and shook her head. “Lieutenant, you would be amazed at how many times we hear that exact question!”
“You would be amazed, Ms. Marukawa, how much I would hate to wake up and find that I was the version of myself that didn’t get uploaded.”
“Do you believe in the soul, Lieutenant?”
“I’m . . . not sure. I don’t think so. . . .”
“Well, let’s concentrate on your conscious awareness, your sense of self. You have one, I assume?”
He was becoming annoyed with her perky assertiveness. “Of course I do.”
“Your brain is a network of interconnecting neurons . . . about one hundred billion of them linked with one another in complex structures through up to eleven topological dimensions, yes?”
“Uh . . . yeah. . . .”
“The interactions of all of those neurons give rise to memory, to decisions, to what we call consciousness.”
He nodded.
“Okay. If I were to take just one of your neurons and replace it with a microscopic nanocomputer, maintaining all of those synaptic linkages . . . would you notice the difference?”
“Probably not.”
“Would you still be you?”
“Yes. . . .” He saw where this was going. He’d heard the
argument before, but still wasn’t sure he bought it.
“And if I replaced ten of your neurons . . . ten out of one hundred billion. Would you still be you?”
“I know what you’re saying, Ms. Marukawa. If you could magically replace my neurons one at a time, eventually, my brain would be all machine instead of organic jelly and my mind could be transferred to a robot body . . . or uploaded to a supercomputer. If all of the connections are the same, I shouldn’t notice any difference.”
“Your consciousness would be preserved, identical to what you think of as you in every way.”
“I understand all of that. What I don’t understand is how you can move my conscious mind from here”—he tapped his forehead—“into a machine. That’s different than just swapping out parts.”
“All I can tell you, Lieutenant, is that we’ve had no complaints.”
“What happens to the organic body once the consciousness leaves it?” He realized as soon as the words were out that it was a damned silly question.
“The organic brain is destroyed in the scanning process, Lieutenant. The body is disposed of in a manner determined by the client. We offer a number of mortuary—”
He held up his hand. “I don’t think I want to hear that part. Listen . . . about my friend . . .”
“This was someone you loved?” He nodded. “A woman?”
“Her name was Megan.”
“Do you have a recording? Or is she already in an eschatoverse?”
He sighed. “I have her avatar.”
“Ah.” Marukawa’s face fell. “We can offer you an extremely lifelike simulation, of course. A dedicated AI recreates her appearance, her emotions, her thoughts and mannerisms based on the available data. It’s not—”
“It’s not really her. I know.”
Gregory leaned back in the chair, fingers drumming on an armrest. The flow of soft light and random shapes around him was distracting, even hypnotic. He needed to think this through.
Meg’s avatar had been the electronic version of her she used to communicate with others virtually, a kind of personal assistant and secretary that could seamlessly stand in for her electronically. He thought of it as a kind of sketch of the real person, though that hadn’t stopped him from having long conversations with it since Meg’s death. Everyone had one—everyone except Prims, of course, or religious fanatics who didn’t believe in using such things.
Gregory had been considering suicide for some time, now, a simple and painless way out of the pain of a world without Meg. Paradise, Inc. offered him an option: even if the mind—not the real Don Gregory—was transferred to a simulated universe, the Gregory left behind would end, and that in and of itself would be a form of heaven.
And if this company was able to transfer the conscious mind, the self, the sense of ego and being and self-awareness that was Don Gregory, he would wake up in a better, richer, more vibrant universe with at least the illusion of Megan with him again.
Maybe in time he could forget that she was an illusion wrapped around a packet of AI software.
Marukawa seemed to be reading his thoughts. “We can edit your memories during processing, Lieutenant,” she told him. “You could be unaware that she was a copy. If you wished, you would be unaware that you were living in a simulated universe.”
He chuckled. “I’ve heard it suggested that we’re already in such a simulation. And how would we know?”
“An untestable hypothesis,” she said, “but a fascinating one.”
“If we are living in a simulation, someone up there programmed a piss-poor reality for us.”
“And that, Lieutenant,” she said cheerfully, “is why Paradise, Inc. is here. Now . . . you’re currently on active duty?”
“I am. Two more years before I can resign my commission.”
“That is not a problem, Lieutenant. We can make a reservation for you, and even begin designing your ideal universe for you before you process.”
“I’ll need to think about it, ma’am,” he told her. He stood up. “One more question?”
“Of course.”
“How do I pay for all this if I’m dead?”
“You turn over your personal credit when you come for processing, Lieutenant, with a ten-thousand-credit minimum. The more credit you transfer, the larger the field of available universes open to you once you cross over. The cost is applied to the ongoing maintenance of your eschatoverse, to administrative overhead—”
“Including your own salary, I’m sure.” He grinned at her. “Thank you, Ms. Marukawa. You’ve been most helpful.”
“We look forward to your new life with us, Lieutenant.”
Gregory left the office and made his way cross-complex to the Free Fall, a watering hole popular with naval officers enjoying some downtime “ashore.” His conversation with Marukawa had brought up a couple of unpleasant points.
First and foremost, of course, was the inescapable fact that Meg was dead, that if he shared an artificial reality with her, it would be with an electronic illusion, not with the real person. Okay . . . he could edit that part out of his memory. But still, the idea was . . . unpleasant.
There was also the very real question of eternity. Nothing lasts forever, and that certainly included the computers and AI networks girdling Earth in the various synchorbitals or buried underground on the moon and elsewhere. Granted, someday all of those networks might be subsumed into a larger, more powerful, more advanced electronic infrastructure. He could imagine Humankind building its own Dyson swarm, like the one they’d discovered out at Tabby’s Star . . . or even a Kardashev-3 galactic Dyson sphere, like the one they’d glimpsed a few million years in the future. If that happened, Paradise, Inc.’s virtual multiverse would likely get picked up and passed along.
But Gregory had seen what happened when the Rosette entity had descended on Heimdall, just twelve light years from Sol. Uploaded minds occupying artificial realities there had been . . . eaten. Were they still alive—assuming of course that digital minds in a virtual reality could be thought of as “alive”?
What if the entity came to earth one day . . . maybe after he’d turned off his organic body and begun cavorting in a Paradise, Inc. heaven?
Or . . . shit. What if the maintenance workers just decided to walk off the job? What if someone pulled the plug?
He didn’t like the idea that his very existence would be utterly dependent on someone, anyone, else.
It might be a better idea in the long run, Gregory thought, to come to grips with the universe he was in now.
TC/USNA CVS Republic
SupraQuito Yards
Earth Synchorbit
1427 hours, TFT
“Bright Light Module One is on board,” the ship’s executive officer said. Commander Jonathan Rohlwing turned and gave Gray an unfathomable look. “Republic is ready in all respects for departure.”
“Personnel?”
“We still have twelve personnel ashore, but all are due back on board by sixteen hundred hours.”
“Very well.”
Was there a measure of resentment in Rohlwing’s voice, Gray wondered? Republic would have been Rohlwing’s command, presumably, had they not dragged Gray in off the street, dusted him off, and put him in the command seat.
Gray wouldn’t have blamed his exec if he did resent what had happened. This whole arrangement—kicking him out of the Navy, then bringing him back as a civilian CO—was ridiculous.
It wasn’t entirely without precedent, though. Centuries before, in the wet Navy, certain classes of supply and cargo ships had been civilian vessels with civilian skippers . . . but in an emergency the ships could be activated as military vessels under military command.
And yet they’d kept their civilian skippers.
But command of a ship, any ship, demanded absolute trust between crew and captain. That trust ran both ways, too. The ship’s XO had to trust his captain to make the right decisions and give the right commands. At the same time, Gray had to
know that he could trust Rohlwing to follow his commands to the letter.
As always, building that two-way trust would take time.
Gray just hoped that they had that time.
USNA CVE Guadalcanal
Orbiting Heimdall
Kapteyn’s Star
1650 hours, TFT
The Guadalcanal had reached the rest of the small flotilla keeping watch within the Kapteyn’s Star system. Captain Taggart had linked through to Admiral Rasmussen and his staff on board the heavy cruiser Toronto in orbit around the ice giant Thrymheim, the system’s fourth planet.
For several hours, now, Guadalcanal had drifted in a slow orbit with the rest of the flotilla. On her external feeds, Taggart could see the other five ships of the group—the flagship Toronto, a North Chinese light cruiser Shanxi, and three destroyers. The ’Canal had long since fed the Toronto images of what they’d seen over Heimdall. Now the small squadron was watching and recording the light show taking place sunward, over five astronomical units distant within the inner core of the system. At this distance, almost 9 AUs, the tiny red sun was a sullen-ember pinpoint, one barely visible to the naked eye. The Rosette entity’s construction consisted of a surreal tangle of geometric shapes and lights, and it appeared to be unfolding out of itself, growing rapidly larger and more complex.
“It’s matching the patterns that were here before the battle,” Taggart told Rasmussen over the tactical link. “I think once those structures are built, they can turn them on or off whenever they please.”
“The structures are anchored within the spacetime matrix,” Dr. Howard Thornton of Toronto’s xenosoph department observed. “Captain Taggart is right. They store the pattern of those shapes inside 4-D space and summon them when they need them.”
“How the hell do they manage that?” Rasmussen demanded.
“If I could tell you that, Admiral,” Thornton said, “I would be from a K-2 civilization. Maybe K-3.”
Referring to the Kardashev Scale, what Thornton meant was that Humankind was nowhere near the technological level they would need to be to understand what was happening, let alone produce those results. Whatever the Rosette entity was, it was eons ahead of Humankind on the learning curve and was manipulating spacetime in ways that suggested an ability to suck up every erg produced by a star . . . and quite possibly considerably more.